Muse

Staff and I went out to go see Minions, Rise of Gru, and I just have to say, it is fascinating to learn the history of how Gru rose to power. If you don't know Minions, they're these little yellow guys, denim overalls, they speak in a kind of gibberish language, yabba babo, dabibibo, bonanna. Yeah. Minions is a prequel to the Despicable Me franchise. Rise of Gru is a sequel to that prequel. Essentially, the minions will seek out the most despicable person they can find, in this case, Gru. And it just gets to thinking, who in our society would have minions if they were real? and are they real and where can I find them and how despicable do I have to be to get some well stay on our show we will be answering all those questions and more I will be attempting all manner of heinous acts in order to court the millions will I be successful find out when this American life returns stay with us T.B.T.L.

their hygiene? Absolutely. Do they have a confused look in their eyes like a dog that's heard a strange sound? Yeah. But strap that dog to a sled and baby, you'll be flying across the tundra.

All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. It's called the Danger Witch and it's dangerously good. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Be careful though. it's spicy. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where we've had some snowflakes coming

down. Snow, snow, and more snow.

Not seeing much accumulation but that's the first time that I've noticed it this year. I think it is the first time this year we've had any amount of snow up here. It's a little chilly. We're running multiple heaters here in the Madrona Hill studio. They're all plugged into different parts of the room so as to hopefully not throw us completely offline here as you might know sometimes when i try to heat it up in here it throws uh like one of the one of the breakers and then the internet goes away and then tbtl goes away for a short time um but uh we're gonna try to avoid that today here at episode 4666 ooh demony uh in a collector's series let the fun begin. I was watching some television last night. Well, it was HBO technically, but I was really enjoying it. I love television. I've got to have that thing on 24-7. I love the patter. I was watching two very different kinds of shows that I want to talk about. Also, a judge has officially weighed in on the question of if restaurants can call boneless chicken wings, boneless chicken

wings. These are the best Cajun chicken niblets I've ever had. What I learned this morning is

there have been a surprising number of times that real judges have been forced to weigh in on the question or the subject matter of boneless chicken wings it's like there's a fair amount of jurisprudence around the question of boneless chicken wings so we'll talk about that and we'll talk to this guy the guy is a nut bar a nut bar he is the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now

good morning my friend good morning uh i'm not trying to be withholding here at the top of the show i just really want to get to the top story today i have so many opinions on this topic and it's not even coming it's coming from a place of what i think to be just solid logic it has nothing to do with whether or not i like chicken wings or boneless chicken wings it's not it's not

You're able to separate your own personal preferences from what you think is the obvious, clear sort of facts of the case.

I feel like it's fun to get fake outraged over food topics, but this is not fake my outrage. Why don't we do this, Andrew? Well, I didn't want to mess up the show. I just thought I would be—

You're not messing up the show. Omaha, Omaha. Why don't we call an audible here, and we'll just talk about that first, and we can talk about my—

TV shows second, but I do need your help with one thing quickly before we jump into Niblet Talk, okay? You know, right after we did our sound check this morning, you're about to start playing the intro, and I said, oh, I've got to run and get this half and half out of the fridge here in the studio for my coffee, and I pulled out this half and half. Throw it away. Whatever the question is, throw it away. well more time for niblet talk so now so this this says uh best if used by february 19th andrew that's tomorrow we still got one day on it but it but i will tell you this i bought this a good while ago this was in my house and then at some point i brought it out here um to use and then i put it in the fridge out here it's traveled you know what i mean it's been sitting out on the counter it's been in and out of the fridge it's been in actually multiple refrigerators just here on the property so that's got me a little nervous but then what i noticed is i also had in there this thing something called nut pods almond and coconut creamer the guy is a nut pod honestly i know unrelated can take care of those for you just uh okay and uh this one says and this is unopened this has never been open wait wait what is nut pot it's a creamer it's a it's an almond milk okay so non-dairy okay it's a non-dairy creamer i think i got this like so i was was i on a shoot somewhere they gave i don't know i didn't buy this i don't remember purchasing this it maybe it was in a gift pack were you at like a mariner's game or something and somebody shot it out of a cannon maybe that might have been it that might have been it um i I don't know how this came into my life, but I remember thinking, eh, you know, couldn't hurt. So I threw it in the refrigerator here, and it's been in the refrigerator for a long, long time. Now, it says best if used before June 22nd of 2026. Okay. So this is, oh, you know, Andrew. You're in great shape there.

Andrew.

Yeah. Do you know where this came from? Do you know?

Okay, your nut pod almond coconut creamer.

Do you know where the nut pod came from, Andrew? The guy is a nut bar. A nut bar. Do you know where this came from? Can I have a hand? I just remembered it.

Because I feel like I could potentially guess this. This isn't totally rhetorical.

You could absolutely guess this. So, okay, the first question is, let's do this. I'm really dying to have some coffee. Okay. So the first thing is, should I do the nut pod or should I do the half and half?

Do you have any niblets that you can just dink in there? No, of course. Well, it kind of depends. Unless you tell me that you got that non-dairy creamer someplace. Sus, obviously use that because it still has six months to its use-by date, and it's not dairy, so it's less scary.

And to be honest with you, it's 10 calories per serving. I love almond milk. My half and half is 40 calories per serving. So if I'm just trying to look smacks here, if I'm just trying to slenderize. Oh, my God. You read that piece, right? Oh, the clavicular piece? Oh, my God. Oh, Andrew, I knew all about clavicular long before that piece, my friend. But, yes, I did read that piece, too.

You had mentioned looks-maxing on the show before several times, and then, yeah, I did end up reading most of that piece. Yeah, I don't even know if I – I don't think I finished it. I couldn't quite stomach it.

I've been talking to, well, a handful of people about the clavicular who found out about him through that New York Times piece, and it's like – I don't know how to explain it other than, like, I just am so terminally online, and I spend so much time on TikTok and just kind of like – it's not exactly the dark web, but it might as well be just kind of like – like, I don't watch that guy. he is for people that don't know sort of um you know i guess the latest sort of incel figure to although that's not technically his message of of involuntary celibacy but it's all feels like it's kind of in the same corner of the internet he's a a young guy who's obsessed with his ratio of his jaw line and his shoulders and waist and his whole idea is looks maxing which is just Just looking what he thinks to be the ideal male through whatever surgical and testosterone related things that you need to do.

And but also just and throws anything and anybody in life that gets in the way of that just aside, like has almost no real human interactions.

Totally. I mean, and and is, you know, it's it's all very, very bad and a very, very depressing thing to think about this being popular online. The thing that cracked me up, it's just so dumb, but mogging? Did you get to the part about mogging? I can't remember. Remind me. I guess part of his shtick is he, as a looks-maxer, will then just go stand near people that he thinks are basically not looks-maxing. And it is to basically roast the person who just looks like a normal person instead of how he looks. This is during his live streams, right? Because he goes out on the street, and I'm not familiar with the content. I haven't watched it. I haven't either, for the record.

I'm not streaming or whatever you'd call it, like a clavicular session.

But for folks who didn't read the piece or don't know what the hell we're talking about, this guy, obviously, he's also like an influencer. That's his main thing. They claim that he makes like, what, $100,000 a week or something like that. And what he does is the content that he produces is him going out on the street, almost doing like person-on-the-street interviews and interactions and stuff like that, and uh and just live streams it for like something like five or six hours a day they claim and then they chop it up into little clips that can then go viral as they live on their own in tiktok but it is a live stream and so i got the impression that this mogging is something that he just sort of does like in cadence with his live streaming he'll just is that right he just walks up to

normies and lets the camera catch them both yes and i think and i hadn't seen that i wasn't aware of that but until i was reading the description of it in the times piece but it was this idea that like in his mind and in his world he's so handsome that if he stands next to a less handsome person it's a burn on the less handsome person i gotta say and that's called mogging i don't mean

to make it so personal but like i do sometimes get the impression that bingo does that to me and i yeah i kind of hate it like i like it when he comes and hangs out with me but there are times where he'll come and sit right next to me and then look at genevieve like i'm gonna look at this potato next to me. Well, Andrew,

you could fight back against it, or you could monetize it. Have you thought about that? Oh, your button doesn't work. There it is. I must have switched this thing off without even realizing it. That's right. Remember, this is the one that a listener sent me that has an on-off switch so the battery doesn't die? Which is great. I must have had the safety on old Betsy

here. Wait a second, though. So, where did you get to the creamer? You're going to give me a hint as to where you got that almond milk.

Okay. Well, first I'm going to just use it. You're going to use the almond milk, because again, it's not

It's very, and it's within its proper window.

I'm going to use the nut pod. The nut pod. The nut pod. And then I'm going to tell you that this did arrive. This was shipped to me, and it was part of an assortment of things. It was, well, yeah, I'll call it an assortment. What's the minimum number for an assortment? Three? Ideally four, but I guess I would. Four? I feel like it. It might have been three things. Well, let me think. It might have been one thing, and then this nut pot, and then some literature, Andrew. That's kind of a hint.

Okay. Oh, I know. I know where it came from. But I will make my guess in a second. I'm retracting my opinion on whatever the hell we were just talking about. Clavicular? Assortments. Because I feel like if you hand me a box of chocolates, and there are three different kinds of chocolates in there, I think it's totally fine to say it's an assortment of chocolates. If there are two, you would just say there's some caramel and some pure chocolate or something, right?

Here's what we can agree on. Two is not an assortment.

No, it is a couple, though. Yeah, it's a couple. A few is a three. Very different than an assortment.

It's interesting to have one more chocolate, and now we're in assortment territory.

Can you imagine if somebody gave you something and said, here, I got you an assortment of chocolate, and it was just two different kinds? You'd be so pissed. They'd be like, well, I still give you free chocolate. You're like, I don't care.

From a linguistic standpoint, I'd be mad. You know, I'd be like, when have you ever heard of an assortment of two things?

I was listening to a podcast about a jazz record, because that's the point of middle age I'm in now. And I have never actually listened to the show before, but I've been curious about it for a while, and they'll break down a single jazz record. I can't even remember the name of the podcast, but I was listening to them break down a Sonny Rollins record, and they had done a lot of chatting before they got to the record. And then, of course, Genevieve walks in the room. Like, the only thing I would assume that Genevieve hates more than jazz is a podcast about jazz. People talking about jazz. I honestly soared. It was, I was cooking in the kitchen and she was in the other room and she wasn't supposed to come in. And I honestly think I would have been slightly less embarrassed if I had been, like, watching some sort of, like, risque content or something. Because, like, her walking, like, you sort of, you see and hear yourself when somebody else walks into a room. You suddenly realize what you're doing. Suddenly the emperor has no jazz clothes. And like Genevieve walks in and they're just starting to break down. Like they call everybody cats, by the way. Oh, yeah. And she was in the room and they referred to somebody as a cat. I was like, don't say that in front of Genevieve. And then they said something about a song, not like a bridge as in a part of a song, but like they mentioned like maybe an album being a literal bridge in Sonny Rollins's career or something like that. And Genevieve just said, oh, literally a bridge and walked out of the room. Anyway, I should have been watching Silk Stockings. I know where you got that. Do you have a guess? Yeah, you got that from Wes at PETA.

I got it from our boy Wes at PETA.

I was just telling V's all about our Wes story on After These Messages last night and about the, you know, how. I have this theory that that organization is using and maybe other PR arms as well.

I don't think it's a theory. I think it's the case. I think it's what's happening.

Are using like automatic transcripts of podcasts because we don't provide a transcript of TBTL officially, but a lot of platforms just automatically create them now, which is really great. And I think that PETA is just going around scanning or putting out an alert for any text where podcasters are talking about PETA or their whole thing about feeding two birds with one scone instead of killing two birds with one stone or whatever. And I wondered if me mentioning all of this on After These Messages will trigger a response from Wes.

Oh, I didn't even think about that. That's a really great little kind of, I don't know, experiment. I'll look forward to it. Now, of course, this is going to end up on Wes's radar because now we're talking about PETA once again. But by the way, I think that the Nut Pods showed up when they sent me the Feed Two Birds with One Scone mug. And then because I was vocal about really wanting one of those Rat Pack hats. Oh, did they send you a second one? Yeah. They sent you a second package. Wes sent me a Rat Pack hat. Wow. And I love it. Today I'm wearing my Burbs hat. Yeah, the Burbs. I feel like the Burbs is back in the discourse. You know, they rebooted it.

I did. I'm sort of Genevieve wants to watch it. I don't watch that much streaming television-style shows anyway. I don't know what to call it in 2026. So I don't know if that would be the one that gets me to sit down in front of the TV. I am a little curious, but I also don't want to be like a you-ruin-my-childhood thing. I don't care that they rebooted it. I just don't know if I—it just holds such a warm, fuzzy feeling in my memory that I don't know if I need a new adaptation of The Burbs.

See, the thing for me is I also probably won't watch it because, I don't know, I've got a lot going on Andrew I'm a very busy person but also I didn't understand the movie The Burbs when I watched it I thought it was weird it is weird when I was you know I don't know how old I was when that came out but basically I was like I like Tom Hanks in things and so and there's a new movie called The Burbs and it's got Tom Hanks in it therefore I mean I'm guessing had he already done big by this time like I just remember seeing that movie maybe Peter and I like renting it, you know, like from Cregan's Pharmacy, and expecting it to be just, I don't know, a straightforward comedy, and it was anything but. Now, I wonder if I watched it in adulthood, if I would have a very different read on it, much like the book Catch-22 by Joseph Heller. I wonder if, like, if I watched it now, I would really dig it, but there's nothing sacred about the movie The Burbs for Me, because all my memory of it is being a kid and being confused.

Yeah, I remember maybe being a little confused the first time I saw it, but liking. it and being really surprised at how it ends up, by the way. I don't want to spoil it for people who haven't seen 1989's The Burbs. I'm trying to also put this... That's when it came out? Yeah, 89, but I'm trying to figure out where that fits. You asked me a question about where it fits. I'll do Tom

Hanks, IMDb. Let's see here.

By 86, he's done The Money Pit in 86. He did Dragnet in 87. Big is what you asked about in 88, and then 89 comes The Burbs and Turner and Hooch. You might even say two sides of the same Tom Hanks coin, I would assume. I don't know if I've seen Turner and Hooch all the way through, but yeah, The Burbs is a dark-ass movie, and who's the um, oh, darn it, Luke, who's the crazy old guy? Bruce Dern. Bruce Dern will give you nightmares in that.

Well, I, you know, Andrew, you talk on the show, and we are going to get to Nuggets talk here in a minute, don't you worry. Or Niblet talk, by the way.

Maybe we've done the intro.

we can do here's my review of this uh nut pods almond and coconut creamer a french vanilla flavor it's i it's better than not having anything added to my coffee but it's not for me as it's not scratching the itch of like non-curdled half and half in my coffee that's still i was was really hoping and honestly for one thing i'm looking down into this uh actually i this is this i think maybe addy got me this coffee cup it's peanuts it says i feel strangely confident today oh yeah and what do you call that kind of um a milk is it called a milk like milk glass or yeah milk glass i think is what it's kind of yeah the mug that luke is drinking i was at the 80s yeah yeah but i think that i just learned this i because our friend broadcast barry is apparently picking me up some milk glass coffee cups in china or he did nice yeah we have a very special relationship andrew that involves me sending him photos of a pillow that has embroidered on it do i look like i fly coach so we're communicating at a different frequency than you and him are and he's retrieving things from china for me now But I thought they were called milk glass because you put milk in them, but it's because they're white.

It's that almost, not quite, but almost translucent, white, milky, you know, what would otherwise be ceramic. Yeah, I haven't seen that in a long time, but that brings back memories, too. And it's got that kind of classic old font, too.

I really like the cup. Now, I'm looking at the coffee. The problem for me right now is that the, the nut pod creamer is, it's sort of, it's separated in there, right? Like it's, it's, it's not bad. It didn't go bad, but it doesn't like when you mix in a little bit, I know you're not a half and half in your coffee person, but for those of us who are, there is this like perfect ratio of like, you get just enough half and half in there. And then the color of the coffee changes a bit. And then you kind of have, everyone has their little, like what they want the coffee to look like to tell them that the, the, the ratio is correct.

and like the cop holding the the little um scale up to peter griffin's face to figure out whether or not he should arrest him are you familiar with that anti-racist meme it's from an episode of family guy obviously peter griffin has pulled over i don't know i don't know if i've ever seen the episode but it's a meme that goes around a lot because basically i believe the cop is holding up like some sort of a um a color scale that goes from light to dark that and then comparing it to Peter Griffin's skin color to decide how to approach this situation.

Well, it just looks like, it's very hard to describe, but what it's, you know what it actually looks like is when if you do pour half and half that is a little bit past its prime, that is a little bit curdled into a cup of coffee, it's just all kind of like it's separated. It's not all one thing. And that's sort of what the nut pods is doing, even though it's, it's, it's not spoiled.

See, I love almond milk myself, but I don't use it as creamer either. I don't know if I've ever even so while I don't drink cream in my coffee I make coffee or I kind of I'm like the poor man's barista over at my volunteer gig so I'm always like you know and I'm paying attention like you said you're watching for the color I know certain customers like their coffee with more cream or what have you I love almond milk in my cereal but also I was a little concerned about the fact that you said that's flavored as well like are you tasting too much

vanilla I don't think you need no I don't mind that in fact in fact when I even with like um If I put almond milk in my cereal, I like the almond milk that has a little flavor kick to it, a little vanilla, a little something going on there. I don't hate it.

I just thought that maybe it would be much for you and your coffee. Anyway, okay, go ahead, Luke.

All I was going to say to wrap up our conversation about the burbs and about this hat is that I bought it because I just thought it was funny because it's kind of like, you know, my name-ish. And I said I bought one for each of my brothers. I kind of had this fantasy that we would all be wearing them together for some reason at like a family hangout That is not I don't know if they like the hats as much as I did But I don't know anything about the movie and it's sort of like In the way that you are concerned about wearing a hat for a team that you don't feel like you have enough knowledge around Like someone's gonna be like ask you a question about that team and you're gonna seem like I'm doing that exact thing Wearing this hat that says the burbs because other than Tom Hanks is in it I could tell you almost, like, I didn't even really know that, you know, Bruce Dern was the old coot in it or something.

I believe he plays, like, an ex-military guy who's pretty aggressive. And one of the Corys is in it. I get all the Corys confused. And I don't think his performance is amazing. What is the book on him? Like, I'm not even joking. This is such a dumb conversation to have. But, like, what is the, Corey Feldman, is he the kid who ended up kind of growing up to do Michael Jackson impressions? Yes. Okay.

that's feldman so there's cory hame who's who passed away yeah okay and had a lot of substance issues then there's cory feldman who has embarked on what i think is a kind of a fascinating thing really which is he has always thought of his maybe true passion as music and he uh has been playing you know these i get the sense that they're like pretty elaborate and pretty like long concerts He's constantly touring his band. I think it's like Corey Feldman and Corey's Angels or something. I think the backup band is called Corey's Angels. And he sometimes is dressed kind of in the style of Michael Jackson. He has a lot of really like kind of interesting dance moves that he's kind of invented. The music doesn't, it doesn't seem to me to be particularly great. But he's been doing this for like, I don't know, maybe going on 20 years now or something to where he's sort of built up a cult following for it and i my sense is it's a lot of people who kind of go maybe started off going as a lark like hey the you know the child star cory feldman's got a band and it's kind of weird and it's kind of not good but it seems that now like it's he sort of willed this into being kind of a thing you know what i mean which is which is interesting because i could see somebody trying to

Thank you.

launch a music career and it just flames out or somebody launching a music career and it goes great this is somehow in a liminal some liminal space of like it's not great but somehow he's still doing it and has continued to do it it is so dedicated to it that it's almost like he sort

of just he just willed it into existence is macaulay culkin still doing his band too i don't

know what i do know is that macaulay culkin was supposed to be doing his podcast oh yeah either right before right after ours at the thing festival and then i think macaulay calkin is also having i don't know if it's a resurgence i feel like he just got a star on the hollywood walk of fame and like i feel like he just got a star is there a waiting period like he should have gotten one when he was a kid he got well what was notable about it was a that it was in the last year or two and um katherine o'hara uh you know was one of the people who spoke and she spoke very lovingly and eloquently about him and a lot of people are kind of revisiting that now that she's passed away but yeah it was not that long ago and I kind of wonder like what is the deal with Macaulay Culkin these days because obviously huge huge child star I know he was in was it Party Monster there was a kind of a movie I think about a murder that went down in the like New York sort of rave scene and I think he was in that but it's like you don't see him in a lot of stuff now but i don't know if that's because he's not being cast or he might have just decided he doesn't want to act anymore also is he financially set enough to not act i don't know that i don't the i don't know the economics of being macaulay culkin at this point did he make so much money from those movies that he never has to work again does he do cons like you know conventions i don't really know but what i know is that uh yeah he was on the hollywood walk of fame i think he also might have received some kind of another award recently where I don't think it was an Oscar or maybe it was a Golden Globe or maybe it was an honorary Golden Globe. He just, I feel like there's been like Macaulay Culkin has been showing up places and everyone's been really happy about it lately and that's interesting to me.

I think that there was a long time where we hadn't heard from him and then you know, I don't know, a while back, I don't know, in the next I don't know, in the past 10 years or something he would pop up every now and then like with this band thing which is very much not for me it was some sort of parody thing called like Pizza Party or something yeah something like that and he plays Kazoo or something like it's definitely not for me but I do like that I don't know I always get concerned about child actors and who they will become and the outside forces on them even if they were successful as kids like but what what can that do to a person growing up in that atmosphere and he seems like whenever he has popped up like even if he's doing something that's not for me he seems relatively well adjusted and has a decent take on himself. My feeling, and of course his brother is huge now, you know,

in acting. Which is like, yeah, like, so crazy that his brother has an Oscar. Yeah,

right? Did he get that for the movie where they go to Poland? A Real Pain. A Real Pain, yeah. So anyway, why were we talking about this?

Yeah, he seems to be, he's married, his wife, I think her name is Brenda Song, I think she is like a performer, she might have been like a Disney Channel person in her own right. They've got a family Things seem to be going just fine for him, you know, so go Macaulay Culkin, as it were. OK, now, Andrew, we've finally, 28 minutes later, we've arrived at your favorite part of the show, the Dazzlers.

We was hoping for some razzle dazzle, razzle dazzle. That's right, man. Razzle dazzle.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody razzle dazzle.

All right. Let's thank those dazzling donors. Before we get to Niblet Talk, in fact, this Niblet Talk is brought to you by Madeline Kanai, who's in Golden Valley, Minnesota. Kanai, pronounced like the Hawaiian island of Lanai.

That's pretty good. I guess you have to definitely know how to say Lanai.

I don't know if you heard it in my voice when I said, it's funny, I said Madeline Kanai with great confidence because I had read that little pronouncer. And then when I arrived at the word lanai, I thought, wait, am I saying that right?

Oh, speaking of saying things with confidence, and I don't want to get into a fight on Madeline's time here. But there was something you said during the show yesterday that like really threw me for a loop. And I had to fact check it later. I'm sorry. Oh, no. But the current the newspaper is out of D.C.

Oh, it is. Yeah. You know what must have happened? I thought it was. Well, I was interviewed by somebody in The Current and they were in Minnesota. So I think that in my mind just made me think that the paper was also based there. But yeah, the DC would make a lot more sense.

Because I remember, I know that they are not part of NPR.

I'm sad you even left that in the show because that was the most confusing. Not just because I was wrong.

I'll be honest with you, if I had looked it up before posting, I would have stripped that out. Because I'm not looking to make either one of us sound wrong more often on the show.

I just thought it was so boring. We're going like, which? It's like a.

The who's on first, but like so much more boring. Like, you mean the current, the radio? No, the current, the paper. No, but they're both based in Minnesota. Right.

Anyway. And they're not. Sorry for being loud wrong. One is American University. Anyway, Madeline, I'm sorry for that fight. And we had to get it out of our system so that we can now, we have now nothing but love for your message.

Yeah. I honestly, I consider Madeline having built a bridge. Kind of like in that jazz podcast that you were listening to.

She literally built a bridge.

She's able to build a bridge here between you and I so that we can really kind of focus on the task at hand, which is reading Madeline's message. Co-bros, you make the world a kinder place for this middle-aged mom type. I love you all so much, and I'm thankful for your diligence in spreading positivity, light, humor, light and humor every weekday. We all need those things more than ever now. Here in the Twin Cities, my family and I moved to Minnesota just months ago from New Jersey. And having your voices in my ear pods has given me the comfort that I needed during the stressful process of selling, buying, and moving homes. You especially helped me get through the days of driving our three dogs, three chickens, and our 13-year-old son, August, to our new home. The Tens community is full of gems, and we feel lucky to have you in our lives. I look forward to meeting my fellow Minnesotens when we start to thaw out in the spring. Thank you again, Cobros. What you do is so important. Aw. That's a really nice message, and that's pretty exciting, Madeline, that you and the whole brood have relocated. That's a big move to go from New Jersey to Golden Valley, Minnesota.

With three chickens in tow. My hope is that August was wearing a straw hat and overalls with one shoulder strap, sort of not quite fastened right. Wait, maybe that makes him a member of TLC. Am I trying to make him a farmer or a member of TLC? I'm not exactly sure.

on yeah a lot of it has to do with the straps yes does he have both straps if both shoulder straps he's in little house on the prairie and if he has one he's he's considering but then deciding against chasing waterfalls yes andrew i don't want to seem distracted here as i was reading madeline's message but i am you see what i'm doing here i don't mean to seem distracted here as i pick up

my binoculars and start looking out the window it's something that is unrelated to the business

a hand there is a giant pod of black dolphins no kidding swimming in the columbia river right now i have never seen anything like this have you heard of black dolphins before or are you just i mean they're either the smallest orcas i've ever seen and i don't think they come down here or they are they're not like the normal gray color of maybe they're porpoise i don't know the difference really they're you know think about the color of like flipper the dolphin right great yes they're not that color. They're, they're darker, they're black, but they're like, I was seeing this kind of just like, I don't know what you'd call it, like a wave pattern out there. That's really unusual. And, um, and I thought, is that just the wind on the river or whatever? And then it just kept happening. And then I got eyes on it and it is this massive school of these porpoises or dolphins. And I can tell because they're all coming out of the water, right? They're doing that thing where they're like not breaching so much but you can just see their backs that's how I know it's not I don't know a really large salmon and they are just going nuts out there and I am totally and completely blown away by that because I didn't know that was a thing that happened in this river so sorry uh for that um little allusion to something that nobody listening to this could see but I just I need to share that with you Andrew because I'm kind of having my mind and now there's like oh this is so interesting Andrew giant giant like flock of seagulls not the 1980s band who ran so far away but what's happening is now there's a giant flock of seagulls that's now descending on the water where the dolphins were doing their thing because my guess is they were chasing fish and maybe the fish were jumping to get away from the dolphins and now all of these seagulls are flying in to try to get the fish who've been brought to the surface. It's a friggin' David Attenborough film happening out here right now, and I'm underqualified to be describing it. So anyway, let's just, let's get back to the, let's get back to the real work of TBTL, Andrew, which is The Donors and Niblet Talk. Maestro?

Okay. Damn it. I was trying to get, I ran so far away. I wanted to swap out the music. If you had just like two more seconds and I could have had this queued up. Oh, believe me, all I want to do is

Stare at these I promise you This song has like a 48 minute intro Before they even get to the Get to the meat of the matter

Well you can just start This is our donor music for our second donor I just wanted it ready for Maestro And I was like literally like Two to three seconds behind it For some reason Spotify took an extra second To open which is another reason I should move over to Tidal according to my friend Aaron I hate Spotify so much Andrew so very much but I use it because it's you know now where all of my saved stuff is my little playlist I saw a really interesting thing the other day about basically why music criticism kind of doesn't really matter anymore and basically was this the story was pitchfork is going behind a paywall now oh really wow and so somebody was using it kind of as a moment to talk about about music criticism and how like it used to be obviously a pretty big deal, whether it was Rolling Stone or wherever you would get your, because what was happening is you would be maybe thinking, hey, should I go spend 20 bucks on this CD?

Like going to see a movie, is it worth it?

You'd read a review that says, hey, this album is great. But because that's not how we experience music anymore. Music is now free, we're not free, but we stream it. So you pay the money to Spotify and then you get all of the music. So you don't, you're not like, hey, should I invest in this CD? And so that has rendered it pretty much meaningless. But what's filled in the void a little bit is music reaction. I don't know if you see this stuff on TikTok, but now the move is somebody listens to fill-in-the-blank music for the first time, and you watch them experiencing the music. Usually somebody already has some kind of social media following. So you see them listening to whatever for the first time and kind of vibing with it. that's now that's now more popular than music criticism it's music reactionism and you mean

that those reactions are for new music because i know that trend of like hey somebody who's like i don't know 20 years younger than us listens to a classic something for the first time you're not talking about that you mean like more of like modern like what's going on in the culture maybe

that's sort of where i guess the like maybe that's where the analysis breaks down because i still think that's mostly people reacting to things that are older as opposed to like so-and-so i have seen it before where it's like so-and-so reacts to the new whatever but it is more of a nostalgia play or more of a like this person's never heard michael mcdonald before right right kind of thing you know this child's never seen a rotary phone before yes yes exactly uh we also have to thank beth wright of seattle washington beth wright not wrong beth was helping with the pronouncer which I appreciate that. Beth says heaps and heaps of thanks to Luke and Andrew and John for wrangling this community of thoughtful and caring tens. TBTL is a favorite part of my day, especially in these times when things around us seem to be spinning out of control. This year, I'd like to hear the drop of the Australian twins who finish each other's sentences. Both the tape and Luke and Andrew saying, ar, nar, to each other always makes me laugh.

What you do is so important.

Do you have that tape?

Yeah. I'm sorry I didn't have it ready, but I'll have it ready here in one second. I'll give a little context. As soon as I find the Flock of Seagulls song.

This was a crazy story that came out of Australia where there was actually like a kind of a violent incident. Somebody was running around with like a weapon or something. And these twin sisters, I want to say it might have even been their mother, had confronted the person. they were relaying a story that they had heard about this kind of incident that was going on in and and and by the way we found out much more about these sisters they like work at some sort of a like they work at some sort of a facility that's for like sea rescue or something no that's right yeah good memory like they have some other they run some kind of an operation i don't know if it's a it's an animal rescue of some kind they're involved in and their whole this is a thing they've been in the news before because they finish each other's sentences they have just spent so much time together and they're twins that like that they that they this is just how they talk like one of them starts a sentence and the other one finishes it they just so happen to be two people who were close to this kind of violent event and then were called upon to like react to it but this isn't the first time they've been in the media for their a unique speech

patterns yeah now the version that i have on hand is the parody version that you and i kind of i think we're doing an imitation of an imitation when we're say r nar and i'll play that in a moment wait the parody version we did a parody version of them pardon me when you and i say r nar we're more imitating the two young women on tiktok who did an imitation of these original twins oh so i'm gonna so i'm gonna play for you a little bit of the original twins and then i'm to play for you what i find to be very very charming which is the two comedians who then do an imitation of these two women and i think that when you and i say are and are we're more mocking or not mocking we're sort of more uh parodying um the uh the the comedians but here are the real people bridget and paula powers they're with our mom and he he went up there and he was coming back down towards us and he goes run he's got a gun and Thank you.

Oh, our hearts started to pound, and I said, well, Mum, where's Mum? And poor Mum was stuck up there, but apparently our brave Mum, she goes, are you all right? Because he had all blood all over his face. And he goes, I'll shoot you. She goes, hey, I'm here to help. And Mum distracted him to make him look the other way, and he looked the other way, and Mum ran into the bush behind the fence. And the guy goes to her, I'll find you and I'll shoot you.

So you will be unsurprised to hear they are wearing the same exact outfit, which seemed to be like some sort of almost like scrubs, like blue scrubs with little bunnies all over them. It might have been around Easter. And that was the original. Folks, here's the TikTokers where they say, Arr, Narr.

We were up on Steve Irwin Way and all of a sudden we thought, run. he's got a gun where's our mum this ain't no fun and our heart started to pound faster than a kangaroo hopping through the bush and our poor mum was stuck up in a tree like a koala bear munching on eucalyptus because he had blood all over his face and he goes i'll shoot you and mum was distracting him to make him look the other way kind of like the toilets here they swell in the other direction and he looks the other way and mom ran into the bush behind the fence and he goes i'll find you and i'll shoot you and we went arnor that arnor i can't say oh no

in regular conversation anymore so i try to only say it around v's because it always comes out

arnor um by the way the backstory on them they're known as the 20s it's paula and bridget powers They're known as the Twinnies in Australia. And I do think the pair met Steve Irwin in a chance encounter after helping a green sea turtle who had been stranded on a beach. After the meeting, he offered them a job at the Australia Zoo. Their rescue organization established in the late 1990s focused on rehabilitating injured seabirds, such as pelicans, kookaburras, and darters, with thousands of birds. Anyway, so yeah, that's the story on them. and uh that that's a i i forgot that there was the the the people doing the impression of them yes that's that's where the r&r comes from i'm also speaking of you know naturalism andrew and the the the natural world while we've been talking i've also been trying to figure out what i was just seeing in the columbia river and it's crazy because there are no reports of there of like dolphins swimming in the columbia river or really of porpoises there are some apparently there are some harbor porpoises that stick around sort of like the area where the pacific ocean kind of meets the river but like i swear to god you saw me looking through those binoculars i was looking at multiple pods of what looked to me to be like dolphin kind of things you know they had the little fin and they were doing the thing where they're going up and down did i just hallucinate something? Am I a cryptozoologist now? What in the heck was I just seeing out there that apparently doesn't

exist? I didn't want to say anything, but as you were using your binoculars, I was looking at the back end of the binoculars because you were sort of facing the camera, and I see that somebody has taped two little pictures over the lenses, and I think maybe... I got pranked. I think you were stereo-opticon-ing,

I think, right there. I got completely pranked. Well, listen, And, Beth, thank you so much for supporting the show. What you do is so important as a listener and as somebody who's helping with the finances of this thing. So thank you to Beth and to Madeline for being our dazzling donors today. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. All right, let's talk Niblets. The Seattle Times today, I think it was originally a New York Times article, But it was, let's see, written by, oh, it's our friend Alexandra Petri. Oh, formerly of the Washington Post. So she's at the Times now, I guess. Oh, interesting. Good for her. We love her coverage of things. Headline, boneless wings are still wings, a judge rules. In an opinion, heavy on chicken puns, a district court judge ruled Tuesday that the boneless wings, Buffalo Wild Wings, could indeed be called wings. The order in a lawsuit filed by a Chicago man in 2023 was dripping with skepticism at the claims that the chain was misleading consumers about its boneless wings. The judge was John Tharp, Jr. of the District Court for the Northern District of Illinois, dismissed the claim brought by Amin Halim, saying it had, quote, no meat on its. bones. Despite his best efforts, Halim did not quote, drum up enough factual allegations to state a claim. End quote, Tharp said in his ruling. Now let's just take a quick moment there, Andrew. I don't know if this is starting at the interesting part of the story or not for you, but I do not like it when judges take part in wordplay. However trivial the issue, I do not like it when judges try to be funny with puns. Oh, I couldn't agree

more. Straight to jail. Straight

to jail straight to jail with you sir disbarred i with with prejudice no wait yeah with prejudice meaning we're not reopening the case oh is that what that means well yeah i gotta remember this you know i've been wrong about a lot of things lately so when charges are dismissed when charges are dismissed with prejudice it means they can never be brought again when they're dismissed without prejudice i believe it leaves the door open for the charges to be refiled at some point

well anyway i'm with you i don't have much more to say other than to double down on what you're saying i mean i find it i don't like this ruling a spoiler alert on my opinion on the ruling oh you don't like the ruling but also it really you're because and again it's not about some sort of fake outrage like i love this food and you're disrespecting it this has nothing to do with anything even regarding that but i actually think it is an interesting issue i think it's quasi serious and i think that this is bullshit the judge acting like the worst like news writer at some sort of like newspaper that's down to like two employees and they're just a frigate on the seas of bad blogs and they have to fill some daily quota so they write about the sausage festival and they try to put as many puns in there as possible. Like, that's bad enough when it's coming from so-called journalists. Let's keep that out of the courts.

I actually thought the judge made an okay... I thought the judge's logic in it was fairly strong. So this is what the guy who brought the complaint. This is Mr. Halim. He said he bought boneless wings from a B-dubs in Mount Prospect, Illinois, in January of 2023. He thought he was buying chicken wings that had been de-boned. I'm going to be honest with you, Andrew. I think for this whole time when I've ever heard boneless chicken wings, I think I also kind of assumed that was the case. Although if you think about it for two seconds, that's so obviously not what's going on here. It's a chicken tender type of deal.

So it's usually a piece of thigh, and honestly, if we haven't talked about this on this show, we've talked about it on other shows, and this is something that's been literally adjudicated before, and that's why I kind of know a little bit about it. It's kind of like they're taking thigh meat, cutting it up, preparing it, and then calling it boneless wings.

In this case, they're saying it's breast meat.

Oh, or breast meat. Okay, yeah, sometimes breast meat.

Halim sued Buffalo Wild Wings saying the chain deceived its customers by labeling its products as boneless wings when the chain instead uses breast meat, which is cheaper. Boy, this is the first I was learning, by the way, the breast meat is cheaper than the bone meat. I would think that the bone, I mean, the whole invention of buffalo wings was because, the story goes anyway, that, you know, Pete's Anchor Bar in Buffalo, New York, somebody said, well, these chicken wings are like, there's no use for them. Nobody wants to eat them. It's too much work. And they're cheap. we got to figure out something to do with them and that was the isn't that your understanding of the origin of the buffalo wing that back then it was like there was it was cheap because nobody

wanted them that sounds right to me i think that's the origin story but um you know our taste in these things then change a lot too like i'm gonna be making a just a little spoiler on my argument here as i approach the bench but um i'll allow it i'll make an analogy later in my arguments uh to cuts of beef and how they're different but it's like back in the day i'm pretty sure i have this right like um ribeye steaks ribeye steak those i think used to be like i think my grandfather's generation were kind of like ribeye that's like too much fat like that's not the good cut but then you know here in 2026 that's my preferred cut because you know i like the marbled fat or whatever so i think our kind of uh taste in these things change yeah yeah i could see that this guy

Halim's point is that or his I guess allegation if you will was that these he was not getting deboned chicken wings he was getting breast meat and he would not have bought these boneless wings I mean for the other thing is like no offense but this guy's truly got to get a life like this is you know this is the kind of lawsuit I feel that you bring when you're dealing with some other kind of emotional and maybe I wouldn't say mental issues but like this feels like displacement to me. This feels like something is not going great for this guy, maybe in some other areas of his life. So this is where he's taking it out. Or, I mean, I kind of assume with cases like this,

because I hate the way it sort of has to be told, like so-and-so made this argument, like he was a consumer who was lied to or something. It's like, he doesn't really care that much. I always think it's somebody who actually wants industry standards on this, whether it's a law firm or whatever. So they get the person, because you need a person to say that Sure.

damaged in some way so it could be that right he was the test case he was i would take it up if

they wanted me if they wanted me to be the face of this i would say i would love this because here's here's my deal here's my deal if you go to a restaurant and like we were just talking about steak if you go to a restaurant and you order a ribeye steak and they bring out a filet mignon or i don't know let's just even say it's like i don't know really the prices of of steak that well but like let's say you order an expensive cut of steak and they bring out a different cut of steak that is a lesser value you can't do that you're ordering a specific cut a wing is a wing i don't understand why you can call a breast a wing because wouldn't you think this lawsuit would be different if somebody was suing like some sort of a let's say upscale steak house chain totally

yes if i ordered a filet mignon and they brought out some like you know some sort of again i'm I'm also the worst person to weigh in on what the less great cut of steak is. Yes, you're right. How about this? A better example. If somebody ordered caviar, somebody ordered a $1,000 thing of caviar, and then they just brought out some weird salmon eggs that just were whatever, a dollar, you'd be like, well, of course you can't say it's one thing and then bring out another thing. Buffalo Wild Wings disputed the claim, saying that the context clues make it clear that the nuggets cannot be made of wing meat, and that the wing refers to the style of cooking, not a chicken's body part. In his order, the judge sided with buffalo wild wings, saying a reasonable consumer would not think that boneless wings were made of wing meat. What do you think of that argument? I think it's total bullshit.

I don't think that a wing describes how something is cooked. I think a wing describes the part of the animal. It's quite literal. Like, a breast is a part of an animal. A leg is a part of an animal. A wing is a part of an animal. The way it is prepared is buffalo style. You could say buffalo style, and the thing is we also have other words for this because you might be thinking, and I don't know if you are or not, well, we can call them chicken fingers, and nobody is confused by that, but we also know that chicken fingers don't – I mean, I guess chickens do have claws. I will actually sometimes buy chicken feet for stock or something like that, but that one I feel like nobody really thinks it's a finger because nobody is selling fingers, but people are selling wings. It is a part of a it is part of the chicken. And I can also prepare wings differently. I often do, you know, like wings are now a part of food and they're very different. They are dark meat. Breast is white meat. It's a different cut of meat. And a wing does not describe a style of cooking. If I go to the grocery store right now, I can buy a bag of raw chicken wings. they're not cooked but they're wings because that is the part of the chicken they are the way it is described is by this is a buffalo style thing call them niblets call them chicken smileys like in that portlandia skit we played the other day make up some and i'll even throw fingers in there as well because it's kind of ridiculous uh but if you think that that undermines my argument then throw that one out too don't call them fingers if you don't want but like there's a million different things you can call these things but don't call them a part of the chicken that they're not i'm really furious about this and i can tell it pisses me off that not only did they get it wrong but they're like the the judge is just kind of like being cutesy with his copy now um one

other thing which i don't think this is going to carry much weight with you the judge said okay if the plaintiff is right then reasonable consumers would think that cauliflower wings are made at least in part from wing meat he said but they don't because of course we all know if there was like a cauliflower buffalo styled cauliflower wings we know that it's cauliflower that's going to be breaded and and cooked in the style of like a buffalo wing but but people don't think that it has wing in it so therefore the judge continued on with this idea that like people are not legitimately confused about this well then people shouldn't call them wings i'm looking at that wing

place that i used to go to or i went to a couple of times it became a um became a topic on the show because they don't accept cash or something i wanted to make sure that they oh yeah no no they do accept cash but they charge extra for using a credit card so i wanted to make sure they accepted cash it doesn't matter but they serve some sort of a cauliflower oh here it is under a section called not wings you can get cauliflower that is tossed in a sauce like i don't know what places are calling them cauliflower wings but i would probably eliminate that language too and if a lawsuit ended up saying okay we're not calling these things wings anymore but like i don't think a lot of places are calling them cauliflower wings i might be out of the loop here but like you can call them something else there the the the preparation is the buffalo style what i was

surprised by was that um they said in this article it's not the first time boneless chicken wings have caused legal action and other drama the ohio supreme court ruled in july of 2024 that a man who ordered boneless wings should have expected the possibility of bones so this is a this is like really flipping the script on this. This guy was suing because he said that he was injured by a bone fragment that was in his boneless chicken wings. So whatever it was, breast meat, thigh meat, whatever the origins of the meat was, they allegedly didn't get all the bones out. So he's eating what he thinks is a boneless product. And then he is, he says, injured by a bone fragment. but the Ohio Supreme Court basically sided with whoever made the boneless wings saying the guy should have still understood there was a possibility of bones. Then in 2020, a man in Lincoln, Nebraska delivered a passionate plea to a city council to remove the name boneless wings from the menus in the city. Now that's your guy, Andrew, right there. That's, that's, uh, you know, that's a freedom fighter for the cause that you're supporting here is just get rid of the name altogether because it's it's misleading um i again i was surprised at how how often boneless wings are making it into the into the courts of this country i think also and by the way you make a very good argument andrew i'm not disagreeing with you it's clear you have passion around this and i think some of that is because i well first of all i don't need a lot of chicken wings anymore just because i don't need a lot of that stuff but even in the days when i ate lots of meat i was not particularly drawn towards wings i would have them sometimes you know camaro kevin i would go to wing dome or whatever most of that was an excuse for me to drink whiskey and have a beer with my friend but like you talk about like i know that it's a treat for you that you enjoy like if the football game's happening and you're doing freezer feast you'll get wings sometimes is that right or whatever like you i think you just this is a space that you play in a lot so you've

got thoughts on this well yes and no that's why i didn't want to i didn't want this to be like i really like this food and so therefore like yeah i'm not trying to undermine your argument some sort of a a ketchup on hot dogs thing because the thing is i don't mess around with uh what you would call boneless wings or chicken nibblers or whatever like if i'm getting wings i'm getting wings you know like for me it's just irony it's just a logic it's just an it's a logic argument to me like i just don't know this does not apply to other meats i don't understand how you can take a cut of meat serve it brand it as something else deliver it and then the court is just going to cheekily like have fun with it and say oh everybody knows no they're different cuts of meat and where is the line then i honestly think like somebody should maybe i mean i don't know i don't i guess you got to find a steakhouse that's disingenuous i don't know i i feel like this can be challenged just on a logic level this just drives me crazy on a logic level i would feel the same way if it

was about like some sort of cottage cheese product uh-huh sure i um think that the next project for tbtl is to get you elevated to an obergefell level candidate for some kind of

supreme court precedent setting sort of case i do wonder if this conversation sort of negates my ability to do that or you know kind of takes me out of the running because in um in court they could play this conversation and prove that i was just out to make a point not that i was actually injured also they now know that i don't order boneless wings as they call them right yeah i

wonder if you've invalidated yourself from being the kind of like ideal the ideal uh you know like what litigant for this kind of a thing yeah i was also then just trying to look up and i wanted to like i'm trying to figure out who obergefell was in the case of obergefell versus hodges i wanted to make sure Obergefell was the good person. I think they were. Obergefell versus Hodges is a landmark decision of the United States Supreme Court, which ruled that the fundamental right to marry is guaranteed to same-sex couples by both the Due Process Clause and the Equal Protection Clause. But let's see, I don't know. I don't know who was who. You would be the good person. You would be the person on the side of justice in this case, Andrew, is my point.

I thought you were looking up the litigant in this case to see, let's see, Amen.

Well, he does, by the way, he's not out of options. He can file an appeal in this case based on some other kind of technicality. So we may not have heard the last of Mr. Haleem. And, you know, you could maybe start a GoFundMe for him or something, Andrew. Absolutely.

Or a character witness. Absolutely.

I have a question for you, which is, have you watched the show The Other Two on HBO? I know you've pulled audio from it. We started with some tape yesterday from there, talking about Bagel Bites, which was living in my head. Well, here's what happened to me last night. I was supposed to be reading books for LiveWire prep, which I did for a couple of hours. But then I decided instead I should watch some television because I was very excited about the debut of this new show on HBO. In fact, HBO got me to re-sign up for their bullshit To watch this show called Neighbors Which is, it's a documentary-style series About, like, truly unhinged disputes between neighbors Yeah, it's been, yeah, every time I open

up hbo it pushes that hard on me and it gave always me just the idea of that show gives me an anxiety attack it's weird uh what um what kind of was that an 11 11 text you were just sending it

was okay i was getting one um i it was weird it's weird to me what kind of anxiety producing television i like and don't like there's certain kind of reality television that like it's just like oh god it's so uncomfortable i wouldn't want to be in that situation i don't want to watch people in that situation and then there's ones that like i just for some inexplicable reason feel differently and this is one of those you know what i mean like i don't know why neighbor disputes in montana don't stress me out to watch um i think it was from one of the producers it's not a safety brother but it was also somebody what the first i saw of this i remember that they were like from the producer of whatever and it was one of those kinds of things that i tend to like i can't remember what show or what kind of cinematic universe but it was like a person who was already kind of like okay by me based on and they knew that very much i think when they were like using that person as the bait they're like a certain kind of luke will like this and i will say that the show is actually shot in a very interesting artful way for being one of these kinds of shows there's this one scene so that there's two big disputes happening in the first episode one is out in montana where you've got these two neighbors uh you know they're very rural montana but there's a dispute over some land that everyone has always kind of used to get to some other land it's a road but this one guy technically owns it now and he's put a gate up so people can't get to their horses and it's just kind of uh so that's one dispute and the thing is everybody in that dispute is all kind of like they're all kind of equally i don't want to say bad but like it's like who am i rooting for here is it the um am i rooting for the um uh What's the conspiracy theory, the super crazy one? Where goes one? We all, you know, the, oh, you do know about it. It's the thing that brought Marjorie Taylor Greene in. QAnon.

Oh, just QAnon writ large. Okay, yeah.

There's a QAnon guy. It's like, am I rooting for the QAnon guy or the guy who's just MAGA?

Oh, sure. You know what I mean?

It's like, there's nobody who's kind of great in it as far as like their politics and their whatever. I'm trying to figure out who I who I who I'm rooting for in this and then they cut to the other the other thing was in Florida some big dispute over this like Over this beach So you've got all these people that own these multi-million dollar homes and the beaches in front of their house are technically private And then there's this little sliver of public beach and there's all this fight about You know where a chair can be on the beach if it's technically going over into private land And the private people have hired this weird dude who just wanders around the beach yelling at people about their beach chairs being slightly onto the private beach. Ooh, I could do that job. And then you have this guy who's, I think, the most interesting character in the entire kind of story, which is he is a former Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints. He's a former Mormon. He and his wife, I think, were girlfriend. They were in the Mormon church, and then he soured on that whole thing. and so he started going in and secretly filming like mormon rituals that you're not supposed to do and he became like his thing is just he's a first amendment advocate that's how he styles himself and what he just does is he just shows up in places with like 11 selfie cameras strapped to himself and he's just filming and filming and filming and people always get mad at him because they're like what are you filming here and he's always like i'm allowed to be here like it could be anything like his deal is he goes to places and it's not ideological in any particular way he's not trying to solve any universal problem he's just trying to stand in places with all these cameras on and then get yelled at and then yell at the people and they film the whole the whole part of him on the beach yelling he's yelling at the guy who's going around telling people they're on the private beach that's this guy's whole move but they film the whole thing i think he has like a crazy fisheye camera lens on top of him or something or it's just an editing effect they do but I almost just want you to watch this like four minutes Andrew because from a cinematography standpoint it's one of the most interesting things I've ever seen it's like it keeps switching from perspectives of like this weird overhead shot where his head is all big and his body is all tiny and then it's like cuts to his camera and then cuts to like the camera that somebody else has on him and then cuts back to this other one it's just visually really stunning

the way they put it together the little trailer that they always play when you open up hbo is very stunning i will say that that's why yeah i was like oh what's this and then i read the

description i'm like open for that i'm out not for that not for you huh no anyway reality kind

of any kind of reality stuff especially if it's got confrontation built into it no thank you

now the i mean yes it is reality and definitely has confrontation built in I don't know.

And I will say this too, like, I found it really entertaining. I'm definitely going to keep watching because it reminds me almost of like, it's, yes, it's about the confrontation, but the way it's constructed reminds me a little bit of like American movie, like, you know, which we play a lot of audio on this show. That's the story of Mark Borchardt trying to make a horror film in Wisconsin where it's the quirkiness of the characters is really highlighted. It's not just pure, like everyone just yelling at each other all the time. It's actually mostly not that. it's mostly a dive into the lives of these people who have clearly taken something much too seriously and then kind of what their life looks like when they're not standing on a property line yelling at someone but rather are home on their computer trying to figure out who left a comment or making a salad with their family and you know what I mean like it's it's really a sort of a it's a character study about people more than it's a show about people yelling yelling at each other over lines of property that being said there was a couple things that i was like well this was very much staged for the show like anyway now it's not now now here's the thing it's not that they're putting words in people's mouth but the people in montana there is this there is this moment where they're actually involved in some sort of a civil case and the judge orders that there is a mediator who is supposed to come out and try to basically mediate between these two groups of people who are mad about this gate and this horse pasture. That's the other thing too, not to get into the details of a show you haven't watched, but the guy who's like a YouTuber and he's really into like the Shire and stuff. He's like, he kind of makes like old weapons, like weapons that would have been in loader, which by the way, powerful Walt Burbank vibrations. He's the one that moved out there with his family and eventually erected this fence and is very mad that these horses, These beautiful, Andrew, wild horses, kind of semi-wild horses that are owned by these other people will come and be like in the pasture that he technically owns. And it's like, I've never seen anything more beautiful than these horses running in a pasture. And it's like this guy is growing crops out there, just scrub land. And he hates it so much that he gets on his ATV and like scares the horses off of his property, which the other people are alleging is illegal. You're not allowed to scare horses with a motorized vehicle in Montana or something is their contention. But it's like, it's like when people, the nut pod, it's working. I feel myself, the change is coming, Andrew. But like, I can't think of anything that would be more relaxing to watch out on your undeveloped Montana land than horses running wild and free. Even if they're a little bit technically coming on to your area. It's not like he has a thing going there that they're messing up. He just owns all this, you know, acres and acres and acres of land that he's not doing anything with. And I would seem like horses would be the best case scenario out there. But he's like, they're just pests because he's so mad at them.

He's so mad about what he feels like is him being disrespected that it's made him it's made him hate the sight of beautiful wild horses.

Maybe this show sounds more like a cautionary tale for me, too. Maybe a reason I shouldn't watch it because I get so I get so in my head about like, oh, you know, cars being parked rudely and how it's disrespectful.

Well, that's what I'm saying. I mean, listen, I'm not telling you what to watch Andrew, but it it it does make one Consider that if you're ever in a sort of a real Intense feeling about something that it could be about other stuff I mean definitely all of the people that are in this have lost Have lost touch with kind of reality at this point and they're just in the fight for the sake of the fight now as opposed to whatever the original kind of jumping off point was. But what they do with the mediation, this is where I was like, okay, this is, they definitely staged this to be this way. The mediator that comes out, he drives out on his Harley. And they've, of course, got this whole, like, shot of him coming down this country road on his Harley. And then where they make the two families meet this mediator, not in an office, not in a room somewhere in town or some kind of neutral site. It's, I mean, I guess it's technically a neutral site But it's one of the fields And the mediator is sitting on his Harley And they have to come stand On either side of his Harley and talk And I was like, well, that's not Listen, sadly I've been involved in some mediations in my life, Andrew And that doesn't go down With someone sitting on a Harley That's never the place Where the important mediation of a legal Civil legal matter is going down It's never somebody on a Harley So they clearly did that just for the optics of it

Yeah, that's ridiculous. You did ask me before if I've seen the other two, and yes, I have seen it. It's really good. In fact, the fact that you hadn't seen it, I think, illuminates something that you told me before the show yesterday. Had you never seen the other two before?

Well, I thought I had seen some of it. And so what happened was after I got on watching Neighbors on HBO, I then was in the HBO.

universe. I was like, yeah, let's see what else. Oh, cause what they're doing with this neighbor's show, by the way, is they're dishing it out on a weekly basis. You know, they're not, they're not, I guess that's HBO's thing, right? They don't, they don't let you binge. So I was kind of like, well, that was 29 minutes and now what are we supposed to do with the rest of my night? So I was clicking around and I, and I saw the other two and I was still buzzing off of how funny that intro is that we played on, was it yesterday's show? I think it was. Yeah. Yeah. Bagel Bites TV. And I was like, I have a, I mean, I have a sense of what I thought the show was, which is I knew It was about basically like, if you were the siblings of like a Justin Bieber, like, and you kind of had your own hopes and dreams, but now they were sort of eclipsed by this wild success of your younger sibling, what would that look like? And maybe I just watched clips of it because I did not, I had never watched an episode of that show from beginning to end, but I was going crazy last night. Like I was reaching out to family members going, you have HBO Max? Let me share my password with you. Like, I feel like we, other than playing the audio from, and by the way, maybe we talked about this and I totally forgot about it, but like, I think I'm three episodes in now. I think it might be one of the funniest, most well-written shows about internet culture that I could, I, that I can remember. It is truly hilarious to me. And there are so, and also it helps that I was for a while kind of a wannabe actor type. So the whole audition culture of that world is something that i'm keyed in on but like it's so so funny i feel like it should have gotten so much more attention when it came out it's funny now keep

in mind i haven't seen this i think i watched maybe the first season when it was fresher and i think it went on to do more seasons so i'm not trying to make it sound like this is super top of mind for me but what i liked about the show was that it wasn't as cliche as you would think if You're making a show that is sort of about a Justin Bieber type, but really more about what does that do to the people around him and his family? What the other two refers to his siblings? In other words, when you have a super, super, super famous kid in the family, the other kids are the other two. And they have their own careers that they're working on. And as you mentioned, one of them is an aspiring actor, but he's trying to do other jobs while he's trying to land roles while his little brother is super, super famous. But what I love, and you sort of mentioned when we were playing that tape yesterday, that you thought it was really funny how the main character, not the main character, but in that piece of tape, Chase Dreams, is like, everything's good. I actually really like the fact that he's not a toxic little snot. He's a really sweet guy. And I think that makes the show so much more, first of all, watchable, but also interesting. And Molly Shannon is great in this. I mean, you kind of forget that Molly Shannon, it's a really, really great role. and like she is a loving mom she's not like she's not just a stage mom you know what i mean but there's part of that in her character i just think that there's a lot more depth to these characters totally um than you would expect from a show if you were just to describe this premise no you're

absolutely right like it's it's there's every time you think it's just going to go with the most archetypal character like this is the bad person this is the good person this is the dumb person is the smart person it always veers just a little bit or there's just kind of a moment of humanity from them and everyone just seems so perfectly cast in in the you know ken marino as a streeter

his yeah he's really broad he's he he's probably the broadest character he's probably the broadest

i'm just like such a ken marino fan that it's just kind of like i he's sort of doing ken marino things in the show but i'm okay with it like i was constantly doing some medical intervention for this kid like oh he can't talk we're dying his tongue it's got to be pink like teen girls don't want a gray tongue he says about it he's like always doing some weird stuff to this kid but like again and also just the like maybe because i'm still watching it close enough to when they made it it still feels pretty relevant to me and the way that they've really they really captured perfectly a kind of a moment of internet culture as well because i mean this their little brother chase dreams he is a kind of a creation of internet culture really and so the way that they play that out on phones and stuff and when and they have this sort of arranged dating situation that he's going to be part of with a kind of a zendaya type um and then they have to break up and just the way that it all is unfolding on social media like it's you could i mean things are evolving so quickly that you could be watching a show that was made two years ago where it feels like the way that they portray the social media version of our world would already be kind of outdated and already look kind of silly yeah didn't it didn't feel that way to me watching

it last night yeah like when the simpsons i always think it's a mistake when the simpsons tackle i guess we've talked about this before when they tackle like a a trendy issue of the moment because it takes them so long to get that show out it already feels old when it comes out and then it just does not that's the part of that show that does not stand up is when something is sued except some of them now are so of an era that they're kind of they've gotten back into the column of funny because they're so specific like that wings drop not wings not the boneless wings but the but the um drop from that show about the band wings i'm just like oh i love how this is so 1992 yeah all that is to say i am loving this show

And I'm so glad that I stumbled back on it, thanks to that intro drop, and then thanks to me paying the home box office company, whatever it is. I'm also, I'm so weird with money. Like, I'm doing the version that has commercials.

HBO?

Yeah. Okay, I want to talk about this. I'm saving, like, $7, but, like, and then I have to watch commercials. It's like, why, I spend seven, there's something about, whatever the cost was to have no commercials seemed to me to be ridiculous. so I went with the cheaper one but like I just I waste $7 on a lot of things why am I going to make my experience with HBO worse

$7 a month though right so that adds up but yeah well I live with Genevieve so we have the HBO with the commercials and also the Netflix with commercials or whatever and usually that doesn't bother me too much I'm not usually Genevieve and I are playing cards and watching like an old movie that I'm half paying attention to and a commercial comes on it doesn't bother me but this is actually I was wondering if we talk about this today or not because i don't know if it's fully relatable but i was watching a movie on hbo yesterday and for the first time the commercials like one of them pissed me off so bad like i yelled at the computer because i was watching something i don't usually watch and i'm very unfamiliar with like french new wave cinema and i think that you're a little bit more into it

i don't know if you took a class or i mean no i just dated someone who really like band of outsiders okay yeah yeah that's the extent of my knowledge that's on my list actually i downloaded that the

other day i have that i've also just been like man there's so much actually i want to talk to you about i've been because i've heard totally coincidentally that some other friends of mine are doing the same thing and we did not talk about it ahead of time but i do think there's something about the media landscape that's going on right now that is driving people like me back to bit torrenting and like having movies and i had a i had a couple of hard drives that i had movies and tv on and i spent over the winter i spent this project of like sort of like reorganizing them and downloading more things and completing some series and collections because things just seem too fleeting these days like we were just putting too much power in the hands of hbo to decide whether or not a movie will be on demand for me tomorrow and i think that i instinctively started doing this project and then i heard from i don't want to put anybody else on blast and private conversations but from other people like husbands of friends of mine who are like oh my husband's been doing the same thing like he's been just like i want to know that this movie or series will be on my hard drive for um years to come and i think unrelated to that luke but do you remember i'm going to get to my hbo thing in a second here but do you remember a week no no I'm sorry I don't know when I brought it up but the time was maybe a week after Christmas or so I needed a new solid state hard drive for this purpose because I was sort of sorting all my stuff out I had an issue with my television I needed to bounce a bunch of files so I needed a very large like not even very large these days I was looking for a one terabyte solid state hard drive external hard drive I have a few of these things i knew exactly what i wanted and i went to i know i drove to five different stores around seattle and i called a few nobody had it i ended up going to that office depot and it looked like they had it on the shelf but when i took up the empty box they said we don't have this anymore and i came home and i even went online and i went to the actual manufacturer's website to that day and they were out of them as well and i was like it must have just been the christmas rush rush the holiday rush have you been following the news on this both mentioned it yesterday that they're getting more expensive they were getting more expensive but then yesterday uh article uh was published that said both it's uh western digital and is it seagate the two huge external hard drive manufacturers are sold out for 2026 already luke what it has it has a lot to do with ai and all of these companies needing as much it happened with ram and processing power first i guess like ram sticks were selling out and for me i'm like how is this consumer electronic being sold out because of ai but we actually even got a note from uh our friend lin fam about this yesterday it has to do with just like they are gobbling up as much storage space for i don't know if it's for workstations or

whatever it is but people are just like they they cannot satiate this beast of ai and so So because of that, I cannot get another hard drive. That's nuts. And basically, they're not prioritizing the consumer experience of buying hard drives. I don't know if you're Googling this now.

I am looking at a PC Magazine article. AI Demand clears out Western Digital's hard drive supply for 2026.

Can you believe that? No, I can't. So a few years ago, or right around the pandemic, I told a story about how during baseball season, I used to like to go at the beginning of the season and just buy a pack of baseball cards. And then suddenly I found it really hard to find just a pack of baseball cards. And we found out within weeks that it was because of this huge trend of people buying up all the cards and doing their openings online and like baseball cards not just being fun anymore, but more of like it was kind of swept up. Car breaks. Yeah. And it was almost like that whole Bitcoin-y kind of thing. Like everybody was obsessed with speculative stuff. And, like, this is the second time that I just went out to buy something, and I couldn't buy it anywhere, and I couldn't figure out what was going on, and I dismissed it until the news story comes out that, no, this is a global phenomenon. We can't buy frickin' hard drives anymore.

Now, did you have – let me try to remember the story. Did you physically have one in your hands and you decided against it?

No. I went to the shelf at Office Depot after having struck out everywhere. Oh, right, and they had the plastic box but not the thing. box and i take it to the front and the guy was apologetic he's like i don't have it and like at that point after having chased this all chase dreamed of this all over town and then finally had the box in my hand and was like you are you guys are my saviors and then him saying no no this is on the shelf but we don't actually have it in stock and i was so bummed about that so anyway i just that i saw that story last night and i was like kind of freaking out about it well i think

but i do think you're onto something with i guess a certain sort of tech savvy corner of the culture and also walt burbank which is maybe because of all the like you know depending on what who you know how the content gets resold or licensed or for how long this idea that like you know you could have a get your hbo max subscription but then something could be on there but then not on there and now it's like now i can't watch it because i gotta there's it's landed somewhere else in fact when i was clicking around hbo the way that i ended up on the other two was because they have a whole category called watch every episode as opposed to and i guess i guess what that means that can mean a couple of different things one is just this is not new enough content that we're gonna like try to parcel it out week after week but i took it to mean some of this stuff that's in hbo that's a series they don't even have every episode in there maybe oh interesting oh i thought

it meant that it had all posted already and you could binge it maybe that's maybe that's what they

mean i mean so maybe that undermines my argument i was going to say like it would be annoying if you were subscribing to hbo and there were some series that isn't like one that's actively being released you know let's say it's from a couple years ago and it's like they brit box you yeah which is like i mean i can't overstate what a ripoff i think brit box is because you if you're like into that kind of stuff like my dad is and and i sort of am you can't just go on there and watch kind of what you want it's sort of the leftovers of whatever they feel like putting up and it could be a random season of a show it could be a random episode which is not how that episodic tv should work no but anyway my thought with hbo was when i saw watch every episode i took that to mean well we've got the whole thing here if you want to watch it whereas some of the other stuff might not have everything which would be really annoying if it's the case but but i may have kind

of misunderstood what the point of that was but i think even more to the point is when you're scrolling through movies if i have hbo open i'm usually looking at movies and there will be a bunch that'll be flagged that says leaving soon you know like you gotta like gamify this idea of like oh i gotta get this because it's leaving as opposed to just like i have my collection or i can go to scarecrow video okay so i do want to talk really briefly about this movie that i watched yesterday because i had no intention of watching this movie i had not heard of it when i had woken up in the morning and then i watched it kind of throughout the day in three parts and i realized i can't stop thinking about it and that doesn't and so it's by somebody named agnes varda a filmmaker named agnes varda who i believe is a french filmmaker um she i don't know if you're looking this up i don't know i don't know if she was born in france but i think she was a french filmmaker and um in part of you know in like the 1960s through i think the 1980s or something like that and apparently very very well respected you know yeah i've definitely seen her like these

pictures of her it's like i i was aware of her in the culture although i couldn't tell you about

her movies but she's very iconic looking yeah she is yes and i had not i i do not think i'd ever heard of her before and again this this whole era of film even though like i kind of you know during college or whatever got quote-unquote into film like i just never got deep enough to to this which you know this is an era and style and genre of film that is you know celebrated right in it.

I've always felt like, oh, I should get more into it. But I just, I don't know anything about it. But I'm just scrolling through Blue Sky yesterday. And somebody, I literally don't even know who it was. Not somebody I know in real life. Sort of vague posted about some movie, which I think in Off the Top of the Dome. I think it's Le Bon Air or something like that. I have no idea how to speak French. But it means happiness, basically. Okay. And it's from the late 60s. And some people described it as a horror movie or a drama, and I realized that people were categorizing it in very strange ways. I really wish I hadn't seen that somebody had called it a horror. Some people categorize it as that. That is a way of interpreting it later, but if anybody's thinking about watching this, get that out of your mind right now. It is not a horror film. There are certain techniques that the camera does that are sort of will be reminiscent maybe of what a horror film does. But it had a short running time. I'm like, what is this person on Blue Sky even talking about? I've never heard of this person. And it was one of those things where I had a little bit of downtime. I had prepared my After These Messages show, but I wasn't ready to record with Genevieve yet. She was still doing real work. And I was like, well, let me just see what this person is talking about. So I Google the movie. I see that it's on HBO. It has a short run time. And I'm just like, well, let me just see what this is like. A movie about suburban Paris in the 60s. it's got to have some eye candy in it so I just dial it up on my computer thinking I'm going to watch five minutes I have no idea what it's about because it's just sort of this very pastoral slow-paced film about a working-class family outside of Paris for like you know the first 45 minutes and it's really beautiful and it really sucks you in but it's not really about anything you're just getting to know their lives and then it essentially ends up being about infidelity and then how that sort of all works out but the style of filmmaking i mean first of all it is so incredibly beautiful i'm watching it most of the time thinking it was literally 15 minutes till the end i'm like when is the big thing gonna happen like when is the some small things have happened but when in almost every the last 15 minutes of the film maybe even the last 10 minutes define the rest of the film and there's nothing shocking or super over the top it's just I can't get this film out of my head it was just a lark that I looked up in the middle of the day and I've been thinking I'm seriously I it was the first thing I thought about when I woke up this morning like I can't get this movie out of my head and I can't exactly even tell you why and maybe because of the ambiguity within it like I spent last night reading a bunch of essays about it and everything And I do think it's about the ambiguity. But to me, it leaves you feeling a little bit cranky and confused, but in a in a purposeful way. You know what I mean? Not in a way that it's like, I don't know about this movie. I think it's supposed to leave you feeling a little bit confused.

And and I think I think angry, although a lot of different people have different interpretation, different interpretations of what she was saying with this.

I'm kind of surprised I'm watching a trailer for it now. I'm surprised it's in color for some reason. And as I'm hearing the description of it, I'm thinking, like, oh, this is going to be black and white. But, yeah, I'm watching it. Just the visuals, the sunflowers. Yes, it is so beautiful. It looks really cool. Well, I will probably check this out. I got to be careful of the commercials, though.

This is what I was going to say. You're in the middle of this beautiful, slow-moving, like, passionate scene. And she does something really cool because color was new then, Luke. She doesn't fade to black between scenes. she fades to red sometimes she fades to green it's really interesting but then it'll just be fading and then all of a sudden it'll be the most modern yell in your face i the one that yelled at me was a i'm not gonna swear because i want to keep it clean today but you know what i didn't need was a very sensitive scene just ending just and then right before it fades suddenly howie howie mandel oh no some sort of some sort of hormonal hormonal what is the word i'm looking for he's got howie mandel howie mandel he's got a hormonal problem you know how there's a certain you know the look of men of a certain age in this day and age who are taking all of the testosterone testosterone and hormonals and everything else yes and like i don't know what's going on with them, but he's still just got, you know, he's wearing mirrored sunglasses telling me I should play some sort of quiz game on Netflix. But something about going from 1967 France to just suddenly like the cheapest, cheapest commercial in my face. I screamed at Howie Mandel. I was serious. I was like, I can't remember ever being so pissed at an ad break. That sounds like such

a rough kind of, you know, record scratch of just like the experience you're having of just living in the world of this film, I'm guessing it's a relatively quiet world.

so quiet and then and then and not just any commercial but something that's probably in a lot of cases not making life actually better for people which is like people shooting themselves up with a bunch of tea so that they so their body isn't doing the thing that it's supposed to

probably naturally kind of he was advertising something for netflix i just think that he's got that look of it it was some netflix quiz game that you can interact with i think it's a reboot of that internet phenomenon what was that um game everybody was playing online during the pandemic that was a quiz show remember it was one guy he would host a quiz show we could all play it i

forget the name of it but um but then i think there was a crazy story with that too i think there was like an aftermath of that like he quit or got fired or something and it became a whole kind of a thing but yeah i remember that i remember everybody was playing some kind of online quiz together for a while this is complete left field and we probably need to wrap things up today, because I still got to read the rest of Chuck Klosterman's book. Hey, by the way, we're doing Live Wire tomorrow night at the Alberta Rose Theater. Chuck Klosterman will be there. Annabelle Gurwitch will be there as well, and it's going to be a fun

night. So it is Klosterman. This is interesting. A friend of ours was saying Klosterman, and Genevieve was like, isn't it privately to me, she said, isn't it Klosterman? I always said Klosterman. That friend of yours was right. Right. Okay, good to know. I'll tell

you. And I know this because, well, I've interviewed him before, but also because I've been bouncing between reading the book Football and listening to the audio book, and he reads the audio book, and he starts by saying, I'm the writer, Chuck Klosterman. But then it's funny, because I've also listened to other interviews with him where they're calling him Klosterman, and I'm like, you guys, you're embarrassing yourself.

Well, I embarrassed myself here on the show today, and also the person who gave me the book is our friend Rachel, who did interview him as well, and so I'm glad, because that was kind of my concern. Genevieve was like, I hope she didn't mispronounce his name in the interview, but she clearly was well researched and i was judgy yes um but anyway i need to get i need to finish reading that book

before tomorrow night but all that is to say i was having actually speaking of chuck closerman i was listening to an interview with him this morning when i was on the treadmill talking about the book and he's been doing the round so he's been on pablo torre he's been in a million places and um so i found one that was the i don't know if you're familiar with this but there's a guy his name is i think ryan holiday and he's become very well known for stoicism he's a you know relatively young guy you know very kind of fit guy and like a kind of a TED talky guy although I like him I think he seems actually measured and smart and his whole thing is talking about stoics and and kind of what stoicism what we can learn from the idea of stoicism in modern life as a way of kind of emotionally regulating ourselves and just approaching our lives and and I find a lot of what he talks about to be very compelling so I'm looking at all the different interviews that Chuck Klosterman has done and he's done one with this daily stoic podcast. I was like, okay, this will be a good, interesting conversation. And it kind of was, but it started like so many of these things start, including Pod Save America, including, I'm trying to think of some other examples of people that I really respect. And I'm not trying to throw anyone under any buses. And I want to also offer this. No one's approaching us to do any, I thought of this when you mentioned like Howie Mandel looking like a person who's on some kind of a something or other. It's wild to me how many podcasts that I really like and respect also do ads for like just kooky kooky medical shit that's unverified and it's just like now again no one's offering us any money to do this so it's an easy call I don't think there's any you know if somebody was like here's a hundred thousand dollars to talk about this thing I'd probably I would I would probably find a way to talk myself into feeling okay about it and I'm not trying to sound judgy about what other podcasters are doing again, particularly in a, in a, in a format that's never been really presented to us much, but it's weird to listen to a podcast where the whole thing is kind of like about stoicism or being, or it's about kind of understanding the higher mind and the higher form of life. And it's like, let me just tell you about such and such. Hey, it's so-and-so. Let me tell you about this supplement and dah, dah, dah, dah. And it's gonna, and I'm always just like oh man like you have really kind of done yourself a reputational disservice to me by doing these ads for these things that are kind of unverified and they might do some good stuff they might not i don't know but it's just it's funny to me that at the end of the day there are so many of these podcasts and again it's i guess it's an indication that they are popular enough that the supplement companies want to pay them a bunch of money but it's just like it's just funny when a podcast that prides itself on being essentially no bullshit has to start by doing something that strikes me as kind of inherently bullshit.

Yeah, and honestly, like, and I'm not trying to turn this into a pitch, but it's these conversations that we would be having off air as well that is just a reminder of how special our funding mechanism is. There is literally, I'm not saying nobody does as a podcast the style of podcasting that you and I do in the space. Nobody has the funding. model that we have which is 100 percent listener supported and in a way that can that can support a daily full-time podcast you know and like and that is if you and i it just we would not be able to do tbtl we would not be able to get enough of those kinds of ads to support the show if we did not have listener support like we simply wouldn't every now and then when we worked for american public media they would suggest some sort of a um you know an ad for a supplement or something and you and i would say no we don't we don't do that but we weren't taking money out of our own pockets we were just saying apm you're not getting us to say that stuff so that you guys can get a tiny bit of revenue but i just know based on the the industry and our particular download numbers and everything the types of ads that we would have to do if we had any ads at all would be really disruptive to the flow of this program. I shudder to think what we would be offered and how many of those we would have to do to even earn a nickel. It just would not be sustainable. So if you don't mind me just taking this opportunity to once again thanking our listeners for keeping the show alive, because at this point, this is the only way TBTL works.

A hundred percent. No, that's actually a really good point. And I don't think that that's overly, I don't know, I'm turning this into a sales pitch. But, yeah, you're absolutely right. Like, A, we just don't have enough downloads for the advertising money to be meaningful. And also, you're right. Like, I don't know if you're familiar with the bottom of the barrel, but sometimes you turn the barrel over and there's an area of ground under it that's really dead. It's just brown dirt now with worms. There are worms, yes. That's who would be coming for us beneath the bottom of the barrel. And meanwhile, we have this crazy thing that's happened where we get to do this show five days a week. It's supported by the listeners. Even though I have rapidly declining testosterone, that can be fine. That can be okay. A lot of these hosts, their testosterone levels are very high, and you can tell, and they're very active, and they're living their best life. I'm living my worst life, but that's okay within the context of TBTL.

Yeah, we're the crying podcast. We don't need no testosterone. her own by the way speaking of worms and this podcast at some point will you maybe we need more of a maybe we need more of a raison d'etre but i've been watching a lot of french films at one point she did say one of the characters says here it is and to hear her say voila but anyway um paula poundstone has worms she loves talking about our worms can we just can You just text your friend. Remember, she talked about it on our podcast once, and she talks about it on Instagram. She will send people worms, right, for their compost, or she'll send you compost with worms in it, I think.

Why don't I have them, Andrew? Why is my brain so broken? How would I not remember Paula Poundstone telling us about worms? She told us all about this. I believe you.

She has videos as well. And sometimes I think about her and her little worms. And are you looking up now? Because I know I've played some of her videos before. paula poundstone i'm not wrong about this i mean what if i'm what if my brain is broken um but i was just thinking i would love to have her back on the show to talk more about here she's on tiktok

she's on tiktok well i'm sure the listeners would love it people think i'm kidding when i say that i'm a worm farmer i'm not kidding here wendell show my uh this is one of my worm bins there's probably i don't know they don't count off that well there's probably about a thousand worms in there uh in fact if you write to me at paula at paulapoundstone.com i have for you the how the heck does she do it package where i send you a pound of worm waste for your garden and a video showing some part of my worm farming process and introducing you to the worm that i name after you now a lot of people think that's fake too they go you can't talk to worms worms don't come when they're called you know what that's because you're not doing it right yes they do watch this i've You take a tube like this, and you put it in there.

Tube, she's sticking in the dirt.

Carol! Carol! Come on, Carol, come on! Come on, that a girl! Come on, Carol! There you go!

The worm came up the tube.

William! I was calling Carol!

Okay, so anyway, yeah, confirm that she doesn't sell you worms, though. So she sells you the worm mud or dirt or dirt or waste.

I mean, I don't know. I can't believe you said we talked about this with her.

That's where I learned it. Remember, she came on to talk about the Alan Rickman encounter that she had in the restaurant.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Okay, so that had gone viral. That I remember. I read her story online about that, which I didn't know about. So she came on to tell us more about it.

that which was honestly just one of my favorite episodes I just remember laughing so hard during that entire episode I'm gonna be back on wait wait in like two weeks and who knows maybe yeah if the stars align maybe Paula will be one of the other panelists I don't know yet but if not I'll reach out to her to see how the worm farm is going I would really love to have her back on she seemed game I mean oh yeah no she's listen I mean put a quarter in her it's like if you can get her thing with paul is she's always touring she's always traveling for work yeah sometimes a little bit hard to pin down but if you get her on the phone you and i essentially can both just slowly back away from the microphone and take the rest of the day off and she will she will absolutely entertain and delight the listeners oh she's the best with minimal uh input from us so anyway all right well uh that's gonna do it i think for today's episode of old tbtl but we're gonna be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio uh for all of you so please come on by for that in the meantime everybody have a great wednesday stay safe take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all power out