Muse

So, you got a boyfriend at the moment?

Me? No. You?

I don't have a boyfriend. Or a girlfriend. No, not me. You can't tame the J-dog. The J-dog's just...

What's the J-dog?

Well, that's me. I'm the J-dog.

Where's that from?

Well, it's street language. You know, you just take the first letter of your name and you put dog on the end of it and all the other dogs sort of respect you.

Okay. TBTL!

They said it would happen, and it has. The day when you could go to the movies without leaving your living room. You wouldn't have to go to the movies. The movies would come to you. Well, they are coming to you. If you're ready for them, via videotaped cassettes, you can play on your home television set.

All right, you guys like impressions? Here's that guy Bob from Bob's Burgers. Hi, I'm Bob from Bob's Burgers. How about that show Archer? You watch that show Archer? Here's that guy Archer. Hi, I'm Archer from that show Archer. Now what if those guys met? Hey Archer, it's Bob. Hey Bob, it's Archer. Thank you.

I don't know who that is and I don't care to find out. I don't know if it's video games or what, but it's so unfair to after something like this to blame people in the backseat or say they deserved it. Oh, it feels good to laugh. And boom goes the dynamite.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

Sorry, Billy Joel, we did start the fire.

My name's Luke Burbank. I am your host.

Things are going to start happening to me now.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it's an absolutely spectacular Monday, July the 6th. Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful. Had a lovely 4th of July weekend. Spent part of it down in Manzanita, Oregon, on the Oregon coast, and then spent Saturday night up in Salem, camping out with Becca's family. And now we're back home, and the sky is blue, and the river is placid, And all is right in the world here as we arrive at episode 4764 in a collector series.

Let the fun begin.

Back here at home, looking out on the yard here, the property. Property sounds very fancy. It's just a very big yard, and a lot of it is a hill. And that hill has grass on it, and it grows very, very tall. And my neighbor is very, very worried about that grass catching on fire and burning the whole neighborhood down. And we've been talking about it on the show. I have an update on what's been going on with me and the neighbor and the hill and the mowing. Can you verify? Can you give me some 411? A topic that is my neighbor sort of guilt-tripping me into mowing the hill that has really got people animated. It was brought up this weekend, I think, multiple times by people who tune into the show. I'm surprised at the traction that this little TBTL plotline is getting. Speaking of getting traction, TVTL is finally getting the attention I think it deserves in Valley City, Ohio. We're getting medium play

on three independent radio stations in Central Europe.

Word is spreading that the TVTL-a-thon is coming to Valley City, Ohio next week. My friend, Jumpin' for Joy will be at the Valley City Frog Jump all week. And then tonight, I'll be watching the World Cup United States match And, well, we had a player who was suspended. They probably shouldn't have suspended him. He probably didn't do something bad enough to be suspended. But now FIFA is bending the rules to let him back in. And I don't know how to feel about this whole thing.

I'm in a glass case of emotion!

Thankfully, I have an incredibly emotionally regulated guy that I work with. He's the longest-running co-bro of the show. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He doesn't have to get emotional because his physicality says it all.

I am a large man. I'm a very large man, and I use my dad voice a lot.

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke. I have some exciting news for you because I think— Okay, it's a business opportunity. It is. It's related to business. It is related to business because I think—I don't know if you want to call it official or unofficial. I think we've received our very first donation to this year's TBTL-a-thon. Oh, my goodness. Let me explain. Intelligence for your life. I went to the post office on Friday, I want to say, and I shipped, by the way, a huge, heavy box of equipment, recording equipment, streaming equipment, microphone holding equipment to my parents' house in Ohio.

because I will need that on the other end when we get off that plane in Ohio, ready to start broadcasting from Valley City. So while I was there, I checked the P.O. box, and we had a package from Max, I believe here in Seattle, and it said specifically, please open this before the TBTelethon, and I could feel there was a little device inside there. And I opened it up, and what is inside? Do you remember these little magic tricks when you were a kid? It was like a little box, and you would put a quarter or a coin in it, And then you would slide it in, and it would disappear, and then you'd slide it out. And it's a bespoke one. I believe this was 3D printed. Look, it says, everybody razzle dazzle on it. And then when you open it up, it says, insert donation here. And you can see. Now, the problem is, it doesn't work. I don't know what happened in the mail, but the quarter just sort of flops around in there. So the magic. Actually, that's an apt metaphor.

Because when you donate to the TV telethon, the money doesn't disappear. Thank you. see max the money is how we get to do the show of five days a week all year long so that's actually a better that's a more relevant exactly way to deal with the coinage in the in the magic box

because max knows what's going on but max also included a quarter okay so this means we are 25 cents into this year's tbtlathon i don't know what our goal is i think it's at least 50 cents I thought it was like $1.50, but I don't know. We're halfway there. We'll have to talk to John. That's right. Just one person. One more. John, I can feel steam coming out of his ears. As I say, we just need one more donation of 25 cents, and we've hit our goal. But anyway, thank you, Max, for this. I'm sorry that the device maybe didn't quite travel as well as maybe it could have, but I'm enjoying. And again, I love it. Razzle Dazzle, insert donation here. We're $25 richer. I guess I've got to split this between you and John. and we'll figure out the decimal points on that in a little bit. Well, let's check out the bylaws of TBTV to see what the exact breakdown of that quarter is. Exactly, but I'm excited. It's all spelled out in there. I can tell you're feeling it, too. I can tell. This is the week before the thon, and we are both feeling it.

I am, and you know what? I'm not even joking. You texted me and John something this morning that made me feel actually very excited and very much like, oh, this is really happening. And this was the mention, I believe, on the Facebook page of the Valley City Community Group heralding that TBTL is coming to Valley City. This is a whole write-up. Did we submit this write-up?

Well, this is pretty spot-on, honestly, if we didn't write it. Well, I would say it's not spot-on because the first word is popular. It says the popular daily podcast. All right.

Hey, listen, Andrew, we can be anybody we want in Valley City. Let's go with successful.

That didn't work out for me when I tried to change my name from Andy to Andrew in eighth grade. So I was going to a new school, but the teacher called me Andy immediately.

We're going back to a place with so many memories for you and also maybe a certain amount of baggage. You can be Andrew if you want in Valley City now, Andrew Walsh. I'm just telling you that.

My dad won't call me that. My dad will call me Andy. But yeah, so I don't know. This is from Facebook. But as you know, I'm not on Facebook. This was sent to me by my sister, a screen cap from something called the Valley City Community Group, but it says AI Info at the top. It does say AI Info, and so here's what I think would – yeah, right underneath –

Wrong, so this was AI written?

Well, here's what happened. So we have our – our liaisons in Valley City are a couple of guys named Dave. We call them the Daves, right? And they asked us recently – I tried to get one of them to change their name to Buster because it would be easier to remember. Exactly. I call one of them Davey. He hates it. um i uh oh dave and buster sure yeah it was a dave and buster joke okay it wasn't good i mean it was a dave and buster comment no sorry hey you know what you know what andy new rule we gotta start big meter to each other anyway they asked us like they sent us like kind of a list of questions sort of like hey just to kind of give us a sense of like what you guys are doing here what your plans are let us know and so we submitted that and this is not it this is not that but this seems to have taken that information and maybe synthesized it i can only say that word once per show before i start lisping all over the place um and so that's what i'm guessing that we fed

yeah source material we sent them of some kind of light biographical info fed that into ai and then and AI fleshed it out by using what the internet kind of knows about us. I'll be honest with you, it's fairly, nothing jumped hugely out at me as far as a hallucination or something that's wildly wrong.

This is our info. It's just rewritten, basically.

It's on the Valley City Community Group, as we've mentioned, that we are coming to Valley City, and it kind of lays out the history.

of the show and that we're getting close to 5,000 episodes and where you can hear the show that it'll be streaming on YouTube. And then to celebrate their visit, Luke and Andrew also plan to adopt and train a frog to compete in the Valley City Frog Jump with listeners helping choose the frog's name and following its progress on a planned 24-hour frog cam. We're excited to welcome the TBTL team to Valley City and can't wait to see what stories, laughs, and frog jumping adventures unfold during their stay. And then it includes an animation, if you will, a sort of a drawing, Andrew, of you and I doing TBTL in Valley City, and I'm being very serious when I say I love this drawing of us, even though it looks... It's not a drawing, it's an AI creation. This AI creation, this AI animation of us. I love it. It looks nothing like us.

It looks nothing like us at all. We look to be in our maybe mid-twenties. You look like a child you look like a maybe a tween like who's like teaching his slightly older cousin how to

podcast well that's how i think of this show um all these years later i'm not kidding i i responded i said why do i like this a whatever i said you i'm paraphrasing here but in the text chain i said i really like this ai drawing more than some actual media assets we've created for ourselves i was sort of half joking but also not like i love this drawing of us and you're like but it looks nothing like it and i'm just like i think what i'm realizing andrew is i no longer care about authenticity when it comes to my depiction as long as it's flattering there was a long time where i was like well i can't have if there's something out there about me um and it's slightly flattering but it's clearly inauthentic i i've got to pull that down i've got a flag that i've got to tell somebody yeah that's just not what i look like i'm apparently well past that because i look at this ai drawing of us and i feel happy it's aspirational or not even aspirational it's

just like you just want you're there we're just it just makes me happy to look at because i guess

it makes me think i don't know five people who read this facebook post will think i don't know i don't even understand what what is about it that makes me happy because i don't think we're ever going to look like that i don't think this moves us in the direction of becoming more youthful in real life but for the first time that i can remember just looking at a clearly bullshit rendering of us that looks nothing like us it's bringing me pleasure

I look I'm trying to figure out who I look like I look like somebody famous I mean this

you look a little bit like Sam Stein I don't know who that is although Sam Stein is a bit older he's a long time he was on Air America now he's a successful podcaster

I have first of all I'm wearing a t-shirt I've never I never wear just a t-shirt I have a full head of hair I haven't had hair like that since I was probably 18 years old I have a little beard and I have glasses i feel like i look a little bit like a mirror in jake and amir yes a little bit like

that i think that is a very clutch pull i think you're absolutely right not not an ounce of body

fat on me either which is again so i don't know how far you have to go back maybe when i was born um so yeah i mean it is you know it's a it's an interesting photo of podcasters and what did i tell you there's a frog watching oh i love the frogs watching us there you're you're saying you have a little speech bubble above your head with a green heart in it i like that you have a frog sticker in your computer i mean i love all the doodahs yeah we're this the actual background

of where we're broadcasting from this would be incredible behind us is it's like a panoramic view of rolling kind of farm land hills and a water tank and and little adorable homes again there's a frog kind of peering at us uh the blue sky and clouds in the back i mean it's incredibly

bucolic scene behind us like i mentioned you guys in the in the text chain this is kind of like what the idea of podcasters are like in a sky rizzy commercial just like just you know nothing is everything by the way i noticed they didn't include one thing so i went back while we were chatting here to like to the actual questionnaire that i filled out uh to the daves that were asking about you know our plans and it said planned activities for when you're here and how people can watch and listen that all that all migrated nicely into this little uh recap it says you know We plan on finding and adopting a frog, not a dog. By the way, she's going to hit me this weekend how much I'm going to miss my Lucy dog for the 10 days we're there. But then the final question was, your plans for the day of the event? And I just wrote, to win it all and be showered in glory, or at least have some fun and eat a hot dog or two. I was disappointed to see that they did not put my boastful, competitive nature in this recap.

I'm very glad they didn't, because one of the things we know about the internet, and to some degree AI, is sarcasm or, you know, comedy. You know, something that is sarcastic but played for comedy sometimes kind of gets lost, the comedic element. And I'm glad that the citizens of Valley City, the members of the Valley City community... group don't think that they just have some this is how legends are made

podcaster

named Andy Walsh coming to town. It is actually quite I don't want to say cute because that sounds a little bit infantilizing but I think it's kind of great in this write up it kind of gives your you know your backstory your connection to the place it says let's see the visit is a homecoming for Andrew Walsh who was born and raised in Valley City and attended Liverpool Elementary School So I don't know. It's kind of nice. If I were a Valley City person, I mean, I'd probably want to come out and say hi at the frog jump. I'd be kind of excited if a local boy made good and is now triumphantly returning to broadcast from the region.

Especially from my former school. That's kind of interesting. I was thinking about that this week, and I don't want to get maudlin about this. Well, there's a couple of things I want to talk to you about, actually, leading up to this. Because I am like today really does feel like, OK, now we're doing this. Nothing is theoretical anymore. Right. Like we're we're gearing up for this. And I am looking forward to it. A big part of this trip is kind of going to be somewhat tied to my memories of growing up in Valley City, Ohio and everything. And of all of these shenanigans, of all of these trips, all these adventures that we have gone on in the past however many years we've been doing these things. Um, never has it really been like, well, what is, what is Andrew's reaction to going back home? You know what I mean? It's just something we're doing and discovering together. Yeah.

And as you know. You don't have a ton of emotional baggage around going to, um, you know, the Olympic peninsula like we did for the secret, you know, the undisclosed location.

Sure. Yeah. And, or, or, you know, even hitchhiking or whatever. It's like you, you and I, I had a lot more anxiety about that hitchhiking trip, of course, because that was way more challenging. But, but here's where I'm going with this. You know this about me, Luke, and I'm not ashamed to say it. In fact, it's one of those things that I started to – I did not know this about myself for a long, long time, and then it took me a while to sort of articulate. But one thing that I've realized about myself is that I am slow to react to things. And I think I might have learned this, and we've talked about this on the show a little bit, but, like, you were a little disappointed in my reaction when we finally, like, got the news that APM signed us, right, American Public Media back then? Was I? You don't remember that? Yeah, like basically...

I believe what you're saying. I just don't remember. I'm not disagreeing with you.

And I think that was the first time that I was like, maybe that I was confronted with it, and then in the years since. And so that's been a long time. You know, it's been almost 10 years. I think in the years since I've been able to articulate...

Was it like I called you or something, and you were just kind of like, oh, okay? Or how did that interaction go down that wasn't to my liking?

What was happening was, obviously, we, but mostly you, almost exclusively you, had been working this APM angle for a long time. And we really wanted to make this work, that we would become employees with American Public Media and that I could quit my job and do it full time. And my job at the time was an incredibly challenging job. You're not hosting, but producing that talk show in Los Angeles. And, you know, we were both a bit at our wit's end because I was working so much and then squeezing in, you know, TBTL at the end of a long day or whatever.

In a studio that you may or may not have been.

That I couldn't get booted out of at any moment by, she was a shake dancer. She did the whoochie-cooch. Michael Silverblatt. Michael Silverblatt. Thank you. I couldn't quite remember his name. Anyway, point is, when you called me to say it happened, like, our new boss is Steve Nelson. Like, this is happening now. Like, they're sending out the papers. We're going to sign it. You can quit your job. I think I was immediately like, oh, my God. Okay, what do I need to do here? What do I got to do? And I was, like, kind of focusing on, like, okay, I've got to give notice. I see you kind of were going with the logistical implications. Yeah, like, what I've got to do, notice for KCRW, okay, when do I tell? And you were just kind of, like, you're, like, literally popping champagne or waiting to pop champagne. I think I literally popped champagne. And you were, like, so, so excited, which I understand that. And I understand that that's your personality, but it takes me a while for emotion to set in. I get that. Like, I just, like, well, never mind. But I literally was about to take it to 9-11, but we don't have to get into that. I literally remember at 9-11, it took a very long time for the emotion of anything to hit me because I was in charge of a talk show for the very first time in my life because my boss was out of town and literally in the woods without cell service. And I was in charge of a talk show for the first time ever. And that happened. And I don't think I had emotion for a long time because I just dug into what do we got to do? What do we got to do? What are we doing? And so like that's kind of like that, too. I think I just have I think that it takes me a long time to process things. And so having said all of that, I was thinking about it this weekend. There's going to be a little pressure on me, I think, to as we walk into what used to be Liverpool Elementary School. This is the school that I went to K through six.

And I have so many memories of this place. And it's actually a place I think about a lot. And the truth is, it has been, no joke, well, quite literally a dream, because sometimes I have dreams about growing up in Valley City. But I have almost more bemoaned the fact that I'll never walk through those doors again. It's not just been a passing thought I've had. I've thought about it a lot. Like, such an important place of my development. And I feel like I have such a feel for what that school is still like. I remember one time missing the bus after school. I was the only kid who ever missed the bus that takes you back home. Like, I just have, and I remember, so I feel like I have this very, very, in a certain way, specific memory of the structure of this place, of the layout of this place, of what it's like inside. Well, first of all, 40 years have passed, no, not 40, but whatever. I went there in the mid-80s, right? And so much time has passed. The place itself has changed a lot. My memories obviously aren't very fresh at this point. the place i might have no i might not see anything that triggers something or it might look like something that i don't know like i'm going to be walking into this building for the first time something that i imagined happening for so long and now it's actually going to happen but also i'm a little bit worried about like having to have an emotional reaction that is palatable to the people around me in a certain way do you mean me and john the listeners your family who are the people around you yes yes yes yes you know what i mean and like and so while i'm this is back to

covering the ears for happy birthday right a little bit yeah expecting something from you

around how you're going to react yes no i'm not i'm not sweating it in that way like honestly if you told me oh we're having a birthday party for you there and you have to open some gifts in front of everybody and say thank you like literally if you told me i was going back home you and johnny aren't even a part of it but i got to go back home and open gifts in front of like i don't know eight family members i'd be more anxious about that rather than this tv telethon

like honestly a week-long live broadcast on which our entire financial hopes hangs exactly but like

i can find another job i can't sit through you cannot open a birthday present no like from your so janice so i'm not feeling that uh so i'm not feeling like bad about it or anything but it did occur to me that like first of all i'm going to be able to do something that i dreamt about doing for a long time and then dismissed as ever being a possibility i'm actually going to be able to do it but also i need to realize i'm talking about literally walking through the doors of the school but also sort of realizing that for me personally it might not be what i've expected all this time it might be surprising it might not be surprising but then also not that we're going in with a camera crew trained on me but reading this thing this morning kind of like it's andrew's homecoming It's like never have I been the first line of a TBTL-a-thon, if that makes sense. You know what I mean? And this isn't about me, and it's mostly about the listeners, I would say, and the community and the tens and to a much, much, much, much lesser extent to you and John. But I don't know. I just – it did give me sort of a feeling of just kind of like, okay, yeah, this is sort of my homecoming, but I don't want to like –

You're a central character in this story. You're the most central character probably that week because of your association, your ties to the place. And, yeah, I can imagine how that might feel. I don't know, just a little bit of an unknown for you what it's going to be like. I do think it'll help that, like, that you're going to, you know, you'll be tasked with, like, you're going to walk in there and be like, oh, okay, they've changed us a lot. And this is maybe unchanged and this is different. This part is different. But then you're going to set about the task of setting up the TVTL stuff. So I wonder if having an important and kind of stressful technical job on Sunday when we get there, if that actually will be kind of good for you.

Yeah, that probably will. And also, yeah, I get so, you know me, I get so laser focused on that. There's going to be a moment where I'm absolutely freaking out because I'm convinced that I forgot something or that something isn't connecting right. And then we'll hopefully knock on wood, work it out. But there's always a moment where it's just like, maybe we didn't have that in a friendship. Well, we were missing that one adapter for John's headphones, but aside from that, we were in pretty good shape. But I feel like there's always an Empire Strikes Back moment in setting one of these things up where you're just like, oh, no, all is dark. There is no gleam of hope. And they're just like, oh, no, no, just turn that thing around. You're like, oh, okay, got it. It works now.

Yeah. It's good that you—I mean, that's just more on the setup side, but it's good that you have, at this point, realized that that is how it's going to go. because it never fails to happen that there is a moment where it seems like a critical error has occurred and there's no solving it, whether it's the streaming of something or the connectivity of whatever. And it always seems to come together. I have already Googled where the nearest guitar center is, by the way.

It's in my old neighborhood of North Olmstead, Ohio, which is a bit away from Valley City, but we know where it is now.

Okay, so we've got eyes on that, so we know if we need anything, that's where we can go. Are they open on Sundays? That's a good point. They should be.

It would be weird if they were closed on Sundays. Let me look up Guitar Center hours. You do the rest of the show. I'll be looking up Guitar Center hours. I will.

Well, you know what? Actually, this is a time for me to update the listeners who, again, just the ones I've been running into lately, by which I mean like my brother-in-law, Jeff, effectively my brother-in-law, Jeff, and my friend Spring and other people, everybody has big opinions, big feelings, Andrew, about my neighbor texting me to say, essentially, you should really spend a bunch of money to have this hill by the house, which has a bunch of tall grass on it, mowed down before the 4th of July because one of our neighbors likes to shoot off fireworks and it's going to burn down the hill and the neighborhood um many people have been pointing first it's when i'm in some sort of a i don't know low level slightly passive aggressive back and forth with somebody that i'm talking about on the show it is rare that when i talk to people they're actually almost more mad on my behalf than i am yeah i was the guy i felt bad for winding you up yeah and you were like well

listen this is this is a long-term thing these are my neighbors i need to like kind of be diplomatic here and i just thought that you know i thought he was pushing your buttons a little bit but but i definitely came around to be like no you're right like none of this is that big of a deal it's just literally tone i didn't like some major tones in text messages but everybody who who uh

who the people that are friends in real life or family members that also kind of check in on the show have all said to me that guy what the hell that guy they've all everybody's been very mad on my behalf which is kind of kind of sweet actually it's nice i'm i rarely have uh you know i'm rarely on what i was apparently the sort of right side of these kinds of things um but anyway so that's that was what was going leading up to the fourth of july now the problem was so i had decided i'm probably going to get this thing done but now getting someone to actually do it is the hard part because i had this guy named jerry who had done it the previous couple of summers and he It was, I think, about 85, very, very healthy and, you know, fit and capable. But I kind of had a feeling he's not going to be doing this for the rest of his natural life. And, in fact, this year when I called him, picked up the phone. I said, hey, Jerry, it's Luke Burbank over at such and such. And you have a brush hogged my hill in the past. You still doing that? No, I'm retired.

Could you get him out of retirement, though? Like one last job. Just one last job. And then you're out. It's a real sexy beast situation.

No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. He was like, no, I'm retired. And I said, oh, are you just going to focus on your wildlife photography? No, I retired from that too. I was like, okay. That seemed kind of fun to me.

Yeah, that seems like what you'd retire to do.

My whole thought was now you can spend more time with your wildlife photography. But when I went over one time to pay him, he showed me his entire kind of like barn, which is also a studio. the guy has like incredible wildlife photography that he has been doing for years and it's nice it's really i mean you know it's it's let me put it this way it's not something that i would decorate my home in but i know that a lot of people would i know that if you had at an art fair people would go crazy for you know it's a lot of stuff of like you know an eagle kind of pulling a salmon out of the river but in like the perfect action shot moment like he was kind Kind of one of those guys will go like set up in some camouflaged, you know, blind somewhere and just sit there for four days until he gets the one shot, you know, which is way cooler than than doing that with a gun in your hand. I think. Absolutely. Although, you know, he's retiring to do more hunting. He said, oh, I'm going to Montana to hunt next week.

So he has traded in the camera for a lethal weapon, I guess. Yeah. And I was going to say, I mean, not not to, you know, whatever, throw shade at this guy for absolutely no reason. But like it's that kind of art that I look at, like that kind of photography and a lot of nature photography, too, even if it's not like action or like, you know, like animal focus, but even more like kind of landscape focused or whatever. Like a lot of it is so technically proficient and admirable, but not interesting to me.

Well, not not particularly creative. Right. Because the rules are pretty clear. the hard part is waiting around for something to happen having the the using the right film you know so much more about photography than i do but there's there's these sort of technical aspects of it but once you put in the time and you do all of that then you're taking

the obvious shot yeah and then you're like okay yeah that would be very difficult and yeah that is incredible that moment but like but now what you know and that's not highly creative it's sort I don't know. highly technical. And again, not something that I could do either. So tip of the cap to people that do that kind of stuff and like that kind of stuff. But point being, Jerry's out of the game, which raises a quick question, Andrew. There's still a sign tacked up to a phone pole down the road for me that says brush hogging and has his number. Should I go take the sign down just to

save him the calls? Sorry, I'm being distracted because I got into a sign war with my neighbor again this weekend sorry no big deal he just keeps on tearing down a political poster i need to hear all about that in the moment i think that's all you need to know but anyway um so

that is a good messing with other people's signs though i know but he's retired yeah you should

ask him you should ask him do you have a text relationship with him or does he not text jerry's not a big texter yeah i didn't think so you don't want to see that's the thing you don't want to call him and say hey jerry like you don't want to bug him but if you were in a texting relationship you'd be like hey just so you know i i'm you want me to take this down i passed this poster all the time but you don't want to call for that hey jerry i know you think i'm probably

being a little paranoid but that sign is a fire hazard and our only protection is prevention so could i have you come bring your 86 year old ass out and take the sign yeah exactly yeah so what's going on with your neighbor neighbor so i don't have so jerry's out of the game and what i know from the last time i was trying to find someone to do this is actually weirdly hard because it's a kind of it's a very steep hill it's a tough job you need particular kind of equipment to actually get this thing done and I had called the sort of big companies in the past you know the companies that had multiple employees and equipment and they were all like we're not getting to anything until August and it was going to be even more expensive um and so I was I was texting with my neighbor the one that that wants the um the stuff trimmed and I said to him I was like I'm working on it it's harder to find someone to brush hog this hill than you would think and he said well what about what about leo and leo is a guy who has done some work for my neighbor and then i asked my neighbor if i could get his number to hire him to do some stuff around here some kind of weed whacking of some stuff that it's hard for me to get to and i don't really have the right equipment for it so he's like well leo could do it and i'm like i don't know if this is leo has the equipment for this job or whatever but i thought i guess i'll give him a call so i call leo up and he's like yeah let me come take a look at it and he comes over and he looks around he goes yeah i think i could do this probably with my weed whacker and i'm like bruh i'm like weed whacker i'm a weed

whacker there's so many steps between a weed whacker and a brush hog yeah and for people that

don't know a brush hog is like this very burly thing that is towed behind a tractor and it's this big kind of flat thing that's got blades under it and it's so heavy and so just kind of like uh you know forceful that it can you can just drag it up the hill and it's kind of it's cutting the grass slash kind of just smashing it in a way that it never recovers from. That's what it was like when Jerry was doing it. This seems like the kind of thing that would take the better part of a month to weed whack. So I said to Leo, you you're proposing weed whacking. yeah. He goes, I go, how long is that going to take? I don't know. He goes, A couple of days. I was like, okay, I don't like, I feel bad hiring you to, to, to do this task in the way that you're proposing because it's like, that just sounds like a really really long couple of days yeah i wonder what he's got on the bottom

of his weed whacker too he can't just be using the nylon blade okay he's got blades okay i learned

so last uh i guess it was thursday uh leo rolls up to do the job and we were actually just starting to do the show and i noticed that his truck's here he and his son were here and um he just kind of heads i see it was got the weed whacker and a gas can and just kind of heads out of out of view and uh and just goes to it and i'm done with the show and i kind of walk and i just peek over and it's like wow he actually knocked down a pretty significant chunk already and then work in doing my thing and go back out there at you know i don't know one or two and it's like oh yeah he's making progress he's chewing through this by five o'clock andrew he had weed whacked

the entire hill is you mentioned his son also have a weed whacker is this a two weed whacker job

i didn't see his son doing a lot of the weed whacking i think it's a little bit like when i used to help my dad on jobs i think part of it was just keeping me off the streets in the summer

oh he's a pretty young son i thought he was he's probably no he's probably he's probably 15 or 16

oh okay i'm in his 20s or 30s okay no leo was telling me that like he his son was mad the other day because his son was supposed to go on a date but then they were doing some kind of a job and was telling me i told my son if you have a date you got to let me know way in advance because you know like i got to block you off the schedule you know so anyway um uh but his son seemed to be more um i don't know maybe he was doing some stuff that i hadn't noticed or whatever but but he it wasn't like two guys with two weed whackers out there this is just wow leo just out there just hammering away at this hammering away at this and he did the entire thing in one day from like 10 a did the whole thing in like seven hours and now it still cost me nine hundred and thirty dollars yeah so and he earned every penny of that in fact he earned nine hundred and forty dollars because i couldn't get the right change out of the atm so you're

getting a ten dollar tip well i hope he spent some of that money on a brush hog because if he could charge the same amount of money right like that you're paying for the job done not the way it's done well that's the way it's supposed to be i've learned some lessons recently but um but you know what i mean like that's that's like a thousand dollar job whether it's with a brush hog or somebody with a weed eater and it's in his best interest to knock it out faster right

yes except you have to have a tractor so when jerry would come out jerry had some big giant truck that's towing a flatbed trailer that has a tractor on it that has the brush hog attached to it so there's a whole level of like equipment needs that are sort of pretty ramped up he did have some kind of like a dr trimmer type of like you know mower like thing you could walk but i just don't think it was i think he tried it at some point and realized this is just not actually more effective than just standing out here whacking weeds uh so he got it all done i was uh incredibly uh i was incredibly impressed i couldn't believe that he did it i high-fived him um and uh and uh offered him and his son all the popsicles they could eat which turned out was two each, a pretty low number. I could eat probably four, not to

brag. Now, when you say, I know we always do this, but when you count them, do you mean two single ones or two? These are singles. Okay, yeah. So really one. Really,

all they had was one, like a one double stick popsicle that we think of, but now they do them, you know, one stick at a time, which kind of honestly makes sense, right? It's much more manageable

if you think about it. And they're tastier. Those kinds tend to be tastier. I think, oh my god.

I'm really into these outshine ones. Not just a Soundgarden song anymore.

I was going to say, Outshine! I was trying to remember who did that. Was that Soundgarden?

I'm really loving these new Bad Motor Finger. What's the other one? What was the name of the record that was off of? Bad Motor Finger?

I know it's a different band.

Is that Sweetwater? So the hill is all moat, and I notice when I go out on the deck once to kind of hand them some water and stuff, I look over, and my neighbor is literally just sitting on his deck in his chair watching this like i would watch a seahawks game at lumen field i can just tell he's so effing excited that this is happening that he is getting his way and it is happening before the 4th of july and it's like it's just like i can tell he's watching it as a spectator sport because it is bringing him tremendous joy that this is happening and you're feeling what about that kind of annoyed yes yes weird i'm annoyed by that for some reason i pay You know, I had made the decision that this was something I thought it should be done. And I don't regret having this job done, actually. And I'm happy that it's done because I do think it keeps things safer. It's probably better overall for the sort of plant health to kind of take it down. I mean, there's a reason why people have big fields, not just because there's crops in there, but there's a reason why this stuff happens. So I don't regret the decision, but there was something about it being like, I don't know why him just kind of watching it out there. I could almost feel happiness Radiating off of him And I don't know why that would bother me

Because he got his way And he pushed you around a little bit And he got his way He told you who to call He did

Really this is exactly how it went down So Leo's gone Job's all wrapped up And like I'm talking This is at Oh so I told you he wrapped up at 5 right And then we're talking Maybe until 5.10, 5.15 That truck is barely pulled out of my driveway 521 this is the message from my neighbor thanks for getting that done before the fireworks start happy fourth exclamation point and now andrew your friend luke has a real decision to make because if you remember the plot um from a few days or a few weeks back i had wanted to go down and kind of check out this little road area what used to be a road back in the olden days that's down at the bottom of my property in the bottom of my neighbor's property i can't get to it for my property and so if i'm going to go down there i ask him permission to kind of cut through his yard and i asked him i said hey can i go down there and he he has read receipts on so i could see that he had read it and like i swear 15 minutes went by which it just seems like a yes or no question and then finally it comes back with uh okay but leave the dog behind which is another thing that people were a bit ticked off about because what a weird thing because oh because i was babysitting gigi and dj also it bothered me they thought it was one dog i'm like they're two dogs with hopes and dreams and distinct personalities and can i just mention here again

this is where tone comes in and I said this last week when you mentioned it, I think if he writes hey but if you don't mind please no dogs I've had some issues in the past and if you don't mind please no dogs they create issues for Like, whatever it is, there's a way of saying that that's less irksome.

Right, and now that he's gotten his way, he's all, happy, fourth, exclamation point. So it's like, this guy's got it in him.

To write a text message that doesn't sound rude.

Yes, he is aware of how to not do that, so that means he's also aware when he's doing it, in my opinion. So now it's like, oh, how the worms have turned, because now I'm Mr. Good Guy, I got this hill mowed down, I did exactly what he asked and he's all happy it's all sunshine and rainbows and now the question is how do I respond to his now very happy text message of thanks for getting that done before the fireworks start happy fourth well I'll tell you one thing I ain't responding soon to that I'm not responding quickly to that it was thing one I'm like I'm definitely going to kind of be a little withholding I'm going to kind of make him twist in the wind so I waited until i think friday well i mean yeah i waited until friday i waited almost an entire day and then i just sent him a thumbs up how was that how was that for a response i was tempted to say you're welcome no which is also that's a flex right is it uh no i don't yeah because that's like me what that acknowledges is that i did him a favor that's how i think of that yeah exactly but is that

yeah that's interesting i i almost feel like that gets into trust me i know that i know these are the things you think about that gets into the like confusing like polite car territory like it sort of means something to you but it could mean something to somebody else it's like it's way too open to interpretation you get in that 11 11 it's you got to hit it right now um the uh i don't know that one right next because in a certain way that also seeds seeds a little bit of ground you could look at it that way as well sort of oh see i thought of it no i hear what

you're saying and i think you're um i think you're right that it it would play larger in my mind than his yeah my thought was if i just waited an entire day and then just said you're welcome it was just like me acknowledging that this was a favor to him yeah and that you're a little bit put out but i didn't i i waited a day and then i just sent him a thumbs up and you could have also not

responded like honestly that was one and i don't even think that that is that aggressive like whatever i maybe i just have bad texting etiquette but like i just sort of think that like okay acknowledge like you don't have i don't think you have to respond to that either but

i probably never responded at all do you want to know the the i wouldn't say craziest part but something else that's sort of funny about this was i was talking to my friend spring about this she and her husband scott lived down the hill from me and i was talking about the like what is going to be mode and not mode and she is a like a real internet sleuth type and so she somehow went to the county and figured out something there's something i don't know or had not known previously she got like the county's whatever the official kind of satellite record of what the boundaries of the yards are dude has got all this stuff in my yard his boats are half in my yard his driveway is my like 70 of his driveway of the getting it's hard to explain but basically if this if this if this plot is to be believed that the thing from the county which is these kind of yellow lines that are superimposed over the lots is to be believed and then it's over a photograph it's an aerial photograph of like you can see my house you can see the madrona hill studio you can see

i mean it's and it's recent too it's like i was gonna say if you can see the renovated garage which is now the studio then that's where you can see the deck on the back of the garage which

tells you that it's that it's you know this deck was not on you know when i bought this place it's in the last couple of years and um and then it's got these you know all these kind of straight and angled like you know lines that are yellow that are indicating where one property ends and the other starts and it is totally way over in my yard i don't care i'm not going to say anything it doesn't affect me but i just thought that's pretty funny coming from the okay but leave the

dog behind it's also pretty interesting because you and i talked about this when it came up last week like this idea of your you're being fed a lot of like kind of tiktok content and there's that HBO show about neighbors and neighbor disputes. And you sort of said, like, somehow it always gets into, like, where the official property lines are and how that seems like it's huge, but it also seems somewhat foreign to you. You're like, I just can't imagine that being that important. And I said, well, usually by the time you're arguing about where the property lines are, you've already argued about a bunch of other stuff, and now it's coming down to this. Now it's, like, literally drawing lines in the earth, right? And now somebody And I know that you didn't look this up But now somebody has just put this little idea In your head Just put this little idea in your head

Not only in my head, Andrew, in my back pocket Yeah, right, yeah And I was like, I don't, because again I really don't care about that kind of stuff And it really does not bother me But I'm like, I'm also gonna know That's the case And if we ever have, if things would ever get tense Which I really don't want them to In fact, what I should really do

is invite them over to have like a drink on the deck and just like, you know, Becca's brother, Scott, who runs this, owns this bar in Portland called 21st Avenue Pub is so good at this. Like I'm really, I really admire him in this because in owning, he actually owns multiple businesses and there are so many times where there are conflicts and disagreements, whether it's with vendors or co-owners of businesses or people that live in the neighborhood that you know have an issue with the you know patrons of the bar being too loud there's just there's so many conflict points that this guy deals with in his life his professional life and he's so good at identifying like how to just actually meet the person in the middle yeah like so many i've just seen so many times where someone comes at him with something that seems unhinged to me and he's like so then i sat down with him and i was just kind of like let me try to figure out where they're coming from and if there's something i can do to kind of like you know address what they're it's like he doesn't like my hackles just go up so fast yeah me too yeah and he's not by the way this dude's not a pushover it's not that he's like uh you know such a beta that he doesn't want to get into it it's that he just understands that like it things just work so much better when you don't go to like the most aggressive sort of stance immediately and he's just so he's a really really good with this stuff and i actually think about him a lot like how would scott handle this and so instead of me certainly instead of me going like hey guys um i'm i'm going to uh i'm going to send you a official courier uh to bring you the property lines instead of that i'm like maybe i should have him over for a beer and uh just keep things friendly and make things even more friendly you know yeah and just like as opposed to eat a little crow although to him

it's probably not even eating crow because it's kind of like well that part isn't important like the tone of leave the dogs behind is just not important at all and so don't focus on that whereas you and i are just kind of like well we can literally spend two hours of podcasting i thought you were going to say a lifetime or a lifetime of analyzing it and stewing over it yeah by the way can i just throw one thing in here i um you were talking about this satellite images and how you were i guess pleased or whatever satisfied to see that they were somewhat new because the deck indicated that there are somewhat recent photos because that deck is new and i had such a nice feeling the other day i had a friend who was in town a couple of weeks ago and he had never been here before and so i sent him my address and i don't know if you do this i'm sure you do because it's just like it's just like when you get a new remember way back in the twitter days you and i would confess that if you got a new follow on twitter of somebody of import or something you'd be like oh somebody's following me what is their experience on my twitter page like let's go let's let's take a look back at my recent scroll through your own page

to imagine what that person i did this vick burger started following me on instagram and i was immediately like is my instagram vick burger worthy what is he seeing when he comes on and i

literally like deleted a couple of things i was i actually i was scrolling through tiktok the other day and i saw something i was like it was i saw a little a bit and i can't remember what it was how people greet each other when they pass each other on the sidewalk i think it was the bit well see i didn't know that it was just over the top and i was like this is funny but man they're really kind of they're really kind of biting and i'm like oh no no this is doug pound this is this is one of the guys who invented this style this is his style like i was so psyched to see that yeah who kind of uh anyway all that to say i had a friend and i was like oh i i think i texted him my address and he was gonna like gonna take a car here or something and um and then i'm like oh, I wonder what the house looks like on Google Maps. And so I looked. In fact, here, I was about to send this to you. I was so psyched to see that the Google Map version of our house is like, it's recent. It's like since we got it painted, which looks nice. But also, it must have been after a recent trimming. And my hedges look so dope. I was so excited. Are you talking the street view? The street. Did you walk down your street? Google Street View, yes.

Andrew, I walked down your street like three days ago on Google Street View. Why? Because they're basically there, as you well know, there have been a number of like kind of emergency laws or an emergency law kind of put in around Aurora Avenue. Oh, yeah. And and things and people, you know, some people have been erecting their own barriers on side streets to try to keep people from pulling off of Aurora Avenue. There's been a lot of action around there. And there was this particular zone that was being described that fell under this like whatever. I don't even know what the rule change is, but I think I think it's being ignored now.

but it was like about a year ago they passed um kath uh what's her name uh our former um city rep uh passed something called like the stay out zone it's like soda up here right where like people

but didn't something just happen like last week a new thing that was in a response to oh i think katie i think katie wilson might have even been in charge something happened last week that was there was a story in the times that was basically like to try to address a You know, a recent sort of uptick in like violence and things going on that was kind of upsetting to people, obviously, and to people that lived on side streets off of Aurora Avenue. There was something in the paper, and really what went through my mind was they said they were giving the parameters of Aurora Avenue or the streets off of Aurora Avenue that it applied to, and I was trying to figure out if you and Vives' street was part of what was in this. By the way, it wasn't, but I started on Aurora.

Is it the zone that ends literally one block from my street, though? because i think what they're discussing is kathy moore's zone which ended literally one block away from me it's just that it had not been enforced for a while and now they're talking about are they trying to enforce it now i think that's the same thing i could be wrong or there's some talk of it

but well so anyway i um yeah it it i was i started out at the tumgus i started the tumgus arco and i just went i just i went trucking up the street and then anyway without getting too specific i ended up street viewing over to your house and Andrew this is crazy I was happy that your house has the newer fence that looks really good I went on this journey independent of great right like

they must have been just trimmed or something like the back hedges which by the way I went ham on this weekend this whole weekend I spent I probably spent I don't even know how many hours I spent Leo hours in my backyard and I'm going to go back out there later because now my backyard is just filled with all of the debris that I cut off of my back hedges. But in a season or two, my back hedges are going to look about as nice as the other hedges, too, very manageable and everything, because I got that chainsaw, and I cut them way back. But yeah, on Google, it felt so good. I'm like, okay, somebody's coming here. How does it look? If you type in my address because you're visiting me, what are you going to be presented with online? I was like, oh, good. This is like the best version of ourselves.

that's isn't that the such a 2026 and also such i guess maybe a home ownership thing which is like having an opinion about what version of the satellite imagery of your house yeah right yeah like i was happy when and i'm not talking there's no street view out here because it's too remote but like the overhead shots like of my house i was like very happy when they updated to like the house look looks more like the house you know what i mean so there's we built a deck on the on the main house i hate saying main house that sounds like there's some palatial big giant home but you know my house we put a deck on there you see that now from the satellite view etc it's like why would that matter i don't know it just makes me happy that it's like the the internet is keeping up with what we've been working on around here by the way i don't know if this matters to you much one way or the other but this was king five as of june 30th so it was a little while ago seattle city council voted tuesday on emergency legislation that will expand the city's authority to temporarily

closed streets because of public safety concerns oh okay yeah yeah the street closures yeah because some neighbors actually did close their own streets because yeah some people kind of put

some temporary stuff out that uh you know trying to keep people from coming down the street now

speaking of neighbors what's going on with sign guy oh yeah i mean honestly i sorry to interrupt you before about that but you mentioned about because i was like oh yeah you could take somebody else's sign down and then i was like oh shit that just reminds me of so um we gotta do a really quick recap my neighbor directly across the street from me is like basically like an old codger right is that the right word just like a really grumpy cranky uh really a jerk of a guy who used to when we were on friendly terms would just as we discussed on the show um recently the term uh a time thief i think um like you just will just like if you get trapped in a conversation with him he just will not let you go you could be carrying the world's heaviest groceries with the bowling ball bag in your hand and he'll just be like oh i see you getting out of your car let me give you a 30-minute story that doesn't interest you at all, but you will not be able to walk away from it. Well, he and I got into a bit of a cold war because whenever somebody would put a little sign in this roundabout at our intersection, which is a totally acceptable place to put little signs that are just like, hey, slow down, kids play here. He kept pulling the signs out, in some cases, cutting them up with a knife and throwing them in a neighbor's yard or kind of like...

The most innocuous signs, I would argue, signs that make me happy in a way when I see them because it just speaks to a vibrant life happening for families there.

And this roundabout, and it's a very small little roundabout, it's just more of a speed regulating kind of thing that a lot of these neighborhoods in Seattle have. It was like full of weeds and it was just like really, really unkempt and, you know, not especially nice to look at. and uh one of our neighbors went and cleaned it all up and sort of landscaped it a little bit and like tore out like i think dug up an old stump that was in there like you know kind of made it a little bit nicer and then she's the one who's tried to put in the she's the one with the children too and she put in these little signs that said slow down or whatever that you can get from the city on a website that says specifically you're allowed to put these in roundabouts it's like one of the places the website says to put these signs and so uh you know it was a sort of ongoing saga he would destroy the sign she would

He would try to put them in heavier cement-laden pots so that they were less effable. But then he just took a razor and cut one up. He's just awful. He's a terrible, terrible human being. And now whenever anybody puts anything in that roundabout, I know that the sign is going to be ripped out in a moment. And there is some campaign sign that somebody who's running for, I want to say, whatever represents our area in the statehouse. So somebody's running for legislature. And the funny thing is I put this sign back like probably four times yesterday, and I still can't remember the guy's name. I know it's Will something. Yeah, so it's working. Now, you put the sign back. So in other words, the sign popped up. Was it just kind of in the dirt or whatever? Yes, it's one of those wire stands with the, not plexiglass, but the little plasticky corrugated campaign signs. And I saw that he put it in the roundabout, And I also noticed that my neighbor's car wasn't there at the time. And when I say he, I don't know if he has a campaign staff that's doing that or his team or whatever. But the candidates sign. Eventually, I saw my neighbor's car was home at some point this weekend. And then the sign was ripped up and thrown in the corner lot again where they're now building something. He's just an absolute maniac. And I was like, of course. And so I just let it sit there for a while. I didn't, you know, I just don't feel like getting involved. But then the other day I was like, it was yesterday. I was like kind of loading some stuff in my car. And I looked over and I saw it. I'm like, I'm going to put it back. So I went and I grabbed it. And it's, of course, it's all cut up though. No, this time he didn't cut it up. He just like pulled the, he pulled the corrugated plastic sign off of the metal thing and just threw them both there. And so I put it back together and then I put it back in the roundabout. And then, and I think his car was not there at the time. And then I'm outside. I spent a lot of time out in the yard this, this weekend. And I'm now like kind of done trimming everything, but I just have this big pile of branches and foliage and whatever that I'm trying to bag up and just do all this cleanup of this big project. And so I'm just in my backyard, and I kind of have a view of that as I'm kind of trimming leaves off of sticks, essentially, and listening to the ballgame yesterday. And I, at one point, literally, I didn't see him pull it out again, but I saw that it was pulled out again, and he was walking away from it. It was like a cartoon. I don't know if he knows this, because he's pretty old, so I don't know if he could hear me or not. if somebody was watching us they would have seen him pull out the sign destroy it throw it back in the corner lot and then me literally behind him i can see him like i i don't he doesn't look around i don't know if he knows i'm there i walk out behind him i grab the sign i put it back together i stick it back in the dirt probably and then he he enters his door from the back i don't know what the back of his property is like if he walked through his house and went and looked at the front window he would have seen that as soon as he was in his house the sign was back again

and then i just went back to my thing and then i saw it was gone again and this time in the same day oh my god this is like an hour later and so i and so i go back to where he looks out his window sees the sign is back comes back outside and puts it back and this time he's taken the metal wire like the stand and he's bending it all trying to render this thing useless but he still didn't render because guess what it just bends back and so and now i'm just like taking my time i'm like i'm unbending it in the roundabout like your version of a smoke break and now i'm positioning it so it faces his house specifically like like a challenge like and then i don't know at some point last night i looked out again and i saw that it was gone and i said if i do this again i bought a bunch of like um i bought a bunch of like sprayable machine oil for my new chainsaw and from my hedge trimmers, and I was thinking, if I do this again, and I was kind of mad I didn't do it the last time, I should just soak this thing in this petroleum, because the sign will still be fine. I won't be vandalizing anything, but then his hands will be all nasty the next time he does it. That's what I want to do. But I also don't want to get that involved. I don't want to get actually angry about this. I actually just thought it was hilarious. I was walking behind him. I mean, it was so funny. Like, I just picked it up and put it right back. I think it would be hilarious. I also wrote to the campaign, by the way, and told them. And I tattled on them. If you start putting the sign, it is illegal to damage campaign signs. I was like, that would be, and this guy was a former, whoever's running for rep is a former prosecutor. So I wrote to the campaign and I said, hey, I'm really sorry about this, but our neighbor keeps on ripping out your sign. I'm sorry. It doesn't look good for the neighborhood. And he wrote back. He's like, oh, he wrote back. I felt like such a child because, of course, he's, I'm just tattling, right? And he just wrote back, oh, I'll get somebody out there to clean it up. Let me know if you want to talk about any of the issues. And I was like, this is an issue. This is the issue I want to talk about. Vandalism. The funnier thing would be if every time he throws a sign away, you just put the sign in his yard. was going to i was thinking about taking the sign and putting it underneath his windshield wiper like speeding like a parking ticket but i was like no i don't want to get in like i was just doing it for the funny i'm not going to get emotionally involved in this like and i definitely don't want to i don't want to cross any lines where i'm messing with his property he's the vandal not me you know what i mean like i don't need i don't need to let him turn me into the bad

guy here but also i mean there is there is an argument that those signs that say please you know slow the flock down or whatever please drive slow you know there are kids here or whatever if we agree that there is at least a non-zero chance that somebody who's potentially driving too quickly through the neighborhood sees those signs and then maybe kind of slows down again we don't know really what the effectiveness is but let's just say that it's possible that someone would go oh okay maybe i'll slow down there's kids here it's reminded me before sure that's that is actually an important safety component for the neighborhood then that's that is something that is serving an actual purpose that is actually keeping kids potentially a bit safer and it's allowed to be there and by him removing it he is in a way making the neighborhood less safe and I'm kind of surprised that nobody in the neighborhood you or the other neighbor who is putting the signs up hasn't actually reached out to the city and say hey we have someone who's making the street actually less safe I mean that's why are we not throwing the book a little more

at this guy? Well I'm throwing it as hard as I can like I literally wrote to the campaign the campaign right just like let me know i mean the city i'm saying these slow down signs that he's ripping out well nobody's really i mean i haven't no one cares i haven't i haven't taken it you know i haven't taken to the highest echelons of power yet like and again i don't know how much i want to i i did it is like a drug for me these little petty wars can be like a drug for me and so like when i was doing yesterday i had to really like maintain sort of like this is funny you know and again i want to remind everybody so that you don't become so emails from people were like be careful this could be elder abuse i'm like i'm putting signs oh i mean i did i did call him a real piece of shit one time but like aside from that like listen all i'm doing all i did yesterday i did not confront him i did not talk to him we have not shared any words about this at all all i've been doing is re-erecting a campaign sign that he is illegally tearing out of the ground and and disposing of in somebody else's property yeah

hello and welcome to top story i don't know if you have been following this particular thread of the world cup i know you're not super uh read in on the world cup generally but this story seems to now have really kind of achieved escape velocity this whole guy uh you know we the u.s team one of our players in fact i think maybe he might be our best goal scorer uh his name is i have it right in front of me apology to the hardcore soccer fans uh his last name is a ball again i don't exactly know how to say his first name but and isn't he sort of historic too

isn't it aren't there only like two people who've scored more goals in a in a world cup than him in

history that part i don't know um but uh but he's definitely i think been our leading goal scorer his name is a follower in Baligan, by the way. And, uh, we were playing, um, the U S was playing the previous game. Um, I guess it would have been against Bosnia and he was trying to like defend a ball or something. He was trying to get a ball and he basically stepped on a dude's ankle and it was, it was pretty intense and pretty gruesome. It was, he, it, there doesn't seem to be any indication that he was trying to step on this guy's ankle. It was just like one of those things where they're running, he's jumping to try to get the ball. And it just kind of, that happened. they watched it on replay he was given a red card which in soccer means you cannot play in the next match i think you're probably kicked out of that match immediately and then you can't play the following match and like we need this guy because he's our leading goal scorer but um you know and everybody you know in the couple of days after he was suspended um but before the next wave of news which is that he was going to be unsuspended there i just saw a lot of people online saying this was really a bad call this guy should not have gotten a red card for this this was this was unfair but unfortunately in fifa there is no mechanism for appealing this there's no way to uh go back and um and and undo this well i guess there was and it's called don trump uh calling johnny infantino the president of fifa fifa is a legendarily corrupt organization uh over the many years uh for the record and um i guess donald trump called him and either i mean this is the same organization that gave trump a fifa peace prize they gave him a fake nobel peace prize when

he wouldn't when he didn't get the real one i tell you after like the the attacks on iran began somebody posted on blue sky does the fifa peace prize mean nothing anymore

fantastic joke so fifa has a has a documented history of being shady just generally around the World Cup, and then

also of being very quick to placate Donald Trump, including making up a pretend award for him. And so it appears to be the case that Donald Trump got on the phone with the head of FIFA and cajoled him in some way into reversing this decision, which is almost unprecedented. I saw somewhere that this may be in 1962. The reversal is highly unusual and is the first time since 1962 that FIFA has allowed a player to appear in a game when they would have been suspended after being sent off in a World Cup. I wonder what the circumstances of that one was. They don't tell you. But it appears, by all we can tell, that they reversed this decision because Donald Trump put pressure on them to reverse the decision. And on the one hand, first of all, when I heard that they were letting him play, that they'd reversed the red card, I didn't have any of the Trump phone call information at that time. I think I got an alert on my phone that said FIFA has reversed the red card. And I was stoked because I am very now invested in the World Cup And I do want the U.S. to go as far as they can. And I did think it was the wrong call. This guy was not trying to be aggressive or injure the other player. One thing was pointed out was that Lionel Messi had done a very similar play that wasn't even called a penalty, let alone a red card. So when I saw the headline, they're reversing the red card, I was like, oh, that's so awesome. And then like a couple hours later, I start seeing these things of like, oh, no, this is because our corrupt guy did a corrupt, but it's a corrupt that I like.

Yeah, for whatever it's worth, that's my understanding of the timeline of it, too. Not that I follow World Cup stuff. I just get breaking news alerts on my phone. And so I also saw this is the first I had heard of the red card because I'm not following it at all. It just said, oh, red card reversed. And that was the news story for at least an hour, if not more than that, on Sunday. And then because I know exactly where I was, I was waiting. I was sitting in the parking lot waiting for my volunteer gig to begin when another news alert popped up that says anonymous sources say Trump called the FIFA guy. And I was like, ah, here it is. Here it is. Now, here's what's interesting, though. Not until this very moment, as you were describing the penalty, I was also Googling and reading other people's reaction to it as well, who were very similar to you, just saying that, like, ugh, I hate this, but everybody does seem to agree. I mean, everybody except for, I guess, well, the Belgians is who they're playing next, right? Yeah, they're playing them tonight. So it's them who are kind of like saying no.

Well, they filed an immediate challenge to this, and they just lost it as of five minutes ago.

Oh, really? That's over now? Because I knew that they were appealing, yeah.

Yeah, listen, if FIFA's going to do a corruption for Don Trump, they're not going to overturn their corruption for Belgium. Exactly. And again, it's one of those things where it's like, I do think that the original call was incorrect, and I would like the U.S. to win, but not this way. And it really sucks, because I think they could have beaten Belgium without this guy. That was the other speculation that I was seeing was like, okay, this sucks for the U.S., kind of a lame, it's kind of the wrong call, etc., but they are still a good team, and they are playing in Seattle on Monday night. Have you seen the way that this is, basically, they Monday night footballed Belgium. The game's at 7 o'clock tonight at Lumen Field in front of the 12s. Oh right It's basically a Monday night football game on national TV Except it's soccer It's like 7pm on a Monday night at Lumen Field With a stadium full of I mean it's not really the 12s Because it's going to be people from all over But if you were to just kind of keep going with the Extending it out kind of illogically It's like you're putting the US in front of the 12s At 7 o'clock on a Monday night in Seattle

It's going to beast quake right

Right exactly It really bums me out Because A um like now this means if we win it's gonna seem like we cheated yeah and the gloating and just

think about the gloating that that he will that that trump will like you know he's already out there like bragging about how he got this thing overturned and now is he i haven't seen his comments yeah i'm pretty sure that he was i i'm let me make sure but i'm pretty sure that i saw him like clips of him talking to reporters i feel like maybe even behind a dais but i could be wrong about that uh i don't feel like it was on a tarmac for a change but um yeah no i feel like he was he was kind of bragging about it yeah i called him yeah and so now already like now it is his victory like he's stolen this victory if it's a victory tonight absolutely and it just really yeah just

cast this weird pall over everything it's interesting because like he just this is it's so right out of the trump playbook so the uh the referee who made the call who called the the red card on our guy the the sort of conspiratorial part of the internet was going down these rabbit holes about analyzing every red card he's ever given out and how he's like basically like shady this is like election you know election interference kind of shit so apparently trump when he called the head of fifa was bringing up all of this conspiracy theory stuff about this particular referee the new york times points out there is no evidence that this particular referee

is cheating but it's just it's just it's like it's the weirdest experience for me to have trump doing all of his to an end that actually i was hoping for anyway like i mean i would have hoped that they would let this guy play because i don't think he should have been kicked out i wish i didn't want it to be this way yeah i just there's never been the case that donald trump has been pulling this towards something that i had a vested interest in and kind of cared about and was kind of like happy at the outcome i mean before i knew the real story yeah right i just never been i've never been in league with him for anything you know yeah like what if what if he had

used this kind of power to to the frog jump for the frog jump or i was going to say promote human rights as opposed to take them away but uh yeah well i mean that's a whole other question which

is like is there something is there a larger outcome that is so positive that it somehow justifies or allows for his lying bullying etc ways like of course this is a sort of a silly hypothetical because he would never do this but it's like if for some reason he he cared about human rights or women's rights or the rights of somehow anyone who's marginalized and he was kind of pointing his laser of gross energy at it would we would we would we let him have it if it was in

service of something good you know what might be even a better example because there's no there's no money in human rights and so therefore i can't even imagine that scenario but what if his graft was actually green energy like what if he actually made money off of green energy boys exactly big

beautiful boys had a bunch of owned a bunch of green energy stocks right and there and now you

have him pulling a bunch of illegal bullshit to promote green energy because they're lining their pockets but also you and i would be like yeah but green energy is good how do you feel about that

yeah question i think i would still say no because the problem is whatever the outcome we're trying to get to generally in life whether it's soccer or green energy or human rights we're going to be going for different things at different times uh there's the public opinion on things are going to shift maybe even sometimes we'll think something was the right decision and it turns out to have not been the right decision we'll advocate for the wrong thing the outcome itself that's something that could change over time in terms of what we're going for or what we believe in etc the process by which we get to the outcome is what matters because that's what's consistent if you have good processes then you'll have good outcomes or at least you'll you know what i mean yep i know exactly i just don't think it's worth freaking up the process to get to the outcome of maybe the u.s is going to win tonight and my calci bet will come through actually i don't because you can't get any you can't make any money on this it's simply too bad no it's like it's like the u.s is a favorite so yeah so what are you gonna do i did uh i did it was very sad that mexico lost last night uh they were playing in mexico city and um uh they were playing england and england is you know has won the world cup many times they're a soccer powerhouse i have a lot of love for the nation of mexico people from mexico so i was super duper uh rooting for mexico to win and they did not win and i was sad how big is the field now well it's getting down to 16 so um some teams have qualified like england is in the round of 16 i don't know how many of how many teams have gotten in but if the u.s wins tonight then they will be in the into the final 16 teams okay So it's whittling down Again, even with this guy Even with this guy being held out You know, for the game tonight I was still so looking forward to it Again, I like that it's in Seattle I like that it's on a Monday night at 7 It gives me football feelings Like, I was fully excited for this game And now I have really mixed feelings Like, I almost wondered Should the U.S. coach sit this guy?

Oh, well, they won't Of course they won't Of course they won't

But it's like, you know, I don't know It's like, I really hope this guy doesn't score the decisive goal oh yeah yeah i want him to have a thoroughly average game and for the u.s to win you know i don't want i don't want it to be able i don't want anyone to be able to say well if not for him you know my dream is the u.s wins five nothing and he scores no goals so the argument is tough to make that he was the difference in this match and then we go on to win the world cup which probably won't happen um and people forget about this thing because again if These guys actually somehow got to the finals and won the World Cup, which seems incredibly unlikely. How much would it suck to be one of the other players who worked so hard for this and it's, like, all tainted by this bullshit? Yeah, yeah. Sucks.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

All right, we've arrived at emails and v-mails.

Hey, Luke, do you remember a while back we got a voice memo?

From location, from location is a weird way of putting that, but on scene, on site, on location, from a listener named Adrienne, who was talking about runners who signal if they're going to be taking a left or a right. If I recall correctly, it irritated her a little bit. It seemed a little bit extra, and she wanted your take on it. Well, we have more field reporting from Adrienne.

Hey, Podboys. this is listener Adrienne reporting from the track again there's this thing that happens exclusively if you're running on the track there's always that little track and field portion in the middle of the park and the time that I usually go down to run at the track is around 8 o'clock which happens to be when the adult recreational soccer league be popping off now listen I know this might be controversial but i really can't stand when they kick the soccer ball into the track that's not the part that i can't stick because i know that's like that's part of the deal when you're running on the track there's going to be balls that fly across the the track lights you know but when they do that thing where they like expect you to kick the ball back oh that's really that's my goat because i'm like listen buddy you're the one who's kicking the ball all willy-nilly okay i'm not gonna be your ball like you go fetch your ball all right you have to deal with the consequences and uh you know if it's a little kid or something i'm not a monster i'll kick it back but i just feel like you know you have to deal with your kicking the ball in an errand fashion You have to deal with it, okay? And I will die on that hill. I know this makes me not sound like I'm no fun, but I feel like I'm a generally chill person in my day-to-day, and this is like the one thing that really annoys me.

Well, two things if you count the signal while you're running.

I totally get where Adron is coming from, but it's funny. I have the exact opposite.

I had a feeling I was going to ask you. I bet you you love it

Because I think I'm going to kick it back to them And it's going to be so good That they are going to ask me to play And they're going to say you should be on Team USA With tears in their eyes Big strong soccer players Are going to say sir I really do think it's my little chance to shine And like if I'm somewhere near Whether it's a kids soccer game or anything like that And the ball gets away from them And also by the way If kids are just in the park kicking the ball around This just happened to me and Becca the other day They were walking somewhere Kids kicking a soccer ball around It came my way And I'm like, you know I'm like, this is my chance to shine I'm going to kick this ball back to these kids But in a way that somehow impresses them Slash shows off my now very long dormant soccer abilities I kind of, there's a whole TikTok trend I don't know if it's a TikTok trend It's a digital trend Maybe it plays on YouTube as well But I've seen it on TikTok That Adrian would especially hate, I think Actually, I don't know how you would feel about this, Andrew. I bet it wouldn't be your favorite. This is what these guys do. They're on a street in Paris or something. Imagine a wide sidewalk, and people are walking, walking, walking. They've got a soccer ball, and they're filming this. What they do is when someone is just walking and talking to their friend or maybe on their phone, they will just very gently, not in an aggressive way, but they'll just kick the ball out to them, pass the ball out to them to see what they do. If they kick it back to the guys, if they ignore it, if they jump over it, and then they kind of rate, the like you know they rate the the the return kick from the unsuspecting pedestrian and like you know this is a pretty busy like city street yeah a busy city street in paris not so busy that they're i can't overstate this they're not kicking it hard at anyone and they're not it's not a danger to people and it's also not like you know imagine times square new york people are just trying to walk and then a soccer ball is running it's like get out of here dude it's somehow just the right amount of activity okay and it's really fun because i mean i enjoy it Because I just like to see what people do And it'll, you know, they'll kick it And some woman will, like, she'll pop it up And then she'll, like, bounce it on her knee And she'll, like, send it back to them And they'll be like, ten, you know And then, you know, somebody else will just, like, completely not even see it They'll be on their phone and just go zipping past them But that would be Adrian's living nightmare, I believe Somebody passing her a soccer ball When she's not trying to be part of that life

And then rating it

And doing it specifically for content And rating it, yeah, imagine that I can't overstate, it's not mean-spirited it might sound a little mean-spirited with the rating it seems like it's not i've also seen them do with a basketball hoop they've got just like one of those kind of basketball hoops that you fill the base of it with water sand and you know put it out in your driveway kind of thing they've just got one of those and then they'll just like throw a basketball to someone and two guys will run out into the sidewalk and

hold the basketball hoop up and like okay so then you definitely see that it sounds like you know that you're being kind of filmed for the soccer thing i wasn't sure if it was like obvious that you're kind of being part of a bit the if two people are holding a basketball hoop then you

know the basketball hoop is definitely way more a bit and way more clear that you're part of a bit sometimes the person kicking the soccer soccer ball or the person let's say the ball going by the person they don't even know that they never saw the ball they didn't know they were in on a bit I guess what's always satisfying is when somebody and what's cool about how they how they end up putting it up is it's not just the guy who looks like he's going to be good at soccer that's kicking it back it's a kid it might be somebody that you wouldn't think plays soccer and then they do a kind of a cool move and you're like kind of rooting for them I don't know it's like I said it's kind of to me it's fun and light hearted but I could see someone also being like kind of mortified that they now have to perform performative soccer on the streets of uh paris

or wherever yeah taking the taking the content side away from it or the content creation side away from it and just talking about what adrian is is talking about like i am between you two i don't think i would be annoyed by it but i would just be deeply insecure about it like on the i mean it doesn't happen for so long and like i have no soccer skills and so like first of all i told you it takes me a while to like sort of like react to things so first i would like grab the ball then i'd get i'd dig around in my backpack and pull out two shin guards and then slowly wrap those around carrying around 35 years waiting just wait well no i think what you would

do is you'd pick up the ball because you'd be like oh shit someone lost their soccer ball yeah right you know what i mean like that's what i think you would probably do you'd be walking

i probably wouldn't pick it up i mean if you see that people are playing and it comes your way i think i would have a moment of i'm supposed to kick this back and i have no problem doing it I don't think I'd be annoyed. I would just be very, oh, now they're all going to see that I can barely kick a soccer ball.

But what about a hacky sack, which we're going to be working on next week in our off hours?

I told you that I shipped this big box of equipment to Ohio. In that box are the three hacky sacks made for us. The sacks that will be hacked. Exactly. Listener, was it Matthew, I want to say, sent us those? I might be messing up the first name.

Like crocheted, us custom, or knitted? TBTL hacky sacks.

They should be in Ohio by Wednesday, and if they're not, that is the least of our problems. It sure is, because there's a Hacky Sacks shop next to the Guitar Center, and I looked that up on Friday. Which is open until 7 p.m. on Sundays, 9 p.m. the rest of the day's BT Dubs. So we'll get there early. All right. How about we wrap up? Whoa!

Sorry, that was very loud. I didn't mean to do that. That was not as loud as you thought it was. Oh, okay. You got to it, or some kind of limiter kicked in somewhere that was not blowing out my eardrums. Okay, good. All right, that's going to do it for today's episode, but we are going to be right back here tomorrow with more, what do we call it, imaginary radio? We'll figure it out. We're trying to say countdown to the TBTelathon is underway. So anyway, we'll see you tomorrow. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. Good luck to all.

Power out.