#4576 Who Killed Bugs Meany?

Summary

TBTL #4576: Who Killed Bugs Meany?

Date: October 15, 2025
Hosts: Luke Burbank & Andrew Walsh

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Episode Overview

In this episode of TBTL, Luke and Andrew dive into the art of dog-sitting, surreal TV plotlines, the AI “Sora” video generator, baseball playoff superstitions, and the saga of a stolen Sinclair dinosaur statue. With their hallmark mix of gentle ribbing, pop-culture obsessions, and local lore, they riff on everything from 1990s Columbo episodes to the existential threat of AI-generated deepfakes. Mariners’ post-season hopes and misadventures also get prime time, wrapped in a mélange of camp songs, commercials, and listener calls.

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Key Discussions, Insights & Segments

1. Life Without Baseball Is Weird

• [01:44] Luke laments the off-day in the Mariners’ schedule and how it leaves him adrift, turning instead to TV binging.
• [03:09] Andrew marks the three-year anniversary of adopting his cat Bingo and the anniversary of a historic 18-inning Mariners game.

2. Pet Anxiety, Dog-Sitting & The “Chain Link” Addiction

• [04:05 – 10:14]
  • Andrew worries his anxious tendencies might “rub off” on dogs he watches for the neighbors.
  • Luke suggests anxiety is more contagious in human children than in dogs, igniting a nature-vs-nurture pet debate.
  • Andrew muses about dog personalities and recounts his odd affinity for chain link fences.
  • Notable exchange:
    • Andrew [09:06]: “I have this compulsion, almost an addiction to Chain Link, have I ever told you about that before?”
    • Luke [09:12]: “You’re a grateful Chain Link addict in recovery.”

3. Monosyllabic Dog Names & Card Games With Dogs

• [10:04 – 11:01]
  • Discussion of dog names (“Goose,” “Flea”) and the humor of naming dogs after other animals.
  • Andrew and Genevieve spend their pet-sitting evening playing cards and watching Columbo with the dogs.

4. Columbo, Faye Dunaway, and Peter Falk's Horn Dog Episode

• [11:01 – 20:09]
  • The duo breakdown an “unhinged” late-era Columbo episode starring Faye Dunaway and penned by Peter Falk.
  • Falk’s character goes against type—“Columbo makes out with Faye Dunaway in this so much. At one point, he's like...wiping this lipstick off. Like, we’re like, what happened to Mrs. Columbo?” – Andrew [13:01]
  • Plot summary involves a chair company, mother-daughter murder, and classic noir twists.

5. TV Binging: “The Chair Company” & The Week-to-Week Streaming Debate

• [21:13 – 26:32]
  • Luke reviews “The Chair Company,” a new HBO show by “I Think You Should Leave” creators, appreciating its oddity but withholding spoilers for Andrew.
  • Deep dive into streaming models: HBO’s week-to-week release format vs. Netflix’s binge drop.

6. Baseball Playoff Coverage: Streaming Rights & Uncanny Shohei Ohtani Ads

• [27:11 – 34:51]
  • Luke finds himself watching live baseball on HBO and discusses the surreality of AI-filtered, stadium-side Shohei Ohtani ads.
  • Andrew and Luke debate whether those giant animated athlete billboards are MLB- or team-contracted and bemoan the intrusion of rivals’ likenesses behind home plates.

7. Documentary Watch: “The Alabama Solution”

• [34:51 – 39:26]
  • Luke shares impressions of Andrew Jarecki’s documentary on Alabama’s prison injustice, emphasizing the lifeline cell phones provide for organizing and visibility:
  • “You finished the movie thinking, like, I can’t believe this is happening in this country.” – Luke [38:49]
  • Suggests watching it as a companion piece to lighten/darken the mood after comedies like “Chair Company.”

8. Commercials & Podcast Structure: Curveballs and Dead Eyes

• [39:26 – 47:53]
  • Andrew walks Luke through a baseball-themed “Indeed” ad, then rants (humorously) about the misapplied baseball metaphors.
  • Luke spots Connor Ratliff (from the “Dead Eyes” podcast) playing Henry VIII in a State Farm ad.
  • Extended discussion on the pros, cons, and psychology of “seasons” in podcasting, referencing Ratliff’s Tom Hanks odyssey.

9. Podcasting & Radio: The Flow & The Show Never Ends

• [47:53 – 50:56]
  • Andrew recalls a radio program director’s philosophy: don’t signal to listeners when a show ends—just let the conversation flow.
  • “Don’t ever give the audience a chance to look away because there’s just always another one coming down the pipe.” – Luke [50:56]

10. Listener Shoutouts & Trivia: Sisters Chicken Origins

• [51:26 – 54:45]
  • A run through donor names, with a sidebar on “Sisters Chicken and Biscuits”—an Ohio-based franchise once owned by Wendy’s.

11. AI Deepfakes Get Real: The “Sora” App & The End of Trusting Your Eyes

• [55:52 – 68:45]
  • Luke and Andrew react with amusement (and mounting horror) to the Sora AI video generator and its viral clips—Tony Hawking on a skateboard ramp, Mr. Rogers roasting Tupac in faux interviews.
  • Andrew plays a Mr. Rogers–Tupac Sora clip
    • “You love these guys and you love these guys together. You immediately love their fake friendship.” – Andrew [61:57]
  • Notable Quote:
    • “If this stuff is starting to fool me, we got some, some real problems.” – Luke [68:45]
  • Discussion turns serious, considering the societal threat of not believing anything you see anymore.

12. Moral Panics, Propaganda, and “Who Killed Bugs Meany?”

• [68:45 – 75:39]
  • They relate modern-day deepfake anxieties to historic panics—comic books, Elvis, MTV, etc.—but concede this moment feels existentially different.
  • Andrew: “There’s already this widening gap between what people can agree on as being real... you’re throwing this on top of it. How can it not feel… terrifying?” [69:47]

13. The Saga of Claire the Sinclair Dinosaur

• [76:11 – 85:15]
  • Luke recounts the theft and community outcry over a beloved Sinclair dinosaur statue (“Claire”) in Brentwood, CA.
  • With Jamie Lee Curtis joining the campaign, the dino is returned with an apology.
  • Correction laughter: the NYT corrects spelling Claire-with-an-E vs. Claire-without.
  • They riff on the inherent absurdity: “We are Sinclair rich around here.” – Luke [80:08]

14. Baseball (Mariners) Deep Dive: Hope, Curses, and Playoff Nerves

• [85:15 – 124:47]
  • The discussion pivots to Mariners superstitions, their “window” for a championship, and being perennial underdogs compared to Dodgers/Yankees outspending everyone.
  • Extended breakdown of player arcs: Naylor’s Hobbesque quirks, Geno’s struggles, Julio’s star turn (and skipping the All-Star Game for self-improvement).
  • Luke on Naylor: “He is gathering information…Even with that, Gino does not appear to be gathering any information.” [122:00]
  • Andrew confesses to baseball-history blind spots about the Mariners’ past division titles.
  • Game day anticipation: conflicted hope and the fear of “jinxing” a good team.

15. Listener Voicemail: Camp Songs & The Judgmental Moon

• [97:07 – 98:18]
  • Listener Laura from Wisconsin serenades the show with a moon-themed camp song, which Andrew and Luke dissect for its lunar shaming undertones:
  • “You’re kind of saying ‘Go back to bed and come out when we’re ready for you.’ …Does the moon not have autonomy?” – Andrew [98:31]

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Notable Quotes & Moments

• On anxiety and dogs:
  “I always worry, will I do that to a dog? And it’s honestly one of the reasons I didn’t want kids as well. I didn’t want them to pick up my worst qualities.” – Andrew [06:55]
• On AI dangers:
  “Anything that a person could possibly imagine as a scenario can now be created in a pretty believable way.” – Luke [67:06]
• On internet disbelief:
  “If we can’t even agree on the source material and then how we feel about that, we got some real problems.” – Luke [73:00]
• On Mariners’ playoff anxieties:
  “All roads lead me to thinking the Mariners are going to win by a lot. The very fact that I suspect that the Mariners might not win makes me think they’ll probably win.” – Luke [106:22]

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Timestamps for Major Segments

• 00:00 – 03:09: Show open, post-Mariners malaise, cat anniversary
• 03:09 – 10:14: Pet-sitting and dog-parent anxiety
• 10:14 – 13:45: Dog names and Columbo, Faye Dunaway episode
• 21:13 – 26:32: “Chair Company” review & TV release model debate
• 27:11 – 34:51: Playoff baseball coverage, stadium ads, HBO streaming rights
• 34:51 – 39:26: “The Alabama Solution” documentary
• 39:26 – 47:53: Commercials (Indeed ad), podcast “seasons” & Dead Eyes
• 55:52 – 68:45: AI video generators (Sora), deepfake panic
• 68:45 – 75:39: Moral panics, media trust, political context
• 76:11 – 85:15: Sinclair dinosaur theft and recovery
• 85:15 – 124:47: Mariners playoffs, player vibes, predictions
• 97:07 – 98:18: Listener Laura’s camp moon song & analysis

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Episode Tone

Conversational, witty, deeply self-referential, oscillating between playful banter (fake pet addictions, Columbo shipping, listener camp songs) and earnest cultural criticism (AI deepfakes, carceral injustice, baseball despair/hope).

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For Listeners Skipping The Audio

This episode is a quintessential TBTL blend: pets and playoff baseball, ‘90s TV throwbacks, internet absurdities, and the slow encroachment of existential dread—glossed with inside jokes, boyish optimism, and the world’s best imaginary radio campfire.

Power Out!

Transcript

[Luke Burbank]

He who questions training only trains himself at asking questions.

[Andrew Walsh]

What?

[Luke Burbank]

Patience, my son. To summon your power for the conflict to come, you must first have power over that which conflicts you. Okay, Am I the only one who.

[Andrew Walsh]

Finds these things just a little bit formulaic? If you want to push something down, you have to pull it up.

[Luke Burbank]

If you want to go left, you.

[Andrew Walsh]

Have to go right. It's.

[Luke Burbank]

Your temper is very quick, my friend. But until you learn to master your rage, your rage will become your master.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's what you were gonna say, right?

[Luke Burbank]

Right?

[Andrew Walsh]

Not necessarily. TBTL for our viewing pleasure, I packed Terms of E. Then we're gonna bring it up with a little fried greens to the T. And then Hope floats with Sandy B.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes. Does somebody die in that one? They die in all of them.

[Andrew Walsh]

Good. This need you have to be the.

[Luke Burbank]

Smartest guy in the room is off putting. Hey, you sound like you might be jealous, babe. No, And I. I know a little something about being jealous.

[Andrew Walsh]

Cause people have been jealous of me my entire life.

[Luke Burbank]

I know these guys are annoying, but that's all I got. I'm doing the work.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'm baby stepping.

[Luke Burbank]

I'm not a slacker. So come on over, take a ride.

[Andrew Walsh]

In my hot air balloon.

[Luke Burbank]

It'll take you wherever you want to go, I promise. Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of tbtl, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Meet the next generation of podcast stars. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

[Andrew Walsh]

He's got ribs like he just does.

[Luke Burbank]

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia woods, another gorgeous October day. October 15th.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, ma pa.

[Luke Burbank]

It's just beautiful. Cows are in the river. I've got my patented Paddington sweater on for good luck. And we're ready, folks. We're ready for episode 4576 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. They say nature abhors a vacuum. And this time of year at least, as has been the case of late, I don't exactly know what to do with myself on a day when there's not a Mariners game to obsess over and think about and watch and pace and stand on my deck looking at the TV from outside the house in the rain. And that was just exactly what happened yesterday. They didn't have a baseball game, and so I had to watch some regular television, or at least hbo, whatever we call HBO these days. I love television. I've got to have that thing on 24. 7. I love the patter and I watched two programs, two very, very different programs on HBO last night, which I want to talk about. Oh, and I definitely want to talk to this guy. Longest running cobra of the show. Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships and now his dog watching service. When the neighbors asked, will you take care of our dogs? He and Genevieve said, I got the.

[Andrew Walsh]

Time if you got the diapers.

[Luke Burbank]

He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

[Andrew Walsh]

Good morning, Luke. That's not the only animal news that is in the headlines today. Of course, everybody is talking about it. Today, of course is the three year anniversary of Bingo's coming home with Genevieve and I. That means it's also the three year anniversary of the time the Mariners and Astros played 18 innings of baseball. That's how I can always remember the date. October 15th. So, yeah, a lot of Dr. Dolittle stuff going.

[Luke Burbank]

And much like our acquisition of Geno Soarers, would you say that you're still. The jury is still out on if getting Bingo was a good idea or not?

[Andrew Walsh]

It's working out. I would say it's working out pretty well right now. I would say.

[Luke Burbank]

I don't know if I've ever met someone who loves their cat more than you love Bingo.

[Andrew Walsh]

He's a special guy. He's a special guy. He is my dude. I had a. I don't even want to talk about this, Luke.

[Luke Burbank]

Future rotten soldier dude.

[Andrew Walsh]

I had the most awful dream about Bingo last night.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, no.

[Andrew Walsh]

As bad as you. I don't even want to even talk about what happened in the dream, but let's just say it didn't end well. And I woke up in such a. Such a bad place that I had forgotten it was his anniversary. I went to bed thinking, oh, I gotta tell Genevieve in the morning because I don't think she remembers the date of the. Of the 18 inning baseball game like I do. And so I went to bed last night thinking, oh, I gotta tell Genevieve about that in the morning. But instead, when I woke up, I just said, ah. Cause I was so scared of the bad.

[Luke Burbank]

Once you realize that the bad dream was not in fact real life, then did you feel that wave of relief that I always talk about? Like I've said on the show many times, I'm not saying I want to have a bad dream, but I will tell you that the difference in how I feel when I realize, oh, that was a bad dream versus, oh, that was a good dream, you know, really, I'm walking around feeling Kind of like I'm playing with house money when I learned that that bad dream I was having was not actually real life and vice versa. When I have one of those ones that I've won the lottery or something.

[Andrew Walsh]

I feel like I've had. First of all, I don't have the vice versa thing. Good dreams stay with me for a while throughout the day. I love it. Sometimes I can kind of still like ride the endorphins of a good dream. Even though it didn't really. Even though whatever happened in that dream didn't really happen as far as we know.

[Luke Burbank]

I don't know.

[Andrew Walsh]

Brain jar.

[Luke Burbank]

How about.

[Andrew Walsh]

Or yet. Exactly. Bad dreams can go both ways. They could. It could be that like, whoa, I'm glad, glad I'm waking up from that nightmare and that it's not real. But then sometimes dreams just. I don't know, this one just concerned me and I don't. You know, you mentioned at the top of the show or as you introduced me, that we did start our official dog watching duties yesterday. Our neighbors are out of town for a little bit. So we're watching their two dogs and Veeves and I went over there last night and you know, I take, I take great responsibility with these things. You know, I'm not trying to pat myself on the back. In fact, sometimes maybe it. That's. That's one of the. One of the reasons I worry about being an actual dog owner of my own or being an actual dog owner, I guess I should say, is that I think the best dogs are the chill dogs who you can take anywhere and do go everywhere with their human companions. I assume we don't say owners. I don't know. But I am such a ball of anxiety that I feel like I would have good intentions for my dog were I raising a dog, but that my anxiety about the dog's safety might wake wear off on the dog. And in the same way I honestly feel that I'm a mess a little bit because of my parents anxiety about keeping us safe and protected and a little bit overprotected. I think that's one of the reasons I'm such a basket case. So I always worry, will I do that to a dog? And it's honestly one of the reasons I kind of didn't want kids as well. I didn't want them to pick up my worst qualities. So these.

[Luke Burbank]

I think it's much more likely in human children because of, you know, what's the word? Genetics. Like, I think, I think that my sense is. And we've probably got some vets, some veterinarians in the audience who maybe have some real knowledge on this. But I feel like your dog, if you ever are to get a dog, I don't think that they will be anxious because you are anxious. Whereas I think if you have a human child, you could very much. Because you're telling them and they're. By the way, they also presumably would speak your same language at some point. If you're telling them there's a lot of danger out there, et cetera. I mean, you wouldn't be trying to do that. You're just saying your, your general kind of vibe or whatever could maybe rub off on them. I think it's less likely to rub off on a dog than a human child.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's funny. I.

[Luke Burbank]

You don't think so?

[Andrew Walsh]

I just, I, I can't think of.

[Luke Burbank]

Anything more about the vibes. You think.

[Andrew Walsh]

I, I mean, not more than a child. Especially if you're talking about actual genetics. If it's a, if it's a, you know, a blood relative. Biological, biological child. But I do think that I've been around people where dogs are kind of like even good intentioned owners, but are like high strung. They can tend to kind of have high strung dogs. Have you never noticed that before?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I guess I always wonder if that's the puppy or the egg in that. You've got those people that are just always kind of like always sort of yelling at their dog because the dog's always doing something. And you're like, is the dog always doing something because they're always yelling at it or are they always yelling at it because it's always kind of doing something?

[Andrew Walsh]

Right.

[Luke Burbank]

I can tell you that's not the most fun energy to be around household where the dog is always being yelled at when you least expect it as the visitor.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, I just. And again, I can't think of.

[Luke Burbank]

That would never be your household.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, no, that is true. But I do anyway, those are concerns I have whether they're founded or not. But yesterday, you know, Vivs and I, it was. We went over and said hello to the neighbors during the day before they took off. And so I got to say hello to the dogs. It wasn't the first time, but it was one of the first times that I got to meet Maggie, the three year old dog on the same side as the fence as her. Because we're fence friends. We talk and pet through this chain link or. Yeah, chain link fence. And I kind of have this compulsion, almost an addiction to chain Link, have I ever told you about that before?

[Luke Burbank]

I, I actually had heard that you had battled that successfully.

[Andrew Walsh]

I feel like I will always be an addict, though, in a certain way.

[Luke Burbank]

You're grateful. Chain Link addict in recovery and that's, you know.

[Andrew Walsh]

But anyway, it was really sweet. I mean, these dogs love people. They're very high energy dogs. One of them I think is a puppy less than a year old, but is going to be a very big dog. So I mentioned a puppy to you on the, on the show the other day and I think you were picturing.

[Luke Burbank]

I better stay on the porch then. I'm not going to try to run with him.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's very, very smart. Also, no fear. I'm just going to throw that out there too.

[Luke Burbank]

Sure. But yet you're not the lead dog. The view never changes, Andrew. That's, you know that I always say.

[Andrew Walsh]

That you get a really nice view of a sweet ass.

[Luke Burbank]

I mean, honestly, I guess if that's what you're into, it's kind of great.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, exactly.

[Luke Burbank]

Part of the human centipede is your preference, I assume. I have assume front human, but that's just me.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. Yeah. But it's funny because they refer to Goose, that's the other dog's name, as a puppy, but the puppy is bigger than probably most dogs.

[Luke Burbank]

I like that name for a dog.

[Andrew Walsh]

I do too. And I love both.

[Luke Burbank]

I also once had a dog named Flea.

[Andrew Walsh]

So I just, you know, manos well.

[Luke Burbank]

Monosyllabic and naming a dog for a different animal.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, and a different animal. Sure. Yeah. But yeah, so yesterday we went over there in the evening. Veeves and I once the neighbors had left and just, just like played. We, we played some cards and watched some Columbo. Oh my God, did we Wait now.

[Luke Burbank]

Were those dogs cheer Were those dogs cheating at poker? Because I recently saw, I saw some CCTV footage of dogs playing poker and I don't think that game was on the level, man.

[Andrew Walsh]

Do you remember that John Mulaney and Pete Davidson bit that they did on Weekend Update where they were talking about the movie the Mule with Clint Eastwood and how Clint Eastwood discussed this, wrote and directed it, and also where he.

[Luke Burbank]

Has not one, but two menage etoises in this film as a person of a very, very advanced age.

[Andrew Walsh]

Exactly. And of course he wrote and they kept saying and he wrote it. We watched this episode of Columbo that neither one of us had seen before. It just happened to be coming on Pluto t choose it. But we were very excited when we saw that Faye Dunaway guest starred in this one. Wow. Yes. And she's great.

[Luke Burbank]

Very Hollywood to me.

[Andrew Walsh]

She seems.

[Luke Burbank]

No, no criticism of Columbo, but she seems like she'd be too good for that.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, yeah, they would bring in some pretty big names. And the. The thing is, this was also a later one, too. So I'm thinking this was pretty late 80s, if not very early 90s. And we see at the beginning that it's written in. No, not directed, but it's written by Peter Falk. And we're like, oh, I didn't know Columbo wrote his own Columbos now.

[Luke Burbank]

And then this is the one where Columbo drops his jockstrap in the gym and it's just like a sale for, like, a sailboat.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, yeah, right. Well, that's kind of what I'm getting at is you will not believe every episode of Columbo I've ever seen he talks about, or at least it's implied, that he has a wife, Mrs. Colombo. Back at home, they even made a TV show. They made a TV show called Mrs. Colombo. Do you know that?

[Luke Burbank]

I think this is the first time realizing Columbo's last name.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. What?

[Luke Burbank]

It was Columbo Johnson.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's not the first time you're realizing that, because it was a big thing and, well, it was a big topic, at least at one point, that there was a fake. Columbo doesn't officially have a first name, but there's a fake trivia question out there that somebody put in their trivia book about Columbo's first name, and they put it in there as a trap because they believed that the Trivial Pursuit people were stealing the. Their intellectual property from their books. You don't remember this?

[Luke Burbank]

This is the second time I'm learning that Columbo is not his first name.

[Andrew Walsh]

I was blown away by the story, and I think I'm getting it right. I mean, this is years ago, Luke. Years and years that we would have talked about this, but they ended up winning their suit because they said we made up basically what you and I would call a factoid. Right. A fake fact.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. They put some bad information into the system to see if it got hoovered up by.

[Andrew Walsh]

And then it got hoovered up. Yes. And I'm pretty sure I have that the right way. As far as who was. Who was suing whom. All of that is to say Columbo makes out with Faye Dunaway in this so much. At one point, he's like, you don't even see all of these Wiping this lipstick off. Like, we're like, what happened to Mrs. Colombo? Why in this one are you like. Cause she's. She's the suspect, right. And she's trying to woo him.

[Luke Burbank]

Columbo just has an indentation on his ring finger where he's quickly trying to pull off his wedding ring.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. What's that David Berman line? Let me ask you about that tan line on your ring finger.

[Luke Burbank]

There you go.

[Andrew Walsh]

So, anyway, we're over there watching Columbo just being like, of course. Genevieve and I just keep turning to each other, and he wrote it.

[Luke Burbank]

That's amazing.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's like, come on, Peter Falk, you dog.

[Luke Burbank]

I did not. That's surprising to me. Only because I feel like, you know, the only person who seems less likely to do that would be Tony Shalhoub if he wrote an episode of Monk. Yeah, I mean, I know they're both, like. They're both quirky detectives, and I'm sure the similarities have been pointed out many, many times. But, like, I just think of them both. Both Peter Falk and Tony Shalhoub as deeply, like, good dudes.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

Like, their characters are good dudes. I think they were. They seem like good dudes in real life. I know more about Tony Shalhoub than I do about Peter Falk. But it's just funny. Peter Falk doesn't strike me as basically like a horn dog who wants to kiss Faye Dunaway.

[Andrew Walsh]

I think he screwed the cannon in a lot of ways in this episode. Sitting here thinking, I don't want to spoil it, but I'm talking about it. Literally, an episode of television.

[Luke Burbank]

I'm talking about. I want. Tonight I come to you wanting to talk about the chair company, which debuted three days ago. You're worried about spoiling Colombo.

[Andrew Walsh]

It is. He also, let's just say this because again, I know a lot of people have this DVR on their Pluto tv. There is a big, not unlike Chinatown twist ending to this. Whoa. Well, which I don't think Dunaway with the. Yeah, I don't think that's a coincidence. And Columbo goes rogue. Columbo lets some people off the hook. Columbo basically files some false reports because he. He's caught feelings for Faye Dunaway and another character in the show. I am just like, I. There. Some justice is served. But Columbo, the character, he lets somebody off the hook. He lets somebody. He turns. He turns away and lets somebody. He suggests that she fly to another country to get out of trouble because he wants to cut her the Faye Dunaway character. No, it's not. It's not Faye Dunaway. Faye Dunaway. She signs a confession to say, you know what? Screw spoilers. Yeah. So she works in this chair company, right? Uh huh.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay.

[Luke Burbank]

That I actually do have to be a little careful about.

[Andrew Walsh]

You know. You do actually, to me, because I don't want to. I don't want to. I don't want it kind of not spoiled, but I don't want it kind of ruined.

[Luke Burbank]

But yeah, you don't want to go in with an opinion.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. And I kind of. I like not knowing too much about what a show's about. And it's still pretty fresh. But basically, Faye Dunaway and a woman that we are heavily. Well, that they infer heavily is her lesbian lover plan a murder of a man who is seeing both of them. Okay. I can't remember which one he's cheating on.

[Luke Burbank]

I thought this was kind of a progressive plot line until I realized it was just two lesbians, but actually who are crazy for the D. Who have to kill a guy because he was getting with both of them.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, it's more complicated than that. And I think above board, he's Faye Dunaway's partner or boyfriend or something. I don't know. But then we see that he's also stepping out with this other woman, maybe slightly younger woman. I'm not sure. Yeah, definitely younger woman. And then we realize that the two women are sort of in cahoots to murder him. And then there's a lot of like kind of scenes that would make. And lines that would make you think that these two women are lovers. But then. And so they murder him. They do all these things. We don't have to get into detail, but let's just say a heated blanket is involved to try to convince the authorities that the time of death is something other. It's actually pretty ingenious. It's very ingenious.

[Luke Burbank]

It's like Encyclopedia Brown, but with much.

[Andrew Walsh]

Higher stakes as it usually is.

[Luke Burbank]

Bugs Meanie. We noticed that he did Blanket box in Bugs Meanies clubhouse.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes.

[Luke Burbank]

He was trying to keep the cadaver.

[Andrew Walsh]

Who killed the Bugs Meanie anyway?

[Luke Burbank]

Would have been doing the killing.

[Andrew Walsh]

I do. Who killed Bugs? Meaning it could be a show title. All of that is. So they. They kill this guy. Then Columbo starts investigating. He has a suspicion about Faye Dunaway. She's really laying it on thick and hitting on him. I thought that he was just. Just kind of stringing her along. I thought he was above it all and I thought he was not telling her about his wife because he was just like, kind of playing her in the same way she thought she was playing him. But he never mentions his wife. There's plenty of scenes where he's like, in a coffee shop bar, which I'd never seen before. Also, like, he's got friends in this bar in this episode, which is strange. And he's always drinking coffee there, but he's always tough case, tough case. And he's like, he's clearly not thinking about Mrs. Colombo. She's just out of the picture apparent. I don't know what's going on.

[Luke Burbank]

Maybe they have an understanding.

[Andrew Walsh]

Maybe they have an understanding. And it becomes clear that no, Columbo really is conflicted in this case. He has indeed caught feelings, as one does with Faye Dunaway, who looks great, by the way. And so he's got some conflicted emotions involved here. And then at the very end, he kind of does, like, kind of catch Faye Dunaway in some lie or something. And she sort of makes it by not saying too much. She basically says, I will confess if you let this other person that you're now sniffing around go. And we at the audience still think that these two are lovers. But that's the big Chinatown reveal. They are not lovers. They are mother and daughter. Uh huh, uh huh, uh huh, huh. And so, and this man, that's a great twist. And very much like, very much like Chinatown. This. This man is not in the family the way Chinatown was. That was very, very dark. But this was a man who was abusing them, or is certainly abusing her, the daughter, in, like, some pretty horrific ways and threatening them and threatening their lives. So they. We learn at the end that they had to kill this man because he was going to potentially kill them or hurt them very, very badly. He was a very, very bad man. And so in doing all of this, Columbo basically lets the daughter go. He says, you travel to Paris a lot. You travel to. You should go to Paris. I heard there's some good things going on there this week. Okay. The imitation didn't start good and it got worse. But that's the spoiler full version of that. It was a pretty interesting episode. It was unlike most episodes I've seen. You can really feel Peter Falk's writing hand in it, especially when he's making out with Faye Dunaway.

[Luke Burbank]

I mean, that does. Yeah, it's like the idea that the Faye Dunaway character would be sort of honey potting him a little bit. I'm looking at the cast and this did also feature. I don't know if it was a bit part or not. It was called it's all in the game. By the way, I believe was this episode Jonathan Banks, who you may recognize from Better Call Saul and Breaking Bad. Oh, I don't think he was in this a long time ago. Again, probably just maybe sort of a bit part. That guy was also in Beverly Hills Cop. That's where I always remembered him from. I was going through to see if there was anybody else in this episode other than Faye Dunaway and Peter Falk that I recognized.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'm wondering if he plays. He might play the murder victim or the Mukduck victim. Oh, he's the. Oh, oh, he's oh. From Better Call Saul. He's. What's his name? Bob. Not Bob.

[Luke Burbank]

I don't know. I didn't know.

[Andrew Walsh]

Whatever his name is. Mike Ehrmantraut. Mike Ehrmantraut, of course. Oh, wow. I wonder if he was the murder victim or the Mukduck victim. I gotta look into that.

[Luke Burbank]

Anyway, we were all watching television last night, Andrew, some of it from a more modern era. But I will be careful when I talk about the chair company. This is the new thing from like the I think you should leave, folks. It's starring Tim Robinson. And I know you don't want me to give you any expectations. I will just here's what I'll say in the most general way that I can. I really enjoyed it. And I enjoyed it for. I did not enjoy it for the exact reasons that I was expecting, you know, because one of the things about anything that comes out of the I think you should leave universe is a question of, like, how close does it hue to that style of comedy? The kind of style that Tim Robinson and Zach Kanan, the kind of co creators of that show, really lean into, which is like awkwardness and people behaving at very extreme levels. And so, like, with that movie Friendship, I think I maybe liked Friendship more than you did or, I don't know, remind me of your opinion. That was the one with Paul Rudd and Tim Robinson. That is kind of like the show, but also kind of not.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, I wasn't a huge fan of it as a movie. I just felt like, yeah, a lot of questionable motivations. I didn't think it was funny enough to dismiss a lot of the questionable decisions in it, if that makes sense. If it's a ridiculous comedy, then you're not exploring certain questions like, well, why would this character do this? Why does this fit into their character? Care. But it was also taking itself kind of seriously. I felt like it was stuck. Yeah. I wasn't. I didn't hate it, but I didn't love it.

[Luke Burbank]

That's interesting. I didn't think about it from that perspective. Like, you. Basically, that movie we're talking about now, you thought that it was. It didn't really have enough internal logic, which is okay, maybe if something is just totally a spoof.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

But if it's trying to say anything serious about masculinity or desire or whatever, then it has to be a little bit more like, it was. It was too unserious to be serious, but too serious to be properly unserious.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. And it really starts off just like, well, why is he married to this woman? Like, we never see any attraction between them or any hint. Or when we do, I don't think it's very successful anyway. Just a whole bunch of things like that. Why would Paul Rudd's character want him to come over there? You think that he's gonna be the type of guy who collects oddballs, but that's not really the case either. Like, it's just like, none of. None of it fit together in any way that makes sense. Which that's really funny because I feel like.

[Luke Burbank]

But like, that movie, that's so much more the argument that I'm making about things. Usually, like, I'm going, like, well, why would that person do that? And I don't know if they've just got me so in the bag that I was like, I don't know, I like the soundtrack. Then they zeroed in on those power lines, you know? But you're. You make a good point about that movie. Anyway, I guess again, I'm. Now, I really don't want to. I don't want to, like, say too much about it because I don't want to impact your experience with it. But I watch, and I'm glad that I watched it.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, good.

[Luke Burbank]

I think it's, like, maybe. I don't know if it's like, six or seven episodes. This first one was, like, about a half hour. And it also felt to me like they kind of packed a lot into this half hour. Like, I was. I. I was quite intrigued to watch the next one next week when it comes out. And I have the sense that it is one of those kind of shows that they're not just. I don't know if that's an HBO thing versus, I guess, is Netflix really the main one? That just, like, when. When a Netflix show comes out, it's all there. That's kind of their whole. That's their deal is that they're going to give you every single episode. Whereas like HBO and stuff, they want to try to get you coming back to HBO each week for the episode drop.

[Andrew Walsh]

I know that Netflix can drop an entire series all at once. I don't know if they always do. Well, they don't. Well, like, obviously they did some live programming with Mulaney and stuff. You can't drop all of that at once. Yeah, I do. I cannot think of an instance where HBO has dropped an entire series at once. I mean, I could be wrong. You know me, I don't follow the stuff that closely, but when I think of hbo, almost all of the stuff we talk about is a week by week thing. Right. Like, whether it's. I mean, going back to the Sopranos, obviously, but that was a much different media era. But even now, White Lotus, like you're. Everybody's. The brilliance of it is everybody's on the edge of their seats for the next Game of Thrones or whatever it is.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I go back and forth, like, if you can get a critical mass of people, like talking, like if you're into a show or if somebody in our friend group is, and we're kind of like talking about it in between the episodes and getting excited. I mean, the. The peak of that, of course, was the Sopranos, which was like an absolute event in my life. We would literally, like me and my first ex wife and my buddy the Colonel, we'd all get together in la. We would literally cook food, you know, that seemed vaguely like something they might eat. On the Sopranos, we had T shirts that said I love Johnny Cakes. It was like a whole thing.

[Andrew Walsh]

A lot of strudel.

[Luke Burbank]

A huge amount of strudel.

[Andrew Walsh]

Right.

[Luke Burbank]

Other classic Italian foods.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's the only non Italian food I can think of in the moment.

[Luke Burbank]

This was good. It read. It read.

[Andrew Walsh]

It stopped, Hit red and then it stopped. We. Sometimes we just need to leave on.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes. Anyway. Yeah, I do. I. So I guess I sort of. On the one hand, I do like the. I like the network being kind of withholding, but there is always the danger that I might lose my momentum with something. I mean, and it doesn't take much with me. I have a very short attention span and I have a lot going on typically. So hopefully I'll stay with this. But it. There. There are many examples of where I've had a show that I'm watching and then I get distracted. Then I just, like, I forget That I didn't even watch the last three episodes of something.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, unfortunately, I've done that. I'm embarrassed to name the number of shows I've done that with. You brought up Peacemaker the other day, and I'm pretty sure looking back now, I said I watched the entire first series, but I think I might have forgot to watch the last two episodes of that. So before I watch season two, I've really got to kind of catch up on that. And I've done that. Downton Abbey. I think I maybe watched the first. First two seasons and then just gave up on before watching the last episode of season two. There are just certain shows where it's kind of like I can say I watch an entire season or two of it, but really it's like those last few episodes, if I lose my momentum, the seasons change, my rhythms change, there's going to be lost.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, well, the other thing I watched, so I finished with that and I guess I'll give HBO credit on this, by the way. Do you all have. Do you have HBO at your house to do that thing? Have you noticed that the baseball games have been on HBO already?

[Andrew Walsh]

There have been some on hbo.

[Luke Burbank]

All of the games. All of the National League games are on hbo.

[Andrew Walsh]

All the National League games. No, I didn't. I thought. I think I remember last year at one point turning on HBO and realizing, oh, I can watch this. But obviously, you know, it didn't have anything to do with the Mariners. I don't know if I did or not. Oh, that'd be great.

[Luke Burbank]

Awesome.

[Andrew Walsh]

If it was for the al.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, yeah, like we couldn't find. So my mom, you know, and I actually, for that matter, we're pretty interested in how the Phillies were doing. And after like a Mariner game or something or I don't know, maybe it's a day. There was no EMS game. I was trying to find the Phillies and it was nowhere on my FUBO universe, even though that usually gets everything. And as a last resort, I was like, there's no way it's on hbo. And then like it was live streaming on hbo, but then also I saw something about TBS in the corner. Like maybe they're simulcasting on. But also that's weird to me because I would think that, like, is it. I mean, Fox has the whole post season contract, right?

[Andrew Walsh]

Luke? I don't know own tbs. I can't answer any of those questions. There's.

[Luke Burbank]

It's something. There was something to me, very unsettling about watching live baseball on hbo. And in fact. Exactly. That was also. That's also the sound it makes when Ohtani hits the ball. I mean, that was, by the way, something else yesterday. Not to get into baseball convo, but like I was watching that Dodgers brewers game and they are filming it. This is again, I don't know if this is exclusive to hbo. My hunch is that I'm just watch hbo. Just one of the places you can see this for whatever weird media contract reason. And I'm just watching it on hbo and it's being, you know, it's also playing, certainly it's playing in Wisconsin on local television and it's playing on, you know, some network, maybe TBS or whatever, but they were using a filter on their camera. Like they're filming Ohtani. He's taking some practice swings before he goes up. He's going to be the first hitter for the Dodgers. They're playing in Milwaukee, so the Dodgers are hitting first. I thought it was an AI version of Ohtani. I thought it was like, you know that you pointed out that like Beats by Dre ad.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, I can't believe. I still cannot believe that.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes, Imagine this. Imagine that you are in your home stadium, like you're a Milwaukee brewers fan and you're going to watch your team. Or let's just say you're a Milwaukee brewers fan. You're watching at home. Let's say you just got done answering the question to ponder on Wisconsin 106.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes.

[Luke Burbank]

And now you're shifting into brewers watching, possibly at the. What was the name of that bar.

[Andrew Walsh]

We like, it's 5 o' clock somewhere.

[Luke Burbank]

Possibly at its 5 o' clock somewhere. And your brewers batters are coming up to the plate and behind them is a giant banner of a very uncanny appearing Shohei Ohtani. Like it's. It's an image of him, but it looks like it's been through about nine Instagram filters.

[Andrew Walsh]

He's facing away from the camera so you can see the earbud in his ear.

[Luke Burbank]

Right. And you were pointing out, Andrew, that like people on Reddit were upset about this, Mets fans, because, like, just imagine that basically the main guy on your rival's team is now he's the main poster behind all of your hitters hitting. And this is what I had forgotten until you reminded me of it. This was a decision the owners of the Milwaukee brewers made.

[Andrew Walsh]

They had to have. So you saw this same ad during the brewers game? I'm a little confused.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh yeah, it was on last night.

[Andrew Walsh]

You and I were talking about this via text message. Because we saw this in Toronto. What is it called? The day the Johnson Center. It's not the Johnson Center. Rogers Center, Bob Erwin Trout. That one's gonna live with me for a while, as will the Johnson Center. But yeah, in the Rogers center here you have two teams. Neither one of them have Ohtani on their team. But there's this big Beats by Dre ad on the digital billboard right behind home plate that has a picture of Ohtani. And I was just telling you, like I. Can you imagine if here in Seattle there was some Mike Trout contract, especially when he was really hot, you know, and that we were such rivals with the Angels. Can you imagine watching the Mariners and just seeing a big picture of Mike Trout or even Mike Irwin Trout behind the.

[Luke Burbank]

Mike something Trout.

[Andrew Walsh]

But like, I just can't believe that we live in a world where people are just like, yeah, put an opposing star player's face huge behind our players.

[Luke Burbank]

Again, assuming that that's not some sort of like system wide contract.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, an MLB contract.

[Luke Burbank]

An MLB contract season for the. For what goes there? Because by the way, if I remember right, I don't even think that's a real thing in the stadium. I think it's Chroma key, you know what I mean?

[Andrew Walsh]

Like that's. Some of them. Are you. You think those in the background of the. Of the actual. Yeah, that would make sense.

[Luke Burbank]

I think that. So that they can just superimpose whatever they want on there. But like so there is a possibility that that's some sort of a contract with the league wide. So that it's not that it's. Because here's what would be make me so mad would be if that was just pure greed by the, like the. The owners of the Milwaukee brewers who are saying like oh yeah, well any. Anybody's money is good here. Even if it's basically trolling our guys by putting their main guy behind us while we're hitting. But I wonder now that we're talking about it if that isn't because I've been seeing it everywhere. You know, I wonder if that isn't maybe league wide.

[Andrew Walsh]

Let me jump in here and say you might be right. But if you are right, it might be a post season thing. Because one thing I do enjoy is watching. I enjoy Hemplers. Yes. No, I do not.

[Luke Burbank]

One of us. Another one that.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, that's what I say. Like when you watch other. When you watch baseball games, you see local. Yeah. Ads. Like, because it struck me, I don't know if I mentioned this to you or not. Probably not, because it's not interesting. Well, anyway, I was watching a Reds game in Cincinnati and I saw they had Cintas. You know, the company Cintas, the uniform company, Cintas. And, you know, my family's business was a big customer of Cintas. So I grew up knowing of Cintas, and I remember this summer making the connection for the first time in my life. Cintas, Cincinnati. I never realized that Cintas is based in Cincinnati. And that's probably why this is the.

[Luke Burbank]

First time hearing that Cintas has a first name.

[Andrew Walsh]

Cintas has a first name. It's Cincinnati, Ohio. But anyway, so anyway, my point is, and you know this too, with the Hempler's example, like, often these ads are representative of local market. Something that I love. I love the localness of, you know, baseball markets and sort of seeing those ads for their fan base. So you're right, though, maybe for the postseason. And if these are superimposed, then maybe they're just saying, hey, listen, MLB is picking up these contracts now, and we'll put Ohtani's face wherever the hell we want. Either way, I think it's mad disrespectful.

[Luke Burbank]

I do, too. They should probably have a policy that says we can do ads, but one of the things you can't put up is like, basically, I mean, it's. It's. In a way, it's sort of electioneering, right? You can't stand there next to the poll, like the polling place with the sign. It's too close to where it's happening. Like, you shouldn't be able to show one of the players, particularly the players that are in the postseason, show their face in an ad that's right behind where either they or other players might be playing. You know, it just seems a little too close to the action. Certainly would. It would make me super furious. What I was going to say about HBO is it was effective. Last night I got into the HBO universe and they kept me there. I went there to watch the Chair Company, and then it said, you may also like. And then it reminded me that there was something that I really wanted to watch, which is called the Alabama Solution. It is a very serious documentary about incarcerated people in the state of Alabama. It's made by Andrew Jarecki, who's the guy that made the jinx.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, okay. Yeah, Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

I think we always forget. I think Jarecki also actually made. What was that really, you know, super hard hitting. Doc, about the. I want to be careful with how I Say it, because we don't need to get too into it. But he made another HBO documentary about a predator who also was like a birthday clown in, like, upstate New York. That was kind of a huge sensation. And of course, I can't remember the name.

[Andrew Walsh]

Not John Wayne Gacy.

[Luke Burbank]

Not John Wayne Gacy, but it was, it was a. It was somebody who again, was. Was found to be very predatory, but they had also. So it was. Anyway, that was. I forget that documentary that was kind of like before even maybe like the making. Making a Murderer or. You know what I mean? Like, there was that sort of. There was a run of these, like, documentary series that were just like everybody was talking about. And they were like. There were almost like cultural moments. Anyway, that was Andrew Jarecki. And then he did the Jit. He did. He did the Jinx. And now I think he's one of the people behind this thing, the Alabama Solution. But I mean, it's a really.

[Andrew Walsh]

Jarecki also, do I remember this right? Didn't he make a non documentary movie that was basically based on Robert. What's the name of the guy in the jinx?

[Luke Burbank]

Robert Durst.

[Andrew Walsh]

Durst.

[Luke Burbank]

Didn't he make a movie Capturing the Friedmans?

[Andrew Walsh]

That's the name of that movie. And then Durst saw it and said, oh, I trust you. Why don't you make a documentary about me? Like, the irony.

[Luke Burbank]

Exactly. Yes, I believe that is exactly how that went down. Yeah. Well, anyway, this is an Andrew Jarecki thing, and it is, you know, it's a tough watch because of the injustice of the whole thing. But it's also really fascinating because a lot of inmates now have gotten access to cell phones. And so basically what it's. It's talking about how unbelievably messed up the Alabama. The jail system is in the state of Alabama, as it is in many places, but particularly in Alabama, and how impossible it is to get any kind of clear insight into what's really going on within these prisons, because they're run by people who have their own motivations, you know, whether it's the guards or the administration. And they are certainly not going to tell on themselves. And when you have, you know, inmates who are. Who are being brutally beaten by guards and things like that, there's just no accountability. And then you introduce this thing of these cell phones, and then suddenly you've got these. These incarcerated people who are organizing by cell phone and having these meetings and starting something called this Halifax Project, where they're sort of like basically educating themselves on the Law. And it's, like, very inspiring and also very infuriating because, you know, there are some really inspirational things that happen in the movie. And then there's also just some. Some points where you realize just how. Just how broken the system is and how hard it is to really, really have to make effective progress. And then also just to hear people. The way people. The way that people who are not incarcerated or have never been touched by that world talk about people who are incarcerated as just. There's absolutely no chance that anyone would ever be in jail unless they did something horrific. You know, and like, some of the charges, there's a. One of the people that's in the. In the movie, and I. Again, I don't. It's like a documentary. Are there spoilers? But somebody who's central to the. To the documentary, who was in jail for many, many years. The crime was burglary three. The crime was breaking into an unoccupied building. And it was unclear if he'd even stolen anything. Now, Andrew, I hope you're sitting down. This person happened to be black in Alabama. I know that's going to be shocking to you. That does not appear that this person was treated fairly under the law. But, like, this guy was in jail for many, many years. And then stuff happens while he's in jail. We should have never been in this particular level of security. What he did probably should have been maybe probation. But anyway, it's just. It's inspiring and also really frustrating. But it's an important watch. So I just want to throw that out there. The Alabama Solution, you know, it's. I think it's.

[Andrew Walsh]

I.

[Luke Burbank]

When I watched it, I guess here was my thought. Why aren't more people talking about what is in this film? You know, like, this is a really. This is you. You finished the movie thinking, like, I can't believe this is happening in this country. That we. I mean, that's really saying something, by the way, in this day and age with everything that's always happening. But, like. Yeah. So I just wanted to say maybe you know what it is? It's a little. It's a little yin. It's a little yang. It's a little bit of both. You watch the Chair Company, you watch the Alabama Solution. You're sort of stimulating all parts of your brain and emotional life in the same night. Thanks to Home Box Office. When are they gonna start just calling it Home Box Office again?

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes, I would. I would sign off.

[Luke Burbank]

Let's go back to that.

[Andrew Walsh]

While we're talking on Media now that it's not the top of the show anymore, I want to ask you about a commercial. I've been meaning to ask you this. Anyway, I, I didn't want to do this at the top of the show because I did this at the top of the other podcast I recorded yesterday with Genevieve, which is actually explicitly about commercials. But I need your take on something. In all of your baseball watching recently, have you seen a short, cute little commercial for Indeed, the job seeking app, where there is an interviewer, you know, somebody who's interviewing job candidates sitting behind her desk and she's a bit stern looking and she's got a big bowl of baseballs with question marks sitting on her desk and she's throwing them at the person who's, you know, applying for a job. Have you seen this commercial?

[Luke Burbank]

No, I. I've been hearing. This is a weird way to respond. I've been hearing a lot of Indeed commercials between the innings as I'm like pacing around my house. So I'm aware they're doing a big buy, but I guess I didn't note that someone was throwing baseballs at someone.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes. So I thought this was pretty cute because what happens is. And I'm going to find a link here for you. I'm going to show it to you and then I'm going to, I'm going to play the audio. It's not, it's not critical. I'm sending this to you, by the way, via text if you want to play along. Curveballs it is. I know that if you're finding one link online, there's a broken link to it if it's an I spot, but I just sent you the YouTube one. I went through all of this yesterday, but basically it's a very. The first time I saw this commercial, it brought a smile to my face. Cause this woman is throwing these balls, these baseballs at the person who's interviewing and he's like dodging them. As he's sitting in this chair, the balls are coming at him. But then at the end he gets.

[Luke Burbank]

I've definitely not seen this.

[Andrew Walsh]

He's got the Indeed app. And so now he can handle these curveballs. And so that is represented by him having a giant, a comedically giant baseball mitt that he's catching. Now suddenly he can catch these balls. What if you were prepared for all those interview curveballs?

[Luke Burbank]

Practice the interview before the interview.

[Andrew Walsh]

Indeed. Career scout, I guess is a way of practicing the interview before the interview. And it's funny, he pulls out this big mitt and he's got this smile on his face. And you can. It's a pretty good analogy, except now it's driving me crazy. And do you know why it's driving me crazy, Luke?

[Luke Burbank]

Because he's not wearing a catcher's mitt.

[Andrew Walsh]

No, because the. You're not throwing curveballs in an attempt to make them difficult to catch. You throw curveballs in an attempt to make them difficult to hit. I feel like he should have a giant bat, not a giant mitt. Now, a curveball could be hard. I couldn't catch a curveball, probably. You know, I mean, I understand, but like, you're not throw. The point of a curveball is not to fool the catcher. It's to fool the batter. And even though I laugh at his giant glove, I feel like it should be a giant bat.

[Luke Burbank]

That's a good point. Also, it is not a catcher's mitt, which it all. It also should be, because you know what? Actually, then the analogy works because catchers do catch.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, they do catch them. And you do need to make sure that, you know, you don't let one buy you or whatever. Especially if it's.

[Luke Burbank]

How did Cal Raleigh not get.

[Andrew Walsh]

Not.

[Luke Burbank]

Not get nominated for a Gold Glove at catcher at zero pass balls this year?

[Andrew Walsh]

I don't know. How did Dylan Moore get the Gold Glove last year?

[Luke Burbank]

Utility Gold Glove. Andrew, obviously, that's like, won that back in the day.

[Andrew Walsh]

I feel like that was the first ironic Golden Glove ever given. That's not talked about enough.

[Luke Burbank]

Hit you with more commercial talk. I think this will be. I think this will be less interesting to you than it is to me. But if you've seen this State Farm commercial with the running back Derrick Henry, and it's like, you know, it's Jake from State Farm, and. And basically they're saying, like, you need this Henry, but instead you're like, with the other insurance you're gonna get instead of this Henry, you get this other Henry. It's like Henry VIII or something.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

And he's being all crazy.

[Andrew Walsh]

Having insurance isn't the same as having State Farm.

[Luke Burbank]

It's like needing the strength of this King Henry, but getting that King Henry.

[Andrew Walsh]

Huzzah. Salutations. I'm here to lead with the team.

[Luke Burbank]

No, no, I don't want it.

[Andrew Walsh]

Sorcery.

[Luke Burbank]

It's just basically a guy who's, you know, dressed like Henry viii and he's. Or King Henry, and he's just doing things that aren't helpful on the football field. That King Henry is played by. Do you remember that podcast, Dead Eyes. Oh, yeah, that's Connor Ratliff.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's Connor. Oh, I need to.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, that's funny because glad to see Dead Eyes is doing well out there in the world.

[Andrew Walsh]

I don't actually think I've ever seen Connor Ratcliffe because I. Ratliff, you had been telling me about that podcast years ago, and I never kind of just took the leap to get into it. Those limited series, sometimes it's harder for me to get into, especially when I'm just listening to this kind of constant stream of whatever sports stuff. But then he was on Comedy Bang Bang a couple of times and he was just so delightful. I'm like, I gotta go back and listen to that podcast. And I listened to the first season and a little bit of the second season as they were sort of coming out of the pandemic and then sort of never finished it. I gotta say, that is an argument. Tell me what you. Let's talk about podcasting in the podcasting industry a little bit here, Luke.

[Luke Burbank]

One of my favorite topics.

[Andrew Walsh]

Everybody loves seasons, right? There are reasons why. There are reasons for the seasons, Luke. Even shows like ours, there are seasons for a reason.

[Luke Burbank]

Andrew.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's right.

[Luke Burbank]

That's the show title.

[Andrew Walsh]

I kneel for the seasons I stand. Even shows like ours that are essentially friends chatting will kind of the podcast industry has sort of just made it sort of common to say, well, we're going to release this in seasons and then we're going to take some time off and then we're going to call it season two. And there might be marketing reasons for that. There might be just like catching my breath reasons for that or what have you. It makes sense when there's like a narrative storyline, if it's a documentary style thing and season one is about one investigation and season two is about something else. But then other podcasts, I'm not exactly sure why they do them. And I will say that Dead Eyes, even though I was listening to the whole thing years after it was made, there was something about trying to switch over to season two that it was like such a roadblock for me. He started season two with an interview with Ira Glass about podcasting. And then it just suddenly felt like, well, we've just lost the urgency here or something. And it just like it stopped for me. And I'm sure the rest of it's good. I'm not trying to dunk on him, but it's just maybe cautionary.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, it's sort of the thing where they often say that, like everyone has One good book in them or one good movie in them. And you know, that certainly what had happened. For folks that don't remember this podcast, this guy Connor Ratliff had been cast in and then basically fired from the HBO speaking. Everything comes back to home Box office today. Andrew. I think it was Band of Brothers. This, you know, one of those World War II kind of shows. Tom Hanks was the, like, executive director, producer or something. And they kind of fired this guy because the word. The rumor he heard is that Tom Hanks had basically watched some of the footage or watched some of his performance and said that he had dead eyes. And they had. So he had lost this job, which was like a huge, huge opportunity for him. And so he goes back into this whole podcast, kind of exploring the question of, like, why did he get fired from this thing? Does he have dead eyes? What was Tom Hanks talking about? And it's very. It's very intriguing and listenable, and you're, like, you said, you're kind of along for the ride because you want to know what really happened. He eventually talks to Tom Hanks. It's great. And I totally understand. It was a big hit podcast, too. So I could totally see being like, okay, we made this thing. It's really popular, and now there's a chance to strike while the iron is hot. Like, okay, you got people's ears now let's do something else cool and bring them along. And then the challenge. It's like somebody making. It's like somebody writing their second book or somebody making their second film. They had their whole life to think of that first movie idea or have that experience, that story they've been telling at every party. And then it's like, once you get that one out of there, it's like, well, what's the next one? And I think that's probably a little bit of what was going on there.

[Andrew Walsh]

And this one was interesting because I know, because I've heard that he eventually talks to Tom Hanks, but he doesn't talk to Tom Hanks in the first season. Oh, really? No, he doesn't.

[Luke Burbank]

I'm blurring this together.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, you might have made it further. Did you hear?

[Luke Burbank]

I guess I did. I made it to the Tom Hanks conversation.

[Andrew Walsh]

I am. Yeah. No, I just listened to it this summer when I was doing yard work, and I still have not heard Tom Hanks on. I know that he eventually makes it on, but not in the first season. I don't know how long it takes. It basically, I know season two begins with A short episode with him trying to get advice from Ira Glass, how to make season two successful or something like that. And I don't know.

[Luke Burbank]

I know it's also possible I skipped ahead.

[Andrew Walsh]

I wonder if maybe you did, or you.

[Luke Burbank]

I might have listened to season one, and then when it was, it was such a phenomenon that it was literally a buzz, like, hey, he got Tom Hanks. And I might have just like. I think. I think what's actually very possible is I just parachuted in for the Tom Hanks episode because I wanted some, you know, resolution to the whole thing.

[Andrew Walsh]

I would, too, if. If it were easy enough or if I. If it just came across like on. On Tick Tock or something. Like, hell, hell, yeah. And that's kind of what I mean. And it stopped feeling like I got to listen to this all in order at a certain point. It's kind of like, all right, it was fun. As you were starting to drag it out a little bit at the end of season one, really just using it as an excuse to meander and talk to your famous friends or whatever. I never listened to an episode and thought, oh, that one didn't hit for me. Even at the end of season one, where basically they have to shut down production because of COVID and he's sort of reacting to it in real time. And I listened to it years later, five years later, it was still really compelling stuff. But there was just something about, like, even though the podcasts were right, the episodes were next to each other in my podcatcher, and my life hadn't changed. I hadn't put down the phone for a year or whatever. It just. The energy just felt different. And I was just kind of like, you've signaled to me. I remember I had a program director, a guy that I would later find out years and years and years later, I'd meet a friend named Luke. And turns out that Luke didn't like this program director because public radio is a small world. But I do think about some of the things he told me early in my career that are interesting, which is like, he was not a big fan of. And I was. I'm going to talk on both. Out of both sides of my mouth here. I disagreed with him at this. At the time, but it might be what I'm arguing right now, which is like, he was not a big fan of, like, at the end of a radio show, to have a bunch of credits and celebrating the end of the show, basically. I remember him talking about this folk show that I worked on. It was like, this three hour thing that had this cult following. And then at the end of the show, the host would do this whole closing of the show and do credits and all these things.

[Luke Burbank]

Things.

[Andrew Walsh]

And the program directors, like, you're kind of telling the audience it's over. You can turn off the radio now. Where we really want them to just keep on listening to whatever is up next. So just try to make it more of a flow of programming that makes sense from a program director standpoint. Just want to keep them there.

[Luke Burbank]

His goal of having his station listened to continuously.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

Is different than the goal of the.

[Andrew Walsh]

Show, which is a creative endeavor. And that. That is the difference. Because I think you and I would feel differently about this. That, of course, you want to. You want to close it out. You want to play words by doves. You want to say good luck to all. You want those, like, kind of benchmark things that. So I'm with you creatively, but maybe I'm sort of arguing about, like, kind of like, don't give the audience an excuse to, like, turn away from your podcast because you've decided to break it up.

[Luke Burbank]

Or just do. Yeah, do what we've done, which is do five of these a week of very questionable quality. Don't ever give the audience a chance to look away because there's just always another one coming down the pipe.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'll do it until you stop.

[Luke Burbank]

Please stop. I speak for the listeners when I say please stop.

[Andrew Walsh]

Thank you, baby.

[Luke Burbank]

Here are some people, Andrew, who are hoping we don't please stop. Presumably, anyway, because these are people. The names I'm about to read to you are donors who are supporting our show financially, and they're doing this voluntarily and it means a lot to us. This is 100% listener supported podcasting. It's supported by listeners like Jennifer Johnson over there in Sisters, Oregon. Thank you.

[Andrew Walsh]

Did we just have somebody in Sisters, Oregon, or was I peeping ahead?

[Luke Burbank]

I think you might have been peeping ahead.

[Andrew Walsh]

Now.

[Luke Burbank]

I wanted to say what I know about Sisters, Oregon is I think you drive past there on your way to Bend, Oregon. But I was so kind of wrong about Spanaway, Washington yesterday. I thought it was the gateway to Mount Rainier, and it's kind of not. I mean, it is in a certain way, but it's not what it's known for. I'm leery about relying on my memory of geography, which has never been great and is probably getting worse.

[Andrew Walsh]

Can I ask you a question about your youth and about fast casual dining of your youth?

[Luke Burbank]

Please.

[Andrew Walsh]

Did you grow up at Least was there a period of time in maybe the late 80s or early 90s that you remember a chicken chain called Sister's Chicken that had. I'm pretty sure this was a Dave Thomas joint because we growing up in Ohio, there were Wendy's, of course, and then there was this chicken place that was like a KFC rival and we were not a big KFC family. But then I just remember, like this place called Sisters came on the scene.

[Luke Burbank]

And Sisters Chicken and Biscuits.

[Andrew Walsh]

I don't remember it being called Biscuits, so I'm not sure. Does it. Are you seeing it? Does it have any connection to Wendy's does?

[Luke Burbank]

Absolutely.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay, great. Okay, good. Yeah. What can you tell me about it? Because I am only sort of just remembering this and I didn't. And I didn't look it up before I started talking about it.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, here's what the Internet says. Let's see. Wendy's founded the fried chicken chain Sisters Chicken and biscuits in 1978 and sold it to its largest franchisor in 1987.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, okay. 87, okay, interesting.

[Luke Burbank]

People are on Reddit saying, anyone remember a place called Sisters Chicken and Biscuits? I miss it so much. This is. Let's see, I've heard, although I don't know it to be true because I haven't actually looked it up, that sounds like. This sounds exactly like how I do my research. Andrew. I've heard, although I don't know it to be true because I haven't actually looked it up, that a few of their restaurants still remain, but here in Columbus, Ohio, they all disappeared. The chicken was delicious, the biscuits were yummy, and I loved their cream chicken over a biscuit as well as many other menu items.

[Andrew Walsh]

You know, now that we say this, Dave Thomas, the founder of Wendy's, he had Ohio roots, maybe, and maybe that's why.

[Luke Burbank]

Dublin, Ohio, Right?

[Andrew Walsh]

Was it Dublin? Okay.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. Whence Wendy's came. That's another thing, by the way, about. About that show, the Chair Company, it's set in Ohio.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, really?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, it's a lot of Canton, Ohio references going on.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, interesting. Yeah, definitely. I gotta check that out. I kind of forgot that that was debuting yesterday.

[Luke Burbank]

Jennifer Johnson. Thank you. Thanks. Also to Kelsey Neal or Chelsea Neal. I don't know how. I don't know what we're doing with that H. I don't know how much, how big of a factor that H is in that name, but we thank you very much over there in Seattle, Washington for supporting tbtl. Oh, and then it's our pal, I call him tt. Troy Tortorich of Lake Stevens, Washington, Tom Thumb Market territory.

[Andrew Walsh]

Thank you, Troy.

[Luke Burbank]

Thanks to Summer Martinez in Puyallup, Washington. Oh, do the Puyallup, huh? Catherine Palacios is in Houston, Texas. Gosh, Katherine, thank you for supporting the show. Thank you for riding along with us as we have talked so much baseball and talked so disparagingly about the baseball team that's based in your city. We love you and we appreciate you and your generosity. And the good news is there, we have new teams to be obsessed with now.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's right, exactly.

[Luke Burbank]

Thanks also to Todd Thorsgard, who's in St. Paul, Minnesota. Boy, does Thor's guard ever sound like the name you'd find in Old St. Paul, Minnesota.

[Andrew Walsh]

Ballard or St. Paul.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes, that's right. Either St. Paul or St. Paul west, which is what I call Ballard. Thank you so much to our donors. Thanks for making TBTL possible. We could not do this thing without you.

[Andrew Walsh]

Hello and welcome to Top Story.

[Luke Burbank]

Okay, Andrew, we're finally going to talk about this thing that I've had on the show sheet forever.

[Andrew Walsh]

Good is this.

[Luke Burbank]

It's an AI video program called Sora and it was written up in the New York Times. Let me see if I can get to that into a better version of the article that I can actually get to because of the why when's the AI going to fix my computer? Talking to my New York Times account, Andrew. This was an article written by Brian X. Chen in the Times. AI video generators are now so good you can no longer trust your eyes. And the one that they tend to focus on is this app called Sora. It's a free app on iPhones. It's, I think it's actually, it's made by OpenAI, which is they're the folks that made chat GPT and like you hear a lot about like AI, obviously, and you hear a lot about like, you know, deep fakes and things like that. And I will say that heretofore most of the stuff that's been generated, my eyes were able to sort of catch it pretty quickly as being computer generated or a deep fake or whatever. And they were not super duper convincing. And but also I would say that I am somebody who's terminally online and even though I'm reaching the advanced age of 50 this year, I would put, again, this is a sad, this is a sad flex. But I would put my ability, I would put my just, just the thousand, the ten thousand reps I've put in on looking at Internet slop. I'd put that up against most people's. Therefore, I'm pretty versed in it. And this I started noticing on TikTok, I don't know, a week or two ago before I saw this article, I started noticing these truly nuts videos where the only reason I knew that they were AI was because I knew that the people that were in the videos were alive either at different times or not necessarily part or were not doing whatever it was they were doing in the video. In other words, it was not that the person didn't look like the person that they were or that the video was glitchy or that it looked animated. It was not because of how the video actually appeared. It was because of the content in the video I knew was not possible. One of the videos. I started seeing a bunch or style of videos, tons of videos of the late scientist Stephen Hawking in his kind of wheelchair that he was, you know, quite known to be in for all those years and that we can all kind of picture dropping in on a half pipe that you would use for skateboarding and doing a couple of really successful trip tricks and then some very unsuccessful tricks and, like, looking and like, it was basically like, imagine the X Games. But they. But they got Stephen Hawking dropping in.

[Andrew Walsh]

More like Tony Hawking.

[Luke Burbank]

Exactly. I want to keep making. I want to keep building on that joke, but that I also don't strudel. Exactly. Stephen Hawking, Tony Hawking. And you know what? That might have been part of whoever made this thing. Because, by the way, this is, like I said, a free app on your phone. And you can start. I've seen other videos now saying, hey, if you want to know how to use this app and start making videos in a minute, here's the tutorial. So I started seeing those. I started seeing ones where like, Mr. Rogers is riding a bike, and then he falls off the bike and he starts swearing and doing a bunch of unmister Rogers Lee stuff. There's one where he's like, interviewing tupac. He's. He's Mr. It's Mr. Rogers. And he's on the set of like, Mr. Rogers Neighborhood, but he's talking to Tupac. But then I forget exactly what he says, but it's clearly a setup for a deez nuts joke on Tupac. So he's asking In a very Mr. Rogerian fan sort of style of like, if Tupac likes something. And then Tupac's answering very earnestly that he does. And then what? Tupac doesn't realize that he set Mr. Rogers up for A Deez nuts joke.

[Andrew Walsh]

Can I just. I know that this isn't really our kind of humor, but I think I found it here.

[Luke Burbank]

Did you find it?

[Andrew Walsh]

I think I did. I'm not 100%.

[Luke Burbank]

I don't think it's overly gross.

[Andrew Walsh]

I've never. By the way, just so you know, I've never seen this before. You've. You've mentioned this to me when we're talking about the story offline and so I haven't looked it up. I'm playing this cold, but it does look like I found something on Instagram here that has Mr. Rogers. And it was made with Sora. These clips get deleted. What's up, my neighbor?

[Luke Burbank]

What did you call me?

[Andrew Walsh]

Nah, I'm just messing with you.

[Luke Burbank]

My neighbor.

[Andrew Walsh]

My neighbor. My mother neighbor. Man, you wild.

[Luke Burbank]

Fred, come on.

[Andrew Walsh]

You know, I was wondering, could I get the pass just one time, please? Nah, Mr. Rogers, that's one thing I can't hand out, even in the neighborhood. Fair enough. You still cool with me? You know what, Pac? I think I'm ready to leave this white ass neighborhood. So what's this game called again? This shit Here is Connect4Loco. I win, you drink. You win, I drink. Well, let's get neighborly. Like this. Chin tuck, step, pop the jab, bring it right back. Real simple. Slip, roll with it, then hook.

[Luke Burbank]

All about staying ready.

[Andrew Walsh]

It helps you feel prepared and kind.

[Luke Burbank]

Exactly, Mr. Roger.

[Andrew Walsh]

Now they're standing out on the street somewhere. It's thug life out here, Fred.

[Luke Burbank]

Dog, I got you.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, they're playing with trains. What the we doing, Fred?

[Luke Burbank]

I'm not sure why the cameras are still rolling.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh no, Lucas. So these, these don't hold. It doesn't have the D's nuts joke. But honestly, wow, I just went on a real journey. I was sort of delighted by that.

[Luke Burbank]

And also, I mean, again, I haven't. I didn't get eyes on those ones you just played, but I can picture them in my mind. And now you had a lot of. You had a lot of heads up going in that this is AI generated. But if you were scrolling, I mean, they're fairly convincing, right?

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, definitely. And I'm not even joking when I say, and I'm, you know, already ruing these words as I think about them later in the day. But like that, obviously that's janky, obviously that's fake. Obviously we're going to be talking about like the danger of being able to pass off things that seem real. But also when I was watching that, I was feeling delighted, right?

[Luke Burbank]

You weren't feeling like, I'm seeing an AI program that was told, hey, have Tupac and Mr. Rogers have a conversation that would be unusual, where they substitute the word neighborhood for a different N word that we don't say. And then the large language model just did it. That isn't what you felt like you were watching. You felt like you were watching two people that you sort of like two friends and like a thing that could have happened because, you know, Mr. Rogers was a friend to all. And then Tupac had a lot of sides to him, you know, so like it was an imagined world that you kind of almost want to live in.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. You love these guys and you love these guys together. You immediately love their fake friendship.

[Luke Burbank]

And one of the things, a big area that they. People have been using this program for, that I've been seeing also for a while. And again, really what's different about this to me is, is it's getting so, so good at the actual video, at the voices, at the. So a lot of it is sports related right now. So what it'll be is like a press conference where let's just say, like, let's say the Mariners have a, have a game where they don't play very well. How do I. I can't even speak of these Mariners without being worried. I'm jinxing. Here's what I'm going to say. It'll be a player from a team doing a press conference after the game where they're saying the thing. As a fan, you would hope they.

[Andrew Walsh]

Would say we fell into that trap. Pbtl recently you were looking for some post game quote from, I think a manager or a player.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

And then you're like, oh, here it is.

[Luke Burbank]

Here you hit Joshne or the manager of the Blue Jays.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. And then you're like, oh, shoot, this is fake.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah. And they're doing. There's one that I saw that was, that was Detroit Tigers. So the algorithm on TikTok knows that I'm obsessed with Mariners content right now. And also I'm obsessed with the content that relates to whatever team they're playing. And by obsessed, I just mean I must let it run 5/10 of a second longer. Which the algorithm learns means I'm engaged with it. So I was getting like after Detroit, I think maybe lost the second game at home or something. Or maybe I was getting what looked like shaky cell phone video of the manager of the Detroit Tigers. I guess that was A.J. hinch walking up down the aisles of the team plane berating The Tigers players who are sitting there nervously and kind of like not making eye contact. And it totally looked like somebody had videotaped AJ Hinch yelling at the Tigers players. Like, it's the craziest thing to fake or spoof. But it also had this. It looked real, it sounded real. It was like, oh, shit. It took me like 30 seconds. And the only reason that I knew is because. And I. I don't know how much longer they have to do this. They put a tiny watermark on these things. It is this little, kind of like it almost looks like a poppy flower, but it's white. And it's the logo of this Sora apparently app. And it doesn't start when you first start seeing the video. You don't see this watermark. You have to watch enough of the video and it literally. The watermark pops up for one half of a second. It just kind of. It sort of. It appears and then it fades out and it. And it appears and fades out on a different part of the phone screen that you're looking at. It doesn't always show up in the same place. And so what I know now is if I see a video and I'm like, it's too good to be true because the person is being too honest, or it's two people that I don't necessarily think of having been in the same context or just basically if it's something that I'm like, I can't believe I'm actually seeing this right now. Now my new thing my brain has been trained to do is start looking around the screen for this Sora watermark to just like very, almost imperceptibly show up and then leave. But it is like the second they stop putting that watermark up, I mean, I, Again, I all. The only thing I could do is use context clues or use larger context, just kind of go like, did Stephen Hawking ever participate in the X game? My brain tells me no, so that video's gotta be fake. But that's. That's what I'm doing. That's the only way for me to know if they stop putting these watermarks on things.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, I'm scrolling through this article too. First of all, one. One quick note to the New York Times. If you're gonna put in your lead paragraph an example like this. The thing can generate realistic looking videos with artificial intelligence by typing in a simple description, like police body cam footage of a dog being arrested for stealing Ribeye at Costco. You gotta make that a hyperlink. I want to See that now I seriously have been Googling that. I'm like, why aren't they linking to that? And I realized that they're just pulling that out of thin air. There are so many real life examples. Don't tempt me with police body cam footage of a dog being arrested for stealing Ribeye at Costco and then make me create. I now need to download this app so that I can see what that looks like.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, that's. I mean, don't. Don't write me a check that your butt can't cash. New York Times about a dog stealing a butt roast.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, but anyway. But you know, like, there are just things that I see a lot of on Reddit. I spent a lot of time on Reddit and there's a lot of, like a lot of dash cam footage. Not police dash cam footage, just dash cam footage. Right. Because a lot of people, a lot of drivers have those little cameras in their cars now. And then when something ridiculous happens on the road, somebody cuts somebody off and it leads to some sort of accident or something. Often like in a, in a sub called Instant Karma, you'll see that stuff like somebody's a total jerk on the road and then they cut somebody off and they go spinning off the road or something. You see a lot of that kind of stuff. Well, of course, AI, I mean, that's the type of thing where it's already shaky footage. And I'm looking at an AI creation of that, of something similar to that in this New York Times article. And yeah, like, there's literally nothing in here that would make me think that that's fake. Except for, like you said, the Sora thing that's sort of kind of coming on and then going away across the screen.

[Luke Burbank]

And as he writes about in this piece, people have figured also how to crop that, how to crop that watermark out now, too. So somebody, if there's a Sora video, I mean, it's literally anything that a person could possibly imagine as a scenario can now be created in a pretty believable way. And again, we're quickly getting rapidly getting to the point where really the only way to know if something's fake is to just ask yourself, is it possible this thing really happened? And how did I not hear about it? And then you got to go out and you got to start cross referencing it a bunch. You got to immediately go to like, CNN or some other news feed to go like, oh, did the Statue of Liberty collapse into, you know, New York Harbor? Or whatever. Like, we're at the point now where it's gonna have to be us being smart enough to realize that anything that we see now online that seems like a crazy extreme moment or something that's deeply shocking or surprising, you're gonna have to immediately go and try to cross reference it with something else because you cannot believe your eyes anymore. Because it's getting, it's getting so convincing. And I mean, I'm not saying anything particularly useful here, but it's just like, like, it is really unsettling to me because it's like, again, I feel like I am, I am such a power user of the Internet and particularly of these short form video things like Tik Tok, that I, I feel like I'm. I am, like I'm very, very, very, or at least I'm in the 10% of people who can quickly identify what is and is not real, but you know, who's not. My parents and a lot of other people. And like, I just feel like this stuff is fool. If this stuff is starting to fool me, we got some, some real problems.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, yeah, and that's where I was just thinking right now, like, I don't even want to keep going on this because I just spin out of control pretty quickly. But I mean, it's, it's. You can't divorce this from the conversation of before. The technology was here to create all kinds of stuff that is making us feel like we can't believe what we're seeing with our eyes. For the past decade or two. I feel like the groundwork is being laid of just like people saying, oh, we can just say whatever we want to the populace and also consolidate media in a way that, that my reality here in Seattle is different than when I go home to Ohio and I hear the same information being told to me from people who watch Fox News all the time. And like, there's already. Without the help of AI, there is already this widening gap between what people can agree on as being real. I mean, whether you're talking about just the norms of politics, but also just the facts of what's going on. And there was already this growing divide in our country about people just saying, nope, I don't.

[Luke Burbank]

What.

[Andrew Walsh]

The fact that you're telling me doesn't fit in with my worldview. So I'm gonna say I don't believe the New York Times, you know, and it's just like. And we already had that. And then you're throwing this on top of it. How can it not feel? I'm somebody who really has not just resisted, but Truly believed that overreaction to technological developments. It has just been something that happens with every generation and it's always overblown. I just said overreaction is overblown. Obviously that means the same thing, but you know what I'm saying, like, yeah, if people were concerned about either pushing the limits of sexuality in the, in pop music in the 80s or 90s, I'd be like, whatever. Elvis was doing that in the 60s and they were saying the same shit. People talking about, oh, MTV is going to rot the brains. I'm like, people were saying the same thing about the Andy Griffith Show. I don't know if I can actually, actually back that up with facts, but you know what I mean, like new media for every generation. No man dressing like a trollop showed a little bit more ankle than I think was appropriate. But, but you know what I'm saying, right? Like you can back me up on this.

[Luke Burbank]

There's always a moral panic. There's always, often surrounds technology and also creative output and it's almost, it's very predictable and it almost always turns out to not be true.

[Andrew Walsh]

Both a moral and a technological one as well. You know, like I just also.

[Luke Burbank]

A moral panic about the technology, about.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. And like in this case I started with sort of the, the moral stuff about the sexuality, but it's not. But it's also just about like, I remember concerns about, well, the MTV generation isn't going to have any kind of ability to hold a thought for more than a minute because of everything being so chopped up and it's so fast paced or whatever, you know what I mean?

[Luke Burbank]

In comic books.

[Andrew Walsh]

In comic books as well. Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

National outrage against the idea of comic books because it was going to rot the brains of kids and they were going to no longer be able to read anything long form.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. And so anyway, I've always felt like, oh, this stuff, like we just roll with this as a society. And so maybe I'm just one of. Now that I'm solidly middle, maybe I'm just falling into the trap that everybody else did. But it really feels different now and there's such a specific political moment that is coinciding with. That seems like just terrifying.

[Luke Burbank]

Right. Because it's not a question of like Elvis is shaking his hips and we think that it's going to start a fire in the loins of the youth of America. That's one thing. And by the way, that's silliness. But, but we could all agree that like if we saw footage of Elvis shaking his. Shaking his legs or, you know, gyrating in a certain way. We. We all agreed that the footage we were watching was actually Elvis and he was actually gyrating. And now you could agree, you could think that that was dangerous for society. You could say it's not dangerous for society. You could be on either side of that argument. But the essential footage of Elvis doing his gyration was not. Was not itself something that we had to wonder if it was even real. Yeah, we, for the longest of times, we didn't agree on things. And of course, we are a nation that's had a civil war. We have been deeply divided in the past, but we haven't also had to reckon with this idea that I could generate my own video of Elvis gyrating and I could use it as the evidence of why I believe the way I believe. And I could have totally made it up and invented it, or I could make it up and invented. And then send it out, and then other people could see it and believe it's real and that would inform how they feel about it.

[Andrew Walsh]

It.

[Luke Burbank]

And then someone else makes their own video. It's like we can't. If we can't even agree on the source material and then how we feel about that, we got some real problems.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. And even without AI you just have a whole bunch of people that believe. Portland, Oregon, where my friend went to a feminist vegan fragrance convention, like last weekend, while the rest of the world hears that vegan that. That Portland is burning and that, you know, rebels are taking over the ICE headquarters. It's just like. And that's. Without AI that's just. That's just the propaganda that's going on.

[Luke Burbank]

Right. Something that, I mean, I'm not a student of history and I'm certainly not a student of like, totalitarianism and things like that, you know, dictatorships and autocracies. But like everyone else, I've been forced to have somewhat of a crash course on it. And something that I didn't really understand that tends to be out of the playbook of an autocrat is, I will. I guess, if I had to guess, I would say, well, they tried to. To control the media and make the media talk about them the way they like. And yes, that is certainly something that, you know, the current president very much would like. He's. He would really like everyone to say nice things about him in the media at all times. And he's trying to bring his boot down on places that aren't doing that. But the bigger thing, and I guess this is Pretty typical is it's actually just to get as many people as possible to disbelieve everything. Like disbelieving everything is as powerful a way of controlling people as getting them to believe your thing and getting them to believe your news outlets. Like, I used to just think it was like, he's just trying to make Fox News the number one and only watched network in America. And there's actually something like sort of almost more powerful, which is just don't. Every. Everybody in the media is lying at all times. Everything is, you can't trust anything at all. Because then once you, once you get people to cross that bridge with you in their minds that they no longer believe literally anything, then you can, then you're not held accountable for anything because, oh, the media said it. Well, it's a lie because that's what the media does. And then you've actually really, like, you've, you've really weaponized it in this way that, that I, I certainly didn't see coming. I didn't understand that as a thing, but now I see it all the time when I talk to people, whether it's when I'm doing my job or otherwise. Like just those people that are just like, if you were to tell them, you know, that something had happened and they, like you said, it doesn't fit into their pre existing idea of the world, they'll just say, well, that's the media lying to you. And it's like, well, did you actually read the article or have you cross referenced it or have you seen how many places are saying, have you seen that Fox News is actually saying it's a real thing? I mean, they're not happy about it, but they acknowledge that it's actually the thing or whatever. It's like it just gives people this ability to not have to interact with any kind of data points that they don't want to interact with because it, it messes with their preconceived notions.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes. And I'm trying personally over here on the left to not apply that to everything too. Just because I get somebody's aw and wrong 99.9% of the time if something, if some not just dismissing Inconvenient Truths. Ooh, we should make a movie speaking of documentaries called Inconvenient Truths. It could be a sequel. Anyway, I'm trying really hard not to just dismiss things that might not fit my worldview just because it doesn't. Doesn't fit.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, let's go from sad news and bad news to a little bit better. News this is down in Southern California in the Palisades. You remember for some reason this came up on the show a couple weeks back, the Sinclair dinosaur.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes, I had totally forgotten about it until you brought it up recently.

[Luke Burbank]

And why did that come up in the first place? Did I just mentioning it that I thought they were.

[Andrew Walsh]

I know. No, I know. I'm suddenly remembering because you and I were on some sort of a deep discourse. I will call it on the TV show Dinosaurs. Oh, yeah. And we learned that all the characters were named or a bunch of the characters were named after or inspired by petrol companies. Right, right. One of them is named Sinclair. And you said, oh, Sinclair is a gas station. I was like, I didn't know that. And you said they're the ones with the little, you know, dinosaurs. Like literally little statues of dinosaurs that you pass as you pull into their gas stations.

[Luke Burbank]

So there was a Sinclair station, it's in Brentwood, but it's, you know, it's in this part of. I guess it's east of the Palisades, but it's an area that was. This is, by the way, Ashvarya Kavi writing in the New York Times. A stolen 50 pound dinosaur named Claire is returned after outrage. Basically, the story goes that you've got this guy who'd owned this Sinclair gas station for years and years in the area and I'm not sure if there was. Okay, it became Sinclair seven years ago. This guy's named John Fossett. He's owned the gas station for years. About seven years ago, it became a Sinclair oil franchise. And some of the regular customers asked this owner of this now Sinclair station if he was going to get one of those fiberglass dinosaur statues out in front of it. And he said that he would love to, but he said they're impossible to find, you can't get them. And that is when one of his customers, a guy named Keith Salmon, invited Mr. Fawcett to his production company offices in Santa Monica. I would love to show you something, Mr. Fawcett recalled him saying. So I went to his office and there was Claire. This guy had basically Somehow found this 5 foot by 8 apatosaurus or maybe a brontosaurus. Sinclair says it's aware of conflicting opinions among paleontologists. Basically this guy who had this, some kind of prop company had gotten his hands on one of these green Sinclair dinosaurs. I, I never said dinosaur in a weird way until I had a professor who said it in a weird way. And now I kind of can't unring that bell. But so everybody fell in. They named. They named the dinosaur Claire.

[Andrew Walsh]

And everybody loved. This was a dinosaur that was a specific Sinclair dinosaur. At some point, this wasn't just a dinosaur that sort of looked like a Sinclair dinosaur.

[Luke Burbank]

This is what I was a little bit. This is what I was a little bit unclear on because it says. The guy says, I would love to show you something. I go to his office and there was Claire. Mr. Fawcett did not find out how the customer had ended up with the 5x8 Apatosaurus. I know I just read this part. But he gladly accepted the present from Mr. Salmon.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, it says here that he then took it and then painted it green and installed it. So he. This must have just been a prop dinosaur. First time a prop dinosaur. And he made it look like one of those clothes. Classic Sinclairs. I'm also learning that Sinclair, which is still a going concern, no longer provides the dinosaurs for their gas stations. Like, Luke, I am not joking. If there are two gas stations next to each other, I am going to just instinctively I'm going to go into the one with the giant toy dinosaur.

[Luke Burbank]

And I didn't realize this because the towns that I live nearby here in Southern Washington, there are definitely. There's significant economic headwinds on those towns. And you know, there's a lot about them that I sometimes wish was a little. Maybe bougie or whatever. But I will tell you this, Longview, Washington, not one Andrew, but two green fiberglass dinosaurs in front of their Sinclairs. We are Sinclair rich nice around here.

[Andrew Walsh]

Lock them down, my friend.

[Luke Burbank]

Seriously, because that's what happened to this dinosaur named Claire Somebody, by the way. People would, you know, take their, like they would dress the dinosaur up for the holidays. I've noticed that. By the way, with the dinosaurs that are down the sinkler. Dinosaurs that are down in the town by me, people will like, you know, during college or I should say high school graduation time, the people will dress them up like a graduate with the hat on. People will put like a lei, like a Hawaiian flower thing on them. Like people love to take pictures with them. They really kind of be. Now listen, I want to also mention the whole thing is premised on the idea that we are extracting resources from the earth, lighting them on fire, raising the temperature of this planet. And we're doing it with cute dead dinosaurs.

[Andrew Walsh]

No fair. Fair enough.

[Luke Burbank]

It's 100% messed up.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's a little bit like my. My whole complaint about like using an. A personified pig to serve your pork ribs. Right.

[Luke Burbank]

Precisely. It Is like, I want to be clear that it's all cute until you do even one second of critical thinking.

[Andrew Walsh]

I want to do critical thinking.

[Luke Burbank]

But that's why we don't do one second of critical thinking because we can keep having fun with. With the cutesy dinosaur.

[Andrew Walsh]

Right?

[Luke Burbank]

So that was kind of the scene down there in Brentwood. People love the dinosaur. And then the dinosaur was stolen. They had security footage of it. They think it happened at about 2:30 on a Saturday. Security footage showed a person with a jacket hood up cutting the metal that kept the dinosaur secured to the ground, then loading the dinosaur in the back of a white pickup truck. By the way, the New York Times repeatedly refers to the dinosaur as her. I don't know what. Obviously, we've been talking a lot about the honorifics of the New York Times lately. I guess the honorifics allow for them to what, personify this fiberglass dinosaur.

[Andrew Walsh]

I guess they're just having fun with this.

[Luke Burbank]

They're having fun.

[Andrew Walsh]

It would be funny if they referred to her as Miss Claire or just.

[Luke Burbank]

The dinosaur or the object instead of the kind of. Yeah, but. So the dinosaur was missing for a long time.

[Andrew Walsh]

The.

[Luke Burbank]

The community was, of course, devastated. Jamie Lee Curtis, what even stepped up? Jamie Lee Curtis got on Instagram and wrote, hey, you with your fancy truck, comma, really? She captioned the video. This is the video of the theft of Claire. You need to steal the dinosaur from in front of the Sinclair gas station. Really? Not cool, dude. Not cool, huh?

[Andrew Walsh]

I guess she lives nearby, huh?

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, she lives in Pacific Palisades. She got that yogurt money, you know, and would visit, I guess, this service station. Apparently, the story of the stolen dinosaur went far and wide enough that the owner of the gas station got a call from the lapd. An officer asked him if he wanted to file a report. He had assumed that there was no getting the dinosaur back, so it hadn't even occurred to him to file a police report. And then after, like, a huge community outpouring of grief and about the disappearance of Claire, Claire turned up. I think this is now last Tuesday, deposited in the early hours, wrapped in a cloth, much in the same way that she had been taken. And I believe there was even a note that was attached to the dinosaur apologizing for stealing the dinosaur and asking that they not file charges against whoever stole the dinosaur.

[Andrew Walsh]

So it was a mysterious return as well as I didn't expect this twist ending. I thought the police were gonna find it online, you know, somebody trying to sell it on ebay. Or something like that, or the Dark Web.

[Luke Burbank]

No, the person who. It would appear that the person who stole it or someone near them had a change of heart and saw that, you know, there was this big community outpouring and everyone was sad about it, and they brought the dinosaur back, apparently. And they included. I can't now locate the part in the article. It says it in the headline. The theft of a beloved dinosaur statue upset residents of a Los Angeles neighborhood that was damaged by wildfires earlier this year. Then she was returned with an apology. So I know there I. Somewhere in this article that I can't get to right now, there was literally, I think, the actual verbatim of what they wrote in the apology. But my memory of it is they apologized for stealing the dinosaur and they asked that they not press charges.

[Andrew Walsh]

Now I'm just stumbling on what might be the funniest part of this article, which was a correction that was made made a few days ago. An earlier version of this article misspelled the name of the stolen dinosaur statue that was returned to a gas station in Los Angeles. It's Claire. Not Claire. It's Claire without an E, not Claire with an e. So they even had to issue a correction for misspelling the dinosaur's name.

[Luke Burbank]

And of course, they left the E off because that's like Sinclair, right? Oh, so it's like the last part.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, I see.

[Luke Burbank]

The last part of the word Sinclair. Well, no, no, I just.

[Andrew Walsh]

Putting that together.

[Luke Burbank]

I just put that together here, too.

[Andrew Walsh]

So you're not.

[Luke Burbank]

I don't think.

[Andrew Walsh]

But what's our. What's our.

[Luke Burbank]

Listen, you're just mad because then they put it in a Dodgers uniform, aren't you? Have you gone to that part of the.

[Andrew Walsh]

No, I didn't.

[Luke Burbank]

That's where I knew we were going to lose.

[Andrew Walsh]

You. Oh, no, I didn't even see that. Oh, but they're not. The Dodgers are not paying the dinosaurs a deferred payment situation. It looks like the. Somebody said that the Dodgers just are able to. They're just able to. To. They're just able to, like, coast through the regular season on 50% battery and then just, like, go full power in the playoffs.

[Luke Burbank]

Of course. Well, listen, keep going.

[Andrew Walsh]

I was just gonna say, I think I even saw a headline in the New York Times today that was like, the Dodger. They're already counting the days to the win of the World Series. They're not even technically in the World Series yet. It's like, only seven more wins to be crowned the world champions again or something. Along those lines. Other, like would you, would you say.

[Luke Burbank]

That you hate, you dislike the Dodgers more than the Yankees? Is that because of the Doors aspect?

[Andrew Walsh]

That's a tough one, Luke. I'm not ready to go on the record. Let's just say there's a lot of hate in my heart because, because like.

[Luke Burbank]

You know, for my whole sort of baseball rooting era of my life, you know, because the Mariners are in the American League, I've always had a big target on the New York City Yankees. They've always been the 800 pound gorilla in the room in the league and they've always been. And the Dodgers, I mean first of all, I actually liked the Dodgers when I moved to LA because they were not at that point super successful. Like they hadn't been good since the 80s. So it wasn't like you're going in and rooting for like again a team that's been going to the World Series 6, seven seasons in a row because they're just outspending everyone. They were, they. I loved the stadium, the physical stadium, not its history, Andrew. Not how it got to Chavez Ravine, but like the actual stadium I thought was very sort of cool. I loved that I could walk there from my house. I was, you know, I was really leaning into the Los Angeles experience.

[Andrew Walsh]

When you walked there, how did you get into the stadium? Because that was always my big disappointment in LA when I got there and I was trying to walk there and I couldn't, I couldn't figure out why. And I realized, oh, because it's like just surrounded by parking lots. You can actually walk through. Can you?

[Luke Burbank]

I mean you can because you can go pre funk at the short stop and then walk to the game. I can't remember how we did it but I mean I know that it's. You do not have to enter the stadium complex in a car, but that's what it's designed for.

[Andrew Walsh]

I see. I wish I had known that. Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

Millions and millions and millions of parking spaces that ring out from around the stadium. But all that is to say, I just didn't think about the Dodgers as the enemy team to me until I moved away. And honestly, you put a little bit of your evil inside me. And I thought, well, if I'm going to apply the, if the rules that I'm going to apply to the yield Yankees. In other words, I don't find it as sporting when a team can afford to just outspend everyone and therefore just have like the best team because they can just, they just have more money than Everyone. And they can just keep getting any good player that comes available. I was like, well, that also very much applies to the Dodgers, if not.

[Andrew Walsh]

More than the Yankees right now, especially right now. I do think it's even. I mean, they've. I was even looking up, like, I was there in 2015. What was their 2015 season like? I was like, maybe that was more of a down year. Nope. In 2015, they went to the Divisionals NLDS for the third year in a row or something. You know what I mean? These teams don't know what it's like not to go to the playoffs. And now, like I say, the Dodgers have this situation where they just don't. They don't even have to really start playing until October. It sort of seems like it's just like it's a, It's a cheat code to steal that parlance.

[Luke Burbank]

And every single time, like, a new player, particularly a player maybe from Japan, or just like, somebody who. There's like a kind of a. Almost a sort of sweepstakes to try to get them. Either they're a big free agent or they're someone exotic from somewhere else who's got all these skills, and they're gonna revolutionize the game. And we're like, there's. Every team is lining up to be like, maybe they'll choose us. And then it's just like, why are we even doing this? We know they're going to the Dodgers, right? Yeah, it's all. And so. And then there was, like, they've been doing something to sort of court the White House or something. That's why you're calling them the Dodgers.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, well, yeah. Well, they, I mean, they were the world champions year, obviously, or they won the World Series, and so the teams often will go to the White House. I realize that, but also, in the, in the, in this era, I would really hope that my team wouldn't. And that's one thing, you know, that.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, I wouldn't have thought about that.

[Andrew Walsh]

I have. Are you kidding me? You don't think I've thought about that? That if the Mariners win the first time.

[Luke Burbank]

This is occurring to me.

[Andrew Walsh]

No, no, no. I've been thinking about this. I, I, I'm. Listen, we have a lot of things to worry about before. That's a real consideration, I think. But I have thought, like, for as hard as I've been on Dodgers and Dodgers fans, for, like, kind of supporting this team that, like, just had a ball at the White House with, with Trump, and, and then also some of the politics Specifically of some of the players on their team, which I take issue with. And again, do we want to. Do we. Do I want to know how famous Golden Glover Dylan Moore votes? No, probably not. Like, you know, like, there's just, like, how much hypocrisy would I have to eat? You know what I mean? Depending on how my team would act in that situation. But I don't have to worry about that right now. And so, yeah, I do kind of group them in and call them the doers, but they just sort of. Yeah, they just rankle me in a lot of different ways.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, because you were talking about how they don't even have to really play their hardest until the playoffs, and then they just come in and, like, you know, are just two and, oh, on the road against what many people think is the best team in baseball, the Milwaukee Brewers. And that does speak to what you're saying. And then also. And yes, by the way, we have shifted into the baseball portion of the.

[Andrew Walsh]

Show, and that's inevitable.

[Luke Burbank]

Paddington sweater on to prove it.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. How did I. How did this happen?

[Luke Burbank]

I did this. I did this.

[Andrew Walsh]

I just remember what the dodge was. Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

Because Claire the dinosaur, when they reach the owner of the Sinclair Station, the. When the New York Times reaches him, he's sitting in his car, he's next to Claire, and Claire has been festooned in Dodger balloons and Dodger. A Dodger uniform, the dinosaur. And I asked you if that. If that made you mad. And then I asked you if you. If you dislike the Dodgers more than the Yankees. But here's where I'm going with all this. I. There was a. There was just a line in the athletic a couple weeks ago about the Yankees, and it was just about, like, you know, I don't know how the Yankees were doing or something about contracts or their players or whatever. And then they just said, like, I'm paraphrasing here. But they. They sort of start to go talk about, like, the window of opportunity for a team, you know, and that normally means, like, your team has gotten managed to get together some good players, and these players are under contract for a while, and you've now got this, like, maybe, maybe couple of years or three, four years where you're really in the conversation about maybe winning at all. And then this person, just writer for the Athletics, goes, well, the window. There is no window of opportunity for the Yankees. The window of opportunity for the Yankees never closes.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

And they were being honest, and I was like, yeah. And that's why I hate them because the rest of us, I mean, the Mariners might. We might get a. Might be in a two year window, we might be in a three year window, the Yankees window. It's not a window, it's a lifestyle. And the same thing for the Dodgers, you know, like.

[Andrew Walsh]

And when did our window open? Is a question I've been asking myself too, is did our window open this year or did our window open in 2022 and we're still somewhere in the middle of the window.

[Luke Burbank]

Our window opened when Josh Naylor refused to put on the Cleveland Guardian celebratory T shirt and alienated the franchise and then was. And then was sent on a journey to Arizona and then eventually here to just be an absolute incredible badass. And I use that term advisedly.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yes, complimentary.

[Luke Burbank]

I love that this is how great Josh Naylor is. When my daughter and I are now texting and she. She had something going on the other day. It was an important moment for her and it went well. And she just sends me to tell me that it went well. She just sends me a picture of Josh Naylor clearly possibly high, definitely. Maybe drunk, smoking a cigar, wearing a Kraken jersey.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, yeah, I think. I don't know if I saw that. You know that picture.

[Luke Burbank]

He's holding a Bud.

[Andrew Walsh]

I don't know if I see that photo, but I've seen him in a Kraken jersey. That's great.

[Luke Burbank]

It's the best. It's pure joy. And it's like my daughter did not know there was a thing called Josh Naylor. Three weeks ago, my daughter, who lives in Los Angeles, and the fact. And. And it was Josh Naylor and then it was this picture and then apostrophe ed it. Nailed it. She's using Josh Naylor as a verb.

[Andrew Walsh]

Nice.

[Luke Burbank]

And that happening is. Has that. That to me. Is that special.

[Andrew Walsh]

I told you that I'm going as sexy Josh Naylor for Halloween. Right?

[Luke Burbank]

Listen, the existence of a sexy Josh presuppose the idea of an unsexy.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'm gonna wear.

[Luke Burbank]

And I don't see it.

[Andrew Walsh]

I'm gonna wear the giant, giant night shirt that he wears. But going to tie it up into a little.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, yeah, definitely do a little. By the way, my mom is trying to steal our valor, or my valor on the fact that we call at least my brothers and I call Josh Naylor the Hobbit. You've gotten into this. He's like a Koopa trooper, right? He's like a. One of those.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's what I thought at first. Because I love him. He's like. He's. He's got these short little legs, and I have this gif that look, and he's got those eyebrows that come down, and he's stealing bases and he's running his little legs, but he shouldn't be stealing these bases. But he is.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, he's amazing, and we loved him. But I think early on, I don't know if it was David or somebody that I text with a lot about the Mares. We started calling him a hobbit because he's kind of not particularly tall. He's a little on the rounder side, but he's incredible at what he gets done. And then we get this text from my mom saying, we call him. My mom says, after he hit his home run the other day, my mom says, the hobbit did it. We call him that because of his build. And I said, mom, we've been calling him that all season. And then my mom says, I had no idea, Luke. I called him the hobbit to your dad, and he agreed. And then I was mad at Walter because I. When Walter has been watching the game with me, like, in the playoffs, and it's just been me and Walt, I have been calling him the hobbit to my dad, and my dad knew that, and yet he just, like, allowed my mom to steal.

[Andrew Walsh]

You wanted your dad to say, hey, you can't make that joke. That's Luke's joke. In the privacy of their home? Yes.

[Luke Burbank]

If you see something, say something. I want him to say, stop the tape.

[Andrew Walsh]

This is a bad hug.

[Luke Burbank]

This is a bad hug. Your son Luke is already using that. And that's fine. You can use it, too. But you don't. I can't have you thinking you invented that.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, I also. And again, this is your fam. I last thing I need to do is get involved in your family drama. I have enough drama, Rama. You know me, Luke. My life is already filled with drama. Yeah, but I was a little bit. I saw you guys chatting about a little bit about this in the text chain, that we're all on the sports text chain.

[Luke Burbank]

And.

[Andrew Walsh]

And I was a little bit confused because I remember earlier in the regular season, your brother saying, my dad likes Altuve, the Houston Astro. My dad likes Altuve because he thinks he's a hobbit. So then I was confused. I'm like, well, how.

[Luke Burbank]

I didn't remember that.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, yeah, your brother threw that out there. And I was kind of like, yeah, I could sort of see that. So we already Have Walt B calling. I thought Altuve the Hobbit. And again, I know that everybody's doing this online talk now, but maybe it's like Altuve. Oh, this is actually. This was literally your brother's joke. I almost stole your brother's joke. He wrote. He wrote Altuve the Hobbit derogatory. And then Naylor the Hobbit. Complimentary.

[Luke Burbank]

That's right, yeah. Hobbit has so has so many different implications. You could be Hobbit, we could be Hobbit negative. Hobbit neutral. What was that thing that was going around for a long time? Chaotic Neutral.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. I can't remember what that. What that grid is called. And that D thing. Right. I think it took me a long time.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, really? I don't think I ever got that far in it. Now, let me just ask you this, sir, here, as we are winding things up on this Wednesday.

[Andrew Walsh]

And let's play. I do want to play one quick voicemail at the end just to keep it listening to the game.

[Luke Burbank]

Hold on. Let me activate the proper sound effect for that and then we'll jump over to. Hold on. You're on my screen. My video feed of you is blocking my ability to play this audio.

[Andrew Walsh]

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.

[Luke Burbank]

All right, what do you have in the emails and females department? Well, I apologize.

[Andrew Walsh]

I didn't mean to cut off your. Your thought. Okay. You'll come back to it. You'll hang on to that. Okay. I just wanted. We hadn't played a voicemail in a while and this isn't related to anything that we're talking about right now. It just delighted me, Luke. And this is from listener Laura. Hello, Luke and Andrew, this is Laura.

[Luke Burbank]

Listener Laura in Madison, Wisconsin. And I. I was reminded by Luke's comment about the moon being out during the day. It immediately reminded me of a camp song sung for many years by me and many other campers at Far View Ranch Camp, Marysville, California. Don't worry, it's short, but I am going to sing it for you. Of course, as an adult, I listen to this song and I kind of think, you know, it's a little bit judgmental of the moon's choices and, you know, who are we to judge? But anyway, I still like it. So here goes. Mr.

[Andrew Walsh]

Moon, Mr.

[Luke Burbank]

Moon, you're out too soon the sun is still in the sky Go back.

[Andrew Walsh]

To your bed and cover up your.

[Luke Burbank]

Head and wait till the day Goes by. Okay, power out.

[Andrew Walsh]

I like the little judgmental warning on that as well. Moon, you can do whatever you want, but this is just a little ditty we have. Have.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, yeah, that is. But I mean, it is like you're kind of putting the moon in its place, I guess, right?

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. You're kind of saying, go back to bed and come out when. When we're ready for you. And it's kind of like, what does the moon not have? Autonomy.

[Luke Burbank]

Stay in your lane, Moon. We don't think of you as a daytime entity.

[Andrew Walsh]

Right.

[Luke Burbank]

So here was my question before we jumped into the emails and Vos. Thank you, by the way. Is that Laura?

[Andrew Walsh]

That's Laura, yeah. Thanks, Laura.

[Luke Burbank]

Thank you, Laura. I would. I would listen to an entire show where listeners just sang camp songs. Yes.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's so nice. She has a nice voice, too.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah, I like. I'm a fan of the. Of the whole oeuvre. Do you think. What do you think will happen to the Seattle Mariners baseball team today at 5pm local when we play against the Toronto Blue Jays? We are leading 2:0 in the series. We are sending. I think it's Castillo, right? We're sending Castillo out tonight.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's my understanding. Luke. I can't. I'll be honest. I'm not trying to be difficult here. Shane Bieber, I believe. And I got to say, that's the only thing. Like, yeah, Justin. Wait, hold on. It's not Justin Bieber, is it? Because that would change how I feel.

[Luke Burbank]

That'd be distracting.

[Andrew Walsh]

That would be distracting. There will be a. There will be a Beats by Dre Justin Bieber ad right behind. By the way, this is. This tonight will be a really good way to test your theory that that Ohtani ad is green screened on and part of an MLB package. Because we know what ads we see AT T Mobile. And will we see Hemplers or will we see Beats by Dre?

[Luke Burbank]

That's really.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's one thing.

[Luke Burbank]

Everybody watch for it.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, I don't want to predict, Luke, because I haven't really been digging into the X's and O's. My whole thing has just been sort of like protecting my feelings and everything. So I'll ask you what you're expecting. I will say that when I heard the name Shane Bieber, and am I right, I know that name because he used to be with Cleveland for a long time. Right? Like with Cleveland. And so I hear Shane Bieber, I'm like, oh, no. But I'm also like, oh, wait. But they also didn't they, they started a rookie before him earlier in the series when it was more important. So Shane Bieber must not be the Shane Bieber that instills fear in my heart. What do you know about this matchup?

[Luke Burbank]

I don't know very much about it as far I. Yeah, I know he was a, he was a Cleveland guardian and has been good in the past. I feel like all of the, it seems like, anyway, all of the, all of the kind of predictions, the way that we try to make sense of these things before they happen, these baseball games, when they're this much, there's this much pressure. Is this like, well, this person's ERA is, is this. And so therefore, and they do their ERA against this team is, is a number. And now because of that, we know who will win. And it just seems like it all kind of goes out the window. The Mariners were supposed to lose the first game because they were coming in on no rest and they didn't have anyone they could throw out there as a picture other than Bryce Miller, who might be part Wild Thornberry on his father's side. I wanted to find a picture of him when he used to have, when his mustache used to be bigger and his hair used to be wilder. He looked like the dad from the Wild Thornberrys. But anyway, I guess my point is, to me, it's less about the matchup and just about the luck, how the ball bounces on a given night. So here's the thing. Now it's like the Mariners are the ones that are theoretically in the advantage position. We're playing at home. We have a much more rested Castillo coming in. Our bullpen has not been overly taxed in the last couple of games because we've had good starting pitching performances. We have a good home record. So there's all this, all this stuff that now seems to be piling up on the side of, well, the Mariners should, should do pretty well tonight or, you know, and then that's when I always get nervous. Yes, I always get nervous when they're, when there's, whenever there's something that we think is kind of a foregone conclusion. Something else that has been pointed out by many Blue Jays fans who are popping up on my feed on TikTok is the blue Jays did sweep the Mariners in Seattle this year, so they're very.

[Andrew Walsh]

I didn't recall that.

[Luke Burbank]

And I don't think that, like, you're going to keep Vlad Guerrero Jr. Down all series. I don't think that their best hitters are going to, you Know are going to struggle throughout. They're going to come back. And really, let me put it this way. If I'm the Blue Jays, here's, here's all I'm thinking about. With the rest of the series, we got to win two out of three. We just got to win two out of three. Three. Because you win two out of three, you take the, you take the, the series back to Toronto. And now for Toronto playing a winner takes all.

[Andrew Walsh]

Well, wait, if we, if we take.

[Luke Burbank]

Two out of three. Sorry, I was thinking of a, I was thinking of a five game series.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

So it's three games in Seattle and two games in Toronto.

[Andrew Walsh]

Right.

[Luke Burbank]

Is that the rest of the series?

[Andrew Walsh]

If necessary, yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

So still two out of three. So the, the, the theory holds, except not exactly the way I was thinking.

[Andrew Walsh]

Two out of three. We're there, we're done. Two out of three. We don't go, go back to Toronto.

[Luke Burbank]

Toronto wins two out of three.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh, if they win two out of three.

[Luke Burbank]

If I'm Toronto, I'm just thinking two out of three. Yeah. In Seattle, two out of three. Get the series back to Toronto, just win two out of three. Like, because, you know, winning three out of three feels really daunting and hard to do. So I guess I'm just saying, like, I. Believe it or not, if I'm the Blue Jays, I would not be in full freakout mode yet.

[Andrew Walsh]

No, I wouldn't either because it's kind of like the shoes on the other foot. Like, yeah, they, there was like, oh man, if only the mare nurse could steal one game at the famous Johnson Center. Feel so bad about that. But you know, then we see what happened because the one team was maybe more confident and who knows? I, There's a million different reasons and like, I'm just, yeah, I'm just in that mode now. Like again, I don't think it's. I think with the Dodgers you just have a, a lineup that is just up and down. What, what is John's less steroid baby 2 or whatever. Like that's basically the team. It's just like up and down the lineup. Like when Freddie Freeman is like your, your third best player or whatever, it's just like that, that you're not even talking about regular baseball anymore. But with the rest of these teams, especially this particular series, I just can't help but just think like, like the old Mariners T shirts used to say, anything can happen. And that's why I'm not necessarily like feeling like super confident going into this and Also just thinking, like, what are the chances that we're actually just going games in a row against this very good team. But I will remain hopeful. I'll also be interested in seeing if, you know, as we're going now, we're playing baseball in Seattle on October 15th. Like the Marine layer is. Is going to be more after than it was mid summer. I'm going to say will they have.

[Luke Burbank]

The roof open or closed? I guess is the question. That's supposedly an MLB decision. Did you know that?

[Andrew Walsh]

No, I did not. For. You mean for the playoffs or for the entire. For the entire season?

[Luke Burbank]

I don't know about the whole season, but they mentioned it on the broadcast the other night because when we were playing in at the Johnson center, they had the roof closed for the first game that we won and then they had it opened for the second game and the announcer said, we know that MLB is who makes the decision on open or close. But it sure is interesting that the Blue Jays play a lot better with the roof open. And now here it is open.

[Andrew Walsh]

Oh really? I would think that that would be a team's decision because the team has to make all the other decisions about their ballpark. That's interesting.

[Luke Burbank]

I would. I mean, that's what they said. That's what they said on sg. No, I mean that's what they said on the broadcast. But that was also the same broadcast that told me today's game was going to be at 4pm for the Mariners, which I will go to my grave saying that because I know I looked at it and I was mad because they were showing our games were always going to be happening earlier than the Dodgers games. And I formed a whole theory. But back to tonight, because of the fact that I think there's a huge risk of the Mariners and our fans and everyone, the baseball knowers now being overconfident for the Mariners and the fact that the Blue Jays, you know, have sort of had a couple of unlucky games all now my thinking is that the Mariners. I could see the Blue Jays winning this game. There's. There's a lot of sort of like, I would call it sideline. There's a lot of stuff going on on the sides of this story that make me think that this is absolutely a game the Mariners could lose. Which is why I think the Mariners are going to win by a lot. All roads lead me to thinking the Mariners are going to win by a lot.

[Andrew Walsh]

Lot.

[Luke Burbank]

The very fact that I suspect that the Mariners might not win makes me think they'll probably win. Like, here's what I'm saying. If I was going into this, like, and it never even occurred to me that the Blue Jays might win, if I was going into it thinking, God, we're already up 2 0. We've got this. If I was thinking all of that, that would be a recipe for the Mariners losing. But the fact that I am thinking all that and that I am uncomfortable and that I am not enjoying this, that means that they will probably. The fact that there is a. There's a countercurrent of thought that the Blue Jays are just fine. And the Blue Jays, in fact, have the Mariners right where they want them. And that if the Blue Jays win tonight, now the Mariners are suddenly on their back foot because one more win by the Blue Jays and the series is tied all of a sudden. And now what are we gonna do? Because of all of that, that leads me back to. I think the Mariners are just gonna absolutely pummel them tonight.

[Andrew Walsh]

All right, this reminds me. I think this clip puts it best, what you're saying now, a clever man would put the poison into his own goblet because he would know that only a great fool would reach for what he was given. I'm not a great fool, so I can clearly not choose the wine in front of you. Right. Is that kind of what you're saying?

[Luke Burbank]

I am saying that the Blue Jays have fallen victim to one of the oldest mistakes in history, second only to never get in a land war in Asia.

[Andrew Walsh]

The Mariners have built up an immunity to Iacane powder.

[Luke Burbank]

And that's all I know. Here's what I really think. I think that. And this is. You're going to be surprised to hear, Andrew, this is not scientific. Scientific. I think the Mariners have broken some kind of a dark magic curse. I think they broke it when they went in and they beat Houston three times in Houston towards the end of the season. And that's why when I say that mantra of the Mariners are good. The Mariners have good baseball players. The Mariners do good baseball plays or whatever it is, I really believe it. I feel like the thing with the Mariners has always been certainly as. Let's just use Julio Rodriguez as an example. Julio Rodriguez has always been someone who's had all the potential in the world. World and somehow plays really well and yet somehow also seems to. Seemed to just absolutely wither in the most important moments. And I have to say that it's just psychological. It's not physical. We know that. And then something shifted this year as we were sort of getting into the home stretch as we're getting closer and closer to the playoffs and now in the playoffs and you have Julio. I just. I'm as happy to see him up there as anybody else, if not more happy. He. Something changed. And again, it's not physical. It's not that his hand eye coordination is better than it used to be be. It's that there is something going on inside his brain and his kind of emotional, his whatever you want to call it, like his, his sort of bio rhythms where he's just. I don't know if he's calmer when he's up there in the clutch or if he's just thinking about the game. I know something has shifted and he is playing differently in the big moments from the plate. Definitely. And I just think that goes for this team. This team some. I think we exercise some sort of. Of a demon when we went to Houston and won those three games. And I think the result is these guys. And I mean, Naylor's always had it. But like, even when Naylor had like a game where he looked pretty bad, I think it might have been the first Toronto game where he swung out of his helmet once. And in fact, the announcers even said you don't usually see two at bats from Naylor like that.

[Andrew Walsh]

He just.

[Luke Burbank]

He doesn't usually look that fooled. He didn't look his particular best self. But because this is the new Mariner, I didn't. My mind, I didn't go, oh, my God, Naylor has lost his touch. He's. He's. He's bamboo. Fatherhood does not agree with him. He's up there. He's bamboozled. He's swinging out of his shoes. He doesn't, you know, none of that occurred to me because I was like, these Mariners are good and they're good at baseball and they do good baseball plays, even if sometimes they don't. They're. I feel like they're fundamentally a different group of people in terms of the magic around this team. And that makes me think that they're going to just continue to do good things. Like instead of always thinking about how can they snatch defeat from the jaws of victory. Victory. It feels to me like this is a team that's going to figure out how to. How to snatch a victory from the jaws of defeat. Because something, something spiritual has changed about this team for me.

[Andrew Walsh]

And I will say, I mean, the lineup is. Our lineup is enviable. We just really need Geno to wake up and. And Randy, we need the. If those Guys woke up a little bit and started performing up to the level that they could perform. This would be the same scariest lineup for somebody. Not the scariest. We know what the scariest lineup is. It's in Southern California. But it would be a very tricky lineup because then even at the bottom of our order, if you have a canzone in there, you know that he can sometimes do something too. You know, I mean it's just like it's so enviable. I just really want those guys to kind of.

[Luke Burbank]

Well, I will give Randy credit. I feel like Randy's at least been getting on base occasionally. Like, I mean, yeah, Randy hasn't hit a home run like 103 at bats or something. Which is. Seems bad considering once in the playoffs he hit 10 home runs in 20 games or something. Crazy. At some crazy postseason stat. But Gino is. You know, it's interesting. The tide has been high enough at least since that 15 inning game where it's kind of like the vibes are good enough that I don't think people are asking questions of like is there a point where you need to actually replace Geno in at bat situations because he's not even getting really close now. Okay, let me see. Say he did hit that double that was almost a home run.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. He also hit that change things.

[Luke Burbank]

He hit that dying line drive that the guy made a diving catch on which you know, if that gets by the guy, it's a really good hit. We're really proud of Gino. So maybe he is. Maybe some small things are improving. He just. His physicality when he's up there is so weird to me. He does not seem like he's take. He doesn't seem like he's taking the at bats very seriously.

[Andrew Walsh]

He's always had that weird stance where he just stands there like he's. He's waiting for somebody to take his coffee order until the windup. It's very strange and like I don't.

[Luke Burbank]

Know what he's doing and obviously he wants to. He does not want to be striking out on three pitches almost every time he comes to the plate. But it's like it's. It's kooky because I don't see anything changing about his swing. About like he hasn't shortened his swing up at all. He hasn't changed. It's like he's not making any adjustments but he keeps having the same outcome generally speaking. Which he goes up there and then just. It's just like three. It's like two balls that are Right over the middle that he didn't see coming, and it's immediately, oh, two, and then a ball in the dirt that he swings at wildly for the third strike. Yeah, it's been. They have just been the most ineffective at bats you could ever imagine. And, like, again, right now, things feel so blessed that it's just kind of like, well, whatever. But, you know, I wonder. I wonder what, like, Dan Wilson makes of the whole thing. In between a few tall beers, if he's like. If. If his thought is. Is, like, we can't keep sending a guy up there who. Who's hitting. I mean, Gino's hitting, like, under 100 in the playoffs.

[Andrew Walsh]

But that is why I do feel like that hit that was almost a home run, even though it wasn't a home run. I just sort of feel like, I don't know, maybe that could be. I don't know. There's no. I don't know that there's science to that, but, like, in my heart, I'm kind of like, you don't. You don't take him out of the lineup. It's funny. It's almost like he's had the opposite season of Julio. Right? Like, now he was with a D. Different team for the first half of the season, but he was so good. He was literally having a career season. And then he came over here and he kind of got cold, which used to be kind of part of the Mariners curse. I don't really put. I don't really group it in with that, because the Mariners have gotten hot in other ways, and Naylor's been so good for us, and. And. But it's funny how Julio. I was just thinking about this again today, just like, as you look back at the season and all the ups and downs and all the feelings that we've had, all the highs and lows and just. Just like. Remember, like, Julio was invited to go to the All Star Game, and a bunch of people were like, why is this guy invited to go to the All Star Game? He's got star power.

[Luke Burbank]

Yeah.

[Andrew Walsh]

I mean, Mariners fans as well as national, I think baseball fans were kind of like, he's. Yeah, he's got the flashy smile, and he's. He's got star power, but what has he shown in this first half of the season that would make him an All Star? And he said, you know what? I'm going to skip out of these celebrations this year. He didn't say I didn't deserve it. He just said, I'm going to focus on My own stuff. And then he came back and had a great second half of the season. Like, that feels like a lifetime ago. But I was just looking back at that this morning, not even with a take to wrap this up, but just kind of like, yeah, that was kind of a. That's kind of a big move, I think, you know, to say, I'm not going this year. I'm going to work on my own stuff. And I don't know what the psychology is, like, going and passing up an opportunity to be in the spotlight like that and hang out with, like, the best players in baseball and everything, but he just. He felt something that felt like that wasn't where he belonged. And then he stayed home or whatever, maybe worked on his swing. Swing, and then just exploded. To have another season with, like, stats that you. You would look at this player's stats and think, he had an amazing season, but he had an amazing second half of the season, which is almost more.

[Luke Burbank]

Impressive, and he has continued it into the postseason.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

And Andrew, they keep saying this, the national announcers, when he's up at bat, because if, like, if something has. Again, if. If there is. If something is psychologically shifted in Julio Rodriguez, that he is now up to the moment in these big moments, which he certainly has been in the postseason. They keep pointing out he's 24 years old and we got him, and we.

[Andrew Walsh]

Have him until he's 52. I think his contract, he's our guy. Yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

Like, that. This is why, to me, this feels like things have started to break the Mariner's way in a way that it just doesn't usually happen this way for us. It doesn't usually happen that we spend all the money that we had, almost all the money we have on someone who's a promising prospect, and then they're actually exceeding. I mean, some of his statistics are unprecedented in mlb. Like, I forget the exact one, but it's something like, basically the amount of, like, home runs and stolen bases.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, I think he's the. I could be wrong about this, but I think now he is the first player to go 30. 30.

[Luke Burbank]

Yes. I think you're right.

[Andrew Walsh]

For the first three years of his.

[Luke Burbank]

Career, his career, no one's ever done that before. Like, think about all the good players. Players in history, and no one's ever done that. And the guy who's done that is our guy. And he's a really good fielder, and we have him under contract for a long time. Like, that just doesn't happen to the Mariners. We sign Richie Sexton for too much money. Like, we get Jeff, sir. We get.

[Andrew Walsh]

We get Sexton, who wasn't Sexton, the guy that we then sent to New York for Buhner or something? Who did we send him?

[Luke Burbank]

That was Kenny Diggerfelt.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's the one. That was the sign. That was the Seinfeld joke, right?

[Luke Burbank]

Like, yeah, that was the greatest trade. And we did get. Okay, we did get Jay Buhner for Ken Phelps. But other than that, there are not a lot of examples of where the Mariners organization has gone out and they've spent a bunch of money on someone and they picked the right pony. That just doesn't seem to happen to us. And here it is happening to us. And again, this, to me, feels like something is shifting where it's like we're not. Not this cursed team that's going to find a way to mess it up. It feels like we have good players who do good baseball plays and are good baseball. Men's.

[Andrew Walsh]

This is a little bit off topic. Don't worry. It's still baseball related, though, and Mariners related specifically. I had a really embarrassing, huge personal revelation earlier this week that I want to talk to you about, and I wasn't even sure if I wanted to bring it onto the show. It's Mariners related. It's not like, embarrassing. This is a, like, personal health talk or anything. This isn't about me sitting in a bathtub in the woods somewhere. But somebody posted a stat about the. The Mariners postseason. Like, we hadn't done this particular thing in the postseason since 2000. And I thought, and this is somebody. This is like, I think it was Brent Stacker or somebody who works for esp. And for a split second I thought, oh, you mean 2001? And then I looked it up. I'm like, wait, is it. Does he mean 2000? And then I looked. I'm like, oh, yeah, no, the Mariners were in the postseason in 2000 and 97. We talk so much. Not you and I, but I just mean Mariners fans. And keep in mind, I didn't start watching baseball until 2009. So all of this is history to me. We talk so much about 1995 in 2001 that I don't think. It's not like I forgot Luke. I don't think I knew they made it to the divisional series in 2000 and 97 as well. And didn't they even win those divisional series in 97 and 2000?

[Luke Burbank]

I forget how those ones went. So. So 97, they would have still had Lou Piniella managing them. I Think.

[Andrew Walsh]

I think. But again, that's getting. I'm getting way out over my skis there. But it's like. It's just so funny. Like, we only talk about 95 and 2001. We never talk about 97 and 2000. Thousand. I have no idea what happened those years.

[Luke Burbank]

I think 97 was. It was still Pinella. And it was kind of like, yeah, I forget about that that year, too. I want to say I can look.

[Andrew Walsh]

These up, too, if you don't want to be put on the spot here. I'm looking them up now.

[Luke Burbank]

But those are sort of like the forgotten trips, because I don't think anything super duper dramatic. We didn't beat the Yankees, you know, to go to the ALCS like we did in 95, and then we didn't have this gaudy 100, 116 regular season wins like we did in, like. Wasn't that 2005? Was that 2005 when we had all the wins?

[Andrew Walsh]

That was 2001.

[Luke Burbank]

That was 2001.

[Andrew Walsh]

The most wins in baseball history.

[Luke Burbank]

Oh, wow. Okay.

[Andrew Walsh]

That was two. You know what? It was. And I made a mistake before when I was setting this up. I said they went. That they won the divisional or went to the divisions. I don't think so. But they did win the West. That's what I did not know. I had not realized. Even though there's a banner up in T. Mobile park, my home away from home, that says it. I had not realized that the Mariners won the west in 97 and 2000 on top of the very celebrated years, 95 and 2001, and everything they did in those years. And I don't. Did they win the west in both of those years? I can't even say for sure, honestly. I'm so confused right now. But it was just. It's so funny how I was like, oh, I got to read up or watch clips or whatever of 97 and 2000. They're just like. They're. They're like middle children, literally.

[Luke Burbank]

I think. So. I think that they were just not overly dramatic and then that we didn't get to the World Series. So it just kind of like, you know, we don't. We don't tend to remember those years, but. But, yeah, I feel like we are, as I said when we. When we won that series in Houston. I think we are now. We will be the dominant team in the AL west for, I hope, anyway, at least two or three seasons, because we've got a good squad again. If we. We can keep Keep nails around. I think. I mean, also, you know, I mean, can he play. Can he continue to play at this level, like, consistently? Like, I mean, I just feel like he is so over delivering on what we were hoping he would do. It's just incredible, you know, I mean, I don't know. It's.

[Andrew Walsh]

You just always know if he gets a hit, it's just going to be weird. That I remember, because I remember sitting. It was the. You were right. I think his bad game was kind of game one of this series. I think I'm losing so much confidence and being able to, like, pinpoint what happened when. But as opposed to the super confident person I was coming into this show, but I remember saying, when he was at the plate saying, come on, Josh, do something weird. Do something weird. Because I feel like every time he hits the ball and it's successful, it's like some weird. It goes in some strange direction. But what he ended up doing weird that time was literally swinging out of his helmet, as you said, and I was like, all right, Josh. I didn't mean that.

[Luke Burbank]

Weir.

[Andrew Walsh]

That was. That was weird in a bad way. But it's just kind of like. It's not like, oh, okay, well, if Gino's going to make contact, then it will go out of the park or. Or whatever. You know, it's just like, no, Naylor's going to hit something down the line or is this going to, like, is this going to go somewhere in some no man's land?

[Luke Burbank]

Here's what you're real. Here's what you're thinking with Naylor, it's like, okay, he looked absolutely ridiculous on that swing, but he's also gathering information.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah, that's true.

[Luke Burbank]

He's gathering information on how that picture works, where that ball. And, yeah, he looked silly on that, but he has a plan and he is gathering information. Even with that, Gino does not appear to be gathering any information. He just is, you know, like. Brian Naylor. Brian Naylor. I love that I started out calling him Brian Naylor when we got him one time. NPR congressional correspondent Brian Naylor. And now I'm just calling him that in my mind. Josh Naylor. When he. That swing, when his helmet came off, that looked like a Bartolo cologne swing, that was remarkably bad. But again, he's like. I knew that he was also learning something and that he was gonna. He was gonna integrate that into his next swing and his next swing and his next swing. And that's what's so fun about him, is that even if it's not. Even if in the moment you're not getting a great outcome, you know that he is working on a plan and something's gonna happen at some point. And that's what I'd like to see coming from Geno.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. He always, Nadler always looks like he's looking into the middle distance. It's my favorite thing. He always looks like he's looking in the middle distance and he's kind of grumpy about it. Just like he's always just.

[Luke Burbank]

He's getting less grumpy, though.

[Andrew Walsh]

Yeah. Yeah, yeah.

[Luke Burbank]

Which beautiful. Which I worry about. Which I would have worried about with the old Mariners. And this is how, this is how kooky my brain is. If this was the old Mariners instead of the new Mariners, I would have thought we need Josh Naylor to always be mildly annoyed because that's what makes him good. That's his. That's his. That's his dilithium, Chris. I mean, that's seriously how my brain works. It's like we can't have, we can't, we cannot have a happy Josh Naylor. A happy Josh Naylor does not, it's not function the way we need him to. And yet he is got. He is smiling. He is excited to be in Seattle. He said it in post game press conference that people who he've played with players that have come and played in T mobile field with him have said this place is amazing. And also you seem like you're having fun, which is something they've never seen from him before. And yet he's still playing really well. That's what I mean. He doesn't have to be grunting grumpy for the Mariners for him to play well, which I would have told you a month ago that he has to be grumpy for it to work. But that's where all of these little. I had so many different things set up, so many jinxes and weird rules because it was so rare that we ever over performed my expectations. And now that seems to be what we generally do, which is why I think we're going to win handily today.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay, good. Well, I. And you're. You're watching at home, right? I'm gonna go meet up with at least one bud, maybe a couple of buds at a sports bar to watch the game. So I've.

[Luke Burbank]

I'm watching it alone in my Paddington sweater.

[Andrew Walsh]

Okay, good. Yeah, so I won't probably hear the ins and outs of the game, but I'll definitely be locked on it so we can share our adventures tomorrow.

[Luke Burbank]

Tomorrow, by the way. Mariners 2000 reached the ALCS. 2001 reached the ALCS. 2022 reached the ALDS after winning the wild card. And then 20, 2025 reached the ALCS.

[Andrew Walsh]

That's right. And here we are. Here we are.

[Luke Burbank]

Yep.

[Andrew Walsh]

All right, here's one thing I will say is don't let Felix throw out the first pitch. Not on this anniversary of the game. That he threw out the first pitch and it went for 18.

[Luke Burbank]

Wouldn't it be nice if they let him break the jinx? I think we're in jinx breaking mode. I would say do everything that we're not supposed to do, and then we win tonight. And then we. All of those dragons have been slayed.

[Andrew Walsh]

It's kind of nice. I like to think about.

[Luke Burbank]

All right, thanks for listening, everybody. Oh, we are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for all of you. So please, if you can join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. Stay safe. Go, Mariners. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

[Andrew Walsh]

And good luck to all. But you must have known I was not a great fool. You would have counted on it. So I can clearly not choose the wine in front of me. You made your decision then. Not remotely. Because I. Cane comes from Australia, as everyone knows, And Australia is entirely peopled with criminals. And criminals are used to having people not trust them, as you are not trusted by me. So I could clearly not choose the wine in front of you. Truly, you have a dizzying intellect. Wait till I get going. Power out.