So... Alright - Walk the Moon

Episode Date: February 18, 2025

Could you walk the Earth? How about the Moon? Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

Introducing the new McSpicy from McDonald's. It looks like a regular chicken sandwich, but it's actually a spicy chicken sandwich. McSpicy, consider yourself warned. Limited time only. At Participate in McDonald's in Canada. Chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken chicken to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get to get and I couldn't do anything to recover it, weirdest thing, I thought, this sucks. But it's not the end of the world because audition always keeps a cash, and so if it crashes, you know, when you reboot, you come back and it offers you the ability

to recover the project. So I rebooted and it offered me the ability to recover the project, which I did, and it was empty. So I lost a good portion of this episode. I'm gonna redo for you right now with renewed vigor and enthusiasm and fingers fucking crossed it doesn't happen again. First things first, wanted to say thank you to everyone

for all of the kind emails and social media posts in support of the episode I did on the NBA trade between Luka Donchich and Anthony Davis. I tend to not want to talk about sports too much. I think there's a fine line between being a fan of something and an expert. And I am definitely a fan of basketball in the NBA and sports in general, but I do not consider myself an expert in any way, certainly not in ways that I consider myself an expert in other things that I talk about, like hot dogs.

So I'm always a little reticent to talk about it so I don't wanna sound like a fucking idiot. And I did listen to that episode a few times because I had to edit it. I edited it more than I normally do because I had to make myself not sound absolutely dim. But the one thing that I keep coming away with when I listen to me talk about sports

is I just feel like I'm so fucking redundant with everything I say. I just feel like I repeat myself over and over again. And I was talking about that on stream yesterday and people said, well, that's kind of what sports commentary is. So thank you for the kind words, everybody. Thank you for not hating that episode.

I was pretty overwhelmed with how much positive feedback you gave me. And so I really, I want to thank you for that. And if you hate sports and that was super, super boring to you, I'm it's not going to happen often. Trust me. However, I am going to do one really quick brief. It wasn't quite so brief in the last version of this episode that just shit the bed. I'm going to truncate it a little bit here.

Brief recap of what's happened since we last talked about Luca and AD. Namely, they both made their debuts on their new teams. And I just wanted to compare and contrast how Luca did in his first game versus how Anthony Davis did in his first game. So Luca played his first game, Lakers versus the Jazz. Lakers blew the Jazz out, won 132 to 113.

Luca only played 24 minutes, which is essentially half the game. NBA games 48 minutes. Most NBA players starting stars will play somewhere between 32 and 36 minutes, which is, you know, a little over three quarters of a game. That's the average for like say Jason Tatum or an Anthony Edwards or an SGA or a joker.

You're playing, you know, 32 to 36 minutes. Luca only played 24 because he is coming off of a minor injury that he was dealing with during the trade. He scored 14 points, had five rebounds and four assists with only one turnover, which gave him a positive plus minus of 15, which is pretty good. That's in line with his career stats. If he were playing essentially one more quarter in the game, you could expect his stats to increase by 33, 25, 33 percent, right? So he's probably sitting in

around 21, 22 points, eight rebounds and seven assists. That's consistent with an NBA superstar and that's consistent with his career stats. So pretty solid game from Luca. The most important thing for the Lakers is that he had a grin on his face the entire time, looked like he was having the time of his life. You could watch him watch LeBron. Like he was on court playing with LeBron, watching LeBron as a fan. It was really kind of a delight to see.

Unless you're a Celtics fan like me, and then in which case you have to kind of hate it also at the same time, like you can see the camaraderie building, which is not going to be good for other teams. Right. So how did Anthony Davis and the Dallas Mavericks do? Well, they played the Sacramento Kings, who have been a struggling team. They have been on the struggle bus for the last two seasons, just made a big trade to ship their best star off to the San Antonio Spurs. Dallas Mavericks did the same thing, actually, now that I think about it. How did AD do? Well, he played 31 minutes, so just about three quarters. He scored 26 points, had 16 rebounds and seven assists with three blocks, also only had one turnover

and had a positive minus of plus nine. Monster night for Anthony Davis. 26, 16 and seven is a great stat line. Three blocks on top of that is huge. However, late in the third quarter, Anthony Davis pulled himself out of the game with a non contact injury. If you're not a sports fan, you may not know what a non contact injury means. Non contact injury is the scariest thing you can hear as a sports fan, certainly an NBA fan. Basically that means there was nobody around him,

nobody touching him when he got hurt. His body did something to itself. When you're in the NBA and you get elbowed in the head and you go down with an injury, or you trip over somebody and you sprain your ankle, or you fall down and get like a hip contusion, those are injuries that hurt, but they heal quickly and you heal 100%.

When you're out there walking the ball up the court and then you go to cut left real fast and then suddenly you collapse on the ground holding your ankle or your thigh, you just tore an ACL. You've got a six month to an 18 month injury recovery ahead of you. It is a fucking nightmare.

Non-contact injuries kill careers. 10 years ago, non-contact injuries killed careers. Now non-contact injuries will take a year to 18 months of your career away from you while you rehab. Medical procedures have increased pretty rapidly over the last decade or so. And what would have been a career ending injury maybe 20 years ago is now maybe, in like, yeah, like a year and a half recovery and

a player who doesn't return 100% but maybe comes back 90 if they're lucky. Regardless, he goes down to the non contact injury pulls himself out of the game sits on the bench for a while eventually goes to the locker room. After the game, Mavs come out and they go, Hey, it's no big deal is some gro some groin tightness. Just wanted to be safe. He just couldn't get the like his groin muscle to release. So we're just gonna you know, no big deal. We just didn't want to, you know, fuck around, especially on his first game. By the way, that first game Mavericks went on to lose in overtime by one point. So Lakers win their first game with Luca Mavericks lose their first game with AD and they lose AD.

No big deal, right? Well, the next morning, the story is a little different. They come out and they say, okay, he's got a left abductor strain that is probably linked to a previous abdominal issue and he's going to miss likely a month or more. There you go. That's what the Mavs fans were worried about.

That's what all NBA fans were worried about. First game as a Dallas Maverick, AD goes down for at least a month. Now, the All-Star break eats up a week of that, but he's missing the beginning of the playoff push, which by the way, the Mavs are not looking good on that front. Can you imagine the pain of being a Dallas Mavericks fan, of going through just the heartache of losing

Luka Doncic, getting Anthony Davis back and saying, you know what, I'm a fan of the Mavs, I'm gonna root AD on, maybe this was a good trade, we gotta give it the benefit of the doubt, let's see. And he comes out and he's a fucking monster. Like everything you could hope Anthony Davis is, he's just instantly physically dominant, yet he still passes, he's still at seven assists

for a big man while fucking ripping down the boards and being an offensive juggernaut. And by the way, one of the best defensive players in the NBA, so he's got three blocks in three quarters, which is crazy. And then just as you're starting to feel some hope, you're like, oh fuck, maybe this wasn't such a bad idea. Hey, he's a monster, this is great.

Oh, he's out of the game, non-contact injury, holy what? This can't be real, it can't be real. It is real and I feel so bad for you Dallas Mavericks fans I'm so so so sorry. I Hope against hope that it's less than a month and that he's back before you know it moving on I Was gonna do a whole episode on the history of the bandana. However, the more I read about it the more I decided it was

better used as a funny throwaway joke on regulation about how I wonder if the first cowboy who put a bandana up over his nose and robbed a bank or a stagecoach or a train had any idea how influential that moment would be and how what a trend he was was gonna be setting for the next 100 years or so. But I did learn one really interesting thing. Bandanas have been around for a very long time, hundreds and hundreds of years, maybe thousands of years. I think the first bandana originated from India very, very long time ago.

However, the first modern day bandana came from Martha Washington. She actually had a bandana commissioned to give to George Washington that had him on it on a horse. And at this time there was a ban on textile printing in the US by the British. And so she had to find somebody who was an artist who would do it.

So she found this dude, printmaker named John the Hueson who was not scared of the British and he designed this awesome bandana with like George Washington on it in the middle and then there's a bunch of cannons around him and a bunch of words of independence and it it became the symbol of defiance and independence and it was considered I guess the first modern- bandana, which then went on to set a precedent and a whole movement where bandanas were largely political for a very long time after that.

Every president would have his slogan like win with Ike put on a bandana and they were given out. I had no idea. I don't know if that's still a thing or not. I don't know if Trump and Biden had bandanas printed with their slogans on them or not, but it was a very big deal for a very long time. And that's your little minor piece of bandana history. Moving on.

I was sitting in a coffee shop this morning collecting my notes and just listening to music on my headphones. And it is a very rainy and cold day in Austin today, which is fucking bizarre because two days ago it was like 89 degrees and we were all sweating our dicks off outside complaining that the winter was over and now it's back and it's just like,

you're getting whiplash and I think it's gonna be really warm again this weekend, it's just going hot, cold, hot, cold. You can't find an equilibrium right now. But so I was like all bundled up and sitting in front of the window of a very gray rainy day, Googling and reading Wikipedia's and listening to music. And I had this realization, I was going to see if it's the same for y'all. Do you guys notice that music sounds better on cold rainy days?

Like something about music just hits so much harder. It's, I don't know how else to describe it. I just, it's so much more vibrant and I connect with it so much more on a shitty rainy day. I was enjoying listening to music so much. I hopped in my car after I finished at the coffee shop and I just drove around town for like 45 minutes listening to songs and each song sounded better and clearer and crisper and more vibrant than the last.

It was wild. And I think it's gotta be a cold rainy day thing. Actually wanted to highlight one song, and this is not gonna be your song of the day, I already picked a different song of the day before this one came on, but it's such a beautiful piece of poetry and maybe it's the cold rainy day of it all,

but it just really connected with me today and I wanted to share it with you. It's a short song by Jason Molina in his band Songs Ohia, who I have used as a song of the episode before and I have talked about before. Really talented, tragic figure and story, guy who made a tremendous body of work from Songs Ohio to his personal stuff to his Magnolia Company thing. I think he made like a dozen albums but

drank himself to death at the age of 39. Had just a crippling battle with alcoholism and you know when they say people drink themselves to death it usually means that they they got behind a car and ended up in a crash or Who knows you know put themselves in a situation where they died violently or quickly But he really drank himself to death He drank himself until his organs failed and he died of I guess cirrhosis and to do that at the age of 39 is such a Heartbreaking thing to hear especially

given the the tremendous talent that that guy had but I was thinking about that as I was driving around and I don't think he had any more talent than anybody else right like talent I think everybody has talent than anybody else, right? Like, I think everybody has talent. Maybe everybody doesn't find a way to connect with it in life, but I think everybody is kind of imbued with similar amounts of talent. It's about finding what your talent is. And then the real secret to the sauce

is the drive and the motivation that you have to push that talent forward. That's where people fail, I think. People have this idea that, oh, I'm not as talented as that person, so I can never be successful. Or they became successful because they're so talented. That's a big part of it. But I think the biggest part of it is just having the drive and the determination to push that talent in a direction, right? So it feels weird to say like he was a unique talent because I think he was a person,

man, I don't even know what I'm trying to say here. The guy was incredibly talented and it's heartbreaking to see him die at such a young age because we lose, I mean, the people in his life lose him from their lives, which is the ultimate tragedy. But we as the world at large lose a beautiful voice and a unique perspective and view on the world. But I think that everybody we lose at the age of 39

from addiction is just as big of a loss. So I guess that's what I was trying to muddle through there as I think it's equally heartbreaking to lose anyone at that age to that demon. So I'll probably do a Jason Molina episode someday where I do a deep dive on him because I'm kind of fascinated by him and I just, I absolutely love his work,

but that's not today. Today I just wanted to share this one song with you called Just A Spark. And it's because it's just a short little poem. And if you read it as a poem, I just think it's really beautiful. And for whatever reason, I really connected with it today. So I'm gonna read to you now.

Will that look be your only reply? You lower your head in reply. Here it is white and full, like a pale ghost across the sky. And here it is crescent, like a dagger from your heart into mine. Here it is just a spark to shine. Here it is just a spark to shine. Just a quick, simple, short song. It's obviously, he sings it a lot longer than I say it,

but it's absolutely beautiful, and you fucking feel it when he sings it, and I just thought it was a really concise, beautiful, poignant love poem, and I wanted to share it with y'all. It's not the song of the episode, but listen to it. It's really tremendous, and as I said before, he's such a, I don't know,

I just really connected with his music. Do you ever think about how far you walk in a lifetime? I looked it up this morning and I've seen conflicting reports, but it seems to be somewhere between 75 and 100,000 miles in a lifetime, which is roughly the equivalent of walking around the earth three times, which ends up being about 200 million steps for the average person across their lifetime.

So in your lifetime, you will walk the entirety of the earth three times if you were at all average. That got me thinking, could we walk to the moon? So I looked it up. The moon is 238,900 miles away. Although I feel like if I would ask Gavin, he would know that off the top of his head. I had to look it up.

So you could walk almost halfway to the moon in your lifetime if you were an average, in every way person. I kind of wonder if you started early enough and you were like, say you were born, you were possessed of this idea and this goal and you started early enough and you maintained health. Could you walk a moon's length in your lifetime if you tried? I bet you could.

I wonder if anybody has ever walked the moon in their lifetime. Something to think about. Song of the episode is going to be Drop Dead's A Nation Sleeps. This is an abrasive song. It is a fun little very simple antiwar song, though, and it hit a little bit harder on a cold rainy day today. So I decided to pick it as our song of the episode. That'll do it for me today.

I'm going to dive into the email and probably cover some of that in next week's episode, along with fucking who knows but I'll see you then all right