917 - Touchdown Tim Chitters feat. D.J. Byrnes & Eephus (3/17/25)

All I wanna be is a jungle.

All I wanna be is in a jungle.

We need to

press once.

All I wanna

Hello, friends.

It's Monday, March 17th, and we've got Chapo coming at you.

And I'd just like at the top of the show to wish everyone a happy St.

Patrick's Day.

Felix, I know you're thrilled.

This is your favorite holiday as it celebrates both drinking alcohol and Irish Americans.

Two of your favorite things.

Let's just say I'm about to play the game ready or not in real life.

In just a little bit, we'll be speaking to the filmmakers behind the nation's hottest independent film, Aethus.

But before then, we are pleased to welcome back to the show the kingpin of independent local media, DJ Burns of the Rooster.

Welcome back to the show, DJ.

What's going on, fellas?

Pleasure to be here.

DJ, I knew we wanted to have you on the show this week.

And I'm going to start here with an example of something that was just like a news story that was just so perfect after I said I want to get DJ back on the show.

And I'm going to start with this story.

This is because this is just like it made me think of you.

And I'm so glad we have you on to talk about this.

DJ, did you hear the phone calls that North Carolina Senator Tom Tillis released to the media this week?

No, I missed that.

It's really good.

It's like, it's maybe the best work I've ever, it's the best work I've ever heard anyone do with the art of phone calls.

That's high praise.

Yeah, it's no mistake that it was boomers who, you know, excelled at the art form.

We'll, you know, you'll see.

Yeah, DJ, we're going to play a few, but I'm just going to read from

this is from WCNC Charlotte.

The office of U.S.

Senator Tom Tillis said the number of death threats and disturbances it has seen has worried staff about safety.

Local Democratic groups said that this is not their intent, that death threats do nothing but hurt their pushes for change.

There have been several protests outside Tillis' office in recent weeks, both pushing back against President Trump's policies and Elon Musk's position.

Tillis' office said both the senator and his staff received a large number of death threats, something Guilford County Democratics Party care Kathy Kilpatrick disagrees with.

So basically, he put out like just a series of phone calls that his office in DC had gotten from all over the country.

And as Felix put it, as Felix just sort of set up, it is all enraged liberal boomers literally saying, I'm going to kill you.

It's so, it's so good.

So they're honest death threats.

It's not.

Oh, yeah.

Yeah, I mean,

I don't even want to like,

I'll just play them.

I just play them.

Good afternoon, Senator Tillis.

What the northern Worvets think about you, southern white trash

and the ones who won this Civil War think about you.

Do you understand that

inferior

bad jeans, inbred stupid?

You and all your people.

Yeah, Tom Tillis.

Afraid of death threats.

Then get the f out of

I would like to talk to Tom Tillis and ask him why he thinks it's okay for him to take money from this nation and f it over.

Why does he think that he can tell his employers to go f theirselves every goddamn day, all day long, and sell his god nation out

and his employers over?

Don't he know that his employers can take a f ⁇ ing act panel and cave his fing head in?

That's suggested.

Well, you're going to have to be very careful about going out in public or talking to anybody that's real, that's the actual American, because we hate you.

If I didn't have a broken back in Southern California, I would spend the rest of my life in federal prison for a chance to cut your f ⁇ ing throat.

That's the best one.

The last one is the best one.

If I didn't have a bad back here in Southern California, I would spend the rest of my life in federal prison prison to cut your fucking throat.

There's the Democratic ticket is somewhere in there.

I don't know why.

It's there.

Yeah.

It's so, like,

man, we were talking about it, but it's like whenever Zoomers try to do it, it's like, you know, you should seriously consider, you know, ending your better help subscription so you unalive yourself.

And when thalennials do it, it's even worse.

Oh, I hope something bad happens to you.

In a video game.

Yeah, with boomers, it's like, my name is Jerry Schmutz.

I work at the State Department of Transportation.

I live on 123 Cinnamon Road.

I'm in your bathroom right now, you cocksucker.

Like, there's

the guy, the guy at the end is the best, but the guy that they start out with, who's like, this is what people who won the Civil War think of you, you fucking piece of shit, is like the angriest I've ever heard anyone calling it.

It's, I like, I totally agree with you.

I would max out to any of these people.

I do they know they obviously don't know.

Like, those are recorded, those can be traced.

I assume you can't just like threaten to care.

I think they do know they want the smoke.

They don't give a fuck.

Yeah.

I'm just imagining like you threaten to cave a senator's head in with an axe handle.

And that probably doesn't, it sounds a lot better in your mind, but when FBI agents are like playing it in your kitchen, like,

I mean, they're like, truly, they're overwhelming the FBI with the like they can't arrest us all mentality.

I haven't seen this level of self-incrimination since like people looked at King Vaughan's Twitter right before he blew up.

It reminded me of Paul Giamatti at the end of Howard Stern's private parts,

with all the beeping, all the leaping out of curse words.

That goddamn motherfucker, Tom Tillis.

He's immature.

He's immature.

But DJ, I mean, I want to bring this up in the context of, I mean, it's been,

we're seeing a lot of anger at politicians right now.

And particularly, like, Tom Tillis is a Republican, but, like, Democratic politicians are facing a lot of anger right now, too.

And it's like Chuck Schumer has become the avatar for like Democratic voters' dissatisfaction with the, you know, like, because they ran an election saying that this is the most important election ever.

Trump is a fascist.

He's going to end democracy.

And now that Trump is a fascist and is indeed ending democracy, Chuck Schumer's attitude is just like, hey, well, you know, we don't have the votes.

What do you want me to do?

I mean,

what's your take on the continuing

CR?

And like, look, it was going to pass one way or another, but

what do you make of the Democrats, like the leadership of the party and their strategy here?

Like, I don't agree with the general criticism that both parties are the same.

I think this shows that there are a lot of differences within the parties.

But when you get to the very tippy, tippy top of the parties, I feel it's like the same kind of cocktail party.

You know, you have Schumer who just completely misread the moment.

I mean, your one skill as a politician is supposed to be able to read the pulse of the regular person.

And he's up here talking, you know, he's got to cancel his book tour because of

security concerns.

I assume the boomer assassins are in his inbox.

But he's sitting up there and he's talking about, oh, well, you know, we've got a plan.

And when Trump's gone, the Republicans are going to get back to normal.

I'm on my exercise bike talking with these guys regularly and when you you know when you're sweating next to them a lot of inhibitions go like like they're in some bathhouse

that was amazing he was basically like yeah like if you know the rumors about the equinox sauna they're true and that's how legislation gets made

And it's just, you know, and I see it in a lot of my readership too.

Like when I went to DC, I got a lot of people that were talking, like, busnap, like, like, Greg Lansman.

Because the thing about Ohio, none of our congressmen go anywhere because it's all gerrymandered.

So, Democrat, Republican, you're in for life if you want it.

So, it's just a bunch of lazy bums.

And a bunch of my readership, they wanted me to bust up.

I mean, Greg Lansman from Cincinnati, Chantel Brown.

Chantel Brown's like chief of staff was like scared she was going to get nailed on APAC, which, you know, if AIPAC's such a good thing, you'd think she would want to stand and talk about it.

And I think the leadership of the party is just really underestimating how fed up people are.

Like at the end of the election, right when Trump got elected, I was pretty much like everybody else.

Like there was no really meltdown.

You know, it was kind of like just, well, like, here we go again.

And I feel like the resist liberals are kind of getting their mojo back.

And J.B.

Pritzker, Governor of Illinois, his chief of staff had a tweet that I agreed with.

It's like, the fight of the party right now is,

do you want to fight or do you want to lay down?

Like, it's not moderate.

It's not versus left, right, whatever.

whatever it's do you want to fight and i mean chuck schumer had the dog check of the century

and and he failed it he failed it and it's just

this the gerontocracy the old people like terminally low levels of dog in chuck schumer

it was a basic test where it's like oh well they're tearing down the government anyway so let's just give them like let's just give them free passes to do more tearing down of the government and just roll over and capitulate.

Yeah, I mean, I've had enough.

I've had enough of the Senate.

I mean, like the thing that I saw from, you know, Trump won was that the bar to impress the people that are now charging Tom Tillis' office with broadswords,

you know, it was quite low.

It was so low, in fact, that Adam Schiff was turned into a media star.

You know, if you had seen a video of Adam Schiff talking in like 2014, and, you know, you told people people are going to line up around the block to see this man speak, I would kill myself.

But that's what happened.

You know, you didn't really have to do a lot.

You just had to put up like a fig leaf of,

you know, of resistance or theatrics.

But yeah, they're not even doing that.

And it's for the dumbest reasons.

The vibe I got from the upper echelons of the Democratic Party, both in leadership and the rising stars, i.e.

Fetterman, was this

that they had completely bought into this stuff about a cultural vibe shift where they thought, well, you know, conventional wisdom tells me that people like receiving their social security checks, but it's gay to complain about that.

So I actually, I like all of this.

And yeah, no, talk about misreading the moment.

You're dead on.

Like, that is.

The two skills you have as a politician are to speak publicly.

That's totally out.

None of these guys can do that.

But to to at least like be able to take the temperature of the country, to be able to know enough to even act cynically, they totally failed at that.

And like, I mean, I think like, you know,

when they try to justify themselves, they'd be like, look,

either the government gets shut down and that helps Trump, or we just keep the government open.

And, you know, like, that'll be less.

We don't have the votes one way or the other.

But like, I just think like, yeah, like, it's...

like you're not going to stop Trump from doing what he's doing with the votes you currently have.

But like there are things in politics beyond just winning or losing the immediate issue at hand.

And like, one of those is, I don't know, the morale of the people you're supposed to represent who like want to see something from you other than just capitulation.

And, like, it.

And why is it like, it seems like when the Republicans are in a minority, they can stop the government from doing literally anything.

And I just like, I don't quite get the math here.

Well,

it shows the shortfalls of popularism, which, as far as I can understand it, is just if something pulls, you know, if anyone less than a a majority likes something, never talk about it, completely give it up, excise it from your repertoire, never talk about it again.

And if you do talk about it, talk about how much you hate it for 10 minutes straight.

You know, a lot of these things that

are signature Trump, Musk, Vance policies now were things that were incredibly unpopular during Trump one.

And in fact, things that they said they were not doing back then.

You know, what happened?

They talked about those issues in such a way, and Biden was so uniquely unpopular that they were no longer radioactive.

I, of course, think that the implementation of those policies will change matters, that a lot of things poll a certain way before people actually see them in effect.

But on the Democratic side, there is just this sort of like Calvinism with how issues poll.

And issue polling is the dumbest thing to do this with because it is the least concrete, least certain, most malleable polling there is, what people think about any individual policy.

But like the second that like, you know, they see that, you know, mass deportations are a, you know, 50, 49, 48 issue of people in favor.

Okay, well, I guess that's it.

There's no use ever talking about, you know, if

like if a woman who was eight months old and has never lived in Laos, uh gets fucking rounded up and sent back to this country that she has never lived in and doesn't speak the language, If people are getting renditioned and fucking tortured, no use talking about that.

Felix, I had a guy today claim that Palestine is a losing issue and anyone who supports Palestine will lose because the Palestinian cause is only favorable to 33% of Americans.

Well, shit, that's 4% more favorable than the Democratic Party is right now.

So you think they could do something with that?

You think that's like a significant enough base to, I don't know, stand for something.

It reminds me of

one of those like stupid

AI women.

Charitably, I'm going to say AI women.

I think it is either

one of Jonathan Pollard's nephews or someone from the subcontinent pretending to be a sexy Israeli babe using an AI-generated picture.

But

this shows how stupid this new generation is compared to the older ones.

Because she posted a poll where she says, only 20% of Americans say that they're in favor of Hamas.

And it's funny, it's crazy.

Oh, only, oh, only one out of five people will answer the phone and say to another human being, I support Hamas, compared to what, like 2% 10 years ago?

Like,

that is an increase by the factor of like 10 or 20, maybe.

Look what the Republicans did with abortion.

They were upside down with that.

They said, screw it.

We're going to protect our people and we're going to run this toxic football all the way to the Supreme Court.

They suffered one election with consequences, and now it's illegal in a handful of states.

Yeah, I mean, like, that's exactly it.

Because, like,

you think they let how brutally unpopular banning abortion is, stopping them from doing it?

And of course not.

Because they know that the people who are for banning abortion are going to vote for them because of that.

Yeah.

And obviously, there are consequences to enacting these policies that pull one way.

And when they're in effect, it's a different story.

But okay, what about policies that have good effects compared to forcing forcing an 11-year-old to give birth at gunpoint or destroying the economy?

DJ, like, and your readership are like, and you know, you're like the king of like actually covering politics, talking to politicians.

If you just show up, they have to talk to you.

Yeah.

Like, I mean, like, how do you, like, how do you judge like, like, the national mood against politicians right now?

And against

Democrats?

Because if you're a Republican, like, I don't know, like, I, you probably, you're probably loving what's happening right now, but everyone else seems to be, I don't know, like, in a daze or just disgusted at what's going on right now.

I mean, even the Republicans, I mean, Ohio is a general Republican state, but I have a lot of Republican followers and a lot of Republican readers that are just like, they respect that, A, I just talk to these people like normal people.

Like, it's just very rare to, you know, be like, hey, man, you're quit being a pervert.

Just the unscripted nature.

And like, there is an inherent like disgust with politicians and just a lot of like untrustworthiness.

And like, Ohio, I don't really understand what the Democratic Party is.

Well, I guess a lot of it has to do with racism when you get outside.

I mean, Ohio is just a very racist state in general.

But you just look at what 30 years of Republicanism has done to this state, and then you've got somebody like Vivek Ramaswamy coming along, and he's going to have to pretend.

You know, he's he had this quote, like he's running against the Democratic machine.

Of Ohio.

Of Ohio.

Yeah.

Yeah.

And

our machine, our Democratic machine shouldn't even be allowed to organize a Child Baptist birthday party,

let alone an actual party.

And so I think that it's just, it goes both ways.

There's a lot of disgust from the Republicans too.

But the Republicans are just better at playing into it.

Like I talk about it a lot.

Like the one thing I respect about Trump supporters, literally the one thing.

They know they're supposed to be angry.

Now, apparently we've got some boomers with broadswords.

That's an interesting development.

It's definitely an interesting development for our side.

It sounds like reinforcements are on their way.

But

a lot of good, well-intentioned liberals until recently, they didn't have the anger in their hearts.

And I think it's changing.

And I think, you know, it's going to keep going this way because at the end of the day, like, Ohio is going to be the perfect example.

We're about to eliminate the income tax.

We have politicians campaigning to end the property tax.

It's going to

no state income tax and no property tax?

Yeah, yeah.

Sounds good.

Yeah, yeah.

But the checks are always going to clear.

And so you're going to see,

you know, like Ohio is going to bear the brunt of it.

Regular Ohioans, poor Ohioans, people that basically aren't some drunk suburban car dealer making $250,000 a year.

They're all going to feel the economic pain, which is inherently going to spur more anger.

more distrust for institutions and general hatred of politicians, which I'm generally in in the position now where, like, what's bad for the state and bad at large is generally good for my business because I'm the only one that seems to like to be talking in these terms.

But yeah, I don't, I don't think this trend is going anywhere and it's going to keep going for a long time.

Well, uh, DJ, when I think about like something that's going to juice this trend out of like all the things that Trump and Elon Musk have done so far in office, and like, I'm not saying that this is the most horrific of them, but in terms of like voter blowback, the decision to shutter social security offices and essentially force the elderly to go on the computer to get their social security check i cannot imagine what that's going to look like yeah ilon's elon's rationale for this was well we're shutting down the phone lines because 40 of social security uh direct deposit fraud is done through phones and like that's already an incredibly low occurrence crime but okay by okay by that well let's extend that 100 of social security direct deposit fraud is done with with banks.

Let's just send them fucking gold bullion through a pigeon network.

One thing, I'm just thankful that these guys are evil in their hearts and that they are just onto,

I don't know, I'm not even going to say that word, evil.

I can type it.

I can type it.

They're evil, but I'm thankful that they're incompetent.

Because where it with messing Social Security, are you crazy?

Like you said, that's the one thing that could turn the tide and give Democrats some gambling money going into the midterms.

That was that was the thing that kind of got the ball rolling on Shrubb's downfall.

All right,

that's a shout out.

We're bringing it back, we're bringing back like 2004 era, like lib posting, yeah, the chimperer in chief.

Yeah, that's right, they're not going to be sleeping well tonight.

I, yeah, well, I, I, I really think that Smirking Chimp is like a good style guide.

You mentioned Vivek.

You know, he had his brief debut and then departure from the Trump administration and the Department of Dog.

But now he

wants to run for governor of Ohio.

Now,

he's been a character that features in the rooster universe for quite some time.

And right before, right before

we started recording today, I saw a news hit about how Vivek says that he's open to renaming Lake Erie Lake Ohio.

He says, anybody think if there's a Lake Michigan, maybe there should be a Lake Ohio around here?

Ram Sami said Friday during a local GOP fundraiser in Toledo, about 13 miles away from the shore of Lake Erie.

I'm feeling that.

We'll talk about that a little more as this campaign progresses.

Hello, fellow flat-brim hat wearers.

His whole campaign is just geared towards stupid people, which in Ohio, you have to respect it.

It's a winning political strategy.

But it's going to be interesting to see because like the Trump apparatus, they kind of like kicked him out of Doge and he was like, and then they had the standoff with John Houstead, who has a marble where his brain is supposed to be, and kind of like neither of them wanted this Senate appointment.

Vivek was willing to throw down for the governorship, like, well, let's just.

throw down for the governorship and Houston tucked his tail, went to the Senate.

And so now you have like the Trump apparatus kind of like getting behind Vivek.

He's got this new commercial out, their pack.

Trump just completely slaughters his name.

Like he sounds half drunk.

He's like, Vivek Ramashwami.

And they just posted it up there because he's talking positively.

Like, you know, that's this is what you piggies can't get enough of, right?

But interestingly enough, that

Mike DeWine, who was basically out of favor with the base, he's probably been more popular with Democrats than he is with Republicans these days.

His country club wing of the party was kind of sunsetting to this MAGA takeover.

And Dwine went out and recruited former Ohio State football coach Jim Tressel, the national champion, as his lieutenant governor.

And it's basically like the governor, like if you were running for, if you were going to run for president, you would do these things called Lincoln Day dinners.

And it's just like these little hobgoblin affairs around the state.

And Tresll is doing them.

He's going out to western Ohio, Dark County.

And it's not like he's an accomplished football coach.

He's been a a college administrator.

He doesn't need people to say, you know, nice speech, coach.

I really liked it.

So, from what I understand, I think if I had to gamble right now, I would gamble on Jim Tressel challenging Vivek

and kind of like the country club wing strikes back.

Trump loves his coaches, loves his athletes, and he's already endorsed Vivek, but like if there's polling that comes out that, you know, shows it's a neck and neck race, I think you could see like a Trump duel endorsement.

And I mean, at the end of the day, Vivek's going to be a guy, a monotheist Hindu named Vivek Ramaswamy, going into western Ohio, Eastern Ohio, asking these holy roller voters to support him.

And if Trump, you know, if he's like the big Trump guy, then that's one thing.

But if there's a guy like Jim Tressel in there, he could be back selling, you know, Veg could be back on Fox News selling junk bonds to seniors real quick.

With Vivek, it does.

I mean, I'm sure more went into it than this, but like, as someone who

tangentially follows Vivek's career, it does seem like he made a big speech about Urkel and then they sent him to Ohio as a form of internal exile.

It seems like the sort of thing that would happen during the Cultural Revolution.

You have to go to Ohio because you have made counter-revolutionary posts about Urkel.

his his cultural re-education is that he has to go to football practice he's got to hit the tech he's got to hit the best

if i if i if i was jim tressel's campaign i would be doing anything to try to get like to try to sort of like fake out vivek's campaign to do like a viral video where he attempts to throw a football oh that would be great that's a great idea oh my god they should hire you he's in it in his In his essence, he is like your typical Ivy League theater kid.

He was a tennis player, but he like he lies about his tennis accomplishments.

And he's like, I was, swear to God, he went, like, he went to private elementary school.

Like, do you realize, like, he's like, my family came from nothing.

You went to private elementary school, brother.

Like, do you know how rich you have to be to send your child to private elementary?

And then he gets up there and he's like, I was, you know, I was all state tennis.

It's like, no, you weren't.

Like, you were not.

It's in the 1960s when you were in school, but you can look these up.

You are nowhere to be seen, just completely lying.

He's a D, he's an all-right tennis player but yeah he doesn't like throwing a football throwing the baseball would be comical well do you think do you think his uh ignorance of the uh sports folkways of oh state um made him especially vulnerable to believing that you were ohio's current ohio state football coach ryan day oh yeah

yeah

100 would you would you let our listeners know about about your your sort of years-long uh your like ocean's 11 style uh heist to convince ronsami that you are indeed ryan day and would like to meet him at a columbus area raisin canes

my we're always my it started with my friend i won't i won't mention his name because uh like legal liabilities but it started with my friend who who got his number one time and he showed it to me and he was like he texted him as right he was like hey it's ryan day here really like what you're doing for this country would love for you to uh speak to the team are he signed it rd and the vacc immediately came back with oh thank you coach would love to meet you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

Thank you.

And he sends it to me.

And he's like, wow, you know, this is crazy.

I'm like, well, are we going to do something with it?

Are we going to do something with it?

And nothing really popped.

I showed it to one of my Republican friends.

And I was like, man, we had Vivek on the hook.

And he was like, you know, that's actually Vivek's number.

And I was like, oh, interesting.

And so that was in April.

And then in August, I'm just sitting there bored.

And I'm like, fuck it.

I'm just going to text this guy.

And I texted him.

My name is Tim Chitters.

I was like, hey, Vivek, you know, this is Tim Chitters, local OSU quality control coach, reaching out the head ball coach.

Like, I didn't use Ryan Day, I didn't use Ohio State.

The head ball coach really wants to like, you know, you to come in and talk to the team.

And so

he immediately responds, you know, we pay,

because I was like, if you really, if you would believe it,

a lot of the football players think you should run for governor in 2026.

And the way his ego works, he's just like, oh, yeah, of course, a bunch of like college jocks are going to have opinions on the 2026

race.

So I've learned in this business, if you're trying to get at these people, if you go to the top and can hook them, like I got Frank LaRose in a similar fashion playing this like Baptist preacher.

They will spin you off.

If you pay them one compliment, they will spin you off to the assistant.

And these assistants don't have they don't have their jobs because they're asking questions you know if their boss comes to you and says hey this guy's from oio state set something up with him

so

it was a nice lady amanda we get to talking and i'm like i can't meet him at ohio state i'm worried about like the legal ramifications but there's like this raising canes on Olentangy Road, probably like a stone's throw up the road from like their football facility.

And so I commence him.

I'm like, hey, we're going to, you know, they're one of the promos.

We're going to shoot this promo in this parking lot, a raising canes.

She's like,

well, you know, just to put something on your radar, he is a vegetarian.

I was like, okay, well, we'll have a vegetarian spread.

He's like, we'll have a vegetarian spread.

I was like, the team's going to lay it out for him.

And not if those fries are cooked in beef tall,

that's a problem.

And so I tried to get him.

I was like, you know, the theme of this season is going to be rugged individualism.

So we can get.

at a team sport.

The theme of the theme this year is rugged individualism.

I was like, so if we could get him to show up in like Western cowboy outfit, that would be great.

And

he didn't take the bait.

That was the one thing we didn't get him on.

So the day comes.

So I'm like, fuck.

So I don't want to wear like Ohio.

You know, I have, I'm a Buckeye pervert.

I have a bunch of Ohio State gear.

I don't want to wear anything.

My boy hooks me up with like a generic black polo with like this O that just says Ohio on it.

And it's like,

it looks like if it was a Netflix movie, they couldn't secure the rights.

Like they would be there.

So I've got this polo on.

I've got like, I tuck my, I sent my wife a picture.

She's like, tuck in your shirt, tuck in your shirt.

So I tuck in the shirt.

I get this text and she's like, hey,

the security guy is going to be contacting you.

I'm like, security guy?

Because I told her, I was like, you know, space is tight.

Like, just you and Vivek.

This security guy hits me up.

He's got five names.

He's like, I got five people coming with me.

Vave's bringing like the whole.

I'm like, nobody said anything about an entourage.

So I'm like, okay, like, hold on.

I was like, let me work something.

I got to talk to our security people too.

So I come back and I'm like, fuck it.

Like, we're just too far along at this point.

I'm like, all right, send it.

So the intern comes up.

So then the assistant gets there.

She brings an intern.

Nobody said anything about the intern.

And out of all the people that day, I thought the intern might recognize like like something was amiss because he was a big Ohio State fan.

He was like, you know, Caleb Downs, I just graduated.

I can't wait to meet Caleb Downs.

And I'm like, I got you, brother.

I was like, you're going to shake two Caleb Downs hands today.

He comes up in this big SUV.

He's got his security guy with him.

He's got like a whole, like, probably three or four.

I looked him up.

They're like doctor.

They're like Indian doctors in Columbus, like very wealthy people who like came to see the part of the show.

And

so we get to like talking.

I get my picture, and that's all I really wanted.

And I said, once I got the picture, it's in there.

And he's like, all right, so what are we going to do?

And I was like, well, I guess we'll go over here by the Kane sign.

And he gets this fucking interview.

It's like a McDonald's-Kane Midwest dystopian parking lot.

And he's talking about, you know, my family up came from nothing.

He's like, that flag up there means something.

And the camera pivots, and it's just like this.

Thinky ass American flag flying above a McDonald's.

And I asked him, like, you know, is there any Ohio State memories in your favorite players?

He's like, well, I was, you know, a tennis guy growing up.

I was like, okay, okay.

And so, like, I just end the interview and he's like, are we going to be mic'd up at the Woody Hayes Center?

And I was like, yeah, I was like, we're going to lay it out.

Like, everybody's going to be there.

They're waiting for you.

You know, this is just a little promo.

We're doing a little behind the scenes.

And he goes, I go, I'm going to get on my bike.

I'm going to meet you guys over there because I ride my bike everywhere.

And they were like, bike?

And I was like, yeah, I was like, you know, I was like, NIL, you know, we got to pay these players.

Like, times are tough in Joe Biden's economy with these gas prices.

Am I right?

And they're just like,

they bought it and looked like you did.

Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

So I was supposed to have my friend.

I was supposed to have a friend in the Woody Hayes Center because I was going to go do it myself.

But when you have a security guy, they have guns.

You just never know how they react when you're embarrassing their rich client.

And those guys are ready to die for their 25 an hour with no

I was supposed to have a friend there, but he couldn't make it.

So I just pedaled off.

And it ended up with him in the Woody Hayes Center.

He was calling my friend.

He had the Google number that he thought was Ryan Day.

And Vivek was texting him, like, hey, coach, it's me.

Like, we're by the area with the trophies.

And then I hit him with my

calling card.

It was a Shrek, some Shrek dong.

I was like,

You know, we got you.

You'll never be governor, you fucking oaf.

He probably will be governor.

Well, I mean, he got some get back on you, didn't in your recent trip to DC, didn't his security escort you away from him?

Yeah, so we were, I was in D.C.

and there was like Ohio's birthday party and it was in the James Madison Library of Congress, whatever the hell that is.

It sounds important.

But it was like a public area and I tried to like walk in because I thought everybody would be drunk.

And so I was like, I'll show up late just to try to breeze in like Bane.

Oh, where is that man?

Speak of the devil and he shall appear.

You know, get a, get, get, get some,

get some free, you know, get some free food.

Got stopped by a nerd, some like University of Akron, like socialite.

And he's like, you can't go in there.

But I saw him at bay.

And we like locked eyes.

They expect to find one of us at the Woody Hayes Center, brother.

And so I was like, I know how it works.

They're like, all right,

you can't go in here.

I was like, okay, well, it's a public building.

And I was like, I'll just wait by the elevators.

I was talking to people who were coming out.

Like, people knew me.

And they were coming out.

I was like, there's one way in, one way out.

Right.

And they're like, yeah, like, if he wants to go down the elevators, he's going to have to like walk past you.

So then they called the Capitol Police.

And they tried to get me escorted.

And she was like trying to cajole me onto the elevator.

And I was like, well, let's just have this conversation here.

And she goes, I'm not talking to you with that thing running.

At which point it's like, gotcha.

You know, you're just like trying to get me on my rights.

I was like, no, I'm good here.

So she goes back, tells Vivek's like little henchman, like, he's not moving.

I can't really do much about him.

And they secure, like, they go out this side door,

which down like the stairwells.

And so I thought like, you know, he was going out some secret entrance or whatever.

I go in the elevator, go to, go to the

bottom floor.

I think I lost him.

I'm like, fuck, like, he must have gone out some side door.

Like, it is what it is.

Like, I thought it was going to be a bust.

And then I look up and like down this long hallway, it's Vivek, his assistant, and one of his like Rena henchmen.

Brother, like, I'm starting to think you don't have any love in your heart for your old friend Tim Shitters.

I was like, we had that moment outside Cades and he's like trying to like shake, you know, he's like thanking the security people, like acting like he's like a fucking man of the people, like just getting his SUV.

And

it's like, brother, you went through all that.

You could have just taken some razz and you could have just like if that were me, I'd be like, yeah, you got me, man.

Like, congratulations, you know, sat there, answered the nice man's questions, and gone about my day, but instead, he just makes it this whole big thing.

And so now I have to haunt him for the next year and a half, basically.

I want to nominate you for like a pollster for coming up with the fake football name Tim Chitlett.

Like, that's that is.

I love that.

I like sit around thinking of fake names all day.

That is one of the best I've ever heard.

Yeah, it was from my alcoholic days.

And in his lore, Tim Chitters is a former Ohio State quarterback who loves barbecue, black women, and drugs in that order.

Study in tape, study and tape in the QB film room.

And

there's a Facebook profile of Tim Chitters, and you look, it's like some guy.

It's like, my office is like, is that Kid Rock?

And I was like, no,

I got on Google and I typed in Kid Rock look alike.

There is some real craft going into this.

Yeah.

And so when I needed a fake name, so I was like, you know, what's your name?

And it just popped, I was like, Tim Cheddar.

So

if all goes according to point for Vivek, he will enter the pantheon of Ohio politicians and Ohio politics.

And one of the things that I love about the rooster and like showing the necessity of having a vibrant local news coverage is that there are so many politicians at the local level that are just so funny.

And there is so much

abetty corruption and characters.

And I want to spend some time talking about a couple of Ohio things.

And I want to begin with a character that I've come to known through you that is, can you tell us about the city council candidate and attorney who

currently has $4,000 in unpaid parking tickets?

And now, like, that in and of itself isn't that incredible, but like, it's her excuse and where the parking tickets were accrued that really makes this story special.

So thankfully, I married one of the nosiest women in Columbus.

I call her my husband.

I'm the wife in this scenario.

But she was just looking into this candidate.

Her name's Tiara Ross.

We have this fake ward system in Columbus and where it's like you represent a ward, but the whole city gets to vote on it.

So even if you lose your ward, you can still win power.

And it was basically like we had concerns about her residency because there was nothing showing.

that she had moved into the district one year prior to the election

as required.

And it's like, okay, well, maybe she has a lease or whatever, but like, we're gonna,

we're gonna challenge her residency and we're gonna like fucking make her prove it.

And so,

in the course of the investigation, like, we went to this candidate night, and like, when I'm inside, I kind of draw the attention.

And she was outside.

Uh, my wife, hilltop husband, uh-uh, she was like outside in the car, and we waited till she, like, Tara Ross was done.

And I'm like, text her, like, Tara Ross is coming out.

We got her license plate, and so we paid a private eye, I think it was $200 to run like a license plate report.

And like Columbus has established this like five eyes type of surveillance with like plate readers, camera, like it's crazy what you can get from it.

But it turned out that she, like, it came back like she had a suspended license.

So at the board, at this board hearing, it's the Board of Elections.

It's you're under oath.

She's a city attorney who like it's whose job is basically, it's called the property action team, which is basically to like enforce code violations on poor owners and slum lords.

And

we have a back and forth.

She produces this lease that showed she moved into the district one day prior to the deadline.

She was the ordained local Democratic Party.

And I'm like, okay, that's cool.

I was like, well, do you know your license is suspended?

And she's like, what?

And I was like, yeah, like, you drove here on a suspended license.

Like, I saw you driving last week on a suspended license.

And she gets asked about it.

And she likes hem and hauls.

She's like, I have no idea what this is about.

Like hems and hauls.

And then afterwards, I didn't see it, but I was told like she just breaks down into tears.

And so on the way home, we're like, you know, it was a kangaroo court.

She beats the challenge.

She moved in one day prior, whatever.

We're going to challenge that in court too.

But I was like, what did she get her license suspended for?

And Hill Top Husband looked it up.

Like one of the things in Columbus, it's like, if you don't pay your parking tickets, they'll suspend your license.

So, and that's public information.

So, we have her plate.

So, we entered her plate into the system and it was a gold mine.

Like, this broad had $3,975 of tickets,

48 tickets going back to like 2022.

She was like, She works as a court attorney.

So that was her, her excuse was like, I was born into a working class family.

And I work around the court.

And,

you know, the meter sometimes, sometimes the meter expires, da, da da da da.

Her, like, there were some around the court, no doubt about that, but they primarily came around bars

around her apartment complex.

And that her lawyer in the case, in the

docket, like this whole binder that he gave is proof, it shows she had a

parking pass for her luxury apartment complex.

But she was so lazy and she didn't think tickets applied to her that she was just racking up tickets, sometimes twice before work, after work, parking in front of the leasing office

at her apartment apartment complex because she was too lazy to go park in the garage and walk back to her apartment.

And it turned out she had gotten a speeding ticket in Whitehall, which we're waiting on the body camera footage of that, got pulled over at

2:48 a.m.

on a Saturday.

And she definitely got put through the paces, but we're waiting on the body camera.

But she didn't, she like got, you know, she likely escapes a DUI, doesn't pay that traffic ticket, gets her license suspended, and then was driving on a suspended license for over a year while working as a city attorney and her excuse is that she was born into a working class family and the tickets just compiled and she didn't know how to do it meanwhile she's making 145 000 for a make work job in city hall

and it just and the democrats in this city are going to endorse her anyway like one of the city councilmen said she's like still qualified And it's like, brother, you're a lawyer.

She's a lawyer.

How are you going to endorse a lawyer who's like, the law clearly doesn't matter?

Like, you say you didn't know, like, she told the board under oath, like, I had no knowledge of this.

I don't know about these tickets.

It's like, how do you not?

You had 48.

And the district, the local, the local paper, they dug into it.

It turned out she had 60 tickets going back to 2019.

And her license has been suspended four times in her life.

This was her fourth.

I mean, I saw the detail about the parking tickets, a lot of them being in front of a bar.

I mean, I don't know.

Yeah.

Maybe the bar was close to her house.

And then if you look at like, and people are like, where did her money go?

And it's like, like, well, probably car insurance, which I don't think she had.

And then, you know, she's in like South Africa wearing matching pajamas with her girls.

And then she's like in Costa Rica.

And it's like,

okay, now she has paid her debt.

She does have her license back, I think.

But we've been calling her reckless Ross.

And it just shows like,

you know, I mean, if you're like, It's just how they treat, we coddle drivers.

And it's like, if you were just blowing off parking regulations like that, parking like an asshole for four years five years your license has been suspended four times and you're still driving like you have no business on the roads at all and columbus is probably going to put her on city council i'm just i'm mystified by the excuse of i was born into a working class family because it like you know far be it from me to try to understand the working class uh but Is that a stereotype that they just like don't pay parking tickets?

And she's like, they accumulated.

And it's like, well, yeah, like it says right there on the ticket that you were clearly just throwing into your glove box or whatever.

Like, if you don't pay it in 10 days, it goes up.

And then if you don't pay it in 30 days, it doubles.

But you just clearly thought it didn't apply to you.

And she like, she lived with her grandparents for her entire adult life, like from the time she was 18.

all the way until 37 until she had to move into this district a day

before before the deadline.

And she's like...

She was living with her grandparents at 36.

Yeah, yeah.

And then, like, the whole thing, we were calling her Reynoldsburg, Ross, because she was living in Reynolds, like a suburb.

And she had this thing where she was like, you know, I love this city for so much.

I commuted 19 miles a day

to go work in this city.

And it's like, yeah, generally speaking, commuting is like an expectation of a job.

If you're going to live 20 miles away, they generally expect you to make that that trip.

And it's our city council president, Shannon Hardin, like they're very good at keeping the image of being progressive.

And he's like, you know, I want a black woman to fill this seat.

And it's like, okay, that's fine.

But you've like, were there no other qualified black women?

You know, and so there's this other candidate, Jesse Vogel.

He's a Jewish lawyer.

And they basically treat him like he's Hamas because it's like if they let him onto the council, then they would have to be, then they would have to vote on like actual good legislation and they would have to vote no and start showing their ass on some of these things and have people realize like, hey, this institution isn't nearly as progressive as, you know, the gay black president or the black woman,

you know, or the Hispanic woman and like the token white guy would have you believe.

And so it'll be an interesting election.

We'll see.

Well,

next up on the interesting Ohio politician character creation screen is State Representative Melanie Miller and her husband, Matt Miller.

Now, DJ, thanks to your interpretive reporting, I learned that this couple is into

a certain lifestyle.

And I'm wondering,

do they have like a Fet Life profile and are they going to be in New York anytime?

So I was trying to bring in Murder Brian for this investigation.

But he's big time now.

You can't just get a hold of Murder Brian these days.

But he was the expert.

But yeah, I got a tip that Melanie Miller, she's like a former like Miss Ohio.

She can sing a little bit,

but she's holy roller, hardcore anti-abortion, but curiously like doesn't have children.

And her husband is the mayor of Ashland, who is just like, I guess if you're familiar with Chris Christie.

He like kind of gives off those vibes.

Like, who did that?

What was his name?

The guy from TLC that had that show that got busted for tax fraud uh he gives up like these just real serial killer vibes so i got a tip one day from a hardcore republican source like hey you know the millers are swingers right and i'm like okay well that's interesting and like

back in my drinking days you know i would have just ran with it i'd have been like this person says you know so and so is swingers but you it's a good way to get sued and i just you know they're trying to wait for me to step out of line.

So I caught him after the state and the state, both of them.

And like they're walking into what I call the danger zone.

I'm standing there with my camera and I point at them and I just go pineapple lifestyle.

And

their reactions like, she's like, whoa, and like the

Matt Miller, the husband, he's like, he's just like this cartoonish, evil, like diabolical laughter.

Like, yeah, what are you going to do about it, you little freak?

And so I was like, I had to explain the pineapple lifestyle.

because again, I'm not an expert like Murder Brian, so my, you know, readership isn't as first.

But I was like, this is a code phrase that only, you know, for the swinger lifestyle.

And if they weren't swingers or were not familiar with the pineapple lifestyle, I probably would have suspected literally any other reaction.

So I'm just going to let you guys judge that.

Yeah.

Yeah.

It's a very specific phrase.

It's one I was not aware of as well.

It's like the upside-down pineapple is some sort of like hanky code for contemporary suburban swingers.

But I mean, like, I'm just saying, like, you know,

you may draw your own conclusions from the facts there.

But like, to me, I think like the lifestyle, I think is probably very popular among like right-wing, young right-wing politicians and like, like influencers.

Like, I just, they, they, they, they have that vibe, and I think that, I think it holds a certain appeal to them.

Well, that's so many of these guys, like, in Ohio, like they get elected because we have, we have term limits in Ohio.

So it's a lot of, you get a lot of these like, you know, 25-year-old freaks, 30-year-old freaks, and they come down and they treat Columbus, like Columbus is just like a city of five suburbs in a trench coat, masquerading as like the big city.

But then these people come down and they act like it's like Las Vegas.

Well, I mean, that's going to be like the big city.

I think if you're young and conservative, it's like you're never going to be out of work for, you know, advertising this like, you know, get married young lifestyle and like living conservative family values.

But like, you need some reward for it.

And I think there's like a give and a take here where like if you espouse the correct values publicly, that I think that gives you like in your mind, like a pass to be like, you know, doing drugs and fucking and sucking at pineapple overjuice.

Yeah.

It's just like every American's God given right as far as I'm concerned, but like

they don't agree with that.

Yeah, and I think I knowing her, because I'd never really had much, like, she just never really interested me much as a person or from a content perspective.

So that was literally the first time I'd ever said any words to her at all.

She failed the test.

And so now, you know, she's under investigation.

And

I think from their model, it would just be like, well, we're married.

You know, God doesn't, there's nothing, there's nothing illicit about the pineapple lifestyle.

You know, Jesus wasn't out there railing against the pineapple lifestyle.

And so what we do in the private of our, and, you know,

in the private, privatization of our own bedrooms is our own business, which is fine.

You know, I'm generally not trying to imagine state legislators having sex, um, but then they're going out and stomping on trans kids, trying to repeal gay marriage and all that nonsense.

So, at which point it falls into my purview, absolutely, and then uh, and then finally, I guess, like, uh, another story you've covered that uh, I want to talk about is like, I would say, like, indicative not just of Ohio, but I would say, like, this is uh, like, so you can stand in for like a lot of the politics of like contemporary America, and that is um an education bill um it's an education bill

i don't have i don't have the i don't have the hb number on it now but 96.

hb 96 that essentially will be um freezing spending on education which isn't you know in in in because costs go up every year that's a cut in education and basically in the exact same bill that slashes funding for special education they're considering giving a billion dollars of taxpayer money to the cleveland browns to build a new stadium.

Talk a little bit about this bill.

I don't know, like, is this indicative of like a larger trend in American politics of just like literally throwing disabled children under the bus to build its football stadium?

For sure.

You know, we've had in Ohio, we're at the tip of the spear when it comes to like the voucher system,

and you know, which is basically just rich

handout to rich families to send their kids to private school already.

And that then these schools can discriminate against special needs students.

And like even the charter schools, they don't want them because the costs are higher.

And so we had Speaker Matt Huffman who got elected.

He could be Speaker for the next eight years.

I call him a domestic, in my opinion, he's a domestic terrorist because of this stuff here.

He gets up there.

He says, well, our school funding model, which is already insufficient enough, they've made certain promises to these schools

in the future.

He said, it's unsustainable.

It's unsustainable.

Everybody's like, well, that's news to us.

You know, while you're trying to eliminate the property tax and you're trying to eliminate the income tax, he got walked back a little bit about on that.

And so in this budget,

like you said,

they froze the costs at 200 and 2022.

So basically, it is a spending cut.

It's going to cost

the House Finance Chair.

It's going to cost districts in his district like $175 million.

And just if that's passed like tomorrow.

And so that was like already going to be a fight on its own because it's going to hurt, like, like you said, the special needs, the poorest students the most.

That was already going to be a huge issue.

You've got Central Ohio's teachers' unions

organizing against it, coordinating for the first time in their history, which is going to be something really fun to watch.

But then last week, they come out.

The Browns have been very open.

They want this, they want to move out of downtown Cleveland.

They want to move into like what I've described as an

Amazon warehouse a cyber truck in terms of like

this dome in Brook Park.

Oh, that's a monstrosity.

Yeah.

Yeah.

In Brook Park, which is 20 miles outside of downtown.

So Jimmy Haslam can monopolize all the parking around there.

And, you know, we could host a super.

Only time we're going to be hosting a Super Bowl, I can tell you that much.

But it's like, it's a $2 billion project.

And they want $600 million.

They want $600 million in public money.

And after basically Cleveland told him to fuck off, Cuyahoga County County told him to fuck off.

Jimmy Haslam is a Republican.

He went to the Republican legislature.

Mike DeWine had an initiative where he was going to raise, he was going to create like a sports funding, a sports arena fund.

Because if we bail out the Browns, then the Bengals are going to come knocking, then the Reds, and then the Guardians, and on and on and on.

And so DeWine, he at least wanted to raise taxes on sports betting and marijuana.

to kind of create this fund that teams could draw in

for new arenas.

Now, I was against that anyway, but at least, you know, you're still paying for it.

And what they unveiled last week was $600 million in state-backed bonds for the Browns, which will cost taxpayers over a billion.

It's even worse than just giving them cash.

Would cost them over a billion dollars

to build this new stadium to basically take the Browns out of Cleveland, out of downtown, and put it in this godforsaken suburb that's nothing but an industrial wasteland at this point.

Oh,

Chris just brought up the proposed stadium.

And if you look at all these renderings, see where all these trees are?

That's all going to be surface parking lot.

10,000 cars surrounding this.

Yeah,

it's literally going to be 20,000 surface parking lots.

Cleveland has

a light rail system up there.

They're not going to build a new station.

There's one, the one that's closest to it is the Crow Flies.

The Browns aren't even going to build pedestrian infrastructure so people can walk from the train station to the stadium.

So they're going to make as many, because they want as many people as they can driving to the stadium to feed them $14 bud lights while they watch a four-win football team in December and then climb back into their 2010 fucking Ford F40 or whatever and get back on the highway.

That is...

Look, I'm aware there are like other justifications people make for this, chiefly economic, but like what?

How many times have the Browns made the playoffs in the last like 20 years on follow football?

Once.

That's not good.

We've won one game.

That's not good at all.

They want $600 billion when you gave $300 million to a brittle sex pest and Deshaun Watson who had no ACLs.

This team would not be relevant for five more years at the earliest.

Wait, well, DJ, like, when it comes to

taxpayer funding for stadiums, I always think, why stop there?

Why not have the taxpayers just pay Miles Garrett's contract?

Right?

Like, why not just like, why don't I just say, like, I'm not saying public ownership of teams.

I'm talking

a public payroll for NFL teams.

We built, like, the taxpayer builds the stadium and then we, and then we fill out the roster.

I remember when I was like 12, my dad was like, you know, talking about, he's like, well, it makes sense, you know, because they build the stadium and then all the all the economic benefits it brings to the bars, whatever.

Those economic benefits that come from a stadium, other than if you own the parking.

And it's like, if it's such a by the way, and also NFL stadiums, they put that seven home games a year.

And that's like, forgetting if leaving aside the playoffs, at most, you get about eight or nine home games a year.

That's the only use that stadium is going to get.

And the Browns are going to be set, they're going to send them over to Europe any chance they get.

Oh, yeah.

And it's just like, are people really dying to go to like concerts in suburban Cleveland in the middle of February?

You know, if it's just,

if it's a dome, that's dome.

That's cool.

Yeah, but if it's still, if it's such like this big economic boon for the area, then why can't Jimmy Haslam, who should be in prison for defrauding his customers anyway,

at Flying Jay trucking, but like, why can't he pass the hat among his friends and get a loan?

Like, why aren't billionaires knocking down his door for a slice of this great economic project that's just going to be such a bonanza?

He has to go shake down these schleppers in the state house for 600 million.

So hopefully Dwine came out today.

I texted the governor yesterday and I was like, yo, Gov,

this sweetheart deal has got to end, brother.

Like

it's bad news.

And he came out today.

I'm a longtime advisor to Governor Mike Dewine, you might not know.

But he came out today and he said 600 million is a lot of money, kind of threw some water on it.

So I'm hoping at least

he can line an item, veto it, and then the legislator would either have to override that with a super majority or pass it on their own because I want these guys as it with the budget as it is now, it's just going to be an up or down vote on the entire budget.

And you're going to get a lot of these guys that are against it, but they're like, oh, well, I have to vote for the budget.

If it's a straight item vote on the Browns, then it becomes, it's, we, I think we can kill it.

Because at the end of the day, it's not like any of these constituents are calling these guys, like, hey, like, we got, you know, that four-win team sounds hot up in Cleveland.

Like, we got to get them 600 million.

I'm trying to see Taylor Swift in February.

I would love to see,

I would come to Ohio to watch Travis Scott do another satanic ceremony

inside the Israel.

All right.

We got to leave it there for today.

But DJ, the rooster, thank you so much for coming back on the show.

Everyone, please check out The Rooster and support your local independent journalists.

Thank you, guys.

Always a good time.

Our pleasure.

And now to continue with the sports sports theme, we'll be talking to Carson Lund and Nate Fisher of Evis.

But before we transition into the second part of the show, we would just like to make another appeal to the residents of the 50 states of this country.

We've done episodes highlighting individual states, and we'd like to continue to do that this year in 2025.

So if you'd like your state to be featured on a Chapo episode, please email us at chapotraphouse.com, no, chapotraphouse at gmail.com, and let us know if you have like a like a a local journalist or someone who covers the state that would be good for us to talk to about the eccentricities of the state that you live in yes i just wanted to say that i i still have a great list of um of leads for that that we collected last time we had um maybe the last time we had dj on uh got a little bogged down in the uh in the fall especially doing matt's book but i want to crack that back open and see if we can program some other states this spring uh and summer so but always recommend a hot local tip especially if you think that somebody that covers your neck of the woods has a chappo mindset would be good on the program.

All right, wrap it up for this part of the show.

On to Ephesus with Carson Lund and Nate Fisher.

Okay, joining me now are the two impresarios behind Ephesus.

Joining me is director and co-writer Carson Lund and co-writer and co-star Nate Fisher.

Nate and Carson, welcome to the show.

What's up, guys?

Hey, thanks for having us.

Two of many impresarios.

I think this was like a

50 impresario production.

Yeah, yeah.

Too many people, man.

They're being very humble here, but I'd like to begin by getting to the heart of the issue.

I think probably the thing that most people want to know about Ephesus, which is what the fuck is an Ephesus and how do you spell it?

E-E-P-H-U-S.

It is a slow-lobbed pitch, like high-arching pitch that a pitcher could have in their arsenal, but very rarely do anymore.

It was thrown in the early, uh, early 1900s, and now it's very rarely thrown except by guys like Zach Rinke.

You can tell that it's an antiquated pitch because the word comes from the Hebrew meaning nothing.

Uh, this one-void, it means also void.

It comes from the Old Testament is the, is where the word comes from, and it was probably spoken from some guy in the Lower East Side to a pickle salesman while he was playing ball on the sidewalk.

It's a real fire.

A real fire and brimstone movie.

Yeah.

Well, it comes from the Hebrew word meaning nothing.

And I was thinking about like nothingness, time, and space, because the movie is really about the passage of time and how we transit through time and occupy ourselves with it.

Carson, I know I asked you this already, but I'd like to put it to both of you.

Do you remember like the first thought that led to what Ephesus would become?

First thought is tough.

It was a slowly dawning realization because I play in a league out here in Los Angeles, like an amateur adult rec league.

And then you know, eventually we wrote the film during COVID, so I had lost that league.

But yeah, it's just, I think that I had felt that playing in a league like this at this age, there's a whole different tone to it than when you're young and everything's really competitive and it's about trying to get to that next level.

I realized this is just about guys hanging out and trying to share their love of something and pass the time.

And when you do that,

you're trying to basically cut out all the noise of the outside world.

And I thought that that really hadn't been captured in a film, like a rec league that's used for that purpose as like a refuge.

Yeah, I remember when Carson came to me and he was like, I want to write a baseball movie.

All we really had at that point was that we wanted it to be sort of in one location during one game, sort of like a sort of one important game that we watched the whole process of.

And immediately my first thought was like, well, obviously this needs to be the one thing that everybody loves going away because that's kind of the only thing anyone can relate to right now.

I don't think we're going to have a guy pitching a perfect game or hitting his 3,000th hit.

We're going to just take away this beautiful institution that people cling to because that's all we got.

Well, I mean, it strikes me that nothingness is the destination where we're all headed.

But, like, the way we fill the time and space getting to that destination is where sports and friendships come in.

And I think this is a movie that very humorously deals with that.

But, like, you mentioned that you wanted it set in one location.

This was filmed

at Soldiers Field in Douglas, Massachusetts.

Now,

when you were writing it, like the one location, this is a movie that was going to be very low budget.

Like, was that a consideration going into it?

And can you just talk about like, what was it like making, like, just getting your friends together and making a picture?

Shooting in one location is a really, really, really good way to save money.

It's harder, but if you plan it out in advance,

that's a real smart idea.

If you want to write a low-budget film, this is my advice to filmmakers, set it entirely in a car.

Just set it entirely in a car and work backwards from that.

Yeah, for better or worse, like like all of my ideas as a filmmaker are derived from limited means.

And that's just how I think.

So I was like, okay, one location that's going to be fairly manageable.

But what I didn't really think about when I had that thought was, well, then there's also going to be at least 20 baseball players at any given time, especially if we're doing real time and we're capturing it in these long takes and we're shooting in wide angles.

You know, you need like sometimes 15 people in a frame.

Yeah.

So we kind of had to have everyone there for a month on this field, living in the town, living close to the town.

We had everyone in like a

Boy Scout camp in the woods nearby.

Like everyone was fully invested in this production.

And it was really just like

hanging out on the field for a month and kind of tapping into all this

childhood memories of playing baseball.

Because I made sure everyone in the cast had played at some point.

Right.

And for some of us, that some point was in the year 2000 when they were seven years old and they they weren't allowed to play in the infield because only the kids that had been to fifth grade instead of fourth grade were allowed to play in the infield.

So the fourth graders got relegated to the outfield instead, and they had to sit down and pick the weeds, even though they were really good defensively and could easily throw the ball at seven.

Early 2000s, that's pretty recent compared to some of these guys probably hadn't played since 1966.

That's a good point.

That's a really good point.

I had a much more recent time in the game than a lot of our other players.

But

it was very hard to make sure that we were up to speed and not rusty in terms of executing basic baseball functions because it's like, you know, the camera can only hide so much.

At a certain point, we are going to have to throw the ball from the outfield to the shortstop and then shovel it to the second baseman and try to turn and try to get the guy out at home.

And

boy, that's a lot of pressure.

It really makes you feel like a professional athlete because there are a group of people watching you whose jobs and livelihood depend on you making that play, even if it's only a crew of 10 versus an audience of 10,000.

I'm touched by

your history with infielding, Nate, because like you, I was someone that always wanted to play second base, but I was always stuck in right center field.

Like in our little league, it was about seven kids in the

not a single one of them could catch a fly ball.

But I mean,

I wanted to play second because first base, like, no, the ball's coming to you every time.

I was quick, shortstop, but shortstop and third base, just that's too frightening.

Too frightening.

The ball's just going to get ripped at you every time.

I play short, actually, in my league.

Oh, nice.

Which is just, it happens to be my position, but also, you know, I'm probably at this point still the youngest player on my team,

even now getting into my mid-30s, because I joined this league in my mid-20s.

And

we've only gotten older, and we just lose and lose more often.

Another theme of the movie is being explicated here.

But I want to go back to like, Nate, your sort of like advice for young filmmakers.

And like, you know, a tip to keep a budget low would be to set it in one location.

But like, speaking more broadly, like film production is an incredibly expensive thing.

And if you're trying to do something that's like outside of the studio system,

it gets even harder.

But like, do you find that like, that the constraints of having like a very small budget to do a movie, like, did you, did you find that like that was actually more liberating or more challenging?

Because, like, did you ever imagine that, like, with like, let's say someone gave you like $30 million to make this movie and you could set it in a baseball stadium or something like that?

Like, with those, with the money, would additional constraints come in terms of the story you're trying to tell?

Yeah.

Yeah, Carson can speak to that more than I can.

I just write and writing is free.

So

it's very, very hard to try and stretch $2 into $20 when you're trying to get all these different moving parts over the line, but Carson can speak to that more than I can.

Yeah, I mean, it's very hard to raise money right now for anything, especially, you know, independent films.

And, you know,

getting into the millions, you need to really prove yourself a lot.

So we didn't get that far, but we raised more money than I've ever raised in my life.

And it's still not very much, especially when you have a large casting crew.

So for me, the limitations liberate you.

I think we were able to be more creative.

I mean, we had it in mind when we were writing the script.

We said, okay,

this game's going to move into the night.

What are we going to do?

We're not going to put a big light in the sky and light this field.

How would the players actually do it?

Maybe I don't want to give that away to listeners who haven't seen the movie yet, but when we do that scene, you can kind of embrace the darkness a bit, as well as when the film turns into dusk.

You kind of embrace it and it becomes part of the film's charm.

And the lack, the inability to see like 15 feet in front of you becomes like what they're fighting against they're fighting against time and and light and balls disappearing and those are just sort of like thrifty ways to create conflict yeah there's a there's a degree to which every movie is like a document of its own creation and i guess in our case it's uh the lack of institutional support and lack of infrastructure kind of undergirds a lot of the pessimism that you see in the movie, but also a lot of the optimism that you see in the movie comes from all the sort of different strange people all pulling in the same direction, trying to get a game over the line or a movie over the line.

It's kind of, you know, it's like even getting something done

is a miracle against all forces in nature and man-made institutions.

Yeah, you work together and you can make it happen.

I mean, this movie's about like a group of people that have to really work at creating this group.

And because it's sort of regimented in their lives, they're able to go every week and have these bonds.

But then once it's stripped away, they're realizing, oh my gosh, there's so much work, which isn't really that much.

It's like, I just got to call my friends.

But in this context, in 1990s suburbia, and I think increasingly so today, that becomes kind of a daunting task for people.

I mean, you mentioned that, like, you know, in

playing this fictional game of baseball outside on a grass field, the characters in this movie are fighting against time and light as the film progresses.

But like filming a movie outdoors, you're also fighting against time and light.

My mom's number one question after seeing the movie was, how did they get it to look like the time was changing?

How did they get it to go from

afternoon to evening to night?

Because it actually was.

I mean, we studied how the sun was falling across that field and when it went behind the trees and everything.

And we had to build our schedule entirely around that.

Like every day we were shooting.

you know, at a certain time we'd shoot this inning and then a little later we'd shoot this inning.

And then, you know, basically most of the shoot was all daytime.

And then we did a whole week of overnights at the end.

But it was like, if we didn't get a scene within a certain allotted amount of time, we would actually have to move on because the light was too high in the sky or too low in the sky.

This is now where I will give my second piece of advice to young filmmakers.

And it's, remember the first piece of advice I said about shooting in one location?

Don't do that.

Do the opposite.

Shoot in lots of locations.

This is too hard.

It is way too hard to figure out where the light and the tree shadows are going to be to make it seem like it's all part of a continuous whole.

Definitely shoot in multiple locations.

Uh, you brought up that you were all, you were all staying on a Boy Scout, a

disused Boy Scout camp when you were filming this movie.

I mean, was the process of coming together to film this movie, casting it, then living together and filming it?

Like, did you find that that enhanced a lot of the themes of the movie about friendship and dicking around with your friends to no obvious end?

Absolutely.

Yeah, a thousand percent.

I I mean, we, it was very much like a, I remember I was not part of this

logistically, but I just remember observing it and going, gee, that seems hard for them.

But figuring out where people should stay.

And I, I remember that, like, we were shooting in the woods where there's like, there are just aren't hotels or Airbnbs or anything.

They're just like, you have to get real creative.

And so the most of the cast stayed.

on a uh

out-of-season Christian summer camp, which was incredibly beautiful.

It was amazing.

Uh, most of the crew stayed on a house that was a block from set that was not finished.

Like there was like rooms that just didn't have like walls.

Asbestos filled.

Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah.

It was getting like, it was in like 30% into renovation.

And then there were a few of us, myself included, who had to stay, had to stay in this place in this town called Whitensville, Massachusetts.

And we,

you want me to, can I tell this story?

Okay, okay.

okay.

This is quick, I promise, but it's good.

So, Whitensville was a town that lost its industrial sort of uh value, like became like an old ruined mill town 155 years ago.

It's a lot of places in Massachusetts like it was, it was like a, it was like a Springsteen song before the Civil War.

Like, it was like, it was like, oh, they took all the jobs down to Pawtucket and all the way down to Lowell.

No jobs for Whitensville anymore.

Um, and so as a result, no one's been there in a hundred years.

And we stayed, four or five of us, in this facility that was run by like these like sort of hippie, alternative lifestyle people with a discord.

And it was a very, very, very strange communal living space that was on a former estate built by the guy the town is named after.

And this beautiful Victorian mansion, we didn't stay in that part.

We stayed in a building called the dorm.

And I got there and I was like, This is this where indentured servants lived or something?

Oh, way worse.

Oh, yeah, that's great.

Yeah, I wish.

Oh, I wish.

Uh, and I was very, very wigged out by the place, both just by the strange people there and just by the general,

it felt very carpentery, sort of like mouth of madness style town.

And I was like, What is this place?

And then we found out that the dorm was built by the Catholic Church in 1959 when they bought the property and turned it into something called the House of Affirmation, which was a treatment center for priests with psychological and psychosexual issues.

So we were staying.

We were staying at the Looney Bin.

You booked the Overlook Hotel.

Yes, no, genuinely.

We were staying at the Looney Bin for the worst priests in New England.

Well, hey, hey, I mean, it was cheap.

It was cheap.

It was cheap because of that.

Didn't it burn down?

it burned down it burned down guys don't worry it burned down

the narrative there oh but the question was about the camaraderie right i mean like yeah yeah so you guys didn't develop much on that on those grounds but not on those grounds no i mean at the other place i mean these guys got so close with each other and and somehow there weren't major tensions and major conflicts and they came to set like with every morning they'd come with new ideas because they'd be staying up late into the night and whatever they were they were gambling there they were doing all kinds of shit they were making burgers for each other yeah so like that it was hard as the shoot went on to sort of like not let some of that improvisation in we wrote this script very carefully very thoroughly i mean we spent a lot of time with the script but then at some point we it was like you know you guys you guys are so close i want to let you use some of your own lingo you know so so the movie has this real rambling shambling sense of uh uh script scripted uh lines as well as just little little tossed off lines in between the the scripted beats.

There's some real stuff based on like what we encountered when we shot on locations, such as, I don't know if you guys have ever heard of a meat raffle, but I have not heard of a meat raffle until we shot this, until we wound up in a meat raffle.

So a meat raffle is something that happens in, it happens in very, very remote parts of New England and around the Great Lakes and nowhere else.

And what they do is everyone goes to the bar and you get five bucks and you get a ticket for this raffle and they raffle off meat and you think, oh, it's probably going to be like, oh, venison or duck or something somebody caught.

No, grocery store brand ground turkey, like Ralph's brand like breakfast sausages.

One guy got a bottle of yellowtail Pinot Grigio and another guy got a

brick of orange like Kroger brand cheddar cheese.

It was like the lowest steaks raffle I've ever seen in my life.

It was really awesome.

So look up look up meat raffles if you get a chance and there may be one in your community.

Over the weekend when

Carrisson, I was with you at the IFC Center and Lincoln Center, we were joined by

one of the stars of the movie and probably like the most recognizable actor in the cast,

if you've seen other movies, Keith from Uncut Gems.

He's the guy who kills Adam Sandler.

He was telling me a story about staying in the Boy Scout, in the Boy Scout sanctuary, that he was so unused to sleeping in the country, free from the humdrum of the city, that he decided to, that he told me he needed to sleep with steak knives under his pillow for, I guess, you know, because Jason Voorhees or something like that, but he was using some taking some insurance at the Boy Scout camp.

Yeah, so actually, just to clarify, he was in another satellite location.

So we had another space where he was the star

actors.

And in that case, he was alone there.

And there was apparently fog climbing off the lake.

And he was starting to get a little bit worried.

Yeah, no, at the

movie.

Yeah, with the rest of the actors, it was great.

We were at the camp and there were like deer walking around in the mornings.

Like I would like, I'd like go out of the door and yawn.

And then butterflies would land on my head.

It was also fisher cats, which are very dangerous.

That's a good point.

Yeah.

So he was in like, he was in the creepy woods.

We were in the beautiful woods.

Yeah.

Yeah.

So, I mean, yeah, Keith's amazing.

He brings so much to this film.

He's such a soulful performance.

He would ride, you know, I think by the, by a few days into the shoot, he actually wished he was staying with everyone else.

He would ride up on his Harley every day at set, and just

he'd get to whatever he had to do that day, which was usually like shoveling puddles and making sure the field was ready to go after.

Oh, the field was so wet all the time.

He was actually like dangling off the press box before we started shooting.

And because he's done a lot of manual labor in his life, and he's been on high rises in New York.

And I was terrified he was going to fall and break his neck, and his manager was going to kill me.

But he actually is responsible for doing some of the work we needed on the press box to get the uh we we put that sign up actually the the soldier's field sign and and and and sort of had to take down a more modern advertisement so he did all that the guy was the guy was a legend got in the harness pulled up and everything i i want to go back to the the question of budgets and independent film i mean like carson you mentioned how hard it is to get financing for for any kind of film right now but like with the financing and with the money like it seems like all the money is with like very homogenous cookie cutter slop it's like the same stuff over and over again, sequels.

Like, do you think that like to the extent that independent cinema has a future, like, do you see it in terms of like the

much smaller budget

area?

Like, I mean, what I mean is like, how are we going to get back to like movies that are original and that mean something?

Because I think, I mean, like, I know it's like overstated, but I think it's a calamitous loss.

to American and world culture that we, that like the country that like made movies the coolest thing ever is fucking up so bad right now.

Yeah.

I mean, I think we just have to weather the storm.

And I think people want great cinema.

I think that's never really changed.

And we've just been a little bit led astray by these major streamers that are now just totally embracing slop.

And I think that people are going to get pretty sick of that.

The profit opportunities for independent film are minimal at the moment.

But I think if we can weather this storm by

continuing to make scrappy films in whatever way we can,

that eventually

the appetite will grow for that kind of film.

I think I used to put it this way, where it was like, you know, back in 19 even 95, a studio would allocate, you know, $150 million across eight different movies, and each of those movies would cost whatever 150 divided by eight is.

It's a little early for me.

But they would each make, you know, a modest amount of money.

Maybe one of them would be a big hit, you know, like a Terminator or something.

And then they would make a tidy profit.

There was a concentrated push to take that $150 and just make a giant Tentpole Marvel movie instead.

What does that mean?

That means seven movies don't get made.

That's people out of work.

That's

screens not being filled in the movie theaters.

That's people going to the movies less often.

This sort of kind of roll-up was

conscious.

It was.

very cynical.

It was very short-term thinking.

And they were like, if we just spend $150 million, maybe we can make a billion right now and forget the health of the institution.

So now we're seeing the fallout of that as sort of things kind of

exhausted and they calamitously decline.

And it's like even the $150 million movies are not getting made as often anymore.

So it's like we feel there's a kind of

precipitous crisis.

And the hope is that, you know, some people will have weathered the storm enough to maybe

prove that they can turn X thousand dollars into a modest profit on movies like kind of like what we made.

And then that will be a building block for a more stable industry.

But, you know, I, my favorite thing about the film industry is what, is when people say, people give you this advice, like if you're ever, if you've ever been like a young filmmaker or a film person, you've heard one of your uncles go, well, you know, it's easier to make a movie now than it's ever been, right?

You got your phone and all that stuff.

And it's like, I've never fallen for that because I don't want to make phone movies.

Exactly.

And it's like,

what they're basically saying is, it's like, hey, it's never been easier

now to make a car.

So why don't you just make your own car?

And it's like, no, we need an industry for this.

It's like, there's, there has a lot of work goes into making this.

Just because it's cheaper now doesn't mean it's still doable.

Like, I don't know.

Manpowers.

You need a lot of work that goes into it.

And we need a, we need a.

We need a massive,

we need a, a new deal for Hollywood.

I, I, that's my platform.

That's what I'm running on.

Well, it's been very gratifying.

Just a little note here that

we did a tour of the film through New England before it came out in New York, called it a barnstorming tour in spirit of old minor league baseball.

And we went to all these small towns, including Belfast, Maine, and Williamstown, Massachusetts.

We did a little bit of marketing, whatever we could on social media.

And we were, every night exceeded our expectations.

We did have Bill Spaceman and Lee along with us, which really helps.

But a lot of people at those screenings that I imagine don't go to the movies very frequently, but they're very excited to have this sort of eventized evening at the movies where they get to talk to the filmmakers and all this stuff.

So I think

it really showed me there's an appetite.

Yeah, and I was wondering, like, when I first saw, when I first saw your movie, I knew that people who loved baseball would be into this movie, and I knew that movie people would be into this movie because of the quality of the filmmaking and how original it is.

But what has it been like as it's now released in theaters and it now

is traveling traveling the country?

How has the reaction been?

Or like, has it been gratifying to see this movie catch on with people outside of like a baseball or movie sicko mindset?

Yeah, I mean, it's been really, really reassuring, especially like when European audiences saw it and

there were like people in French being like, well, you know, I hate baseball, but okay.

Wait,

one of the members of your cast was telling me when he was in conn, he was approached on the beach by a French baseball player.

oh he was you are la you are leftos and i was like i had no idea they played baseball in france what is going on i learned a lot yeah i learned a lot about these sand lot leagues that they have in the countryside they were organizing screenings and stuff and they're very like they're very it was very heartwarming to see like they would have like outings with their like team all in uniform to go see the movie and i was like this is damn we really did a number on these people this is we got we got propaganda we propagandize them like crazy but i think think even the baseball segment of the audience is an audience that I think we're tapping into.

And a lot of those folks are the sickos at least, probably aren't going to see a lot of movies, especially around spring training.

The whole baseball world is focused on that.

But we have kind of captured that part of the audience to some degree.

And it's been really gratifying.

I think Nate and I were both realizing when we started writing this that we're like, you know, yes, yes, we want to make a baseball movie because we love it and we see a comedic potential here.

But it was also like, well, we also can tap into a very very large pre-existing audience here.

Yeah,

there's always

the sort of lure and impulse to make a movie just for yourself that nobody will see.

But if you want to make even close to your money back,

you need to put some jokes in for the everyman.

And

that's kind of our guiding principle is that we really want to be just completely standoffish snobs, but try as we might, we just have to try and appeal.

Sometimes you got to do a meat raffle.

raffle sometimes

we wanted this movie to be four or five hours oh my god I'm talking 17 innings we play till 3 a.m

would have been so cool well

for everyone at a time here uh Nate you have uh you've brought some some baseball lore for us you have yes would you would you explain the uh the the ancient tome that you have brought yes i was in an antique store i was in an antique store in phoenix and i found an ancient tome called the ball Players.

And this is a book from 19.

Can we read the subtitle?

The one and only book that tells the stories behind the stats.

It is

a 1,400-page book about everybody that ever played baseball in 100 years from 1890 to 1990.

And every single person gets a write-up.

But the thing is, they have thousands of players to get through.

So

some of the write-ups, you can just pitch to a, you just turn to a random page, and you'll find like the funniest,

the funniest player you've ever heard of.

And that's why baseball, I think, is the coolest sport is because the weirdest people of all time play it.

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

Page 862.

We got a guy here.

Yeah.

True.

Right, exactly.

Yeah.

We got a guy here, Babe Phelps, the 6'2, 225-pound left-handed batter, hit 367 in 1936.

The record for a catcher qualifying for the batting title.

Hypochondria and a refusal to fly limited Phelps' career, who was called the grounded blimp.

I mean, I don't know if I would want to fly in 1936 either.

We need to stress that this guy's nickname was the grounded blimp because he would not fly.

It says that in the piece.

So he was big.

Yes.

He was 6'3, 225, which is gigantic for that time.

Oh, there's another guy

named, and also like the way they write is.

Gotta get Herman Level.

Oh, I gotta get Herman Lee.

And Nate, I really appreciate that you're reading this in a mid-Atlantic accent too.

Oh, I'm gonna, yeah, yeah, yeah.

I'm gonna do it.

Yeah, let's try it again.

The way they write is incredible.

Herman Long, with a powerful arm, a quick release, and outstanding range, speed, and agility, Long played shortstop like a man on a flying trapeze.

He joined Fred Tenney, Bobby Lowe, and Jimmy Collins in the Braves, then called the Bean Eaters infield.

That was probably the best of the 19th century.

Skip down a little bit.

He always, oh no, noisy and uncouth on the field.

He urged teammates to greater efforts, ragged opponents, and stirred up fans.

He always played all out, once breaking Pittsburgh catcher Connie Mack's leg with a ferocious slide when there was no play at the plate.

After his playing days, he managed in the minors.

However, he contracted tuberculosis, moved far from the scenes of his success to Colorado, and died broke and friendless.

And that's it.

How did they know his network of friends?

Yeah, how did they know he was friendless?

These writers seems like that seems like targeted cruelty.

These writers are so, so mean.

It's like incredible.

And you can just like.

Wait, wait, I like that one.

Hal Jeffcoat.

Wait, oh, yeah, let's see.

Hal Jeff Coat.

Where'd it go?

Hal Jeff Coat, once one of a family of pro ball players, fast, smooth fielding Hal Jeffcoat broke in with the 1948 Cubs as an outfielder.

His light hitting forced him into a backup role by 1950, and he converted to pitching in 1954 to utilize his strong arm.

And that's it.

They don't, they don't have, like, some of these are like really really boring, and then other ones are like he took his own life in 1972, and that's it.

This one we don't have to read because it's very long, but the guy's name is Blue Moon Odom.

Oh, yeah, Blue Moon Odom, every page.

We got a guy named Admiral Schley.

If you can find this book, I don't even know.

Blue Moon Odom led the league in RBIs before being killed in the trenches of Verdun.

This is fantastic.

Where is it?

Virgil Trucks.

Virgil Trucks.

I think I heard of that.

Man, that's so good.

Oh, this is a really good one.

Burley Grimes, spelled B-U-R-L-E-I-G-H.

Burley Grimes was the last legal spitball pitcher in the majors.

In a 19-year career that ended in 1934, he often faked the spitter to keep batters guessing.

Grimes never shaved on days he pitched because the slippery elm he chewed to increase saliva irritated his skin.

His growth of stubble added to his ominous mouth presence

and led to the nickname Old Stubblebeard.

Oh, wow.

That's a clever one.

This is, this is

Oyster Burns.

This guy's name is Oyster Burns.

And this is where they put an axe.

This is spelled phonetically.

Erster Boynes was a popular Brooklyn outfielder and utility man who led the National League with 123 RBI and finished second in home runs with the 1890 Pennant winners.

Burns reportedly earned his nickname selling shellfish in the offseason.

And that's it.

End of life.

End of winter.

I mean, like, you know, what you see in the movie, and Nate, you bring up a great point.

Like, more than any other, like, professional sport or team sport that people play, baseball currently in the history of baseball has a higher concentration of guys, of weird guys, than any other sport.

And I'm wondering, like, of any, of any contemporary baseball player or baseball players that you guys grew up rooting for or thinking about, do you have a favorite baseball weird guy or baseball character?

Oh, yeah.

Oh, yeah.

So by a country mile, my favorite baseball player, I mean, Randy Johnson was my favorite when I was a kid, but by a country mile, my favorite baseball player is Zach Granke.

And Zach Granke

is who I base my character and Ephesus on.

Actually, first thought we had when we were writing the baseball player.

He's the same sort of affectless charm.

You bet your ass he does.

He certainly does.

He talks that way.

There's an apocryphal story.

You don't know if it's actually true or not, but there's a story of Zach Grenke was like, he's famously very socially, he has social anxiety and famously doesn't do like media appearances or like talk to fans or stuff.

But he'll like hang out like on the grass before games like barefoot and just stand around and stare at nothing.

And then a fan called him over.

and was like, Zach, can you sign this ball for me?

And Zach came over, signed the ball, then picked it up up and threw it into the outfield as far as he could and the fan went why did you do that and he said for my amusement

um there's another great interview uh if if my the co-host of my my podcast a closer look will sent it uh we send each other zach granky stories every single day and he found one where he gives a radio interview where he talks about how his favorite actor is brad pitt and he's like and so the the host is like so you really like like the oceans movies and he's like no I actually don't really like the oceans movies at all like I'm more of a like a meet Joe black legends of the fall sort of a river runs through it type of guy wow because those are the ones where Brad Pitt just really gets to you know just gets to go crazy and be like a weird guy and so I kind of more him into those because he's really got he's really just an incredible actor and he just can really show what he's all about and just kind of be himself um he's my favorite athlete on earth.

I'm a Red Sox fan, and we've had many over the years.

Manny Ramirez was amazing.

Poppy.

Pedro, Pedro as well.

Pedro, there's that new Netflix documentary about the Red Sox 04 run, and Pedro just very, very openly admits to, you know, if someone gets thrown at on the other side, he's like, I'm going to throw at someone else.

Like, it's, it's, it's like, it's insane.

There were Pedro's little friends on the current Red Sox, Tristan Casas.

I know this is a PG family-friendly show, but can I tell my favorite Pedro Martinez story?

Because I love Pedro Martinez so much.

Yes.

There was an interview where Pedro Martinez was giving an interview to Sports Illustrated for Kids,

and they asked him

favorite color?

Do it as an interview.

Well, I'll take the interview.

You want to do the Pedro Martinez accent?

You want to do the voice?

No, no, no, you do the voice.

I'll try.

I'll try.

Don't do it.

Okay.

You be the industry.

I'll be Patrick Martinez.

Favorite color?

Green.

Favorite book?

Whatever.

Favorite actress.

Sandra Bullock.

Secret Ambition?

I would like to fuck Sandra Bullock.

When Martinez was reminded that the interview was for a children's magazine, he amended his answer.

I would like to sleep with Sandra Bullock.

That reminds me exactly of

the famous Mickey Mantle incident where

50th anniversary of Yankees Stadium and like they got all the great players to like submit what your favorite memory of Yankee Stadium was.

And Mickey Mantle wrote back that his favorite memory was when a girl sucked his dick under the bleachers during like the seventh inning of a game.

And like in it, he was like, yeah, she was real nice, but like didn't know what to do with it after I was done.

And she said, what do I do with it?

And I said, don't look at me.

I'm no cocksucker.

It's on the wrote it down.

It's not even like this.

Yeah, he wrote this and sent it to the Yankees.

But, you know, my favorite weirdo baseball character is, of course, Hideki Matsui of the New York Yankees.

Oh, yeah.

Both for announcing his engagement to a woman by sharing

a doodle that he drew of her to the media, but mostly for being

world-renowned among the Japanese press for traveling with a VHS pornography library.

I did not know this.

Yeah, yeah, you got to look into that.

He had a lending library of Japanese VHS pornography tapes.

He had one of those little free libraries you put up in a gentrifying neighborhood.

It's like, take a porno, leave a porno.

Exactly, exactly.

All right, Carson and Nate, I really want to thank you for your time.

And Carson,

I know I told this to you the other night, but I really want to thank you guys just even for my tangential involvement with this movie because I think you guys have created something that is genuinely beautiful and meaningful.

And I think will stand the test of time.

And, you know, obviously, like, you're listening to this, like, you're aware of our involvement with the movie, but I I would just like to, once again, really encourage people to

make a chance to see Ephesus.

If you like baseball, if you like hanging out, if you like movies, make a chance to see Ephesus because I think you guys have done something really unique and really original here.

And I think that's a very, very, very strong thing to do.

Thank you so much.

Hey, now, thank you so much.

And if you like steakhouses,

you'll enjoy Will's

radio ad about RB's steakhouse.

I'm going to do my Robot Brendan voice right now.

recognize.

There it is.

Oh, my God.

I'm back in the radio again.

Thanks so much, guys.

Carson Lund and Nate Fisher, everyone.

Please see Ephesus in Theaters Now and check out a closer look podcast as well.