Muse

Ladies' choice. Ooh, wild card option. Okay, anybody reveal anything about their life, anything at all?

I've gotten two annulments. One for pleasure and one to cap off a long con. I was running against Keith Sweat. Wow.

Ethel, have you... Okay, Ethel's asleep. Shauna? I'm writing a memoir based on my blog. It's called Tweeping Up Appearances, and it's about my journey to find happiness by smiling through the pain. Okay, I can work with that.

T-T-T-B-T-L guess what day it is guess what day it is it's friday friday gotta get down on friday everybody's looking forward to the weekend and it's time to slay all day stay woke beyond fleek and get that gucci breakfast go stop stop telling this i'm gonna puke you know you're overthinking

it buddy yeah i mean just kind of see this as a fun thing to do where you make a little bread

the comedy factor speaks for itself it's just painfully obvious it's an unfulfilled prophecy

it just has to be played out all right hello good morning and welcome to a friday edition of tbtl hey where's the freaking gabagoo the show that just might be too beautiful to live my name is Luke Burbank. Your voice is like a combination of Fergie and Jesus. I'm your host coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center here in Portland, Oregon, where it's actually

pretty nice outside, even a little bit sunny. I'm sorry, I'm tan. I like to be tan. It just

feels good. I think we're heading into a decent weather weekend. We're also getting ever closer to the sun setting after 5 p.m. here in the Northwest, which is, I, Becca told me some kind of stat that, like, within a month, it'll be, the sunset will be at 7 p.m. Like, there's some kind of weird thing where it goes from just absolute depressing darkness, it's getting dark at 4.30, to, like, hey, it's 7 o'clock and it's still light out. Like, there's a weird kind of rapid change in things around here, which I am very much looking forward to. I'm also very much looking forward to episode 3598 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Which is where we are at today, with lots to talk about, including an email from a listener about a lie that got out of hand. Lying is like 95% of what I do. Also a story of I feel, you know Grief and loss They're strange things And I know many of our listeners Can identify with this Having been through it But there was a story In this sort of The week that we've all been Remembering Bob Saget And thinking about him And talking about him There was a moment where The comedian Jeff Ross And the singer John Mayer had to go do something related to Bob Saget and Bob Saget's legacy that's so mundane and kind of boring, but they turned it into something. And I think it's a comment about grief and loss and what ends up happening when somebody passes away unexpectedly. So we'll talk about that. And we'll also, I'm actually very excited about this, we will try our hand at getting some of the Jeopardy questions correct that reigning champion Amy Schneider got wrong.

I made the change from A Common Thief to Up Close and Personal with Robin Leach.

And we'll also do some music for your weekend because it's a Friday. We'll do all that with the help of this young man, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ship.

He's got hair, he's got chutzpah,

and broad-based knowledge. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

I have zero of those things, but I do have more scam calls coming into my phone. It does seem like it might have crested yesterday, though. I came in, it looks like, when I say it out loud, it doesn't seem like as much. A total of 15 scam calls between the hours of 8 a.m. and 5 o'clock yesterday. This morning, I've only received two scam calls, which is an improvement already so uh maybe maybe it crested i'm i realize i don't understand kind of like covid wave rules to these scam calls that are coming in that curve yeah exactly

this is what i don't understand about those kinds of scams we were talking about it yesterday why do they ever turn it off is there a cost to them why are we not all just getting

10,000 scam calls or texts every day from everyone because it seems like there's no cost to them. Once they've gotten your number, why don't they just continue to hit you with calls indefinitely?

The thing about this particular one, because I've been hearing from people who said, hey, I got a note from one listener who had to change her number because she was getting so many. She was getting like four or five or six an hour. Eventually had to change her number. I got some other notes from people saying, Yeah, yeah, I was getting them for all kinds of things. But the one thing I want to kind of underscore here is these are all the exact same message. And it's always coming in from a different 800 or 885 number. Like they're changing it around. They're masking their number. But it's all the same scam. It's not like, oh, I'm going to look.

Has it moved you any closer to availing yourself of your existing DirecTV account?

I know. That's the thing. Profit and reward. It's almost working. I want to sign up for ATT DirecTV just so I can get this 50% off. So it is working. But, you know, you just got to you just got to kind of keep the message up. You're laying the groundwork, as my former program director used to say during unsuccessful fundraising segments. You're laying the groundwork for later, Andrew, which is good to hear. But, yeah, I don't know. But, like, the thing is the thing that's maddening to me is it feels like a like a glitch in the system. You know, this doesn't feel like somebody who is making a decision like a cost benefit analysis of if we if we, you know, up the number that we're sending to this to this guy's phone number, is that going to eventually break him? I just am picturing like some sort of cartoonish machine that is just like spitting out phone calls, but like something's gone wrong and one of the wheels is spinning too fast on it and it's wobbly and there's some smoke that's starting to come off the wheel. And it just seems like something is wrong somewhere, and I am just the recipient of these calls that are just coming in incessantly.

I mean, because you think even by their – even by the scammers' standards, they realize that this is – they're actually making it less likely that you'll – like, they're – that's actually an interesting point. I hadn't thought of it that way. So my thought was there's just somebody in wherever they are who just has, you know, has some kind of malware program and they just set it in motion and they just like their thing is if it could call you every second, they would. But actually, if they called you once every three weeks, you might respond to the voicemail. If they call you 50 times a day, you get it immediately that this is some kind of a spam situation. So maybe it's actually maybe this like you're right. Maybe this is maybe they're upset that they're hitting you up this much. They don't actually mean for this to happen.

Yeah, but I don't think they have a lot of accountability. Like, I don't think I can call their office of external affairs or whatever.

They always try to drive you right to chat. Right, exactly. First, they try to send you to an automated assistant, and then... You know what I've learned with that, by the way?

Are you going to say that there's a chance that if I called these scammers, there's a better chance of me getting actual customer service than if I called my existing Xfinity number?

i wasn't going to say that but i actually think that's possible i just made that realization myself i have discovered something and i'm not proud of it but i have discovered that when you are in that kind of quite maddening phone like automated loop from hell where they keep trying to they're doing everything in their power to not let you talk to a human because they've kind of like done the math on it and every minute that a human is talking to you is costing them x amount of dollars and so they're constantly trying to get you to use the virtual assistant uh tell me what tell me what you'd like to ask the uh you know tell me what you need help with and i can get you to an agent faster and then but then what i've learned is if you tell them like uh my card expired then yeah that's a bad faith offer from them because they're not actually trying to get more information to send you to the agent they're trying to get you to say something that then sends you into another like automated response you can order a new card at the web at chase.com or

whatever yeah yeah or hey i need help uh with my account oh your account balance is zero dollars and 63 cents that's what i how do you know my exact account because it's a joint account and

you and i both need to make some changes is it related to the tbtl voicemail line that also tells you when i'm making reservations for dinner but here's what i've learned and this is the part i'm not proud of if you swear if you say i want to talk to a human i'll get you i'll get you to an agent but first i'd like to know a little bit more about the nature of your call if you say and earmuffs everyone including my nieces if you say i want to talk to a freaking human yeah but you say the real word you say the real world word it sends you to a person really fast and i think it's because the software is like oh this person is about to lose it like i

promise you that those those ai programs or whatever you call them part of the part of the design is if they hear a swear word they escalate you they move you up to a human it's never failed me and i think it's because they're like okay this is a sign that this person is about to like cancel their membership with us or whatever or go you know go out and start punching a tree like let's get them to a human and so just as a pro tip for people if you just say i want to talk to a freaking human but say the real word and you'll be amazed at how quickly it will get you

to a human see this is interesting because this reminds me of a belief that i've had my like going back to like the early days of like these kind of phone systems i swear i read sometime and again this could be an urban legend and i'm talking about something that has lived in my brain that I haven't actually shined a light on in a long time. But I remember reading or hearing that if you acted angry on these machines, there was some AI that would flag you. And I don't know exactly what it means, but it would flag you in kind of a bad way. Like we have a customer on the line who's hot. And I always felt that that was going to be unhelpful, that it was going to work against you because nobody wants to deal with the hotheaded person. So they were basically going to dismiss you or keep you on hold or maybe eventually get you to somebody who's like a therapist that would actually be kind of nice i don't know that's not bad so i'm wondering if you're right about this and and actually that's one way to get help but if you're uncomfortable swearing or you don't want to be angry person let's try some other extreme emotions like what if you're just totally distraught what if you're just bawling you're just just crying like what why are you calling what can we help you with and you're just like i just can't take it anymore uh well that was actually darker than i meant it to be but maybe uh maybe you use that same voice but then you say something about your account balance i don't know like is that a way what if you're laughing maniacally or that laughing the whole time i like that that is another great i think let's see what happens there

you know i haven't tested any of the other emotional states other than swearing but here's where it kind of bit me when i was in las vegas last weekend my bank decided that uh they thought my card was stolen because i was in las vegas oh so you were making good decisions yeah yeah yeah okay and so oh and by the way if anyone asked it was stolen i didn't do any of

them you're like oh thanks for noticing yeah i don't know here's okay here's what happened this

is so boring actually i don't know if it's boring or not but the i probably will regret giving these details out but basically about a week ago i thought for a minute that i had lost my wallet i could not find it it turns out it was in the laundry hamper it had been in the back pocket of my jeans which i had slung over the hamper and then the wallet had fallen into the hamper was under a bunch of clothing and uh but anyway for about an hour i thought my wallet was lost and i was freaking out terrible feeling because among other things i had all this travel coming up i you know i have a passport so i was like i have id i can get on an airplane but how am i going to get money and also i'm going to vegas so i realized that i had this paypal debit card that i never use like i've never used a debit card physical debit card that's associated with a paypal account that i have and that was in a drawer somewhere and so what i did was i loaded it up with a bunch of money thinking this will be my debit card that i will use out in the world um if i have to well an hour later i found my wallet but unfortunately the money was already in process and it takes like five days what by the way why should that take five days yeah no reason are you putting on the wells fargo wagon like are you putting on the pony express like it's digital it should just go poof and be in the other account considering my bank account is linked to the PayPal account. But anyway, so I had this PayPal card that had the money on it that I was going to use to pay for my hotel in Las Vegas and to get money out for dinner and gambling and things like that. Well, it turns out, don't ever. I just would like to do a reverse advertisement here. Don't ever use this PayPal debit card. It sucks.

I'm going to write a note to our buddy Annie in sales right now say if they ever ask to advertise on the show. I'm a hard no on PayPal ads. We've burned this one, Annie.

Yeah. Because the card consistently wouldn't work. I was on the phone with PayPal. It would let me get like $200 a day of cash, which in Las Vegas is not enough cash for even walking around. It would like kept telling me that I exceeded my spend limit.

it which i'd be trying to buy like a you know a pack of gum in the gift shop and it would like deny it would deny it it was just and i was so mad because all this money was trapped on there so finally when the weekend was done i was like i gotta get this money off of here i wanted to transfer it back to my bank account unless i wanted to wait another week i had to pay a 14 service charge for them to rapidly move my money off of this stupid debit card that didn't work and I mean it's the other thing is it's attached to my bank account so it should have just been a thing where I could use it make withdrawals do whatever I want and it just like take stuff out of my bank account instead I had to like put a bunch of money on it so that I could get to the money although I couldn't in fact get to the money do you think that these cards I've never

used these before I don't even know if I knew about them except you except maybe you mentioned this like in passing one time that you have one of these things but I wonder if the the point of these cards is is so that maybe it's for maybe young people who are getting a start maybe it's the first time they're going to be using some sort of a payment system like this or potentially maybe is it set up specifically for people who've had credit issues and are trying to like put governors on their own spending do you think that's the whole point of this or do you think

it's just a bad system i don't know i mean because it's not like i mean maybe but that's not how it's like marketed you know it's not like establish your credit like there are things that are for that and they usually charge you some kind of excessive fees or interest rates or things you know this isn't really presented that way and it's like i said it's weird because again this is so granular and not interesting but like so when there's no money in the account it this is what i found out if i were to just take this this debit card over to the grocery store to the fred admire near me and buy something and scan the card it would just draw the money from my bank account but if i put money on the card so now there's cash in the account when i go in and scan the card for admire it takes them from that account so your mistake was actually loading it with money well in terms of buying things yes that was my mistake in terms of getting cash out from the mistake was that the daily limits are super low which brings me to my point about swearing at AI yeah so on Saturday morning I needed to just go to the bank and physically just get some money so that I could have I just realized this PayPal thing was not working so I was like I'm just gonna go to the bank I'm gonna get some money and I'm gonna just that will be how I handle this so it's a Saturday in Las Vegas and I'm trying to find a bank a branch that's open because i have to go in and talk to a human um about this stuff um and the thing that i've noticed during the pandemic is that the internet which has always been fairly unreliable has never been less reliable on when things are actually open have you noticed this you mean when you

look up on the map function or whatever the the google's and it'll tell you if a business is open

or not yes in the last two years i feel like i have about a 50 success rate with showing up at a business that says it's open on the internet and having it actually be open me too but i i not not

to make you feel bad about complaining about that's i think that's a hundred percent pandemic like i think that like yeah i you know i went to this restaurant the other day that was definitely said it was going to be open and i showed up and they had a sign in the door that said we've taken

today off you know they're all just right yeah that happens that's happened to me so many times here in portland and i totally get it and i attribute it to the pandemic on the banking front i've had a lot of so i have an account with u.s bank as well which is kind of like a savings account and i've had many not many but i did had a very memorable saturday driving around portland trying to find a u.s bank that was both said it was open on the internet and was also actually open when i showed up because that particular bank has they've like drastically changed and modified their hours and no one has told the internet so for instance like they're supposed to close at six i've showed up there at 5 30 and there's just been a paper sign in the door not because of like omicron this is before omicron just going like we've modified our hours it's just like closed it's just like so frustrating so i'm in a lift in las vegas going out to god knows where Where there's allegedly a U.S. bank branch That's open on a Saturday But I don't want to spend $30 going out there If it's not actually open And so I'm calling The like And the other thing is You can't call anyone anymore At the physical location you're trying to call Like I couldn't call that branch In the outskirts of Las Vegas I could not just call them and go Hey are you open today Because all they'll give you is an 800 number They don't want you bothering the people at the place. Yeah, you will get you will get. routed this goes for everything now rental car banks you name it you can't talk to the person who's at the place where you're trying to actually do the business yeah it's really frustrating so i'm in the back of the lift with this very nice guy named kevin uh not camaro kev different kevin and you're in the back of the lift kevin's your driver or you're in the back kevin's my driver okay gotcha it's me and the driver named kevin who's also a music producer on the side he says the best business in music producing right now in engine he's a sound engineer and he said it's the hip-hop guys they come out to vegas they bring a bunch of money they pay on time and that's his main his main recording engineer work these days no one asked but i just thought i would put that out there so i'm in the back of the car and i'm in phone like tree hell with u.s bank and we're at a critical moment where he's about to get on the freeway i'm about to be really committed to this ride yeah and i would like a human to tell me if this branch is really open or not and so i say to kevin hey kevin i'm really sorry to do this but i have to swear at this robot right now i got you and so i say i want to talk to a freaking human and wouldn't you know it boom immediately connects me who was very helpful and nice looked up the branch said yeah they're open we went out there they were open nice um so everyone wins Kevin wait with the car running he did and that was a whole other thing I had booked the trip one way and then I was like well

I was like can we you know can I just can I adjust the drop-off point so that you just take me back to the hotel please and he was like sure but I had to do it like a few miles before we got to the bank because as you're getting closer to your drop-off point Lyft is feverishly trying to find another ride for this person yes and so before i had to i had to basically like which then got weird because then it just he had to override the mapping software because now it was like well now we're going back to the hotel and was like we're actually not but we're trying to get this we're trying to complete this ride back to the hotel before you insert another ride into the system

you didn't just add oh i see because you were just adding another stop right that's the move there I know that I'm just digging us deeper into the what's the what's the noun of mundane mundane mundacity mundacity is that the right word I feel like that's wrong the mundacity of hope the tediousness I'll try to remember that maybe right um it was for some reason I either it didn't occur

to me to do that or I had already had I don't know there was some reason why it was more complicated and then just adding a stop and again maybe it was because i just was hung over and didn't think of that but he did wait in the parking lot with the meter running and uh it all worked out but again it brought me to this moment where i was like kevin i'm sorry but you're gonna hear me swear at a robot did you ever ask him if you could call him argyle because isn't that the name of the

limo driver that is good memory well it came up because of a commercial recently remember that um One of the most hyped commercials with the least payoff, actually two come to mind right now. One was the one we get together, have a few laughs. One, we talked about this on the show quite a bit before the Super Bowl two years ago with like they were going to kill off Mr. Peanut, but then they didn't. And then I think Kobe Bryant died and they're worried about the messaging. So they cut the commercial way back and it was just terrible. But then the other one was the Die Hard Batteries remakes or reboots the Die Hard movie franchise. Did you even did this even hit your radar?

No, it didn't, which is weird because I'm pretty obsessed with commercials.

One year ago, two, three, four. I'm just going to keep naming numbers until you say I'm right. No, I don't know. In the past few years, there was some like hyped like Die Hard's going to do it. Die Hard, the battery company, they're going to do it. And they're calling it like a reboot. But it was like a two minute long commercial that actually had Bruce Willis. It actually had Argyle in it. I don't think that's the actor's name. oh that guy and um it also very briefly had um the quarterback is toast i believe a quick cameo from him seriously um but it's just not a good commercial though it's like the sound mix is terrible and it's just like it is kind of like a big um action movie but it's just kind of like for as much money as they spent on it it's just a cacophony you know what i mean there's no cleverness to it at all there's nothing that makes it worthwhile other than yeah this is Bruce Willis sort of recreating scenes and a lot of explosions, and you can't really hear the dialogue that well.

Well, you wanted the quiet life, John. Dead batteries, empty streets.

Video? Wait, who does he see? Someone in the window. The guy in the window, I think his quarterback is Toast Guy. Oh, man. He kind of gives him... I think he kind of... I could be wrong. No, I'm... movie better than me now he

bashed I need one of those is there another

way out he gets a die hard battery and he like bashes through the glass which is I'm already seeing what you're talking about here which is it's kind of it's sort of a it's it's everything is adjacent to something that sort of happens in die hard but not in a way that's really coherent enough yeah nothing's coherent

about this exactly right

Like, there's an iconic scene in Die Hard where he's walking on broken glass, but that's because Hans Gruber has told his henchmen, shoot the glass.

By the way, quick note on that that Genevieve pointed out to me. He says it first in German to his German colleague. His German colleague doesn't understand it, so he repeats it in his second language of English. And then that works.

Anyway, shut the glass. But again, Bruce Willis doesn't, as I remember it, bash through a window himself. So you're like, you're kind of, you're referencing this like broken glass part of Die Hard, but you're doing it in a way that isn't how it happened in Die Hard, which is why this commercial is already kind of not making sense to me.

Yeah. And so keep going. He's going to crawl through the duct. Oh. You kidding me? Did you know we have re-installation? Yeah.

Okay. Yeah. He just climbs through the duct. Oh, there's Argyle. There's the limo.

Argyle? Argyle?

Meanwhile, Argyle's the only one Who actually looks okay in this commercial The quarterback is Toast Guy I didn't recognize him

I only remember him as being a far away shot With him sitting in a window That is, you know, in a diner at night But I don't remember what he looks like It's like Nighthawks Yeah, exactly, right

Nighthawks are the Die Hard But that's also a show title It's also a painting I mean, I guess Bruce Willis just kind of looks like Bruce. Although Bruce Willis, Jeff Bezos, Elmer Fudd, and Pitbull are all slowly morphing into the same person.

That's where all the alternate universes combine.

If you combine every male human on the planet, they eventually become that person.

I don't think this commercial, I mean, feel free to play the rest if you want. It's mostly just cacophony, and there's no driving principle to it other than, hey look we got all these guys and we got Michael Bay to direct it which they didn't get Michael Bay to direct it but it's you know just like explosion explosion hey look we got the but it's like there's nothing compelling about this at all and again I don't really care I do think it's interesting that I only know Argyle's name because I saw it recently in a commercial not because of the movie so I guess it has that going for it but it just seems like such a waste you know what I mean I mean somebody spent yeah buko bucks as my friend Luke might say to make this thing I would say buku but Oh, what did I say? Bucco. Bucco de Bappo? Like as in Artie. Bucco de Bappi? I can't say the name of that restaurant either. I don't know what it is. It's like Bucco de Bappi. Is that right?

Yeah, you said it right. Oh, look at me.

Oh, I'll take a point.

No, Bucco de Bappo. Bucco de Bappo. Okay. That place, when that came to Seattle, man, I didn't realize it was a chain. And I thought, this is the coolest flipping restaurant of all time. Because they have like the kitchen table Which is a table that's literally in the kitchen So that you can be seated at the kitchen table And you can like It's actually really fun I thought the food was quite delicious I had a I wouldn't say I have a refined palate At age 45 But I've eaten a lot of Italian food at this point And I would probably say Buca di Beppo is comforting and yummy But not like Cafe Lago in Seattle Or something that's real Sort of high-end Italian But at the time I was like this place is amazing who invented this like they are they're a genius and then you know years later realized there's like a thousand buca de bepos in america i've never been many airports i've never

been there before at all i mean and the big thing is like now this is kind of more common i think sharing plates like i grew up in a family where like it took me a long time as a young adult to get used to this idea of going out with other young adults it's like referring to me and my friends as young adults but you know being in my 20s and like trying to as we all are at that time kind of figuring out what adulthood looks like but also because of my I mean we all are the results of our upbringing to a degree right and so I was kind of spoiled growing up in that my family unlike your family had a lot of opportunities to go to restaurants as a big part of growing up for us but we also were in you know suburban or rural Ohio we weren't going to kind of nice restaurants and we certainly weren't the type of family who would do like sharing like hey we'll get this or any kind of family style thing so therefore when i grow up and we're going out for tapas and various small plates kind of things that was an adjustment that i had to make as as a as an adult that i don't think i was super comfortable with at first but now really like and enjoy because it kind of it's um kind of takes the decision-making out of my hands. Anyway, I'm going into too much detail here. I hate sharing, by the way. Do you really? You don't like this ballpoint?

I really do, and it's been happening a lot because, you know, partially because I don't eat meat. Oh, yeah, right, yeah. It's a thing where, like, I want to be... There's, like, no chance that... There's no chance that the folks that I'm talking about are going to hear this, and nobody did anything wrong. But I went out to dinner with some folks, me and Becca and some folks, and Becca doesn't eat meat either. And so it's like if you're at a typical restaurant, like a non-vegetarian restaurant, there's probably like three appetizers that don't have meat in them and one entree. And so we always just end up ordering like lots of appetizers that don't have meat in them and then kind of sharing those, she and I or whatever. And so we did that at this place. It was like I just wanted everyone to order. here's what i want i want everyone to order their food and eat their food i don't want to like order the three vegetarian items off the menu and then we all pass those around and then everyone else orders the ribs from the flintstones and then i'm that's not something i eat like it's a it's a bad deal for me not even financially yeah but it's just from i'm also ravenous because most of the time i don't eat during the day so which is on me like i'll show up at a restaurant like in in like a you know deep state state of hunger but it's it just seems like it's been happening a lot where we go out everybody wants to order and share and it's like i don't really want to share i want to just get the food that i want to get so that i can feel satiated and also i have kind of now a slightly limit you can identify with this because like not really liking cheese stuff yeah you know

what the more you talk the more i realize because i was kind of getting towards like hey i've come a long way like now I kind of like this move whereas it was a tough transition for me as I started hanging out with people who wanted to do this but the truth is I think again to use the word spoiled I think that I haven't really been in the challenging situations in a long time for a couple of reasons well first of all we haven't really been going out um but also I have Genevieve now like we are so bonded that like often she will be sort of team captain and so like she kind of knows like you know what I mean we can kind of work out like what do I like and the times where we will do this type of stuff is like sushi like that's a safe enough place for us to like share plates like I'm fine with that I might say I don't do the cream cheese but you guys get the cream cheese and there's plenty else for me to eat but you're right like generally speaking at the core of my being I am such a picky eater that I do have to throw my lot in with other people so everything you're saying is incredibly relatable I'm a little bit everything you're saying totally makes sense for your for what you're describing do you feel it did you feel this at all though even before you went vegetarian because it seems like before you went vegetarian you're so gregarious that I could see you like kind of being the team captain and I've gone to dinner with you many many times so it's weird that I'm asking this but it's been a while since as a big group we've all gone out I could sort of see you being like hey I've been here before I think we should get this and this and this that that seems like something that wouldn't be uh you know kind of um outside

of your personality I think because I grew up in a large family where I mean what I always say is There was no lack of food But there was a lack of the good food So we would be You know If we went out for dinner on a Friday night We would go to Burger Master at Northgate Mall Now known as a hockey team practice facility

Oh that's where it was

We would go to Burger Master My mom would have a coupon from the entertainment book It would be a whole thing Where it would be like we're getting two orders of fries And you know Luke, Liz and Sarah You're sharing one of the orders of fries and and again there was plenty of food my mom would do the salad bar and she would go and like just endlessly fill up her plate god i love a good sneeze guarded salad bar with those like crispy noodles on top of the just pile of calories it's so not a salad at some point because it's just like iceberg lettuce a pound of blue cheese dressing a bunch of cheese a bunch of those like a bunch of basically snack food on top of it those like crispy noodle things anyway i think i i got kind of unfortunately and this is not a good look for me i got sort of wired so that i just want to order my food i want to get um i want to get enough of it i'm also like probably at the end of the day i eat about the same amount as a normal person but i do it all in like one meal like i eat a shocking amount of food sometimes when i'm hungry like and so when people like i'm not the kind of person who can just like have a like two nachos like we'll get nachos for the table and everyone has like two chips like i can't do that i want to eat the entire plate of nachos and so i'm bad with sharing because because i just can't and if i just demonstrated some self-control it would be fine because the other thing is if i were to just like go along with the sharing plan and then just have a reasonable amount of each thing along with everyone else my stomach about 10 minutes in we'll go hey we're actually pretty full this is a good amount of food but i'm so messed up in my head That I want to like outsmart my stomach I want to like wharf down food Enough of it I want to do it so fast that my stomach doesn't Get the memo Because I find the experience of eating so pleasurable And so If I were to just calm down and just eat Like a normal person with everyone else It would be fine but I don't like that I like to like order too much food And then scarf it down And then hate myself later That's my system and it's been working for 45 years

Out of curiosity OK, here's what I'm thinking, because you're talking again about the quantities of food. Now, one thing about Vives and I, and again, and I do realize I've softened on this because so often the meals I'm talking about, it's either just Vives and me, which is no problem there. We know what each other, what we like and what we don't eat. But even on the occasion where we do go out with somebody else or other people and we do that, like, again, Genevieve ends up being team leader and we just always order so much more food than we need. In fact, it's always kind of embarrassing. Like, Vives and I have a thing. We need to come up with a word for it. where she and I say, well, we're going to order this, and we keep on adding things to the menu for when they come by, and then we always have a moment where we're like, that's too much food. No, it's going to be okay, and then the food comes, and then there's a moment when everybody's full, but then it's like, oh, God, we still have two more plates coming. That's it. The things that we say to sort of mitigate our embarrassment as if this is the first time we've done this when it's really our total protocol.

Do you remember when I got into it with the server at Dintai?

Well, that's where I wanted to lead this to Because I'm thinking like as I'm picturing us doing it It's usually a place like a sushi place And if we are there with other people Like again Genevieve will order for the table Usually after we've all talked about it But the other big place would be Din Tai Fung Which is maybe that's why I'm sort of surprised Or that's why I have this vision of you being team leader at a table Because the first few times we went to Din Tai Fung It was with you And you would you know you knew that place And one time you had to say to the server This isn't my first rodeo But like that's definitely a sharing situation but like do you have the same feelings there or have you changed do you think or were you putting

on your best behavior because we were i think dintai is a special place because in the olden times i found out about it because of vanessa and so i i was talking about this over the weekend in vegas with like camaro and everyone else like i only i mean i don't eat meat anymore but in my meat eating days i would only order the same three things from there because they were the three things that vanessa ordered and so that is now what you do at dintai when i see anyone which is what we order now think i think getting anything different i'm like you fool right right you you idiot like how could how are you not getting pork chopped fried rice pork shaolong bao and string and the string beans right right right that's what you get at dintai so i think because at the there was sort of a novelty for a while and oftentimes it'd be like you would go there and no one the people in your party most people hadn't been there before and i had been there and so i think in that one place i would kind of take the lead and go here's what we're getting um but that's not generally my move in most restaurants and again it's it's really less about the not eating meat thing like the they're not being enough vegetarian options and it's more just like i just don't like sharing which is again a bad look it's a very bad look for me but i just like to get my food that I ordered and I like to consume it and I don't like to have to think like am I having to am I having more than 25 percent of this there's four of us at this table and am I exceeding the 25 percent of this particular food item or whatever I just don't like doing that calculation in my head so so yeah I'm kind of anti-sharing that's

what I do with the movies all this comes back to Buca di Beppo by the way because the last Last time I talked to my dad about it, I don't know, we were just talking to my dad. I was talking to my dad about something on the phone, and he just meant, have you ever been to that place, Bucca de Beppo? I'm like, no, there's one in Seattle I've never been. Yeah, you know, it's good, but it's that family style, and everybody shares, and I don't think I realize that. They make you eat in your car. And he says basically what you're saying, just like, I just like to have my meal and be responsible for my meal. But there is a moment if I'm going to the movies with somebody, like another couple or a group of people or whatever, I will have to kind of say, like, I am going to be ordering an amount of popcorn that you think is shareable. But just so you know, this actually isn't shareable.

I want you to have a laminated card like Joaquin Phoenix has in Joker. I have a condition that you just show. people yeah i know this looks like the amount of food that like four or five people would eat but just so you know that's not the plan going in here my problem with the movie popcorn is

i i well first of all you know obviously the like the sizes are ridiculous and it's like three cents more like the difference between a small little bag a sad little bag and the like bass drum or whatever the kick drum of popcorn it's like four cents and so you obviously you end up just all of a sudden you're you're holding a bucket of soda and a massive drum of popcorn but i honestly i think what i really want at the movies is like six bites of popcorn like i never ever ever get to the bottom i i run out i also always get extra butter topping so that's probably kind of adding to the caloric density so maybe it is a thing where i'm filling up faster on it but like i always get the huge thing of popcorn and i i will get i've never even gotten a quarter of

the way through one of those things oh oh my my goodness i'm usually like a quarter i'm usually like three quarters of the way through before the 20 ends which is a bit of a dated reference do you remember the 20 i don't know which movie chain it used to be this was like early 2000s because me and vives that was again a big part of our relationship we'd always get to the movies in time to watch The 20 because apparently we were 85 when we were 23. But The 20 is how they branded when they went from just showing trailers before movies to showing a bunch of like kind of commercials but then incorporating those commercials into somebody who's kind of hosting it like you always mention what's his name when you go into a hotel room and you turn on the TV Mario Lopez. Yeah, you know you have a Mario Lopez-esque host except usually these are women who will kind of host something like you've been watching the 20 you you heard interviews with leonardo dicaprio about his new turn in jingle all the way or catch me if you can or whatever um and jingle if you can you know about you know about that too don't you one time i was watching genevieve was watching catch me if you can and i said oh is that uh chase me all the way and she tweeted it or something and our friend ben parsons responded oh then he's gonna love jingle if you can anyway uh i didn't know that story yeah but anyway do you know what i'm talking about those packaged like things that are kind of commercials and yeah they used to be called the 20 at amc or something and views and i would obsess over the 20 but like i can pound one of the bass drums full of popcorn like during the 20 basically wow yeah i just popcorn is one of those

things that is you know while we were talking i was texting back i was like do you want to go to

a movie tonight i know right just talk like now it's in my brain i'm gonna go i'm gonna get the

drum of popcorn i'm gonna eat the top two layers of it yeah and call it good because the other thing for me is i also want to shift to the milk duds portion of the event as quickly as possible i only eat milk duds when i'm at a movie and i get very excited but i have to eat the savory like the salty thing first so it's like the popcorn first and then and then i can get my

milk duds going oh yeah see i don't do can i don't even like milk duds really at all they stick in my teeth um and uh and frankly i'm getting to the age i'm getting to the age where

i have to really think about my candy consumption as in terms of what it will do to my teeth i don't mean like give me a cavity i mean like will it pull a tooth out i think i wrote on twitter that getting old is mostly just chewing on your good side like i'm really starting to notice that like I now look at things and I go, oh, yeah, no, no, no, no. I'm not messing with that. I'm going to lose a molar over that.

Well, it's 45 minutes into the show. We've covered a lot of ground. We sure have.

I don't know how we ended up where we are. Do any of us, honestly? All right, let's take a quick break, and then when we come back, 45 more minutes of mundanity.

Whatever this is, yeah.

Here on TVTL. let's thank some donors of the day these are the generous people making today's episode possible with their financial support thanks to taylor hasse of everett washington is that

how you'd say taylor's last name could be hassey huh there's maybe in there yeah yeah could be

Thank you, Taylor. Haas, Haas, Hasse. Thank you, Taylor. Appreciate you. Jessica Haley is in Mattapan, Massachusetts. Now, that's fun to say. Mattapan. Sure is. Have you been to Mattapan? The name rings a bell.

I'm guessing that it's not too far outside of Boston, but I could be totally wrong about it. that Daniel Pass is in Snohomish Washington where are we allowed to say Snohomish oh yeah they were saying Snohomish in Snohomish before Ron and Don were right yeah because we mentioned

that on the show oh yes because I always knew Ron and Don said Snohomish I said there you know when their show went off the air maybe we can use that now other people said no listen we were saying that in high school um but quick aside quick little local radio talk Luke I you know I check in on Como Radio every now and then which is like pretty straightforward like AM news radio kind of a news wheel kind of format but they do in the five o'clock hour now have the top five at five which was always a Ron and Don thing do you think that they've always had that or do you think that somebody said hey Ron and Don are gone we can grab that now and if you didn't notice it rhymes so therefore it chimes

are they doing four on the floor that would be the four stories that are flooring them

Three on the tree, four on the floor. Yeah. Anyway.

Top five and five. What were the other benchmarks of old Ron and Don?

So I made up the three on the tree, although I always thought that would be funny. Because isn't that the opposite of, or not the opposite, but it's like the alternative to four on the floor. You can have three on the tree. But they did have a, yeah, well, they had what was ringing Rachel's bell. Oh, yeah. Of course, that was a big one.

By the way, Rachel just did a My Last Meal with Shatner.

Oh, I saw that. Yes. I saw in her write-up, she said, it was dot, dot, dot, interesting. So I wonder if he was being his usual rude self.

He wouldn't stop talking about Andrea Seabrook?

Do you know Andrea? Anyway, Mattapan's a little bit outside of Boston.

Mireya Alandrino is in Kenmore, Washington. Thank you, Mireya.

Now, wait a second. I was looking at that earlier. I want to come back. Could it be Alejandrino? No, that doesn't make sense.

No, Alejandrino. I'm sorry. I probably said it wrong. Did I say Alendrino? Maybe. I think it's Alejandrino.

Alejandrino, yeah.

And I'm going with Mireya because you could say Mirella, but considering Mireya's last name, I'm guessing that the pronunciation, we're doing the L's in the more Spanish language tradition.

That's my, that would be my guess as well. I love that name. Yeah, that's a beautiful name. You know, Kenmore, we now, we do have in the TENS community, Nigel is the mayor. I'm the mayor of Kenmore now, I learned recently.

And you also remember Kenmore is where we took my boat. Oh, yes. That fateful trip where we ended up at the, what was it called, the Blue Moose or something? That's what it was. Yes. Maria, where were you? We had to, we docked the boat. We took it from the U District to Kenmore. It's amazing that boat made it there and back.

It felt like such a perilous journey. And then later on, I just looked at the map. I'm like, oh, that's like a 15-minute drive from home, right? Okay, got it.

And we stayed on the boat. Camaro Kev slept. Was it you or Camaro Kev who slept out on the bench? I slept outside.

I said, I'm not going to be in the fart locker with you guys.

Oh, right, right. And you said you actually slept okay, right?

Oh, it was great. Yeah, I bundled up under a bunch of coats and a blanket or something.

That was the night where we famously, in our minds, where I learned from you and Camaro Kev, I think, the process of stepping a bar down off of bad music to good music. via touch tunes because it was real real crapola when we walked in there and then you I believe you guys launched on a very kind of systematic plan to play crappy but less crappy music that was adjacent to the music they were listening to and then over the course of the night just like turn the water up on the frogs

yeah even yeah exactly you got to try to meet them where they are and then eventually kind of you know just kind of ease them into okay maybe five songs later we're hearing Tom Petty everybody likes Tom Petty nobody's got a problem with that but somebody might look around and be like well what happened to the megadeth we were listening to before and you're like ah the subtle art of moving you off

of megadeth that's right well morea hopefully we'll see you at the blue moose next time we're there in kenmore washington todd kenfora is in albany oregon twist ending on that one do you know where albany oregon is i should i think i've been there but i couldn't tell you off the top of my head i i've noted that it's you know like the state capital of new york so it's made an impression on me but i haven't actually i can't tell you as the crow flies what direction it's

just outside of corvallis i wonder if we drove through it oh maybe that was it you think that's

where our signs are i'll bet you that's where they stole the signs mary cheval is in tustin california thank you mary thanks todd morea daniel jessica and taylor thanks for making tbtl possible we would not be here without you hello and welcome to top story i don't know if this is a top story i just struck me as interesting andrew um there was an an interesting i think it was like an instagram live thing featuring john mayer and jeff ross uh going to lax and retrieving bob saget's prius from lax

parking i haven't i haven't heard word of this other than seeing it on the show sheet

and i thought it was it ended up kind of turning into a a sort of memorial for bob saget between these two people who are famous but also knew him and really loved him and they were just kind of in the car memorializing him as they were driving back from lax in his prius and it just struck me because it's like this is the things that happen this is what happens when people pass away there's obviously the tragedy of it but then there's the let's just use that word again the mundanity of it all like his car was just in the lax long-term parking and someone had to go get it yeah you don't think about that with death until you experience it um and again i know many of our listeners have and know what that's like but it's like there's this sort of grandiose tragedy of it all and then there's just the like mind-numbing details of can someone go get his car from lax

please yeah yeah yeah and so what did they did you say that they kind of documented their journey

yeah they started streaming it on instagram i actually just read an account of it but it sounded actually quite kind of charming and moving and they they were you know i mean every i actually think maybe the most if i don't know if people are on this friday are like i want to continue to wallow in the sadness around bob saget passing but jimmy kimmel's um uh sort of memorial for him or remembrance of him was so moving he basically recorded something like before the show so it's just him alone on the stage in his theater just talking about Bob Saget for like four minutes and he is really wrecked by grief in it which is this thing where he's apologizing and he's like I've taped this a bunch of times and this is just I can't get through it and you have that feeling watching it like you don't have to be sorry for being sad about your friend dying you know but of course we all do that thing where when we crying in a public way is always deeply embarrassing the person is doing the crying and no one else cares

like well also though when you're trying to do the talking though too when you're the person where all eyes are on and you're trying to you know i mean who am i telling i mean you know that too it's not like there's a group of people sitting around and you're all mourning and you can kind of take turns to cry there's also like how long can i if i break down and totally lose control how i think it's almost more about losing control in any way than than just the act of

showing grief you know yeah it was a very i think you're right and it was just a very lovely a tribute to Bob Saget Jimmy Kimmel's um if you're like I said if you if you haven't seen it and you're interested just google it or something but yeah I just thought it was I don't have a ton to say about this other than it was well it was interesting to me that he was driving to LAX he didn't take an Uber like you're Bob Saget like you're like there's nothing worse than dealing

with the parking situation at LAX yeah that's a good point or even an Uber you wouldn't have just like a driver like because if you live there like you just think that you have a service and our guy yeah yeah if not like a personal driver which i understand is a different situation like but just a service that you usually use that isn't like i'm gonna get a random uber or lyft driver but it's maybe slightly better than that but you're bob saga yeah that's interesting maybe

he also just likes to drive i don't know and he also drove i believe they were kind of in a good natured way making fun of how he had an old prius which is also kind of funny because i think bob saget made a lot of money in his career between full house and america's funniest home videos and his stand-up and all of that i mean i think he was probably pretty financially set but he was driving he's pulling a real dave ross take it back to seattle radio i wonder if dave has upgraded his prius he had like literally the first prius they made uh-huh yeah he's probably still driving it is my which is just so charming like i i admire that greatly in people people who intentionally are living sort of below their means if you will yeah like i find that to be a really a really great quality it's not one that i have every dime that i make it just goes right out to some amazon purchase but the idea of bob saget in his outdated prius like he's not driving the new you know audi electric or something in his prius driving down to lax long-term parking there's

something quite charming about that to me yeah did they get to look at i guess in this day and age

you don't have like cds to look at oh that would be great yeah what's the cd and i wonder if the prius if they even made the prius with a cd probably not yeah yeah i don't yeah my car doesn't have a cd player anymore i assume your car doesn't either mine

It does, but it's in the glove compartment. It's like a very – it's like, all right, listen, we'll give them the functionality of a CD player if somebody absolutely needs it. But we doubt they're going to use it, so it's in the glove compartment, Luke. And it's just a single. It's not like one of those it's in the glove compartment and it's a six-disc changer like my dad had in 1998, and it was the coolest bloody thing in the world. I don't know why I'm saying bloody all of a sudden watching too many Beatles documentaries. But –

Is there a CD in there?

but uh yes there's one what is the cd it is an album that i've only listened to all the way through maybe twice and it is the band james that does the song laid yeah do you remember i think you're so pretty remember i told you a long time ago my my journey to um uh courtney barnett fandom because i'd heard her around i'd heard some duos there are some uh things that she had done Collaborations that you played on the show But it was like I just found Myself in what is that What is that neighborhood north of Seattle There was a one of the last Surviving like CD and cassette Stores up there that's actually selling new CDs And cassette stores it doesn't it's by a mall North of Seattle Genevieve was getting Alderwood probably yeah I think it might have been Alderwood Genevieve was getting a massage someplace so I dropped Her off and then I'm like hey I'll go to this CD store And I bought my Jessica Barnett cassette tape and then I was like looking at their used CDs and I was like I really like that song Laid even though it is you know adult themed it is it gets into sexual positions and the like and what works for various partners but anyway but I was like I never listened to the full CD and you know so it was like five bucks or whatever so I bought it and that's the only CD that's ever made its way into that car that's hilarious is it an okay like Does it hold up as an album? It's okay. I'm just not completely driven to listen to it. But when I listen to it, it's pretty good. I could see myself getting into it so far I just haven't, if that makes sense. An album just has to strike you at the right time, I think.

And again, we talk about this on the show constantly. But I also think if you would have gotten that James CD in 1991 when it came out or whatever. Yeah. You as a kid you would have listened to it front to back You would know every single song on it I was listening to The Howard Stern show this morning For a minute and They bumped back in with The song No Myth by Michael Penn, Sean Penn's brother I don't think I know it but I'm gonna look it up And it just Sent me because that Was one of the first CDs I ever had I actually think I probably Stole it from Peter's sister Dahlia And I could tell you Is Michael Penn

A collaborator with Amy Mann or something Why do I have Yes So

She says it's time she goes Oh yeah yeah yeah yeah yeah I wanted to be sure I know Oh yeah She hopes we can be friends

So this album I think it's called Half Harvest maybe uh-huh and this was the big radio hit off of this album but this cd i mean and you know god bless michael penn he's a talented musician he is the um he plays the engineer in um uh boogie nights who's like doing the engineering session for the very terrible mark walberg song like he's not the guy who they argue about over the masters with uh-huh like the master tape he's literally the sound engineer is Michael Penn because he's in that whole world of Largo, Paul Thomas Anderson, Amy Mann.

Yeah, because Amy Mann plays a huge, I mean, her music plays a huge role in, not Adaptation, but Magnolia. Magnolia, yeah. Yeah.

So they're all kind of part of the same cool Hollywood club. But I heard the song this morning and I was like, I was immediately like, I got to get that, I don't have a CD anymore, but I was like, I got to get that, I got to put that on Spotify and I got to listen to that today. And I know every single track off of it. And what I was starting to say is Michael Penn is talented and deserves to have fans. But if I were to pick up No Myth or, sorry, Half Harvest today, there's no way that I'm going to learn every song on that CD. Yeah, even if you buy it physically, like I did the laid one. Yeah, right. I'm just not. I just don't have the attention span anymore. But I mean, I studied that CD, the cover art, the thing. I would just listen to it constantly. So, yeah, it was, I guess, a different time.

I love landing on kind of a quasi-random video like this on YouTube and then reading the comments. Here's the first comment posted by Andrew Douglas.

two years ago michael penn if you happen to read this this song is still extraordinarily close to my heart i love the entire album you did this work you gave us this gift and please let me say thank you sir no one's ever said that about people have said very nice described it as a gift

you know that's true i'm looking at christmas ornaments exactly tbtl christmas ornaments that people made i just want to say too that i've now gotten through all of the christmas cards but it was a pretty hefty pile yeah and each and every one just brought me pure joy yeah so thank you if you mailed a christmas card um to apm to us i just want you to know we got them and they're extraordinary and it's really i get why the listeners are so into this gift card or this

christmas card exchange and i feel like it's getting and i don't want to say anything that adds pressure to people who want to send a more simple card because that's beautiful too but also i've been seeing people been like kind of texting me photos of the various things that they received and like people have been making more and more kind of aren't ornaments or other like kind of tbtl related holiday crafts and sending them to each other around this time and like you say also cards and it's just like it's really uh it's really amazing and again thanks to melisande for setting this all up and keeping it going all these years hey speaking of the listeners

can you lay this email on me that you got this week about a listener getting into a predicament I haven't heard any of the details but it already sounds like something I would do

yeah so earlier this week no no it was actually late last week when Kamara Kev was on the show I kind of cornered us into a conversation about times we either kind of lied or cheated or Forged documents To get through high school Like you know maybe sometimes Manipulating grades On a report card what have you I actually I'm not even joking I'm still like somewhat worried that my mom Was going to hear that but Let me read to you this Email from Tim in Kamloops BC we've heard from Tim Before and this is a This is a full this is a full story With Ark says hey Andrew your forgery story reminded me of this tale from my past sorry it's so long in 10th grade I fell in with a less than ideal friend group we were skipping class a lot to the point that I was failing everything but phys ed it was the mid-1990s and one friend of mine had a pager he changed the outgoing message to a generic recording and an adult sounding voice and a bunch of us went into the office at school to change our home phone numbers to the pager number the school's robocalls about a skipping class went to the pager and our parents had zero idea we were not really going to school it was so stupid

i would argue that's a greater lesson than anything you could learn through conventional education like they should have just graduated magna cum laude from just that just thinking

that up that's genius work it's very um uh ferris buellery uh when report card time came around i hatched a plan our report cards were mailed home so i made sure to intercept it before my parents could a friend of mine had a scanner so i scanned the report card at his place and used ms paint to copy and paste individual characters to edit my grades and comments i turned a 38 percent into an 88 i turned a does not participate into a a pleasure to have in class etc i then by the way this is mid 90s so this is um a little bit after my he says like around 96 97 so i guess you know computers are becoming a little bit more common now um you know i graduated in 95 i mean the idea of having this kind of technology even ms paint blows my mind um he says i then swiped an envelope with school letterhead from the counter in the office and I mailed the fake report card home to my house using the official

I'm hearing that song playing the whole time that was a terrible impression of that song

I thought you were making an imitation of a printer a dot matrix printer what are you making a sound of?

you know the song that is in Ferris Bueller that it's impossible to sing it because it's just sound yeah that one what's that called? I can't I'm looking at the Ferris Bueller Day Off soundtrack and is it Love Missile F1-11 it looks like

is this it here yes what's this called it says it's just called oh yeah oh by yellow oh yeah that rings a bell actually

this is the song that's playing as this list as Tim is doing all of this very high tech you got the page you're involved you're scanning you got ms paint so he's swapped school letterhead and envelope sent the fake report card his house. This continued for each report card my entire 10th grade year until the final one came in June. When I opened the envelope, there was a report card in there and a letter from the principal telling me to find a new school. I had to come clean. To this day, I don't have any memory of the conversation with my parents. My brain just must be blocking it out. My mom, who is a teacher in the same district, was heartbroken. My relationship with my dad never recovered but it was already a bit of a mess before this my mom helped me get into a new school and i actually graduated on time despite passing just one class in 10th grade i took night school and summer school throughout 11th and 12th grade and barely had enough credits but i did it about five years later the edmonton son this all happened in edmonton by the way the edmonton son was holding a mother's day contest looking for the craziest i put my mom through hell story i submitted my story And won her a very fancy spa package So it was all worth it I love the show Never stop Tim in Kamloops, B.C.

Wow Is that not a journey? That's amazing So basically He got expelled And that's not just Tim That's on your phone

That's my phone

So essentially He got kicked out of school He failed out of that school And so he had to tell his parents. But had they not like had the school not expelled him, he would have just kept doing this, I guess, indefinitely. I mean, the real Tim, if you would really committed to it, you would just continue to pretend to go to the school.

Tim, don't listen to Luke.

You know, like this, like a guy who like loses his job, but doesn't want to tell his family. So he gets dressed every morning, gets his briefcase and goes, leaves and then just like cools his heels in a coffee shop for eight hours before he can come home.

I feel like that was a George Costanza thing, but I could be wrong about that. But yeah, but it is funny that your takeaway from this really, what I consider to be like kind of a really sweet story is he didn't go far enough. No, I'm just saying. That's interesting.

Once that rock starts rolling down a hill, it picks up a lot of momentum.

Yeah, apparently.

God, I wonder what that conversation was like. Those poor parents, because they're, you know. And a teacher. Right? And they're just kind of like, they're living their life, they're seeing, they're seeing, you know, they're getting these report cards just to find out that it was a fabrication. You also wonder if on any level, well, I mean, Tim said it was kind of a, it was a mortal wound to his relationship with his father, which is very sad to hear. But I don't know, I feel like if Addy would have done that, I would be, 5% of me would be impressed.

Well, I'm glad you had a kid.

The ingenuity of it all. I mean, let's just say she had her academic challenges at times in her life. And I'll let her tell that story if she cares to on the show. But never with that kind of flair. Yeah, right. Never with an entire.

Well, that you know of. Maybe she was just better at it. That's true. Yeah.

That's true. I need to call Western Washington University. I call the diploma. You know, that was one of the many things that was run out of the University of Washington Visitor Information Center. It was called verification degree. So it was like public records, trademarks and licensing. If you wanted to get a map of the campus and also degree verification, those were all things I answered the phone for.

So if you were an employer and somebody put themselves down as a graduate of the UW, you might want to double check that you could call this number and somebody would look their name up on maybe a computer at that time.

Maybe just a giant folder or binder or something And tell you yes this person graduated And I actually called it five or ten years ago To just double check if I had even graduated from college

Did you because you honestly didn't remember the details of graduating

Well I knew that I did I mean I just barely graduated But I wasn't even sure like did they even Like did that did they file the paperwork on that Like if someone were to ever call the UW Or ask did Luke Burbank graduate from the UW

up wouldn't even like say that I did I didn't realize that I mean we've talked about your college experience so much and of course it's tied up in your your work study and in your beginning of radio but also the fact that you had a very young child at this time but I don't think I realized that you feel like you barely graduated well actually you know what I didn't have a

terrible GPA at the end it was just the last like two years of college for me it was not like I was It was a thing that I had to do That I was doing because I had to do it To get it over with But I was already living an adult life Yeah yeah i already had like a full-time job i had a kid i lived on my own i was paying my own bills or not paying them like it wasn't like i wasn't like living a block off of campus and like hanging out with all my college chums and going down to the um you know susalo library to cram for the test and so i didn't it was it just felt like i got it just was this thing that was constantly hanging over my head i mean i don't know if i've told i think i've told this story on the show but you want to talk about forgeries this is why tim if you ever want to have a you ever want to like take a master class in this shit did i ever tell you about how i basically forged an entire college class i feel like this sort of rings a bell but i don't know i so what happened basically was like i was in my maybe final year of i was in my final year of school but i needed to get basically almost like two years of credits because i had dropped a lot of classes or this or that so to stay on track I basically graduated college in four years and one summer which is kind of remarkable exactly what I did yeah considering how behind I was in credits going into my final year I had to basically somehow I had to take like let's say three classes was full-time I had to be taking like five classes every quarter and even then it was like I wasn't going to get there so there was a general studies there was a thing that you could do where you basically got a professor to sort of be your um i don't know what you call it mentor in something like basically your advisor you propose a an independent study project to them they sign off on and then you meet with them a couple of times throughout the quarter and then you present this independent study thing to them and then you get five credits which is what a full-time class would get you is five credits i'm by the way not proud of this and i'm a little bit i i don't know if I've told this story on the show this is not I don't feel good about this for the record but I was so desperate that I basically proposed this independent study program or independent study project to this professor in the in the journalism department and he said sure and this was what the project was going to be there had been one of those kind of like satanic panic crazy stories coming out of um a town in washington state i want to say it was walla walla it was one of those stories where everyone every adult in the town was suspected of child sexual abuse maybe i should trigger warning that but it was a huge national story that there was this like town where all of

the adults were were taking part in these really awful victimization of children and it turned out to not be true okay because it was a huge story at the time and it turned out to be kind of just something that it was it was a it was a rumor and kind of implanted memories and then it ended up being the case that i mean there may have been a person or two that was involved in something but it wasn't like the police chief and the principal and the every like the way that the story initially sort of came out was that this was a town that was like a predator town where all the adults were predators and it really was it was it was a huge national media story and then when it turned out to not be true there were very few things written about it not being true and what i was interested by was why it is that we are why it is that the coverage when there's something like that that's happening is so fierce but there's almost no coverage when it turns out to not be true and this happens of course sometimes when people are like wrongly convicted of a crime and there's a sensational trial and and there's a lot of coverage around the crime and the person and then later it turns out they didn't do it and maybe i mean i guess that would be a story these days but you know what i mean they're just like i was trying to i the idea was to understand why it is that certain things get coverage and then other things don't for instance the fact that this thing was made up got like no print so that was what i proposed the professor said sure and my plan was i was going to interview various reporters who had um covered the story and try to figure out like well what you know what was the conversation with your editor like did you pitch a story about going back and talking about how it wasn't true etc well andrew i never talked to any reporters it was always on my to-do list and so what i had to do was generate long conversations like basically i didn't fake the email but i basically made up a bunch of conversations that i had with various reporters who had covered this story and apparently did it compellingly enough or convincingly enough that this professor read this whole paper and gave me an a on it well to bring it full circle stephen glass terrible the stephen class i'm just

I said that, but then I didn't want to say the word.

Tim, I'm just saying you have to commit. Wow. That's what I'm trying to say.

I do think that you have told that on the show before. Oh, okay. I do think so. That's a good story, and I hadn't remembered it. But now that you say that, I think that you have revealed that before. But now, if I call the front desk at the University of Washington, and I ask them, are they going to be adjusting on the fly if they hear this?

I really should be five credits short. I should say he was considered a graduate from 1999 up until about a month ago. But we learned that he made up an independent study project.

This is why Phyllis couldn't get you on that wall of fame.

Again, the irony is I probably did more work in writing this big fake dossier than if I would have just talked to the people.

No, making stuff up is easier than actually doing. Yeah, you're right.

I was trying to get myself an out, you son of a gun. All right, let's do a little music for your weekend. before we slide down that dinosaur. What song would you like to play for the listeners this week, Andrew?

This song has been going through my head nonstop for weeks now. This is one of the songs that I was listening to a lot in Hawaii. Again, that was kind of a vacation where I just kind of spent a lot of time just kind of going on, you know, just walking around with my camera, just kind of wandering and listening to songs kind of over and over again. And this is one of them. Now, this is by our boy Petey, who you and I always refer to as Petey USA, although he performs under the name Petey. He just says Petey USA on TikTok. But I think there was some confusion about what his name is, too, because I say it weird, and it sounds like I'm saying the letter P and the letter D, but it's Petey, like the name P-E-T-E-Y. And he's got a song I don't know if we've played it on this show before Called California Which is kind of an up-tempo synth-pop song With a pretty depressing story Of him needing to get out of I think Nashville And leave some heartbreak behind Because he wants to go to California Where it'll be easier to be depressed And so the chorus is I'd rather be depressed in California Which is good And that's the main song And I probably should play that for you But PD has released kind of a secondary album when he released his first album called Other Stuff, which is kind of other versions of his songs and some stuff that didn't make the real record. And this is a version of California called the Prius Edition. And instead of him singing, there's a musician on here named Maya Folek. Now, I don't know if that's a name you recognize from other projects, Luke. I don't recognize it. Maya is M-I-Y-A. Maya Folek. And she or they are singing his song, California. And Luke, you know, I love things chopped and screwed. This is so slowed down. Like this is so slow and so heartbreaking. And for some reason, this is the type of music I listen to when I'm on vacation. And I really love it. I got to say, I played both versions for Vives and Vives thinks that the Petey version is better. So I don't know if this will be for everybody, but my God, do I love this haunting version of the song California by Petey and Maya Folek. Take a listen to this.

left behind my home three thousand miles down the road In my Prius with my lonely mouth to feed I don't care what town as long as she's not around Just get me far as hell from Nashville, Tennessee Cause I'd rather be depressed in California Ocean's got the only blues I need Lay me down to rest in California It's hard for me to fade it out here

Because it kind of goes through some more changes And builds a little bit in a way that I really love But that's in this California pre- I thought you might It's pretty good Yeah

Is that You were saying Is that on like An unreleased thing Where do people find that Uh Yeah, it's it's it's released. It's on it's on Spotify. So if you look up PD on Spotify, you'll see he has a record called Other Stuff. And it's I think it's kind of like, you know, remixes and what have you. A lot of great stuff on it, actually.

The song that I would like to play is by a guy who plays another name Reverend Barron. His real name is Danny Garcia. And I guess he was a skateboarder in Southern Cal who got into playing music. I can't find a lot on him. Like, there was an article in the Orange County Register about him in 2013. There's a Facebook page that I can't look at because I'm not on Facebook. He has an Instagram page with seven posts. It doesn't seem like he's been super active of late, but I just heard this song somewhere, and I made a note of it because I just thought it was pretty cool. So I don't have a lot of information to give you, but the song is called Jackie G by this guy who plays under the name Reverend Barron. Can you play that, Andrew?

Yeah, is there a chance it's just called Jackie?

Yes. I thought it was called Jackie, but then I think I saw maybe a live performance where I thought he was calling it Jackie G, but yeah, I think

it's the same song. Alright, stop me if this is not it, but here it is. This is Jackie.

Jackie wore a dress Jimmy always was a mess Jackie was my friend Jimmy was my cousin And Jackie waved goodbye Outside the liquor store Jackie got Jimmy's car I didn't want her to go with her But I didn't say I just watched them as they pulled away Jackie Ward

Pretty good, right?

Oh, it's beautiful, yeah, and I really like the production on it.

Sounds like a Velvet Underground song. Like, I thought, when I first heard it, I was like, oh, is this like a Lou Reed cover? But I don't think it is. But, yeah, I really, really like this song a lot. It's Reverend Barron. It's Danny Garcia.

Nice.

And our listener suggestion this week comes from a person who's not only a listener, but my actual brother. One DFTB. I meant to have that sound effect ready to go, but you know what? I don't think anyone's going to be sad that they're not going to hear the tape. Chunk. How is that? Okay, now do that eight times longer. Otherwise, pretty good. uh david uh emailed us and said hey there fellas i got a music for your weekend nomination for this week it's an adele song from her new album 30 i've never really been a huge adele fan in the past but alicia that'd be david's fiance introduced me to this song off the new album and it bops it's called all night parking interlude features a sample from jazz pianist errol garner uh which i think was mixed originally uh as like a lo-fi hip-hop instrumental anyway sorry for the long email but it's just like the perfect rainy day sultry r&b-esque jam love you guys david from the basement and uh i listened to the song and it does in fact bop it's really good i'm similar to david in that like you know that like adele's like five most famous songs i'm familiar with and i don't turn them off if they're on the radio but i didn't like go right out and watch like adele's concert at oprah's house or whatever that big television event was one night only actually i believe the concert was at griffith park observatory where i once got engaged andrew but let's be honest i've been engaged in a lot of places anyway um but uh this song is really uh is pretty good it's a it's pretty nice uh production as well so that's how we're gonna wrap things up here on this friday with a little adele for y'all um so thanks for listening everyone that will bring us to the end of our broadcast week. We'll be back here on Monday with more imaginary radio for you. Until then, have a great weekend. Stay safe, take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. I know you've got things to do I just want to spend all my time with you I'm so hot to impress don't leave me on this stretch alone When I'm out at a party I'm just excited to get home And dream about you

All night long

I don't know how You got through to me I'm so cold It's all happening so easily It's so hard to digest Usually I'm best alone But every time that you text I want to get on the next flight home And dream next to you All night long Maybe it's the way You think you're too cool for school, but I got a newsflash for you, Walter Cronkite.

You aren't.

Power out.