Muse

What's happening? Nothing. It's just, I think a furry snuck in and then he's scritching. What's a furry? It's not a big deal. What's a furry? A furry is simply just someone who likes to dress up like an animal with human characteristics. It's a form of role play. It's huge. Yeah, that's great. But then the scritching thing you said, what is that? Scritching is simply light scratching or grooming. It's a form of affection. Furries love to do it. I do that. It's fun for them. Yeah, sure. We all do it. But I was in the other room and one of them kind of bumped into me. I thought the guy was going for my wallet, so I turned around real quick. It seemed different Did he yip or did he yiff? He said skip and I said no my name's Buddy Okay he yipped If he yipped that means hello If he yiffs if that happens well then you got a problem Yeah you know what might have been yiff Might have been yiff Well if it happens again just go

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. Hey, what is the deal with the smart car? How smart is that? Those things are tiny. Can you even drive them in traffic? I'm so smart. E equals FC squared. I drive a smart car.

I don't know who that is, and I don't care to find out. You're not even a real journalism. That's right. www.this and www.that. Let's www.explainit.

All right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Friday edition of TBTL show that just might be too beautiful to live.

That was the fanciest sentence I've ever heard, and I used to watch Frasier.

My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host. Oh, la, la. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where we had a day yesterday. And that was maybe one of the most lovely spring days I've experienced in my life, weather-wise. Maybe because I wasn't fully expecting it, or just because, I don't know, at age 45 I start to notice these things more. I start to think of these things as, you know, a little bit more precious. but it was just blue skies it was warm the flowers and trees and things were blooming you just like the smell of of of spring life in the air gosh it was it was sure great today not as great but i'm still coasting off of the high from yesterday so that's going to get us through episode 3648 in a collector series let the fun begin something very interesting happened at a movie theater in burbank california this week so who needs a movie the projector broke and there was apparently about 30 minutes of kind of awkward waiting around for them to figure out how to fix And a person who was there, the movie they were seeing was Lost City. I think that's a Sandy B vehicle. Is that maybe Sandy B and Channing T? And a member of the audience decided to get up and start doing her stand-up comedy act.

When it comes to comedy, I'm sort of like a little bit of Eddie Murphy Raw and, well, several others.

I have watched the footage of this. It's really, it's like Rashomon or something because it's California. Well, really, this isn't California specific, but because it's 2022, of course, everyone in the movie theater had their own cell phone. And so there are multiple different pieces of cell phone footage of this stand-up comedy routine. And I just keep obsessively scouring the internet looking for them, trying to piece together what on earth actually happened. So we'll talk about that. Also, the guy who invented the GIF, Stephen Wilhite is his name. He has passed away. And he was the one who was very insistent that it's pronounced GIF, like the peanut butter. And I was like, well, he invented it. He should know. But then I started doing some digging on what a GIF actually is. And I feel like I'm more confused now. This is so confusing, Ron. When I started. So we will maybe talk about that as well. And do some music for your weekend. Because it's Friday. A.K.A. a Fry-yay. We'll do all of that with the help of this young man. He's an activist and house party enthusiast. Who joins us today at the end of an era. The past is history. The future is a mystery. He is the longest-running Cobra of the show, of course, maybe best known for his depiction.

of the tall ships but today is the last ever episode of tbtl that we know of that he will be recording from the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington his name's andrew walsh

he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning i just got an email like just got an email from xfinity reminding me that my service is ending my internet service is ending this sunday so we better 20 minutes yeah it's a short show today guys yeah um i mean with buffering i might be able to get like 21 minutes i don't really know i don't understand buffering started with cds i didn't understand it then you ever do that you ever are you ever watching a youtube video and then you turn off your wi-fi i don't know why i think i know what buffering is it like i preloads a bunch of information so that even if you lose your connection yes the the content can continue streaming until it finally runs out of of uh of room i guess it runs out of its buffer

that's right I think I feel like that probably the nascent version of that technology was when you know you'd have a a cd player with anti-skip technology if it was like a a disc man although I think we would call it disc person now we would not need to gender it that way but like yeah the idea that you build up some content and then if there's problems it can just kind of like play you what it's already front-loaded and then figure hopefully things will be remedied before you notice any difference in your in your service now that also means andrew when you're you're if your service goes out on sunday does that mean your service at your new home at your forever home in the sweet cream district does that not start until sunday do you have the internet over there

currently i'm a disc man not a disc man um i do have internet um going over there already got that hooked up last weekend and i meant to tell you this it is it is super fast we are talking uh we We are talking fiber optics technology. We are talking gig speed. We're talking there. I mean, TBTL is going to be so good once I move.

You're actually going to be able to upload yourself and then just come over to Portland. Like you will send your you will send your physical body. That's how that is how robust this system is. And then you'll just materialize here like like a Tupac at Coachella. And then we'll just high five and do the show together kind of like in person.

It's even better than that. The internet is so fast over there I've already recorded my parts of Monday's episode They're already in the internet They're already uploaded, Luke You just gotta do your part

Okay, great You know what? This will be I didn't really think this through Although I guess I also didn't really know When you were going to be doing your maiden voyage From the Sweet Cream District But I will be in Hawaii Monday morning Where it will be wicked early for me because there's like a three hour difference and where we will see what the internet connectivity is. I mean, I'm going to be at an Airbnb and they allegedly have Wi-Fi. It's just like in a big kind of condo building. But that's probably not the ideal, but I guess it is what it is. So we will be trying out your new system in Seattle and I will be like, you know, thousands of miles away

from you so hopefully it'll all work yeah I mean I I'm pretty confident of the um of the internet over there when I plug in I had them it's so it's so strange just being the master of your own domain like I've rented my entire life I mean with the exception of a short stint in New Hampshire but I was like a kid then I didn't know what I was doing I treated our house like it was a rental house basically i was too scared to touch anything but um you know when we came actually i got to give credit to our buddy broadcast barry who was uh getting a quick little tour of the house once we got the keys but before we moved anything in and he knew that i was um looking to upgrade to fiber internet and as we were showing him around he's like oh yeah right there that's fiber like he recognized that there was a box that was left in one of the rooms and when we were taking a tour outside he pointed up he's like look that's where your fiber is coming into the house the dude knows more about the the after a five minute tour of our house broadcast Barry knows more about the infrastructure of our home than I do or ever will but anyway so I was like oh okay so we're already wired for that but you and I have sorry I'm at that part of the story where I just heard myself and I realized this is so boring but you and I have a thing that we have to do in order to have fast enough internet to do this show and that is we have to plug directly into our modem we can't just rely on wi-fi you do it when you're on the road um i did it when i was on the road in cleveland but there are technical what do you call them there are technical times involved with that um so we need to be plugged in whenever possible and unfortunately the modem that it's not even really a modem whatever the black box is that comes into the

Thank you.

house with fiber. It's called something else. It was not in the room that I will be using as a studio. It was in an upstairs room and my studio is going to be down in the basement. And so I said to the fella, well, let's see how fast the internet will be just on Wi-Fi when I'm in the basement if you hook up this existing box upstairs. I wanted to see if we are at that point of technology where i don't have to be hardwired into the system in order to have fast enough internet to do this show so we ran a test he hooked up that existing box got some wi-fi flowing through the house and i did a speed test and i'm like that that ain't it bro and he's like yeah that ain't it bro he was he was great by the way this guy he neither one of us called each other bro it wasn't that kind of a relationship but he um he was like no no that's not the service that we provide we need to we need to juice this we need to get you up to one gig speed and so anyway he was working with me but we realized no we definitely need to put this black box which sits inside the house in my studio so he's like yeah so i'll just drill a hole here and he just i mean everybody knows this it's obvious this is how cable and internet has worked for years and years and years now but he's like yeah i'll just drill a hole i'll stand outside your house and drilling hole with a long bit that goes into giant long masonry bit probably he said or you can do it yourself if you have a bit he's like if it doesn't work and you're not happy with it you can just install this yourself later i'm just like do i look like a guy who has a bit like that come on man i mean i let's leave the dirty jokes aside but i i don't have that kind of tool anyway um and also the the the studio i'm going to be working in is uh kind of wood paneled it's not especially nice wood but it is wood paneled and um i'm just like i'd hate to just drill a permanent hole in just right through my house you're just gonna drill first of all it makes me feel penetrable like this is my house you're gonna try to make it not dirty like it's just wait anybody can just come along and drill a hole into my house that doesn't seem right and secondly like I mean, the nice thing is I didn't have to go get a note from my landlord saying this is OK and hope that the landlord does give permission. I've been in those situations before, actually a couple of times. And sometimes the landlords don't give permission to drill more holes into the apartment. It was totally my call. It was totally my decision. But it really I don't know if nervous is the right word, but it gave me some sort of anxious feeling just giving him the green light to drill yet another hole in our house.

It's a very, I mean, I've done that sort of thing before at my house. Well, first of all, I've had, you know, cable folks do that. But I've also went and bought a, like, masonry drill bit that you can drill through. Yeah, because, well, I was trying to set up the basement of the Burbank Springs facility, my old house in Bellingham. I was trying to set the basement up for cable, and it didn't have it. And the best way to do it was to go through this kind of, like, intermediary cement wall that was—anyway, point is—

An internal wall, though. You were taking—you were dropping some lines from inside the house into a different part of the house, or were you going from the outside in, just out of curiosity?

Effectively from the outside in. Wow, okay. So it's kind of complicated, but basically there was a big, thick cement wall that is more or less the exterior wall of the house. There was a little bit more kind of shed outside of it, but for all intents and purposes, just imagine this was the outside of the house. and i had to drill it was took a long time i don't think i had the exact right tool for the job um and i'm not ashamed to say it i do not have the right tool for the job andrew and that's something closer than me it sounds like it really did become a really did become a competition the have either yourself or someone else drilling a hole in the wall of your actual home like the the outside wall of your home is an intense feeling particularly when you just got the keys a couple of weeks ago. Like, it just feels like you're doing something very extreme to this home that you only recently took possession of and that you're still kind of figuring out the deal with and that cost you a significant amount of money. Like, I can see why you were like, okay, I guess we're just drilling holes in the wall now.

And it also just reminds you how fleeting these technologies are. Like, okay, cable-based internet has been around for quite some time, but you walk around our house, which still has no furniture in it tomorrow's the really big moving day um and you see okay cable was coming in there cable internet was coming in there phone lines coming in there like and all these old things like we at some point we want to go around the house and just like cut these old wires out and patch up the walls where they came in but like we have seen so many technologies that force us to drill holes in our walls i mean we as a society you know and then And for those who got like any kind of a satellite dish or the dish TV, what are those gray things that hang off? side of direct direct tv yeah and like all of those things like how these houses especially our place which was a rental unit we now realize and so people coming and going and having different you know different plans and working with different companies it's just like man how many and how many more are we going to go through in our lifetime like are we going to look back at fiber optic cable like dsl do you remember dsl speed internet that came through the phone line but then you'd hook a little dongle you'd plug a dongle into the phone line into the phone jack that was an intermediary between your computer and the wall. I had so many of those DSL dongles, not to

brag. It's just, I mean, you're right, we, you and I before we started recording, we're having believe it or not, listeners, an even more

boring conversation. I know, this is rough.

About, about returning the cable equipment because that's something that I think you also have to do from your, from the Roosevelt house to the, you know, because you're going to the new place and I was saying, I don't even understand why the cable company really wants you to bring the gear back you know unless it's been like a week because i feel it feels just like the kind of moore's law of this whole thing the exponential evolution of technology like the physical equipment is so rapid that like as soon as they put a modem or a router or what have you in your house or apartment like by the time the cable person is driving away that equipment is becoming antiquated It has already been replaced with something snazzier. And the idea that they want you to bring back, I mean, it's just all of this, like you said, there's that Great Portlandia sketch where he's trying to find, what is he? He's just going through all of his, Fred Armisen's going through all of his old storage devices for technology. like he's going through a closet and he's just got pulling out all of these different things that i i identified each one of like old cell phones old you know like i don't know not a mini disc that's more specific to audio but just kind of like all of these things these technologies that at the time to me just seemed like well this is the top of the mountain it's never getting fancier than this and i remember owning almost every single thing that he's pulling out and thinking like this is it and and then a year later it's like comical that we were using flip phones or that we were offloading our photos onto whatever it was you know like so anyway yeah

I used to um one of my jobs when I was still a college student but working for the public radio station was and I've mentioned this to you before I think many times um one of my jobs one of my favorite things to do was to um take these old reel-to-reel tapes and archive them digitize them and then burn them onto CDs. And this is during a time when, you know, KOW was like a pretty state-of-the-art radio station then, and they were pretty early on the kind of jumping onto the digital trends and the digital tools. But this is still an era when, like, the fancy studio, like, all the studios were pretty nice, but there was one big, really fancy studio where they would, like, produce classical music stuff or maybe sweeten classical music live recordings and stuff and had the big board, everything. the computer in there had eight gigs of space on the hard drive and we were out of our minds over that like we were out of our minds that you had eight gigs like people would try to go in and use that computer because it had so much storage space and it was so fast and meanwhile i'm in studio e you know uh listening to these old reel-to-reel news all these news stories on these reel-to-reel tapes and running them into a computer and then burning them onto cds and it's like i just i loved it i have no regrets but i spent hours and hours like burning those cds and then you know me i was like i created some label or i used some software to create some labels so they were all like kind of perfect and whatever and like now like where are those now like are those cds even in existence anymore was somebody able to like because i wasn't burning them as data cds i was burning them as audio cds because that was it that was the technology job done as you might say and now It's like now you would just throw all of that onto a little thumb drive and scatter it in the parking lot.

And make someone's lucky day. I mean, I think, again, everybody knows. Well, I think this is pretty commonly known, but I heard the other day someone mentioned somewhere that it's like, you know, our iPhones are more or whatever particular smartphone one might be holding has more computing power than whatever it was that sent them to the moon. Yeah, yeah, right. I mean, and that's pretty astounding to think about. And that, I'm holding this iPhone right now, which seems to me to be pretty state-of-the-art, and this is going to be a joke in five years. You know? I don't know what, that's the thing, I don't know, I mean, what is it just going to be? Is it going to be a chip? And will I get it? the chip the answer is yes of course i will because i don't care about but then you'll get

another chip that will block the effects of the other that's the problem using the chip too much

you talk about drilling a hole in your house how about a hole in your skull you're gonna get a light chip the guy shows up the guy shows up and uh he's got like uh you know like a drill he's like yeah i can go ahead and just uh drill a hole in your head and put in this uh this new chip and then but then i'll find that you're like you're right andrew that the chip is i'm thinking too much about the chip i'm spending too much time shipping too much on whatever twitter is at that point whatever we're doing on twitter because that's the other thing presume although you know facebook has proven to be pretty durable for a lot of folks i was gonna say you know twitter unfortunately still looms very large in my life it's still a thing where it's still a place i spend a lot of time and get a lot of my uh approval from if i make a spoof that people like and so my assumption is well you know that's like i'm not going on myspace anymore i'm not going on friendster so there's no way that twitter is going to be relevant in 10 years but i don't know i mean facebook is again to a lot of people still pretty relevant what 20 years later yeah i

mean and it is true it's such a blind spot for me because i kind of forget what a large role that plays in other people's lives i can be like yeah look even facebook no like facebook is huge and of course with this um with with them turning into meta and all of that facebook is as prominent i assume as it ever has been but um you know what i'm thinking we should do i actually and i'm saying this unironically i know that we sometimes accidentally end up talking about something that you or i tweeted out and um we're both guilty of it if guilt is the right word there um and it's really hard to i think sometimes maybe translate those but it would be fun like here it is friday let's just try this now luke what is your best tweet of the week this is something we could start doing on fridays luke open up and i'm not on your twitter page right Now, why don't you open up your Twitter, and then we'll just do this. Define best, most engagement, or what I'm most proud of. You know what you're most proud of, not the highest ranking. What is your favorite Tweet of the Week? I wish we had a song. It's Luke's Tweet of the Week. How was that? I guess we now have a song. Well, exactly. That's why I was being quiet.

That's exactly what was happening. I was leaving that in the clear.

I was probably rambling too quickly going into it, though, so it might not cut clean. Anyway, what do you got?

Well, okay, so let's put some parameters in, if we can, if we're going to really do this. So the parameters are not, it's like it has to be original content from me. Can't be a retweet?

Yeah, yeah, what's your favorite thing that you tweeted, yeah.

So I...

I mean, unless you have a retweet, unless you retweeted something, but you, you know, with bonus content that you added that you think is fire.

Sure, right. Like, well, I did retweet something that I thought I added a little content to that I thought was kind of sort of amusing. It's highly visual. You know, I'm going to skip that one. Yeah, skip that.

You only get one here. It's too hard to explain. Don't, don't. I'm the first one. Don't.

Andrew, this is a big. I know. This is a big thing. This is, this is, I'm just scrolling through here. Well, how about this? You do that. I literally tweet. I literally don't know if I tweeted this week, actually. Go ahead. i'm gonna go with it was not the most engaged with tweet but it was the edgiest tweet and it's your favorite i sent this week or the most dangerous yeah you know what i do i'm gonna say it's my favorite andrew because it showed that i am still the bad boy of public radio like elvis mitchell so somebody at the npr west um twitter account i don't know who runs that now uh presume somebody maybe in the engineering department had tweeted out a picture of sam sanders the erstwhile npr host who's now moving over to i think vox um and sam sanders who works out of la had brought all of this gear audio gear that he had been using that belonged to npr and npr west and it was all spread out on a table and it was just kind of an interesting photo because i guess today andrew all we're going to talk about is antiquated okay equipment yeah either of the audio or the internet related variety so it's a picture npr west says sam sanders participates in a ceremonial gear return in my backyard over snacks and a chat and i'm looking at the thing and my response was every piece of audio gear i have has npr west which is very true um and i had to take off my headphones for a second because i i know that i

I have one – I did not steal them, but I inherited – there it is. Yeah, I have one pair of Sony headphones that say NPR West carved in them. Should I send them back right now?

Now, the thing is, I have to say, that tweet is a little bit of an exaggeration because I also now have accumulated a lot of stuff I'm not giving back to APM. I mean, seriously, like, it's either stuff that I got.

From NPR West or stuff that I've gotten from APM, with a few little exceptions. And, you know, the longer my life goes on, the more that the NPR West things kind of just disappear from my life. Either they become non-functional or I lose them or whatever. So it's like a snake shedding its skin. So now there are more things here that are probably APM property. Although, also, I have actually bought a lot of this stuff for some reason. like this mixing board i bought remember i went to the guitar center at the same week the guitar center declared bankruptcy oh right and it was just an absolute free-for-all in there um this microphone i'm talking into right now this shure sm7 i actually purchased with my own money because they wouldn't send me one from apm um you have a reputation for some reason apm wouldn't send me

equipment so i could talk to my podcast about how i steal equipment and then somebody i think

somebody tweeted at me i don't know if you want to like just put that out on twitter but and i just thought yeah but i mean who i don't know who at npr is going to come after me and try to get like um like literally a microphone i know for a fact the the microphone stand that i use when i'm traveling and in fact this was featured in a hey dummies video like two weeks ago that definitely says npr west on it somebody and it's funny because i think now the like there's a standard thing where they maybe like have a sticker that's a barcode maybe it's like a really hard to get off sticker or something yeah but in the old days there was just it must have been a big part of the job if you worked in the engineering department of npr was just literally etching like i don't know what you were you what they were using some diamond bladed knife or something etching NPR or NPR West into things yeah you know I did I don't want to make myself sound like a

sleazeball but um I was taking this little piece of equipment this little it's called a mix pre three little mixer it's both it can act as both a portable mixer but it's also like a kind of a digital interface for my equipment it doesn't really matter either way it's a it's a nifty piece of modern equipment already mine is really old though when I um was having a conversation it was it was having a couple of issues and so I was on a troubleshooting call with our friend uh the engineer Eric Stromstead the Viking yeah I did that no longer send me yeah high-end microphones exactly I um I don't know about this thing is pretty old now I don't know if he wants it back but these things are also um pretty uh I think you know both valuable and kind of important in in what apm does and i think these things are kind of much sought after maybe they're rarer than they used to be like you can't just get them to send you one anyway i flipped it over when i was taking it to cleveland and i saw that it did have one of those like digital like um stamps on it that said you know this is a piece of apm gear with all the numbers and the barcode and the tracking and i was like okay noted you'll be getting this one back when you fire me apm i get

well i mean or will they yeah because i mean that's the other thing and i will just we can

end we shouldn't talk like this it makes the listeners anxious really about us getting fired

yeah i don't think we're getting fired oh no i don't think we're getting fired no i was just joking but but i but i was gonna say like part of it for me though and i'm not just trying to like justify my my sketchy behavior but really it is a thing where whether we're talking about computer you know accessories or the modem that the cable company gives you or even a lot of this gear some of it is again very durable some of you know a microphone that's going to work for a long time potentially that has value to it um but a lot of the stuff it does feel like it's the highest end of the you know of the gear spectrum until it's not and then it's kind of almost like is it worth the is it worth mailing a task cam dat recorder back to somebody somewhere let me feel that one no because the other thing andrew you and i know and then we really will go to break because this is now gonna this is just delving into a level of esoterica that is even by tbtl standards esoteric but you and i have both worked at enough radio stations and we have seen enough chief engineer offices to know that there is an equipment graveyard there are piles once the technology once that once that particular tascam dat recorder is no longer the industry standard there is a pile of 20 tascam dat recorder usually at the foot of the desk of the chief of engineering you know not wrong like and so when you see that i've just seen so much gear at radio operations that's no longer the thing we're using and then it just becomes you know sort of more or less garbage that i think that's also impacted how hard i'm working to get this gear back to the various people who loaned it out to me 10 or 15 years ago if that makes any sense i know that's just justifying my un sam sandersy behavior uh which is you know which is not good because i'm i wish i should try to be a more moral person in the world but i i just feel like well okay i'm going to mail this thing back so that it can go in a pile somewhere in the bowels of of of APM or NPR West or whatever and so that's kind of also that sort of influences my decision making but let's be honest it's mostly just sketchiness um uh ironically the one thing that

I actually do have here I mean I have I have some things that engineers actually told me to keep as I was leaving NHPR I can't remember what it was I think I have one pair of headphones that they actually said you just go ahead and keep this I'd worked there for a long time and had good relationships and whatever i don't know if it was headphones or what but um ironically the one thing that i do have that is emblazoned with npr west on it and again i've never worked there i inherited these um are these sony studio headphones which are the one things that never go out of vogue every radio station i've worked at public and otherwise in the past how long have i been in radio since 2001 actually before that even in college these headphones have remained the standard in the industry for all that time yet that's the one piece of equipment like if i were to send this back to npr west right now they'd probably use it they'd probably give it to who's taking over they have a temporary host for uh it's been a minute now i believe i don't know actually

that's a good question that's an interesting that's an interesting conundrum because that show was so centered around sam's personality and his family you know like he'd have i think his mom on doing stuff and like it was i i really like that show it's been a minute and it's it'll be interesting to see if there is a way to keep it going without the because the thing about public radio as you know andrew is a lot of the time the pressure is this is technically public radio what we're doing and this is clearly an exception to that but a lot of time at the level of like it's been a minute with sam sanders there's a certain amount of pressure to have shows sound kind of like existing shows and not just be so built around one person or one person's personality and so that wasn't the case with sam show which is one of the things that made it so good so it'll be interesting to see if they can actually find someone else to come in and host it or if that show can only exist with sam as the host i don't know what the plan is on that you know i know you

really want to take a break but it's funny because i've been wanting to talk to you about this off air so why not talk about it on air it's an interest it is a very interesting conundrum from a programming standpoint because yes that show was so it was sam's show like you can't separate it seems like you can't separate sam from it but i also understand the position the network is in like that is a show that they make and they distribute to radio stations and radio stations they you can't just suddenly say hey there's now a hole in your programming fill it I mean, you can it happens. I mean, shows go away, but you would need to give the stations a lot of time. But also like you're a network. You want to you want to keep that real estate. You don't want to say, hey, this show is going away. You guys have to fill this with something else. And then the radio stations could go to some other. They could go to American Public Media. You know anybody who works there? They could go to PRI. They could go to PRX. They could go to, you know, all these different places and choose one of those shows to slot in there. But if you just keep it's been a minute going and it has a different host now, it's easier on stations just to keep that show. You know what I mean? Like, so I understand why the network would do that. I mean, it makes sense, but it's just so but it's also it seems awkward to me.

Well, I mean, an analog to some degree would be a Prairie Home Companion. Yes, exactly. Which became Live From Here, which is now no more. And that was because that show was so much about Garrison Keillor's kind of sensibility in the world. And again, I mean, that's a show that our actual company distributed. But it's like, yeah, if you're on 300 radio stations, you would like to try to keep that going if you could, if you're NPR or if you're APM or whoever. So definitely, my guess is that they will give it a good shot, NPR will, of trying to keep that show. There's no reason to take it off and then have to try to get back on all those stations with whatever your newest show is. Exactly. I guess I've answered my own question, which is I bet you that they're going to continue. Then the question will be, does it work as well?

They are, by the way. I know that for a fact that the press release said something like they are, I believe they are going to have kind of a host of fill in a host of hosts. But they're going to have a kind of a rotating cast, I believe, of fill in hosts while they figure out the permanent hosting situation. And that's what the press release said. Ah, okay. Well, there you go. See, I didn't even...

read that press release i've just been focused on the gear situation related to that show that's where most of my energy and attention has been going now we have a new segment on fridays i'm looking forward to next friday yes we do with a theme song will someone please uh can someone write us some spiffy music and put the andrew singing over it produce that up but make sure that you have to write the music because otherwise we're going to get spotify is going to ding us right exactly you can't put it you cannot put it over some somebody else's music or we'll get in trouble but i i like this idea andrew of this twitter friday thing yeah i don't know if i don't know if i picked the the right tweet this week to talk about but i definitely think it could it has

some potential i only i literally did not tweet this week luke you and i are very different people i was just looking at my twitter i retweeted something without any comment of my own i just retweeted something yesterday that i found funny related to the mariners um but aside from that i I haven't had an original tweet since last Friday when I was publicly bemoaning the Brown signing to Sean Watson.

Well, you know, that was an intense that was an intense time for you. And so maybe it was like you needed to get it out and then you needed to just kind of like lie low for a little while. Exactly. All right. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, have you watched any of this footage of this impromptu stand up comedy performance in Burbank?

I was going to tell you this after the break. I'll make it very short. I am so thankful for your show sheet today for explaining to me what the hell I was trying to watch while walking down the street yesterday. I can't remember. I was, like, hustling, bustling around, moving something. I don't know what I was doing. I was on some errand. But I was flipping through my phone, and I just saw a tweet that said something bizarre went down at the AMC last night. And so I hit play on this thing, and it was a video of a woman. It was all cut up, and I couldn't tell what she was talking about. And I was walking down the street trying to hold my phone up to my ear, and then I just gave up on it. completely forgot about it just completely forgot about it and then all my questions were answered with today's show sheet so thank you for that good all right well we will get into this in a moment

here on tbtl we was hoping for some razzle dazzle razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your mark get set get set now ready ready go everybody razzle dazzle let's thank some

dazzling donors these donors are dazzling us with their dough donation that's how we're able to do the show and not get fired and not have to return apm's equipment at least for the time being folks like andrea elkins in jewett texas andrea says cobros thank you for the many hours of companionship you provide through our shared imaginary radio your friendo status is solid among Polly Prissy Pants and myself as new listeners who have been hooked since 2018. Wow. Andrea, that is a mere babe in the woods. A mere four years ago. A mere, you know, six, 800 episodes or whatever that might be.

My gosh.

Although we are still working on converting our 11, Mr. David, from a passive audience to an active TVTL listener and house party enthusiast. I like that idea of the difference between passive and active listening as it relates to this show Andrew one

puts up with us the other right encourages us which really nobody should do yeah I I feel like

that the passive listening is the most mystifying to me because that just seems if this isn't working for you but you're having to hear a lot of it that that seems like a certain ring of hell And hopefully David is moving in the direction of enjoying this Since it sounds like they're being subjected to it We are moving the needle one drop at a time With a special shout out to Lynn Pham of Marsupial Gurgle Who daily enriches our lives with the hottest hits I love that The hottest hits of yesterday and today Drops as cool today as they were yesterday Many thanks going out to Luke and Andrew for their everything, the fine folks at APM, for recognizing how special TBTL is, maybe, and for continuing to promote and distribute it to our ear holes and the tens of TBTL listeners who make each day special via Slack and Facebook exchanges. Wow, what a nice message, Andrea. Thank you, and thanks for supporting the show. We really appreciate it. I will say this, to the degree that APM, well, you know what, that's not fair, Andrew. i i i've now i think because again see previous comments about me trying to be the bad boy of public radio i've kind of leaned maybe too hard into this like antagonizing our company thing it's because i've been listening to a lot of like howard stern i told you i recently watched the movie private parts again and i think i'm like thinking like yeah man like the the rock and roll thing to do is Thank you.

just kind of like bite the hand that's feeding you or whatever which maybe a little bit of that can be fun but no too much of it is well first of all it's kind of a tired shtick but um i also the thing is we work with some wonderful people um you know i mean do i think that whoever is in charge currently of uh american public media slash minnesota public radio knows what a tbtl is no I don't and that's fine but like you know think about our good friend John uh in membership I think about our friend Annie I think about our friend Emily and and before that our pal Sarah and I mean the list goes on we work with a lot of really incredible people and and some of them are tens they listen to the show now so I don't want to make it sound like I think that you know there's no love for us at 8 p.m. it's just you know I think that we're I think that we are not on some folks radar but we we will continue to get to do this job as long as fine folks like andrea uh are willing to support this thing i guess is my larger point yeah do you mind if i

um actually i'm gonna get real earnest here for a second if i may especially given how i was gonna do an ad for earnest equipment before yes i'm gonna do an ad for earnest um i was reading i'm i'll admit i'm actually really bad at staying up to date on industry news like what's going on in the podcasting industry and i think it shows i'm actually trying to change that about myself because you and i have um really operated in this special little space where we can mostly kind of play by our own rules because we have such um a loving and literally supporting audience and that's what we're talking about right now but i was reading you know there's this um industry insider kind of publication called hot pod and it's also um it's also published in the verge now and ashley carmen over there wrote a piece this week called how serious xm bought and bungled a beloved podcast network and it's talking about the kind of um basically what started with earwolf which then got kind of combined with something called midroll which then got bought by stitcher which then got bought by something else and now serious xm owns it all and i'm reading about the industry and i'm as i'm reading about this it is and i i mean this in all seriousness it is astounding that you and i can still do this show for our jobs and it yeah absolutely has to do with our audience i mean what they define as a small audience in the industry these days is ginormous compared to our audience size. And I don't say that to belittle us or our audience. What it says is our audience is amazing that they have made it possible for us to survive in this space where everything is just like everything is aimed at getting in this space, getting bigger and bigger and bigger audiences. I mean, again, I just can't stress this enough. What they consider a small audience, I've never, we haven't even begun to see those kinds of numbers on TBTL. We are whatever is smaller than small, but the listeners we do have like Andrea are just they give so much to make this possible. So I don't know. That was just really I didn't mean to go into all this, but it was just it was so striking to me when I was reading this yesterday.

And it makes me really appreciative. Right. Well, I was just I don't remember if we were talking about this on the show or off the air. But there was this piece in the New York Times about sort of what you do as a smaller production company, a smaller podcast production company. And the person that they were profiling largely was Leon Nafok, the guy behind Slow Burn. That started out being something that was over at Slate. And then he sort of migrated it off of there and obviously runs it. And he has this production company that he's that he has started, which I want to say has like maybe like 19 employees or something. But it was or maybe I don't know the exact number, but a handful more employees than we have, like on TBTL, let's say. And this whole thing was about, like, how do you survive as a small podcast or small podcast production company in this ever evolving media landscape? And I thought it was hilarious because, you know, a small podcast company, they're still getting so many more downloads than we are. They still have so many more people working there. I mean, the economic stakes are just so much higher than what we're doing. But what I always end up at with after, you know, reading about that or thinking about the industry is I feel really kind of proud of this show, which I don't say that a lot, you know. But I but I feel I feel happy of ourselves that somehow this thing is still working and nobody's talking about it because I think it's so unique like this is a pretty weird I guess my point is that they were talking about what are the various business models for podcasting and they were saying well one is try to get enough listeners. that you can you know um that you can charge a lot for your ads and that's how you could make money or go to a subscription-based service go behind a paywall which is always a little dangerous because if you if you have to pay to listen to something if you create that barrier for folks you know you don't know how many people will listen we're something in between we are just like pay if you want if you like it we'll keep doing it and if we get the you know enough money to get paid to do this etc we are just in this bizarro very unique category of how this can actually get done but again ultimately i feel kind of proud of it because it's like we are some i don't know how we are all these years later still doing this and the checks are still clearing but it is outside of the norm for any other sort of podcasting operation yeah yeah so all of that is

to say in all sincerity thank you so much to andrea and everybody andrea sorry i didn't mean to say to Andrea and everybody who makes this possible. On the subject of which, Andrew,

Maestro? On your mark! On your mark! Get set! Get set! Now ready! Ready! Go! Everybody rattle, dazzle,

We've also got to thank Sarah Hogan in Denver, Colorado, who is dazzling us with her donation. Sarah says, Thanks for continuing to be friendos. Love y'all so much. I think what Sarah is saying there with that extremely concise message is I love the show it wouldn't kill me if y'all just tighten just go home, listen to the show and then make it 40 minutes short just leading by example we're not here to tell you that the show should be shorter, we wouldn't want to get into that sort of thing, no no no we just want you to go home listen to the show and then make it 40 minutes short

OK. OK. So you want me to make it?

Sarah, thank you so much for supporting the show. In the interest of brevity, I will just say thank you. We could not be here without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right. The Top Story, as alluded to before our break, comes to us from Burbank, California, where, well, it really comes to us from Twitter, which is where i saw this tweet yesterday which was i mean almost like sort of um like perfectly designed for me to bring together all of the things that i find interesting in the world which is like people behaving in a surprising fashion the city of burbank california stand-up comedy etc that the tweet just was from somebody named charlie dampsky and he just wrote all hell broke loose at the amc burbank 16 last night that's the tweet that i saw and it's just uh obviously he just shot this with his cell phone of a of somebody standing in front of this movie theater audience doing stand-up or doing something a performance now again you mentioned this too andrew uh i maybe just for the i don't know the sake of brevity or whatever uh charlie just cut together a bunch of almost real non-sequitur stuff from this stand-up comedy performance. So it's just, it's not a coherent, it's not really a coherent thing that I can play you the, I mean, you know what I'll do? I will play some of the audio just so people can hear.

I am a single mom. Do we have any single moms in the house? Take my ashes and spread them near Pismo Beach and Lake Tahoe and whatever's left over, I want you to put your dad's coffee grind. I feel like all the moms in NorCal thought I was a stripper. Do you guys hear tattoos? So I also like to give advice to people i believe in buddha jesus was never married he could have been dropping off the kids for her week and have been like yes you're dead fish i want to help i want to inspire i've been going through depression is anybody in here chants i'm like if that can get tina turner away from ike turner that can get me out of my one bedroom into a house in the hills and you say this was confusing to you andrew as you were walking down the street yesterday

I'm actually, I'm now, I'm actually, I'm miffed though.

See, so this person is making it, I mean, maybe Tiffany King, by the way, pardon me, Tiffany King, but the person who recorded this and chopped it up is making this even, I don't know if I should say even worse or just worse than what it was. Like it does not tell me whether or not this was, this was somebody who did something really bold, whether or not they should have done it. I don't know, stand up in front of a bunch of people and do stand up and hope to entertain them it's an interesting story but i would like some evidence of what her jokes actually were like this is not serving anybody it's only it's making her seem like a total wacko which she might be but can we at least just hear these jokes i'm miffed now i want to hear the real stuff well this has

This is what led me, Andrew, to try to find the Zapruder film, the definitive piece of footage on this, which I wasn't really able to. I will say for this being a movie theater in the greater Los Angeles area, presumably with a number of filmmakers or editors or people who work in the industry in the audience, nobody had the good sense to just roll on the thing and present any part of it unedited or unaltered. so all you can find are just little random clips of this woman again her name is tiffany kings very i will give her this very energetic performance like like she did not like if you i mean this is a stress dream for me and i think an even more of a stress dream for you andrew but if if you were to if somehow we were in the situation we're in a movie theater and there's like a 30 minute lag or or downtime while they try to fix the projector and i don't know why you would do this andrew but i saw you pulled out a small a tiny gun like a pearl handled you know derringer i don't know about guns is derringer small what are like the little ones that there were like in a lot of the noir films someone will just have in their purse um i could get into one of those guns i could get into a gun that didn't actually break the skin just kind of was like ow If you shot someone with it Maybe even not quite as strong as a BB gun I'd be fine with more people having Guns if the bullets Didn't actually penetrate your body If it was just kind of annoying Like hey quit it

I used to have these toy guns I think they were orange And they would shoot little yellow rubber pellets And you could shoot it inside the house But it wasn't like a pellet gun Those will break the skin It was just like a little toy spring action gun

Yeah pearl handled small revolver What does the internet tell me that's called I don't know It's called a small revolver A pearl handled small revolver If you pulled one of those out Andrew And we're at the movie theater And you pull it out of your purse And you poke it right into my ribs And you say I'm going to shoot this at you And you're going to go ow If you don't go up and do stand up comedy Which again I think would be a really It would definitely indicate a new phase For our relationship sure sure sure the part of our relationship where you start pulling out a gun on me and making me do stuff i don't want to do i feel like those roles would be reversed but okay if i had to go up there and do stand-up comedy i would i guess do it but i would be my body language and my level of energy would at all times indicate to the audience that this was something that was terrifying to me and i was uncomfortable and i wished i wasn't doing it that is not the energy that is being projected by this woman Tiffany King she is into it also I don't know why this matters but I don't know what I think a quote-unquote stand-up comedian looks like but this woman does not sort of conform with I guess maybe the stereotypical notion of that she is wearing a very tight-fitting dress I believe she was at the film with her daughter the story goes that her eight-year-old daughter dared her to get up and do the stand-up comedy this is what she told um the local nbc station in la that's now been covering the story a woman who went viral for him her impromptu stand-up performance at an la screening of the lost city said she decided to entertain the crowd on a dare from her eight-year-old daughter tiffany king a stand-up comic and psychic medium said during a wednesday screening uh at the amc the projector broke down and the air conditioner went out as the crowd waited king decided to go to the front of the room and start telling jokes to entertain the restless audience now uh because we you know live in the era we live in in the comment section of this initial tweet from this guy charlie that was getting a ton of attention people have been all kinds of things have been going on in that comment section one thing was people were claiming they were at the movie but of course they weren't because they were didn't even have the right movie theater or film that was showing people were trying to lie it's like saying i was at woodstock or something people then other people are like fact checking them and like busting them out for lying also people figured out that tiffany king has also done stand-up comedy at least once that was filmed so someone found her more complete act oh i'd like to can we hear that well i'm gonna be honest with you andrew there's a lot of stuff in there racially that i don't 100 seriously feel great about this is a white woman right this is a white woman um uh i mean it's just it's not let me put it this way i don't think it's particularly funny or good stand-up and there are sections of

it that are just kind of like just getting into white people talking about a white person talking about race in order to try to make this crowd laugh in a way that to me didn't really strike me as a tonally the best way to talk about race, at least if you're a white person.

in 2022 like it's it's just very hacky it's it's i mean what i think if i can assess the this this this person tiffany king she appears to be somebody who has a lot of energy and i would actually argue a certain amount of charisma like what she's doing in the movie theater setting and also when she's on stage at the um i mean this whatever this comedy show that she did she's got A lot of energy and she is watchable On stage like she's not Mousy like I would be she is like Going for it and it's not like it's Just I think sometimes people confuse Being charismatic with being funny Like if you can get up on stage And you can be energetic and you can kind of like You can sort of keep people's attention That is not the same As you can write a good joke And or write a joke And then over the course of time after delivering It a bunch of times make adjustments to it and And form it into the best version of that joke Whatever it is that people who are stand-up comedians Have going for themselves as far as their performance I don't think this woman, Tiffany King, appears to have that She just appears to have a lot of energy

Yeah, that's interesting And I guess that's what Those are two I won't say they're the only But they are two important ingredients In becoming successful in this particular industry of stand-up comedy Or any comedy But usually it starts with stand up comedy. So you have to you have to be funny or funny ish. You have to have some ability to be funny and make people laugh. But you also have to have the energy where it doesn't feel like torture for yourself to go up. And you have to have at least enough self-confidence to get up there and do it. I mean, that's right. That's why it's always been a thing for me. You know, I think about it a lot. I think, boy, if I ever had to do that, I still think that maybe when I'm 70, I'll be like I'll finally do an open mic night when I'm 70 because then I'll just be like hey He's the old man who's doing stand-up for the very first time So maybe I'd get some pity laughs like the idea of doing stand-up is still very interesting to me But it's also absolutely mortifying. I told you I still have a An ongoing email thread with myself where I email myself funny jokes that I think are good stand-up jokes or potent or ideas for stand-up jokes I've never done stand-up in my life I think that's so interesting

I like I really like that you're Intrigued by that by that Form and I you know I would love It if you at some point If you actually you know For whatever reason got up and tried I know like karaoke is a lost cause on you Yeah but that's because I don't have a desire

To that's not a lost cause It just doesn't you know it doesn't seem fun

To me to do it I had that I had What for me is a strange thought Circa 2022 the other day i was just here in portland and i forget what i was doing but i the thought crossed my mind i wonder if there's an open mic tonight that i could go to like and do some open mic comedy which is strange for me in 2022 because i'm not lacking for outlets uh or chances to talk into a microphone in front of some number of people and in fact i kind of mildly dread it when it's happening like if it's the day of a show i'm nervous like a show like live wire i'm nervous and i'm kind of like you know i'm it's not the most it's not like i'm looking forward to standing in front of people performing now once it's going i'm always enjoying it i'm really happy that it's my job but there's just a certain amount of anxiety that i have so the idea that i would on top of that decide i want to go try to find a dimly lit bar in portland and stand up and tell jokes to people um is weird that I would have that impulse and I think it just must have to do with something with whatever's emotionally going on for me it's probably my fantasy would be I walk into uh you know I walk into a comedy club or a bar that's having an open mic there's zero expectation about my abilities I get up there and because I am you know relatively comfortable in that space I do well and everyone's kind of like wow that was good and then maybe I just was in that moment needing to fantasize about that those series that series of events let me ask you this i think this

is kind of beside the point but i know you you've talked about this urge and you've you've actually done this before i mean were you living in not in port townsend but did you ever do this in

bellingham there was some time during my i think i've done it in i think i've done it in seattle maybe going to like you know back when the comedy underground was still open um and i think i started Going to some open mics in Portland But not actually getting up and perform Or excuse me in Bellingham But not actually getting up and performing But it's definitely like Again before I was doing Livewire Or I don't know I mean I guess I was probably still technically doing it But like I guess my point is I haven't had this urge in a while And this urge feels to me like It's not even related to comedy I think it's related to some You know sort of feeling like I want I want to get some kind of hit of approval and thinking wouldn't that be cool if I like if I did stand up comedy or if I did open mic and it went really well and no one was expecting it that would be a cool feeling but of course the chances are greater that it'll just be like the scene in Joker where I'll just be standing up there in my burgundy vest that was also something that was noted a lot of people just posting that picture of Joaquin Phoenix doing stand up from Joker as their take on this impromptu stand up comedy performance.

in this movie theater but my question for you is this though um you've had these you've had these um kind of urges before as we've talked about i don't know if you like me describing them that way but um would it if you were struck by this urge and in a position to do this just like find an open mic night somewhere and go to it kind of on the fly which you have done before in other stages of your life and in other cities you've lived in would it change would it would it change your mind about doing it knowing that there's a very real possibility that right now in portland oregon a lot of people know who you are like even though you've always worked in kind of publicly facing jobs or have for a big chunk of your career now you were doing tbtl you were on cairo radio probably during some of these times that you would do do just like impromptu stand-up um it wasn't like nobody knew who you are but right now like you you've mentioned on the show in in private conversations that like in portland now like you're on a nationally syndicated radio show portland is a big public radio town it's much more common for you to walk into a room and somebody to know who you are and also keep in mind that you only probably know a fraction of the times that somebody knows who you are when you walk into a room would it change it knowing that there would probably be somebody in the audience who recognizes you as luke burbank from live wire well luke burbank obviously from tbtl but also yeah that other show live wire well it's funny that you ask that because

in this bizarre fantasy that i was entertaining for whoever amount of time i was whatever amount of time i thought should i should i give a different name which would also be extra weird because if there was someone in the room who was like had been to live wire or i mean the thing the connection to the stand-up comedy community here is pretty strong because we have on a lot of stand-up comics on the show so we know a lot of the local comics and and their friends and you know it would it be even more weird if they said okay let's bring up you know ricky and it's like me and then someone's like isn't that the guy from live i wouldn't do that is this performance is this like is this performance art is this some like you know andy kaufman thing where he's trying to pretend he's someone else um so yeah i don't know i i mean i i guess the answer andrew is i would be less inclined to follow through with this yeah that's the word i was living in a city where there is it would appear more awareness of what my job stuff is yeah um because the fantasy is and you know what's really funny is that there's like a whole this is a whole genre of tiktok videos not stand-up comedy related but basically like no one thinks this guy's gonna be good at basketball and it'll be like a like a guy who dresses like he's real nerdy he's got a backpack on but then he goes to like a pickup basketball game you know like at venice beach or like west fourth in new york like one of these places where it's just like hyper competitive and then he just like is way better at basketball than anyone thinks or there's this this I don't know if this is racist or not but there's just whole like kind of like series of videos where it's like white guy can speak Chinese and everyone's shocked and it'll just be like some guy who took an interest in you know I don't know if it's Cantonese or Mandarin but some version of the Chinese language and then he'll show up at like a Chinese restaurant and then he'll just like say some something in Chinese to the the folks that work there who speak Chinese maybe as their first language uh and they're shocked or whatever like that's a whole thing too like white guy speaks Chinese so I don't know if this is like my version of that guy who they don't know can do stand-up does stand-up um one of those that made its way to

me a lot of people were sending me this video of a kind of overweight shirtless white guy probably in his 30s who's on rollerblades at a skate park and flips all the way upside down that is an That's an amazing video. Yeah, that's an amazing video. I wish he would just keep his mouth shut at the end. He comes off as such. You don't like that ending? No, I just think it's over the top. You don't need to. Let your actions speak for yourself. It's amazing. But here's what, you know what I really want you to do? And then, oh man, yes. Okay, you do come up. Do my stand-up comedy in Cantonese? You completely humpty hump it. You put on like ridiculously fake, like old-fashioned Groucho Marx, like glasses nose mustache one you do change your name but like it's known that you're like to the degree that somebody in the room knows who you are like it's maybe it's book lure bank or something like that and you're just like and you go and you perform

and it's like this alter ego but like it's just the the just the kind of shittiest alter ego what if i go as gallagher too what if you just go as gallagher three but you don't do gallagher style comedy you just do your you just do whatever you do

that's actually very intriguing that would be for the like two people that got that joke if i was just going by gallagher three but again it's not there are no watermelons getting smashed I'm not even sure because that's the thing is that's the third version of Gallagher it's not the real guy it's not his brother it's a public radio host who just feels sad on a given day and is hoping to get some kind of oxytocin hit from someone saying good job after the show

okay I'm going to take this way too far to a point where it's no longer funny but how about your Gallagher three but you just come out with like a plank on two sawhorses and you line up little uh watermelon flavored jolly ranchers and you just smash them with just like just you angrily you just go out there you angrily smash them with just like a carpentry hammer and then just walk off the stage like you're working something out i mean i could see that where

that would andrew you're you're half joking that would be better than whatever my actual act would be that's the other problem the other problem is i would i'm sure would not necessarily you know what else is probably animating this in my mind is that there is a stand-up comedian named um stavros hakalis and i follow him on twitter and i also i think i because he's got a lot of videos that pop up on tiktok now and i think he's very funny um he um uh but what i noticed is that he really primarily does crowd work or at least the videos that make i mean he has material and he's a funny writer but and he also hosts a podcast too called like stavvy baby or something but um what i've noticed is the videos of his that make it up on tiktok a lot which will be like 20 second clips are primarily crowd work where he's just talking to somebody and then he's just quipping about you know whatever answer they give he it you know he's bemused by it and the crowd is eating it up i mean and this is not like i'm not breaking any news here but crowd work to me if you're decent at it feels like a very doable form of stand-up comedy because there is a sense in the room that any first of all people know this is not a joke you had written in advance so you immediately get a ton of credit like for anything that's even moderately funny i'm thinking about this because when i did live wire last and i asked if anybody was new to the show or where folks had come from somebody said that they were from montana and i was like welcome and i was like what brought you out here and they said well we love the ocean and i said i just have to tell you this is not on the ocean and and everybody laughed or whatever and then at some point i was like you know when did you get here or when did you arrive and they said 15 years ago i was like oh you mean you just came from montana like you moved here from montana a long time ago they're like yeah i go well if i ask you know if anyone's visiting or whatever like i mean technically i'm from california's or whatever we just had this like kind of and then throughout the show elena and i were kind of riffing with this person in the audience and the who was from montana originally but now lived in portland and every time it would get called back the audience very much i don't think any none of this will be in the radio show i was gonna say this is kind of making the life

of the editors hell though right because you can't have these callbacks in the show oh their life is

already hell trying to edit me yeah um trying to wrangle you exactly the bad boy of public radio with all my stolen equipment but and stolen valor but like uh i guess it was i was watching stavros and i was thinking about that experience and thinking like maybe i'll just get up and just talk to people in the crowd and just you know have a i don't know an enjoyable chat with them or something so i guess that was that was what the probably where the germ of the idea started back to tiffany king though this stand-up who got up in the movie theater i just want to say a couple things quickly about this one i would have had to leave the theater if i were in the audience um and i am not trying to be mean to her um but i it's there's nothing that would cause me to have more um uncomfortable feelings than watching someone really flail up there i mean it does not appear that it went particularly well somebody yelled put us out of our misery to her that was the one like heckle that was noted and she said to them i've this is in the that kind of montage of the charlie guy put together someone says put us out of our misery i.e stop doing this and she goes put you out of your misery well why don't you try to come down here and entertain a theater of people and my thought was well no one actually nobody asked you to do that nobody put a pearl handled small revolver in your rib cage and said go down there and entertain so that's a little bit of a kind of i don't know bad faith retort yeah argument whatever i agree you're doing this because you wanted to do it i will say i get in a way though i do have some sympathy or maybe empathy for tiffany king because she says she's a single mom it's very hard for her to get stage time in la and it's hard for her to get you know be able to have the opportunity to go out and perform and so this was for her a chance to perform to basically a captive audience and she uh you know didn't want to pass it up so she and she also says that she got up as a joke and basically made some announcement to the room not thinking she was going to fully do like a 20 minute set yeah and then she went to go sit down and someone said tell us a joke so really if we want to be mad at

someone it's whoever said tell us a joke yeah i yeah i'm on the fence and again i need i need the raw tape the unedited tape of whatever happened on this night because i i don't know how to feel about this i'm with you like part of me does actually respect the chutzpah of this and and and the fact that she just decided to give this a whirl but on the other hand um i really dislike people who are doing something in their own interest but claiming that they're doing it for some broader purpose like in this case the broader purpose just entertaining people uh during a uh you know a theater outage but like generally speaking and i don't want to get too personal because I'm sure people in our listening audience potentially do certain things like this. But, you know, like there's certain like challenges of I'm going to rollerblade across the United Kingdom to raise awareness of X, Y or Z. And you're like, well, I think you wanted to do that as a personal challenge. Like there's a lot more you could do for that cause of X, Y and Z other than rollerblade across the UK and stop and do media shots at every single city you go through. You know what I mean? I mean, that's somebody who really wants a rollerblade and they're making it seem like they're doing a selfless deed and they're not. It's OK to do that, but it's not selfless.

Right. Or like when I was at a place called Cadillac Jackson Ocean Shores, Washington, for a July 4th weekend, a bunch of us had gone down and we were staying in the beach cabin of my at then my agent Topo Swope. and we went to this karaoke bar, Cadillac Jacks, and a woman, a kind of older gal, probably in maybe her 60s or 70s, who was wearing, at the time it was very in style to wear like a denim top and jeans kind of matching with like a, I don't know what you'd call it, but like embroidery on it. And she had a big, I think Winnie the Pooh embroidered on the denim top. And she sang I think she sang Wake Me Up Inside by Evanescence And then about 15 minutes later She got up and she said Tony just got here And he asked that I sing this Wake Me Up Inside by Evanescence Because he missed it before So I'm going to sing it again So she sang Wake Me Up Inside by Evanescence Twice in about 20 minutes And my feeling was That was probably less for Tony And more because she really liked Doing this particular song

there's so many dazzling details in that story you just told how we never we never cracked that before you're having like an ocean shores weekend with your agent and you're at this guy well no

topo was not there it was like the mummy uh van um i actually was you and veeves were not there i guess but maybe this was before you were you you'd actually moved out from new hampshire but But, yeah, it was just kind of, it was, I don't know, maybe three or four couples. Oh, my sister Liz was there, too. I think Liz and Sarah might have been there. But, yeah, this karaoke bar was a trip because it was also where a guy got up and did the song, Let the Bodies Hit the Floor by Drowning Pool.

I don't think I know that song. If I heard it, I know it. But that sounds like an amazing flex at karaoke.

It's so dark. It's such a dark song. I mean, it's a it's it's so messed up. And I think, you know, I think I used to always tell the story and joke about it being like, I think I don't think I thought about or we talked about PTSD the same then as we do now. But I used to always say it was like this was like this was like I don't know what I mean. I would say something like this is like what I don't know. I don't want to repeat the joke because it sounds a little insensitive, but it seemed like it was the soundtrack for somebody who was out to do some real harm to other people. yeah yeah and like it was not appropriate for a karaoke like it wasn't a fun song it wasn't sweet caroline no one had to say it was just this guy just tearing through this extremely violent and dark song uh you know at this on the same night where this lady is getting up and singing wake

me up inside two times in the span of 20 minutes it was a it was a vibe there at Cadillac Jazz

oh I hate aggro karaoke like you know I don't um as you said I don't sing karaoke I never have but I've hung out I've sat next to karaoke people and I've studied them no but I mean how many times have I been in a bar or a karaoke room with you or other people like I have spent a lot of time it's been a while now oh it's been a global pandemic it's been a while that's that's in a

different category that's like that's like too downbeat for me that comes up at karaoke a lot too it's been a while by stained but it's it's downbeat but it's not aggro at least yeah but

like and i don't think he would hear this i'm not going to mention any names but like i remember being in a karaoke room with you i might be conflating things but i also no i am conflating things never mind i'm going to leave that thought anyway we were in a karaoke room and you and me we have a mutual friend and he decided to sing um wrecking ball by miley cyrus oh i know i know him he has he's talented musically um but he decided to do a screamo version of it yes in the like talk about not reading the room like maybe you have some friends where you do that but like you just like look around like that was one of the most painful and i love this person by the way But that was one of the most painful karaoke moments of my life. I felt I felt like I felt embarrassed for him, if that makes it. I was I mean, I was both annoyed because it was a terrible sound. And right. But I also in one of those rooms, too.

Yes. Contain.

And I was also just like hearing it through the ears of everybody in the room. Like I felt somehow responsible for this. I was not responsible for this in any way. It was not my party. It was not my microphone. It was not my choice. Not your circus, not your monkeys, as they said. I love that expression. I always forget about it. But yeah, exactly. Yet somehow I felt embarrassed on his behalf. I felt responsible. It was so bad. Just screaming, screaming, growling, top of lungs, growling version of this song. I love that song. Actually, a good song. And he could have done it so well.

That was one of the last times we hung out with Steve Nelson. A.K.A. El Ropo. I was right before he put in his resignation letter At 8pm I think actually At the core of all of this Is what you just described That feeling you've just described Of feeling somehow responsible Even though you are not You are not responsible for that Nor was I Neither of us was responsible for this A person doing stand-up comedy In this movie theater But when I watch it It gives me a kind of uncomfortable feeling Because it somehow does feel like I have some responsibility Or let me put it this way if i were in the theater yes that's why i would have to leave because i would not be in charge of this person but this overwhelming feeling that this is awkward for everyone and that somehow that then that awkwardness infects me even though it doesn't i'm just sitting there waiting for the lost city to start playing again but i i mean this is when i started when i was a kid and i'd be watching donahue or something and i'd be so embarrassed for someone on tv that i'd have to

change the channel yeah yep as a kid i would call it the jerry lewis effect or something like that like jerry lewis made me so so uncomfortable as a kid yeah like to where i would have to change

the channel because again i think at some core level it's almost like you feel you're so embarrassed for the person that that embarrassment is like contagious or something or their humiliation is

contagious or something it's contagious bro and you know you and i have talked about this before But that's why Q and A's at the end of an event are so, so painful for me. Like I've sat through a lot of like book readings from authors. When I first moved to Seattle, I was recording that I would go out to like various bookshops and other venues where a visiting author would be reading from their book or whatever. And you'd record it. Then there'd be a Q and A at the end. And like the Q and A, there's something about people standing up at those kinds of events. And they're always either trying to be too clever. They're not asking questions. They're telling too much about their lives. I know that I tell too much about my life on this show, but this isn't a Q&A, and I'm not pretending that I'm asking a question of an author. It's just some of the most painful moments in life are watching Q&As.

Yeah. Well, I have a different relationship with them, which is I don't mind them because the pressure's off of me. When you're the one handling it. I think you're probably thinking of, like, specifically, the most recent one was that Amy Sedaris event in Seattle, and there was a Q&A. where some of the cues went a little off the rails. And I was, it was weird, but for some reason, again, this is like why I'm so inconsistent with this, whereas I would feel embarrassed. Embarrassed. I would feel embarrassed for a person who got up and did stand-up comedy in a movie theater that no one asked them to do. I don't, for whatever reason, and I cannot explain this, feel embarrassed for someone who asks a question that is maybe not the most interesting question or is more of a comment than a question. But I think that is animated for me by the fact that I know most of my work is now done. Like, I had to interview Amy Sedaris for an hour, and I wanted that to go well. I was kind of stressed about that. But once it's, like, turn it over to the audience, it's like, by the way, belly flop away. Like, flail away, my friends. Come flail away. Come flail away. Come flail away with me. Like, because you know what? I'm not the one. I'm not the one who's the focus anymore. I mean, although, really, I wasn't the one who was the focus ever. Amy Sedaris was the focus as the person who everyone bought tickets to see. But anyway, if you want to find out more about this stand up comedian, her name is Tiffany King. And, you know, I guess she put it all out there. So we at least got to give her some credit for that. All right, Andrew, a little. I mean, I'm making a bigger deal out of this than you are. The last music for your weekend from the Roseville neighborhood of Seattle.

I know. I feel like I have. So we didn't really talk about this being my final episode from the studio because I get I don't know that there's much to say. Even for me about it, Mr. Kind of nostalgia and Wistfulness over here But I do think that I'm so Busy, like I'm just like looking around the Studio, all of these things that I thought I couldn't give up Until the last day, everything I need to do the show Everything, and it's like, I didn't need that Printer, I should have disconnected that printer Weeks ago and sent it over to the new house And I'm looking around and I'm just like, I gotta get Moving as fast as possible here and just start Tearing down the studio and moving things over because the movers are coming to like take all the furniture tomorrow so anyway i think i'm a little bit focused on what's in front of me right now to be too too like kind of pre-nostalgic about um about leaving this place but it is definitely um it is definitely the end of an era but i am not i would i was going to ask you a favor um why don't you go first with music for your weekend because i know that you're excited about something and i have something that might sort of bite the rhyme a little bit so i want you to go first okay yeah i mean it's just in the same it's just sort of in the same era and it's it's very rare that you and i would come into this with the same the same kind of era so i want you to go first because i know that you've been

excited about this all week well i just heard this song this week i think i actually saw on a tiktok video and i was like okay what is this this is this is a very cool song that i am unfamiliar with and i figured it was probably some kind of new or soul act probably called something and the somethings you know there's like a whole yeah there's like a whole kind of like movement of like bands called like the saint paul and the broken bones or nathaniel right lift and the night sweats or the like it's and it's it's almost always like a white dude and then there's like 74 people in the band and i actually like the sound of that kind of music like because it harks back to a kind of a an era of music that i really like so i kind of heard this and i thought i wonder if this is some newer band doing older sounding music but no it's actually from a performer a singer named uh durando durando was born in 1946 in berkeley and he just had this kind of fascinating weird life he was a guy kind of like living in the bay area in the in the you know 60s and 70s uh and and making music he was like kind of met james he opened for james brown at one point but he basically played like two or three shows and then had a falling out with his record label and then just kind of stopped making music and he so he he sort of dropped out of the music scene but then he re-emerged later doing a public access tv show he had two different public access tv shows that he would do in the bay area one was called durando's penthouse after dark which sounds like durando's penthouse after dark sounds a little racy right but then he also did a children's show called tapper the rabbit where he would dress up in a rabbit outfit which again that's range if one is durando one is racy one is hoppy so he like he he he also apparently um uh had a nervous breakdown by his own kind of description he then went and played guitar on a cruise ship for a while so he could see the world then he came back to california he went to school and become became like a physical uh therapist of some kind and so then he spent the last i don't know 20 years of his working life just working in hospitals and doing like various therapies for people before retiring. And he was just kind of had been sort of largely forgotten.

by the scene and then you know somebody discovered this song that i want to recommend today called didn't i this got started getting played on um radio one on the bbc there were some dj over there that like found this song because he also never really put out much of a proper album but this song was really good people started listening to it and then eventually they went and found some old recordings of this guy durandos and put together this let my people go which is the name of the album i think it was released in 2005 and it's just kind of a collection of songs he did that were generally slept on by the by the wider public i think it's also kind of interesting because it sounds like he never really went back to music i read an interview i read two different interviews with him where he was just living out in california in this house with his wife and his teenage kids just kind of chilling like you know even though he was getting this attention again it wasn't like he jumped right back on it and was like okay durando returns now i'm going to do this tour it's not like he kind of had his moment doing music and then he was sort of fine with it the other thing was he was because he drove a rolls-royce with a vanity plate that said durando on it and he loved to wear love it he loved to wear fur coats and snake skin shoes there was the assumption that he was a pimp which he was interestingly enough very um dismissive of like he was like i was not a pimp ever that was not a job i had i knew some pimps maybe because of my outfit you thought that but i'm not that's not what i was which i tend to believe him because if there's one thing we know about pimp culture it's that the people participating in that thing which i think is a terrible thing to be part of are usually pretty vocal about how they're part of that lifestyle so to find a guy who's saying no man that was not me that was just a rumor i don't know how that got started now he did have a relationship with various gals who would give him money he admitted to that part but he said there was no quid pro quo he wasn't in charge of them he didn't know how they got the money but he was like if somebody Showed up and wanted to give me some money to help me pay My rent I wasn't turning it down But I was not part of any organized system

This is becoming more and more like that Jeffrey Wood store tape we play I don't sell Wood just because my last name Is Wood store and I have an online Site that says sale on Wood that was just a project For my media

Class just because I'm driving Around Oakland in a Rolls Royce wearing Furs and receiving money from people It does not mean Anyway this song Didn't I I've listened to this song Probably 50 times this week It's really good And I would love to Play it for music for your weekend So could you maybe play that From where you're at Andrew

Didn't I treat you right now? Didn't I do the best of cool? Good night, didn't I give you everything? Good night, I tried my best just to be a man. Good night, didn't I do it? So there you go, a little Durando.

That's amazing. I love the recording quality of that. I love the sound of it. I got to point out, and you and I, you told me the song you were going to play is called Didn't I? I hadn't heard it before right now, but I immediately thought of the Delphonic song, Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time, Didn't I? The chorus here, or the background singer singing, Didn't I, sounds so remarkably like that exact song, Didn't I Blow Your Mind This Time.

Yeah, I wonder what the timing is. I wonder if that was a big song and old Durando's brain was kind of like, well, I could do something inspired by that. Who knows?

But again, it doesn't bother me, though. I mean, that's the kind of thing that I like. I don't think that anybody was probably getting rich off of somebody else's art on that. That was just like, maybe it was a coincidence or maybe it was inspired by it, but either way, they're two great songs, you know? I just like the...

part at the beginning which does not repeat part of why i've listened to the song 50 times because i keep listening to it hoping it repeats somewhere else in the song which it doesn't but i just feel like that little flourish at the beginning of the song is so magical and you're right too just the kind of like you know there's just a little bit of hiss in the background of that kind of analog recording from say probably the early 1960s you know and stuff like uh anyway so uh that's what i wanted to play now andrew now that i've bitten your rhyme no you have to play um it's interesting

because there's a little backstory to this and it's totally a coincidence a little backstory to this that isn't well it's not really similar but somehow it's kind of from the same era and it's somebody who has been generally unsung i get a lot of emails from various um you know publicity companies saying hey this new album's out and this new album is out and usually it's you know well it's always brand new music that's being released, right? And I will sometimes go through those emails on maybe a Thursday while I'm doing some other work, as I was yesterday. And I hit play on one, and I'm just sort of listening to it in the background as I'm doing my work, not paying any attention to it. And then I'm like, wait a second, what am I listening to? This is just like straight up jazz. I don't know why I said it like that. It's a cosmic gumbo. But I was like, this is straight up jazz, but I like it. But it was also like kind of very stripped down sort of. And so I went back to the beginning of it And I started listening to it And then I read the actual press release And the press release is from It doesn't even matter It doesn't matter But I don't know the label But it's music by this person named Charles Stepney Who apparently was just kind of known behind the scenes As a producer and arranger And an arranger, I should say Apparently worked with like Earth, Wind & Fire Which I know nothing about worked with a whole bunch like the Dells and a bunch of groups that I really know nothing about, but never released his own music. But apparently he's got these three daughters who are adults now because he died back in 1976. And his music was, I think, from the maybe early 40s, late 50s. I'm sorry, late 40s, early 50s through the end of his life in the 70s. But he was like making music just like by himself in his apartment or his home or whatever. And that's when I realized reading this press release, the interesting thing about the song is it's just him recording this back in the 60s on a like a four track recorder. And he's using some sort of a drum machine, like a really like kind of an early drum machine type of thing to keep the beat. So it sounds like you just kind of like, you know, at first blush, it just sounds like jazz. But then you listen more closely. You're like, oh, this this is a drum machine in it, too. Just a very, very simple one. So anyway, this is it. They have released one song by Charles Stepney. We're going to listen to his entire discography with this one song. It's called Step on Step. And this was him recording this just in his home somewhere with a drum machine.

Thank you.

so just a little simple track there with piano and vibes and a little bit of uh just a little bit of a beat behind him to keep the rhythm his 91st birthday uh would have been tomorrow for

whatever that's worth that's that's really nice i really like that um i feel like i have been at the risk of sounding like tim heidecker and i think you should leave too i feel like i have been getting more into jazz lately and and more jazz that's probably some of the stuff you tend to listen to that's a little bit like less vince garaldi which i love that stuff still but there's like the extremely accessible stuff and then there's stuff that maybe is five percent more challenging and i've kind of been going there and actually enjoying it um i you mentioned this sort of in passing but i didn't realize this guy produced the earth wind and fire song shining star and sing a song i don't see i don't really know earth wind and fire at all

so that doesn't really well you know that you're a shining star no matter who Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah.

Shining bright to see. Sure. And then sing a song is also just an absolute banger. So, wow, this was a really talented dude.

Yeah. And, again, I just kind of love it. Like, that's – oh, I think I was really rambling getting into this. I mentioned his adult daughters. If I didn't close the loop on that. So I believe they're the ones who have been kind of advocating to get his music out there. And so I think that they are maybe somehow involved with releasing this song.

Well, they also sued Earth, Wind, and Fire for not paying him for any of those songs. Oh, really? so they're also just trying to get paid well well i mean maybe rightfully so at least for the estate because according to what i was reading uh when you put his name into the internet and then i saw a picture of one of the dudes from earth wind and fire and i was like huh and that was actually an article about how his estate alleges that he was never paid for any of that so hopefully that got worked out in an appropriate manner uh we have an email from listener marissa suggesting some music for everyone's weekend by the way if you've got ideas for music for your weekend songs you would like to suggest send them to me luke at tbtl.net and put music for your weekend in the subject line some people go with m f y w m f y w but um you could just music or that but anyway put that in the subject line and i'll find it and i'll listen to them we'll put some of them on marissa says hey luke elia heifetz is a young folk americana singer songwriter i knew him when he was a kid and i recently saw that he'd been interviewed by the nashville paper so i looked up his music look i'm not as much into folk as i think you are mr john prine bicep um i think she's talking to me with that unless you also got a tattoo of john prine yeah i do i just don't talk about as much as you do it's not a personality mr john prine biceps for me biceps plural because we both have that tat now i'm really surprised at how not this is not why i got into this i promise even though i do have a lot of the show off demon i didn't get this tattoo so that people would ask me about it in fact i got a little nervous this is the john prine tattoo i'm talking about i got a little nervous after i realized kind of how visible it is that i was going to end up you know it's cute the first eight times you hear the story about me and that song and the lyric and whatever but the 80th time it's like i just didn't i was like am i going to be explaining myself constantly the backstory of this for the rest of my life um but no i'm not no one has commented on maybe partially because it hasn't been short sleeve weather but i think people are pretty used to seeing gigantic portrait tattoos on people's bodies yeah and again it sounds like i'm sort of sad that it hasn't been more of a talk about conversation i'm really not like i'm fine with that i'm just a bit surprised because right when i when i first got it i was like and i was at home looking at it in the mirror i thought i'm really happy with how it turned out but also i didn't really contemplate how many conversations i may end up having about it and i can't think of one person who's brought it up so well yeah at the barbershop you said everybody was loving it at the bar oh the barbershop that's right thank you yes uh the well again though if i hadn't told the woman cutting my hair so i i said who's your favorite she had a picture of herself with bruce springsteen and i said oh so like is bruce springsteen your favorite she goes well i love bruce springsteen but really my favorite is john prine and so then of course i

like pull the smock back that i'm wearing and i'm like but check this out so had i not done that we wouldn't have even had that conversation but yes you're right that was it was well received there at the barbershop okay marissa says i'm not as big of a folk fan as mr john prine bicep but a couple of these uh tunes uh really resonated with me i think the one i like the best is called paranoid blues uh signed marissa in maryland who says no mountain too tall so that's what we're going to go out with a little elia heifetz this song is called paranoid blues and this will bring us to the end of our broadcast week thanks for listening thanks for being part of tbtl we'll be back here on Monday Lord willing and if all the technology cooperates with Andrew at his new place and me somewhere in Oahu so we'll see you then until then have a great weekend stay safe, take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

My oh my There's a bucket in the sky Now anyway When it's spilling out the sea What about the rising cost of living Tides scuttled closer by the day it's the way my love she tells me to dive in i blame it on the When you're asking.

So I have all this stuff and all my photos and everything around there and like all these devices, this hard drive. And I just want to like put it all in one place.

Ah, OK. Yeah, you want the cloud.

Yeah, I can move everything to the cloud. Thank you. All your stuff will be in one place. Thank you. For six months. And what happens after that? The river. What is the river? The river is just like the cloud, except they're not compatible in any way. Right. If you try to move a file from the cloud to the river, the file will get destroyed immediately, and your keyboard will get really hot.

So I don't want that. I've tried the river. And? Yes? Yeah.

What? There's still a few bugs in it. Power out