Muse

that's funky i like that thank you yes yeah that's a fun card where does the music come from there's a small chip and speaker set that goes into the back of the card was it a cd no it's more like a um a chip and speaker set that we uh It's very small, and it's about the size of your thumbnail, and we just put it right inside the back of the card. Like headphones? No, this is a computer chip that's devoted really to one function only, the playing of the song when we open the card, and then I guess you could say its second function is turning off at this point. Like a Walkman? No, it's not like a Walkman at all. TBTL

Okay, stop I feel like I'm watching regional theater, you guys God, am I in the Cleveland Playhouse or something? Let me ask you something

Why would a review make the point of saying someone's not a genius? You think I'm especially not a genius?

And for our viewing pleasure I packed Terms of E Then we're going to bring it up with a little fried greens to the T And then Hope floats with Sandy B Does somebody die in that one? They die in all of them

This is making me sad, and I hate being sad Hey, everybody stand by, here we go again

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of TBTL A show that just might be too beautiful to live

It's the first line of the film, man, it's gotta be on the money here

My name is Luke Burbank, I am your host

He's a prisoner of his own grievances

I'd rather be known as Kitty Cat Man, coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where it's actually the sun just came out. And the Broadcast Center is bathed in sunbeams.

Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful.

Bubbles the cat has decided to really lean into the cat stereotype by actually sprawling out in a sunbeam right now, which is cute. But she's not doing that. It's just two things that she, two parts of this room that she really likes to focus on. One is the router that actually, you know, allow, like the internet router, the thing that allows this very show to happen.

Welcome to the internet.

And she likes to chew on the coaxial cable to that router. So we may or may not stay on the air for this entire broadcast. And then she likes also to try to chew through the headphone cables. So even if we stay connected by the Internet, I won't be able to hear anything. So she really focuses on two mission-critical aspects of the show for her gnawing ways. We'll see if we get through episode 3699 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

Harry Styles has the number one album in the world, Harry's House. I was surprised to see, though, that it made, like, over $7 million in its first week. I guess that's, I mean, that's pretty good. Four and a half million of that was vinyl, and over a million of it was compact discs. Hello, CD listeners. We're buying over a million dollars of Harry Styles CDs 2022. We'll look into the numbers on how people are consuming the music of Harry Styles. Also, I ran a half marathon this last week. Really? I'm trying to build my beef castle? And it was both somehow way worse and way less bad than I was expecting it to be. So we'll talk about that. We have a lot of emails to get to today. People weighing in on septic tanks, earwax, things like that. So we will get into that in the email section. We'll do all that with the help of this young man. longest running co-bro of the show may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships he's an activist and house party enthusiast there's a hidden valley ranch party in his mouth oh la la he's andrew walsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning luke

it's not often that i actually have an idea come to me literally in a dream does that happen ever to you where you wake up and you're like whoa like divine intervention an idea was just planted in my sleeping brain. Do you ever get that? No, my dreams are so chaotic

that there's rarely anything of use that comes from them. Sometimes as I'm falling asleep, like I'm right in between being awake and being fully asleep, I will have what I think is like a grand thought for a movie plot or a business idea or a tweet. Boy, that really drops off when you get to the last one.

Either a new business I could start or a plot for a film or a tweet I could send, Andrew. And then when I wake up and I think back on what seems so profound to me, it's never profound. But anyway, what did you hear about? What did you learn about in your dream?

That's actually what you describe is very much what I experienced this morning. It wasn't part of some narrative dream where I woke up and I was like, in that dream, I was a genius. And I came up with an idea. I was in sort of a half sleeping mode where I'd already woken up. My alarm had already gone off. Genevieve's in the bathroom listening to NPR I got a cat sleeping on my chest that's the scene and so I'm kind of like in and out of consciousness sort of and everything you described about like the the idea the big idea came to me but I want to make it clear I never once thought this was a good idea I think it's a terrible idea but it came to me fully formed and that's the amazing like if there's anything interesting about it it's the fact that I just woke up and I said oh that's the idea and then i immediately was like well that's really corny and stupid but there it was in my dream the idea of opening up a um well like you said luke a business idea opening up a comedy club calling it laugh out louds and the tagline is lol is our personal goal like it just hey i don't know why that it might have been something i heard on the radio in my half dream but i just woke up saying, LOL is our personal goal. Laugh out loud.

I don't think, I mean, that honestly might be the best comedy club name in America. I mean, maybe. And no offense, but that's based less on how good it is and mostly on the fact that it's not called the Chuckle Hut or Crazy Bones or, you know, like we've talked about it extensively on this show, But for places that purport to be about comedy, comedy clubs have some of the worst names in of any kind of business. You know, you got zanies. I follow a lot of stand up comedians on Twitter and I'm friends with a lot of stand up comedians who are always the kind of thing to do on Twitter now, which I totally understand because, look, we're all on our grind. But it's that you change your Twitter handle constantly to where you're about to be playing. so like i follow just top of mine is laurie kilmartin the very funny comedian and writer laurie kilmartin and laurie kilmartin's name now when it comes up on my twitter is never laurie kilmartin it's laurie kilmartin is playing at the chuckle hut in des moines this weekend so i get to see a lot of the names of comedy clubs that just kind of passing through my twitter feed and i'm often struck by how much they don't seem like a place where real comedy is happening Now, that's not a reflection on the comedians, but the usually greaseball dude who named the comedy club and now just is in the back smoking cigarettes and eating chicken fingers.

Sounds like that LOL is your personal hell, which was the second tagline I came up with. Wow. Are you still in a dream state? It's more of a flow. No, I think that once I was awake, I was like kind of my brain was now feasting on this and came up with that as well.

I do think that's a good name. And it, I mean, obviously it plays to the idea of comedy. it's very in the culture i mean i i now say lol in fact i found myself doing this recently i forget where i was but instead of laughing like somebody said something funny and instead of laughing i just said lol and i meant it it wasn't sarcastic but it was sort of in lieu of actual my laugh response now is just to say the letters lol out loud that reminds me of something that i heard

that has lived in the back of my brain for quite some time and i don't know the veracity of this at all i feel like it was a story about woody allen if it wasn't woody allen it was somebody like that somebody who you know like putting the the awfulness aside regarding his personal story but like it was somebody like that who was like very revered in the in the i guess in comedic spaces right like not just a comedian but somebody who is seen as an auteur and like a master of comedy you know and i think it was him and somebody said yes you know when you uh when you meet him and you talk to him about jokes he doesn't laugh he just says that's funny and i'm like that sounds exhausting like is that where we want to be as comedy auteurs like so that we stop laughing and we just say hmm let me let me process what you said hmm green light that is funny oh sounds

exhausting to be around like you like you've reached total consciousness of comedy where you no longer actually laugh you just i mean i don't know if there is a as long as it doesn't come off No, you know what? I'm just going to say this, you know, full stop. I don't know if there is a more generous personality trait than being an easy laugher. And I love being around people who laugh freely and easily. The reason I paused was because I was like, but can that get awkward? No, what gets awkward is someone who also compulsively has to make jokes or say things that are looking to draw a response of laughter.

where you then have to kind of go ha ha ha or lol um as the response as the responsee but as far as like if you're going to hang out with someone and there's somebody who just is enjoying themselves and life and if you say something moderately funny they laugh at it and it feels genuine that's a great feeling that put really really releases some dopamine in the old brain

yeah the first person i think i truly fell in love with i think it was because she laughed at my jokes i think it took me a long time to realize that that might have been the the original trigger but I think that was a big part. Was it Maggie May? It was Maggie May. Is that a line from the song Maggie May? Yeah, you laughed at all of my jokes.

My love you didn't need to coax. Oh Maggie, I couldn't have whatever, tried anymore or something?

Sure, yeah. I don't know the lyrics. I've heard that song a million times. I could not have told you that those are the lyrics. I do think I do both of those things, by the way. I think that I am both somebody who is an easy laugh which can be good but can also be somewhat annoying. It's probably how I got this job.

Much appreciated from this end of the conversation.

I'm not not gonna lie. Do you remember when we first started working on this together? Like I described myself and not in an overly humble way, but like I was basically honest with everybody and said, I Luke needs somebody in that room to laugh. Like you just need somebody to read or to react. You know what I mean? Like I wasn't bringing my hot takes on throwing your dog poop in my garbage can or whatever else I get up to 10 years later on this show. But like back then I was like, well, that way when, you know, Luke is talking in a room, he's not by himself. That was my job description back in, I don't know, 2012 when this was a side gig.

I mean, again, I wouldn't want to I wouldn't want to reduce what you have been what you did in the early days of your time with the show to just being someone who was there to laugh at things. But it was a massive help to have you to bounce things off of, you know, because there was a period of time where it was mostly me solo. I can't remember how long that went. It felt like about five years, probably like two months, but it was it was it didn't feel great to me. And so, yeah, I remember the first day that we officially actually I don't even know if it was official. like if we said you're going to be the new co-host or if it was just you want to come down and hang out for a while and see how it goes i i don't even remember what the pitch was to you when you came down to the mount baker house and and we did a show together do you remember how how did i

present it to you as an option yeah i think you you made a you made a deal you made an offer that i couldn't refuse you made an offer that i could refuse but i didn't you made an offer that i

should have refused i uh that you really want to think over i had been on the show a couple of

times with you and jen but like a couple of specific times recording at cairo um and i think we all got along pretty well and then she left for a while or made it known that like she was permanently going to not be able to be on the show and i think that's when you said hey you know do you want to be on three days a week i'll throw a little cash your way maybe give you some snacks um bubbly water i got one of those new uh fangled bubble maker machines in my kitchen that was a big

sell i remember by the way i do actually i am now the proud owner of a bubble machine becca's mom sudell is so in love with the idea of bubbles the cat that we were all down at the beach the oregon coast this weekend and it's sort of a belated birthday present she got me an actual

bubble machine oh is it one of those guns that just shoots tons of them it's not a gun it almost

looks like a tiny little digital projector you place it somewhere yeah but i gotta get the bubble the bubble you know solution for that but that's gonna be some good content that's gonna that's gonna be hours of video fun when we have a bubble machine shooting bubbles at bubbles the cat

there is something that keeps getting advertised to me on instagram that again it's like i don't want one of these things or i don't need one of these but just like seeing it and it's like i don't know it's like this giant kind of gun looking thing where but it's like i guess it's got a trigger on it but really the the quote-unquote gun part or the barrel part is like huge it's like a big round thing i'm trying to think maybe it's about the size of a bigger than a football right but kind of squared off on the ends and it just shoots huge arrays of bubbles just tons of them sounds amazing right and of course the video is really cool it's like one of those video it's one of them video ads that they have on instagram now and i showed that to genevieve she happened to be in the room when it was you know delivered up to me recently and i was like oh man look i gotta get this thing i always do that i say for a second like i gotta get this thing i have no intention of getting it and she's like that would be a nightmare for you that would be such a mess your hands would be sticky and i'm just like you're right that would be like such a mess i'd have fun for two seconds no you do it outside yeah you have to do it outside you definitely have to do it outside but um anyway yeah the technology has gotten so much better on all of

that stuff when we were kids you just hoped that maybe you got one of the bubble ring things that was larger than than the standard yeah that was pretty Pretty much, that was the height of the technology, and now you have all of these motorized, cool, battery-powered options. You got the WizBuilders, Bubble Machine, SunSquad, something called RelaxLove, Gatling Bubble Gun. I don't know if, I mean, I know we're calling this a gun. I don't know if I want Gatling. It's called a Bubble Machine Gun. A Gatling Bubble Machine Gun, that's okay.

I want to take a look at that because the way I was describing this, that might actually even be the one, although i don't remember that um uh that terminology right that's a very unfun way of thinking yeah we can't get any meaningful gun control legislation passed in this country could

we at least not label the things that create bubbles also with violent terminology this one

says bazooka on the side of it let's go back to the kind that we had growing up and ask you a question here luke you can take your time with it and i don't want to put you on the spot but here we are um you have a let's say one of those bigger bottles of bubbles right with a little wand in there one wand has one ring but it's really thick and um and it's kind of got edges and kind of sketched into it or etched into it i should say and then the other end is two smooth rings which one do you blow through i think you uh i would blow through the more ridged one the the i would

Would you hold the smooth rings? Were those just to blow a different kind of bubble? Or were those to actually hold the base of the bubble wand?

My thought was you choose. Choose your own bubble adventure depending on what you like. But looking back, I don't know that I ever really knew any discernible difference. I think when I was a kid, it was just like, what will be effective? Because sometimes there's literally nothing in the world more embarrassing than going to blow a bubble and just having it pop and it never even a bubble the idea of a bubble doesn't even appear can you think of anything more embarrassing than that no you can't yes absolutely shitting your pants at a

mariners game draw push we'll call that one a tie anyway obviously they need to make when i was a kid i feel like they needed to make the bubble the solution a little bit more um i don't think the word is viscous but if it's a ratio of some kind of soap to water presumably the more that it's soapy the the thicker the bubbles will be does this make any sense from a sort of scientific standpoint i felt like we would get you i'd get a thing of bubbles and then at some point i'd run through it and then i think my mom would maybe put some like dish soap in or something or we start to get watered down maybe she would add water and that would be when the bubbles would become less and less like you're it's really thin gruel at that point like you're trying to blow a bubble but it doesn't have i wanted something that was just basically all bubble machine i wanted to blow a bubble that once it was formed it would become a solid object and fall to the ground with a clank that was the that's what i wanted the thickness and durability of the bubble to be

and we wanted them big too we wanted to create planets out there right like and then you would sometimes your hubris would would get the better of you and you would be trying to snap off a giant one and it just doesn't quite remove itself from the wand i'm trying to get a good answer here so much time and technology has passed since these like very basic ass bubble uh jars that you and i used to use luke i mean like even just finding that really old school like unless i just have to type in a retro but it's monday morning i don't want to be having to type in a retro to

find a very basic toy from my youth how are you feeling on this monday morning you and i did our sound check and then we went to grab our cups of coffee and then we sat back down at our work stations and i don't know if you thought your mic was muted or you didn't care but you just kind of i heard you just go god damn it let's get it together i don't think i said let's get it

together i did really after i said god i was across the room and i said god damn it and i realized then that my mic was on of course you always notice everything like that and i you did totally catch me in a in a private moment but that had nothing to do with uh monday morning I will tell you what that was about, although it's not a fun answer, but I'll just be honest with you. Okay. I was just thinking about Theo. Oh. My dead cat. Here's the deal. Genevieve has a little, and it's a nice thing, but Genevieve has a little calendar over by her desk, which is kind of outside my office here, and it's a calendar that she made before he died, but it got delivered after he died, and it's like a monthly calendar of him and Bananas just snuggling. and you caught me in a moment and I don't, you know, I passed that calendar a million times a day and I think I was just passing it today and I was like, oh god damn it and you heard that. Oh, I'm sorry

man and I'm sorry if me bringing it up on the show

made it. No, I kind of, I heard that and I was like, oh, I hope Luke didn't hear me say that. I thought it was just because your computer was giving you some trubs or something. No, I know it sounded just like a Monday thing and I was like, I'm actually happy to be here. I have something more fun to talk about which is a project that I've started this week and although we should talk about your running too but I of Oh, in fact, I was thinking about you and your daughter, Adelaide, all weekend because I almost reached out for some advice because you told me a while back that she got really into cleaning and kind of restoring cast iron skillets. And we have a cast iron skillet that is like super old school. Genevieve got it used at like a garage sale or a, you know, something. But it was in New England. And when you're buying antiques and stuff like that in New England, you really have no idea how far back it goes. You know what I mean? like here on the west coast it's like i went antiquing and i got something on the other side like he may have made it yes yes it says the it says the the sizzling state the fajitas are coming the fajitas are coming that's a cultural writing that down um cultural cross-pollination there interesting if you if you go back long enough you will find out that that's what he said um but anyway yeah so we have this cast iron skillet that long before i really cared about cooking or skillets or anything genevieve found and i remember she got excited about this and this is i mean again this is going back to us being like in our 20s in new hampshire and so she got this skillet and then she restored it or said she did and i'm going to be a little bit frank here i don't remember the process i remember her being very into the idea of it i believe she even had to sand it down because this thing had not been used in a long time it was one of those things that was like old and probably had rust on it and just you know build up from years and was probably stuck in somebody's attic to repel the british at some point there was at one point a woman hit

her husband in the head with it a woman with definitely her hair was in some kind of like nighttime cap she had a nightgown on she was a woman of fairly hefty carriage and she bonked

one of the brits with this pan that would put you down by the way you know how in a movie you hit somebody in the head and they go out immediately and that's ridiculous this pan would put you out immediately so genevieve did some sort of restoration to this that she was excited about at the time i didn't pay enough attention because i was a bad boyfriend and i didn't care that much now years later i'm much more into cooking i'm much more into puttering and i'm much more into the idea of restoring things and i'll tell you that this to whatever degree genevieve kind of like um kind of brought this pan back to life and then seasoned it i know that she mostly focused on the inside of it because the outside of it still had like i mean literal like three-dimensional kind of old crust on the outside of this thing which never really bothered me because again it was just like from the ages and we've cooked with it I mean we've cooked with this thing thousands of times now at this point but I've just been noticing that when I first was using this I know I didn't care for it correctly and then I know that once I started caring about my cooking stuff more and the idea of this thing being a fun tool is probably already a little bit too late soap had probably entered the situation like whatever either way i've been thinking about for years now i've been thinking about how i really want to restore this pan you know where this is going and so or the skillet i should say so i did some reading this weekend and i'm i know there are going to be a million different um life hacks and ideas and suggestions but i read something that was really in depth or relatively in depth on a trusted cooking site and i can't remember what it is right now but i followed i'm following the first steps which is stripping it down to the original like stripping it down so it's gunmetal gray and they suggest letting it soak in lye for a long time but i didn't know i don't know if you can still get lye at the hardware store or not i figure you need three forms of id to do that i don't know if i trust myself with lye so they said a quicker kind of way around this is you can use that oven cleaner stuff like easy off and a lot of them have a lye base to them or at least whatever is i assume it's still a lye base or maybe they they've updated it with similar you know products that replicate that same experience but anyway so i have now for the past i don't know 36 hours or whatever been spraying this thing down and then enclosing it in a garbage bag and letting it sit for like 24 hours and then bringing it out and I bought myself a little like a steel brush you know like at the hardware store and I am just going to town on this thing and there's still a long way to go but seeing the places where the years and years and potentially generations of buildup has flaked off and i'm seeing the actual product underneath it is one of the most satisfying feelings i've ever had and i'm still i still have a long way to go but it has been great you're gonna become one of

those guys you're gonna i'm gonna see in two years i'm gonna see you on youtube you're gonna have you're not even gonna be in the shop you're just gonna be narrating and you're gonna have a whole array of these kinds of cast iron products that you've like you know rehabilitated there's a guy that i was watching probably on tiktok who they do all those things you know where you soak a lot of people will bake it i think addy was baking it in the oven but with a certain solution in it or something but then there's

a guy that's just got kind of like a like um you know a sander like a kind of not angle grinder but that's more cutting i guess but he's basically got some kind of power sander that he'll just like sand that thing down like after he gets it to a certain maybe gets the grease and the gunk off but it still has an outer layer and then when he like sands it down and it's it's like it looks like aluminum it looks like it's silver like aluminum and there's just something about looking at one of those things when it's back to that color uh which is obviously pre-treated like you i don't think you want to cook it you don't even want to cook with it like that that's just getting it down to its most basic form and then you build it back up with all the weird shit you do to it

after that but it's very satisfying yeah i'm looking forward to the seasoning part where you and and i always thought that was way more complicated but i mean it's what i always thought it is which is you just you know you make sure you apply some oil to it i think one thing is like we probably the first time we seasoned it i don't know for sure but my guess is genevieve might have used olive oil because that's just what we usually cook with and that's around but i've heard that olive oil is not really something, usually just like a vegetable oil, like a regular vegetable oil is. But anyway, that seems pretty straightforward. I thought it was going to be like, oh, first you oil it, then you cook it, and then you repeat that 5,000 times. Everything I'm reading is just like, no, you just season it once in the oven with some oil. Like, that's pretty straightforward. But anyway, I'm really excited. I will send you photos as it comes along. Yeah.

I'm not, you know, somebody who will ever probably put the time in on this kind of a thing, but I like to watch other people putting the time in. I like to see the results. I like to sit next to you and study you and your habits. So I did end up running this half marathon this weekend in Newport. Like I said, Becca's family rented a beach house down in Lincoln City, Oregon. And that was about 30, 40 minutes from the town of Newport, Oregon, where there was a full marathon and half marathon. and Becca had said oh you know what my um my my brother and his wife and I were going to probably run this thing and I said well if they have like a 5k I'll run that or something she said okay and then she called me back and said I have a good news and bad news okay what's the bad news there's no 5k it's just a half marathon or a full marathon and I went what's the good news and she said well there really isn't any good news that I was able to get us signed up if you want but actually that was the good news is that it was technically sold out but she like sweet talked the race director or something so the bad news was the only length i could possibly do would be a half

marathon which is 13.1 miles which is 13.1 miles and how much is so a 5k is how many miles like three okay so that's under okay gotcha yeah there's yeah so i can never remember if i shouldn't have even admitted that but i can never remember if a kilometer is more or less yeah so a 5k will

be i i don't know like maybe three and a half miles um so yeah the the bad news was there was nothing shorter than a half marathon the good news was i could be i would be allowed to pay 85 to run the half marathon if i so chose and i said this last week that i was like still kind of on the fence about it but i had a feeling that i was going to end up doing it because of not even peer pressure like anyone was making me feel bad but mostly just like i guess you could say FOMO or more fear of I guess it would be fear of missing out on the feeling of being done with that race like the doing something like that which for me is very physically taxing and kind of a lot of it is not fun the being done with it part is really fun and I didn't want it to be Saturday and you know the three other folks had done this whole thing and then they were kind of in the afterglow of that and I was just like well I got up at 11 and I'm eating my second cinnamon roll now so i i did i took part in this uh in this run and um i have to say and i did like zero training for this other than i run like maybe four or five miles um you know probably five days a week so that's that's a base of of exercising but it's not like um typically if i was going to try to do something like this i would have done some longer runs i would have really like had it circled on my calendar i would have i would have built up some mileage which i didn't do and i'm telling you Andrew in the last like I don't know four miles of this thing I had to go somewhere in my mind to finish like I was doing breathing exercises I was telling myself I came up with this crazy I was like this is one hour of your one wild life Luke you can do this for one hour and then it was like you can do anything for 27 more minutes and then it was like I just kept and i would cycle through different ways of trying to convince my body to keep moving forward of like okay just run to that sign and then you can start walking if you want and then i'd get to the sign and i'd be okay run to that neck like it was down to the point where i was having to basically trick

my body into taking each step it's amazing how time just stops right like you say you can do anything for 27 minutes. And again, I'm not trying to talk from an from a position of knowledge here i've never run i'm sure i've never even run five miles in my life nowhere near it but like in the occasions where i'm trying to do some sort of exercise where you're just like keep going keep going whatever that happens to be if it is time based at all and you're kind of looking at that clock like it just it seems like it goes backwards like it seems like it goes backwards right like how is every second actually

five seconds in my head right now well and also you know i had a watch on that was tracking my distance and i initially was sort of like i think my thing should be i'm not even going to look at the watch because there are mile markers and maybe i'll just like i'll kind of lose myself in the beauty of newport oregon and i'll just kind of like i'll just like look up and it'll be mile 13 i'll be like oh my gosh i did it um but as the race went on i would literally look down at my watch and it'd be like 9.2 miles and i'd be like okay then i'd be like i'd run i'd be like okay we've got to be at like 10 and it'd be like 9.3 miles then it'd be like 9.1 miles what are we what's happening here like and i would be i was checking it so frequently because i and i would make this deal with myself don't look at your watch just go just do this and then i would look at the watch uh about every two seconds because i just couldn't stop myself this was this is going to sound like a serious humble brag and i am i'm loath to do this except that i was i was very very very surprised about this when becca sent me the results but so i was in the male 45 to 49 division So as a 46-year-old, I'm on the young side of that. And there was only 14 people in that division, right? We're not talking about thousands of people. But I won the division. Oh. Like, I was a pair of the 46-year-old to 49-year-olds, which, again, is all of 14 people. I guess despite my complete agony and desire to just walk slowly into the bay during most of the jog, I somehow was, at the end of it, the fastest person of my age of dudes.

So you didn't stop because I was you had mentioned, you know, that you were thinking about doing this last week and you weren't sure if you were in the physical shape to do it. I think you said you had run 10 miles to prep, but had you run well, nine point one. So you'd never even gotten up to that 13. So I wasn't sure if you were going to just like, well, take it. It's just like par for the course that you'll end up having to walk at some point. But it sounds like you did not do that.

I well, it's really funny. You know, I have like a special power to stop running at exactly the time when I'm interacting with somebody who I know from real life or who knows me from the show. This is a proud tradition going back to the Green River Marathon in Seattle where I started walking towards like mile 24 and then a guy jogged by me and goes, hey, you're Luke from TBTL, right? And this is when even fewer people knew about TBTL than now, which is really saying something. and then when i was doing this road run in salem um a few months ago uh with becca's family again um i started walking at the end that was like a nine mile i started walking at the end because i was so tired it was so hilly and a guy goes hey luke burbank it's like really so in this race of course in keeping with my tradition i and like miling maybe 11 i don't ever like um usually I don't do the water break stuff like I don't grab water and drink it because I just feel like if I stop I'm not sure if I'll get restarted again and also I don't know I just don't feel like for for that distance for me I don't need to be hydrating constantly so I just have it as a because there's a ton of these water stations um that people are trying to hand you Gatorade and water and stuff well I was so tired probably at mile 11 that I was like I'm gonna have some water and I'm not just gonna do that thing where you grab the water and you like throw it over your face mid-stride and you just keep going and you like chuck the paper cup like you're just like a total machine you're like the guy in terminator 2 who's chasing uh arnie i was like i'm gonna stop i'm gonna drink this gatorade and i'm going to like let myself rest for the five seconds it

takes to drink the gatorade but did you drink the gatorade stopped and arresting like the guy from terminator 2 when he stopped to drink gatorade and stop chasing arnie for a second

it was exactly what it was like and as i was in the midst of doing that as i was in the midst of savoring my gatorade and my four second break and by the way there was a whole i swear to god it's such a mental thing with this stuff because the part of the reason that i was letting myself do this well the primary reason was because i was exhausted the secondary reason was because i had heard somewhere that it's actually either you get more hydration or it's you don't lose that much time if you actually just stop and drink the water and toss the cup away and then go back to your jogging as opposed to continuous striding trying to drink while you're in movement etc i basically was trying to make a scientific argument or a sports science argument as to why it was okay for me to stop even though i just wanted to stop i just wanted to be not running and as i'm standing there drinking my gatorade becca's sister-in-law tiffany just zooms right past me she had been stalking me like the whole race. She had been like a

little bit behind me and then in that moment of me stopping she just went right past me and then just became like a small speck ahead of me getting ever smaller as I slowed down uh and barely I mean barely got to the end but again I was I just felt so I felt so bad for so much of this run that I was surprised to see that it ended up being that of the people my age and a few years older than me It turned out that was technically, I guess, like the fastest time, which was not, you know, not setting any land speed records. But I would have just very much expected to be at the back of any and all packs related to this thing. But I kind of that's why I said it was both terrible in the doing of it, but then kind of rewarding in the seeing that it kind of went OK.

Did you send like kind of mocking things to Broadcast Barry, a runner in his own right, and just being like, someday I'll show you how I do this.

you that broadcast Barry was texting me literally two hours after the race was over he was like how'd it go and I was like it went all right now Barry when I the one of the previous times I ran a half marathon was with Barry in Winthrop Washington he won yeah like won the race so that's a totally and he might have even been doing a full I can't remember like it's it's quite something that person's ability to run so anything i do is just kind of uh you know it's always i'm never going to be a berry out there but you know like i said i was i was i was i had what is the feeling less shame i just had the kind i had a surprising feeling of of feeling less shame like oh wow okay so that was that again as i if i were to keep doing this as i get older once i'm 49 i'm the oldest in this category i will i'm sure be getting last place in the division like right now i'm benefiting from the fact that i'm the youngest of the older people who are doing this in this particular bracket but um yeah that was the result of the the of the weekend half marathon

sometimes i wonder what barry's running from but we can talk about that off air um how do you feel today was that race on saturday or sunday it was saturday so how did you feel the day after

i um i felt i felt very uh sore the day of like after the race like we went and we got some breakfast um this place the otis cafe and like from the time of being like sitting at the table and eating you know some like pancakes and stuff to then getting up and trying to walk across the restaurant i was a hurting unit but uh but by yesterday i felt pretty okay and i think i may even go on a jog today i think i feel you know i feel more or less you know back to normal and 13.1 miles is not i mean it depends if you are someone who runs a lot it's definitely a doable thing if you're somebody who doesn't run at all it probably seems really far but it's not like i didn't do an ultra marathon although i did this was before uh this the past weekend but i did see something on this thing called the like lead it's called like the lead better 100 or something it's like a hundred mile race that's in um let's i think it's in like colorado or something okay i'll do it with you leadville trail 100 and i i was like could i be a person who does something like that like is that could is there any way my body could ever perform that way i don't know but i just get these what i occasionally get a wild hair because you know what it really is is i just want to be a totally different person i want to be a person who drinks less alcohol who gets up earlier who who doesn't you know engage in various unhealthy activities and who like can run 100 miles in the colorado rockies and i just think well maybe if i if i if i just commit to running the leadville trail 100 then all the other stuff will fall into place i have this weird memory that bangs around

my head sometimes i don't think i've ever repeated it's not probably even worth repeating but here we are keeping the needles moving um i remember i was having a couple of beers like after work beers like innocent beers you know what i mean this wasn't like 11 o'clock at night and we've been going hard this was like you know like after work beers maybe having two beers with our pal nick jar and this is going back i mean so long ago we were probably maybe both getting off of an afternoon shift together or something at the radio station and it was during a period where i was in a good place where i was going to the gym like on the reg right as part of my routine which is always a good when i find myself in those rhythms that's good oh maybe i should do that now that tv telethon is over i can get my uh cast iron skillet in shape and i can get my body in shape um but uh i remember having these beers with him and saying like you know what i'm gonna i'm gonna blow off the gym i've already had a couple of beers and he just looked at me and said in the old days dudes used to work out drunk all the time and it was weirdly it was it was weirdly sad and inspiring at the same time because i realized i wasn't going to do that like for me it was almost like a switch but not in the good way when i turn my hat backwards and then i arm wrestle you for my

truck and my son it's not a switch like that it's kind of like nope i'm in beer drinking mode now i can't go back to exercise mode which is ridiculous it would actually be better if i just said i had a couple of beers after work and then i went to the gym and you know it was two beers over three hours or whatever you know but instead it's kind of sad that i'm like nope beer drinking mode not going back now it would be probably be more healthy if i could just go to the gym in that state Having said that, picturing me going to the going to the gym on the reg after having beers is probably even more sad.

Well, I mean, I do. I wonder how widespread this really was. But there are lots of accounts of like in the sort of pioneer days, because like a lot of times maybe the the the drinking water was a little bit less reliable that people would, you know, drink a lot of beer and cider and like kids would be drinking like a kind of I assume it's sort of low. uh what's the um is it abv alcohol by volume kind of low abv cider but it was still you know it had alcohol in it it was fermented but like these these images of like basically a farming family coming in for lunch midday through the middle of a long day of hard physical labor out on the farm and everyone's just drinking beer at lunch basically before they go back out there So there is some so much harder to do your job after that. I know there there's a I don't remember the guy's name. So this will not be a very interesting story or at least it won't be specific. But speaking of kind of long, long runs, there was this guy who has I think he wrote a book. This is where I heard about it. And he is kind of I think he might be considered sort of the father of ultra marathoning. he was the story goes sitting in a bar in san francisco it might have even been on his birthday i don't know it was like his 30th or 40th birthday and he was drinking beer and he just had this realization that he wanted to change his life and he ran from where he was at this bar wherever back home and it was really far it was like 20 something miles and then the story goes he got up the next day and ran another 26 miles and got up the next day and i think the guy ran like a marathon every day for some insane amount of time you know like months on end so it's not unprecedented Andrew in that moment if you would have just run 26.2 miles I'd be talking to a

totally different you wouldn't even be talking to me I'd be too famous I'd be I'd be running somewhere right now I'd be the world's most famous drunk runner but what would you be running from

that's the question I gotta talk to Barry all right let's take a quick break and then when we come back we'll talk Harry Styles and earwax here on TVTL hello and welcome to top story I'm trying to find who that person is I was referencing who wrote this book about ultra running or about marathon running and so then I was googling around and I don't think this is the guy but And so I just found somebody named Carl Metzler, or Meltzer rather, fueled by beer and junk food. Ultra runner Carl Meltzer sets the Appalachian Trail record. And that is the guy? No, I don't think it is. But this guy's nickname is the Speed Goat. He's worked as a bartender at a ski resort in Utah. And now he lives in Sandy. And he is considered one of the most accomplished ultra runners in the world. But apparently, according to the Men's Health headline, unlike the former Appalachian Trail record holder, Scott Jurek, who maintained a strict all-natural vegan diet, Meltzer indulged in steak, fried chicken, ice cream, peanut butter, and jelly sandwiches, chocolate bars, hamburgers, steamed vegetables, pasta, and energy drinks, Red Bull in particular, daily, and to cap off each night's meal an ice-cold beer or two, depending on how he felt. can you imagine running the appalachian trail with uh ice cream hamburger a red bull and a couple of beers in your system i feel like you would just be start each day by vomiting right

yeah that sounds um by the way that reminds me do you remember we i think we even talked to her on the show i think she called in or we called out to her um a listener whose trail name is pale l and i believe that she was hiking the appellation when we talked to her she um and i'm going through like weeks worth of emails here because i think she reached out uh during the tbtl-a-thon uh via one of i don't know i thought it was a text message but i can't find it here but is back out there on another trail kicking ass i wanted to give a shout out i'm sorry i didn't respond to you um because it was this was during like kind of a i was getting a maelstrom of of of emails and text messages and what have you, but go Pal-El. You're out there. Make sure that you stock up on peanut butter. Is it Pale-Ale or Pal-Ale? I think it's like the beer, which I have a weird accent. Pale-Ale? I think so, yeah. Okay.

So she's back out on a new trail now?

Yes, and I'm going, I wanted to give the shout out, and I thought maybe.

Maybe if I started blabbing, I'd be able to find it. But I can't find the details of where she is right now. But anyway, thinking about you out there, not specifically where you are, obviously, but thinking of you generally speaking.

I think this guy might be named the Dean Karnazes, I think, is the guy who his story goes that he just was sitting in a bar on his birthday and then just decided to start running and then just like never stopped. So I don't know who needs to hear that. probably dean carnazes um but uh that's who i think i was referring to gotcha um so harry styles has the number one record in america which shouldn't be a surprise because he has been out there on the publicity circuit um really pushing this thing he was on stern he actually strikes me as a very thoughtful very interesting person like i'm pro harry styles do you have i'm

guessing you have a limited opinion on harry styles yeah i i just i know he's one of the biggest pop stars are you more zay malik guy if you're kind of going one direction i was trying to even even i was going to ask you like what's the band again so it's one direction yeah see i'm very obviously my connection to this is very tenuous i know that he's one of the biggest

names in pop music i really only know his music because of it getting into tiktok like there are just so many songs particularly during the beginning of the pandemic pandemic when i got really obsessed with tiktok still living in bellingham i would hear these songs and have no idea who they were by but they'd you know be meme-ified into something else and then later i'd be like oh watermelon sugar that's harry styles or um just a variety of his songs that are massively popular in the culture which i didn't hear because i'm not listening to you know jubel in the morning on pop radio or whatever surprising to me what a big hit that

thing is do you know about that no is it that's a local show here in seattle it's local but it's

also now i think it i it's it's definitely on in idaho and i think here down here in portland it may even be based out of boise so uh he was uh this guy uh jubel was the sidekick or i guess the co-host of of like a morning show in seattle on um i think on 92.5 or something but it's super famous for these like phone pranks that they do but i'm pretty sure that these phone pranks are all just sort of like actors because you know there's like these there are there are these services where they will hire actors to do like something called like the war of the roses where you like you send roses to your i don't know i don't even know exactly how the bit works but it's basically like this is an entire morning show that's based on the idea of like catching people cheating or pranking people or do having these weird dramatic relationship blowups unfold live on the air and the thing is that it's all actors like they've just people have been hired to you know be pretending to be scandalized by something their partner is doing or whatever and what's funny is i have i know people that are huge fans of these shows and particularly this jubel show and i'm like you know they're all actors and they go yeah i don't care which is which is interesting right like i mean which i i guess it's totally like i watch those hgtv shows that i know are faked like where someone's these people are supposedly like deciding on which house to buy but like i know that they've already had to choose the house because that's as you know andrew you don't just one does not just wander into mordor aka the current housing market um so even though i know it's all faked i still for some reason i just suspend my disbelief i guess that's what people do with these with these morning shows with all these people getting super mad at each other about relationship stuff so it used to be jubel and brook in the morning

and now it's just the jubel show apparently and they had a little they had a little breakup and now the jubel show might be out of the southeast i'm trying to drill down on this here but it has

northwest roots um i um the reason that i was monitoring that early was because a long long time ago long long time ago um that this is when this was post us doing this was post tbtl being a radio show and probably pre me going back with ross and burbank i was in a very very very brief and and and not serious conversation with that radio station about co-hosting their morning program oh interesting which at the time was called like monty and brooke in the morning i think before brooke got there so it was like maybe we do the monty and luke show and i was like who i mean i was really not into the schedule of morning radio i was into the fact that it might pay a lot but i was not into any other aspect of that job but you know i was out of work at the time or at least i was doing tbtl but it wasn't like i didn't have a real steady income and i was like it was appealing on that level but it ended up not going anywhere and then i remember eventually it was like Monty and Brooke and then it was Brooke and Jude. And then it was the Jubal show. And then he went like he like walked away from some kind of lucrative deal, I guess, to like, you know, renegotiate his contract. He was off the air for a while. Then all of a sudden I just started seeing billboards like when I'd be in Seattle or like Boise for this thing. So, you know, tip of the cap. I mean, the guy's making a name for himself and radio.

One of the last pieces that was posted on the Jubal show under his byline is the body part you wash in the shower says a lot about you. I wash them all, baby. I wash them all. I think maybe it's supposed to be the body part you wash first in the shower. I'm going to blame the copy editor on that one.

Let's see. I'm trying to think if there's any body part. I might every once in a blue moon, if I'm in a huge rush, I might not give my feet a full on proper treatment. I mean, I have obviously all of the all of my my sort of nether regions and armpits and everything is getting a very is getting very close attention with the soap. Sometimes I get nervous now washing my feet because if I stand up on one foot in the shower, my life flashes before my eyes. We're not even kidding.

So goddamn old man. And in my new shower, too, which has an especially slippery tub, you know, that I use it as a shower, but it's a shower slash tub. And it seems especially slippery. And then you wash the bottom of your feet. I mean, it's just this is just such old man talk. Now you've got a foot that is especially slippery because there's soap on it. And then you're balancing on one foot and then you're trying to trepidatiously put the other one down. You're just like, who am I?

The thought I have every single time I need to get some kind of a grip.

i was i had that thought this weekend luke i thought and then am i gonna be the mat in here i'm gonna get those little like fish stickers that are also gritty you know like if i i feel like if i'm gonna do that i need to just lean into it i need to go full 1980s era grandma

you need some like butterfly decals that go on the sliding glass door so you don't walk through that which no offense to my uh my grandma virginia burbank rip i remember she had those in her condo in Bellevue and I didn't know what they were for I thought they were just decorations she was like well that's just so you don't walk through the sliding glass door and my thought was have you ever even been out on your balcony like was this a real danger that you were gonna just go just straight up just Chris Farley right through the sliding glass door like because it was so translucent that it's almost like it was wasn't even there you know what I'm just remembering now

um I don't know if you had this experience as a kid I'm sure you did like you'd go over to like your grandparents house for like the weekend or even just maybe one overnight but it seemed like a big adventure and like you know grandparents were in charge or whatever and on the occasions we would do that at grandma and grandpa walsh's house when we would take a bath my grandma would prepare a bath for us and she would put actual like um it's just called baby oil right like is it johnson and johnson baby i can almost picture the bottle but we were like not we weren't babies You know what I mean? We're like older than toddlers or whatever. Let's say five, six, seven or something like that. I don't know. And I'm just remembering that feeling of like getting out of the tub and drying off and being sort of slick feeling. So baby oil in the bathtub. In the bathtub, which does that sound right?

I mean, oil and water famously mix very seamlessly. I've never heard of that. I do remember us having baby oil around and probably it getting used maybe on, you know, I'm thinking of my younger sisters maybe after they got out of the bath. But, I mean, honestly, was baby oil just a big scam by Johnson? Were they just – did they have some petroleum that they couldn't sell as gasoline?

Yes, I think that's exactly it.

They were like, well, we can probably – speaking of weird industrial products, you know, I spent about an hour on Friday trying to find some Vaseline because of this run that I was going to do on Saturday and wanting to be able to kind of like grease my feet up basically so that my toenails and toes weren't kind of rubbing together too aggressively. And I'm just walking around this Fred Meyer in Portland like I don't there's a Vaseline shortage. Finally, I find a guy and I'm like – and I had walked up and down the sort of like personal care aisle like – I'm not exaggerating 10 times, like five times up and five times back going, this is the only place where they would have Vaseline. I will just walk and I will look at every product and then at some point it will be Vaseline and then I will get that product. And he was like – finally, I broke down and went and found somebody in the store. And because there's a labor shortage, it's like it can be difficult to locate someone these days. And the guy was like, I think that's in the baby section. So I go to the baby section and there's like one industrial size container of petroleum jelly, not even Vaseline, not even the brand name, like more petroleum jelly than I'll probably need to use for the rest of my life. But I went ahead and bought it and I thought, boy, this is a weird product. Like it has petroleum in the name. i'm slathering it all over my feet like that's bizarre i remember a this is one of those jokes that i don't think i fully understood as a kid but i just tried to pick it all up from context clues and because of that i think i remember it because i couldn't tell if it was really dirty or off color but i remember my exposure to it being on the big chuck and little john show which was like the ultra local like um little skit show that i think we tried to play some of it once on the show and he immediately got his fast yeah i mean it was the 80s and like it was like well it was big chuck who was a big guy and little john who's a little guy i don't know if you can picture that it wasn't little john the rapper and um you know it was like yeah it was like um you know a lot of the humor had to do with like making fun of like kind of eastern europeans or whatever because like that's a big community in cleveland at the time and i assume that they are from that background as well um so kind of a lot of making fun of like eastern europeans and polish jokes and what have you but i remember there and just the most low budget skits you can imagine in between the monster features right or during the commercials of the monster features on i think channel 43 um but one of the skits was somebody goes into a pharmacy of some sort and asks for i believe talcum powder which i don't know if this works and says hey i'm looking for some talcum powder and the person says yes follow me and then walks away in a very like a very um kinetic and like i don't know swishy kind of way i assume i don't really know i can't quite picture it but i remember the person who's looking for the talcum powder saying

if i could walk that way i wouldn't need talcum powder oh and that's the joke so i assume there's

a rash involved can you explain this joke i wonder what would have to do with yeah some kind of painful rubbing maybe not even a rash but like because there was that is an old school thing of people both men and women putting kind of padding down again their nether regions with talcum powder i guess to keep it kind of dry i promise you lyndon johnson we heard him ordering pants yeah i promise you he was throwing a half a can of talcum powder down that situation every day it's again it seems like a very like 1950s 1960s thing that people were doing probably because that's sort of how they were raised or whatever but i i don't get the sense that that's a thing people are really doing anymore um i'm also now just trying to figure out what the hell baby oil is even for and it's funny because everything that you want to find about what you can do with baby oil is basically traces back to johnson and johnson trying to justify it as a

product i've come across some other products like that too on spotless like weird old cleaning products you're like oh they were just putting like petroleum like you said in various stages in cans and saying this can do everything i i now understand that snl skit from the 70s where it's kind of like you can clean the floor with it and it's an ice cream topping like it practically was

like that yeah it's all this stuff like 24 surprising uses for baby oil and then you're reading it and it's like uh this is probably just a pure wow.com that sounds like definitely johnson and johnson somebody started a website uh you can you can remove temporary tattoos with it andrew you can give a flawless manicure you can remove your eye make you can soothe cracked heels etc etc i i again i'm i'm willing to say with very very limited research that this was 100 industrial product that they just couldn't figure out what to do they had this somehow and they were like there's got to be a way we can sell americans this and make them think it's a

thing absolutely and you can dump a bunch of it into the bathtub so that your grandchildren are super slippery um i found a uh somebody uploaded the entire two hours of the big chuck and little john presentation of little shop of horrors but not the steve martin one like a some version of little shop of horrors you know they didn't pay for these movies or they paid as little as possible this is some like black and white probably i'm going to say 1950s version of little shop of and it's complete with all of the big chuck and little john interstitials i will not make the same mistake and try to play this for you but i will save this because i may some night in fact i believe this friday genevieve is going to be out of town and so i might spend my friday watching

this oh my gosh dude you you at i forgot you needed to update us on what ended up actually happening on friday night because you uh on friday's show you said okay as of right now veves and i are both going to be home i believe you described what you were doing as aggressively staying in yes i was really looking forward to this weekend and you're like and there's nothing afoot but you said your prediction was that by about nine nine thirty there would be a clarion call there would be a bat signal that would go out uh probably from our friend camaro kev or Maybe Katie saying, hey, what's doing? Should we hit the karaoke? And then you would end up at home. Genevieve would go out and you would be listening maybe to your kickseat. At 9.27 p.m., I received this text message from you. It's a picture of a radio with the words, it's all happening.

Yeah, baby.

Fidelity is good now as it was then. A little Billie Holiday on a Friday night. So I'm guessing that the fact that you weren't wearing your headphones for that means Veeves did, in fact, end up going out, presumably with the crew.

Yeah, I had it a little bit wrong. So Genevieve always calls it the bat signal. And usually at some point, usually on a Friday, if not a Saturday, Camaro Kev will send a note out to the group text chain that just says, anything cool going on tonight or anything fun going on tonight? And that's his way of just saying that, like, you know, looking for looking for gang, as they say. Is that what they say in video game circles? I don't think so. Oh, oh, maybe. I thought it was some or. Probably. I'm the last person to ask. I have it wrong. But anyway, and so what will often happen, though, is Genevieve will say, I'll say, are you going out tonight? And she'll say, no, Kevin didn't send out the bat signal. So that did not exactly happen this time. The bat signal went out at a very early hour. It went out in the afternoon. And so I responded and said, listen, I'm staying in. I've been looking forward to just like doing nothing after two weekends on the road. I'm just going to play some video games. And so then he and Veeves did end up. I don't know they went to their usual karaoke places or whatever and karaoke the night away so yeah she left around 9 30 I turned on the kick see radio you know what else I did Luke and we won't spend too much time with this but last week or the week before you and I were um talking about old video games and you actually a big chunk of the show was you watching a run through of Mike yeah speed run yeah and I told you that that had reminded me of my days playing Ninja Gaiden which was a game that i had on the nes but i never by the way cracked any game i've never gotten to the final level of any video game despite i'm surprised by that hours playing them but you like you like that kind of kind of puttering and um yeah i like doing it but it doesn't mean i'm good at it so um i have one of those little raspberry pi little tiny like computers as i told genevieve if a potato were a computer it would be a raspberry pi so it's just like this tiny little block that You can kind of program to do whatever, and I've turned it into an NES simulator. And so it's kind of a weird process where you can download things from the Internet, old Nintendo games and other system games as well. And so I found Ninja Gaiden somewhere on the dark web and I put it on this thing and I spent Saturday night like I actually the muscle memory kicked in way better than I thought it was going to. I, with some, you know, hiccups here and there, I streamed through the first few levels pretty well, but now I once again got stuck in, like, the middle of World 5. I believe there are six full levels of this game, and it's very cinematic for its era, too. It's one of those games that, like, told some story that, don't ask me to repeat it, it's ridiculous, I don't even fully understand it, but it involves reawakening some beast, right, of two statues come together. a classic a tale as old as time um and you're this like ninja guy and anyway i whizzed through the first parts pretty quickly and now i'm stuck at the same place i've been stuck since 1989 and

it's so i cannot get past this one page and now i had to turn off the machine at the end of the weekend i was like okay i'll turn it off so now if i want to play again i got to start all the way from the beginning which is exactly like the nes like you could if you could kind of sneakily leave that thing on for like days you wouldn't have to go all the way back to the beginning of the game but eventually now i'm i'm both the child and the adult so on sunday night i turned it off and said

another time friend so did you did your weekend go the way you were did the aggressive staying in help you oh it was recover and all that it was great i mean i scrubbed the hell out of a um

cast iron skillet that I intend to keep on scrubbing. I reconnected with Ninja Gaiden. I listened to some Kixi radio. It was wonderful.

Well, speaking of old school technology, this is what I was surprised by with the Harry Styles stuff is that he sold $4.5 million worth of vinyl in the U.S. and over a million dollars worth of CDs. This was, let's see, $1.12 million from the sales of 114,000 CDs in the US of his new album, Harry's House. Does that seem, I mean, is that shocking to you that there were 114,000 people wanted to buy a Harry Styles CD?

I mean, I don't know.

Based on the fact that it's Harry Styles, if it was Billie Holiday, you know, then maybe. But like, I'm just trying to understand who the, because I feel like like harry styles is generally going to appeal to a younger group of folks um i just also like i don't let me think i don't think i own a cd player maybe there's one in the glove compartment of my car that i've literally never actually if there is i really want to put a cd in there because we were talking about this this weekend down at the coast i love nothing more than having a cd in my car like when i had that forerunner there was a paul simon negotiations and love songs that just lived in there actually for a while it was this marimba cover of elliot smith music which i really loved and actually i need to get that cd back i wonder if that's in the storage unit but then for a while it was this paul simon cd and it's just something kind of nice and relaxing about knowing you have an analog or i guess it's digital technically product that you

can just listen to yeah and it kind of for it kind of gives you some constraints too like it's hey i have this thing yeah the um i have a little cd little little boombox cassette and cd player i want to get a better one though because i was actually trying to listen to some cassettes the other day and they just sounded terrible and it's like it's so weird it's like i don't need to i can pull out my bluetooth speaker and i can pull out my phone and i can play literally any of these cassettes that i own with the exception of like a couple of like local bands from the 90s like Cleveland band sons of Elvis. I'm looking at you, but like I can play anything via Spotify, but there's still something fun about like, Hey, we're going to go start. I hope they spelled that S U N like sun records. Cause that should be kind of a clever name. I don't think so. I don't think so. But anyway, but there is something nice about, Hey, yeah, like, go grab some seat or having somebody over and we're, you know, burning a fire or grilling or something. Hey, go inside and grab some CDs. Like that's fun. And it's fun to ask guests to do that. I like that. But to go back to your Harry Styles question, like, yeah, I do wonder if it is sort of a because in the grand scheme of things, one hundred and fourteen K isn't that much. Right. Like, generally speaking. But is it people who are kind of collectors? We do live in this collector's era. Right. Of just like people like everything has changed, like baseball cards. You can't just go into a 7-Eleven, buy a pack of baseball cards. Everything is collector this and collector that Luke. And so I wonder if maybe that's part of this as well. Like there is something about buying physical media that I do think is appealing, maybe even potentially to all generations, like saying like when this album came out, I got this thing that I'm holding right now.

But what's funny is I think of vinyl as having this like great kind of like archival and historic kind of quality to it. Like, yeah, you'll get an album and you'll store it, you know, for years and maybe you'll give it to your kids or whatever. it's cool it's a cool object i think of cds as just being trash cds are something you hang in a tree so that birds won't nest there and eat your figs like i feel like cds have somehow they do not they do not get any of the sort of cult status in my mind that that vinyl records do

no i mean you're absolutely right but i mean cassettes have even worse sound quality than

cds and those have a retro moment i know well i guess my question is how did cds how cds missed out on the nostalgia factor why is it that we have no love for cds but a lot of love for older and in the case of cassette tapes arguably worse technology well maybe that's the thing like we're

coming up into it right like because the vinyl craze i mean listen the vinyl craze was i remember being i remember being alive in the 90s if you can believe that and you know you we had cds which were the you know which were just the craze of the time and this idea of lossless media and everything but people are saying i can't believe people are still buying records because records i mean people always collectors there's always a mystique around records right and collectors and cool people always um like my friends in the 90s and their bands they would press vinyl you know and all of my friends who are musicians now i'm thinking about our friend leanie like she still presses vinyl like there's always been a bit of a market for that amongst collectors and music lovers and what have you the cassette the little retro cassette nostalgia thing came out in the past decade or so and now maybe like cds are just kind of getting there as well you know what i mean

there's a lag on those technologies yeah i just i mean i guess probably uh record players and things that play cassettes are as difficult to come by as something that plays cds but i'm just shocked that as i'm looking at my house i'm looking at two laptop computers neither one has a cd drive I'm thinking about my other computer that I take around for travel stuff. It does not have a CD drive. Again, I don't think my car has one. I don't think there's any way for me to play a compact disc in this apartment. And at no time did I actively think I'm transitioning out of compact discs as a thing. I just woke up one day, and I would have no way to play it.

Yeah, and the same way you didn't ever say, I'm transitioning out of having an earphone jack on my phone. They just made that decision for you. I know.

Yeah, exactly. Yeah, I guess that for...

the the Harry Styles stuff there was two different kinds of there was a special um color of vinyl that you could only get if you were like a subscriber to the fan club or you're getting the kind of um the updates from whatever the you know like the website is for the label and that was let's see if I have it right here it was like one of them was like a red vinyl album that you could get and then the other one was uh like blue and that was only sold in certain stores so people were getting ah see this makes sense which is very smart actually as a as a collector's item for people but anyway um yeah addie has kind of gotten me into this idea of she's really into buying old vinyl but she likes to just go to a rummage sale or garage sale or whatever and grab something for like two bucks and then just take it home and play it like she's really into exotica music right now which i'm getting into which is kind of like how do i describe it do you familiar with this genre no it the stuff that she's played for me is kind of like uh a guy who made um you know uh italian movie soundtracks in the 1960s or like often instrumental or kind of a little bit out there stuff but not so out there that it's like it's not yoko ono you know screaming for 30 minutes or something it's like it's just this kind of interesting mostly instrumental genre of music that she's kind of now looking for exotica records and we were hanging out at her house a while ago and she just put on forget who it was but it was so great to just put an album on have a drink hang out chat the album is going for the duration it's going then it stops and then one of us gets up and turns it over and i'm not like clocking the music thinking like okay is this uh am i shuffling am i nexting this song that i don't exactly love what playlist am i on like none of the concerns that i have around a digital music experience like when i'm playing music digitally in my house i'm obsessing over if the quote unquote right song is playing whereas if you just put on an album it's just whatever song is next is what you're listening to there's something very freeing about that i like both i like both

experiences like i like playing um games with genevieve mental games um really screw with her real gaslighty situation here uh no like when veves and i were playing birds the other day uh our birds actually game and um you know in that case like i put on a record but then sometimes like one song will remind you oh have you heard this one and then you kind of like bounce around or you put on like a an algorithm you know and like that's a lot of fun and i love that we live in an era when you can do that but you're right sometimes you don't want to do that either right like i don't know if i feel stress about it the way you describe it but like that is something that you can you can find yourself in that situation certainly if you're uh trying desperately like if you're in that jukebox mode of like oh we don't have a song we don't have a song uh queued up so anyway i i know that feeling i enjoy it but i also like the other thing too which is like i say if we have a little fire going outside i love pulling out the cd player and just like

grabbing a few cds yeah i think i have so much of an obsession around the perfect song playing at the perfect time that i sometimes get a little overwhelmed trying to choose what the music should be for a moment instead of just being like it's just going to be whatever song like there's even on like my running playlists or like i listened to this um tame impala album a lot currents it's called and there's one song that i hate and it's like uh it's i think it's called like from my past life it is an aggressively terrible song he pitches his voice way down and he's like talking like this to the beginning of the song like it's so bad and every time i'm on a jog and it comes on i next it well when i was doing this half marathon it was so rainy i mean was pouring rain that my watch was totally wet i couldn't do any music changing i couldn't do anything to it and so i had to just listen to the from my past life song that i always next and it was fine i just listened to it and i just kept jogging and like frankly was probably a useful distraction but i am so obsessed with the right song at the right moment that it paralyzes me a little bit which is why i think kind of restricting it down to like a cd or an album where i can't be so i just it is what it is it's kind of probably actually calms me a bit well the

perfect song is always a eddie rabbit song right yes it is which is the eddie rabbit song that

you want yeah right i love a rainy night right driving my life away and the other one

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female

no man it's not from a female all right can i close the loop on something quickly here luke I know that you have a bunch that you want to read. I also have a voicemail I could play regarding something that's on your list, this septic situation. But I wanted to read this email from our friend Pale Ale. And, again, I know that I have an Ohio accent. Pale. P-A-L-E-A-L-E. Pale Ale. Pale Ale. Yes. Listener Lindsay checking in from yet another long trail. We talked when I was on the Appalachian Trail.

2019 this time i'm on the continental divide trail hiking through new mexico and colorado around a thousand miles lindsey's doing so anyway just wanted to check in and says always appreciative of you two for keeping me company in the back country uh have fun out there and be

safe lindsey that's incredible thanks for checking in so we've been talking about septic tanks on the show because i found out last week that there's a youtube video of the septic tank at this little house that I bought which was total news to me I was just trying to find out some info for this contractor so they knew where not to build this deck and the guy pops this lid off of the I think this is where some of the confusion happened Andrew because I don't have the tweet in front of me but we you and I were both we were watching the video and we were looking at this kind of like watery kind of sludgy substance that was in this area of the septic tank and we were trying to figure out what is it is it human waste or is it just groundwater um and somebody got on twitter and was like it's human waste that's what goes in a septic it's human waste and we understand

that waste goes into septics i just wasn't sure if the the stuff directly under the grass the stuff that is right there like inches below the surface if that was just mud um because i and

what what i probably didn't accurately describe to folks was there's a huge kind of pipe not huge there's a substantial pipe that's going into the septic tank the septic tank is obviously for for environmental reasons and otherwise it is a closed system right it's a tank there is a pipe that goes into the tank i assume what flows through that pipe is human waste and other things but mostly human waste but what this where this water was piling up was around that pipe which made me think that this was just water that was rainwater and groundwater that was sitting kind of just in this little hole but it was not like we they've not popped to the top off of a giant plastic tank full of human waste obviously that would be you know like number two or whatever number one number two what we were looking at was i think still different i was surprised at how many people thought you and i did not literally didn't understand what goes into a septic tank

yeah and i mean i'm still willing to say i'm wrong i don't know exactly what we were looking at but like obviously i know it's human waste that is being you know i guess not truly treated there but that's what we're dealing with there but i'm talking about he flips the lid off of this thing and you're just looking at a hole in your yard like if that was just human waste i don't even think it's illegal to have human waste that you can also everything was reek it was wet wet wet mud i'm quite sure that then inside you could see the pipe for me right exactly i mean i could again i was i saw that i also didn't like the the people kind of came in kind of aggressive there on twitter

i didn't really love that just one person but it was kind of like i felt like and that's person probably listening because how would they know to tweet us if they weren't listening to the show so whoever that was i would just say definitely um we are at least moderately aware of how the process of the septic tank work also uh dan wanted to weigh in he said um the stuff in a septic tank is everything that comes from the drains in your house sinks shower and toilet i don't think i knew that a septic tank works on bacteria that breaks down the solids i guess the gray i mean look if you don't have water service the gray water has to go somewhere right so i

guess that also goes in there yeah no then that that makes sense to me i'm we didn't the reason this came up on the show was because you sent me this photo actually you sent me a video from the guy who was actually pumping the and cleaning out the tank um and i took a still like a screen cap of it to use as the picture of the show and then i was like i don't know it looks like wet wet mud but am i accidentally showing human excrement i don't want that to be the show pick now i'm tempted to make it the show pick um because to to prove that i'm not a complete idiot but then if i'm wrong about it i'm even bigger of an idiot can actually play a voicemail for you from this well let me finish dan's email really quick yeah uh dan who has a septic or had a

it says make sure the toilet paper you use is okay for septic and definitely no butt wipe down the toilet or chemicals that could kill the good bacteria in the tank i didn't think about that andrew but you know me i love me a good wet wipe i might have to go to the our friend p fletch model i believe of having a a separate container that is not the toilet for disposing of like wet wipe type situations because now once once you go there you can't go back unless you get a bidet andrew which is another thing Dan mentions. He says, maybe you see if Hello Tushy wants to come back and sponsor TVTL. I'm going to have to figure something out because I tell you, I can't go back, Andrew. I can't go back to just dry toilet paper on my hiney.

You're going to get yourself a poo bucket, like P. Fletch. I always call it a poo bucket. Yeah, actually, you know, I don't have to play this voice. I'm basically kind of reiterating the same things that you just said. It was just one person said that growing up there. their septic tank would always get clogged up because she blamed it on her brother, said my brother would always clog it up. I don't know exactly how you're pinpointing that. It seems a little unfair. But yeah, basically, also ending with the same point, like definitely don't be throwing your wipes down there, which you had already learned kind of in your Mount Baker house.

Well, I had forgotten about that, though. Like, yeah, definitely the Mount Baker house, that was a dark, dark moment when the guy came and used his boot to unscrew the overflow and sewage. That was more roots, though, than anything, but regardless. Yeah, I think, I know I'm not going to use wet wipes there, but I'm going to have to figure some out, probably bidet-related, because, again, I've got to keep everything clean down there. Also, Jay wanted to talk about our hearing problems, our declining hearing in our middle age. Jay says, I just finished listening to the Friday episode pretending to hearing trouble i thought i'd share my experience of hearing issues in case it helps you i'm a 44 year old fella who's been to an otolaryngologist three times since my 30s turns out my head produces a substantial amount of earwax jay writes aging is awesome so i just head on down and have it sucked out now and again first it's medium to very gross looking second Such a great feeling. And third, every time I have this done, I feel like a superhero who can hear the fibers of my clothing move.

Highly recommend. I've been thinking about this for years. I heard about people having this done, but I don't know. Like, for some reason, a doctor has never recommended it. You know what I mean? A doctor, you go get your regular checkup. They put that little thing in your ear with a little cone and the light on it. And you'd think if I needed that, he would say, hey, you should have this taken care of, like a septic tank. Because it sounds so satisfying to me. Stop stuffing wet wipes into your ears. But I feel like, I don't know, maybe I should just actively inquire about it, because it sounds so satisfying in a gross-ass way.

Oh, my gosh, totally. And, I mean, I don't know. Again, I think my hearing is probably more because of just wearing headphones every day for the last 20 years. And I don't listen to things super loud, but I just, unfortunately, I think it's part of the aging process. But, oh, boy, if it was mostly earwax related, that would be incredible. That would be I would be so stoked to find out that just getting these bad boys washed out every year or so would help with that. And just the mental satisfaction of knowing that something has been flushed out of your body is also. Yes, I was watching a thing online the other day of a, I guess, maybe a veterinary surgeon helping a turtle out like someone's pet. the turtle had been anesthetized but turtles i guess their ear they don't have external ears like we do you know they have like it's some kind of a flap or something weird and those things can get really infected and so this this turtle was you know again anesthetized and they were like removing this like giant kind of infected mass that was blocking up its ears and they like it just came out in one kind of semi-solid chunk and then they kind of washed the wound out and then they put some antibacteria in there and I was like so I literally wanted to be this turtle waking up from the surgery being like what are you kidding me it was basically like a an infected lump that was roughly the size of the entire inner ear slash whatever from the turtle so just imagine being that blocked up and then you go to sleep and then you wake up and it's like you can just everything is you can hear again what a relief that must be yeah one of the things i find

satisfying lately is um i actually still do have a phone that has a um that has an earphone jack on the bottom of it and it came into play very importantly during our uh recent tb telethon because we were using that phone to stream our audio and video out of denver and so every now and then you know just pocket lint will get it'll just build up in like the little charging station on your phone or a little charging socket on your phone or the earphone socket. And I noticed when I got this piece of equipment that I needed to plug into my phone to stream the audio into it from the board that it wasn't fitting in there snugly. So I grabbed a needle and I tried pulling out lint that I couldn't see. And at first I'm like, there's none in there. And you always think for a second there's none in there. But then eventually you just keep digging and then eventually a big ball or even a straddle. It is the best. Here's what's amazing. I did that before our trip and I thought I had caught them all as they say in Pokemon language and then I came home and I remember just looking maybe it was on the road trip under the bright sun of Denver I don't know what it was at one point I looked and I was like I think I see more in there so I came home and I grabbed that same sewing needle and I went back to town and oh my god when you thought it was all clean from the previous week's cleaning You

but then you catch some more my goodness forget about pokemon go in fact like just have people

catching lint that yeah i anything like that it's so satisfying i i bought a bunch of these um i just realized that i i don't have a very good well this is on the subject of apple constantly changing everything you know how i mean you don't use apple products but they recently switched now Now, if you get a phone from them or whatever, you don't get the thing that plugs into the wall is no longer for a USB, if that makes sense. It's now for, like, I think, what is the other one, the smaller one? Oh, USB-C? It's a USB-C now.

Okay, so it's USB-C on both ends now, instead of being USB on one end and USB-C going into your... Oh! No, you never had USB-C going into your phone, did you?

It's USB-C on one end, and it's like thunder lightning bolt or something on the other end. apple specific yeah that's exactly they keep changing it so now i have a bunch of usb to apple thunder whatever's but all of the but all the i basically was slowly losing chargers over time and then what i found myself doing was a lot of things you buy now like i have a water like a water thing for the cat that just kind of constantly cycles the water to keep it fresh and anything like that it's just a usb yep power source that you plug into the wall and you plug a usb into it that's the standard and i've started like accumulating those things through various products yeah and then i'll like use those as my phone charging thing i'll take those on the road with me and then they're like i think they're kind of shitty like they're not they're not like from the menu they're not from apple they're not maybe that they're not powering things so i'll get up in the morning put on my watch to go for a jog and it'll be like 20 oh yeah when those things start to go bad it's infuriating yeah so i just thought to myself this is the kind of thing this is there's a solution to this and so i bought um i bought just like on amazon like a four pack of like really fast charging ones that have usb and they have two usbs on them and they're very effective but i didn't even realize i plugged them in in various parts of my apartment so anywhere i go now andrew i can charge what i didn't realize was those little cubes are all wrapped in a plastic thing that i didn't see before so now i have four chances and i'm not doing it yet i'm waiting but i'm gonna have four chances to peel a plastic thing off of something else after it's gotten all dusty and gross and then you take the plastic off and then it's all

clean and nice nice i am wondering i mean it's funny that i mean apple's always an outlier because i feel like they're just honestly trolling you guys at this point but they really are the fact that like you have that special plug that only works for apple products like for our android stuff now it's pretty consistently like everything is moving to usb or usbc and like you said even just like Genevieve has a little makeup light that now plugs into the wall via a USB adapter, right? We have a water fountain for our cat, too. USB. You're seeing more and more of that, and you're just wondering could we be coming close to another universal power source that is both good for computers and non-computer related things? My guess is it can't handle really heavy loads. I don't think I could run my hedge trimmers via a usb right type of situation but it is nice to see things are i feel like everything was changing constantly for a while and at least outside the world of apple it sort of seems like people are kind of settling into this usb as the future universal product which would be nice we've just been moving too quickly through things cycling through tell me about it i have so many superfluous

cables now thanks to all of the apple changeovers that are that are very first david spade had a funny bit i saw the other day on uh like probably tiktok where he was talking about going to the apple store and buying this laptop and and them talking him into all the upgrades and the and i mean i don't do a great david spade impression but it was sort of like oh what are you gonna do with the um you know what are you gonna do with this computer he's like i don't know just mostly emails oh okay you didn't say that before um we're gonna need a another probably a couple terabytes and he's talking about how they're upselling him and telling him this is the greatest computer of all time and then they go do you want the apple care and he's like no i don't want the apple care it's like 600 more dollars and he goes i don't like that they spend the first 45 minutes telling you how it's the greatest computer of all time and the last four minutes telling you how it's going to completely explode yeah right and that's why you need the

apple care it's like which is it right yeah yeah good call yeah i don't have that experience of going into apple stores which i mean that does sort of seem like a fun part of it it seems like they've done a good job of making it like a candy store you know yeah all right uh let's go ahead

and call that good here on this Monday. Thanks for listening, everybody. We will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. So please join us for that. Until then, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves. Stay safe. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Let's see, it was this air, right?

Yeah, it's all stuffed up and plugged up. It's something, I don't know. I can't hear, I don't know what's wrong.

Well, Mr. Lafredo, I think I see something.

Uh-huh. Let me just try this here. Careful now. Oh!

Mr. Lafredo, you had a suppository stuck in your ear.

Oh, no!

What?

Now I know what I did with my hearing aid.

Ha ha!

Power out.