Muse

So what is this new project you guys have for Sally?

Okay, okay, okay, okay, okay, okay. Okay, so this new project we have, it's called The New Medusas, and we think it could really use the Sally Reed touch. So it's a show about three women who run a salon in Soho, who are just trying to get by, and they have snakes for hair, and they turn dudes into stone. Okay. So, right now, the show, it's a little, I don't know, hmm? And I think that you, Sally Reed, could bring to it more of a hmm. I don't know what you mean. So, right now, the show, it's more, yeah. And you could bring it to more of a yeah.

I think I know what you're saying. I have a client right now that's bringing to a Fox show that before was just, hey. So we're looking for less and more. That actually wasn't in the email.

TBTL.

Dear TBTL, you're so amazing. And I know you're gonna do better. Luckily for me, I've processed all my feelings. And I've gone through the five stages of grief. denial anger internet commenting cat adoption african dance cat returning to the adoption place watching all the episodes of murphy brown and not giving a flying fart whoa watch out says

that bird ew it's got a snake oh it's chasing a jackal oh my gosh that's the voice of the youth

of america have a good show dummies what you do is so important all right hello good morning and

Welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Why now? What are they doing? And how can you steer clear of it all? My name is Luke Burbank. I'm your host.

Hi, everybody.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where I have had to take the unusual step of actually locking myself into the office, or at least fully closing the door, keeping Bubbles the cat out of here because, you know...

A cat is an angel that poops in a box.

As I was trying to do the sound check with Andrew, an audio drop played out of the blue at like 150% of recommended volume, and it was because the cat had jumped onto the desk and was playing drops. And by the way, that's not the only computer-based tasks that she now knows how to perform. Yesterday, she literally, I'm not kidding, sent a text message to somebody.

LOL. Laugh out loud. OMG. Oh, my God. WTF. Why the face?

So she has lost her hanging out here in the studio privileges. Thankfully, I still have mine for episode 3716 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Where we have arrived. Hey. It's your lucky day. We might actually get to a story we've been promoting over two shows. Well, two shows where we promoted it and didn't get to it, so that would make today the third day that we might talk about this thumb drive that got lost in Japan and has imperiled the personal info of an entire town. Also, in New Jersey, the employees of Medieval Times are looking to unionize.

Welcome to Medieval Times. I'll be your serving lunch, Melinda. Might I fetch you something from the barkeep?

It is a really well-written article and raises a bunch of interesting challenges, unique challenges faced by people who are pretending to be in the medieval times while trying to basically offer service to drunk bachelor parties from New Jersey. The intersection of those two groups of people creates an environment wherein the people working there might benefit from unionization, as we will find out when we get into the article. We'll do all of that with the help of this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's doing the work. He's baby-stepping. He's an activist and house party enthusiast. He's Andrew Walsh, and he is joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Hey, Luke. You ever have one of those situations where you kind of receive some good news, but unfortunately it comes on the back of the specifically bad news that you were kind of an idiot all along? Sort of. Single Christians, good news. Explain. I'll walk you through it. I'm going to say sometime over the weekend, maybe, Genevieve and I were hanging outside on our front porch looking at the plants, talking about the plants. Genevieve saying, again.

got to water some of those plants over there in the corner of the yard really wish we had a hose out here really wish we had a spigot on this side of the house uh i said are you using the big green can right now she's like yeah and we started even talking a little bit about down the line maybe getting a spigot installed on the front of the house like it seems like there should be one there then yesterday i come home and i think you know where this is going i opened the gate and i just look at the house i just happened happened to look at the house not really thinking about anything in particular and i see the place where we would want a spigot and what is there luke but a spigot now a spigot with a g oh am i saying am i saying that wrong it's spigot not spigot have i been

saying spigot this whole time i you know what up until probably my early 20s i called it a spigot i grew up calling it a spigot and it's actually spigot it's a g it's spigot but i also i don't I don't think there is any kid in America who's calling it a spigot I think we all call it spigot And it's because so much of your childhood is related to that thing Because you're either trying to plug in a sprinkler to play in Or maybe a slip and slide or water balloons I spent a lot of my childhood in the summer thinking about what I called the spigot And what its water related implications were

You know, I mean I feel a little embarrassed But I'm going to not because I'm on the number one source for spigot or spigot, which is hydrasecure.com slash hydrasecure slash spigot or spigot. And they say, what do they say? According to the Dictionary of American Regional English, spigot is more common east of the Mississippi. But the use of any version of spigot is most common in the Appalachians and in the middle and central Atlantic states. The rest of the country is more likely to use the term faucet or tap rather than spigot. Now, here's what's funny.

I would never call the thing that's on the outside of the house a faucet. Would you?

I wouldn't. No. Faucet feels extremely indoors to me. Seems too fancy. Keep that for the indoors.

Let me guess. Well, you put an indoor faucet outdoors on your spigot? So let me guess.

You found out you had one all along. So, yeah. It was right. I look I come but you know what and here's the deal this is gonna make me sound even dumber but I want to I want to caveat this I knew this was there but right now it's still underneath one of those little winterized styrofoam protector cone things you know but I know that when I was looking at the house I think maybe even before we bought it but certainly not long after we got the keys. I remember, you know, like taking that thing off and looking at it and checking it. So like at one point I knew that that was there. It wasn't I don't want to make a narrative where I didn't realize what those little protective cones are. I know that underneath those are the spigots. But in the spigot, I call it a faucet. But anyway, yeah. So I was just kind of like – but for like several days, Vives and I were just kind of sitting on this information and wishing we had something that was there all along.

Yeah, I am – you know, I've been talking a lot about this, I guess, ADU or something. Like so they're at this house that I'm working on. It's got a garage. I'm not a big garage person, right? Like I just don't care about parking my car in a garage. I guess I've never had a nice enough car. yeah um it's a detached garage so it's not even like you know if you're in the midwest or somewhere where it's very cold yeah it's convenient to be able to park your car in relative warmth and then go into the house without having to trudge through the snow that makes sense but this doesn't solve for that problem yeah if it's not attached miss me with that is an expression that i've been saying since the 80s yeah yeah no and i i've i know i've always known that about you but so i it's always interesting to me on these like um hgtv shows where people are like out allegedly uh searching for their dream home although as we now know it's they've usually purchased a home already and now they're just pretending on a couple of other houses so that then they can make a show out of it but when someone's when one of someone's uh really big sort of important things to them is what's the garage situation that's always just the kind of thing where i've been confused as to why that would be a high priority. Anyway, this house has a detached garage and it's actually kind of ideal for me to turn into a little recording studio and with a little living room and kitchen ed and things like that. And, um, and so, uh, same thing, Andrew, I was talking to my dad's going to help me with this project. My dad and I are going to allegedly install something called scissor trusses, which are basically like the way this garage is, is right now, if you were to walk into it it has a kind of relatively low ceiling which is like you know you have that in garages

where it's just cross support beams like two by fours that are just going across like you know like east west and if you're walking through the garage and there's just a bunch of old like shovels and like various things that are like stacked up on the top of those rafters or whatever you'd call those so that's the current situation but it has actually a very high ceiling which could be cool if you were to take some of those rafters out and then you'd have this very kind of awesome high ceiling that would be neat looking but the thing my dad explained to me is that those are what are supporting those those things are not there for looks and they're not there just so you can put a snow shovel on top of them they're they're also doing some structural work so we're going to take some of those out and put in something called a scissor truss we're also going to pour cement i mean this is an involved situation but my point is i would talk to my dad and i was budgeting it out and i was thinking how are we gonna have to run water up there and we got to get the plumbers out and then i looked the other day and i realized oh it has water there's a spigot nice it's got a hose so it's like and that's what's crazy about when you're trying to do something on this scale i was like okay it's probably going to be like three grand to run water to that thing and then i was like oh no it has water okay now that three grand can get burned up on some other part of this project or double it at the casino as i like to encourage you to do uh dangerously close by the way i don't want to give away too much intel i don't know i don't know why i've decided to be so secretive and ineffectively so but it is uh you know the part of southern washington i'm in is is it's got a lot of casino action going on unfortunately i have not uh followed that siren song yet but i'm like huh i got the should i have bought a place that's within spitting distance of a number of casinos but luke there is something about my

garage that if i don't mention it to you today if i forget um i'll remind me i'll bring it up another time i'm sure because there is one little thing about our our very non-fancy little garage slash workshop unattached to our house that brings me a little bit of joy that i tell me about it well i want to hear about your joy though i have something else that is oh i bring me a lot of joy

because you were like hey i want to tell you about my garage remind me to tell you about it at some point right like just tell me about it right we're only 10 minutes into a show that's

going to be 90 hours no um the thing is i have something else that i've been meaning to say on the show that is tbtl business related that also brings me joy though which is the fact that i'm thinking about you saying that you don't want to necessarily give out your address on the air as as neither do i um but i am in the works i am in the works i am in the process of getting setting up a tbtl po box so that if somebody does want to include us in a and now now it sounds like I'm just begging people to send us free stuff. But there are times, as many listeners know, when somebody wants to send us a little thing that made made them think of us or something that they made that says TBTL on it and they want to share it with us. And and I've often been urged by the listeners to set up a P.O. box. But, you know, they ain't free. And I just never put in the request with APM. And I finally did that. And they were like, yeah, sounds good. And so it was as tough of a process as I was concerned it was. So now I need to figure out which is the best post office near me, but a return of a P.O. box. And then we can use that to get you stuff as well, Luke. I can forward it on.

There may still be two or three TBTL P.O. boxes in various cities that I've set up one time or another and then abandoned, but I'm still direct depositing to. By the way, I was going to introduce you today by saying his money don't jiggle jiggle. it's directly deposited on the first and third friday of every month unless friday is a holiday in which case it's thursday that's really good but then as i was waiting for the intro tape i then tweeted that but about myself and then i was like i can't i can't tweet it and then i can't tweet it about me as a joke and then and then attribute it to you on the show because let's be honest the people who listen to this show and the people who have any awareness of me on twitter are the same people pretty much yeah and they would they would they would smell uh you know a rat

yeah so i didn't but um anyway yeah so i don't have the po box address to give out yet but i because there's somebody um who uh and um it's jeremy i believe wanted to send us a little uh a little tbtl a cast iron skillet a leather holder thing which is like you know what i mean like so you can grab the handle a little handle protector can you picture that yes oh is it just jeremy do

is is we have a listener who's got a leather yes and now other company the reason i'm really we have a lot of listeners who are leather daddies right but then something that says daddy loves

leather yeah exactly but i'm sorry but keith keith i apologize i was so distracted for the past 60 seconds i knew i knew i was messing that up keith i was trying to honor you and instead

i dishonored you please accept my apology but also that is why retract your cast on your leather tbtl cast iron holder change it to say the gist and send it to mike um anyway yeah so anyway sorry about that keith but yeah like keith was like hey where can i send this thing and i was like you know what let's just get this po box set up right now so um i don't have it set up quite yet but we're

working on it nice speaking of mail andrew i mentioned this at the top of the show but something quite remarkable happened yesterday involving this friggin cat which was i was in the living room and i had my my laptop my macbook air laptop which i i uh you know do a lot most of the work that i'm actually doing when we're not recording or i'm not recording live wire is on that computer because it's a little more comfortable i can well in the olden days i could sit on my couch and type away now i can't because the cat will jump on me but i'm sitting at the breakfast thing bar whatever And I'm looking at – so I can text from my computers because it's all – oh, my God. Andrew, I have something I want to tell you about that will make me so – that makes me so mad. Remind me to tell you about it after this.

Okay. It's really the opposite.

It's the opposite of what you were doing earlier. Let's both tell our stories at the same exact time just talking over each other. And then they'll sum out because your story is happy and my story is negative, and then they'll equal no sound. That was a joke for the audio nerds out there. Shout out to Mike, Holly Woo Mike, who will get that. It was a little sine wave joke. There you go. So I can text from my laptop because it's all part of some iCloud account or whatever. And I'm sitting there. So I have my text program open on my computer as I'm sitting there doing some work. and i look up and i realize that i have texted complete gibberish like just a string of different letters and semicolons etc to this guy that i'm working with on some electrical stuff out at the house and i know for a fact i will i would just never send that and i know that i didn't do it and i'm like what in the world and then i realize oh here in the studio where i'm now currently standing this computer the laptop that sits on this desk permanently was still open and i come in here and poke around and there's the cat she's up on the desk and she has successfully sent a text message she didn't just like mash the keyboard randomly which she did but then she somehow that translated also to sending it the message actually sent and it didn't say

anything in particular it was just gibberish i'll read none of the auto because that's what always worries me with the phone technology right the phone auto completes so much stuff now that you could actually send a cat could actually accidentally send a somewhat cohesive message i

worry okay here was the first message was um bracket like one like the the right hand side of a bracket the square one those are cool those are the badass parentheses the right hand bracket And then Someone, I think it's a forward slash We have a listener who always corrects me When I say, I get backslash And forward slash mixed up So it's bracket, forward slash, right? Okay E-O-M, end of message The next message 8, bracket, forward slash S-W-J-R-T-K 7-6-R-J-M 3-F-D-F-E-R 8 apostrophe three apostrophe p eight six semicolon apostrophe eight seven one that that could be code i mean that could be a new a new app that someone just coded are you sure it doesn't say five three

one eight zero zero eight and if you turn it upside down it says boobies just see what just make sure to see what your cat is up to here turn your phone upside down i'm turning my head over

like but it's like so okay so now add this to my list of things that i have to be aware of i can't leave this computer i have to just make sure to close this laptop yeah i guess so that i leave this room because if it's if it's and you're right with all of the autocomplete and this and that who knows who knows what havoc the cat could wreak by standing on this computer because things are they've they've tried to make things so convenient for us that it's getting to the

point where a cat can actually do it and that's dangerous well i have a lot of follow-up questions here so first of all how much time went by between these texts being accidentally sent before you saw it and then i'm assuming that you texted the electrician with an explanation

uh i i'm thinking five minutes i don't know i'm just guessing there and then uh and then i immediately said oh sorry that was my cat and then okay so five minutes okay um the other question

is more related to the context of the story which you set up yesterday you're working with an electrician it sounds like things are going well now but oh my gosh so well most got you almost got

bed with a sketchy electrician which is the fact that he wanted to get in bed before he would give you a red flag like red flag red flag right there um but when you went to call it off there was some concern that he would not take that news well that he might even get into a stock a light stalking situation he's done that apparently to potential customers in the past by harassing them by calling them constantly have you received any feedback from canceling that appointment

i have not received any feedback negative or otherwise yes it would appear that that bullet was fully dodged for people that missed yesterday's show yeah i had in a in a fit of desperation which is honestly my favorite kind of fit um i i had agreed to a very weird system where this guy was going to come out apparently and look at some electrical and like but i was have to pay him to even come out and he was kind of aggressive on the phone he told me he was recording the call i mean just a bunch of reasons why i should have just been like let me find someone else and then only after making the appointment did i look at the reviews of this guy and they were all terrible well except for one and um so then i tried to call it off but then i was worried that maybe he would be mad if i called it off so it seems like things everything has sort of settled down over there now the interesting part is this other guy that i got andrew could not be more on it nice like he just i was just on the phone with him right before the show today and he's like okay so this is you know from the county we got you got to get this permit and this whatever he's like i just talked to annie over there and like i'm gonna and he's like i'll send you the application i'll fill out the parts that are have to do with electrical that you don't understand i'll email it over to you then you just fill out the other part and sign it and like so helpful nice and like and like always like calls me right when we agree we're gonna have a phone conversation responds to my messages is like i'm just like we i really went from just probably what was going to be a nightmare scenario to probably my new best friend yeah just imagine don't be jealous just imagine

just imagine being tangled or entangled maybe i should say with this other person like how far down the line before you would oh my gosh i know it's like because then really dodged the bullet

the fact that i had to the fact that i was going to already be like a hundred and whatever seventy dollars into it just to get him to show up then you start to kind of think well i'm already paying the guy to look at it and so you know now i guess i should have him completed or or whatever like just just it would have just been bad news it would have been bad news all the way around so i'm i'm feeling i'm feeling grateful today nice that that i was able to swerve on that now let's get oh one other thing let me after a bit of positivity let me get into a bit of negativity i spent about 45 minutes this morning andrew trying to just send you an email and it just wasn't specific to you is because i was trying to send you the show sheet so basically i spent 45 minutes this morning and it's still not fixed trying to send email from the other laptop the one that i usually roam around the house with because i made the critical error of buying into one of apple's security situations that was just you know i mean the ios or the whatever it is that the systems are always always updating i'm constantly being asked to update to the new operating system and i've been on this harangue many a time but it feels like it rarely improves my experience but they just corner you and then everything stops working and then eventually you have to go final upgrade to whatever you're on now mount rushmore i don't know they're all like these they're always this like i don't know vaguely like they're always like the new system sedona it's like calm down apple but anyway i was i was on the petco website and i was i was i don't know what was happening but i was somehow about to buy something from petco i was pricing things on petco and the apple system not even petco the apple system says would you like to anonymize your email i guess the idea of this well obviously it's some security feature but i don't know if it's supposed to decrease spam or decrease the chance that somebody if they hacked into the petco system could then get more of my info i don't understand any of this and i should have said no the answer should always be no with this shit but i guess i was like well i don't know maybe you know you never know someone could hack into petco and then if they get my real email address who knows what could happen next so i stupidly said sure and in doing that i created some freaking alter ego nonsense email that now when i try to just send you a regular old email for work it keeps saying uh you haven't set up any forwarding info to this

particular anonymous email so then i go and i tell it don't send it from that send it for my regular email then it shows me icloud it's like log into icloud then i try to log into icloud it says we don't recognize this password so then i x out of it so then i quit messages i go reopen it try to do it again no it's i i'm that computer is like bricked right now i mean i'm gonna have to get on the phone with apple or somebody or take it to the apple store now just to get them to let me back into my normal email on that now it works on this computer that i'm looking at right now and you definitely have the right password yes because i can log i mean yes i can log into

this is a let me let me put it this way like this is a password that you're pretty familiar with you log in like because i have you know different levels of passwords that i use some i use almost every single day well some i use literally every single day to log in and do my tbtl work the system requires me to type it in weirdly stuff like google which i use constantly i actually don't know that password that well because i'm always logged into it you know what i mean so if i were to un if i were to like kind of log out from google accidentally on one of my devices that would be a little bit more of a it wouldn't be terrible i can figure it out i have i have systems it involves sticky notes uh no uh but i uh you know i can i can get back into things but this It's not a password that I know like the back of my hand. So, like, what level is this password?

This is a password that I use all the time. Okay. So it's very – this one I definitely know, and I can successfully log in through the website. So, you know, Apple has this iCloud that's kind of the clearinghouse for everything. So I could go into the, like, web-based email and send you an email. Yeah. As opposed to the, you know, I have, like, Outlook or some kind of an email system that just makes it easier and means i don't have to i'm not constantly logging into a website the software on your computer that's where the issue is that email software is now all bollocksed up and so and

it's and part of the system is like if you want to send an email but you want to anonymize it so in other words like no joke like if you x if you accidentally did something you you could send me an email and it wouldn't look like it's coming from luke burbank it'd be like a show sheet but it would look like it it's coming from the cayman islands or something uh maybe i don't even

understand what i was agreeing to what is this i just lure bank i just thought that like yes it's so no one will ever figure out who this is there's so many books i just i'm so i so deeply regret saying yes to anonymizing the stupid email the petco yeah because i didn't even like i it was just like i could say yes or no i don't know maybe whatever but i guess more secure is more better but now so i can go into sorry this is incredibly detailed and so boring but like i went into the system and i found where it's like here's your these are the places you have an anonymous email with and like petco is the only one so i try to delete that and it like won't let me get rid of it now it needs me to sign in to get rid of it but it doesn't recognize oh here's okay i'm sorry andrew i am really sorry this is so boring but it is for techno geeks with spreadsheet i think part of the problem is when it wants me to log in so it will give me like a it'll it'll pop up a box when i'm trying to do some of this stuff and it'll just say you enter your password but you know what it's saying it says enter the password for account and then it doesn't say like my account it just has quotation mark a period and a quotation mark in other words so of course the password doesn't match because that's not my account that's some there's some error in the system that's wanting me to log in to an account but it's not it doesn't understand the account it's trying to get me to log into if that makes any sense and you can't change that account that thing is grayed out you cannot change that this is why i'm gonna take it to a professional because it's hitting some weird process issue where it's telling me you have to put in this password to get into this account but the account that is presenting me is not a real account yeah that is

frustrating what a world what a world yeah and you know all of this stuff when you tell these stories like i don't understand macintosh computers any more than i understand macintosh apples so um i can be of no help i do sort of feel like if you were on a pc i feel like maybe it's good that you're not because i think that i'd get i would just by my very nature personal i would just get sucked into these because i love solving these kinds of problems and then the next thing you know i would just be you know doing your finances for you and trust me you don't want me doing your finances for you so um i don't even know what doing finances is if i'm being completely honest about it so yeah happen at a casino i think so are you hey lloyd take your finances down to the

casino does it involve me sending the front-loving criminals an update on my most audacious bet oh that was not tasty though it's not even like it was for big money it was just i couldn't believe it worked out which is last night i had the mariners to score the first run and to eventually win the game and also to score the last run and eventually win the game

and that worked out because they scored the only run because they only scored two runs at the same exact time and it was our boy jesse winker who's on our fantasy football baseball team the fact that i call it fantasy football probably means i'm not ready for it um speaking now what's the thing that you're happy about you know what i will tell you my happy little joyful almost burbankian little moments that i experience right now i also if you really don't want to get to the usb story i did go to the dump yesterday and there's always something to talk about when you go to the dump

always content in the dump yeah you know what but we can talk about that another day no let's retire here's the thing the usb story isn't all that fascinating a guy in japan when he was hold on hold on a second

welcome to top stories what does he say how do i not even know what the fuck he was gonna do the top story sound and i actually don't i've heard that literally three thousand times okay well

first of all we should take a break if we're gonna do that let's take a break and then i want to come back with you doing your version of the top story sound effect can i listen to it again before i do the invitation i need you to do it from memory wait a second stay with us this is very this is gonna be very interesting when we come back on tbtl okay ready i'm gonna cue you hold on i need

to think for a second i'm not joking i need to think why is this i'm not allowed to listen to it you better leave all of this in because i'm getting confused with that so i want you to do

your impression listen okay here's what i want i want you to do your impression then i'm going to do my impression then we'll listen to it and we'll hear how close either of us got it's just so weird

that all these drops we play live in my head as earworms but the one that i hear literally every weekday of my god forsaken life i'm having trouble conjuring right now and i feel like my brain i feel like i've lost something all right i'm i'm imagining it in my head give me a second yeah i think it's welcome to okay ready yep welcome to top story

okay now my impression it's like that kind of newsy sound hello and welcome to top story hello and let's see here let's see how close we got

hello and welcome to top story ah without hearing the music hello and welcome i knew it wasn't just

welcome it sounded weird i was just missing the hello and also that's the the everything else that's not him talking is sounds that are impossible to reproduce with the human voice

or voice box and remember we got a note from a listener who met that person they worked with that person or know that person or met that person wow yeah it's like a friend of theirs we really need to make that happen that that love connection between that person and our show or maybe we just

let that lie so we don't get sued um okay so very quickly yeah usb story let me just get oh yeah okay the usb story is not even that interesting i just by the way thank you listener paul for sending us a not that interesting story no that's not true it's all right we got this from a number of people because you know we have that audio drop about usb drive and so people were understandably excited when there was a story about usb drives in the news simply put it was just a worker in japan a person who worked for a local government uh no a company hired by a local government got wasted and then passed out and then someone stole his bag uh and i mean that's clear unclear

that somebody stole his bag unless you know that for sure i saw i heard he found the bag later he lost the bag while on a bender but it was unclear if somebody took it really okay this is what i get for trying to do this from memory i mean i have you and i think probably read different versions of this so there's a chance that you read a more updated version i think i read one from wired a couple of days ago and here's what i know this guy doesn't work for the government he works for a company contracted by the government of a town of about a half a million people and they were doing some sort of work looking at taxes actually looking to see if if looking to see if people were eligible for exemptions for some reason right so they're just going through all this data you already have way more info than i do they have like you're my fat checking they have like 500,000 names uh in the system that they want to go through and you know audit in some way uh in a good way a good audit um this guy's supposed to be doing the work there on site but he against the rules decides that he's just going to copy all of this information probably in a spreadsheet or database uh onto his thumb drive will you be my database and um now that's And he's going to take it back to either his home or his office to do the work there.

He wasn't supposed to do that. After work that day, he's got this thumb drive on him. It's in a bag. It's in his, you know, in his briefcase or whatever. But he decides to go out and have a few drinks on a Tuesday. Now, this is where things are kind of interesting. He ends up having so many drinks that he passes out on the sidewalk and he wakes up.

Which is an intense amount of having a few drinks. I've never done that, nor have I in public. yeah right i mean like i mean i you know passed out yeah i can't i can't remember a time you know kamara kev might might uh be able to remind me of something that's a little dim but in my memory but like yeah i don't think i've ever like fallen like passed out on a street that's that's that's

next level yeah and again you know everybody's got their own schedule but for what it's worth it was a tuesday and maybe it was a wednesday when he woke up and he's like oh shit where's my bag that had the USB stick in it, and then they couldn't find it for a couple of days. They have found it now. Apparently, he recovered the bag, and it was kind of in an alleyway near a building that he vaguely remembers passing during his bender, and the stick was still in the bag. I'm still not clear, and you might know this, or if you're looking it up now, I'm not clear if somebody took this bag from him while he was passed out, or if he just threw it in the alleyway, and you know because he was just blind drunk and he didn't know what was going on but either way they have recovered the stick but people are still very angry about it um okay no you have

all so many more dazzling deets than i do uh which is great um all i knew was that this person who had access to this thumb driver was carrying a thumb drive around uh got really drunk passed out and then what i had heard was that they woke up and the bag was gone including this sensitive information Now, the thing was, it was encoded or it was, you know, encrypted, I should say. So that was like the good news was it was encrypted. And so whoever got their hands on it, were they to even care about that? And again, maybe he just drunkenly left the bag somewhere that it sounded like at the end of the day. This is why it's not a huge story and why I honestly kind of wish Paul wouldn't have sent it in. Come on, Paul. It's because we're not angry. We're just disappointed. Yeah, that's all. No, it was that it sounds like there was pretty limited chance that anybody nefarious was going to the chances that somebody who were to have grabbed a bag like this, if that would have been what happened, would also be good at unencrypting thumb drives to get this information. It seems like those would probably not be the same person. Somebody who somebody who steals a bag off the street and somebody who's doing high level cyber crime are not always the same person.

Well, here's what it got me thinking about, and this is a conversation we've had before, but I just am surprised about something, because I have said before on the show that were I to see a USB drive randomly somewhere, like, on the ground, and it's clearly, you know, it's not, I'm not talking about taking off of somebody's desk. I mean, like you find a random USB drive in a parking lot. I understand the temptation to plug that into your computer. Like I if I were to find a USB drive in any parking lot on any sidewalk in my driveway, if somebody dropped it while they're walking by, I have a computer here that I barely use for anything. I would take it off. I would take it offline and I would because the thing is really old and it's half broken anyway. And I would probably plug it in and see what's on that thing because I am just curious about it. And, like, I said that before and I thought you and certainly some listeners were like, why would you what is even the curiosity? Like, and I was just thinking about this again today. Like, if you were to find a note and I'm not saying it's right, it's very voyeuristic. But if I were to find a notepad on the ground, I would pick it up and I would flip through it. I love little glimpses into into just random strangers lives like that.

oh i i mean maybe i was in a mood that day but i am very i'm very with you i would definitely want to know what was on there i would i would potentially buy a different computer like just buy a burner and just like plug that thing in raw dog that thing and just see what was what was happening on that no i i find that kind of stuff tremendously interesting yeah and you know

hopefully it wouldn't be anything that you know if i found something that was clearly important or financial data or something like this, I would get it into the right hands. But chances are it would just be somebody's boring homework or something. You know what I mean? But it's just like, I don't know. It's always a fun window into just random life.

Okay, so that's the USB story. It's done. As you know on this show, if I promote a story three times and we don't get to it, then it never existed. So we have now cleared that off the slate. I can stop playing the USB drive, whatever thing, for a while. Back to what you wanted. See, I can do that one. Oh, yeah, that's actually not bad.

Thank you.

So what was it that you're so excited about that we were trying to talk about before the break?

Do you want to hear about the dump or do you want to hear these small moments of joy? Can I, I mean, do I have to choose or can I hear? What do you want to hear about first? The dump. Okay. I went to the dump yesterday because my garage was filled with those yard waste bags containing blackberry brambles, right? We've been talking on the show about me pulling all those blackberry bushes down. And then Genevieve said, well, can't you just leave those all at the curb? Because we have curbside pickup here and we do have yard waste pickup. We have one of those tiny, tiny little bins. Like it looks like a baby bin. You know what I mean? A little green baby bin. And it looks like it's hanging out with his parents at the curb. If you were to personify these things, which I would never do, obviously. And Genevieve said, can you just leave them at the curb? I'm like, I can't. I'm not 100% sure if there's a limit. I have a feeling there isn't, but maybe I was just looking for an excuse to go back to the dump and use that little sticker I have now that gives me access. Now that you feel like you've got special access you shouldn't have. So to catch people up, if you haven't been following every word of my dump saga, I went to the dump, the transfer station.

You asked me to stop talking about my dump sagas on the show.

local transfer station that when I first went to it, I thought I was allowed to go to it because I'm a resident of King County. But it turns out it's really only supposed to be for residents of King County who don't live in Seattle because Seattle has its own stuff going on. I didn't realize that. I happen to live in a zip code that straddles both Seattle and another municipality, I'm assuming Shoreline. So because of that, they didn't blink an eye. They asked for my zip code. I gave it to them. They're like, OK, you can come here. Here's a sticker. And now that sticker is in my car and i can go to that dump whenever i want to now if you're going to be dumping actual garbage like actual landfill garbage you got to pay like 28 bucks right but it was my understanding that at transfer stations at least this is the way we city slickers do it in seattle i believe um you can recycle as much as you want and you can drop off yard waste as much as you want and those are free because they're not you know they're not going to the landfill um so i load my car up with eight bags of these blackberry brambles and by the way If anybody's curious, how many full yard waste bags can a 2018 Volkswagen Golf hold? It's exactly eight. No more, no less. Well, I guess less. But so my car is just absolutely. The eighth bag is on the passenger seat next to me. Yard waste is my co-pilot.

Is your car getting jacked up? No, it's super light.

It's super, super light. These bags are just blackberry brambles in here.

Right. Right, but they're garbage bags, or they're yard waste, so those paper ones? Those big brown paper two-ply bags. So that's actually better than, because that's keeping probably the stickers at bay. I'm just imagining these stickers just absolutely ruining the interior of your Volkswagen.

Oh, no, not at all. Every now and then, if I squeezed a bag too hard as I was transferring, I'd feel a little bit of a splinter. Not a splinter, but a thorn going through. But no, that was not an issue. The bags are actually, yeah, talk about small moments of joy. there was something about picking these bags up and putting them in the car and then getting them out of the car that was actually kind of nice because they look big and bulky but then you go to pick it up and you're you kind of brace yourself they're super super light yeah let's face it what i did was i put one on each arm um and i went out in the streets i told everybody that there were bricks in the bag um so anyway i go to the i go to the uh the transfer station i just smooth criminal my way in there i'm just like peep the sticker my dudes they they wave me in they give me their little card right they give you a little card when you come in and i think that it the card contains digital data about how much your car weighed i believe when you came in because you're you stop on a scale and then when you leave you hand them the card again and they can see how

much garbage you got rid of and they'll know how much to charge weight and i always see my brain because i'm a total sketchball i was when i was doing this a lot up in bellingham i was always thinking how do you how do you hack this i guess it would be it would be you go in with a bunch of garbage you dump it all but then on your way out you pick up some bricks and you put them in your car so that when you get back on the scale going out you weigh roughly what you weighed coming in so they charge you less then the problem is you've got these bricks what are you gonna do with them

well you gotta take them back to the dump and then it all starts over again that's so funny but the thing is it's not even worth trying because literally anything from a small garbage can up

to i think like 3 000 pounds are all like 30 like the minimum is yeah it's so it's so much stuff that you like somebody like you are never going to exceed that anyway exactly so anyway i was a little surprised so i i follow the green line they're they're a line painted on the ground by the way they have an art installation right at the at the front of the dump that I mean I don't usually think of a dump or a transfer station as being super art forward but I gotta say these folks who work there have really leaned into the culture in a way that I really appreciate and feel like I would as well if I worked there like first of all you drive in and they've taken these huge tires like they're huge tractor tires sort of and in the place where the hubcaps would be they've put um they've put these little speakers that are painted these bright colors and as you drive in luke if your window is still down because you just talked to the the toll booth operator or whatever they've given you the card and you drive in and these speakers are making various nature sounds so as you pass each one it's making sound and then they have the same display on the other side so as you're exiting they have these big tire speakers have you ever seen anything like that before can you even picture what i'm talking about uh i can i

can sort of imagine it that has to be i'm sure that the county uh you know put together a public art like you know using like the funds from a public art fund uh you know thought well this would be this would be something that would improve the experience of of the people that are using this facility it's an interesting idea i'm sure we could figure out who actually did

who created that art yeah i'm looking it up now i uh oh yeah there's something written about it here on the shorelines public places owned by other entities site anyway also though there's another thing that and again i don't think this was commissioned it there's a place where you're driving through the actual kind of the small indoor section of the transfer station and there's all kinds of signs that are just like drive slow slow down drive slow uh which is their right to have them there it's a very dangerous place with a lot of people kind of coming and going um but what i like is i think somebody probably went there and threw away a mannequin because there's kind of a janky mannequin there that i my guess is and i'm going to stand by this now that's upsetting somebody salvaged this weird mannequin it's like a silver mannequin but they put like one of those um vests on it and a hard hat on it and maybe even trousers i'm not sure and gave it a sign that says slow you know like a sign that you might see a construction worker using when they're working on a road that says you know slow and first of all it's really eye-catching because for a second you think there's a human there and you really do slow down and secondly i love imagining them seeing that seeing that thing thrown away and saying hey we should use that

i am reading up on this piece of art by the way it's called i think terra firma retire plus sort is the name of the art and it's by an artist named Carol D. Pellison and then I believe a photographer named Steve Magee

Well, the photographer just took that photo that you're looking at. I don't think he had to do with the art other than the photo you're looking at but there's an audio person involved too, right?

Well, yeah, Magee captured this juxtaposition in his photograph Terra Firma now installed as a billboard above the station's public dump site to remind visitors where their unwanted stuff is headed so i think this is so is this the audio

the art itself is called retire yeah

so this but it's actually pretty i have to say it's kind of edgy they went out to cedar mill cedar hills which is this big dump which i think might have been sort of controversial at some point and it's in the it's in the shadow of mount rainier took this massive photo of it and then posted it above where people are throwing their trash so they could remember what's going to happen to their trash while this audio is playing. I've never noticed the big

billboard or photo of it. I've just noticed the actual piece of art as you drive by. And I think, I could be wrong, but that sound you were just playing is kind of a combination, as we're hearing it right now, of all of the tires. But when you drive by it, I think each tire provides a different sound. Like the crickets might have been coming from one, the ethereal sounds from another i'm quite impressed with the whole thing it's nice i you

know that's honestly that's public art at work that that changed your experience a little bit yeah i i mean this is one of the things that's nice about living there's a lot of things where i think we do not apply the the ample resources of this country in the right direction the fact that we don't have better health care for all for instance comes to mind i'm not even getting into supreme court stuff for roe i'm just talking generally speaking there's a lot of wealth in this country and i think it's not distributed in an equitable fashion it's not spent on the right things etc every once in a while though somebody says you know what we have this dump but also we should remember where this stuff is going and we should make this a slightly less soul-crushing experience and then the money is actually dead

to it and then talented artists come up with a with an idea and then it's executed and then it changes your experience and i think that's a very cool thing yeah i so i enjoyed that and now we

actually know what it is so i appreciate that as well the only thing that's sort of here are the two things that happened to me at the dump if you'll recall the last time i went there i got hollered at right because i was trying to recycle the styrofoam but i was recycling it in the wrong place and some guy what did he yell at me again um oh my dude my guy my man my man what are you doing my man and i was like well that made me kind of feel like i'm somebody's man

so that was actually kind of nice right we we agreed that of the things he could have yelled at you that was actually kind of not aggressive because my man is yes familiar it's collegial

and it also like he really just seemed dumbfounded that i would be so dumb like he just had this look on his face like how would somebody be so dumb as to put styrofoam in the wrong container which i I mean, give me a little bit of a break. I still feel bad. But obviously, I'm rolling in here yesterday thinking like, mission one, don't get hollered at today. All you have is yard waste. It should be pretty straightforward. I follow the green line on the ground. I find the yard waste area. It stinks. It smells so much worse than the just regular waste part of the dump because it's organic and things are starting to rot, right?

Next time you're going to do a dump story, Andrew, will you give me a little heads up so I can... It stinks. There you go. I'm going to queue up one of my very favorite audio drops.

I'm surprised you didn't go with stinky. Well, there's room in our hearts for both, I assume. Thank you. Yeah. I'm just, I don't know if you're going to spring that on me. Stinky! There we go. I just need to get that out of the way so I can breathe easy, ironically. So anyway, here's the deal, though. When I pull up to the area where there's all this kind of yard waste and just all kinds of sticks and stones and stuff that will become mulch, not stones sorry sticks and whatever brambles and leaves and stuff from people's yards and construction projects all organic none of it is in brown bags like mine is right it's just a pile of organic matter and so i don't know who to ask if nobody was around i would probably just throw the whole bags there but like last time i did not see this guy he popped out of nowhere to holler at me so i'm like ah and then there's one guy and he is kind of behind if you can picture it i've pulled my car up and now there's this long pile and a trough of organic matter and behind that behind the sort of moat of this stuff is a very disinterested looking worker who's sitting in some sort of little machine that has an arm on it that at some point he will use when these piles get too big to transfer this organic matter somewhere else right it's a little uh i don't even know what kind of little piece of machine this is but i think you can all picture it um and he is behind the the plexiglass in you know in the little cab of this little machine so it's not like i can communicate with him easily so i am now really confused as to what to do can i just take these eight bags these brown bags and just throw them bags and all on top of this organic matter i feel like the answer to that is yes that's why we use the paper bag yes they're made

out of the same stuff that well they're they're made out of compostable material so they can

compost right exactly i mean that's my understanding of it but you no more don't like being hollered at and i felt like last time i was really caught off guard so i'm sort of just standing there with my bag for a while waiting to see if he'll if I can kind of catch his attention I sort of do I don't know if I waved or what but finally he's reading something I don't think his phone either I think he was physically it's like the place that time forgot he's like reading a newspaper that's folded up into quarters and he looks he's drinking a cup of black coffee yes out of the styrofoam reading a folded newspaper that I recycled the wrong way he looks at me I mean just so disinterested and just like barely like barely lifts his head to look at me right and i'm i'm like can i i think i yell can i just throw the whole bag or i have to empty it out and i'm sort of pantomiming it too and with as little effort as you could possibly imagine in a little bit of a scowl he just sort of just like throws his arm up at me just like throw it over just throw it over so i did that i threw the bags over i kept waiting for that ghost guy to come yelling out at me and saying my man but nobody called me their man that day um and I drove away but then I was surprised here's the last part of the story which really doesn't have a power out I'm leaving I hand them their little digital card back and I'm just ready to go on my merry way and the guy's like that's $18 I'm like what do you mean or like $17 or something I'm like what do you mean it's $17 um I actually didn't say it in that tone because I these are people that I don't want yelling at me so I just said oh I thought that yard waste is free and the garbage is is uh what You charge for he's like no it's some sort of fee that we Gotta we gotta pay And I'm like, well, if I left this outside on my tree lawn, would it be picked up? And he's like, tree lawn? Isn't that what you call the little area out front of your house that the city technically owns? But it's like the little.

Oh, you know what? We call that the parking strip in the north. Oh, yeah. Interesting. See, every once in a while we uncover a regional difference.

Yeah. Sometimes you just go, you attach a hose to the spigot and you water the tree lawn. Your tree lawn. Exactly. But then he said, well, I don't know. It depends on what kind of service you pay for. And then I remember, oh, we're not all from Seattle here. Nobody's from Seattle. Who said Seattle? This guy was like, oh, those clowns in Linwood. I don't know. And I paid the $16 and drove away. But now I need to figure out, like, maybe Genevieve was right. I should have just left all of those eight bags. But I didn't want to be stuck with those eight bags if the city of Seattle didn't pick them up.

So anyway, it's so funny because had you. Well, OK, a couple of thoughts on that. i mean you could have left them out and if they didn't take them away then you could have just dealt with it after that yeah but i just didn't feel like dealing with it i mean i didn't know you yeah right and also just the the amount of the kind of amount of of mental energy that you use thinking about your garbage or even yard waste situation yeah where like those bags were out and then are they going to be taken are they not and then you hear the truck and it's just like you want to just get that thing off of your plate exactly and i still actually you know what

yes you put it that way uh even if i knew a 17 i still might do that it was just nice i'm glad i'm

so glad that they're out of my garage yeah i i hear that um i would have probably i would have probably put them out front on my uh tree lawn and then uh just on the hopes that they would take them away like then it's that's a form of gambling like you just put something out there put a random i don't know put a old washing machine out there and then just like one day you come out and they took it and you're like yes it worked i did it um but the other thing i was thinking was there is a certain kind of and i bet you you feel this righteous indignation more than i do because you really strive to follow the rules of when you're you were trying to be very careful with what you were doing at the dump and for that person working there to give the minimal effort To almost seem put out by you Just trying to do the right thing At the place they work There's a certain kind of anger that I feel When somebody treats me that way When all I was trying to do was Actually make sure that the place they work Was operating more effectively and efficiently You know what I mean? Like when you're asking a question That's only to make their life better essentially Because let's say that you Let's say the bag You can't have the brambles in the bag And then you just throw it there And the guy's reading his folded newspaper and then maybe in an hour he has to come over and deal with it all you're trying to do is make his life easier and he's acting mildly annoyed it sounds like in your description of like you asking the question that's when i go from trying to be mr good boy to mr rage man because it's just like i didn't bro i was just trying to help you don't don't neg me when i'm just trying to follow the rules that's when i'm probably like the most mad in those because and again it's rare for me I'm usually just like I have a lawn bag, but it's actually just full of old paint cans and I've tightly rolled it up and I'm hiding it under the like yard clippings. I love Mother Earth, but usually I'm like happy to get limited attention from the employees of a place like that. But if I am trying to follow the rules and they're like dismissive of me, then I go right from being nice to being like deeply angry at them.

i wasn't deeply angry i mean and you know where i come from on this stuff like okay so i'm rolling up at four o'clock on a what was yesterday a tuesday and you know he works at the dump it's such a harder job than what i have and i imagine that like there are debatable i mean honestly how do you define hard i mean it's not i like my job i wake up i talk to my friend i mean yes there's no way and then you also do tbtl i was talking about bananas my cat and then i do tbtl and i talk to my enemy um no but i mean listen is it from from working in a place that literally stinks all the time i mean again i would not i i i can think of much worse jobs for myself personally than working at the dump i find the dump somewhat fascinating but there's no doubt in my mind that that guy puts in a harder day's work than i do there's no doubt about it but i'm not giving him i'm not giving them carte blanche on this either because you know i don't know if you know this but it takes more muscles to frown than it does to smile i actually think that's bullshit i don't think that's true no i will give some people some leeway um in jobs like that but on the other hand though yeah you don't i mean it wouldn't take much just to be like give me a thumbs up you know what mean yeah thumbs up and that

that would communicate so much more instead this guy is just kind of like you know he's just giving off the energy of just like i don't want to be dealing with you in any way i don't want to be here i what does carl havoc say i don't want to be around anymore i don't want to be around it's

too heavy there's too much stuff on it too much stuff yeah i mean sure i i want to be careful because like you know there's a certain probably class issue that comes up and who are the people who have access to what kinds of jobs, you know, who gets to host a podcast versus who's somebody who's working in a transfer station. But, you know, I just, yeah, it's an interesting question of if this job is more difficult than that person's job. I think it comes down to how you define difficult. I would argue that there are difficulties around doing a show like this five days a week that are actually kind of real and that sometimes I, and this only lasts for a fleeting moment, Sometimes I sort of think there would be a certain relief in having a job where there wasn't a ton of problem solving and a ton of and, you know, I'm again, I don't know what this that person does for their eight hour shift. But I will tell you this. They definitely get their one hour lunch. They definitely get their like I don't think it's the kind of job where they take it home with them would be my guess. Now, if you manage that place, you probably do or if you're one of the supervisors. But there are – I don't think – I would definitely not want to work at a transfer station. But sometimes I fantasize about having a job that when you're not doing it, you're really not doing it. Listen, I – There's something appealing about that.

I know what you're talking about. In fact, I used to kind of had a philosophy like that as a younger person. Like, you know, because I worked in – I literally worked in a fiberglass factory and I worked in, you know, my dad's shop, which that was a little bit of a different experience because it was my dad's shop. So let's just leave that out of the equation. I worked at a at a telemarketing place, like, you know, working in a fiberglass factory and a telemarketing place like neither one of those are like, you know, described as dream jobs. Right. But there is something about, you know, not being responsible necessarily. You're not a manager, so you're not responsible for other people. But the thing is, it's still life like that. People who work at the transfer station and shoreline still probably have to deal with a whole co-workers, if not bosses, bosses who might be taking advantage. of them bosses who in various ways bosses who might be you know working outside the rules to get them to work like there's so much that does I mean it's there's still human beings who I mean sure I just know that if if working at the transfer station were a better job you would do it you know what I mean like I it's you mean I would or one would you you would and more of us

would you know well right but see that's I don't think well again that's the defined difficulty I don't think it's a more difficult job than we do I think it's a more frustrating job than what we do or it's a more but like i guess you think difficult is are the circumstances appealing or not and i think difficult as being technically challenging and i think this is more technically challenging than that but i think it's i would definitely not want to have that job but i think that we just maybe have a different definition of what makes

something difficult yeah i mean well okay so i spent two days um just like you know pulling and pulling brambles out of my hedges in the heat right and that was physical labor and today my my lower back hurts and i can't tell if i actually hurt my back or if it's just like kind of muscle pain but it's located there but it sucks but like i'm sure that like at the end of a day at a job like that you're coming home you're probably pretty depleted depending on how old you are not everybody who works in these jobs are young people like you have all of the the the problems of dealing with people so and again i am not arguing here that this guy couldn't have just given me a smile and a thumbs up like i don't think being a dick is ever acceptable you know what i mean so i'm not giving him a pass to that but it doesn't send me to rage zone um in this particular case because i was like whatever it was like literally a 30 second interaction nobody hollered at me that's a win in my book here's my bell uh i gotcha but i do think that Listen, I mean, we can both speak for ourselves, but what I do for a living, waking up and doing this job, not that it's not that it's all easy, not that that, you know, going to Denver and doing, you know, the technical stuff that we did at Denver, as well as the content stuff we do at Denver. I'm not saying that, like, we don't work for a living, but I will say that, yeah, like, I can probably. This is a way better job than working at the transfer station.

A hundred percent. And we're lucky to have this job. And we, you know, we are often saying to the listeners, like, thank you for supporting the show and making it so this can be our job. Definitely. So, yeah, I want to be clear. I'm not bucking for a job at the transfer station. I wouldn't mind like I wouldn't mind a week, a week where I just kind of had a job.

And, you know, this is less about TBTL and more about the lifestyle that I have chosen of having kind of multiple jobs. So there's, like, different groups of people. Maybe this is heavy on my mind today, Andrew, because we have about six more hours to submit our biannual employee goals with APM. And should I put work at the transfer station as one of my goals that I submit? Should we see what happens with that?

I know. i mean that that is something that it's just like that that that part of our job is just absolutely

ridiculous and you know didn't i put that i wanted to learn karate i think that was one of your goals one time is there i think it was is there any professional training that you would like to get and i think i put karate and i don't think that ever even went commented on which made me think and that wasn't our current supervisor no i really like you know for all the belly aching i do about the kind of oddness of working for a company that's you know in a different part of the country than us and etc etc you know the it training and things like that that i'm always griping about i have to say the actual people we work with are lovely and our actual supervisor and our actual supervisor supervisor um and the folks that help us with the ads and certainly the people in the marketing and membership like it's a bunch of really awesome people especially right now i

will say too because i mean it is amazing how many supervisors we have had i believe we've We've worked at APM for seven years, but we've had eight different people that we've reported to at various times. I could be wrong about that. Maybe it's just one for one, one each year, but that's quite a bit, right? And I will say the current people that we actively interact with are the best, I think, so far. Well, maybe I shouldn't rank them because obviously El Ropo, Steve Nelson, who hired us as a dear friend, and I loved working with him and for him. So maybe I don't have to rank it. But, no, I love these folks. In fact, our current supervisor, I don't know if she ever says this to you, Luke, but she'll sometimes say, you can make fun of me on the show about this. And I always think you're the one I don't want to make fun of. I know we like you, Beth. So I don't know if she'll hear this. We're pretty deep into the episode. But anyway, yeah, no, we are lucky in that way. But there is also some of this HR stuff that is just ridiculous that we have to do. But, yeah, no, I also understand, though, that feeling that you have of sometimes wanting to say, listen, I don't mind doing some tough labor, but going in, punching in, punching out at the end of the day. And, yeah, maybe I'm a little smelly at the end of the day. Maybe I'm a little sweaty at the end of the day, but I can take a shower, have a cold beer and then do it again tomorrow. I mean, there is something appealing about that. And I think I said this to you on the show recently that as a kid, like I kind of had a whole philosophy about that. I mean, as a as a older kid or a very young man, let's say, you know, 15 years old or something, I remember going around and telling people and I actually had this as an expression that I would say, like, I always said I'd rather work at a 7-Eleven than own a 7-Eleven for all of the reasons I just said, like, I'd rather punch in and punch out. I never want to have to deal with the with all of the stuff that goes along with, like, making sure that the bottom line is is is working out and dealing with managing people and all these things. I don't think that's true for me anymore, but that was definitely a guiding principle for me as a youth, which was the total opposite of what I didn't want to be in management.

But like, I just had all the jobs. All I ever wanted when I was a teenager was a job in the mall. I just wanted to work at a department store with cute girls in it. And I would apply for these jobs at like, you know, Zebra Club and the Squire Shop. And and, you know, I don't think I ever applied at Nordstrom. That was that would have been my dream. Becca worked at Nordstrom when she was in, I think, high school and in college. And I was like, I can't believe you were one of the people that actually worked at Nordstrom because that was like the highest end of the retail jobs you could get. But that's all I wanted. And I could never get those jobs. And instead, I would just have these shitty summer jobs of just like digging a trench in like the height of the summer heat, etc. Or all I ever wanted was a job that was indoors, which is really what led me to my radio career, because I was looking for a summer job when I was in college. And I saw an ad in the newspaper, the UW student newspaper, that they work study job was hiring at this radio station. And I thought, well, that would be inside. That would be a win for me this summer. It'll be the first summer where I'm not outdoors. So, like, I always wanted to get away from that kind of stuff. And then, you know, I got very lucky that that I've gotten to do the job stuff that I have. and yet now i'm like god i wish i could just be outside like when i'm at the end of a like a long day of doing some demo at this house that i'm working on or something i will say sitting out after like a long day of hard physical labor and now this is by the way this is privilege because the reason that i feel good after i've exerted myself on this house is because it is voluntary i could walk away from it tomorrow i could maybe hire someone i would be expensive but But the thing that made me feel stifled when I had these jobs. that were just doing really hard manual labor was I had to go every day to get paid like I did it wasn't optional now when I'm doing work on my house or even when you're pulling blackberry brambles as hard as that is it is still in some way optional for us oh yeah which I think which I think also very much yeah that very much affects my experience with it but I will tell you like the and I've only spent a few days doing this so far because I learned that if I tear down the bottom of the chimney the top of the chimney will collapse and destroy the house but like Of the like maybe three, four days I've spent just solidly working all day out there on some kind of a, you know, demo project and then lugging debris up to this area where I'm going to have the junk haul people take it away all day long and just being so tired and just like sweating way more intensely than I do from one of my runs. but the end of the day when i'm like sitting having a beer like sitting in like the one kind of camp chair that i have at the house it is so satisfying it is i would put it up there with any of my uh media job accomplishment just looking around this room seeing where there used to be stuff and now it's torn down and i'm sitting there and i'm maybe drinking a beer i'm listening

to the mariners game it is a very satisfying feeling but again that's because it's that's

because i'm opting in oh amen yeah no and that's true for me in this this project of pulling these blackberry brambles out like never once i hope has a i hope as i talk about this that it doesn't come off as me complaining in any way it's just like it's a project that took me by surprise because i became obsessed with it and like if i really didn't want to do it i would put it off and i would i would i would have been doing something you know i was doing that instead of doing my my uh employee employee review which by the way i don't think you have to come up with goals this time i think you have to go back over your old goals and then analyze whether or not you've hit your goals so good luck with that i know karate now so i have one of the goals has been achieved but it's been great our listener karen actually uh we were emailing about something tbtl related and i i don't know if i'm allowed to say a lot but she works in uh what's the word i'm looking for well you know like landscaping and landscape architecture i think and uh-huh And is working on a book, I believe, about the mental health benefits of working in your yard. And I was like even thinking like, yeah, you would think you're not working in your yard. I'm sorry, working with plants or plants in general. And I'm just like, yeah, that's like, yeah, even though like I'm tearing down thorny bushes in 92 degree weather, like I kind of love every minute of it, even the painful moments of it. Like, it's great. I'm doing it because I want to be doing it. And then you're right. And you do it for that moment at the end of the day where you just and also the shower at the end of the day.

But you're right. And I'm just saying the same thing for the ninth time. So we should probably move on. But it it's very much it's a very different experience to be sort of a gentleman farmer than to be a farm hand, like to just be like, OK, this is you know, I get paid to do a podcast. But then I'm also going to do this other stuff because it's kind of rewarding to see the progress, et cetera, as opposed to it's 6 a.m. I'm at the a.m. p.m. I'm getting my large coffee or my giant, you know, soda or whatever I drink to go out to my roofing job that I'll also be getting up at 6 or, you know, 5 a.m. to go to the a.m. p.m. by 6 a.m. to be on the roof by 630 tomorrow. You know, it's a really different experience. And I think if my life would have taken a different course and that would have been the work I was doing, I think I would not have found it as enjoyable as I find these little moments of DIY stuff in my life.

Here I go once again with the email every week. I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

We did not get to the Medieval Times story, but I do want to talk about it tomorrow because it's very interesting. Of course, we had to focus on how much I want to work at the dump. That really killed our time that we had allotted for the Medieval Times story. But we'll get into that tomorrow because this is a very interesting story.

Let me just play one quick voicemail for you here, Luke. This is from listener Rich. This sounds like the type of thing that you – tell me if I'm wrong. What Rich is about to describe sounds very much like something that you would not enjoy. But we were talking about dynamic pricing the other day. You brought it up. It was for something – oh, it was for restaurants. We're talking about menus and like whether or not we want to use physical menus going forward or if there are any benefits to the QR code digital menus. And one of the things in this, I think it was a Washington Post op-ed that you were reading or op-ed that you were reading said that one benefit for restaurants is they can kind of have dynamic pricing. Like if there's a certain menu item that is really surging, they could actually tick up the price on that a little bit, which I don't think most people like the sound of that. rich has some experience with that where it's sort of gamified hey friendos it's listener rich

from philadelphia area and uh i was listening to the show

So today, the aptly new number, 3707, and you're talking about dynamic pricing in menus. And there's actually a few beer restaurants around that are, like, really kind of cool that use a stock ticker for the beer. And depending on supply and demand, the prices can go up and down. And if you have a large enough party there, you can literally, like, drive down prices and drive up prices and watch it happen while you're drinking beer. And so, you know, it's not always bad to have dynamic pricing. It can be a little bit of fun to go into these ticker beer spots that have the beer priced just like the stock market. Anyway, that's my story. Power out.

I have a question about that, but I'll wait and just get your reaction first.

I do actually think it'd be kind of fun just to see that price move. You know, I remember I did that to myself with this thing called StockX, which is like a sneaker, kind of like a place you could buy sneakers that were no longer being produced, like dead stock. And there was a particular kind of Nike shoe that I got really into, and I bought like maybe three or four pairs, and I watched the price of the sneaker go up as I was getting to like pair number four, because I think I was personally driving the demand, which was kind of a weird feeling. It would be fun to be sitting in a brew pub or whatever and, like, ordering a round of something. But the thing is, the only direction that you can actually watch the price go as a group, the only direction you can impact it, well, that's not true. As I say, the only direction you can impact the price would be up. If you all ordered a round of Surly, whatever, you could make the price go up because there's more demand. I guess what you could do is you could get everyone to agree to not order something, and then maybe you could drive the price down due to lack of demand. But it seems like the more likely scenario would be as you're enjoying this beer, you're watching the price go up because your large group of people is increasing demand.

That's the thing that I was going to raise, and that was my question. Like, it's exactly what you just said. Like, the only way you can drive a price down, it would seem, would be by not buying it. Right. You know what I mean? And, like, the idea, I mean, I guess also people who go, you and I are not really, like, kind of brewery people. I can't even say the word brewery. I really have trouble with that. The rural brewer. The rural brewer. Can you write that down? Yeah, we do currently have Will You Be My Data Bay as one of them. But the rural brewer is pretty good, too. I also wrote down white spigot fences, which isn't something we said. But, yeah, you and I are not big beer garden people, I think. we're not big brewery people we like more of our kind of dive bar scene or whatever and so this isn't really probably for us but i guess it does maybe encourage you to maybe try other parts of the menu as opposed to just getting the same beer over and over and over again but it does seem like the only way to drive down prices on something that you like is by not buying the thing that you like and hoping that it goes down and then deciding deciding when to buy because if you're impacting prices directly it means you're buying something and then you're increasing demand and the price would go up or i'm misunderstanding it it's weird though because there really are the

things that we we know that airline tickets are you know it's that's a very dynamic scenario we're just used to it but then there are the things that something about it being dynamic feels deeply wrong like the idea that oh i'm gonna get the last order of this at the restaurant and therefore i'm going to have to pay a premium for it we're just not i just don't think our brains are trained to think about that purchasing experience in that way and it feels it feels off to me i guess again the all the alternate or the other side of that coin could be true which is no one decided to order the soup of the day so now the soup of the day is becoming more affordable as they're trying to incentivize people incentivize people to buy it of course who wants to buy the thing that everyone else has said no thank you to yeah right yeah in the food environment in the

food space the one thing that would appeal to me the most i think about this scenario if they set it up this way is if that big board that they have that shows the price is changing if it's one of those physical boards that flips yes is that like an old school airport thing i'm picturing or is

a stock market thing where you can actually hear go well i think it definitely was an airport thing but you know where that really shows up are amtrak stations oh okay like a bit like the the amtrak station in like grand central i think still has that in new york yeah that's the amtrak part of it that is that's that's fun although from what we've learned from movies we always associate that with something bad happening in planes trains and automobiles or a movie like that where it flip flip it just flips to canceled right right right that's the perfect example yeah all right that's what i got today i need a bar i need a bar that's like the orange theory of bars

Hey, Andrew, can I describe the last place on Earth where I would ever find you? Yeah. It's called Orange Theory. Do you know about this place? I've definitely heard about it. I can't remember what it is right now. It's an exercise kind of—I guess you would say a gym, but not really. It's a place people go to exercise, and they've got treadmills and some weights and other things. But the Orange Theory part of it, the reason it's named the Orange Theory—and this is why, Andrew, you would— I could, I could not, there's nothing I could do physically that would get you into this place. You wear a monitor on your heart and your name and your bio stats are up on a screen and you're trying to stay in this orange zone by exercising hard enough that your heart rate is in this kind of optimal range. And everyone can see where everyone else is at as far as where, what zone they're in and if they're in the orange or not so it's this kind of public very public representation of what you're doing um i would never go to it either by the way but it doesn't sound great to me but it doesn't sound as awful as as bad as i set it up you may be like i you know pool parties i'd probably put up there as a more uncomfortable space for me i guess i just thought you feeling like everyone is able to monitor what you are doing with your physical body seems like right not your move i just need a bar that's telling me when i've had enough to drink i need an orange theory type thing up on the like a video screen that says okay burbs that's uh two and a half monopilovas and soda uh you have an early day tomorrow that's plenty and then somebody be like why is that guy headbutting the monitor you're almost in the headbutt zone don't praise the machine all right should we call that a day here on tbtl on this job that is clearly much harder than working at a dump you gotta go do your you gotta go do your uh 12 hours at the dump i do i have to go i have to go i have about i'm not kidding between between our um performance reviews or goals or whatever we're doing and then just a mountain of concur i have to do today yeah it's It's not harder, but it's – I'd rather be – I'd rather – if I could push around a pile of yard waste in one of those skid loaders or whatever they're called this afternoon, for just this afternoon, I would take it over dealing with Concur. But such is life. What do we want for the show title? The Rural Brewer? The Rural Brewer? Or Will You Be My Data Bay? Which I thought you could write will and the letter U and then the letter B, my data bay. I think the Rural Brewer is kind of funny. also it's hard to say it really is man it satisfies the same sort of tongue twisty qualities of the roger it really does alright we'll do that then

thanks for listening everyone we will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you until then have a great Wednesday take care of yourselves please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all Why don't I tell you all about it over a hot steaming mug of beer and a cup of cold corn? Power out