Muse

Tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me, tell me. Do yourself a favour. Come and work for us. The glittering prizes and endless compromises shatter the illusion of integrity. So do you want to come and work for us? You have no idea what I'm talking about, do you?

Track one, side one, the Hemispheres album by Rush. Do yourself a favour and download it. Delete one of your Dido tracks. I don't follow you. Let me put it in plain English. I don't dance to Dido, dude. I know there was a lot of D's in there before you say anything. TBTL!

Wow, you're really good at puzzles.

I did them all the time as a kid. As my mom used to say, when you're doing a puzzle, it's like having a thousand friends.

Do you have any types of food for dogs who are afraid of spiders? It literally, like, if I'm not wearing a good outfit, I can't sing a good song.

Look, man, you know your stuff, but you're like a crazy volcano. You'd have to show me you can bring it down a notch. I'll bring it down a thousand notches if I have to!

Eh, tomato, tomato. It's tomato, tomato. You say tomato, tomato, I say tomato, tomato.

In a few hours, you're going to be smarter than anyone you've ever met.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL.

Well, well, well. Look who's back.

The show that just might be too beautiful to live. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Welcome back. Your dreams were your ticket. Yes, indeed. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon. Back from my little two-week vacay Where I actually wasn't just lounging by some pool somewhere No, I was digging a trench through real concrete Really? I'm trying to build my beef castle? Feeling maybe more macho than I've ever felt I invented an entire new genre of camping Cat camping There is something about the soul of a cat. And just had an overall amazing time the last couple of weeks.

What a fun, sexy time for you.

It's a perfect day here in Portland, Oregon on this Monday. Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful. I am ready to get back to the business of bringing you this imaginary radio show, which arrives today at episode 3,759 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

Speaking of fun, this is the sound of folks in Detroit trying to have summer fun. Summer fun that came with more danger, maybe, than people were expecting. We will explain what's happening in Detroit and how they're trying to fix it. Plus some emails and V-mails. And this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. I know he's excited to be here.

I'm back. I've returned. I'm back, y'all!

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Hey, Luke. I've been here the whole time. How are you doing? Welcome back to you. I know. Did you hear the positioning statement? I did not say our vacation. I said my vacation. If you go back and listen to the tape, you will hear that I was very carefully not implicating you in whatever my time card looks like.

I think I was more referring to the drop that introduced me and that said I'm back, baby. That was all I was referring to. I mean, there's no need to bicker here at the beginning. Right. I am back from the restroom. I had my. That's what that refers to. Right.

When you went to get some coffee.

I. And then you came back. Told you before the show, something that was happening to me is happening to me once again. And I have a new cat in the house. Nobody get too excited. Not that you should get excited about my pet situation. This is not my cat. Hey, listen, I'm trying to build an entire career on it.

So let's not dissuade the people from getting excited about our pet situation.

A cat is an angel that poops in a bar.

More cat content. I was trying to turn that into one word. Cantant? Cantant. That didn't work either. But, yeah, I got a large cat that's desperately trying to get on my lap right now. We're kind of cat-sitting for some friends who are out of town for a couple of weeks. And it's been interesting having two—I honestly don't. I mean, you have more adventures to talk about. Are we not at liberty to say who the cat belongs to or the cat's name? Only because somebody—you know, talking about somebody being out of town for an extended period of time, I mean, I wouldn't want to necessarily—

put them on Front Street, so it's not critical to the story, so I don't think it's necessary, but yeah, it's interesting having two cats in the house, because it's been a long time since we've had two cats in the house, and it's been a really long time since we've integrated two cats, you know, and this cat that we're sitting, Pretzel, is a younger cat, but a much bigger cat, and so there's different energy levels. And a much hairier cat. I've never seen a cat. A much hairier cat.

That cat has the hair of Cat Williams, which is just an irony, or ironic that they both have cat in the name but that cat's got some real locks it's a little bit

of a problem because the cat has been trying to hit me on the head with a microphone during her world sports cafe down in south lake union so that's been that's been the hardest adjustment right there honestly having somebody chasing around live in your basement chasing me around with the microphone and telling me that she's gonna buy a seattle ferry um but uh yeah it's been it's been interesting we're on like day five now i want to say maybe more and i gotta say you know it takes a while for everybody to settle in the cats are still mostly giving each other a lot of space one of them is usually upstairs one is downstairs pretzel the visiting cat has kind of carved out the downstairs for her space she's finally starting to eat regularly again which is good luckily this is a cat that had a lot of calories to go off of before she finally settled down enough to start eating but she's got a little she's already got her winter layer she's a big she's a she's a big cat she's thick she is definitely a thick cat but it's interesting because she's younger and she has so much more energy you know and so she's down here right now she hasn't seen me all night because we were sleeping upstairs and she was still a little bit too nervous to spend her her her evenings upstairs because if she runs into professor bananas there will be a little bit of hissing that will happen and they're they're not fighting or anything but they're still giving each other a very wide berth but now that i'm down here in the basement and she's like what you do a daily podcast she's so excited right now she's trying to jump on my lap and she's again she's not the tiniest little thing in the world either but she's just so excited to have a human being in her lair now and i am that human being i did not want to start our first show

my first show back andrew you've been sitting in that chair staring two holes into the computer for the last two weeks but i haven't moved i'm a skeleton with cobwebs it's actually kind of unsettling yeah you're holding a mug of coffee in one of your skeleton hands that's the move it's always like the person is like their the hand is still on the adding machine or whatever like the skeleton someone has to pose the skeleton so it's still in the act of whatever it was doing with it when it expired i didn't want to start uh the first show back from the summer games kind of doing my normal thing which is to be slightly put off by an interaction that I had because I have so much to tell you about Andrew and I'm just I had such an eventful couple of weeks and so that's really what I want to focus on but when you talked about cats not necessarily integrating easily with other cats and also when you talk about just cat sitting I'm in the even as you and i are speaking at this point on a monday morning i'm in the middle of a slight situation related to bubbles care and i have to be honest with you it's been gnawing at me for like the last four days so maybe i can just kind of uh get this out of my system relatively quickly and then we can move on to what i think is the more interesting stuff uh that i wanted to talk about but so uh typically when i go out of town so i was just in washington dc uh on friday night i was doing wait wait don't tell me at wolf trap by the way shout out to the tens who came out uh thank you so much for being there saw them out well I saw this via twitter it's a lot of people there was like 6,000 people there but amidst those 6,000 people was a handful of awesome tens who were lounging on the grass and tweeting at me and uh just want to say hi to all of them and thanks for coming to the show I also won which doesn't matter because it was not the show that they're going to broadcast they just kind of like use pieces of it and play it you know on you know when they go on vacation so i'm glad at least those tens got to witness the majesty that is me winning an episode of wait wait don't tell me uh anyway point is usually when i go out of town i will take bubbles over to becca's house because becca's uh great with her and also has a cat holly and so they have fun and everything works out great becca and i went to dc together and had a really lovely weekend i got to go andrew when i tell you that there is hand-drawn pornography underneath abe lincoln in the lincoln memorial i now have photographic evidence and i can show you we got a tour of that place uh that was kind of like just for i guess special VIP guests and it was incredible anyway point is I couldn't take bubbles to Becca's house so a few months ago when I was in a similar pinch I had been calling around to different places in Portland

that will do cat boarding and I had called one up and I talked to the lady who was super nice and she I had said well how does it work with the cats and and kind of what like you know she said well we keep them in these separate rooms but then you know we'll go in and play with them a lot and We love cats. And this lady was just very bubbly. She sounded like the kind of person who is well designed to be a person who watches a lot of cats, right? If I pictured her in my mind, she had a sweater on that was more cat hair than sweater. So now that this weekend is approaching and I know that I'm going to have to put bubbles somewhere, I call the place. And I talked to a woman who I think is the original woman I had talked to. and uh and and she says sure yeah just send over the vaccination stuff and we do have some availability and i'm like great so i get all worked out i take bubbles over there like basically right

before my flight oh my god i thought it was gonna be the bubbles did not want to get vaccinated i thought for sure this is gonna be a robbie ray situation okay good so she's she cannot pitch in

canada okay good if we end up playing the blue jays in the playoffs and it's going to be an issue Andrew um it's funny how much less mad I am at Robbie Ray about his vaccination status when he goes seven innings and gives up no runs yeah yeah because I'm a principled person Andrew and really really what I went from Robbie Ray are some quality starts of what we could just and then we don't have to talk about his anti-vax anyway so I I show up there with bubbles and her little toys and her her little pig Douglas that Addie got her that she loves to murder by the way she loves this little stuffed pig because it's about the size of some actual thing that if she were to get her claws on it she would go crazy on but this is just a stuffed animal and i show up and i think this is interesting this is not a house this is a facility now the problem is i don't it's too close to my flight i don't have uh i don't really have time to try to organize a plan b um and and one other little not so dazzling but relevant detail in this whole thing is i had made the appointment to drop bubbles off the night before my flight and i realized then that this place was by the airport their their their hours were like 10 a.m to 5 p.m and i thought it was in someone's house this whole time and so when i looked at where they were on the map and where the airport was i realized they're right next to the airport so i was like maybe my flight isn't until 10 a.m i could just take bubbles there in the morning so i get to spend one more night with her and uh and then it'll be convenient i don't have to go to the airport two times in the course of like 10 hours so i email the people back and i say oh hey would it be okay if i this is like the afternoon before my flight i go would it be okay if i just um brought her in uh tomorrow morning instead of the tonight because you know and i just get this response that's like we uh we only accept cats during business hours which is the reason we scheduled to drop off this afternoon and i was like huh customer service much i was like that's a really weird because i had i had emailed once with the vaccine stuff and gotten a really pleasant response i think what happened was this is a husband and wife i believe that own this place but they share the email address and i think the um you know i'm because of how it was signed i think the nice email came from the wife and then the unsigned email just came from the the husband now were you actually asking to

drop this off before they opened or so were they mistaken well here's the thing i didn't find i did

not easily find their hours on their website so i actually didn't know like it wasn't like i knew it was 10 a.m and i was trying to get special treatment okay so you were looking to drop your

flights at 10 so you're looking to drop her off at like 9 30 or 9 or something okay gotcha gotcha

about my flights at 10 i'm looking to drop off about 9 54 yeah that sounds about right yeah so So I guess what I was proposing was something because I said, can I drop her off at around 830? I didn't realize that they weren't open then. I did not really know what their actual hours were because they were not super clearly marked on the website. But I got a very – what felt like a very terse response. And so I was like, huh. And already alarm bells are going off. Like just right out of the gate, I just didn't like – I felt like that response should have been, oh, we'd love to but we can't for this reason. And, I mean, maybe I just need so much hand-holding as a customer. I guess I probably do. But there's just an energy when you're in a customer service relationship that is like the person acknowledges that you're paying money for whatever the thing is. And, therefore, they're going out of the way to just be a little nicer and more explanatory than they need to be.

Or just a human. I mean, that's the thing. Like, who talks to humans that way? This is why we set these rules. And like if somebody is being difficult with you and they've. asked for the same thing like three or four times and you need to set boundaries and they're not hearing your answer well then and excuse my language here and the fact that it's coming from my mouth but as my um my boss mary said who was like a super producer at new hampshire public radio she says sometimes you just have to turn up the bitchiness and i watched her do that sometimes with the um like the very friendly engineers that we would work with like sometimes you just like no like sometimes you start here but then you just sort of ratchet it up when you're not kind of getting or the person isn't hearing what you need in a situation and i think about that a lot and it's like if you're dealing with somebody a customer or potential customer and they ask for for a request and you say a wish we could accommodate that i don't know why i said a wish but a wish we could accommodate that a mario it's a issue but um but we can because we don't have any staffing outside these hours like it takes the same amount of letters on the page just to not say not to start off like like you're already being reprimanded so here's my first

i have the actual email here so this is me asking if i could drop bubbles off on a thursday morning versus a wednesday night hey there so i just realized you're located right by pdx where i'll be flying out tomorrow morning could i change my reservation to start tomorrow morning at about 8 30 am this is so i can avoid driving out there twice thanks exclamation point l that's this this is the response that's your energy this is the response i am not i promise you i am not adding to this or taking away like the bible this is the breathed word of luke please start with it it says hey dummy so great this is the entire response to what i just read you from me okay drop off and pick up for your cat is only during business hours which is why we scheduled you for dropping off today period that's it okay i'd also like to mention we're not dealing with english as

a second language yeah yeah yeah not great for some reason in my head or maybe the way you described it before i had it being a little bit itchier i don't know why i used that word but let's just say i had it being a little bit more edgy sort of um but uh still not i still not great

no no thanks no yeah the person's name no hi luke just literally the words drop off and pick up for your cat is only during business hours which is why we scheduled you for dropping off today period yeah and why not just say sorry we can't accommodate like why not what does that hurt even just saying hey sorry we can't now some of this makes more sense when i realized this is an off-site facility that they own this is like a you know it's it's kind of in a like a office park near the airport where they also would make some kind of a ball joint for the stair ladder that you wheel up to a plane and it'd be called like dynacore or something you know what i mean like that's the energy out there yeah so then i am now getting a little so then after that i was like okay well let me figure what the hours are maybe the hours are nine maybe i can make this happen i go to their website the hours are not posted clearly anywhere and so now i'm like kind of now i feel i'm a little put off by the first by the response and then i'm also just like you should make your hours much more visible if you're gonna this is gonna be your policy so then i said okay what are your hours then we didn't have a specific drop-off time if i remember right other than afternoon which is all true by the way i'll need to bring her as late as possible today then i didn't sign it because i'm like whatever dude although my phone does say iphone regrettably so there's kind of a signature and then the response was actually this response felt a little bit less terse to me only because it had more words in it but it still had a it had a little kind of subtle layer of i thought passive aggressiveness the response to that was you do not have to schedule a specific time for drop off or pickup it just has to be during our hours monday through friday 10 to 5 saturdays is 11 to 4 our hours are posted on our website as well as our google business listing and it's like

and what are they buried on the website somewhere they were they appeared to be when i was looking

for them on my phone which i feel like is how most people probably access a lot of this information these days it was not like the first thing you saw it was i couldn't find it is why i legitimately asked you know so it might be on your website but it's not in a place that's obvious just none of this is feeling to me like people who are excited to be receiving my money for babysitting my cat meanwhile i'm also kind of confused because i'm like the lady i talked to on the phone two three months ago just sounded like a and i please i say this in the nicest way but just sounded like the perfect cat lady just like somebody who just really loves cats and wants to hang with them and i'm getting this vibe off this place so anyway again another issue with all this is i don't really have time for a plan uh a plan b at this point so i drive bubs out there It's like 4.45, and I go and – Sure enough, they're, you know, thankfully they're open and they're there. And what it is, is it's like it is a very clean, very professionally operated cat condo place where they have basically like I don't want to say the word cage because that sounds like very mean. But they just have these enclosures for all the cats and they have like tons of them. It's a really large building.

Can I ask you some questions about that? because I've been trying to picture them lately because when our visiting cat, Pretzel, do you realize we have two animals in this house right now who are named after food, and both of their names begin with PR, Pretzel and Professor Bananas. I've been calling them the wrong names. I'm like my grandma trying to reprimand one of her many, many grandchildren. She just rattles through all of the names until she gets to it. But anyway, Pretzel started off upstairs with us. We wanted to acclimate her slowly. So we kept her in a just like our TV room, for lack of a better word, although I hate to hate to name a room after that box, Luke. And for the first couple of nights, like she was we kept the door closed in there because you could tell that she was more nervous with the door open. And that's where she needed to be. She had food in there and water and a litter box. And, you know, we tried to spend as much time in there as possible. However, at the end of the night, when we would like kind of close the door, I would feel bad. I'd think like, huh, that's funny. You don't have you don't have the whole house to roam here. Right. You just have one room to yourself. But then I justified it. And I thought to myself, well, this is better than boarding. Like you have a full room to yourself with all of your accommodations, including room service. So I was kind of trying to picture what a boarding place would look like when you talk about these enclosures. They're not stacked like you picture In the old days or in the darker days

No, and I got to walk her back I got her the biggest one they had available And it's very cute It's like the size of two telephone booths It has a cat condo in it It has a climbing thing It has a small rocking chair from Ikea That would be for a kid's bedroom And a bunch of other toys This is just in her area It was totally clean in there This is also, by the way, what you're hearing is the mantra I repeated to myself every time I started to feel really kind of regret about this decision on the trip was it was totally clean. The dude who was taking me back to where Bubz was going to be was talking to all the cats and mentioning them by name. He seemed like, he didn't strike me, my first like awareness, whatever you would say, my first visual on him, he didn't seem like the kind of person Who would be running a cat condo situation But whatever He seemed generally pleasant towards cats He wasn't like a bad person From a Disney movie He wasn't Cruella de Vil And you bring your Dalmatian over for boarding

As he walked through the aisles Passing the cats Did he take his nightclub And kind of rattle it against the cages

He did but he said that was fun for them A little stimulation And so this thing This enclosure this enclosure that she's been in uh is it's it's not like she has no room to move she can run around in it she has things to climb up it was all carpeted and again it was like very very clean this place was like there wasn't a like a piece of kitty litter on the ground anywhere it didn't have any weird smell to it none of the cats were meowing like everybody seemed pretty chill with the situation um but basically like so what happened first was i walked in there and i was like i'm checking her and i go so how does it work do the cats the cats get to play with each other or do you get to play with the cats he's like no we don't we don't let the cats out of the enclosures uh we don't they don't the cats don't get along with each other so we don't let them play which that makes sense actually like i get it it's not a dog park no but again the person that i had talked to what i'm realizing in this moment andrew is i've brought the cat to a different place like a literally a different business the first business i talked to on the phone two three months ago was just had a similar name like it had cat in it or kitty or something and i because i was like bubbles is going to be hanging out in a loving home run by a kooky cat lady who like spends all her time like bringing the cats out individually and then like throwing balls of yarn around for them this is not that right and it's like but it's too late for me to like, I either have to cancel my trip or start making frantic calls or whatever. It's like, I'm just kind of, I'm sort of committed to this. And the guy did say, after I checked her in and I got her kind of set up in her, her little, her little hangout, her little habitat for the time being, he said, Hey, you can call us anytime, check on her, find out how she's doing, et cetera. I was like, okay, thanks. Okay. Like he kind of warmed up as the thing went along. He was like, where are you going? What, you know, what are you traveling for? He's like making small talk. So I left feeling like not as there was a moment. moment where i was like i gotta not do this then then i left feeling like this will be sort of probably okay and i still felt that way except for then we come to this morning andrew this monday morning and all i want to do is go get that cat but guess what they don't open until the exact moment you and i start recording so i didn't want to push back our recording time on day one of of us you know being back from the summer games and so i so becca was lovely enough to say you know what i'll just go grab her because i i'm working remotely today and i can go snag her and then just bring her back to my house you can get her later it's like thank you so much but then i was like but i've got to call these folks because i you know i have to let them know that someone else is picking my kid up from daycare 10 03 i call them like you and i are still kind of waiting to dial up we're dealing with some technical stuff i get the voicemail 10 0 5 call them back the voicemail 10 10 a.m i call this place and get the voicemail as if as indicating to me

if they are there they're certainly not at the phones and i was like if these people are not open at the at 10 a.m and one second if they are in any way lax about their office hours and there was some issue with becca getting this cab because she's also working she's on a tight this is like a 20 minute window in her day that she's doing me the kindness of going to get this cat if these people are not there i am going to i am going to torch that place i'm gonna let the animals out first then i'm going to torch that place because after making me feel bad that i was trying to get around the timing of this without even knowing it and all of the the hoops i'm jumping through to to honor these office hours if there's any issue with me getting this cat out of there asap because they're not there or weren't there when becca showed up i am going to be as

you would say andrew rip shit so it's 10 after and you're still getting the voicemail is that what you said is that the the where we left off you said we started doing the show then we started

doing this right oh so that's it so you haven't so this is where we are oh okay and i'm texting with becca i'm like how's it going with bubbles i'm not getting a response back i've not i've never talked to them and been able to say to them hey somebody who's not me is going to pick this cat up because they would they were not answering their phone between 10 and 10 10 and the third message i left i have to say was probably kind of terse i was like i hope you open at 10 as it indicates on your website so that when you scroll down on your website yeah so i don't know i'm just like okay fine if you want to play because the other thing the guy said to me when i dropped ruff was he was like when i said do you let the cats play do you play with the cats or do you let the cats play with each other or out or something he's like no he goes this is very professionally run we're the largest place that does this and he was kind of selling me on the professionalism angle like what you're going to get here is like again all of the litter is scooped right away all of everything's clean everything is very hygienic and peaceful you know like the cats all seem fine like so i was like going for the professionalism side of it versus the maybe a little bit more wacky you bring them to someone's house and it's a little funky and but you're like this is great they're going to get a lot of love but their their litter is not going to get cleaned maybe you know every two hours so if they're selling me on the professionalism and they are not professional enough to actually be there when they're supposed to be open so that i can get get this cat out of the hoose cow i am going to be really really mad yeah and especially given the

tone like if there's if their tone right away with that second email was a little bit more like oh yeah sorry we can't accommodate and it was still the same answer i don't think you would be as bent out of shape right now but it was like the officiousness of the tone exactly it was like

they are like here's here's what you're dealing with you're dealing with the uh you know with the the intratrode of cat cat boarding you're dealing with the like very corporate i mean it's just like a husband and wife but still like they were selling me on the or what they were hanging their hat on was that this is like a highly professional operation therefore it's not the kind of thing where you can just kind of like maybe knock on the door and it's at someone's house and they'll take the cat a half hour early and be like whatever or like pick them up late or like they're really pushing the rules-based system fine okay you better also obey your own

rules-based system yes and i gotta say though after as you describe this place um let's see i don't want to get bogged down um i'm a little confused so you had had a really let's make this really quickly and then i'll finish my thought but you had had a phone call with a different organization it wasn't just that you had a different perception of this place you're now realizing that you had called a phone number months ago got a certain vibe then you went online to book your appointment and you ended up on a different website is that how that and what

added to my confusion was the first call i made a few months ago i talked to a woman who sounded to be of roughly a certain age i don't know what that would be but and a certain energy and then i called what i thought was the same place and a woman of the same sounding age and energy answered so that was like i think that the the wife in the duo answered i gotta say though i like this aside from the um aside from the somewhat terseness of the original email i actually like this place you're describing i think i would even choose that given just like the the two different vibes that you're kind of describing now i kind of like that and maybe this is in my mind so much because i i am watching these two cats in my house right now just take their time to acclimate i was even telling thieves like it's so it's such a slow process at first with these guys like first to get a cat just to get used to a new surrounding it's you know especially you know we're not talking about a brand new kitten that was just a newborn um and so just to get used to two new human beings and our house and then you throw another cat in the mix and like this slow slow process of watching these cats sort of circle each other and um and get to know each other like I was telling these it's going to be like right at the two week mark when we're going to give pretzel back to our owners that I'll bet you the two cats are going to be getting along and I'm going to want another week you know what I mean and so the idea of like the idea of this place where they give the cats a lot of space and they keep it like super super clean but they're also not like kind of like trying to like have the cats become best friends during a weekend boarding The place that you picked ended up sounding sounds pretty good to me.

I just because Bubbles is younger and super active and a bangle, I just would have liked her to had more room to roam, even though she's not like it's not like she was in a like a bus station locker or something like it was you know, it's a nice thing that she's in. And it's very comfortable for her. But I think I think I would rather what I mean, I'd rather she was just like a Becca's house or not here alone. But she's just used to having a certain amount of space to run around and get the zoomies out. And she's just very active at her age. If she was 16, because that was the other thing. There were a bunch of cats in there who just looked absolutely pleased. Like they were at the they were at the Ritz because they're like older and they don't really like to move that much. And they're just getting fed and they're just chilling and taking it all in. Like there is a cat that that's probably a really good system for. I just don't think it was the best system for bubbles, but I just didn't really have a better option at that moment.

Out of curiosity, what do you and I know you've described the vibe a lot of the more house bound kind of place. What do you picture the actual how are the cats actually kind of enclosed this place that you thought you were booking the place? I'd be more kind of home based. Do you picture like kind of a bunch of strange cats? they have the roam they they can roam the house they have the freedom to roam an entire house or

or did you say that before um i i had a brief phone call three months ago where the person said that the the cats are all in their own rooms but that she plays with them all day like takes them out individually i think or goes and hangs out in the room with them so i don't know more than that

okay you you had said that i just couldn't quite remember um and then as i was doing more research

last night because i was like just i was just kind of it was like gnawing at me a little bit i was like huh i figured there's a bunch of better options if it comes up again that i don't have anywhere to take her just places that are there is there's a there's a middle ground between like a very kind of like antiseptic um place where they're all well you know they're safe and well tended to but there's not as much kind of like hanging out with them and then there's a there's a middle ground between that and just like you're dropping them off at someone opens the door to their house and four cats try to escape yeah right yeah just toss them into the scrum and then they work it out like that also would be a bad a bad system so um you know there's there's some in between ones now that i've done my research my i just thought i was like oh i remember this place it has this certain name and then i googled it and then i called what i thought was that place and i got a nice person on the phone and i said you have availability and they said yes and i felt like i had done my research i really hadn't it was the issue i had i was and i was mixing some things up so by the way this will be a real cliffhanger for either the end of today's show or tomorrow i've been texting with becca trying to figure out what the sitch is and uh still no

word back so yeah we should mention so it is now as we're recording it's coming up to be 11 o'clock right now and so you know this all started at 10 o'clock this morning so we're an hour in i mean i'm starting to think there we might uh need to issue a bubbles alert and that's what they call it when some what a dark joke when somebody abscond somebody in the family absconds with your cat i mean is there a chance you'll start seeing it on the billboards on the major freeways

that's right it's back you've got a amber alert a silver alert and now you've got a bubbles you know you got a bubble i'm gonna be honest with you the bubbles alert is pretty cute it's a pretty cute alert yeah kind of a cute well this is the thing andrew i think i am feeling a particular sense uh like even more than normal an acute kind of like missing of my cat because we bonded so hard during my break for the summer games we hung out every single hour hour of every single day because of something that I want to talk to you about when we come back from this short break, because we're already 35 minutes into the show. So let's do that quick break. And then I want to tell you about a life changing development in my life and the life of that cat coming up on TBTL. All right, let's thank some daily donors. these wonderful generous folks are keeping this program in business the kind of show where you spend two weeks on tape with the summer games and then you just come back and you just start right into complaining about your cat or the care of your cat for a good half hour to 40 minutes that's the kind of program that jessica fluke in bethesda maryland is helping support with her financial donation thank you jessica i was uh very near bethesda maryland i could probably see bethesda maryland from the top of the washington monument which we got to go up inside of and look out of andrew and uh boy that is really cool um yvonne vorderstrasse is in portland oregon right here in portland oregon uh there's going to be a meetup uh i believe someone i've i saw an email on this. I know your email's been down, Andrew.

No, my email just came up, though, so I'm actually looking at this right now. Do you want me to just mention this? Yeah, why not? I think that there's

it sounds like there's a bit of a cap on it based on the space that's been reserved, but there's a kind of a little sort of 10's picnic that's going to be going on, I think, in a couple of weeks.

I have Saturday, September 10th from 12 to 4 p.m. This is being organized by a 10 named Sarah. TBTL Potluck on Saturday, September 10th from 12 to 4 p.m. They've reserved a picnic area at Brooklyn School Park in southeast Portland. Make an RSVP on the TBTL Slack channel.

There you go. That's going to be happening. I'm going to try to, I don't know, I actually am supposed to go to a housewarming party that day, but the house that's being warmed is under construction. It's not mine. And if the construction, if they're not done with it, then the housewarming is off, and i can definitely make it if not i'll still try to i'm very much gonna try to stop by and say hi to the the folks that are getting together on that saturday uh maybe even yvonne vorderstrasse will be there uh jeffrey bettenal is in port townsend washington the small maritime village of thank

you jeffrey michael lighter is in wolfville ns oh my goodness oh that looks like uh that's canada I'm seeing another thing. Oh, Nova Scotia. Nova Scotia. There you go.

Wow.

Wolfville, Nova Scotia. That sounds like a big town. Or it stands for Not Scotland. I'm not sure. Uh-huh. Nova Scotia or Not Scotland.

That's what Nova Scotia means, Not Scotland. Uh-huh. Yeah. In Gaelic. Yeah.

Mm-hmm.

Sure. Paige Dowlin is in Leavenworth, Washington, another just lovely town. Leavenworth has the most interesting backstory that I won't bore everybody with here, except for the 10 second version which is leavenworth used to be a stop on the train that would go you know uh across the country east and west and as it was on its way out to seattle and it was in the kind of middle part of washington state they had a stop at leavenworth and if you were one of these towns that was on the train stop you were you know usually doing kind of okay and then they moved the train route and then leavenworth started to wither away and then they had a meeting a town meeting to decide well what should we do about this and they said let's go with some kind of a theme for our town let's make leavenworth kind of the place that's known for a certain kind of theme and one of the ideas was western town and one of the guys said well you know i've been to bavaria and these mountains around us kind of remind me of bavaria and they voted on making it a bavarian

village and it still is and it worked didn't they consider some snm stuff too like as they were going through various ideas they were thinking about making it like leatherton or something along

the lines of that yep yep leatherton daddyton right uh any other joke i make would be probably

inappropriate if you hit whipsville you've gone too far oh yeah you've gone too far

you can't get to chainsville from here anyway it's amazing though that that was such a it was like a focus group and it worked because leavenworth is so adorable and a very fun place to go uh certainly in the winter time for all the christmas lights and stuff so anyway page thank you for checking in from leavenworth and then douglas del paggio is in san francisco california also known as leathersville that's right in more ways than what

one depending on the neighborhood that you're wandering through on what particular day so thank you douglas thank you to all of our daily donors uh for making the show possible we absolutely couldn't do this without you hello and welcome to top story all right uh i'm i didn't i did not mean for so much of this show to be cat related andrew but i have to tell you this breakthrough that i had with bubbles has been really kind of life-changing for us and i know that sounds dramatic but i you know i she's not an outside cat and she's also not the kind of cat who just is gonna like hang if we were to be outside in a park or in my yard of the house that i'm working on she's not the kind of cat that will just sit near me and be like chill and i didn't know what how i was going to solve this because i don't want her to always be inside kind of yearning to come outside and also a lot of times i want to be outside in the yard or i want to be working or whatever and so right as i was going into the summer games break i thought let me just try something let me see if i can get this stupid harness onto the cat now this is like a a little harness they make if you want to like walk your cat and i had tried to put it on her one time a long time ago and she just was not having it like she was in full freak out mode this was a harness that Becca got for her cat, Holly, and then Holly was a little too rotund for it. So I just thought, let me just try and put this on her and not even walk her, just put it on her. She's not going to like it, but she'll just maybe get used to it. And so that's kind of what I did. Also, the first time I put on her, I was worried she was going to bite me, but now I'm so immune to her violence if she is to deploy it. I just feel kind of, I'm just, I'm more comfortable knowing when I should be, when I'm about to get bitten, which by the way is very rare. she doesn't really bite me but anyway i'm just more comfortable making this cat do things she doesn't want to do and realizing it's not going to turn into like a situation so anyway i got this thing on her and i just left it on her and she didn't like it but it was like sorry buddy you're wearing this today and i and so she just wore it for like i don't know the better part of a day and i didn't have the leash on it was just the harness part and i noticed that by the end of the day she just kind of didn't notice it anymore and she was doing her normal thing running around being wild and so the next time I went out to uh it was the house I'm working on I I stopped by Petco and I bought this really long like leash and I bought one of those like metal screws that you turn into the ground and then attach the thing to and uh my dad and I we were working on the house the first week of the summer games and I just the first night we were going out to sit by the fire and kind of watch the sunset and i just brought bubbles out and i put her on that thing and she had the time of her life she just wandered around she walked you know she went down the hill a little bit as long as this thing would let her she came back she looked at the fire she spent a lot of

time on my dad's lap but she just like got to be outside and so it just started to become this thing we were doing where whenever we were going to be outside doing something i would just bring her on her little thing and give her some room to run you know but like have it connected to the point where i was going camping last weekend with addy and i thought let me just bring bubs and see what happens i'll bring this thing and she had such a great time camping people thought i was insane everyone who walked by our campsite was like who brings a cat camping but then they were also very into it because it was adorable she just would be on this thing there was this rock that had kind of a flat area on top of it addy put a blanket on it for her and she just like sat on this rock watching the world go by we went down to the lake she got to sit on a bluff and look at the water she got to go down on the beach it was the most fun time and it was so fun to have her with me in those uh you know in those moments it all of a sudden feels like i don't have to choose between if i'm outside i can't have like i'm gonna go have a little picnic later today because it's gonna be like 90 here in portland and i'm bringing the cat with me i'm gonna set up my hammock in a park in the shade i'm gonna have the cat there i'm gonna read my book i gotta read for live wire

like this has totally changed my life a couple of questions um the uh the sleeping time sleeping times would be my biggest concern what was it like uh when it was time to actually go to sleep and somebody couldn't keep an eye on the cat well no she slept in the tent with me okay so just in the tent and just made sure that there was no way to like nose her way out of the tent in any way

Yeah. Yeah. Well, I had a backup plan, which was my car. I had set up like I had the kind of back seats down and I had her blanket she likes and I had her stuff in there so that if she because I wasn't sure how the first night was going to go. If she was just going to be like a maniac in the tent. But I think because so a normal day here at my apartment for her is a lot of napping. Right. Because it's just like it's boring. But when she's camping, she was not really napping at all. because there's so much stimulation so i kind of think that when it was time to go to bed she was kind of ready for it so she was pretty chill in the tent but i'd had this plan of if she's being really annoying i can put her in my car and she can just have her run of that place i'll even put a litter box in there for her and then uh you know the car is very soundproof and it's you know at night the temperature is not an issue so but i never had to do that she just slept in the tent with me now granted she did stand on my head at like six in the morning but that's the fun thing about camping is you're pretty much ready to get up then anyway because it's light out you're waking up she had i mean she saw so many things that she's never seen before like we had these crows that were hanging out you know in the trees above our where we were camping in the morning and they're calling and going crazy and she's just like in the tent with me and the kind of tent i have it's just mesh like you can put a cover on it but if you don't if you want to look at the stars the top it's just basically a mosquito net you know and she was just like sitting there like staring at these crows like you just see pathways being created in her brain and synapses firing and all like it's almost like a really young child when they start learning a bunch of stuff that they've never experienced before that was like her out there camping and her i put this video on twitter but her looking at this lake is hilarious because it's like she's never seen a lake before and her eyes were so wide she's like what is this thing i'm looking at so anyway and

And did you kind of like being the guy who has the cat at camp? I can sort of see you enjoying that aspect of that.

I didn't like it at all. It was a real thing because on the first night, Addie and I set out to go find the – there was like a trail right by our campsite that led all around this lake. And if we went over to the other side, you could see the sunset. And we wanted to do that. But I didn't know if I could just leave bubbles at the campsite tied up. That made me feel nervous. i didn't want to put her in the car so i just brought her with us because i just didn't know what else to do and that got us so much attention like every pretty much everyone who saw us stopped and wanted to pet her and like she also started to actually walk on the leash which is crazy like she'll she's not like as good as like rudy was or like a dog but she's kind of starting to pick that up and it was so much and i felt like ferret guy i felt like guy walking around green lake with a And I don't, that's not really the energy I'm trying to put into the world. It was purely just because I didn't really know what the alternative was as far as what the best move was. So I thought I'll just have to bring her with. So no, I don't like being guy who's walking cat. That's really not the vibe I'm trying to achieve. But that being said, it is a vibe I will probably end up exemplifying because my plan this week is to see if I can get her out walking in the neighborhood with me a little bit. and see if she'll just, like, kind of go along with it because I just think it's so much more fun for her to get that kind of stimulation.

I got to say, and we can move off of cat talk here, but I am feeling very much, it's so funny what I'm living through right now. Like, for the past half hour, as we've been talking and you've been telling that story, like, I want to stress again that this cat that we're cat sitting is one year old. Now, bigger than Bubbles and not quite as much energy, but an energy that I am not used to. Like, you know, Bananas, when Theo was alive, he would sit next to me and sleep on the chair like my little co-pilot which I loved and we would talk about that but Nana's usually is not down here when I'm doing the show or if she is she's just sitting quietly but like Pretzel who is a large cat but has like kitten energy is crawling all over me she is not normally a lap cat but I'm not giving her the attention she needs like she needs me to play the feather game with her you know like the feather on the end of the stick she loves that we have a laser pointer down here if we don't play with the laser pointer she will start knocking it off the table and batting it towards us and that's a total bubbles move if i'm holding the point if i'm holding it but it's not even turned on she starts looking around the room for the red dot like so this cat right now is kind of harassing me luke like i'm sitting here with my legs crossed under the table kind of but but angled down so it's like a ramp and there's not a lot of room between my legs and the bottom of this table she just crawled this is a big cat she just crawled her way up my legs as if she were in in world war ii and kind of crawling up a bunker to look over the top and stuck her head over and now she is going crazy she thinks my head tell me if this sounds familiar she thinks my headphone cable is a toy luke and i'm trying to get her to stop biting it while we're talking does any of

this ring a bell to you it rings an intense bell yeah uh and uh i'm i'm hoping that you overall find it to be i do as tolerable and the payoff you know the payoff of having a cat that really wants to like oh yeah you a lot is worth the the hassle of the like just the trying to broadcast this show yeah oh yeah last i don't know however many months that's been my whole issue is like

Uh, it's been trying to deal with bubbles is curiosity. Okay. Uh, we're 51 or so minutes into the show and that entire time has been dedicated to cat talk. I want to apologize to the people out there who don't enjoy cat talk, but I want to say things are about to get better because now we're going to get into construction talk, uh, which I know some, the people that don't like cat talk love construction talk so i um i don't i'm not a particularly macho person andrew but i felt maybe the for the first time ever only for a brief period of a few hours i felt almost legitimately macho during my summer games break because you know my dad and i are working i'm building a tbtl studio at this uh at this house that i'm trying to remodel the actual house is kind of that's stalled out i'm still working with some structural engineers that's like that's just it is what it is but there's this garage that my dad and i have tackled as a project to make it a like a little place where you can sleep it has a little kitchenette in it and a bathroom and stuff and but mostly it's a place for me to do this show from and the live wire stuff that's remote and anything else that i need to do i've never had like a kind of a cool dedicated studio space like that that's not just a room and so um that's the project that i worked on for the first week of the summer games and we the put in the i sent you the picture we put in these things called scissor trusses that we basically constructed out of these big like uh i don't know what they were like 16 foot two by sixes or something we had to cut very carefully and specifically and then i was up on a ladder with a nail gun just like like locking in these like braces and like by the end I started off very timid about the whole thing and then I just realized my my dad is 68 right and he can so much outwork me like he is just he is just physically more fit than I am and also just mentally more fit than I am about these things that are not fun like we also had to break the concrete up and dig these trenches so we had to first break through the concrete in the floor with a concrete saw that we rented which is just like you'd think oh a concrete saw like it's like you're cutting through wood no man it is like time consuming it's like wears you out your push it keeps wanting to lock up it's a whole thing then you've got to like smash the then you've got to smash the concrete up that you've cut you've got to smash it up into more manageable pieces and you've got like haul those pieces out then you get down to the dirt and then you've got to dig these trenches because it's where all the plumbing is going to go now we're going to have a new floor poured over all of this but just this like very demanding physical labor oh by the way it's like 93 degrees it just happened to be like the hottest week they were having where this house

is and i was so amazed at my dad's just like into fatigability or something but after a while i realized like when we were doing the ceiling thing these trusses i was like if he is the only person going up and down the ladder and like doing the kind of like hard part of like holding some beam in place and like like nailing it in this is going to take a long time and he's going to possibly die so i had to kind of learn how to do it myself and then of course a few trusses into it i totally had it down and i'm like i got i was doing i thought the ultimate cool guy move i had like four or five screws in my mouth because like i didn't have a tool belt and i was wearing shorts so i didn't want to have these screws like in my jersey shorts pockets like poking my leg or whatever so i just the easiest thing to do is just have a bunch of screws in my mouth and then when i needed one i would just pull one out and then use it to screw down something that felt pretty cool um swinging the sledgehammer felt pretty cool going into town all covered in dirt and like getting some lunch that felt pretty cool so uh that was also a really fun aspect of my little summer break nice so what is the situation now the situation is that uh we are uh what you would say is called roughed in meaning we put the we did the whole ceiling and then we put in all the plumbing for everything and now uh next week the cement guy is going to show up and then they're going to pour a new um basically slab so because this right now is a it's a um it's a garage so it just has that kind of like cracked crummy garage kind of floor and i want it to be like smooth finished concrete that's like you know you would we'd want to have in like a place where you could live potentially so they're coming in to pour a new slab on top of everything that we've done um that that's going to be a whole process so when that's done uh then we can frame it out my dad and i can finish like building some walls on the interior and and reinforcing some stuff and then we can put in the electrical once we framed it out and then the uh have guys come blow insulation and have the sheet rockers come and and then it's pretty much done i guess that's nice it's nice to

know what's inside your walls because you put them there or what's under your floor because you put it there we had a little uh we had uh in in my basement bathroom we saw that some water was sort of i don't know if i don't think leaching is the right word but some water was sort of seeping up into the floor through these microscopic cracks kind of the seams of the laminate floor just like a cheap laminate floor um and we were just trying to figure out like well where is the water coming from and we're like is it a sump pump issue like that doesn't make sense it's in the bathroom it's kind of near the tub it's got to be related to that and then but it's like not by a drain and it's the basement so there's not a pipe underneath there and we couldn't figure it out and we had a friend come over and he kind of sussed it out he's like oh it's probably like some of the sealant around your tub and stuff is this is an obvious answer but vives and i are kind of new to this stuff and our friend rodent's kind of like oh yeah like this is you know you should just try re-caulking the tub first now by the way they had just installed this thing before we moved in they just hired just the worst people to do it so already like nothing was sealed up properly so genevieve being the handy one in the house and loving this stuff like watch a couple of youtube videos got herself a caulk gun um and and like resealed up this this tub and then it went away and it's like small little things like that are victories but there is this moment where i'm just like kind of like kind of sitting on the edge of the tub looking at where the water is and just trying to figure out but how is the water coming up there and of course it makes total sense now it was going through it was getting kind of behind the walls of the tub and then seeping out under the floor and popping up there but i was just trying to i just had so much trouble picturing what was under there um and now i think i have a better picture of it but when you're building this stuff and you're laying the plumbing and then and helping you know look no matter how much actual physical work you're doing on it just like knowing that you designed this and you know where

things are that must be kind of nice i i really was in the words of ralph wiggum learning last week because i just have never i mean i've i've in the couple of houses that i've had some pretty major remodels done on i have always done the demo like the really just kind of dirty but fairly mindless work of just you know using a crowbar to take down and you know get rid of walls and lugging it all out because i just i'd rather do that than pay someone since that doesn't involve really a lot of skill but when it's come to the you know running the pecs which is the the nobody used like copper for for plumbing water anymore use this material called pecs and like when it came to just running all the pipes and stuff and figuring out what the grade needs to be in terms of like how stuff drains and what you put under it like the kind of gravel you use and just all these little details that I just I have and I'm still not ready to go try to plumb like I'm not ready to go do a plumbing project on my own but I would say I have a lot more awareness of how some of this stuff works after spending a week basically apprenticing under my dad the funny part is I I could have gotten all of this information 35 years ago if I would have ever said yes when my dad was like, hey, I'm re-plumbing the basement. Do you want to help me? Do you want to watch? Do you want to learn about this? Hey, I'm going to frame this out. Do you want to learn how that goes? My dad was teaching basically a This Old House master class for my entire childhood, and I was deeply uninterested. Now I'm 46, and I've tried to remodel an old house, and I'm like, God, I wish I would have paid attention to some of that.

Now, I have a question that kind of shifts the conversation a little bit, but it's something that I've been thinking about and wanting to ask you. Yeah, cats, kittens, inspired by kittens. No, I know the answer to this question, but I'm going to ask it anyway because you're describing everything that you've done or some of the adventures you've gone on in the past two weeks. on your things that you accomplished on your list of things that you accomplished one of those wasn't completing the new and i put new in quotations because i'm sure it's the same exact one we've done a million times before but the new required cyber security uh quiz for apm did you i assume you did not but i'm going somewhere with this i'm just laughing i'm what

i'm imagining is what your response would be if i were to say yes well like if you would if the entire chair would collapse out from under you and you'd just be lying on the ground with pretzel crawling like that would be such a shocking development i almost wish i would have just because it would be so funny but no i did not do that nor did i even know that that was happening Well, I have some good news for you, Luke, I think.

By the way, cybersecurity awareness training was the word I was looking for. They're not quiz, although there will be quizzes.

there always are quizzes they should start with the quizzes and if we get it right we shouldn't have to sit through the slides y'all have heard this before but here's the good news here's the twist in this thing so i guess i got an email a while back i don't know a couple of weeks ago saying we got to take this shit again it's so infuriating it's just so infuriating because it's the same one over and over and over again and they just lord this over us and they say you can't get your email anymore unless you do this anyway i i had kind of forgotten i should have done it over the past two weeks it was dumb of me not to but then I think it was on Friday I got a reminder email and this one was a little bit more personalized this was the email that went out from the IT department that does a little bit of public shaming it goes out to all of the managers right and the managers forwarded on and it's a spreadsheet or as we say a spreadsheet that lists everybody who hasn't taken the training yet and still needs to and it's divided up by manager and i have found our manager here uh beth and underneath it is me and a couple of other people who haven't completed this yet yet i don't see luke burbank anywhere on here i think that you've beat them down you're not even on this anymore i have achieved escape velocity it is

infuriating. I escaped the gravitational bounds of the training! That is my forget scissor trusses, forget cat camping, forget winning a wait, wait, don't tell me that no one will hear. That was my greatest accomplishment of this break, my friend. Although, wait a second,

now I'm not seeing me on here either. But why was I forwarded this? I brought you with me. No, yeah, let's see, I was forwarded this. I'm not actually in the spreadsheet itself for some reason, so maybe i don't know maybe it's a typo but how much do you we talk about this every year how much do you care though like if they don't have anything over you anymore right no they don't they don't i mean

i i guess you could say i am playing a slightly dangerous game dano in that um i'm right now banking on the fact that i'm just playing chicken with them about some of the stuff that just feels so kind of like a time waster like doing the cyber security training for the umpteenth year i will that one i'll probably do honestly because i just have a system now for it which is i just i set up my laptop when i'm doing something else i want to be doing and then i just kind of like tolerate it and i click through and i wait and i click and i wait and i click and like i watch the mariners or something that one's okay there's other ones that are like involve zoom meetings that i'm like i don't know about um i am kind of i guess i am testing the theory of like will they fire me over this and i think that they're probably they probably won't i think

that you've beat i i've realized why i didn't see myself in the spreadsheet for a second there and it's because the message was cut off as sometimes long messages are in gmail but when i expand it and i see the whole thing there i am listed under our supervisor beth perlman and a couple of other people who i will not publicly shame molly um who have not filled out their um their uh cyber security training yet and there's me and a couple more people and no luke burbank and i i did think to myself for a second when i saw this on friday i'm like now luke has had two weeks is there any chance that one night over a bottle of wine he saw an email and said i'll just do this

now while i'm not that would be at tv honestly that's exactly the circumstances in which i would

do it i'm not even yeah and so i thought maybe but i also doubted it no uh you're you trust your

fears yeah well congratulations then my friend i mean or something or i don't work there anymore like let me ask you this on friday when i paid yeah yeah that's when that's when the rubber meets the road i mean that's the dangerous game is like uh and this has happened to me at other places too i feel like we must have talked about this specific thing on the show but with all of this stuff Whether it's Bonneville or APM By the way, I'm thinking of Bonneville, Andrew Because I got the most crazy email Right as we started the show From somebody named Ben At Bonneville.com

Okay, now Bonneville is the parent company Of the radio station we used to work for

Yes, and It was a response to an email Somebody named Val Sent out an email this morning at 1147 To me This guy Ben And somebody named Scott Sutherland who is the person who actually hired me at Bonneville like 15 years ago or whatever. And it says, we got dinner reservations closer to your hotels and airport. Just FYI, 545 dinner tonight at something called Jack's Restaurant and Bar. And I am somehow on this email about people at Bonneville getting like a corporate dinner tonight.

Wow, so somebody just typed in L-U or something in an auto. to your name this is either uh a different luke or a different burb something i guess so but it

was just uh yes i assume that's what happened i'm clearly not going to dinner with these folks tonight or then i thought are you super complicated spam like is this very intelligent i should take a cyber security training course andrew because this feels like if this is spam this is really smart like it it figures out somehow that i did used to i mean this guy scott sutherland would have been like technically my boss initially when i got hired at cairo to do tbtl because it was like he was rod arquette's boss and i i did have one meeting with both of them it was a breakfast meeting at the um four seasons which is now the fairmont olympic in seattle like a breakfast meeting and i chatted with them and then they just basically said yeah you want the job here you go but this is clearly just a typo or a mistype but um i was wild for me to see these names particularly the name of that guy scott sutherland and this bonneville thing and just to kind of see they're still i guess they're still out there they're still out there having meetings having dinner meetings and talking strategy and uh it made me five percent wistful not not not for it made me wistful for the days of being 31 or something and having uh you know having this job as a radio show and the kind of i'm not even really related to this job it made me feel wistful for being 31 in my life that makes any sense when there when there is more excitement in front of you sort of exactly exactly and it's like again it's not of course even a commentary on uh you know the current status of tbtl versus the the the whatever was going on back in those days of us starting the show it's really for me more of a just uh i was on becca and i were uh having dinner on saturday night in dc and we were sitting out uh we're at this restaurant called haleo and we were sitting uh outside on like the sidewalk and some like outside seating and there were all of these young people and by young i mean probably like mid-20s okay oh that is that were just like that were just out on a saturday night with each other and their friends and it was like the energy that was vibrating off of these people like in a good way they weren't nobody was being you know like i don't know annoying or destructive or like overly loud it was just you could just tell like somebody would grab someone's phone and start punching in the phone number of their crush and then like just they were just everything was potential for these for these people like that night was all potential for them right the rest of the night was just going to be so fun and the rest of their life is all potential and like i just looked over back and i said i remember what that felt like and that's i wasn't trying to be glum but i was like i totally remember that energy of just being young in the world and everything is ahead of you and i

I was like, and that's just not the world I live in anymore at 46.

Yeah, I know that feeling. I know what you're talking about. Even for me, somebody who isn't like a big party boy and never has been a big party boy. I mean, I was an old man in college, people. That was my reputation, that I would be, you know, sitting in my studio apartment watching Twin Peaks while all my friends were leaving long voicemails on my actual taped voicemail machine. Trying to get you to come out. Come out to Euro-Gyro, which is how we pronounced the name of the local restaurant incorrectly. But was it called Euro-Gyro? Well, I mean, it should have been Euro-Gyro, right? I'm sure that was the joke, but everybody... I don't know if people were in on the joke, or I don't know. I think Euro-Gyro is a great name. That was it. It was Euro-Gyro. Bands would play. It was a tiny little space. You could get yourself a gyro or a gyro. Bands would play. They were really good gyros, too, by the way, or at least in my memory, they were great. I know what you're having for lunch. It was one of the only places as well where you could get food delivered that wasn't a pizza. Again, this is the 90s. This is pre-Doordash and all that stuff. But anyway, what was I saying? Yeah, so my reputation. You were just kind of more of a homebody. Yeah, I was always a bit more of a homebody, but still, I would still go out a lot, you know, and like just that energy that you're talking about. And you started this by talking about the professional side of things, too. You know, when I see a young person in a public radio station, it reminds me of like nothing excited me more than the early days of my guest public radio career or those days when I was trying to break into public radio. And I had a very, very small job at this public radio station, but I was just in awe of all of my kind of supervisors. And I don't you know, they weren't really co-workers as a student employee, but like every time they would give me the time of day, which they would do a lot because they were very kind people and they took me under their wings. It was just... so exciting and like my potential was just literally limitless in the field at that point you know like i could there was a moment where i realized my first job will dictate whether i go into the more engineering side of things or the content side of things or the news side of things or whatever um and i wouldn't say that my life is worse now in fact i think my life is way better now and i'm still happy in a different way now but that energy is different yes in fact we've talked about this before and this goes back to more high school but sometimes i ask genevieve i'm like what do you think would happen if you just woke up today with the hormones that you had when you were 18 years old and she says i think i would just die i think that like my body would just not be able to handle that kind of rush we're just different i um you know was doing that the

wait wait show at wolf trap and that's like that holds i think like 6 000 people and on friday night it was packed and that's the closest thing that i'll ever get to being and i know i understand how silly this sounds um like because there's nothing less rock star than public radio but the closest i'll ever get to being like in a hit band that's touring playing big venues is like you get to the hotel and then a shuttle picks you up and you get in the shuttle with the other people that are doing this performative thing and then the shuttle takes us over to the venue but we go through a certain back entrance because there's already just traffic ringing the entire place you know just like stop traffic and people are walking and like they're they're they're like the state police are ushering us our shuttle through some back thing so we can get to actually where the the venue is right and then you you they let you out of the shuttle and then someone like opens the back door of the venue and everyone there is really nice and like welcome we're so happy to have you at wolf trap and then like then you get to go on stage and it's like a very large number of people are like excited that you're there all of that is it surpasses whatever my wildest dreams would have been of what i would get to do for my job stuff especially in public radio right when you're a young yes exactly and that's a very that's once a year something like that happens for me and i'm not trying to like humble brag here or uh i don't know try to make it sound like i'm living some famous life i'm really not but i mean that and that was really fun but it's weird because i think probably like the first time that i got to file a piece for marketplace was for the marketplace um morning report was probably i was probably more excited about that than i was on friday night to walk out in front of those 6 000 people and that's that's really what it speaks to is how psyched i was to file that piece for the marketplace morning report

yeah right yeah it's not it's not hopefully this doesn't come off as saying like oh you or we are just jaded at the great experiences we get to have it's just that at a certain age like i mean the whatever the path my future is not like written in stone like it's still very even at age 45 my career could go different places including potentially in the toilet if i don't start doing better at this job but um if you don't start taking your cyber security yeah right yeah exactly um so you know i i don't want to sound jaded but you know here's one thing this is tangentially related and i don't know if we're going to get into uh psychosis talk here a little bit um by the way got great feedback from so many people about our kirk honda episodes and i've been

oh my gosh out to kirk about that i listened back to one of those on the trip which i never do i was just feeling lonely and missing you and i listened back to i could i don't know if it was the first or second one but it was good i mean again not because of us but because that was a great quiz and just really good information from a professional in a field that is very relevant to

our uh our our interests yeah we'll have to have kirk back on the show um soon but um yeah so anyway great great job and thanks to everybody who reached out for that but um just talk about kind of where we are mentally i was walking to the ball game with genevieve on saturday in fact i'm seeing i just got a note here i don't know if there was supposed to be a photo attached or somebody just acknowledging that um let's see this is from listener kathleen who saw me and Genevieve on the Jumbotron along with our friends Steve and Michael we were we were on the Jumbotron very briefly um uh near the end of the game uh which I have a really bad record for Mariners games now by the way I think I need to stop going to the ballpark I'm like I'm one in three now for my four trips to the ballpark as far as walking out of there a victor um okay all of that is to Thieves and I were walking to the ballpark And we passed a

A bar that Genevieve, myself, and our friend Nick went to after we had done our first sound check on some live podcast appearance we were doing at a Comic-Con several years ago. I talked about this on the show. And this was the only live podcasting thing I had done that wasn't TBTL related or at least that I was kind of in charge of, right? And I was in charge of all the technical aspects of it. I was in charge of most of the – not all of the content. I mean, you know, everybody chipped in on that, but like I was kind of driving the show. I was driving all the technical stuff. I was so stressed out about it. And also I knew it wasn't people coming out to see us. We were just going to be doing our podcast to a bunch of people who had never heard of us before. And I was just racked with anxiety, as you'd expect. And it was unclear kind of what the payoff was going to be other than having this experience and learning from it. Like that was basically what I was getting out of it. And a little bit of the fear of saying no to something, right, which you talk about a lot. And I'm glad that we did it. But I remember we had just had our sound check. It went well. Like, all the equipment I had purchased and, you know, brought looked like it was going to work out well. The guys who were working the sound stuff were, like, really nice and accommodating. It quelled a lot of my worries. But then we went to get a drink, and the big event was the next day. And me and Nick and Genevieve are having some cocktails somewhere. And they're, like, really excited for the show the next day. And I realized at that moment I was excited for the show to be done the next day. Right. And I started thinking about that. And that's something that I don't want to be that person. I don't want the adventures in my life, both professional and personal, to be so tinged with anxiety that I'm always waiting for the experience to be over so that I can say, hey, I did that and it wasn't so bad. And I do worry that more and more of my life has sort of become that. Like, even later on, this sounds terrible, but, like, even later on this month, next month, it's not quite September yet, I'm going down to Bend, Oregon to see Wilco with some old, very, very, very close friends of ours. I'm not going to get invited to that. I love Wilco and Bend, Oregon. And, you know, like, I'm looking forward to it, but, like, I'm so used to being at home now, and I'm just, like, you know, really settling into our new place, and I don't go out that much, and I'm kind of like, okay, yeah. And I realize I'm sort of like, okay, well, because I'm going to be doing some TBTLs from Bend because we're going to spend a couple of days out there. And so I'll be in an Airbnb hooking up with you, Luke, in the mornings. And I've only been thinking about kind of, okay, this needs to get done. And I hope this goes okay. And, like, I need to just say, hey, you're going down there to see your friends and have some fun and see a concert. And also, it'll be fun to do TBTL from a different location. I'll have some stories for you that don't involve cats. Maybe.

um but uh but i'm i realized i was doing that thing again where i'm just kind of like okay i just hope everything goes okay i hope i can look back i hope i can look back on that and everything went okay you know what i mean like i'm i'm always looking i'm looking forward to the moment something is done instead of the moment that it is and that is yeah i think i'm starting to really put my finger on uh some some issues with my outlook on life that's a very good thing for that's a good

piece of advice not that you were offering it as advice to me but that's a good thing for me to really think about because i do exactly the same thing now so for instance i just saw on some social media somewhere livewire tweeting less than one month till our live return at the alberta rose theater and i just looked at that and my heart just dropped and i'm like meanwhile it's gonna be such a fun show we have like a really i'm not just trying to pitch the show here or promote it But we just have a really fun lineup of guests this fall, and that show in particular is going to have some really great, really funny, interesting folks on the show. And when I'm out there on stage doing the program, I'm having a really fun time, and the audience is usually extremely supportive. And it's always been a positive experience, and yet when I think about doing that thing, I don't feel – I feel anxiety rather than joy. and i would like to figure out how to how to not have it be that way because it ends up i mean and the second it's over like literally when we say that's our show thanks get home safe it's like there's nowhere in the world i want to be more like i'm my body is just like coursing with i don't know serotonin or something and it's like it's such a good feeling to have done a show and and even to be in the moments of doing the show when something gets a laugh or you can just tell the audience is really engaged but it I don't and I wonder if this is just typical for most people that do stuff that's I mean what I know is that most writers most serious writers detest writing I think I read somebody wrote somewhere you know someone's a good writer if they hate writing right like yeah i'm i'm just processing that sorry you probably thought the line went dead again um i i i wonder if that is a universal i mean i know that i mean i know that people have this weird fantasy of oh i'm gonna be a writer and i'm gonna wake up and i'm gonna go sit in the lilies and write and it's gonna be enjoyable and i'll write what i want to write like i do know that like the discipline of writing can be very tough and you've got to take it seriously and it's a full-time job and so i understand that although i i do know that like i mean there's different kinds of writing in this world as well and i just do know that like genevieve genevieve loves writing and it is it is her job to to write and it sometimes she'll get an assignment that she like is just like it's so important and she kind of will put it off because it is work but i also know that she does not she like doesn't want to get promoted because she doesn't want to get promoted out of writing because she loves writing so maybe this is a

really bad way to look at it and maybe this is also just me trying to justify the fact that i would have never been able to get my s together to actually you know write a book or whatever despite all of my threats over the years but i guess you're right there's different kinds of writing and i think i took that to be referring to long form writing i.e writing a book and i thought you know to me it's sort of i think i wanted it to resonate because the idea is that like there are some people I mean I I'm gonna be delicate here I mean I know people that love writing and have and have generated kind of a lot of written content in their life maybe even books and stuff and it ain't great it's like and then I know some people who hate doing it like I'll just say this our friend Nora McInerney very much on the record as saying it's the last thing she wants to do every day and yet her output is really stellar in my opinion and so I think I've created this tortured artist idea that makes me feel less bad about the fact that i have been so tortured that i've never created any art and that like if it's just fun if you're just typing away and you're just loving it that the final product is probably not going to be as good as somebody who's just like bleeding into their laptop which i don't think has to be the case i just think i wanted to believe in that worldview i'm gonna ask you a question here and it's gonna sound i can't remember

if I've asked you this before because I've had this thought before but it's again this is indelicate but I'm asking it to your face so I can stand here and if it's insulting you can tell me but I do think the difference is I've known people who feel like they have a book in them or something that they want to get out but it is a lot of work and they can't quite do it and so that's one thing I get the impression talking to you that it is there something that you really want to get out do you feel like you have a book in you or you just feel like you're squandering an opportunity not to have a book if a lot of your compatriots have a book uh i think

it's kind of two things one i do think that here's the thing i don't know if i want to do this particular maybe tbtl because i do enjoy doing this but like i don't know if i want the rest of my life to be trying to um be a like a an entertainer in the sense of going on the microphone and talking and doing live wire or doing wait, wait, or even CBS stuff. I also just don't know how long that will go on. Like there's going to be a point where the people are going to be like, okay, we, we get it. We've heard enough from this guy. So part of me thinks if I could learn the craft of writing and if I could actually write something that had enough success that it allowed me to get a second book that I could see myself maybe being a writer when I'm getting kind of past the age where this is something that either i want to keep doing and again nobody i love i'm this is that was this is the most conceited caveat of all time by the way conceited caveat it's not a terrible show title this is the most conceited caveat which is like i'm basically going to the tbt listeners don't worry i'm not saying i'm not going to be doing this show in 20 years assuming that people like

yes please 20 more listening right now they have some interest in this yeah so i didn't want it

to sound like i'm saying like i'm planning my escape from tbtl what i'm saying though is part of me knows that like there are not as many people signing up to hear my hilarious observations and japes and wisdom probably when i'm 65 as when i'm 46 i mean even 46 feels like it's pushing it so some part of me thinks i got to transition to something else that i could do either as a do it for a living or do it for something that feels creatively satisfying And so part of it is me thinking, how do I do something now when I have, luckily, these platforms of like TBTL and LiveWire? By the way, if I wrote a book, most of the sales would be to 10s. It wouldn't be to CBS Sunday Morning, viewers. Those people don't really care about me particularly. Wouldn't be to wait, wait, don't tell me, listeners. I'm one of 30 people that are on that panel. It would all.

It would be maybe a smattering of LiveWire folks, but it would be the people listening to this right now. And the problem is they've already heard all my stories.

Well, here's what you do. You teenage mutant ninja turtle. Listen to this. This is going to be a chop up a pizza with a katana blade. That is. Yeah. OK. That's it. Yeah. Sorry. I was going to explain it. You were very. No, no. You were very concise about it. I was going to say the same thing with more words. No. How can I do this quickly? I'm just basically stealing from Scott Aukerman's Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles podcast with Sean Diston. But I learned this story that you had the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as a property, but it still wasn't a huge property at this point. Like as far as like the actual creators of it, there was a comic book first and there was a cartoon and the movies were coming out. But they, you know, it was unclear that these things were going to be some huge hit. meanwhile you had this group of four guys who wanted to do a stage play or some sort of a live some live performance of TMNT and they basically because the creators were not super famous at this point they basically for a very low fee just gave them the rights to produce this and so if you go back to the early 90s and you see appearances of the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles on like literally like oprah and i think even barbara walters interviewed them at one point or some some other interviewer that is not like these are the guys who were doing the live performance of it and they just basically bought the rights for it and they recorded an album and here's where i'm going with this god what a tortured okay analogy i have never heard any

of this and honestly this is the first decent content we've presented today and it's only

Because we're ripping it off from Scott Ackerman. A better podcast, yeah. By the way, you'll never remember this title if you're not already in this universe, but the name of the show I'm talking about, if you're interested, is We Have to Stop Talking TMNT on CBB. That's Scott Ackerman and Sean Diston. But anyway, they tell the story of these guys. They basically bought the rights. They're doing these performances. They're going on talk shows, and they release an album. And this album charted, like, pretty majorly. I don't know exactly where it ended up in the charts. But Scott Aukerman's like, I don't remember this. Like, I was into pop culture at this time. Like, I don't remember this album even existing. How did it end up on the charts? Well, here's how it ended up on the charts. These guys struck a deal with Pizza Hut, and Pizza Hut just bought tons of this album and then gave it away as, like, along with some pizza deal or something leading up to the movie, even though this wasn't specifically a movie-related thing, right? And so, therefore, you just find somebody to buy all like, can you think of some organization that you're associated with, Luke, who might buy a bunch of copies of your potential book and then give it away free as a thank you gift along with, I don't know, let's say a donation to TBTL. Then that's how you get your book on the New York Times bestseller list. Goldie's Casino is exactly what I was thinking of.

And then you cut up a pizza with a katana blade. Less, slightly less of a reach than, say, Pizza Hut. But I said Pizza Hut because I think I've been channeling a lot of Matthew Barry lately. I wanted to introduce you with this today, but it would have made even less sense than saying you're back.

You really are the most devious bastard in New York City.

From what we do in the shadows. I mean, can you please go do something bad in New York City so I can introduce you?

You really are the most devious bastard in New York City.

We've got to get – I'm trying to think who are our – well, I guess we could get Chris Hayes on the show. He lives in New York, right? Yes, yes. We just have guests on who are New Yorkers.

Yeah. Or I have to go back to New York and do something devious, which is never hard for me. Yeah, so to answer your question, and then we should probably get to emails and emails, I'll let him even tell you about our DC tour, Andrew, where I got to, you know, to answer your question on the book thing quickly, admittedly, part of it is because I feel like I'm kind of leaving something on the table during this period of time where I have like three media jobs. And the ability to If I wrote something Actually tell some folks about it Which it turns out in this day and age Is like almost more important than the book Which I know sounds extremely cynical But it's like you could write a really great book But if there's not a mechanism by which to Tell a large number of people about it It can be kind of languish So but then part of it is I also would like to I don't I'll probably never do this But I would like to see if I can actually do it Like as a challenge Like the creative stuff that I do With I mean to the degree That this show involves any creativity I feel like

like you and i both really kind of know how this show works now and how we work together and like i hope that we're doing a good job but i would say that this feels like something that i sort of have a pretty good sense for and experience with same thing with live wire at this point same thing with doing a tv piece for cbs same thing with um popping up on wait wait occasionally um this would be so different and new for me and in the way that i was saying earlier in the show how i watch those kids walking down the street in dc and i say kids you know people in their mid-20s and i just comment to becca like i don't have that in me anymore i think if i actually somehow got into trying to do something that was new for me and not comfortable and not something that i just kind of like pretty much know the the beats of that could actually be really good for me just as a human just to feel like invigorated and like i'm trying something i haven't tried before that's i that's just not i just don't do a lot of things anymore that i haven't already done a bunch of times and i think that's part of why sort of i'm i'm feeling every bit of my 46 years right now and i think it would be maybe a good interesting experiment for me to try something that i'm not comfortable with that i don't know how it's going to go because i think if it went

okay that would be really gratifying you know have you thought about becoming like i don't know politically independent for a full year of your life and writing about it just a thought i'm just throwing ideas out there i don't know where these come from they just flew through me what if i

picked like i love that because of course that rash of books including that one the conservatize me one which is well let's just say i i witnessed that on the ground level and um i've got questions but it would be just funny if you picked the least interesting political like i decided to spend a year trying to listen to both sides we're like i spent a year being politically moderate it i spent a year focusing on the idea that we have more in common than we do apart because the idea of pretending to be a conservative is like i ate beef jerky and i went to a rodeo and i saw how the other half lives that's uh it's not interesting to me but it is i can see how you get a book deal out of that but what's the like just i spent a year being switzerland i spent a

year eating healthy on some days but then kind of letting it go on other days and then sliding then having some wings and then also having some elves exactly having a salad for lunch but then going out sometimes and eating a little bit too much and then sometimes going to the gym

buy my book yes exactly that's the book i'm gonna write andrew and that's the exact title of it uh okay uh quickly just uh because i feel like this is gonna this is the shelf life of this is already probably expired but it's not gonna hold up till tomorrow um i did uh becca and i did a bunch of touring around dc this weekend she's a very history kind of interested person and she never been to dc before and she really likes seeing things and museums and stuff that like i just don't i don't go to on my own you know like we went to the national portrait gallery i don't think i knew there was a national portrait gallery she was like well we have to go to the national portrait galleries like okay um uh which was actually really cool and interesting and kind of a a history lesson if you will because you just like a portrait of some person with some mutton chops and you're like uh who dis and then it's like this is the person who actually did this thing historically and this is why it's interesting and this how it fits in it's also nice because clearly they've gone through like the national portrait gallery and really like carefully they must have in the last year or two updated the descriptions on all of the portraits because it very much reflects like if this person was an enslaver it's on there and they call them an enslaver you know like they don't say slave owner um and they're like it's like it's very clear that these that the descriptions of a lot of these historical characters have gone through a process where i think a lot of people uh who look at history through the lens of not just the victors but also people who are marginalized are like okay we're gonna have this picture of this dude in here but we're gonna also mention that uh they were not uncomplicated you know so it's nice i didn't feel like i was walking through one of those museums that's just pretending that history didn't actually go the way it went if that makes any sense yeah absolutely yeah it felt like they had a real and even we got this tour of the of the oh one other thing in the portrait gallery you know they have a portrait of each of the presidents and i um do they mention their slave owning status like washington oh oh absolutely um they uh but like you'll go up to so i was walking and i was just like i guess here's what i'm trying to say it was clear in the writing of the descriptions of the the various portraits that this is put together by people who i think probably would be more politically aligned with your and my beliefs um and so i thought how

are they going to handle trump because there's a photo of each president and again the description or there's a portrait of each president and the description of the president is not like only positive it points it will and we're talking about a paragraph but it will mention like things that this president did that were not great or you know what i mean like it's not just like a glowing like this president was awesome because of this like i think they really tried to have a as much as they could in this one paragraph try to present an accurate image of

this person and you're worried that there's nothing bad to say about trump and how are they

that was my concern yeah sorry to cut you off but i was really like i was like how are they i was like how are they going to handle this because basically what i'm trying to say is i think the people that run the national portrait gallery and the people that are on the whatever committee that writes the things i would not guess that those were people that leaned heavily donald trump sure you know and so it's like how are you going to deal with the fact that this guy i mean i'm sure that honestly if given their druthers there wouldn't be a portrait of him in this gallery but that would have been a whole thing so it's like dude was the president technically and every president gets a thing in here and so i've you know make my way around uh the various ones and then you finally get to uh the latest one or i should say the the the one before biden and it's it's trump and i just take out my cell phone and i just whip out my middle finger and take a picture my middle finger because that's you know that's that's sending a message and then i noticed that there's like two security guards the first security guards i've really seen on this floor of the portrait gallery and where are they stationed next to the trump and they didn't really see me so i'm kind of proud of myself i'm like i got this funny picture i'm flipping that guy off i'm really giving it to him and then i circle around then becca is happens to have made her way to i just watch her she didn't know that i was watching her she saunters up to the trump portrait and as she gets there she does this like for no one's benefit she doesn't know anyone's even watching her she just goes like oh like just does the like i'm gonna throw up thing yeah only for her edification yeah and then i walk over to her and she goes do you think they'll yell if i take a picture flipping this off and i was like way ahead of you i show her my picture i was

gonna say those guards have seen everybody take that photo well then she takes out so then she

takes out her camera to do the middle finger photo and as she's doing it the guard goes ma'am please don't do that really what about freedom of speech i it was but see i have to say these guards were not they can't tell you not to flip off a photo they weren't being but they weren't listen these guys were like 24 they work for some outside security company that gets hired they couldn't have cared less what we did i think they've been instructed to try to keep people from just flipping off the donald trump portrait so they just said ma'am please don't do that and they didn't take away her camera they didn't stop her she took the picture and then she went over she was like how many times did you have to say that and they were like more than you could ever know it was the only portrait that had any security near it and they're literally there just to try to dissuade people on an informal basis from just taking middle finger pictures at the very least yes of course with no authority with no like weirdness with no like you're kicked out or We're taking your camera. They're just there to kind of go, please don't do that. Yeah, right. Yeah. Which was awesome. But then, I mean, not awesome, but it makes me feel good that that's happening enough that somebody has told the guard, try to hang out over near the Trump one. Try to keep that to a min if you can.

Well, again, I mean, I don't even know if this is a gross kind of exaggeration of the stereotype of Trump supporters. But, like, do you really think that a bunch of people who support Trump and think he was a good president are the same people who are going to spend a Saturday afternoon enjoying the history of portraiture in D.C.? It doesn't seem like a super intellectually curious crowd. I mean, they're interested in a certain kind of history, but it has to be fed to them by Tucker Carlson, I think.

Right. No, I had that exact thought. Like, as we were walking, I was like, I bet you because I was playing through like, OK, people come and flip it off. And there must be a few people that want to, like, pose with it, like they're excited. And I thought, I bet you that's about 50 flip-offs to two we're excited to be posing. Because, let me tell you this, I didn't see, while we were in the, and this is all part of the Smithsonian collection of things, in the National Portrait Gallery, in the Natural History Museum, I'm trying to think of the other things that we visited, the Smithsonian Castle. i didn't see one let's go brandon t-shirt sure yeah i mean it was weird to be we saw one like literally on our whole time there and we walked everywhere we walked like i think 25 miles total in like two and a half days of being there um because it's all tracked on the phone now you know and in all of that i saw one jeep that had a blue lives matter kind of very subtle like a pleasantly subtle small little flag that just had a blue line through it and i i remarked to becca i was like that's the first thing i've seen like that since we've been here like no one's driving down the street with a pickup truck with a with a fjb flag out of the back like it's just that is not the energy of at least the local population in dc and certainly the people visiting uh these museums and things that are sort of uh quiet and and informative and none of the things that i think those people generally like i think there's

also maybe a contingent of trump supporters who are maybe a little nervous to return to the capitol

the scene of the crime as it were this shows you how short-term my memory is we walked up to the capitol and uh we're just kind of we didn't we didn't go in or have access we were just walking around the building and we were standing on the side that faces the ellipse so you've got like the the washington monument and then you have these kind of series of lawns the national mall and this big circular one called the ellipse and then you get down to where the actual u.s capital is and that ellipse of course was where the january 6th the initial like rally was that was then the the ignition point for going down to the capital and here we're walking we walk through the ellipse We get down to, you know, the steps of the Capitol and there's like scaffolding up and I'm like, God, they're always working on this. What are they doing? And then it's like, oh, people were climbing up this, you know, like however many months ago, like trying to tear the thing down. I bet you anything what I was looking at was them trying to make repairs off of the BS that went down on January 6th.

Let me ask you a quick question before we move on, because we should probably get to V-mails here. But did you get Nancy Pelosi's desk lamp or no?

that she didn't have one i went in there i was looking around i went i looked for a lectern down on the floor of the senate gone i went to get a lamp from nancy pelosi's office none of that stuff was there and i wore my best buffalo skins to do it too so i thought it would be cool but the other thing quickly that happened uh that was and yes we very much need to move on although i think there's something comforting to the listeners when they see the first show after a break and it's like four hours they're like they had a lot to download yeah um because of being there with wait wait they hooked us up with this tour of the lincoln memorial and ultimately we got to go becca and i and this really cool guy named mike who's like head of pr for the national park system um he or at least the national parks in dc uh took a group of us underneath the lincoln monument or i should say the lincoln memorial and it's i mean so we went and actually looked at the lincoln memorial uh itself and found out all this really interesting stuff and because he was leading this tour and just a lot of cool detail and also just inspirational stuff about lincoln although it's as he pointed out one of the things about the lincoln memorial is when they made the lincoln memorial and this feels so much like something that would happen today There was a big political argument about if they should put in mention of the fact that he, you know, signed the or at least gave the emancipation declaration, you know, and that like basically he was he freed the slaves, as it were, the enslaved people, or at least he was, you know, the president who was trying to make it so that you couldn't have, you know, couldn't own humans in this country. I'm trying to be careful with my terminology because it changes so often. Point is, nobody wanted to talk about, or at least there was enough political opposition to highlighting him freeing the slaves that there's no mention of it at all in the Lincoln Memorial. All they talk about is him reunifying the South and the North. And that's what they went with. And our Mike, our guide was very clear to point out that that it's missing the slavery piece in this thing, which I just thought was like, who was like being like, let's not let's not mention the fact that we had millions of enslaved people in this country and that this person was instrumental in that getting changed. Like, who thought that was too politically radioactive to put in the memorial?

And this is this is I was a little bit lost there. This is the language that is officially on the memorial from its inception. Right. This isn't something I wasn't sure if you were saying this is more of a modern thing, because obviously there's a lot of stuff out there about how Lincoln did, you know, give the Emancipation Proclamation and what have you. But like, that doesn't mean that he wasn't racist in his own way, because white people were racist back then. And he certainly was anti-racist. I thought you were saying that, like, this was more of a modern thing of people striking that.

But you're saying back in the day when this was what happened back in the day, you had a bunch of you had a bunch of of lawmakers from the south. and they were talking in like i think this is like the 1920s um i think i believe that the the lincoln uh memorial they continued building it throughout world war one And that was one of the only large projects like that that didn't stop construction during World War I. So that puts it in a certain time frame. And at that time, there were still enough butthurt Southerners. And I say this with peace and love to our listeners in the South who are awesome.

Oh, yeah.

But there were enough butthurt Southern legislators who wanted us to just, quote, unquote, move on. And that was literally what their argument was. Like, we don't need to get bogged down in the slavery piece of this. We need to just move forward. and and so they prevailed in at least making it so that the monument i keep see there's the washington monument which is the obelisk and then there's a lincoln memorial and i'm constantly switching up the language but they succeeded in making it so that the memorial doesn't have like it doesn't have the emancipation proclamation etched into a wall somewhere it doesn't say here, you know, we honor Abraham Lincoln, who reunited the South and the North, and also was instrumental in ending slavery in this country. There's none of that. And that's not because of now of people going back and saying, well, actually, Lincoln wasn't as great as we thought he was, which I'm sure there's plenty of evidence of that because people are flawed, and it was a long time ago, and I'm not trying to be dismissive of that, but this thing, this argument played out in the whatever, 1920s or 10s or something.

Sure, okay, gotcha, yeah.

And was about even back then, basically white people not wanting, like, just being like, aren't we past that?

Right.

Like, the idea that in 1920, they're like, aren't we past this yet? Yeah, right. Even though they're living under Jim Crow. Yeah. And, like, it's so, I mean, it's so obviously not an equal country. And even then, they're like, come on, are we still talking about this? And now here are in 2022, and people are like, are we still talking about this? Right, right. I was just like, God, nothing changes.

Yeah. I mean, in 1920, you still had living people who experienced slavery and living people who own slaves. And that was 60 years later after the emancipation. It's just like I guess that's a thing for me, too. And it's something that I just kind of realized as I became an adult is how compressed history is. And these things that we think were so long ago, especially when you talk about these issues and the and the continuing effects of slavery. And it was just taught to us in this very simplistic way. well you know it wasn't a great thing but you know just like it was sort of this black and white idea of well yeah some white people some white people own slaves but you know they were mostly treated okay and you know and then the white man saved them all like lincoln's granddaughter died in like

1970 yeah granddaughter like granddaughter i don't even think not even great granddaughter i think grand i think granddaughter died in like 1970 yeah it's like this shit is not that old and anyway i was i guess i was just uh struck by that because i don't think about history a lot i should think about it more but what was also cool was the pornography angle uh which was we got to go down underneath the memorial and it's just incredible because and you've probably been to this right have you have you do you have a kind of a visual in your head of what this whole thing looks like

the lincoln memorial i can picture just from pictures from the outside i don't know that i've

ever visited it myself well it's very it appears to be up on a hill like so you're walking along there's this reflecting pool and you know there's this these lawns and it's very grand and as you're coming from the washington monument towards it it really kind of it sort of looms large well it's not built on a hill basically it was a it was a swamp that they dredged and moved the potomac river over like to make room for this but they wanted to have the effect of seeming like it was on a hill so they built this incredible sort of foundation for it that's these like 100 plus of these columns that were just hand poured by like god knows who in whatever 1920 down there you know in the down in this cave basically building these incredibly robust columns hundreds of them hand nailing the forms pouring the concrete probably from buckets and and building up this support so that when you look at it from the outside it looks like it's on a hill but really it's just on this big giant like bunch of piers okay and we went down and looked at all of this and you can stand right underneath where actually lincoln is and actually see that they had to put more rebar in because they doubled when they built when they started building the actual kind of building that he's in they realized that the original lincoln they had was like puny like he was gonna look it was gonna look wrong when you walked into this huge cavernous

place and there was like a tiny lincoln oh no the old spinal tap inches versus feet exactly it was

totally we were underwhelmed by the size of lincoln the fact that lincoln was about to be trod upon undermined his so so like uh they had to double the size of lincoln and make it of a different material but then it was going to be heavier anyway i'm getting too much into the structure of this building. What was fun

was all these dudes down there that were just like working all day probably in pretty tough conditions the way they would blow off steam would be to just pencil draw pictures of their boss like there's this one kind of pencil sketch of this kind of portly man who shows up on a lot of the columns and they think that might have been one of the supervisors they didn't like who they would just like draw this like very funny stylized cartoon of they would draw like there was a cartoon of like the um the the silent film star of the day who was like you know basically the you know main like i guess sort of sex star of her time just because she was a beautiful woman in the pictures and they had drawings of her there was lots of like just nakedness and people in various states of sexual excitement you just walk around and but this is all drawn in like 1910 19

various states of sexual excitement but i'll bet you there's a a specific state of sexual excitement

that probably is predominant uh it's i mean i don't know how to answer that question because all right really was a variety there was the female figure there was the male figure there was females uh there were males uh engaged with the female figure uh it was and there was a whole host of things represented in this like catacombs under the memorial that was like even and even though it's kind of it's a little bawdy and a little dumb it was also genuinely interesting to look at the style of drawing that these guys were doing and just kind of thinking about being down there all those years ago and like it's lunch and you're bored and you're probably not super stoked to be going back to this hard work and you're drawing a caricature of some boss that you don't like or some pretty lady you saw in a silent film. It just felt like actually in its own way very historic to me. Well, that's what Lincoln would have wanted.

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 righty an email or v-mail now that we've got your system working again

sorry about that oh the the emails yes um i did i lost my access to email but only for like two days or something like that so i don't think any any damage was done there but i'm going to start off with a voicemail in fact i have um actually let me let me summarize one thing that i thought was kind of interesting luke and this is not a scolding and the in the email that came in several emails came in about this um and all of them were just informative but i thought this was interesting as something uh we can learn and then i want to play a a voicemail but um we were talking about you know the get pumped up rock music that is played in um you know sporting events or whatever and you played i think this is right centuries right by fallout boy and and that's the one where it says uh what what is the um i won't be forgotten what is it what is the main um

chorus of that song i just deleted both of those as i was getting my audio together today i was just like we're never gonna play these again no that's fine you will remember me for centuries

was the thing yeah and you would say that's a fallout boy song yeah and you're like we don't even know your name lead singer of this song and it turns out that that is one of those songs for And listener Jen points this out. Apparently, it was actually co-written by a friend of hers. And she says, actually, that is a.

Whoa. Yeah. Oh, I forgot. I'm playing the email music as well. I'm sorry. I totally derailed everything there. I was trying to provide audio proof of concept. And all I did was completely derail the program.

So anyway, I just thought it was interesting. So it turns out that centuries, that whole you'll remember me for centuries. He's not singing about himself. That is a song in the character of character of Marsha P. Johnson, who was, I guess, like a huge trans rights or like a very formative, early LGBTQ trans rights person. And that song is a tribute to Marsha P. Johnson. And so whether or not you like the song or not, the you will remember me for centuries is honor of Marsha P. Johnson.

All right. But here's the problem. I didn't remember that person. Well, maybe you will still didn't. Well, now maybe I will only because you explained it.

but I still yes I mean when I hear that song now I will probably be like oh okay that's interesting and in a certain way then the song is doing its job and again I'm not saying I like that song now like just because I agree with the sentiment of a song or a movie or anything does not mean that I need to like that art and that is not Jen's point either I think she's just sort of saying that like that specific idea of like who are you dude we're not going to remember you that wasn't a self-aggrandizing statement by the singer of that song it was written by other people or

that is a much better that's a much better um inspiration for the song than what i thought it was which was just the fallout boy guys being like we're going to be remembered forever right so i'll 100 acknowledge that and i just thought that was interesting because i will remember that

now you know like oh yeah you know when i hear that song that'll that'll literally ring a bell Or I guess not literally, but you literally just rang a bell. Okay, now we got this voicemail, which I think is complete. I give no setup for this because it's completely self-explanatory.

Hi, Luke. It's Tan Ying from Pittsburgh. Yes, I am the Tan Ying that sent you guys a video of my front yard from my Nest camera and of a guy putting his dog poop in my trash can. That is me. because several times where I have, I don't know, sent in like something or some Thursday or called in and Luke hears my name and every single time you go, I think Tan Ying's the one that had something with a garbage situation and then you asked me to get at you. So I am calling in to clarify once and for all, yes, that is one of the things I sent you. I mean, I've also called in and emailed in with other things, but, you know, I suppose that's what I shall always be remembered for. Ask your question of how to deal with people like that, if I had any advice.

Now, this was kind of inspired by you also talking a couple of weeks ago about you witnessing a neighbor of yours, or at least somebody who lives in your building, walking his dog.

Who I, by the way, talked to in the elevator now, by the way.

Okay, so this is somebody who is walking his dog, and you were watching out the window during an episode of TBTL, I believe, and you watched him let his dog poop in the lawn somewhere, and he just moved on without picking it up. Now, I want to continue Tanying's email here or voicemail, but so do you want to give us an update then if you've run into this fella in the elevator?

I ran into him in passing in the building and recognized him, and then he got in the elevator with his two kids, who are two of the most adorable children I've ever seen in my life, and I had bubbles in her carrier, and they were, like, oohing and aahing over bubbles, and I was just like, this is not the time for me to bring up the fact that this guy needs to really just bring up a poop bag with him. So I the the update is I have not said anything.

Yeah. And I think I I would be hard pressed to imagine myself or you or most people to actually confront this person, even if he wasn't armed with two adorable or two. Maybe he was disarming with two adorable children. You're probably like, just bring your dog into my apartment and poop on my carpet anytime you want. Now, that's a little too far. Although you could have. Well, I guess I overestimated the cuteness of the children. And that's how you know a kid is really cute when you're inviting the parents to let their dogs poop in your living room. You could have said, like, oh, yeah, this is Bubbles. Now, what happens with Bubbles is Bubbles goes to the bathroom in a box, and then I scoop it up, and I bag it, and I throw it away while making uncomfortable eye contact with the dad. All right, back to Tan Ying.

What did I do? I found video footage. I mean, I would video that guy, that guy who's not picking up his dog poop in front of your apartment building. I would video that guy, and I would shame him on next door. You might get called a Karen like I did, but screw that. I don't think it's right. I just don't. I know Andrew said he's trying to be more cool about it, about people putting their dog poop in other people's garbage cans. I'm not cool with it. I'm sorry. If you choose to have a dog, you can take responsibility for that dog's poop, And you could take that poop home And put it in your own dang garbage That's my position on that I don't know if that's any help Public shaming That's my suggestion Okay guys, power out

Alright, there you go And we also got the confirmation

I would love, Tanying, if you come out If you visit Portland, will you let me know Because I might have to put you on the case Because you've got more of a stomach for this than I do And I can be a pretty confrontational person um often aided by alcohol which is probably oh that's good the the the best time to be making decisions about who i'm going to confront but um yeah i mean i guess i could i could try to take a picture the problem is if i take a picture of it next time it happens it would be very it'd be fairly obvious the perspective from which the picture was taken because i could take a picture then i could blow it up and i could just put it up in the lobby and be like hey this guy didn't pick up his dog poop the problem is he's gonna know if he if he's familiar with um you know any of pythagoras theorem he's gonna be able to figure out give him a lever and he can point it right towards the window where the picture was taken and then we're then we're having the issue of him knowing that i'm calling him out

Thank you.

Send it to me. I'll put it in Photoshop, and I'll flip it so that it looks like it's coming from the other angle, if that makes sense to you. Oh, yes.

That's great. Okay. All right. Next time I see him and the dog, I'm going to get the picture, and then we'll try to figure out if we can rub out my digital fingerprint.

You know what we need to do? We need to do that thing that you'll see in, I assume, a documentary or maybe even one of those crime shows where it's a black-and-white photo, But, like, most of it is a little bit darker, but then just around his face or his body is like an oval of kind of lightness, almost like to spotlight the perp a little bit. All right. We're back on this. Fantastic.

Love it. All right. All right. Well, what do you say? Have we done enough podcasting for a lifetime? Is this our final show?

For a day or for a lifetime. Here's what I'm going to do, by the way, as we close out here and say our goodbyes until tomorrow. I think I'm going to close out the show. Some folks have been sending in audio recordings of them or their kids reading their Too Beautiful to Lib submissions. And so I think I'll close out the show with these.

And our colleague John yesterday. And just I'm so glad that these are getting some airtime because these are adorable.

So, yeah, we'll do that after the music. We'll start peppering these into the end of the shows because they really are adorable. and thanks again to everybody who donated and I hope you're enjoying the two beautiful talibs

yes and thank you for I know you're not bringing this up so I'll say it but thank you for writing all those Andrew and thanks to our colleague John for handling all the production on them alright that is going to do it for today's show but we will be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you we'll talk about the Detroit slide situation that I played some audio of also you know what i did basically right upon getting home last night andrew even though it was like 11 o'clock at night i fired up my hard knocks so i'm still oh yeah i got a lot to say about hard knocks maybe we can get into that tomorrow and i have a cat that is literally clawing up my legs right now so we couldn't be ending this at a better time all right please join us for tomorrow's program until then have a great monday stay safe take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Hi, Luke and Andrew. It's me, Julian, from Corvallis, Oregon. We had a very fun time doing your Too Beautiful to Lib, Mommy's Favorite Podcast. And I'm going to tell you what we wrote on this surprising piece of paper. My mom has a very big relationship with her favorite podcast, which is called Too Beautiful to Jog. She listens to it while she's hopping While she's falling And even when she's dancing Please excuse me Sometimes it makes her sad But other times it makes her so angry That she ends up throwing her fall Excuse me, I'm so sorry Across the room When I ask her why she listens to it She says it's because Luke is tall And the other other Andrew is fuzzy She says she wants them to visit Mount Hood so she can meet them in person, but that sounds like a turquoise idea to me. I think the show should say what belongs in her face. Power out. Power out.