Muse

We like different things and that's okay, cause we just like different things. Me and my mom like our eggs in a different way and that's okay. My mom likes them fried, I like them scrambled with cheese.

TBTL

i'm going to suggest that we have a little constructive talking time not long at all i mean maybe maybe 10 minutes or um okay or maybe 15 is also good but it'll be so amazing

you'll love it it's gonna be the best ever i love this show do i wish our fans were a little more

hip? Yes. Do I wish they were a tad more on top of their hygiene? Absolutely. Do they have a confused look in their eyes like a dog that's heard a strange sound? Yeah. But strap that dog to a sled and baby, you'll be flying across the tundra. Hey, can we get

back to the funny? All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome everyone to a Monday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live i just love my name is luke burbank i am your host hello everyone coming to you today from beautiful san francisco california california got sunshine looking out over the embarcadero and up towards coit tower and all of the um Tremendous beauty that they have here in San Francisco, the city by the bay, where it's sunny today. It's relatively warm, probably in the 60s.

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

As I have been over-describing on the show, I have been on a real tear with the travel stuff. And I have this interesting experience of yesterday getting to go for a jog in Washington, D.C. on the Capitol Crescent Trail, which I really love. It's a beautiful path through Georgetown and out towards Bethesda, Maryland. And then a real blur of flying and whatever, and then getting up this morning and then running along the Embarcadero in San Francisco. I feel like I'm getting, really getting to cover the different kinds of experiences you can have in this country when it comes to jogging very slowly in different locales. This is episode 3819 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. In case you were curious, I had some big personal news over the weekend, and I couldn't tweet about it because the personal news was that I decided to finally get off of Twitter.

Attention, everyone! I have an announcement to make! I am leaving this party!

My first thought upon deleting my Twitter account was, I should really tweet about this, but that's the saddest thing I've ever heard. That's not how that works. That's not how any of it works. We will talk about the latest with Twitter. I'm actually here in San Francisco doing a story about Twitter as well. When we're done here, I'm going over to Twitter headquarters, joining the gaggle of media, standing in front of the building, and shooting what we call a stand-up. And I'm already dreading it. So that'll be interesting. Now, I left one organization, Twitter, over the weekend, but I joined another one, or at least I'm in the beginning stages of becoming an eagle.

Let the eagles soar.

Truthfully, I'm surprised it took this long. Many of my friends are in that club, and I like hanging out there. And it all sort of came together this weekend. Speaking of one of my friends and a member of the Eagles, and also the longest-running co-bro of the show, this guy may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He is Andrew Walsh, and he is joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning.

I was just trying to Google something on the fly here. There is a saying amongst us eagle brethren that is something along the lines of, if you can't speak well of a fellow eagle, speak not at all. Is that what it is? Have you heard of this?

This was raised on Saturday night. So the story on that is we were all hanging out at the Eagles in Seattle on Saturday night, having a wonderful time pulling some tabs and all of that. And I realized in talking to our friend Katie, who's the president, that why don't I just become a member? Like, what has been holding me up? I mean, presuming that I passed the background test, a check, and all that stuff. And so then I said, yeah, like, okay, I'll join. And, of course, because Katie's the president, she sponsored me. Somebody had to, somehow the paperwork got expedited, I'll be honest with you. And then I'm just handing Mike $100 cash that I had brought for pull tabs.

but then immediately what i realized was i can't shit talk any of our friends anymore like even in that night i wanted to say something snarky about like rodent or something and i couldn't because you cannot speak ill of a fellow eagle it was a real lapse in judgment or a critical error of me to suddenly it's like attorney client privilege or something all of a sudden i now have to be nice to all of my friends because most of you are in fact fellow eagles also i'm going to

correct you on one thing um katie would be the worthy president i believe is the proper title of that did you know that i'm not making that up and then i think that i actually think i remember

i did i don't remember that from saturday night but i do have a memory of of hearing that at some

point i always forget that and then when somebody says the worthy president and i always feel like i'm part of some sort of a i don't know there's something president of an organization sure worthy president i feel like i'm in a cult uh well i mean you've seen the photos of like isn't

there a photo aren't there various photos in that eagles of like the og dudes and they're just like all like bowing their heads in a kind of bizarre way they're like there's one photo that's hanging

on the wall that is just like a bunch because the um the the airy that we belong to here in Seattle is airy number one, which started, I don't know, a long, long time ago. And now there are thousands of these around the country. But that particular one is a bunch of bald men and they're sort of bowing their head. That's not a ceremony. I believe it took us a while to get the joke there. They're just early members of one, you know, one era or another. But they're all bald, making them a bald eagles, bald eagles.

It's not a it's not a ceremony, but because I really just thought that like. They had just there was something in the water in 1943 where all of these guys were bald. And I was like, they need to actually look into that. Something happened. But no, they were specifically chosen for the joke of being bald eagle.

That is my guess. Somebody said that, you know, we've been members for five years or something. And I always just thought it was like kind of a funny picture of a bunch of bald guys saying, hey, look, we're bald. And then somebody pointed out to me recently. It's like, oh, hey, they're bald eagles. I'm like, ah, that's the joke. And I'm guessing that photo might be from the 50s or something. But speaking of ceremonies, so here's the deal. You know, you filled out the paperwork and you paid your money. There was nothing actually expedited about that, I don't think. I mean, you know, I don't know who's sponsoring you, but you have a sponsor. That's how it worked for us, you know, Kamara Kev. It's Poppy, Katie's dog. Nice, nice. But here's the deal. This is my big question about that. So, like, you filled out the paperwork. You've paid your money. But there is technically an initiation ceremony, and I just don't see that happening. And I don't know if this is going to be some sort of a, like, Luke gets out of his time cards. Actually, you do fill out your time card situation.

That's the one thing I reliably do because I'm very keen on getting paid for my job.

Like, first of all, these are in-person ceremonies. They happen in Seattle. You don't live in Seattle. And also, like, I'm not allowed to talk about what happens in the ceremony. But, you know, like, it's a little ceremony that happens in an old mattress store. Or, I'm sorry, knitting. What was it? A knitting store. A quilting store. Sorry. Right in the middle of knitting and mattresses is quilting, I think. At the intersection of knitting and mattresses, you'll find the quilt district. Exactly. And, you know, people will gather and you will, you know, whatever. I guess I don't know how much. I don't think I'm allowed to say anything about it. There's nothing nefarious But I just I don't know I just can't picture you doing that So I don't know how that's going to happen

I actually proposed an evening I didn't realize how many people are supposed to come to this I like thought I just have to show up And then like Katie and Poppy are there And then she does the sign of the cross or something And then it's like I'm in I didn't realize there's like multiple Multiple attendees and elements to this But I will be You know I've been really kind of I'm gallivanting lately for my TV job, but I will be calming down a little bit in the coming weeks and we'll have some time and we'll be in and out of Seattle. So I, you know, to be honest with you, and this was something I said repeatedly and probably to the point of great annoyance on Saturday night because I was, let's just say, a little into my cups by the end of the night. But really, there is an Eagles. I mean, I love the idea of getting to be a member of the very first one ever with all of you, my friends. But honestly, there is an Eagles that I saw in Rainier, Oregon, that is on the water, is in such a cool building, and it's on the Columbia River, and they have like a video, you know, poker or whatever. And I've driven by it a few times, and I've just thought, boy, I could see myself whiling away a couple of hours there on a sunny Sunday afternoon. So this will now, I guess, equip me to go into any...

Once it's all said and done, I can then go to any Eagles in America, right? And I'm allowed to and all that?

Yeah, I believe so. Now, I've gone to some before, like one that I didn't belong to, and I'll call them out. Well, maybe I won't because I don't want to get it wrong, but I know that I went.

Also, Andrew, do you remember anything about not speaking ill of a fellow Eagle?

Well, that's true, too, but I will say that I have been to some of these Eagles where it's not like my usual club. And, like, the bartender, at least on one of the places I went, was pretty cold towards me. Now, I was also bringing a couple of non-Eagle friends in there. And I don't know. And then Genevieve was somewhere in a much more rural part of the state. And she went in with some friends. And, like, Genevieve's card was expired by, like, one day or something like that. And, like, the bartender kicked them all out. I was like, I think that there's, like, I'm sure you'll be fine because you'll be going somewhat regularly. But I will say that. And I don't think that is the case with our club. In fact, I believe our little, our area, as they're called, really welcomes, you know, we try to bring people in so that we can get more members so that we can continue to do this, you know, like.

Yeah, it seems like a bad business model to have, like, the Nick, you're not going to get this reference probably, or maybe you will, but, like, the Nick from It's a Wonderful Life in the version when Jimmy Stewart hasn't been born, which is to say a kind of mean bartender. If that's kind of happening in various places, it doesn't seem like it's going to encourage business.

yeah I know I mean but and you've been to places like that right that you know just any kind of a dive bar that has mostly regulars whatever and you just have like a bartender who's a little bit who's a little bit short or feels like you're an outsider it doesn't happen all that often but then you know when it's a specific club I sort of feel like you know there's a little bit of like well who are you guys kind of deal I'm like all right maybe everybody can just like calm down a little bit here and like see that I have a card that is you know and by the way if you can get that card laminated luke i mean that's really they'll give you a membership card that is like i'm thinking about getting a tattoo of it oh that would be smart too and then every year maybe on my neck or the side of my face you need to do it someplace where you get a new card every year so you need a place where you like on your back you can just keep adding them to your back sure that's what

i would recommend i figure um i don't know how many more years i got but i could probably fit

another a good 15 of those on my back i'm looking here on wikipedia a list of every grand worthy president of the national organization going back to 1898 was the first one and it looks like the last one listed here is 2017 so i don't know if that person is still in power um in order for you to become an eagle you need to name one of these people name one past grand worthy president now let me give you a hint here they all sound like old white guys so just throw some names out there Is Grover Cleveland one of them? I don't think so. That's a good question. Were there any famous? Was Rutherford B. Hayes part of the situation? I feel like maybe he was a member of, like, what are the other ones? Like the Caribou Club or whatever? I feel like there's the Elks. I think that's what I'm thinking of.

The Elks. There was the Loyal Order of the Water Buffalo, which Fred and Barney were in. Oh, right, right. Oh, you know what? I had, like, no idea what that was as a kid. I mean, it's it's kind of funny to think that the Flintstones was, I mean, presumably aimed at children. Right. Would we assume that it was a considered children's programming or was it considered just like primetime programming? Like when did the Flintstones air in like the day part when it was on television? Because if I think back on it, the jokes are very grown up. They're not like inappropriate in any way, but it's like no kid understands that there are fraternal orders and they wear silly hats. you know what I mean so much of the comedy is really played for people who are like more like

my age now I feel like I'm looking it up but you you saying that rings a very strong bell with me even growing up knowing that the Flintstones was created I believe more for an adult audience according to Wikipedia it says it was the first animated series to hold a prime time slot on

television giving me okay that makes a lot of sense yeah because the jokes I mean I often refer this one but the one that really stuck with me of course is the like bird who has to be the can opener and then he goes it's a living i mean those are just jokes that you only understand when the world has sufficiently beaten you down yeah right you know you kind of have some strong arthur miller some real death of what's who's the who's the guy in death of a salesman who's just kind of like

over it i know i have when you said if you said the name i'd know it but i can't conjure it

Willie Loman, I think, is the name.

I am looking at this list of past worthy or grand worthy presidents. And surprisingly enough, the Great Gazoo is one of them. So you were kind of close with the Flintstones thing. I was in the neighborhood.

Mr. Slate Rock did it for a while.

Right.

Did the Flintstones ever address fracking?

No, but Frackle Rock did Frackle Rock The way they were able to use puppetry to Highlight the way that we have really mistreated Mother Earth, I thought it was actually Kind of a, it was ahead of its time, it was cancelled After one episode

Frackle Rock is a possible thing We should go I told you before the show that you have a lot to say About Twitter, I have a lot to say about Twitter And you know what I was about to Segway into something that would just be yucking somebody's yum so i'm gonna just hold off on that i mean we can just go to a break early for once

let me just say quickly though for folks we have a lot of listeners here in san francisco people might visit this town or other parts of silicon valley i this morning almost got myself mowed down by a driverless waymo car here in downtown san francisco i was hustling back to the hotel room after my little run and it's a without getting into the details it was an annoying stretch of road I had to run on Market Street to get from my hotel to the water and the problem is every block is a light and every light was going against me so I was trying to make up some time and it was one of those things where I didn't have the light but there weren't that many cars and they were far away and then I started sprinting onto the intersection and I looked to my right and totally one of the There was a driverless-ass car heading towards me. And the funny part is I bet you that it would have less of a chance of hitting me than a car with a human driver who was just looking at their phone, you know? But it still freaked me out, and I stopped immediately, and I scampered back to the curb and waited for it to go by.

Yeah, no, I've never seen anything like that. It must have been kind of thrilling.

It was so cool. I mean, it has, like, all kinds of – it kind of looked a little bit like – well, first of all, it's a very fancy car. I think it's, like, a Jaguar or something. Like some very high end vehicle. And it's got all these cameras on top of it, sort of like a Google Earth or one of those, you know, Google Maps cars that you might see sometimes. But yeah, there it was just tooling about town with no one driving it. And I've been thinking about this stuff a fair amount lately because I'm working on this story about Twitter, which really means working on a story about Elon Musk, which really means kind of looking at his whole career. And one of the things that he's been very mad about, which I don't think he's a particularly laudable person in a lot of ways, but I do think he has an argument here. When Tesla is criticized for having crashes, his argument is we never said there wouldn't be any crashes with autonomous driving. But what we have found is that there are fewer crashes than you have with humans driving. Like car crashes happen. If you have a robot car, some of them are going to crash, but they would contend that it's actually a lower amount of that happening than inattentive humans, which I have to say kind of checks out for me because I know as an inattentive human, it's amazing I'm not hitting people left and right.

Yeah, I mean, how inattentive are you behind the wheel, though? Like, are you just mowing people down on your daily travels? I haven't witnessed that. And I've been in a lot of cars with you.

I'm not mowing people down, but I just mean I honestly have more faith in a robot that has all these sensors and that isn't also trying to check its text messages than me. I mean, even though I do think I'm a pretty good driver, I have a pretty good driving record. And I just mean generally people like we're I think so many of us are so distracted when we drive that I I guess my point is just I avoided this car. like it was um you know like something like the car from um you know maximum overdrive like the truck that's trying to kill emilio estevez and it probably was it probably would have just stopped is the thing but i was freaked out by it because i'm not used to it that's all you know i haven't

seen that movie and now i know emilio estevez is in it thanks a lot luke you know i'm obviously joking there but you know i saw a movie this weekend and i didn't even know it existed an hour before we walked into the theater, Vives and I, actually, after our somewhat wild night, I had two, it was a busy weekend for me, I had two pretty, pretty late nights of revelry this weekend, and boy, was I, was I, I'm still kind of recovering today, but on Saturday morning, after staying out pretty late with you guys and certainly sleeping late and feeling very, you know, hungover on Saturday morning, Vives and I went and walked to the IHOP that is somewhat near our house and um had a breakfast and then over breakfast uh looked at my phone opened up the old fandango app to see if anything would be playing in the theater that's basically next door to the ihop and there was a movie that i'm sure you and maybe folks in our audience have heard of that i was not aware of called the menu uh and yeah peter gross is in that who's peter gross oh yeah peter gross i do wait wait with the comedian

the improv guy who did the Carl's Jr. commercials is that right? No Sonic but yes Sonic yeah yeah okay yeah he's in that because I saw it but so anyway I'm at breakfast with Vives or lunch or whatever you want to call it and I said well this movie the menu is playing in like an hour or whatever and she's like oh yeah that's good our friend just recommended that to me last night I said what's it about she said I don't know our friend Rachel recommended it to Genevieve and she said Rachel told me You should go in knowing as little as possible She's like I don't even want to tell you what it's about Just go in and watch it It has Emilio Estevez It has Emilio Estevez in a truck that's chasing him down Because he owes him two dollars No all I knew literally All I knew was that it was called the menu And that it had Rafe Fiennes in it That's all I knew and we went in And I really enjoyed it Like I don't know that it's for all audiences So that's the only thing I'll say Is if you're a sensitive viewer it might not be for you But I love going into a movie as long as it's not terrible you know like bad movies or bad movies but this was a pretty good movie but what made it so much better was that i didn't know shit and it you know there's it's like it the first half of it or the first quarter of it almost felt a little white lotus-y to me in the fact that there's clearly tons of tension but you don't know why you know and i love that feeling of not knowing why there's a lot of tension and then like slowly the movie sort of revealing these things to you. So I would recommend it, and I would recommend trying to maybe not know too much about it before you see it.

All right. I may check it out. Now, I'm not trying to rank which Fiennes brother is the, you know, is the one people are going out for, because Joseph Fiennes, he was in Shakespeare in Love. He's a very beloved actor as well. But Ralph Fiennes, I think of Ralph Fiennes as being the premium Fiennes brother. And I'm just wondering if ever somebody goes to a movie thinking it's going to be Ralph Fiennes and it's Joseph. And they like it, but someone goes, how was it? He goes, ah, it was Fiennes.

That was such a...

The thing about that joke was the efficiency, the economy, just not one wasted word in getting to that joke, I think is what the listeners appreciate about what I do on a daily basis here.

I want to give one little... I just want to acknowledge something that happened. there is a very very brief very brief drop out on your voice we didn't lose any words but what happened was you came back and for a moment your voice was sped up pretty quickly i think if we just acknowledge that here i don't have to go through the process of um of of remixing the show later but yeah getting out of work but i do want to just kind of acknowledge if a listener's like what just happened to luke it's fine it's just technology he's in a hotel room so it's Was I sped up on my punchline? No, luckily there was a hefty buildup to that punchline, so I would say it. Okay, I'm going to do this. I wouldn't usually do this. You know I've told you I've been working on a secret – we should go to break, sorry. But I told you I've been working on a secret stand-up routine for a while. And when I say working on it, I mean I just have a couple of vague ideas of jokes or whatever. But then I came up with a new joke this week, and I really like this one. And I'm going to just try to give it I'm just going to try to share it with you here Nobody can steal this joke Although I don't know if anybody would want to steal this joke Or it also sort of sounds like I couldn't be the first person To come up with this Okay, are you ready? So I'm in the club here It's a two drink minimum, Luke Do you have a coffee and a water over there?

I do, you know that's how I like to enjoy my stand-up comedy

Yeah, so I'm just coming out of another joke And I say, yeah, yeah, but you know I got ideas, I got ideas you go to the um you go to the post office right and they always have that slot right in the front it says it says outgoing mail and i really like that um but if i ran the post office i'd have another slot next to it that would say introverted mail you saw that coming at one point did you see

that coming as soon as i said outgoing mail when when you said the word outgoing yeah then i started to try to write my own version of that joke yep uh which i didn't get anywhere better than you for the record but um i i felt i felt i had an inkling i had an inkling what was where i was going with that yeah that's i would describe that joke as it was fines fair enough you know i didn't even

remember that joseph fines exist there's only one fines in my life and that's rife um all right

listen uh let's let's do take that break and then we come back we will thank some donors we'll talk Twitter, and continue with this content train just rolling on here on a Monday. So stay with us here on TBTL.

Hey, let's thank some donors of the day. These are the wonderful, generous, long-suffering supporters of the program who are keeping this thing going with their help. And we really, really appreciate it. We really appreciate folks like Samantha Wheeler in Everett, Washington. Thank you, Samantha. Also, Greg Woller is in Olympia, Washington. Now, those are different last names. They share some similar characteristics As in starting with a W And ending with an L-E-R L-E-R, yeah Yeah, but that's a Samantha Wheeler And then you got yourself a Greg Woller

And they're both in Washington I mean, I know that I always Criticize you for doing this But I'm just wondering if we can make a love connection here Is that inappropriate?

That's for Greg and Samantha And possibly their partners to decide I think that's really what it comes down to. Exactly.

I think you all should sit down.

It's Garrett Schumann in Ypsilanti, Michigan. I believe this is our music expert. Exactly. Now, I always say Schumann, but maybe. I mean, honestly, if we're going, I mean, if this is a person who's an expert in the area of music, in particular, classical music, Schumann seems more apropos. It'd be like if his last name was Chopin and I was calling him Chopin.

Chopin. Also, how many cities begin with the letter Y? That's something else I'll look up and quiz you on before you can become an eagle. Yuma. Oh, okay. Yeah. Nice. Yellow Springs, Ohio. Oh, once you throw in Yellow Springs. Wow. You're right. Yonkers, New York. You're really good at this game.

You can become an eagle. Where's the paddle? Why wasn't this? Why isn't this a game on the scale of Jeopardy? I'd be the friggin' Ken Jen of it. Yellow Y letter cities For a thousand please Mayim Thank you very much Garrett Also thanks to David Hughes In Santa Rosa, California The home of My distant distant relation Luther Burbank Who I'm not even probably related to Even though weirdly I have the same name The potato guy The potato guy And the rose guy He hybrided or cross-breeded a variety of plants But it is odd because my name is Luke Burbank But my name was Luke Kelly Long before, well, two years before my mom married my dad, Walt Burbank So it's just a coincidence And also I understand, I don't think Luther Burbank, the botanist, had any children So I cannot be a descendant of his as much as I want to be Even by my marriage

Who was the Lutheran, wasn't there a Lutheran in the rap group Two Live Crew?

Yeah, Luther Campbell. Luther Campbell.

A.K.A. Luke Skywalker. Okay, gotcha. No relation there either, though.

We don't know, actually. Like, I've done some 23andMe. I think Luther Campbell and I are going to be on that Henry Louis Gates show, Who Do You Think You Are, on PBS. Oh, I don't even know about it. Find out some of our roots. I would watch that if me and Luke Skywalker investigating our respective roots with noted academic Henry Louis Gates. That sounds great. Also want to say a big thanks to Mintenseno Gebre in SeaTac, Washington. Thank you very much for the donation. God, I really, there is something, this is a weird place to take it, and we've got things to talk about. But, like, there was a place in SeaTac, Washington, for, like, five minutes called Funsters Casino, and it was the Red Robin company's attempt to get involved in the casino game. Whoa, was it a chain then? So whatever the parent company is that owns Red Robin decided very briefly that they wanted to have a casino, and I think the idea was it's going to be a not-seedy casino. You know, like it's going to have, you know, it'll have tables and stuff, but it's just going to be like, it's going to be called Funsters. It's not going to be, you know, some kind of sort of down market joint. And it was phenomenal. We would, Jess and I would go there along with Bill Radke and our friend Hugo Kugia. Like we would, Percy would come out. It was kind of a little, it was a little local Seattle media hang for a minute. We had good representation between KUOW and the Seattle Times. but the thing was because they were trying to get funsters off the ground they were just absolutely loose with the food comps and it was red robin food so it was just like everything i loved in the world playing blackjack and eating red robin food that they were comping us because they were just trying to get people to go alas i guess not enough people went to funsters in sea tack because

i do not believe it exists any longer well the first hit on funsters casino is You It's a 2002 article from the Seattle P.I. with the headline, Funsters Casino Under Scrutiny for, quote, Fraudulent Conduct. And it does say the second line is the casino is owned by Seattle restaurateur Gerald Kingen. So Gerald Kingen must be the—

Yeah, that's the Red Robin guy. There you go. Oh, you know what? I'm sorry. It was called Fraudsters. That's—I mean, honestly, that's truth in advertising right there.

That's what they're naming the new Miami Heat. The new naming rights for their arena is Fraudster's Arena.

They took FTX off. They're just putting Fraudster's Casino. It's just easier that way. Anyway, Mintensino, thank you so much for checking in from SeaTac. And then thanks also to Tiffany Heiner in Campbell, California. I don't know where Campbell, California is. I wonder if it's not far from where I am right now.

Yeah, I'm not sure. I wonder if you hear me, Tiffany. I'm not sure. And I also wonder, you know, I was thinking about Santa Rosa before because, listener david who you mentioned a moment ago is from santa rosa and i was starting to think hey i wonder if everclear also has a song called santa rosa because everclear has a song called santa monica right go out in the ocean is that what the name of that song is i think so i think it's called santa monica and then i love that song i love that song and i think that everclear should do what um oh what's his name uh come on feel the illinois guy oh sufion steven they should they should try

to make a song about every city in california um did i i think the guy i'm gonna i think there is a guy named joey banks who decided we interviewed him on um live wire at the beginning of the pandemic he's a really funny writer and comedian who decided to basically crowdsource the rest of the 50 state project that sufion stevens did not complete i think sufion did like i think he did Two I think he did come on feel the Illinois and then one about Michigan Yeah there's a Michigan record and then stopped And then so I think this guy This guy Joey Banks decided to To step in and And I don't think Sufjan was happy About it which is kind of funny and then he did one for The moon so he covered all of The states he basically recruited people to write Songs and so he did all like the other 48 states and then there was so much content That somebody had been writing stuff about the moon So they also got the moon on there like it's a very Thorough coverage yeah the

Moon. Wow. Yeah. I mean, you wouldn't think that the problem would be we've run out of places to sing about. And so we have to expand it to the to the galaxy.

That's exactly what Elon wants to do, Andrew. Elon realizes. What if I just became an Elon head from doing this story? That would be a surprising outcome. He just Andrew just rightfully realizes that we need to become a multi-planetary species.

Yeah. So all the rich people can escape the Earth as it crumbles.

I would rather be on Earth than Mars. Mars seems very inhospitable. I agree. Best case scenario, it seems not great. Like, I don't really, that's, you know, I'll go ahead and stay here if possible. Anyway, thank you to all of our donors today for keeping TBTL going. We really do appreciate you and wouldn't be here without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right. Yes, I finally did it. I finally deleted my Twitter account, which was it felt, Andrew, I'm not I don't want to over over dramatize this, but I was flying from Seattle to D.C. and I started getting a flurry of texts. Everybody apparently knows that, like, I'm the person you reach out to when you find out that Elon Musk has decided to let Donald Trump back on Twitter. and i had said on this show a lot that like when that happens i think that for me would be just kind of like kind of the last straw and so sure enough that announcement came out and i was this is the part that i'm so embarrassed about but it's so silly i like um what was the song again i oh i made this decision andrew i was like i'm just gonna do this because if i don't if i don't delete the account i'm never gonna do it or i'm gonna keep hanging around and i'm also gonna look like a hypocrite because i said i was gonna leave if he lets trump on or whatever but i felt it was like funereal for me so i ordered a red wine i put the song change by big thief which is like a very beautiful but dramatic song though there is a lyric in this this song by big thief um that says death's like a door to a place we've never been before i was having a full-on funeral at 30,000 feet for this thing, Twitter, that I have spent way too much time looking at, tweeting at, getting my little self-esteem hits from, et cetera. And so I just went ahead and got rid of it and then immediately felt like I needed to.

tweet out that i wasn't on twitter anymore i mean that's like i'm not even just saying that for effect that was my i don't what i realized is i very little of note has happened in my life that hasn't been followed by me tweeting about it like when anything big happens or funny happens and i just dislike the last whatever two days however long it's been i see something and the way i my brain has has been sort of now kind of the pathway the groove is so deep for somebody does something and my first thought is how do I construct that into a tweet and then I tweet it out and then if it gets attention I feel good and if it doesn't then I delete it like and I'm walking around composing tweets in my head still but with nowhere to tweet them do you remember what your

handle was was it just your name Luke Burbank without anything in between it yeah because I've had a couple of other friends who've um quit Twitter and they've told us like hey I quit twitter and i just look i just google them i don't google them i search for their handle on twitter just to see like what it looks like and it's kind of funny because some people like their account their handle stays there um but all the tweets are gone um yours disappeared immediately but it was funny because i typed in luke burbank into the search engine of twitter and what did pop up was the luke burbank show which you can apparently tune into on cairo radio so you still have that If you get the keys to that kingdom, you could still be tweeting under the Luke Burbank show in which you're wearing a a suit in the I don't know if you're looking it up now, but you're wearing a suit in the profile pic of that. Yeah. Your last tweet under how many followers did we get on the old Luke Burbank show feed? Fifty seven. Well, it's higher than I would have expected. That is lower than I expected. The very last tweet from the Luke Burbank show was a photo of a city attorney, Pete Holmes, and a Seattle mayor, Mike McGinn. And the Luke Burbank show tweeted out, it appears that Mayor McGinn and city attorney, Pete Holmes, have made up the evidence. This selfie looks like the photo taken in the Cairo studio. So congratulations on on that, I suppose. I am not to like fast forward over your emotional journey because I do. No, I mean, I do understand. Yeah. And I think I do understand that, too, especially like you say, like I truly do understand the instinct. Like, I don't think I am that with Twitter necessarily, but that idea of of cutting something off and then just instinctively, like almost muscle memory reaching for your phone to then then tweet something out. I mean, it's going to be an interesting journey. In fact, like I think that'll become more interesting and I'll ask you about it more as news breaks and, you know, also the way you consume information on Twitter, not just like tweet things out. I will say this, though, I this news broke Saturday kind of afternoon, I think latest afternoon West Coast time, or at least that's when my timeline became flooded with it. And I was really irritated. So somebody, I think, copied me in a tweet. I'm not irritated at this person. I think a listener like copied me in a tweet from the day before something that I just noticed that like Elon Musk put a poll up on Twitter. should he let former president donald trump in and it's just like the whole thing from the very beginning i mean from the from the idea of him buying the company was nothing but elon musk wants everybody to look at elon musk like and then to make it a poll and make it seem like it you know like trolls are like oh finally bringing uh bringing democratic ideals to twitter or whatever it's just like and then he says okay the poll you know the poll says bring back donald trump so i'm allowing donald trump on now the only thing that happened was elon musk said that donald trump is

back on twitter or allowed to be back on twitter donald trump didn't tweet anything that i know of there was nothing there was literally no news other than saying that he could come on twitter and all i saw in my timeline were a bunch of people who you know lean progressive like suddenly like my timeline which was mostly like hey you know here are things to look at in the seahawks bye week or you know like whatever new all of a sudden everything was a bunch of progressives freaking their goddamn shit out about trump being back aloud on twitter there is nothing the only everybody was just spinning themselves up i'm just like guys go back to tweeting your pictures of your cat or or things that are important to you like i the only reason we on the left are we're getting owned by elon musk just saying hey i'm putting out a poll oh guess what the trump can come back on twitter like you're letting him get exactly what he wants is which is just a bunch of attention and for a bunch of people on the left to get spun up about it

well i agree with you that getting mad on twitter about him doing that is kind of counterproductive and it's just driving more clicks. I mean, for me, though, the...

thing about just like not wanting to be a part of it is it's just like I feel that I feel that Trump's access to Twitter was back when he was president and even you know when he was running for president I just felt it was so damaging to our democracy his ability to blast out these these ridiculous ideas and policy and stuff and have it become immediately part of the news cycle I just thought it was really and so much stuff that's just provably false that even the possibility like Elon Musk thinking that giving that megaphone potentially back to him, it just feels so reckless to me that it really for me genuinely was. Now, now the fact I know Trump hasn't availed himself of it yet, although I give that a week like to me, what it feels like is it's like it's like a rom-com where, you know, Trump has this dumb truth social thing that nobody's going to that he's like trying to make. He's like marrying truth social. But then the love of his life, Twitter, shows up on the day of his wedding. And it's like I feel like it's killing him to not be on Twitter or to have not jumped right back on there where there's much, much more attention. But I know what you're saying, which was nothing as far as what has happened in the I don't know how however long it's been two or three days. Nothing is different. Trump is not on there. He's not tweeting. It's just the I'm going to let him do it. But I will speak for myself. Him just saying that was for me kind of just like something inside me broke. And I was like, I just don't want to do this anymore.

Yeah. And I want to I just want to make it very clear again what I'm saying here, because I think Genevieve sort of had a similar reaction. like you you taking yourself off Twitter like I applaud that that's good like and I you know I think that that's good to stand up for something also he has one less account like that that's great I think the more people do it no my my statement here is not even a statement about whether or not whether or not it's a good thing or a bad thing or or a larger statement about the toxicity of Twitter by allowing Trump on there I'm not making a statement about that not being a big deal I don't know if it's a big deal yet we're gonna have to wait and see who I'm criticizing here are not the people who might be secretly concerned not secretly the people who are just internally concerned about it who i'm angry at and i'm sorry like if this is somebody who's listening right now is everybody who had to quote tweet or or tag their friends in elon musk's tweets all about how trump is back on twitter and i'm also a little bit i'm a little bit peeved about the washington post and new york time both sending uh push notifications about breaking news about this like i understand that this is something that maybe we should keep our eyes on and if trump is using the platform to you know and trump type of people in the in the platform becomes more of a place where hate speech and is is um is becoming more and more prominent and bad things irl are happening happening because of that like that is all very important stuff but what i'm saying is there is something that goes on on twitter where you follow the people that you want to follow because they don't upset you right but then those people who have good intentions start quote tweeting and giving their takes on all this stuff and they are ruining their own timelines and they they become the problem and then people are bringing it onto instagram like people are now like my instagram stories for a few hours were flooded with a bunch of people who you know probably share my values when you look at the world in politics but all they're doing is talking about elon i almost said elon trump elon musk and donald trump and it's like we don't there's nothing going on here other than just it's a social media platform let's keep an eye on things but like let's not ruin all of our experiences like here's another thing like this was saturday like i said kind of early evening late afternoon when this was all going on online vives and i were um heading back to the eagles for a second night of the eagles because there was a big uh bingo night going on there and it was a lot of fun and i've been sort of keeping Genevieve abreast of some of the like kind of ongoing stories about what's going on at Twitter as you know as we get these sort of inside inside looks at the organization from the Washington Post and some good journalism like I've been enjoying that and I've been kind of keeping up to date on that but when all this stuff happened on Twitter on Saturday these and I took a lift over to the Eagles like I didn't I made a point I'm like I'm not going to bring it up like I this isn't news like we're going to spend a bunch of time with our friends like I don't need to be bringing this energy like oh oh let's all get mad that Trump is

supposedly back on Twitter or allowed to be back on Twitter you know we did we talked about other things I didn't mention it to Vives I don't think she knew until the next day at bingo we talked about uh what did we talk we talked about Jerry DiPoto for a while I remember that conversation we talked about our friend are they letting Jerry DiPoto back on Twitter right like we all we spent probably five hours at the Eagles having a great time nobody in that club or at least nobody at the table of like 20 people I was sitting at were talking about trumping back on Twitter because they were more fun and

interesting things to talk about i just sort of like i don't think i'm being super articulate although i guess i've made my point just that like the problem with trump being on twitter is all the people in my timeline wringing their hands about it and amplifying it i know what you're

saying i think broadly which is you know if we if we the the people who are not fans of that kind of stuff let it as is overused let it live rent free uh in our heads that's you know that's not good and also it's giving like one of the things that i have noticed on twitter would be when somebody like a ben shapiro type writes something that is specifically designed to provoke a reaction from people on the left and then everyone like you said is sort of quote tweeting it and dunking on him and then it's you know there's a hundred thousand interactions with the tweet i'd always felt to me like oh you're 100% playing into the hands of the person who's just trolling you like the best thing to do the way that you put out a fire is to starve its oxygen maybe a better analogy is the way you get rid of a tumor is you starve the blood supply to it like don't you know so I'm with you on that that the the all of the the freaking out is probably certain from a certain sector of the political world is is definitely not productive in any way i i have to say for me what it has felt like the last couple of days and again i know it sounds like i'm acting like uh i mean it was very illuminating for me to i talked to kara swisher um yesterday in dc and it was very illuminating talk to her because she's very smart and really really knows this stuff and she was like i was like is this a big deal if twitter goes away and she goes absolutely not she goes have you heard a friendster she goes social media platforms they come and they go you know and this you know like nothing none of this stuff lasts forever and it's like she was very unsentimental about it which actually was kind of interesting for me to hear and to put it into some perspective because it has been such a big part of my really part of my life and like just the default thing that i poke with my thumb on my phone when i'm anywhere with any downtime and of late i've had a lot of downtime in a lot of airports and so for the last two days i've been like what do i look at now because like i don't i don't follow that many people on instagram i mean instagram's fine it's not as interesting of a place to me as twitter was so i'm i signed up for mastodon which i haven't been back to because it was confusing but like i'm kind of like well what do i what do i look at now

instead of being alone with myself yeah you know that's the thing i mean i like instagram for totally different reasons and people who have been you know like a few nights ago when there all the news stories out about how like there were kind of mass resignations and layoffs at Twitter and people were saying hey are we actually seeing the final days here is this my last tweet that was like kind of a whole vibe I believe on Thursday evening I told you off air that it almost felt to me like everybody I was like I don't know if this is really the last night of Twitter but I feel like everybody's sort of enjoying it like when a big snowstorm is approaching and there's like a community and everybody's sort of hoping that it's kind of a big event in a certain way like a safe but big event um but like that stuff is is interesting and a lot of people are like well you can find me on instagram and like i love instagram i spend a lot of time on instagram but not i i don't get the comp there at all the comparison like i don't it's not the same like if like lindy west tweeted or like kind of put something in her instagram stories that um i found interesting uh this weekend i can't remember exactly what it was but i remember i wanted to react to it but it was like oh well i would want to react in more like in a comment section like i did react to it i said hey yeah this is on my mind too but all that is is that's a private dm to her that she probably won't even see because she doesn't follow me or i could have screen capped it and then re re-grammed it or something to me but like it's just not the same kind of conversation it does not i think people who are looking for this is comparison to like i you know you were talking about like hey i really like getting drunk but i'm gonna start using marijuana instead like right it's not the same man like instagram is it's a different thing and it's got its it's got its own drawbacks and it's got its own um qualities but it's just not the same thing it's not a it's not a public for better for worse as it happened on twitter like it's not i i can't even imagine getting the same sort of um satisfaction out of instagram i think that'd be an incredibly frustrating experience trying to recreate a twitter experience on instagram i think the thing

that i'm noticing too is how much of my news i was getting at least initially from twitter because it's just a good place for that stuff just kind of bubbles up really quickly and you'll see like a you know they'll just be like a very simplistic tweet from your like you know um like whomever i'm thinking of like who are the nfl who are those just kind of like very in the bag for the NFL Adam Schefter or something like an Adam Schefter tweet like whatever or something and it'll just be like one line and then what I do I see the breaking news aspect on Twitter and then I go find like, has the New York Times written a piece on this yet or CNN or somebody else? But it is it's convenient for that because it just things have a way of hitting Twitter for me anyway, faster than like it's it's more time consuming for me to do a survey of all of the different news sites. Like if somebody well known passes away, unless I'm double checking TMZ on that day and CNN and whatever, I was like, it just used to just, you know, that experience of just on the side. whatever's trending on Twitter it's just kind of a it's a quick kind of temperature read on what's going on which is pretty useful for me actually so that's slightly a bummer I'll just have to figure out a different system and again I'm sure like I don't know I'm not a I'm by no means an expert on Twitter but my sense is it is going to over time become a place that's probably more like got more Alex Jones kind of going on than I feel comfortable with I think it's going to become a place that a lot of people uh like you and i just kind of don't find very appealing anymore and i don't know if there will be enough if there will be enough users that want to be in there just getting really like kind of i don't know bare knuckled with their political arguments or whatever i just think it's going to become a place that's less fun to be anyway so i kind of feel like maybe i could have ridden it out for another month or two and maybe my experience would have been like like you said if trump doesn't go back on there i guess effectively my experience is not different at all but I if it wasn't this week I feel like at some point I was going to get off the merry-go-round because it just seemed like it was just becoming a not fun place owned by somebody who I think has made a lot of decisions that I just really don't agree with

yeah several things that I want to react to like first of all you're absolutely right about the idea of sort of like breaking news or unfolding news and be able to watch it unfold in real time And also having to have some news sense of being able to tell, like, or at least be wary of fake news kind of happening. I don't mean that in the Trumpy way, but, you know, of people misleading you on Twitter. And, of course, it's getting harder to verify that with all of the checkmark verification debacles that we've seen in the past couple of weeks. But you're right there. And again, I just want to say there is no comparable social media network to what Twitter brought around. And I think that's for better and for worse. Like the closest thing, I think, are the breaking news alerts that you can sign up for on your phone and you get push notifications from, again, like my obvious ones are Seattle Times, New York Times and Washington Post, plus a few others, because I'm seeing a lot of people saying, hey, you can still get my information via my newsletter. I'm leaving this site. And I think that's kind of interesting. I from a media perspective, I think it's really interesting to see people like kind of leaning back into their sub stacks and and newsletters and journalists and just people with thoughts on Twitter saying you can get my information this way. But again, you don't have that sort of public conversation. You can't have somebody react to that publicly and then see where the conversation goes from there. And again, I think sometimes that's terrible because it just leads to people fighting and people being trolls and kind of inhumane to each other on Twitter. But it is different than just saying, hey, once a day or once a week, I'm going to get this person's newsletter with their thoughts in it. Like that's the immediacy is completely gone. And the other thing I want to say, you mentioned interviewing Kara Swisher about this. I'm surprised. I kind of I guess I kind of like her reaction to that, as you describe it there by saying, you know, like, hey, do you remember like Friendster, like these things come and go. i said something similar um on the kow podcast i was on on friday but then i was sort of thinking about it over the weekend about whether or not that was a cringy thing for me to say i guess not i guess i have some good people backing up my comments now but um because yeah i mean i gave the example of when i first joined social media i'm not of a generation where social media was always around of course so like we burned through several different social media sites it reminded me of like when you and your friends in high school have a certain table you sit at all the time but then for some reason you move tables but eventually everybody sort of migrates with you we went from friendster to myspace to facebook and then twitter and then things sort of slowed down a while there and it's like oh i guess we're just sticking with facebook and twitter um but the the one difference is i don't think they are different tools and you didn't see twitter has just had so much of a bigger effect on the world and information sharing and information sharing at times and in in countries where you didn't have a free flow of information and people using twitter

as a tool to you know foment real change like i i i think it's a even though i did it it's a little

bit glib to make that comparison don't you think well i i i sort of yeah i mean far be it for me to think i know more about this stuff than kara swisher but i she also was saying well it's just the chattering class it's just a bunch of journalists and politicians talking to each other And I was like, well, yes, it is. But what happens is it's. It's an incubator in a way. And so somebody gets into a thing on Twitter like, you know, some buddy puts up a tweet about immigration and then it gets a bunch of attention. And then the people are like fighting about it. And then a producer for the Sean Hannity show sees that and then says there's a you know, there's a fight on Twitter about X, Y or Z. And then Sean Hannity does a segment on it. And then somebody's grandmother who's watching Fox News gets her opinion on immigration from this thing she saw Sean Hannity talking about, which started because there was a some kind of tempest in a Twitter teapot over. You know what I mean? Like so even though it's it's the fourth largest I think it's the fourth most visited Web site in the world, the biggest being Google and then Facebook. and I forget what the third one is. Tbtail.net by any chance? I think that was it yeah then Twitter no I mean Twitter is Twitter is very actually very small compared to Facebook or Meta or whatever you want to call it now but it still is it seems to me like it's the place and even and then that stuff like so then that Sean Hannity piece what happens it gets put on Facebook somebody grabs a clip of it and and now somebody else's grandma who doesn't watch Fox News but her Facebook algorithm is delivering her you know stuff like this it's just I don't know why I'm picking on everyone's grandmothers but you know what I mean it's like it seems to me that even if it is just the chattering class chattering at each other it's where a lot of stuff starts that then kind of makes its way into other places where a lot of people who even aren't even on Twitter see it

yeah and I mean now I feel like I'm trying to go back and clean up my earlier comments but it sort of reminds me the more we talk kind of about giving things oxygen and sort of saying like well I have my I have my Twitter account I follow people that don't upset me you know for the most part but then these people who don't upset me are upset over the news they're basically upset over something that Elon Musk tweeted essentially and then they just keep on amplifying that louder and louder and louder in this echo chamber and where it starts to be like okay now we're turning this into a toxic place by retweeting toxic people who want us to pay attention to them with our own take on it and that's always been the infuriating thing to me and i sort of you mentioned truth social and sort of like well look look what happened like there might be i'm sure there might be luke there might be terrible things being said over at truth social and while i don't think it's necessarily good to like kind of totally live in a in a vacuum where we just block everything out like if really bad things are being planned over at truth social on a january 6th you know level or something that's terrible and hopefully journalists are over there keeping an eye on things and so if something big does break over there or if somebody does say something of significance that is of a broader news value that will be reported on but um the fact that i have no i have no idea what anybody has ever said on truth social i have no idea what trump is saying over there it's just like okay they have a space where they can play in and like the fact that we're not amplifying that really kind of like i think sort of proves the point that like just like we don't we don't have to we don't have to spend all of our time just sort of like amplifying the terrible stuff like it doesn't have to be such a terrible place if we're not doing it but again I want to say that you're I'm not I'm not talking about your experience of wanting to get off the platform I think that makes a lot of sense too I'm just criticizing the people who are making it a bad place by complaining that it's going to become a bad place I would really like whoever is inventing

the next thing to invent it really fast please yeah because i miss being able to put my important thoughts out in the world like uh such as and i this is literally a tweet that i sent a long time ago but if there's more than 10 people in line for coffee your new order is black coffee that's how this is going to need to work because this morning when i was coming back from my jog i was there's a little coffee shop here in the hotel and i was waiting to get a cup of coffee bring back up to the room to do the show and it was um somebody was just ordering so many this wasn't a starbucks or anything it was just kind of a like a cafe but they still have you know they offer things that have so much steamed whatever in them and different you know and it's just one incredibly um hard-working and nice woman who is like the only person in this little coffee stand So she's I mean, she was really, really doing a good job. But somebody was ordering like six drinks that all needed to be steamed at different levels. And they were somewhere half calf. And it was really something to behold. And I just kind of thought, I mean, people should be allowed to live their life. But is that is it is there something socially irresponsible? And there was a line of people. There's something socially irresponsible about ordering six involved, steamed, various pumpkin chai drinks when there's a line. Is that is that just seems like bad form to me?

I mean, listen.

It sort of sounds like that's an the company has a menu. We're allowed to order off the menu like I wouldn't do that. You're right. Like I'm somebody who's always kind of looking over my shoulder to see if I'm in somebody else's way. So I think you know how I would treat that situation. But like I don't think that like I can sit here and say like, yeah, if there's a long line, you can't order what you've waited in that long line to get. Like if somebody is like coming down from their hotel room to get coffees for the rest of their coworkers or their family or whatever, and then they see it's a long line. And so they just come back with one black coffee That doesn't really make sense to me

I guess that would be a bad outcome too That's a good point This is one of those things that's not fair Because that's not really what I go in for anyway Those kinds of drinks So like I'm very It's easy for me to be judgy about that Because it's not a thing that really appeals to me If it did I probably would have a totally different take on it But see that's just the kind of thing That I would just have loved To light up the internet with With a quality tweet and I wasn't able to do it I had to instead I had to talk about it with you.

I'm going to create a new poll and it's going to say, should Luke Burbank come back on Twitter? And then we'll see.

Will it get more or less engagement than the supposed Trump poll? I mean, one last thing on that. It's like allegedly part of why Elon Musk, I mean, what he claims he wanted to buy Twitter because or he he one of his missions with Twitter is to sort of clean up the spam bots and things like that. And it's interesting to use a poll like this. I mean, to the degree that this was in any way ever, there was any chance that it was going to end in anything other than, yeah, Trump should come back on Twitter, a thing Musk was already on the record as saying he was going to do. But, I mean, I feel like I could write a bot that could spam one of those polls. Like, if you gave me two hours, I could just Google around and figure out how to write a bot. I mean, an online poll is one of the most easily hacked and one of the least reliable ways to get to any decision, which, again, I think indicates how how how not serious Musk was about this being an actual way of deciding this matter. I think he had already decided the matter.

All you have to do is log into your HBO Max account first. OK, good luck.

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.

Oh, man. The other thing I wanted to talk about with you today, which I don't want to. If we start talking about this, it may sort of, you know, take up the time we have set aside for emails and emails. But I, as I was on my way out of the building this morning, a guy gets into the elevator in a bathrobe and the slippers from the hotel. now he had on shorts and a t-shirt it wasn't like he was only in the bathrobe but he could not have been less phased like this was this was for him a completely normal thing to do to wander around the hotel in the hotel bathrobe and the hotel slippers over his shorts and a t-shirt have you ever seen anything like that in your life well sort of weirdly why was i thinking about this

today did i see somebody taking out their garbage in pajamas or something because i i was thinking

about we talked about it on the show the other day though tony soprano style yeah but i know

that's the thing i saw something yesterday and again not that i was sitting there judging somebody but i i saw something yesterday that made me reflect back on the conversation we had on the show and again i i tell these stories about how i have tonight pants that are also just like really old khakis and my tonight shirt is like a button down and people are like how could you relax in that and it's like for me i feel more relaxed knowing that if there's an emergency and i have to run outside that i won't be in pajama bottoms and again like i know i say all that saying like i know that i am the weird one there like there's no there's no doubt about that that was weird behavior in 1994 when i think i started to establish these habits um and it's certainly weird though in 2022 because just like the the the comfort the the comfort that people have and i'm not going to go on a rant here of being like in my day people had dressed like they had some self-respect or whatever like it's none of my business and people should do whatever they can do and you know live in society and and and do what's right for them and their circumstances but like yeah i do feel like i mean we live in a society now where people are very comfortable just being in their pajamas right like in in public and stores and whatnot but this i guess

the thing about this was it wasn't even like this guy's pajamas like that he was in his you know comfy sweats or his like you know kind of tonight pants that have like minions on them and he's just kind of like out in the hall of the hotel which would be a little informal but of course i'm with you everyone should just do whatever they want to do this was the full-on hotel bathrobe hotel slippers like it looked like he was sleepwalking like and he's looking at his phone and it's like i guess the thing is i'm putting myself in his shoes i'm putting

myself in his slippers and just thinking like if i had been wandering the hotel in my bathrobe i would be so unbelievably self-conscious and he was unbelievably not self-conscious yeah he just was maybe i'm just maybe i just resent somebody being that comfortable in their own skin i've never for one second ever felt that comfortable in my own skin ever did you say dude why you got

to swear so much i don't know what that's a reference to oh the big lebowski that was oh he just i mean if he's wandering around in a robe and slippers he's sort of he sort of

it was it was extreme except he had this guy had this guy had like a shaved head if he would have had long hair you're right he would have exactly but wait who says why do you have to swear so much

sam elliot right it's in the same scene where the bar eats you i think that's another thing dude

you gotta swear i forgot about that so he's sam elliot is chastising him gently for too much

swearing yeah i think it's in the same scene or it might be just maybe there are two scenes with sam elliott i'll see if i can find it here but interesting before i do that let me play a quick voicemail for you here this is from listener rachel um you had or we had brought up the topic of asmr on the show last week and i think you asked me specifically like what is asmr you didn't say what does it stand for but like kind of how does it apply in a sentence and i was wrong i I guess I was wrong because I said ASMR is the content in the same way you might say this is a movie or this is a TV show. I thought ASMR was a type of content, be it a video or just audio only that you can find on YouTube or what have you. But that is not technically right. And actually, listener Rachel called in with this interesting response.

response hi guys um this is listener rachel from pittsburgh again calling in um with some more fair i guess therapist facts i'm not sure that this is actually a therapist fact but asmr is actually um stands for autonomous sensory meridian response so it's supposed to be a response that autonomous mean you can't control it right this sensory experience that runs up kind of your nervous system and it feels like that tingly sensation kind of in the back of your brain that feels positive for people I get ASMR from the sound of people like drawing with charcoal pencils like that sound feels really nice for me my friend said and i had never thought of it but once she said it it was true for me too that uh she gets that response from listening to the sound of hockey being played just like the puck sliding on the ice when the wow the like quiet thud of it being hit by a dick so uh my question for you is what is kind of the weird asmr response that you have right like it's common for it to be the sound of whispering or uh like pouring coffee maybe but like what actually gives you that tingly response all right power out now this is interesting

because if if that's what asmr stands for i mean not if it is and so it's autonomous sensory meridian response rachel said right um i think i just always assume that the a might have been audio or something along the lines of it because i associate it with audio so much and i think a lot of us do but it's actually just a sensory response and i was on a little um i was on a little uh a like a walking bridge this weekend that goes over aurora i'm sure you know it very well luke it's the one that is now like kind of colorful over here in north seattle right and um that's kind of near our house it's actually by the um theater that we went to we had some time to kill before the movie started and i need to walk off some of my ihop breakfast so i said hey let's walk over the bridge which i'd never been on before and the bridge is not super high off the ground it just kind of it goes over aurora which is a terrible road to try to cross so this helps pedestrians cross over the road and i stood on top of this bridge and watched the traffic go underneath us and i got a total sensory response to that now it was not in the back of my brain though it was more in my undercarriage sort of but like it's it was sort of like um it was sort of like a fear of heights but i don't think it was the heights it was like the heights with the rushing traffic below us like i had a sensory response to that but would that be considered asmr or does it have to be in the back of your head and also was it positive or negative for you it was interesting it wasn't because i wasn't like often if i have that feeling it means i'm i'm in a position where i'm really scared of heights and i'm kind of you know maybe mid-level panicking but i wasn't mid-level panicking i just it was just like oh i i kind of liked being up there i liked watching the traffic there was something interesting about kind of having that perspective on aurora

And all the cars going underneath. But I definitely had a weird tingling feeling doing it.

Yeah, I don't have a good answer to Rachel's question. If I had some time to think about it, I could come up with something. I can say that a sound that I can't, like, if I even talk about it, it makes me feel kind of faint is the sound or even the feeling of cotton balls rubbing together. I knew you were going to say that. You've mentioned that. That's kind of my biggie. that really like i honestly get just saying it the hair on my arms stands up so that's i don't i wouldn't call that asmr or i guess i don't know maybe it is maybe it is in that it's in that it's autonomous right i'm not in control of it so which is interesting because i think that the beginning of this conversation was is asmr always a positive because i think it had to do with i started talking about the listeners who really don't like it when we like eat food on the mic or whatever or when you have a you know you have like a drink of your of your drink that had ice in it or something and I actually love that I find that to be very very sort of calming and of course I like all of the kind of greatest hits of sounds i.e. you know ocean you know waves breaking on the ocean and all the stuff that's in those various sound machines and the good old calm app our buddies over at calm like I really do like all that stuff but I don't think that's what Rachel was really asking about Rachel wanted to know um you know if there's a like hockey is a great one that's you know that's interesting i can totally my guess would be also that that person who's rachel's friend grew up playing hockey grew up going to a lot of hockey games so there's probably kind of that nostalgia aspect of it i could totally i could imagine that as well so i'm going to be thinking about that for the next couple days and i will give a proper answer when i think of it what is the weird sound that i find kind of calming or that just does an asmr number on me um you know almost in spite of my uh you know

whether or not i want it to so and i will say that if it if it definitely does have to be like kind of in the back of the head and and down like the spine which is how i see it described everywhere here as i'm kind of googling around um i guess i might just not have it like i definitely get responses to things but like i don't i can't quite picture that particular sense i get the the idea of, you know, having a reaction, as you said, where the hair goes up on your arms or, you know, fingernails on a chalkboard, even just thinking about all that stuff. Like, I have a reaction to it, but not there, really. It's kind of, they're all a little bit different.

But anyway. Yeah. All right. We should wrap it up because I'm going to go. Well, first of all, the plan is that I'm going to fly home tonight and we'll be able to join you tomorrow from portland which i'm as you might imagine quite looking forward to but while we were talking i got a a text that our person we're supposed to interview this afternoon is potentially bailing on us meaning not bailing on us but can't do the interview so i don't know maybe i live in

san francisco oh my god two weeks in new york back to seattle for a live live wire then suddenly back to dc for another interview then back to san francisco like this is it you just it's been a

pretty like i mean it's it's definitely been uh uh it's been an intense amount of travel but um but you know i mean i think we're getting some good stuff and uh and i'll be happy for it like uh you know sunday morning when it's all said and done and the piece is on and hopefully you know our bosses will like it and you know there's one other thing which is there's a not insignificant chance that elon musk will end up seeing the piece and will i'm sure hate it because if we just accurately report i mean certainly we're not going to try to opine at all but if we're just my sense with him is that when people accurately report things that are not flattering for him he takes it as some sort of personal attack and he already so cbs made this announcement like our bosses made this announcement um that we were not going to use twitter for a while for like until they could figure out the security because like the dual factor authentication and there's a bunch of stuff that i think are like whatever it people were like we don't even know if twitter is actually safe to use as a company which i don't know if that was an overreaction or not but that was the announcement and then they did they they went through their their whatever research and then they decided that uh it was safe and so then someone made this meme that's like from broke back mountain the one character saying i wish i could quit you but instead it's cbs saying that They wish they could quit Elon, and then Elon retweeted that. So we're already kind of on his radar right now, and it would be very interesting if we do our absolute best to put a very even-handed piece out, which we're going to do, and if still we end up getting Elon and his folks coming for us over it. That'll be a weird Monday.

Yeah, that's so funny. That's almost like the opposite of what I was saying. Now you have him sort of amplifying your work. work in supposedly a trolley way but it's people that are talking about cbs you know like i mean

the thing too right and i mean the guy's pretty busy right now and is not there's no shortage of ink being spilled over him so it's also very possible he'll have no idea this happens but uh it just he's so sort of unpredictable in terms of who he what he decides to react to or interact with it'll be stuff that makes kind of no sense it'll be a person with five followers um who he'll get into it with or whatever um and they're and also ignoring the new york times or whatever so i don't know it's just i i could see a universe in which i wake up sunday morning and look at my phone i guess i wouldn't be looking at twitter anymore but i'll look at my phone and i could have like 20 texts from people being like did you see that elon musk got mad about your story

yeah oh speaking of i got a text from a friend who said that um our pal chris hayes mentioned our podcast again at the maybe i think on his tv show god did you hear anything about his television

program we could really use that t that tbtl desperately needs that chris hayes all-in bump so that's great thanks chris appreciate it all right uh that's going to do it for today's show um but we will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you um i'll either be here or in portland or possibly guam it's definitely down to one of the three so uh we'll all find out tomorrow where i am in the meantime have a great monday take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

you're just one thing dude what's that you have to use so many cuss words What the f**k are you talking about? Power out.