Muse

Attention everyone. Hello. Yes, I just want you to know that this is not my decision, but from here on out, we can no longer be friends. And when we talk about things here, we must only discuss work-associated things. And you can consider this my retirement from comedy. And in the future, if I want to say something funny or witty or do an impression, I will no longer ever do any of those things. Does that include that's what she said?

Mm-hmm. Yes. Wow, that is really hard. You really think you can go all day long? Well, you always left me satisfied and smiling, so...

That's what she said.

Michael.

Michael. Michael, please.

TBTL. All right, everybody. Who's ready to laugh? I can't hear you. That's not true, of course. But cheer louder. Yeah. What do you see when you look in the mirror? Daffy Duck. I have a picture of him taped in my mirror.

Okay, what do you see next to Daffy Duck?

Ryan Gosling.

Can you imagine doing a podcast for 10 and a half, 11 years?

I'd feel terrible.

He's really having trouble keeping his balance. He's still funny, but not ha-ha funny.

You wouldn't say that to Tom Petty, would you?

Put my headphones on, and here we go.

I'm so excited. All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. That's what's in. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. First things first, I love my job. Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where we are looking at a kind of gray, slightly glum, but not raining. So that's a win. A day where my concerns are more indoor related and that the cat has just been on fleek this morning. I must forget how injurious our interactions are. My interactions with my cat bubbles. It's time for cat massage. Because I feel like we have a pretty okay relationship. We have fun. We like to, you know, watch Netflix together and throw little earplugs around and chase them. It's all nice. And then I'll be like, yesterday I was at a get-together with my family for the holidays. And I'll look down at my hand, and it's just like I've been, you know, giving Freddy Krueger a high five or something. Like, I do not notice how much she's terrorizing me in the scratching department. But anyway, I'm going to get past that, and we are going to get to episode 3,839 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Speaking of that family get-together I went to, we had a white elephant gift exchange.

So many children ready, and for them, quite a gift waiting.

And it was fun, but it got awkward for a minute. I wasn't planning on talking about it on the show today, but then I just thought, you know, this show is, well, it's like a gift. You hold it and you pass it on to the next person. Also, it's a place where we try to get really real, and I was really having some real feelings during the White Elephant Gift Exchange yesterday, so we'll talk about that. Also, Elon Musk put a poll up on Twitter, which he owns, I don't know if you heard, where he asked the people on Twitter if he should still be in charge of Twitter. I wish I hadn't done that. It didn't go great for him. So we'll talk about that. Also, the youngest new member of Congress, like United States Congress, cannot get an apartment because it is so expensive and also he has not great credit. I'm an activist and house party enthusiast. It indicates just how incredibly competitive and unfair it would seem the housing market can be, even as we see inflation on the rise and interest rates up. You'd think that the economy cooling a bit would help with that, but it's not. We'll talk about that. Because this is where you turn for macroeconomic conversations. Mostly from this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show, Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships He is Andrew

As Jay would say, he's got flow

Walsh, and he's joining me right now Good morning, my friend

Good morning, I'm looking at my notes from last week here, Luke As I kind of rearrange today's show sheet Adjust the fonts a little bit for my usage

You put it in Comic Sans, right? You make the show shit

sheets you email them to me i put them in a google doc i put them in sanskrit and comic sans because that's how i like to read them and i realize i see a note here from last week i had a show title all ready to go um that we didn't get to use because we never talked about the topic ursay can you see i had ready to go to talk when we're going to talk about jim ursay and now this is like kind of a new realization of when we don't get to topics sometimes if i have a show title in the back of my head that goes to waste as well well we can talk about jim mercy right now if you'd like to i mean in a certain way we already have i mean i've uttered it on the show

is that the rule it's canon it's part of the it's canon uh i was trying to oh this is a good title too i was listening to so i was doing a lot of driving yesterday up to shelton washington where my sister lives and then back down to this area and i was listening to a lot of 99 invisible and And they had a show, an episode about the kind of trends around houseplants. Turns out we are not the most houseplant-obsessed generation or whatever you want to call it. The Victorian era, people were really into houseplants. And then it kind of went away a bit when sort of modernism and minimalism came into popularity. But now it's back again, and social media has a lot to do with it anyway. their show title for their show about house plants was say hello to my little frond

that's quality good oh and that's i thought it was going to be like really polished in public radio with just a hint of pun but no that is messy and i love it it works so hard i love it

it's great yeah no i was like i will listen to this episode based on the show title alone hopefully every once in a while we're able to achieve that with our listeners and the show

titles to this show somebody i was on a text conversation with somebody recently and they were joking around about a uh i don't know going to see a pink floyd cover band or something and i said oh you mean the sid baritones i thought that was pretty cool and my friend replied puntastic which made me think that that is not somebody who's into my punny bullshit i used to be against puns what happened it's like i you're either like totally into them or totally against them maybe it was just like the show title thing for us but like i used to think that puns were the lowest level of humor now here i am i live and die by the pun i think it's sliding into middle

age i think it's that we're sliding into middle ages dms and it's just like so much stuff like that that i just once thought was corny i'm now you know i have certainly more appreciation for it i don't i feel like i don't use puns that often but i use a lot of word play things that are adjacent to puns i can't give you a good example right now because that would make this of quality broadcasts and we're not here to do that but i feel like i do now just use a lot of kind of word-based jokes or things that sound like other things or stuff that's right on the

edge of a pun yeah the the dad the quote-unquote dad joke type of situation um hey i rarely say this but i'm actually really interested in what you mentioned at the top of the show sorry i don't know i don't know why i'm being mean i'm wow i'm just teasing but um for lack of a better segue you really got me what's going on with the white elephant thing well we had a

a white elephant gift exchange which you know i only i have to say i don't know if i'd ever done the white elephant with the steels until a few years ago i think maybe we maybe carrie does it with her family i think that might have been my introduction to that part of the white elephant i always thought a white elephant gift exchange was just you get kind of a weird like you get sort of like a silly gift and you you know you give it to somebody at work or whatever and it's just stuff that's kind of funny and silly and that's what i thought a white elephant was but i guess there's this component where you everybody gets a number and then you know if you don't like the thing that you unwrap you can steal something that somebody else has right are you familiar with

how all this works yeah yeah we had white elephant parties i think i was introduced to them in new hampshire and yeah that's the thing so you draw a number and then the number corresponds to a gift that's you know on the floor or whatever well i grab your gift right it corresponds to just where you get to pick oh where you oh that's true i'm sorry you're right in which you get yeah and then you can choose just based on the looks of the package or whatever then you open it up and if you're the very first person you're like okay good i got a um i don't know bosom buddies tea set and then um the next person that would be that would be awesome i'd hang on to that right but then the next person opens up number two and they get something that they don't like they get a bottle of uh cheap wine and they don't even drink so they say i'm gonna trade with with number one and now they have not trade they're gonna steal wait they don't have to give the they don't have

to give oh actually no no sorry i'm already mess i'm messing this up so basically if if person number two has opened their bottle of cheap wine they're stuck with it no i thought you number two

doesn't then get to look around the room and say okay i'd rather have the the polka set and then they trade their wine. The way we play it is you have to make that decision before you've opened your present because the interesting thing is the interesting thing Scoob is that you have to make that decision when you don't know what it is you've because it would be easy if you open a bottle of if you open a bottle of cheap wine and you don't drink that sounds like we're about two thirds of the way to a Tom Waits song it's a cheap wine but he doesn't drink but if you open the thing and you don't like it and then you get to pick something else it's anyway again I'm bizarrely enough at 46 I'm relatively new to this process I only know the way that I've played it the last few years and it is you when your turn comes up you can basically like steal something that's out there or open something that you don't know what it is oh that's

interesting that isn't how we play there must be different versions the way the way we play was just more simple and the only times I did this was a couple of times with like a literally at a work party we would go to like the GM's house or wherever we'd have these parties it was just pretty small radio station at the time and very kind of familial um and so it would just be like okay well i opened up this thing i don't want it so and and everybody knows what is like kind of the most as the game goes on everybody knows what is the most coveted thing in the room but i never nobody that i played with said that you had to like kind of make that decision before opening but both make sense okay so that's how you guys are playing and also once something has been stolen twice it's frozen oh it's shit no this is yeah

this is way more you can't steal it back from so like if you get something really awesome and then somebody steals it from you then you now can either go grab another wrapped present or you can steal something that's out in the game that's been unwrapped okay but you can't steal back the

thing that was just stolen yeah that makes sense but the frozen thing is interesting boy this is

complicated so uh we're you know we're playing this game and it's really fun but the thing is um you know it's like people have put in all kinds of fun little the the limit was ten dollars by the way that was the that was what the amount that the max amount and that you should spend on this so it wasn't like you know everything was pretty much uh within reason so it was like you know some some chocolate covered pretzels a candle and things like that well addy decided to i accidentally or without knowing and i picked up the thing that addy had brought that was wrapped and of course it was awesome it was these like Cadbury eggs that I love that are usually only around at Easter but now they're releasing some like Christmas version and Addie also loves them so she was like yeah I just saw these and then the thing the other thing along with the Cadbury eggs was an Amazon dot an Amazon Echo Alexa dot those are only 10 bucks they're on sale for 14.99 right now or something and Addie was like quick to point out she was like i know it seems weird it was $14.99 it was almost $10 was in the range of $10 well that it was really interesting to see how it went from just being kind of like a fun little oh i got some chocolate pretzels and some socks to like what there's there's amazon technology in the in the mix and the person who was the most affected by this was my one and only mother who by the way wouldn't even know what to do with an amazon alexa dot if uh you know if you threw it at her but she just perceived value and it was really interesting to watch because it went from being this kind of this like fun casual thing to something that felt a little different to me the first thing was my mom not unlike me at the beginning of this conversation was sort of confused about the rules and she was she had basically picked up a prize a present or whatever and opened it and only then realized that she could have stolen before she went and she only realized it was midway through the first round so she was like wait I could have stolen the whole time now the thing was the gift that she had opened that she was clearly expressing a certain amount of disinterest around was something that had been created by a family member It was a piece of art that a family member had made.

Can I jump in? My mom is like, yeah. Here's the thing, though, and that's where these things get a little – you're introducing the possibility of tension is, like, I do think that – I could be talked out about this. Tell me if you think I'm wrong here. but i i always thought a white elephant was find something really goofy find something that doesn't have a lot of value or much value but you open it up and then people laugh at it it's funny it's goofy it's whatever now there has to be some difference in level i suppose of kind of perceived quality um because otherwise like you know that what would be the game if you didn't want to steal right but i sort of feel like if the and i realize i'm talking about your family members i don't know who made this thing i don't want to hurt any feelings but in a certain way like i feel like you shouldn't bring something to a white elephant that you feel actually attached to or that you put actual thought and love into because if it's compared to again a bosom buddies tea set and people want the tea set like it's sort of only going to lead to hard feelings well yes except

the people in question here were children a child made a child made a piece of art child a young person I don't want to say child a young person a person under the age of 18 made a piece of art that my mother who everyone just do the math is related to this young person

immediately started hollering

about I was allowed to steal and I didn't know it and then it was just like and I was like mom mom mom

mom mom luke this might be hard for you to tell but god this is a good story because i'm i'm

wincing over here and it's like it just i think something primal gets set off in my mom's brain when there is uh-huh it's hard to describe but it's like when there's an environment like this where there is just stuff and some of the stuff is perceived to be having slightly more value or at least more personal value to to somebody in other words when there is a thing like this my mother's maternal and grand eternal instincts just shut off and it becomes something primal for her and it was like i could just see in her eyes that she was legitimately pissed that she didn't know

she could have stolen the amazon alexa from me uh-huh you know right and and and yeah and there

And also then be unburdened from a lovely side note. I have the piece of art here at my house. I ended up, to skip to the end of the story, but we'll circle back. I ended up with the thing. It's amazing. It's really good. The person who made this is very talented. And I was excited to have this thing, and I'm putting it up in my house. So it's not even like it was some kid made a hand turkey or something. It's like a good thing that also has value because it's made by somebody who I love, right? And somehow this just is like – my mom's brain's wiring does not work this way in those scenarios. And so I said, well, mom, what did you want to steal? And she goes, well, that thing you have. And I was like, I'll buy you one. So I proceeded to buy my mother an Amazon Alexa Dot on Amazon and send it to my parents' house on my phone.

Did you do that in the moment, like during the game? I did it five minutes after the game. Uh-huh, just to, like, because the conversation was continuing?

Also, I felt a little bad because I was a little... The problem is my mom's wiring is the way it is around these things, and then my wiring is the way it is around my mom being that way around these things.

Yeah.

So, like, I make things worse because I can't just kind of, like, smile and kind of laugh it off like everybody else does. I go in for the, not the kill, but I go in for the, like, really, Mom? It's $15. Do you want an Alexa? I have $15, I'll get you one That's not a fun energy during The White Elephant either But it just And then And again, I'm sorry that I've done such a poor job Explaining the rules of this game And also how this particular version of it Was going But it ended up being the case That one of My mother's other Relations Who are children, i.e. not her kids but let's say maybe kids of her kids had gotten something that was like a bunch of bath salts or something not bath salts like the kinds you smoke that's what I got later I stole that from a person I met at the mall no but like here's what I'm trying to say in an extremely I'm being weird about this I'm trying not to be too specific about who was who in this other than my mom which I'm being very clear about I feel like the job of adults in a white elephant situation when there are kids the job of the adults is to take every bullet possible in terms of making sure the kids can get the fun thing they want to get yes yes and the younger people i agree if you see a kid that has a bunch of candles and they're nine you steal their candles so they get another try and they can try to get the nerf

gun and you give them the cigarettes like that's how it works thank you exactly as the adults

our job we don't go in with any expectations about what we're going to get from the white elephant we are there to facilitate the people under the age of 18 having as much fun as possible yeah and there was a situation where my mother had uh i think she had at this point somebody had stolen the stuff from her because she was going on about it so much that it was like it was potentially becoming weird and so somebody stole it from her so now she had a steal so she could go back out and then she went and got i forget what she got some almond I'm going to show you a little bit. maroka or something and now she's but oh sorry but what happened was she had a steel to use she could pick anything she wanted and one of her grandkids had some shit sandwich they didn't want and they were sitting next to her and she was looking around for like is that dot still frozen and i was like mother steal the nativity scene hummel things from abe so he can get something fun like x actually was my nephew jack who had picked up this thing was blue tissue paper that was like pottery nativity scene and like um a brooch literally my 11 year old nephew had a brooch and a nativity scene my mom had nothing and she was like is that dot frozen and i was like steal the goddamn brooch did you say that out loud or you were saying this in your head i said it out loud not goddamn i was like hey mom mom mom can you steal that please from jack so that he can get something fun for him and did she and she just like she did to her credit that's why i bought her a dot she did the right thing but it was like so i just was shocked i was just shocked that first of all i could have handled everything better including probably not talking about it on the show today but like it just shocked me that it took that much cajoling to just do the obvious thing as an adult which is like look out for the kids in the room at a white elephant gift when the amount of purchase is ten dollars i'd never played with kids before but i

mean you're absolutely right and i like to think even with my own emotional stuntedness that i would be able to pick up on on that vibe pretty quickly myself um because i had only played with adults before and it's like again it was kind of a it was a work thing and so and it was you know get a little bit more body we played like strip white elephant i don't know i assume you guys didn't play strip white elephant right the adults did the kids were horrified yeah right um but uh yeah i could see it so i want to ask you another question here but now i'm a little bit like i don't want to make you more uncomfortable or give up more details but it's out here this is just

we're really hoping this is one of the episodes that no one in my family okay but hopefully everyone is still you know kind of recovering from yesterday's festivities and is not listening to

tbtl today so i guess my question is of the younger people like in your extended family who do you like the best you like the worst and then rank them no um it's interesting to hear this from a perspective of somebody who this is clearly not a a tradition because you're kind of just learning about it or learning about this version of it so i get the impression this isn't something that your family has done a lot um who brought this to the table was it one of the younger people who had heard about it and said hey this could be a fun thing i am guessing it was my

sister hannah because we had it this event was at her house oh okay but i don't remember i don't remember who on hawk squad pitched the idea of a white elephant thing and by the way it was really fun and everyone had a great time and i'm making it sound also like it was this tension filled thing it was only tense in my own mind because i was witnessing a behavior from my mom that feels to me part of an unfortunate pattern that's existed throughout my life so it was very triggering for me personally but not i don't think for the rest of the room everyone had a great time and it was very fun like if you were to pull everyone else who was there except me they would be like wasn't that a blast i had fun but i was also kind of dealing with this sort of frustration throughout of just being like please just do the maternal thing here why is that so hard in this situation

i'm gonna go deep here i'm gonna ask you a question i'm not joking um you've you know kind of lovingly talked about things that your mom does on the show that um not things that she does on the show but on the show you've lovingly talked about um things that your mom does that also kind of frustrate you you've also mentioned in in passing um and maybe not even so much in passing maybe in the early days when your mom was kind of interviewed on the show back when you're on the radio i think you guys expressed um that you're very similar in a lot of ways and i don't know your mom well enough to to see those similarities necessarily and while obviously you're somebody who can we'll go back to the phrase read a room and kind of like sense what other people are feeling in the room i i'm not saying that you would ever go into a white elephant and act the way your mom did in this case clearly you had a different perspective on it but do you think that the frustrations you have with your mom are amplified because in some ways you see so much

of yourself in your mom told you i was going maybe sub maybe subconsciously but in this one way like there's there are i mean i am in fact we were talking about this yesterday my mom and i like unrelated to the white elephant thing just kind of like how much of my personality comes from her it's pretty much all of it because well i never really met my biological father uh you know my dad, Walter Burbank, I'm not genetically related to him, and he and I have pretty different personalities. So I'm pretty much

100% Susie Kelly um but I don't in this moment in that moment of the white elephant thing I can't say that consciously I was I was extra frustrated because of our similarities because this is a way in which we're dissimilar yeah um in this one way but we're very similar in a lot of ways um but yeah it was just and again the thing was my mom ended up with the nativity scene and the brooch and was super stoked about it that's the thing about my mom that's so interesting It wasn't like – it was like she did the right thing after I publicly shamed her, and then she was happy with it. And then later she said that she was joking about one in the Amazon dot, which was not true. She was not joking. But it was like she – my mom is just in these – that's why I said it's primal because it wasn't even like – it was like she goes into some kind of a fugue state. I know people don't like it, I guess, if we say that. But then she snaps out of it, and then everything is different. It wasn't like the rest of the night was ruined or it was weird. Everything was fine. We had a really wonderful day together. But she just – there was something that happens that triggers this kind of like state for her where it's literally almost like fight or flight in a way. It's not conscious. And I, by the way, I get into that state myself often over other things. So maybe that is also a similarity. But the good news is, you know, my mom will, as of Wednesday, be the proud owner of an Amazon Alexa Dot, which I assume the next time I go to their house will be sitting in the box. Yeah.

Like, how do you use this thing?

Next to the coffee machine. Right.

It's not talking to the... Hey, why isn't it talking to the coffee machine? We set them next to each other. You gotta plug it in. Also, this is interesting. I'm on eBay now, and I see brand new handmade art, $75. Portland, Oregon, $75 or best offer. That's kind of an interesting coincidence here.

Well, I've got to pay for that dot somehow, Andrew.

And, you know, get your beak a little wet, too.

Yeah, sure. I mean, you know, I'm not going to – I mean, I need – for my time and energy, Andrew, I've got to get a – you know, I've got to get a little payoff for that. Sure, sure. Anyway, really fun holiday get-together yesterday for the family. And I mean that. I mean, I'm actually not even joking. It was a really wonderful day with everyone.

That does sound fun. And I know you want to wrap up, but let me just say, and maybe this will end it on a somewhat cheerier but introspective level. You're describing that, and I realize, wow, it's been so long since I was any part of a white elephant party. And I look back at maybe the first one. I know I've done a couple. They were to varying degrees of success. But I look back to those first couple I did way back in New Hampshire when I was a much younger person. And I have very happy memories of learning that game and playing that game and getting into it. But I also know me, and I know that I was probably griping about it ahead of time, and I was probably like, oh, I've got to find a stupid gift for this stupid thing. And I guarantee you, if somebody told me, hey, this Christmas party you're going to on Saturday, on Christmas Eve, it's going to be a white elephant thing. I'd be like, oh, another thing I've got to worry about. But then I would probably do it and have a really good time, because despite the little tension that you're describing here, it does remind me what a fun kind of game that can be when you get into things. Totally. And I tend to get into things eventually, but I'm also so reluctant to or reticent to or just plain old grumpy about. And it's a good reminder that I should try to maybe not be so negative about things up front, because that sounds like a that sounds like a fun thing to do when you're all gathered for the holidays.

It totally was. And yes, I, you know, yesterday morning I got up and I was like, I've got a two and a half hour drive in front of me and then a two and a half hour drive home. and there was some point in the journey where I was like, oh, this is a bit of a slog, you know? And I was just kind of, I wouldn't say I wasn't looking forward to it, but I was noting the time commitment just to get to and from where it was happening and had the thought like, oh, well, you know, this is my whole Sunday is now committed to this, et cetera. And yet it was so much fun and I just love my family and I love my nieces and nephews so much and I love my mom so much, I really do, that it was a blast. And I kind of had the same thought. I was like, I'm so glad that I'm here with these people doing this thing That if you would have given me some magic, you know, some ruby slippers Sunday morning and said, click these together and you can just lay here watching football all day under a blanket, I'm clicking those goddamn slippers. Yeah. But it was a really it was a really fun thing. And you're right. It's like those are the kinds of things that I have to sort of sometimes be obligated to do or sort of like if I commit and I'm like, I got to go do this thing. I don't maybe feel exactly like doing. But I'm always really glad that I'm a part of those things. And I'm just really lucky to have this awesome family that I have and, you know, to have a bunch of people that I love and, you know, who love me until they hear this broadcast.

People who love me.

No, I'm very fortunate. I'm very privileged. What's that? People who loved me. I'm so lucky to have people who loved me. All right.

Let's take a quick break, and then we'll do some top stories in a moment here on TBTL.

Thank you, baby.

Hey, let's think. What's going on?

I just noticed something in the donors.

I did, too.

I just noticed it as the music was playing.

That's fun These are the wonderful, generous people Who are keeping TVTL in business Including Hannah Nelson Of Grapeview, Washington A.K.A. Shelton, A.K.A. my sister A.K.A. the place Where the white elephanting was

The host of C1 of TVTL Today

Hope your family doesn't listen to this episode Full Full integration of my family structure Into today's episode I love it Thanks Hannah Love you Thank you Hannah Appreciate you Yeah Thanks also to Amy Zents Of Seattle, Washington I don't know what Amy Was doing yesterday Probably Hosting a holiday Get together as well With a white elephant With possible Awkward Undertones She didn't let that Get in the way Of supporting TBTL Financially though And we appreciate By the way These are the folks Who are donating On a monthly basis To the program And we are very Very appreciative Thanks Amy Thanks also to John Lynn of Spokane Washington. Thank you John. The gateway to the Inland Empire. Thanks also to Amy Crockett of San Jose, California of noted large city San Jose, California.

I tell you I did hear from a listener from San Jose who said it is very big here. It's big. We're big. San Jose is

big. Very big. Thanks Amy. Thanks also to Shannon Curry of Federal Way Washington. Which is also, I don't know if Federal Way is large, but I know it's the home of Wild Waves, which looms large in my mind, even to this day. I've driven past Wild Waves and Enchanted Village in Federal Way, Washington, I would say easily 5,000 times in my life. When you were a kid, did you beg your parents to stop there? Oh, I knew that was a non-starter. We're talking about a lady who wanted to steal an Amazon dot from a child. I think we were going to Wild Waves. no but we would go once a year with our school and it was like I did get to go I would go once a year so it would be at the end of the school year like you know early June when it would be warm enough that you could I mean everything was probably heated but we would go then and oh my gosh I would sit there in the wave pool and like Tiffany McMacken would be in a bikini and it was like everything was coming together for an 8th grade luke burbank like anyway shannon i'm sorry that was the digression we took over federal way

washington i like to picture you like oh yeah i'd go to wildwaves and i would sit in the um sauna with the old men and read a newspaper where i thought you were going with that it's so funny

though how like just body image and insecurity and stuff like finds a way life finds a way and insecurity finds a way because i remember being at wildwaves and being so embarrassed because i didn't have armpit hair but being like luckily you know i was privileged in that i was a kid who was very lithe you know i i was i didn't deal with um you know body issues around my weight or anything i just was kind of naturally a a pretty slender kid and and and and yet my brain found something for me to be deeply deeply embarrassed about in that wave pool and it was lack of armpit

hair and now you wax now you're like you're as you're a slippery irony of all of this and nobody

appreciates that more than James Duncan of Washougal, Washington.

James appreciates your eel-like features.

James was born with armpit hair.

James came out of the womb

with a thicket of armpit hair.

Alright, James, you get your money back. Let me know where to send the check. Sorry, bud.

Thank you, James. Thanks to all of our donors today for making TVTL possible. We really couldn't do this without you.

hello and welcome to top story all right uh oh you know you wanted to ask me i did have a question

about the present that i got at the or brought to the white elephant yeah i didn't want to interrupt

but i was curious um in the last segment what did you bring to the table because i don't think we

got into that i had stopped by a new seasons new seasons here in portland is an interesting place because it is a tier above Trader Joe's and a tier below Whole Foods market in my mind in terms of cost. I don't know if that's actually the case. I have not done a side-by-side, but that's just how I think of it. Like, if I'm going to a family thing and I want to bring stuff, but I want it to be kind of nicer...

But I don't want to splash out for Whole Foods prices. I will splash out for New Seasons prices.

But now Trader Joe's and Whole Foods are on opposite ends of a spectrum, right? So isn't Trader Joe's even a cheaper alternative than a Safeway or a QFC? Or am I wrong about that? I don't go in for the Joe's myself.

I love Trader Joe's. I mean, they have me dialed in in the packaging and just the whole thing. I don't actually know the answer to that. it's a good question like is Trader Joe's pound for pound cheaper than say a Safeway I don't know because it's like Trader Joe's is so its own business model I feel like they they do sell the same stuff but it's packaged so differently and it's like it's in different quantities and like there's just I don't I don't know I don't know how to answer that question I don't know what the answer is um but I think of I think of Trader Joe's as being somehow fancier than Safeway But maybe what it is is more interesting than Safeway. Then where do you put Sprouts in all of this?

We don't have to get hung up on that, though.

We don't have Sprouts around here. I haven't been to – I've been to a Sprouts once when Becca and I were driving back from Napa Valley because it was so hot in Portland the airplanes couldn't land. And we were just driving through, like, Northern California because we both had to get home for work. And we stopped at a Sprouts. But that was my one and only time in a Sprouts.

Yeah, there's a Sprouts kind of near me. It seems okay. I have a friend who really hates it for some reason. I don't even know why, but when we want to, like, kind of, like, get him all turned up on anger, which is a weird way of putting that, we want to rile him up is a better way of putting it. We'll just bring up Sprouts. But any who's, well, so you stopped at a New Seasons.

Right, and they have, what I like about New Seasons is they have a little kind of, I wouldn't even call it, I guess we'd call it a gift area. They just have a little area with, like, weird tchotchkes and stuff like that. So I knew I was going to go there to get the fixings that I was bringing for the meal, and I thought I'll just go and grab something from the kind of – like if you have nieces or nephews, New Seasons is great because they have a lot of like $5 to $10 toys that you can grab and then bring to the thing and then be like the hero. So I initially had picked up a calendar that had a cat on it. And I forget what the cat was doing, but they had two different cat calendars. And one of them was like, literally like, cat lasers. And I was like, give me a break. That's, we get it. Cat lasers are not a personality. But I did kind of think one of my nieces would love a calendar about cats. So I got a different, slightly ironic cat calendar, but one that was, or I was going to buy one. but one that was slightly less ironic than cat lasers if that makes any sense it was displaying a level of irony that i felt was appropriate for the young mind yes but then i thought well i don't know who's gonna actually end up getting this and do they want a cat calendar and whatever so then i ended up getting this like real high-end hot cocoa mix is it the balls is it like the balls

that you drop into hot water they look like i don't know it was in a box okay maybe maybe it

was it was in a box and it had like the marshmallows and whatever it was like it was hammers or something which i guess is like a high-end brand i didn't know it was twenty dollars by the way ironically it was probably the most expensive thing i i couldn't tell how much it was until i got to the checkout and then i was like i'm not taking this back i really had a moment i was like am i gonna get kicked out of the party for bringing a twenty dollar white elephant gift to the $10 White Elephant gift exchange. But I just thought, well, this is cute, and who doesn't love hot cocoa, and someone will get a kick out of this, and also I just needed to get on the road. The funny part was Addie got the hot chocolate or the hot cocoa mix, and I got the Amazon Dot and the Cadbury eggs from Addie, so it was a real gift of the Magi type of deal, or at least it was a direct exchange between father and daughter, except everyone came for the Amazon Dot, and nobody came for the hot cocoa, by the way. Zero steals. I think Addy now has that at her apartment in Seattle Who ended up with the dot? My cousin Johnny Who is a coder Get this He's a coder and he was like How does the Amazon dot work And I was like Bruh, aren't you a coder? Don't you make these? Don't you make these? Don't you build these? Yeah, he was like How does this work? And then he goes Is it going to be recording? Is this going to be sending all my info to the government? And I was like, yeah, probably you tell me I was like, yeah, exactly. You tell me, you know, more about this world than I do. And also, yes, but also you don't have to set a kitchen timer. So give it over to Bezos. Hi, Jeff Bezos. Please have all of my personal information, because now I can say to set a timer for 15 minutes.

It's interesting, you know, when those things were newer and you were a pretty early adapter to them or adopter. I'm sorry. Early adopter is the term, right? An adapter would be if you got one and then you changed it.

Well, the adapter, I need a new adapter because I'm sure the latest one has some other plug-in mechanism.

Yes, because it's got a different dong. single um but i said yeah you know i don't think i have a huge need for that but maybe down the line everybody will have them and i'll have one whatever well i still don't have any of those specific like home devices but it's interesting because that technology is just integrating into our existing devices so much right like i can just say okay girl to my phone i didn't want to say it too loud to trigger everybody's but you know i can get my phone to talk to me if it's sitting across the room i can talk to my remote control like i just got a new tv and that tv you can talk to it at least in certain apps and it's kind of like oh maybe it's one of those things kind of like the early days of web tv maybe you weren't somebody who got web tv right right away but eventually 20 years later everybody's kind of using a version of web tv it's just called netflix

and hulu i'm surprised that at this point that amazon even charges for these devices like they should just give them out for free because all it is is a business tool for them because now i you know i i mean the circuitry must be incredibly cheap at this point you know what i mean like the actual physical component of the thing components but also it allows me to again it allows them to gather all kinds of personal information on me i'm sure and it allows me to keep a shopping list which i do i'll tell the thing like hey uh put you know garbage bags on the list and then guess what i get uh a message from amazon at some point about things that are on my shopping list that they will happily bring to my apartment sometimes even today that happened recently not from my shopping list but i i ordered what did i buy oh you know what speaking of dongles i got this new apple watch and of course my the regular like usb uh it comes with a with a charger right it comes with a little thing you plug in but it doesn't use usb anymore now it uses usbc and i realized like more and more of my devices are switching over to or at least the the power sources and the the cords and the dongles it's all going to a usbc world now that's

kind of interesting because i you said it used to be usb but it wasn't it apples because iphones have their own little if i feel like almost everything else is ub usbc now but apple still has their little like dongles that are special just for iphone the part that goes into the phone

which i think is called like a lightning plug or something that's still proprietary to apple but the other end of that oh i see the thing that charges my apple watch the thing that they gave me yeah was a a circ a disc on a cord and i put my watch on that disc but you know what it didn't come with the thing that plugs into the which is weird because it's like a 500 watch and it didn't come with the thing that plugs into the wall yeah that thing is usbc so what i did was i went on amazon i thought i can read the i can i can read the the tea leaves here uh it's we're moving to a usbc world what i really need to have are a couple of usbc chargers just for various things because that's more and more stuff is going to use that and so i went on amazon and i bought a couple of them and this is like 10 in the morning and by like two in the afternoon they were at my apartment mailbox like i was getting an update and i don't know why that just like freaked my chili but it did there was just something really like almost on it was like a it was you know like the jimmy john's promise sandwiches so fast you'll freak this was like usbc plug-ins so fast you'll freak

right and it's just it's sort of uncomfortable yeah and it's almost kind of like because then you start to think because you want to be like listen you and i are not the most responsible consumers in the world right um there are people who really really try to live a life where they are being the most responsible consumers possible um and i i think you and i like we kind of have some guilty feelings about some of our shopping habits but not enough to actually change them too much you know i've actually been buying more things off of amazon i would say in the past few months than i used to like i needed some new markers for the dry erase board next to the dark board uh sure like i there's literally a time i would have driven up to the like bombed out office depot you know a couple miles north of me on aurora but it's like so much easier it's like i'll just buy it right now and i gotta say like you know obviously i'm not saying anything novel here you you have been a power amazon shopper for a long time but i think i always like kind of tried to not rely on it too much but boy once you like once you give over to the dark side and you just start to slip a bit it's just like why wouldn't you but then something reminds you that like this is too efficient this happened so quickly what happened in the world you know what what what what immoral butterfly flapped its wings here and what is the end result of it no just quickly talk about jim mercy no um uh yeah so i know what you mean it's this is a different this is sort of a different thing but like i don't know what it's been like in portland but it's been snowing here um like it's

been stopped now but it's starting kind of early evening yesterday actually actually afternoon it started snowing here in Seattle and then we went out to dinner with some friends and it was like it was coming out it was really really beautiful and I kind of like it I like I like seeing snow and especially if it's not going to be super heavy like it is in New Hampshire or Cleveland or other places as I've lived it's a very kind of romantic cozy thing around the holidays the problem is this is like the fourth or fifth snow we've had in Seattle uh so far this winter it's only December 19th usually snow is like a once a winter thing here yeah and I'm just like huh it's almost like the climate's changing and then like I start thinking like like does this city of Seattle have to start building different infrastructure because are we going to become a snow city I don't know this might just be a a quirk of this year I'm not trying to go off the rails but in my head i'm just kind of like i'm in sort of enjoying this but also this doesn't seem

right like at what cost exactly and there was something about yeah for whatever reason meanwhile you know i summon things to be delivered to my apartment all the time you know food by by way of doordash and stuff but there was something about just having a thought i got to get a couple of usbc plug-in things and then just getting an alert on my phone they're here and i was just like what what human had to suffer for this to occur yeah you know actually somewhere in the chain of these events me having this convenience is at the expense of somebody's happiness and i don't know which part of it is if it was the person who physically drove it here if it was the person who built it in china if it was you know i don't know where the humans the human cost is but there

is a human cost to this yes and it's probably spread out across a lot of different things it

It just hurts everyone.

Yeah, except me. From environmental. Yeah, but you got your SBC, and I got a bunch of colored markers, Luke. Sweet.

Speaking of tech stories, if you will, I know that we've been kind of back and forth on the Elon stuff. You're kind of, I think rightfully so, saying let's not necessarily spend a lot of time on the show obsessing over him and Twitter because that's a little bit what he wants. I do think this is kind of interesting, though. You know, he likes to put these polls up on Twitter. He put one up to ask if he should let Trump back on, and somebody pointed out that these polls seem very easily hacked, and if one of the things that Elon Musk says he wants to change about Twitter is the kind of veracity of it, he wanted to get rid of a lot of spam bot accounts he claimed when he bought the company, deciding things by a poll that you could – like I could write a bot that would probably illegally vote in one of these polls seems like a bad idea. but he put a tweet out that said should i continue to be in charge of twitter i uh i will abide by this and it was like 57 percent people saying no you shouldn't be in charge of twitter and so this raises this kind of interesting question is like will he actually abide by this this poll that he put up and also i wonder what in the heck he thought was going to happen did he just feel that confident like one of two things is possible either he felt so confident that the people on twitter would say oh no you're doing great elon you should continue to run it either he was overconfident about that or he legitimately is looking for a way to stop running twitter and just was like please please tell me i'm not i shouldn't be in charge of twitter anymore i will abide by this like it was a very weird uh very weird move and i wonder if he will actually do it now because he says that he will abide by the results of this poll or another option is people

weren't looking or talking about him for like five minutes and so he decided to do this like

well sure that could have been the motivation sure that's door number three but i guess my question is do you think there's any universe in which he actually stops running twitter because of this

poll i think there's a universe in which he stops running twitter i don't think it's going to be because of the poll i mean i don't know i'm just shooting from the hip here you know i i you know i'm sure you're more read up on this than i am i just sort of saw the headlines and i'm just like another poll like he did with the trump thing and he's doing this i mean i don't think that any obviously nothing is binding i mean the way he's running twitter is the polar opposite of everything that he said he wanted to do with twitter he's like oh it's not this the speech isn't free enough there and then he takes it over and then he bans a bunch of reporters for giving like for sharing information that is publicly accessible about where his helicopter is or plane or whatever it was like it's just and that that happened on thursday and a lot of people were saying like wow this is finally it this is the last straw for me and i i kind of got close with that i you know as far as my own journey with twitter like you got off of twitter you felt like it was like the morally right thing to do um and i was kind of like well i'll just see where it goes i mean i don't love that that elon musk owns this thing i find him deplorable but like you know whatever if my mariners fans are still talking about um hot stove league stuff they're like Thank you. you know, and I'm not following anybody who's doing a bunch of retweeting of people that I don't want to see in my timeline, then, you know, I'm basically fine. It was very chilling last Thursday to get this news of like reporters who had done nothing wrong, but share publicly available information being targeted, but some of whom have been reinstated, some of them with independent sources who have not had their accounts reinstated yet being kicked off of Twitter. And And, like, I found that, like, pretty upsetting. And so what I've been doing is I've been messing around with that Mastodon app a little bit more. And it's kind of funny is I think a whole bunch of people migrated is maybe the wrong word, but, like, kind of started experimenting with Mastodon to see if it could be an alternate platform on Thursday. I think there was I think a bunch of servers kind of were getting kind of slammed again because people are like, oh, this is kind of real. This is kind of this Twitter thing is feeling more and more dystopic. And I don't think that, like, 10 years from now, we're all going to be talking about Mastodon the way we're talking about Twitter. I don't think that's, like, a long-term solution. But, like, once you spend a little bit of time with it and then more and more people going over there, you can see, like, I'm trying to think, like, what is her name? I think she's a tech journalist. Parker Malloy. Is that? Do I have her name? Yes. She's big on Twitter, right? Like, and I saw them over on Mastodon, and they already have, like, tens of thousands of followers. And I was like, oh, wow. So, OK, so you can. And I never had tens of tens of thousands of followers. But I was like, OK, you can amass a following. And then if you go in, you look like, OK, well, who is this person who I like following? Then you can start to see a bunch of familiar names like, oh, I'll follow this person again. Oh, Baratunde is on here. OK, I'll follow him. Like and then it started to feel a little bit more like Twitter as I filled up my timeline more and more.

So it's kind of like I don't know I not that you asked by the way I realize I'm 17 minutes into a rant about my feelings on Twitter that you never asked for but I am starting to see if maybe I might like start by just deleting the app off of my main screen or deleting it off of my phone but not totally deleting my account so that all of my history is gone if that makes sense but I am more and more interested in maybe separating myself from that app.

I'm also, I'm settling into Instagram kind of more than I thought I would. Again, I'm misusing it. I'm just trying to send tweets out on Instagram. So there's all kinds of, you know, stories and funny stickers and all kinds of stuff I could do on there that I'm not doing. But I actually am finding it fun to be on there. It's not quite, it doesn't work quite as well for me as Twitter did. But it's not like a total, it's like I'm enjoying it more than I was initially. Although Addy did roast me slightly She goes, when did you become Instagram's most active user? And I was like, I have 15 posts, okay? I went from zero Post to 15 posts, so I guess that makes me Instagram's most active user Not to, I mean, state the obvious But I was looking at this article That I had linked to in the show sheet about Elon Musk doing this poll Just the photo they happened to use is Him and Jared Kushner Watching the World Cup in Qatar And it's just like, that tells you everything you need to know Just about the world Yeah

It's also knowing of the journalists to use that picture as well You know Interesting, you're absolutely right

That's a really good point I hadn't thought of it that way, but you're right That's a choice That's a choice as well That is a choice I mean, but did you watch the World Cup, by the way?

No, I didn't It's funny, I know Now, I was starting from almost like negative 100 of knowledge of the World Cup in anything soccer or football related. But because of listening to the Levitard show and also just like keeping my ears open, like literally when I was at the AM, PM buying beer the other day and hearing the guy behind the counter talk to a customer, neither of whom based on their accents were probably born in the United States, although I have no idea where they were born, like having like a very kind of fun animated conversation about whatever bracket that was. And I was just kind of like, oh, I kind of know what they're talking about. I realized that I have much more awareness of the world cup than i ever had before now i didn't watch a game but i still think that that's progress for soccer in this country when andrew walsh can kind of overhear a conversation at a

store and be able to follow it yeah i i was fairly into it i actually watched early yesterday morning i was watching the um well because the cat wakes me up at 5 30 every day now so that's fun um but uh but the so i was up watching france argentina like the the finals and then it was very funny because you know um argentina was leading to i'll just say two nil because i'm a real soccer head was leading two to nothing at at the break and now the cat i had played with the cat the cat had been sufficiently exercised and i was like i might be able to go back to sleep for half hour it's sunday morning and i was thinking man

I bet you I could get so much money on France right now because there's no way. Nobody thinks that France is going to come back and tie this game. They're down 2-0. I bet you I could get plus 1,000 on this bet. And I was also like Argentina had led 2-0 in a different game and had let the other team tie them. I think it might have been Morocco maybe or something. I forget who it was. And then I was like, don't be dumb. Every time you do this, bet a super long shot. Most of the time it doesn't work out. So I went, I'd like laid back down for another hour. And then I woke up and I looked at my phone and it was like the most amazing World Cup final ever. It's three, three. Messi has two goals. Mbappe has two. Like, and I was like, I was laughing my ass off because they had totally tied it. But then Argentina won. So I would have lost the bet. Had I made that bet, I would have lost it. So I guess that was a good call. Here is the thing. This is like an inside soccer thing. and I don't think you're probably going to have a ton of experience with this or have very much interest in what I'm about to say. But, you know, a way that a lot of goals get scored in soccer is through a penalty kick, right? Like in the game, somebody is in the box, so they're kind of near the other team's goal, and they get fouled. And if that happens, you get to put the ball, you know, like 15 feet from the goal, and there's the goalkeeper and you, and you kick it in, right? and there is a small chance that the goalkeeper could guess where you're going to kick the ball and dive and hit it, but it's a pretty small chance. My guess would be the conversion rate of penalty kicks is really high. Most of the time, and I played soccer in high school and I used to kick these kicks, and you pretty much almost always get a goal. What's weird to me about soccer is that the announcers and everyone else treats scoring a goal through the penalty kick like the same as if you were to like kick the ball from you know outside the box with some smoker through three guys and pass the keeper like it's all considered a goal there's no asterisk and we act as excited about the penalty kick as we do about some like amazing you know like uh you know bicycle kick for a goal or some really hard thing and i always want to say let's not get crazy it's you should convert the penalty kick this is it's i could do it i mean it's like it's like

going bananas over the extra point or something in football right or a free throw in that it's

like it's like it's like treating a free throw the same as treating a half court shot but i guess

the difference is even though it's often made the sport has much lower scores right i mean that's obvious but you know what i mean like a basketball game can get into the hundreds of points whereas you know this game was 3-3 and that's relatively high scoring for soccer right

or uh yes that was yeah that was really a for i think for a world cup final it's got to be in one of the higher scoring events maybe ever or in a long time um yes i just i feel like and this shows you that i'm not a real soccer fan i mean i get into it every four years for the world cup and i had a fun time watching it but i just feel like because they were like messy with two goals And I was like, yeah, but one of them was a penalty kick, to be honest. I mean, like most of us probably could do that. I mean, again, sometimes you get unlucky and the keeper guesses and they dive in the direction you're kicking it. But, like, it is way, way, way harder to be the goalkeeper defending a penalty kick than it is to be the person scoring the penalty kick because you have the advantage as the person. There's a lot of net. There's a lot of goal that you have to work with as the person kicking it in there. And I just if I have one piece of advice for world soccer, it's put an asterisk down.

That's all. I have a sports question for you. Can you play pickleball? Sorry, first of all, can you say pickleball? What the hell? What in the... Mondays, man, what was that? I don't know, but I love it. It's the only way...

Pickleball?

Suddenly I'm Buffalo Bill over here. It puts the pickle in the basket. I decide to close out my day by chomping down on half a bag of these Flamin' Hot pickle chips.

Wow, what was that from? I was just looking for pickle.

Flamin' Hot pickle chips. I have no idea. That's probably years old. Anyway, I was going to say, can you play pickleball, Luke, is the proper way to say that, on a tennis court? Because I know that pickleball is all the rage now. I was driving somewhere the other day, and I almost crashed. I didn't almost crash, but like it was raining out or it might have even been that like snowy, rainy mix. And I passed a tennis court and I saw people kind of like bundled up. They didn't look like they were in like good like sports gear. They were just like bundled up with their hoodies up playing some sort of game on a tennis court. And I was like, are you shitting me? Yes, you can.

play pickleball on a tennis court but what people do is you change the parameters a little bit so you can use the net but you oh wait do you use the net i think you can use the tennis the tennis court net but you it doesn't go as far back uh so you you sort of set up some kind of a little i've seen people doing it here in portland you can you can kind of make a tennis court into a pickleball court so that probably was what you were yeah i'm guessing what you were what you were seeing but um anyway uh the other thing well we don't probably looking at the clock i don't think we have to get into this the story from the new york times but i did think it was interesting that this there's a congressman named max frost and he is the youngest congressman i think he's like 25 or something so by the way i really gotta get my shit together 25 year olds are in congress now um i feel like my time is passing of becoming one of the most powerful politicians in america But this guy, Max Frost, there's a really interesting piece in the Times that I'd recommend people check out today of him literally not able to get an apartment in Washington, D.C., where he has been elected to Congress because of having not great credit. And he also went into some debt in order to fund his campaign. I believe he also drove Uber during his campaign. That was kind of one of the notes about him was like Uber driver is elected to Congress. He seems like an incredibly bright young person, as you might imagine, getting elected to Congress at age 25, but he had not great credit, and he applied for this apartment, and the New York Times was kind of like shadowing him on this, and they turned him down, and he is now couch surfing, and that is the current plan. I kept waiting at the end of the article. The article starts with this guy, Max Frost, trying to get an apartment, and then it goes into just like affordable housing issues, and I assumed the end would be like, he found one, and it's like, nope. The end of the piece is he's couch surfing for the foreseeable future.

Now, let me ask you this. And I'm just thinking of this right now. And I'll be honest with you. I have not read this New York Times story that you sent me on this yet. But I feel like I have heard other stories from like like almost like quasi romantic stories of days gone by when like young and there's usually congressmen, but like young congressmen were all like living together. Like freshman congressmen were living together in almost like dorm like situations or or almost more like a kind of a college house type of situations, because that was kind of the reality of young people coming to Congress and then sort of like kind of scraping there, scraping their way to the top there.

Yeah. Famously, there's actually a house that Chuck Schumer. I forget who it is, but it's actually a bunch of senators and they've shared this. it's been written about pretty extensively and i'm sure there are lots of other examples of people in congress because you're not there all the time and you're working crazy hours and so you just have basically have roommates and your roommates happen to be other people in congress and there's this like i said the particular living situation that it was i forget who all was in it but it was like chuck schumer it might have even been like peter king i don't know if it was like bipartisan even but like there was kind of like a a bachelor pad flop house just with u.s senators in it yeah um and uh and and again just because of the fact that you know you don't you're not there a lot of the time it's not your full-time home i think you have to pay for it still out of your pocket actually i don't know what the rules are on that if your campaign can pay for your housing or not my guess would be your campaign probably can't which is why also if you're chuck schumer and you have like some nice home in new york that you're maintaining you're not trying to spend another three grand a month on an apartment in dc so you just kind of have this like roommate situation but i do know that that is a thing that happens there's also have been people in congress who live in their office and have kind of used that as a campaigning tool like hey i am being so frugal with my money and your money that i'm just like i have a cot in my office and that's where i sleep like that's a not a totally uncommon thing either so that's why i'm sort of wondering

again i haven't read this thing and i'm not trying to dismiss the broader issues that it raises generationally and and about the modern state of capitalism and the housing market like these are real issues to talk about but I'm just wondering now that we kind of talk about these other examples of it almost being a tradition of kind of coming in and scraping things together for your first term or something like is this a story that we're talking about Maxwell Frost because it sort of fits into this Gen Z narrative well I think the difference is Chuck Schumer could

get an apartment if you wanted to. And this is a person who, you would think if somebody is elected to Congress that that would be enough of a resume sort of note that they'd be able to rent an apartment in D.C. Like, the idea that, so I think that's, to me, that's the critical difference is that these, a lot of times when you have these people living in these group situations, it's for financial reasons or for whatever, but if those people wanted to go get an apartment by themselves and prioritize the payment, they could do it.

In this case, this guy literally is not able to get an apartment in D.C. that he can afford. That's within walking distance of the Capitol. And that's in his price range, which I actually don't even know. What does a congressperson make? U.S. Congress salary. Let's see here. You know, I mean, it's it's one hundred seventy four thousand dollars a year. So not insignificant. So I don't know. I mean, maybe you don't get it up front. Yeah, you don't get it up front.

And if you've got bad credit and, you know, you know what it's like to rent things, you have to first month, last month rent sometimes, security deposit, like just getting your foot in the door if you're broke but you just got a new job is not easy.

I would 100% be the person who got elected to Congress and was asking if I could get an advance on that. Yeah, exactly. So when do we, when does that check drop? When is that evil shit?

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

All right, Lee, an email or V-mail?

Yeah, I have one voicemail that I want to play for you here today, Luke, and I thought it was kind of interesting. It starts off commenting on the Kia logo, which I brought up the other day. Kia has a relatively new logo. I'm not a huge fan of it. Rebecca wanted to weigh in on that. But then also, I think, I think buries something at the end of this voicemail that might even be slightly more interesting. Take a listen to this.

Ahoy hoy. This is Rebecca from San Diego. And I just wanted to call in and say I really appreciated your Kia conversation. I have been having thoughts about that logo for so long. I absolutely hate it. When it came out, I wondered, is this a new car manufacturer? who is this and just to make it a little bit edgier to me it looks like 9 inch nails

it looks like the logo

for that band and I just I could not understand so I'm glad I'm not the only one yeah anyway also shout out to Erica and Jamie we should catch up soon and just to drop some new information on you I'm pregnant so fun way to look at that

anyway thanks keep up the good work power out congratulations i like to think that's the first time somebody has used our podcast to announce their pregnancy to friends and family god we are

really turning into the muckluck telegraph i love it listeners it's just how just it's just an easy way to if you need to like hit up you know 12 of your friends who happen to like this show and you just need to spread the word on something this is the place to do it absolutely easier than using an

amazon dot or whatever the hell also i feel like maybe the um i mean to the kia people do they

know something we're talking about the logo that listener actually looked it up by the way good calling the nine inch nails it does look like it does look like nine inch nails um but i mean i don't know i mean when's the last time we spent two shows talking about a car's logo i know and

also when we do talk about the logo i say it's a bad logo but a great car i loved my experience in

a kia so what are you gonna do what i'm gonna do is tell everyone that we are arriving at the end of today's program but the good news is we are gonna be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio oh my gosh dude is tomorrow really the 20 wait is tomorrow really the 20th tomorrow's the

20th yes indeed get my crap together on the holidays i've been saying this is the week for it but if it's if not this week when it's too late to have things delivered now so i know i can

probably get a couple of usbc addy you're getting a usbc plug-in for christmas she your dad a bunch

of um a bunch of usb uh memory drives or whatever you call them usb drives yes they can fill them

up with my mom was trying to describe them bit torrenting um what was the show that she loves I forget what it was It's like an old Oh it's Whose Line Is It Anyway She goes You know what I just love Luke Whose Line Is It Anyway Do you watch that And I was like I'm familiar with it She goes Sometimes when I'm feeling down I'll just tell you Download a Whose Line for me And my dad will go BitTorrent Whose Line Is It Anyway

That's such a weird poll For BitTorrent Now is this the Well you might not know Is this the Drew Carey version Which I consider to be

The Ryan Stiles one I think they're living in a post-Carrie universe now

Oh, so it's even newer than that Because it goes back early I used to watch it on Comedy Central Long before Drew Carey took over Oh, yeah You remember that

Yeah, I think there's a newer one That doesn't have Drew Carey Because he's off-hosting The Price is Right Oh, wow, okay My dad bit-torrenting Whose line is it anyway for my mom is It's quite the image. All right. Thanks, everyone. We will be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio. Until then, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

I can get tickets to Nonsense, because I really want to see that before I die. They're nuns, and they sing, and there's a lot of improv.

Power out.