Muse

And I'm going to take tea and take a sip of it and spit it into each and every one of your mouths. Oh, it'll burn me, but it'll burn you twice. Burn me once with tea, shame on me. Burn you twice in your own mouth, shame on everybody involved. TBTL!

Well, well, here we are. I want to congratulate you for being on time

I'm not handling this well I don't feel competent, I'm depressed

I'm just trying to figure out why you would do this Why anyone would do this The reason anyone would do this If they could, which they can't Would be because they could, which they can't

Laughter, a sure sign of a good time And now I'm going to fill this silence With the words I'm saying Right now

Alright, hello, good morning And welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show just might be too beautiful to live.

Isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets?

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I'm not quite sure why I'm here or what I'm doing, but there's a reason.

Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where it is kind of just a mellow December day. like it's kind of cloudy it's not super rainy it's not super cold it is snowing in parts of the northwest my parents are getting feet of snow up where they are i hear seattle is also getting some snow it's very christmassy i am right now even as i'm recording this i am entering hardcore

christmas mode i've been waiting for this moment for months and it's finally here today is finally

the first day that i can actually focus on getting my christmas shit together i've been so busy with travel and we've been recording extra episodes of tbtl for the winter games and this and that and the other thing and now today i was telling andrew before the show i'm turning into like the bad guy from terminator 2 like i just i'm just running with a singular focus and that is getting Christmas presents decking the halls with boughs of holly all of it and if I get interrupted or knocked down I just turn into that weird like mercury kind of silvery thing and then I just reform back into my Christmas Terminator self is he the Terminator? is that is the cop the Terminator or is Arnold Schwarzenegger the Terminator? I'm not trying to be funny here I don't know if I know who the Terminator is in the movie Terminator. I do know we're at episode 3840 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. It's shocking that I don't actually know the basic plot of the movie The Terminator. Less shocking is the fact that Elon Musk is now trying to get cute. Remember he put a poll up on Twitter that said, should I still be in charge of Twitter? I will abide by the results. And then everybody said, no, you should really stop. You're ruining this. And then he now says, well, I don't know.

And when he said that, that shocked me.

We'll talk about that. Plus, winter storms are descending actually on various parts of the United States, and it's going to cause all kinds of trouble for travel here as the holidays are in full swing. Airlines are already trying to get people off of flights that aren't even happening for days in the future. There are sky jinx afoot, my friends. Sky jinx. Ooh. And this is your number one place for Sky Jinx discussion, including something that's been happening to me recently when I'm in line at the TSA and something that has given me kind of a bit of a frustrated feeling. And now there's an article in Slate Magazine that says my frustration is actually well justified, which is rare for me. Usually my petty, petty frustrations are pointless and my own emotional distress, not really related to the world. But not in this case, my friends. Not in this case. We'll talk about that with this guy, the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He likes to spend this time of year just putting together all kinds of elaborate holiday menus and really just getting into food culture.

You've gobbled your last ghoul.

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

Good morning, Luke. You probably don't want to get into it right now because we have a whole plan for today's show. But if you ever have any question about the Terminator, large or small, or in between, shaped or sized, there is a woman who works just outside my door who has been waiting her entire life to answer those questions. She is deep.

in the Terminator-verse. She's not here right now. I'm not asking for a barge in, but I'm just saying, if you ever want to know, we have the answers at our fingertips. Because I couldn't tell you.

Do you at least know... Oh, okay. Terminator is Arnold Schwarzenegger. I'm looking at this on the internet. Disguised as a human, a cyborg assassin known as a Terminator travels from 2029 to 1984 to kill Sarah Connor, said to protect Sarah is Kyle Reese, played by Michael Biehn, who divulges the coming of Skynet, an artificial intelligence system. Blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah. But, so how is it?

Well, I think you're reading the description of Terminator.

Yes, one, but is he like the good guy in two? Is that kind of like what happens?

I think that he becomes, yeah, kind of a good guy.

Doesn't he say come with me if you want to live or something?

Maybe, but I'm pretty sure that the other unit, the thing that turns into molten metal, that is the T2, I believe. got you okay situation yeah then i so what happens is like my guess is they had a big hit with the

first one but they thought it's going to be more interesting now if actually arnold schwarzenegger's terminator is like a um sympathetic character and uh the other guy is like the the he's the bad guy t2 is the bad guy so now arnold schwarzenegger is like protecting them and he does i know he says come with me if you want to live because i'm looking at a clip on youtube well really what i'm doing is watching an ad about cooking the perfect burger with gordon ramsey now i'm skipping that the master class now linda hamilton is running down a hallway in some kind of asylum or something maybe some mental asylum i think this is going to take a much like whatever it was i was playing when we were Recently recording some winter games, Andrew. It's going to take a while. Oh, here we go. Maybe he's going to say it here. Arnold is now in the building. You're squeaking shoes. And Linda's very afraid of him. She should be. Because he was trying to kill her in the last movie. Sure. So that's, I mean, honestly, the body keeps the score. Fool me once. Obviously, she's traumatized by... Now, Eddie Furlong is in the mix. He's running down the thing. That's the kid, right? The kid, yeah. Edward Furlong. You may know him from Pet Sematary. She's now being detained by orderlies. Okay, Arnold is coming up to the orderlies, and he is about to kick some living butt. Oh, wow, that's going to leave a mark, as they say. Don't come back right. Somebody looks like Sarah Silverman just tried to punch him. That didn't go well. Okay, he's going to say it now. This is going to be so great. Now Edward Furlong is there.

Mom!

This is huge. Come with me if you want to live.

Yes! Yes! Oh, my God! Paid off, baby! All right, we did good work here today.

So I'm guessing that maybe, like, they've institutionalized Linda Hamilton because she's, like, talking about Terminators and Skynet and stuff, and they've probably assumed that she is experiencing some delusional tendencies. And so what I get from that scene is when Edward Furlong shows up and when Arnold Schwarzenegger shows up, she's sort of realizing that she's not crazy, that this is all real. And so that's what's going on in that scene.

If she ever doubted herself, which I'm not even sure of. Well, that's what I'm saying.

This is the nuanced acting of one Linda Hamilton. I could read that whole story on her face having not seen any of these movies, which are some of the most popular movies of all time.

The weird thing is I've seen a bunch of the much later ones. I'm looking at a list of them here because Genevieve was so into this universe that even after the movies really turned and stopped being good, I'm talking about Terminator Genisys spelled in a funny way and Terminator Dark Fate spelled in a normal way but a stupid title. Like those movies were terrible. But Genevieve swears by this TV show called the Sarah Connor Chronicles, which is hard to say. But she says that's a real sleeper. Like that's one of the one of the highlights of the Sarah Connor Krolls.

No. Why do I stop? You're telling the story. Why do I interrupt for that?

It's OK. I was done anyway. I apologize. I mean, the irony here is you and I are not familiar with this franchise very well. I'm trying to I'm trying to think of what Genevieve would say here. You're trying to tell the entire story of two movies just based on one woman's face in one scene. So we're probably not the best.

I think I did an OK job. I bet you we're going to hear from some of the listeners that are going to say, damn, Luke, did you take film studies at the University of Washington?

And you say, no, but I sat next to a guy at a bar.

And I studied him. studying film studies that's right you know you mentioned that it's a pretty mild day this is a change of subject here because i'm getting uncomfortable with that topic it was snowing so hard this morning it snowed all night it was snowing this morning i honestly and again i'm a little bit drowsy i stayed up too late last night but i i woke up this morning and i looked out the window and it was just huge snowflakes i had this like this urge to text you and say hey maybe we shouldn't do the show today like oh man i know that feeling and i was like wait that's not that's not how any of this works i just need to walk downstairs like the snow doesn't stop the internet as that famous internet catchphrase goes um but i burners lee was the one who said i seriously had the um the urge to be like well we shouldn't do the show today it's snowing too much well that's just your that's your inner school child absolutely yeah in the same way that like even like in the fall when it's back to school time all i have to do is kind of dial up with you that's not usually a super busy time for tbtl the early fall but i start to get this sinking feeling like oh time to really crack down on work i'm like wait a second i don't know i've been working nothing's changing for me it's just the change of seasons the u.s education system has just instilled in me a dread

of fall because it means going back to school i also feel like the kids that are growing well that's you know what i'm actually i want to retract something i haven't even said oh good what's the first can we do that um like i was going to say i feel like the kids in seattle are getting so many more snow days than i got when i was a kid i can remember like in the total time that i was you know going to school there i might have been like six or seven total snow days and i feel like now you might get four snow days in a year and i was going to say they're lucky for that but then i realized also these kids didn't even get to go to flip in school

for like two years and also it's worse no i actually think that i think i was just reading in the news yesterday that they are going to get rid of snow days i think i'm right about this i'd have to look it up but i think this seattle school system is now saying no more snow days it's now learn from home days and you zoom in there's a system in right so no i wouldn't not i i think that we had the goal even though seattle didn't have as much snow as a place like valley city Ohio I think we had the golden ideal of like a snow day means that you just you don't go into school and you you put on your rubbers yeah okay you bundle up and you go outside and you make snow

angels um I uh that was the that was how it worked when I was a kid and it was sort of perfect the thing I wanted to retract before saying is I you're right we were we were going to school during a sort of golden age and i actually i feel i feel a lot of empathy for both the students and the parents who have been in school the last however many years with all of the you know and the teachers by the way let's please i don't want to leave the teachers out of this i mean it is just i can't imagine how challenging it's been for everybody involved so i don't want to like act like i'm jealous because there's it snows more in seattle which is also probably a sign of something amiss with the climate and you don't even get to be off that day you just have to go stare at a screen and pretend that you're engaged while a teacher has to try to somehow capture your imagination virtually which is yeah and change a lesson plan for digital order yeah i can't imagine uh we i i add the more that we talk about this the more that i realize just how absolutely ideal my snow day life was as a kid which is probably why i only got like five of them because 10 of them would have been too much good stuff for it would have been tumgis for one kid this is what we would do when we would go to sleep and you'd be like please please let this snowstorm be worse than they expected and i my bedroom was in the basement i would get up in the morning and then i would just peer out my window which was at ground level right and this was i'll tell you what i did not have egress for i had egress from this room like i could get out of this room in the case of a fire because i weighed 40 pounds i could climb through it was one of those windows where the pins are kind of in the middle. And so the window doesn't open up completely. It just, what was the word? It rotates, it spins so that you could crawl out beneath the window. But the window is blocking still. The window itself is still in the window frame and blocking the middle of it. Does that make any sense?

Yeah, it does. And it had probably little arms on the left and right. Could you pop those arms off? There was no way of popping that window out, huh?

You know, there actually was.

Because I think I had a similar situation, and I popped the window out when I lived in the basement, and I would sneak out in high school.

I think I could have, but I was just not an imaginative kid, and so I chose to just shimmy between the half of the window that was available and open. But I was in that room, and I would get up in the morning on what was hopefully a snow day, and I would look right out the window. And if I saw snow, if the snow was piled up above sort of my field of vision, I was like, yes. and then Then it was turn on the local radio or maybe the local TV news and wait for them to announce your school district.

Yeah, and just like a scroll, a constant scroll under the morning news that had, I don't know what it was like around here, but, you know, again, growing up in the cold weather climate of Cleveland or the Cleveland area, just like it would scroll. It would take an hour to go through one scroll, and if you missed your school alphabetically, then you're like, okay, I'm Buckeye. I'm the Buckeye school district, and then it's like, okay, we're in the H's, and the H's are going on forever. You're waiting forever to get back around to the B's.

And it was like there was a whole range. It was like on certain days it'd be like it'd be like, you know, you know, Pierce County, Pierce County schools, two hour delay. Seattle Public Schools closed. And you were like, oh, if I got closed, like closed was like a delay. Yeah. Two hour delay, two hour delay, no bus service, two hour delay, no rural bus service. Like there was all these different kind of versions of not having to go to school. but if you got lucky and you got seattle public schools closed then it was like we're going to jackson i'm going to jackson you turn a loose on my coat like we're going to jackson golf course with an inner tube and we are just inner tubing like we're on the cover of some kind of tin of cookies that your grandmother would have had some kind of courier and ives shit going on and that would be the most fun day of your life if you could convince your mom to drive you up to jackson golf course which ironically andrew was about eight blocks from the school that was closed

i'm surprised that you had to take this however you will i don't mean it as an insult but i thought for sure you were going to have like that we didn't have sleds but we would like save the trays from from school lunches or or invent something like that to go down the hill on

well i mean truthfully i didn't have any kind of a fancy toboggan or anything but we had like inner tubes like but like legit like uh an inner tube that had been inside of a a tire oh that

kind that had the little the little stem sticking out of it that could just come coming off of it

that was legit i didn't even know that they sold like inner tubes that were just for the purposes of sliding in snow like i didn't this was like some legit someone had gotten an inner tube from somewhere and when we used to go with our church up to like i guess it must have been snow qualmy or something where you could do like they would cut these big really pretty intense like inner tube tracks you know like that would be really fast and really steep and everyone just had like inner tubes that had been in a tire like that was like i didn't there was the default setting i didn't even i didn't know till later that there was special stuff being made you know but but we had so much fun that was just the absolute best when you get a snow day like that

so again are we doing the show today or not because i guess it stops snowing but it still feels like a snow day to me i need to um here's the thing is it sticking is it on the ground yeah yeah i mean it's been and it started snowing sunday night it paused for monday most of monday then it started coming down really heavy monday afternoon yesterday afternoon and then i think it snowed throughout the night. I'm not sure. It's not super piled up, but it's sticking. And now Vives and I are in this situation that we keep finding ourselves in, which is we don't own a snow shovel. And we only think of buying a snow shovel when there's snow on the ground, which is when everybody in Seattle freaks out and goes to buy a snow shovel and there are no snow shovels available. Since it's been snowing so consistently this year, though, I mean, again, I just cannot believe how much snow we've seen this year. I'm wondering if maybe the maybe the stores are stocked up on snow shovels again and i can go get one i feel like if you can just wait this

whole winter out vives can find a free one on offer up yeah down in rent this summer you'll only have to drive to federal way yeah exactly i got a line on a snow shovel i can't decide if i miss that or i don't miss it now if you live in the northeast or the midwest or somewhere where it snows a lot i know that dealing with the perpetual snow is a a real hassle and people are constantly trying to shovel their driveways and their walks and you know the parking area in front of their house etc but in the northwest it's it is historically so rare that it's kind of a treat and right now i just mostly live in this apartment right so even if it were to be snowing i would have no snow responsibilities and it is if it's if it's a rare enough event it's kind of fun to like get you know bundled up and and get the shovel or the rock salt or whatever and kind of go outside and tend to your little to your little area you know make sure the sidewalk in front of your house is shoveled off and and you've got the rock salt spread on the stairs and kind of get everything ship shape there's something kind of fun about that as an

adult i think yes a shoveling snow can be very satisfying if you have the time to do it even in new hampshire i remember sometimes where it would be a lot of work to shovel our entire driveway but if it's a saturday

Thank you.

and you're like well this is my job today and you get bundled up and you go out there and you do it and you wave at your neighbors and they're doing the same thing and the guy with the snow um blower a couple of doors down will come down and help help clear yours and then like there's a community aspect to it that i like i mean the more pains in the butts was when you wake up on a random goddamn wednesday you don't even really want to go to work because you're a human being and work is work and you go outside and you're like oh i have to put in an hour of digging my car out and clearing my driveway just to get out of the driveway just to get to work you know was that fairly typical in new hampshire that would be something that would happen in new hampshire certainly especially once we had a place where you know i wasn't parking in the parking lot of an apartment building right or parking on the street like parking on the street could be a pain because the snow plows come and they bury your car and it's going to take you maybe a maybe a half hour or something to kind of dig it out depending how bad it is but if you have to like if your car is parked at the front of the driveway by the garage and you didn't know it was going to snow when you come out you're like oh god damn i gotta shovel the whole driveway just to get out of here you know uh it can become a it can become a thing and then you're like sweaty at like seven o'clock in the morning after having taken your morning shower but i don't know there's also you know

what i'm internetting right now best chains best adjustable chains for a mazda which actually it's really less specific to the vehicle and more specific to the tire because, Andrew, it's not snowing here. But this house that I'm trying to fix up is on a hill. It's probably 500 feet higher than, you know, sea level or something or whatever. And what I know from last year was it regularly got, like, snow when it wasn't snowing in Portland. So it could be like it is here right now. And just because of that altitude change of 500 feet or so, it would be like half a foot of snow. And it's a kind of steep hill getting down to the driveway of this house. And I'm thinking, like, I'm going to be back and forth a lot. My dad and I are going to be working on the place come January and stuff. Like, I either need to get an additional truck, but that when I actually drive, that's a four-wheel drive. or I've got to get some kind of slick chain situation that I can throw on and off my Mazda so that I can get to this house. And what I remember about chains, like the last time I had chains would have probably been in the 90s. And, I mean, have you put chains on a car? I mean, it's one of the most annoying, time-consuming, hassly projects you can do. I'm just hoping that they've come up with a better system now. Something that's akin to, you know those bracelets that would be like stiff and then you'd slap them on your wrist and then they're suddenly wrapped around your wrist yeah has somebody made that of chains is there something that i can just like throw on my car with like minimal hassle so i can get to

and from this house i'm working on you know in all of my time of living in snowy places i've never had to put chains on my car really yeah never had to deal with it so you don't have a lot of experience with it i have zero experience with that particular thing yeah everybody says around here if you're driving through the passes put your chains on like how about i just don't drive through the passes you want to talk about well that's one approach that's one approach um stay put um that's one of my biggest hobbies is staying put um I stayed put last night and you're talking about like kind of snow shoveling snow having kind of a um you know if it's if it's not too much of a hassle it can be kind of a nice thing to do I'll tell you what like last night you know I picked up Genevieve from the train station because it was just cold and snowy and I you and I had just gotten done recording a whole bunch of shows and so I gave Genevieve a call just to see how her commute was going she walks about a little over a mile to get to the train station then takes the train into work by the time i called her she was already on the train coming home i'm like well why don't i go pick you up at the train station so at least you don't have to like kind of trudge all the way home in this mess which is probably a bad idea because me putting another car on the road during a during a snow situation is probably not the best thing but the

roads were fine like i mean one of the i mean i believe the volkswagen golf gets full marks for

being one of the best cars yes absolutely right actually it does seem pretty safe there's one yeah it's kind of got those anti like brakes that i have kicked in a couple of times in the past couple of days which are helpful but anyway um not here to defend my car but anyway then vives and i are driving home they're like hey you know i said you know we don't have any food at home let's get some takeout so stop got some chinese food to bring home we bring these steaming bags of food home you know it kind of sounds gross when i put it that way but i meant it as a nice thing um but like and it's just like we don't have anything to do for the rest of the evening i leave the front uh drapes open because we have this little christmas tree that vives and i picked out together that's like kind of the perfect size smaller than we usually get but it's the perfect size for our new little living room and when you have the um when you have the blinds open or the drapes open in the front and you look into our front yard it's a nice little scene and there i was kind of standing in the window inside I don't know. holding my kitty who was purring and looking out the window, and I see the snow coming down and the reflection of our Christmas tree just over my shoulder. It was a real what we used to call a coat hook moment, I will say. It checked all of the boxes of holiday cheer.

I'm happy for you. I'm also doing some research on Gear Junkie right now, best tire chains for the snow 2022. too and i can't quite tell if the technology has really improved or not like if they've gotten some kind of because you used to have to do this thing where you would lay the chains out in the snow and then like back over them enough that they were under the wheel which is like an impossibility when you're you know just by yourself and whatever and then like it was a major hassle and i just feel like there has to be also uh there were years where i had snow i had studded tires on my car but that was only because i was so broke in college that my tires were super bald but i but i remembered that i had had i had two studded snow tires that were in pristine condition because there was really no need for them so i put those bad boys on my car and just drove around with those which you're allowed to do during the winter time but then there's a point at which it becomes illegal because they're hell on the roadways yeah like and so i think i've told this story before but I was driving around with these snow tires, like two of them on like the front of my car, front wheels of my Honda Accord. And then, you know, the pavement is completely bare and dry and you could just hear me coming from like a mile away with these things. And I figured out that you could actually pull the studs out. Like they're not, they were sort of like fit into these little pockets on the tire, but you could just pull them out with a pair of pliers and it didn't like pop the tire or anything. They were just nestled in there. so then I spent an afternoon with pliers pulling out every single one of the studs so now I had normal tires and I drove on those for another couple of years yeah that's what I said we didn't

put chains in our tires and now I'm remembering growing up there was always a time that my parents would take like you know twice a year they would take their cars in I think to have the special snow tires put on and then the special snow tires taken off for the spring and they had those like you said the little metal studs in the snow tires if anything it looks like things are getting harder

in the chain game andrew i'm looking up on amazon something called the koenig easy fit cu9 100 snow chains it's got like a bar on it i mean it looks way more complicated it looks like something ramsey bolton would be using to do something not great i don't like that yeah uh listeners get at me. If you have some kind of easy snow chain solution, please let me know because I think I'm going to need it as the winter rolls on here. Okay, let's do this. Let's take a quick break and then we come back. We got these top stories, including the rare time that my petty grievances are actually not as petty as I thought. So that's a win for me on this Tuesday. Stay with us on TBTL.

Thank you, baby.

Hey, let's thank some of our donors of the day. These wonderful, generous folks are making a donation each month to keep the show in business. And today, I'm not related to any of them. I haven't been at a Christmas party where my mom was acting up during the White Elephant. At the homes of any of the people who I'm about to announce today, Andrew, unlike yesterday's program. I'd like to thank Connie Evans in Stone Mountain, Georgia. Do you think it snows ever in Stone Mountain, Georgia? And is it hard to get down off of Stone Mountain? And does Connie have any inside tips on good chains for a Mazda CX-5?

When it snows in Stone Mountain. Wait, I started doing a parody song there. I thought I was inventing a new tune. You were. There are no new tunes.

There really aren't any new notes to be, but I thought that seemed pretty original to me.

It felt like it slipped a little bit in the Moon River or something along the lines of that, but I'm no improviser.

Snow chains in Georgia, my Huckleberry friend. I will tell people that at least one of the episodes of the TBTL Winter Games involves really a ridiculous amount of singing on my part.

Yeah, and it's pretty good. I mean, it reminds one that you are a professional karaoke singer. Do you know that Genevieve's a professional karaoke KJ now? What? Well, maybe not professional. I don't know if she's getting paid. I don't think she's getting paid for it. But she's resurrecting the karaoke program at the Eagles, which was a pretty big deal before the pandemic and then went away. And now the people who ran it aren't running it anymore. So she spent the past couple of months working with our friends at the Eagles.

to figure out the best equipment to get or software or what have you, and she is going to be the official KJ. When is the maiden voyage? I believe it is this Thursday. Can you make it down here or up here?

Well, I'm coming to Seattle on Friday. Oh, maybe make it Thursday. I mean, I've got half of mine to come up on Thursday, and then we could just do the show together on Friday at your house.

What do you think? Did you do it? What do you think Genevieve's, do you think she'll be one of those KJs who has a signature song that she does every every time and at first it's cute but then it like it's kind of annoying and other people just want her to give her them the microphone well i do i know that genevieve will read the

room genevieve will not be like the guy that we used to deal with at the at bush garden yeah right who wore a superman necklace and would often do a song that someone had just done and he would just do it better as just a flex well that is ridiculous oh he was the absolute worst i detested that dude Genevieve would never do that Genevieve I'm sure will be a facilitator She'll be a uniter not a divider I think so And so all I can say is I'm jealous because I've long Dreamed of becoming a KJ And have somehow still not Ever managed to make it happen In my own life but even just knowing a KJ Sure studying her again As we say like I feel like I'm not asking for special treatment at the Eagles I mean step one for me is actually going to the meeting where i get officially so that's true yeah that's step one and step two is um staying in genevieve's good graces so that you know saying maybe there was a line but you know they really need to hear faith by george michael sneak up a few spots kind of thing or something i don't know but um that is i'm legitimately excited about that like because i love that eagles I love karaoke I love Genevieve We know Camaro Kev is about that life That would be the first time That somebody in our friend group Is also literally controlling The karaoke microphone This is a big development

Yeah exactly and my plan is just to play the touch tunes Over top of her music the whole time

You would do that

I don't think that's possible but no of course I wouldn't do that

That's exciting Well thanks Connie Evans in Stone Mountain Georgia Thanks also to Aaron Hicks in Renton, Washington. I feel like we've been getting a decent amount of Renton in our life. Although, we're at that time of year, that most wonderful time of year, where we're recording so much content that my mind starts to, the line between what we're recording for the regular shows and what we're recording for the Winter Games starts to blur. So, maybe the Winter Games are full of Renton references, I'm not sure.

Maybe, although I did earlier in this show just say that I'm going to get a snow shovel in Renton, I think, so, didn't I say that? Yes, you did. You did. Maybe it's Aaron McFadden. Thank you, Aaron. Sorry.

Appreciate you. Thank you for donating money and shovels to the program, Aaron. Juliet McFadden is in Prospect Harbor, Maine. Is she, though? I don't know.

Juliet's been a long-time listener to the show, but I feel like we just read an email from Juliet that says she's in a different part of the country now, but I don't want to confuse things. I thought that Juliet's over on the West Coast now. I could be wrong.

M.E. is Maine, though, right?

Yeah, you're right.

I'm embarrassed I have to ask that But Maine is not something that comes up on the show A ton And when I look at that ME I'm like It's got to be Maine because MN is Minnesota And MD is Maryland MA And MA is Massachusetts Massachusetts I thought you were telling me Maryland is MA Which also I would believe

MO is Missouri

Let me go ahead and play this Gary Goldman bit

But thank you Juliet Juliet is one of those younger people who practically grew up with tbtl so seeing that they still listen and support the show means a lot

thank you julia thanks also to daniel pitnell of pittsford new york i feel like with a last

name like pitnell you got to live in a place like pittsford i wonder if it's just do you think daniel's family founded pittsford new york yes i'm going to say yes no they founded pitnell

new york which is one town over but then he had to get he had to get out from under that legacy It's just like, oh, there he is, the son of Pitnell, New York. There he goes, Daniel. He can never make it in Pittsburgh. Part of the founding family. Yeah, so he's exactly, he proved all of the haters wrong. Exactly. By flourishing in Pittsburgh, New York. Thanks, Daniel. Also, thanks to Jared Edwards, who's in Orangevale, California. Welcome to Orangevale, one of my favorite podcasts.

Oh, that sounds like such a relaxed, that sounds like the opposite. I would listen to Welcome to Orange Veil I could never understand

Welcome to Night Vale

I tried it a couple of times I feel like probably if I listened enough I would sort of crack the code And then I would get it all But I never got to that point

Yeah Because that was I...

I feel like early in the there are podcasts that are a phenomenon kind of wave like it was like, OK, people are podcasting, whatever. And then there was like, oh, we're seeing magazine pieces about podcasts because they're they're becoming a sensations and they're like having live events where thousands of people are showing up and people are like making a really healthy living on this. None of that has ever applied to this show, for the record. Hence us reading the names of donors every day who are donating to the program. We are, this is a real, how do you put it? This is a real pop and pop operation. I was going to say mom and pop, but I don't know which one of us would be the mom in that situation.

I'm just happy to be either. Just happy to be included.

This is a real down-home production. But I remember Welcome to Night Vale being one of those shows that was a phenomenon when it was really first sort of blowing up.

And actually, I think it took, I think it, I think it was around for a really long time and then got a lot of attention during the boom. But I think it's like a real OG podcast from like way back in the day, I think.

So you're saying there's a chance. You're saying that we could actually maybe blow up at some point.

Just stick with it, Luke.

Yeah. I mean, 3,000 more episodes. Maybe it'll finally hit. Maybe this thing will finally take off. It'll be one of those overnight sensations that took 20 years to build. Yep. With the help of folks like Jared Edwards And then also Trent Stolieresis Of Vancouver, British Columbia Thank you Thank you, Trent How do you feel like I did with Trent's last name?

Let me take a look here I was looking up the years Might be Stolieresis Now, Stolieresis? No, I'm saying it wrong What my mouth wants to do is not helpful I think you did it better

I feel like there are days on this show, Andrew when what my mouth wants to do is not helpful and days when that applies to you. Luckily, one of our mouths is always being helpful, so we're able to get through the show five days a week. It's a snow day, Luke. I'm not even supposed to be here today. Fair. You're supposed to be at Jackson Golf Course sledding down a hill somewhere. Anyway, thanks to our donors for keeping TBTL going. We would not be here without you. hello and welcome to top story um well okay one quick update on the elon situation with with twitter you know he put this uh poll up recently i think you said it best yesterday andrew when i said something like why do you think he did this and you went well because people weren't talking about him for two minutes yeah and uh you're probably not wrong i really hate i don't get the sense you loved him you know what i think is actually the most interesting part of this story that nobody's talking about there is a guy in like i don't know where he is in the world but there is a guy who is a dead ringer for elon musk dead ringer for elon musk and he shows up on um he shows up on tiktok and like he looks so much like elon musk it is just oh i guess he's maybe chinese i'm seeing on youtube that they're listing this person as maybe being in china but the thing is because the the difference in language between i'm not sure if this person speaks mandarin or cantonese or whatever the difference between this person's native language and english is really vast he looks so much like elon musk that it's clear that someone's trying to figure out how to harness this like this guy could be the next biggest thing on tiktok but there is a pretty intense language barrier so now they'll just have him do things like he'll be holding a whip and he'll be whipping a piece of paper that says b that says binance and he'll be whipping a piece of paper that says ftx because they're like we can't really figure out how to utilize how to take advantage of how insane i'm going to send you a picture of this guy right now andrew by the way um i don't know if this is going to i'm going to play you a little bit of this guy i don't think this is going to be particularly great audio but take a listen hi everyone i'm iluma money oh oh my bad my bad hey my bad you know what now that i'm looking at youtube they're saying maybe this is a deep fake but i feel like if it was a deep fake i would deep fake it over somebody for whom english is a little bit more of a yeah easy language and again i'm not saying anything about this person's inability to speak English

because, like, how's my Mandarin, right? But if I was going to deepfake this and try to, like, turn this into a thing, I would deepfake it over somebody who spoke English maybe as their first language because it would be more convincing. I think this guy just randomly looks so much like Elon Musk. But he'll just say, like, Hi, I'm Elon Musk, and then he'll just say,

like money and then he's holding money and then he starts whipping pieces of paper that have writing on them um and that's i feel what we should be talking about when we talk about elon musk andrew

every time you have the urge to talk about elon musk instead shift the focus to this random person

on tiktok who actually could be elon musk uh that would be a really that would be an a surprising development i'm trying to figure out if i'm sending you yeah this is an okay picture i'm going to send you a picture of this dude anyway he did this poll he said that he would abide by the rules and i guess this is what's interesting to me about it andrew is obviously like at this point there's not a lot of love out there for elon musk and and i know that you feel like us talking about him is only giving him what he wants but i also do think that he's in charge of this still very huge platform that like i was talking to hari kandabalu um on live wire last week and i was asking him about twitter because you know harry it has a you know like a hundred and something 50 000 followers on twitter and i was asking him what what are you going to do about he goes well the thing is i'm a comedian and this is the best still the best way for me to let the most people know about my shows and stuff he's like basically he's like i'm running a small business and this is like very important to my business even though i really don't feel great about a lot of the stuff that's now happening around it and I hadn't really thought of it that way but I mean that's one approach anyway my point is I know you I know you feel like we're just giving this person undue attention which is I think probably true but I also think that the impact of Twitter in the real world is still kind of pretty significant and so when I see him say I'm going to step down if you guys say I should step down I become curious well then how's he going to get out of it when everyone says you should step down right like how's he gonna how is he going to uh you know basically not how is he going to save any sort of face if he said i'm gonna quit this or i'm gonna stop being in charge and now it's basically like of course right after like the poll you know finishes and 57 percent of people are saying you shouldn't be in charge of twitter anymore then of course a bunch of his elon incel types are in the comments saying well this could have been easily hacked by bots and then he's of course retweeting that with like saying hmm interesting and then somebody says well only people with blue check marks i.e only people who are now paying eight dollars a month although i don't actually know the rule on that are our friends who have blue check marks are they paying eight dollars a month currently or is that about to go into place like somebody said only people with blue check marks should be allowed to vote in these polls that elon musk is putting up and then he said yes we are now making that change uh and that will be the new policy so he hasn't really answered the question of if he's going to step down but it sounds like he's trying to move the goalposts and basically say well this poll didn't really count because it could have been hacked and it could have been anybody and now only people with blue check marks are going to be allowed to vote

in these polls he's just a troll i mean it's just this is the this is the trumpiest shit we've seen since trump i don't i mean i'm not going to say that it doesn't have any import on our culture society but obviously it's a lot less dangerous than having someone like him or trump in the Oval Office but it's just the same shit it's just kind of like hey they weren't talking about me so I'm not in the news cycle so I'm going to stir shit up over here on this thing that I bought by the way just a quick for those who aren't following it super closely and if it matters he wasn't saying I'll sell the company he's saying I'd still be the owner I just would step down as CEO which maybe you said I'd thrown it in there for for clarity for whatever purposes but like yeah i mean it's just so dumb i mean people some people have been like hey it looks like he's taking this seriously and would like send me the link i'm like you think i'm gonna vote in fucking elon musk's poll like like i know like it just it's so it's so ridiculously stupid i i'm i keep on i apologize if this is uninteresting but um with this coming out again today i was like you know what i really really got to figure out what my plan is with twitter i told you yesterday like i want to back off it i i'm starting to like kind of create more of a habit of going to my mastodon app instead of the twitter app and i am thinking about maybe signing up for the post thing as well why not play around with two different platforms i like the post thing there are two things that are kind of being talked about as a replacement one is post which i think was more i think more maybe it has more of a background in uh in in serving journalists as a platform i think it's it's just called like post i believe if you google post i think you'll see a bunch of articles about it i think there's a waiting list so that's why some people are a little bit turned off it like you have to give them your email and then wait and that's not that's not a huge turnoff news is that what it is dot news and so that's a platform i might sign up for that one like i said i've been messing around with mastodon more and like the more you play around the more people you find to follow the more community you find it at first i was really turned off because i couldn't figure out like why is there not a bigger mariners community but like because of the decentralized nature of mastodon you do have to dig a little bit more. But once you make some connections, you can see oh who are these other people following so like a of my interests let's just focus on the mariners one for now like now that i found a couple of people on there who are mariners people i can look at who they're following and then i can tap into that community more and it can be you know across the various servers of mastodon and i'm you know i i'm not afraid of messing around with new technologies so i sort of find it fun too as far like this morning and again i know this isn't interesting and i apologize but this is where my brain keeps going with this like i'm just so turned off by musk and everything he's doing now it's just like i should get off that platform i don't really want to delete my account i sort of feel like i should just take maybe twitter off my phone but then i'm like should i set an away message and and this is like one of those things where you know how you have a maybe even a smallish or a medium-sized task to do it's not that big of a deal but then when you sit down to when you're when you're thinking about it in the moment

when you're driving or in the shower or eating a bologna sandwich over the sink or whatever you're doing you're like okay i just gotta take care of this one thing and they're like yeah but if i do that then i gotta do this and well then should i do that i'll think about this later that's kind of how i am with my twitter right now because i don't want to do a big like attention everyone i am leaving this platform but i'm also gonna like well do if i do want to delete my twitter account from my phone but leave the account kind of active will people be trying to reach out to me in ways that i won't see and does that matter you know what i mean if if i have a sort of a dead floating account that i don't check that much um will people be reaching out and i and then i'm like also do i want to migrate every i don't know if i want to migrate everybody i follow and who follows me over to mastodon either there's something fun about starting fresh and small and and and and not just like kind of like recreating the exact same experience so anyway when i think about this stuff that's where my brain goes i'm like i gotta i gotta get rid of Twitter in some way I'm probably not going to go nuclear or nuclear like you did but I definitely am just becoming more and more turned off for you it was the should I let Donald Trump back on this platform that didn't affect me that much because so far as I can tell he's still not on that platform but it's just seeping in too much that I am playing into this trolls behavior and it's

bullshit and i hate it if i can i i hope i hope that you uh take this in the spirit that i that i intend it because i'm not trying to like in any way i don't give you grief but i'm it's kind of funny it's interesting to me i was so much more so much more emotionally invested in twitter you know obviously like i talked about a lot on the show it was i had a not healthy relationship with it because it was a big deal to me if i got like a viral tweet or whatever and and you have always had a much like more chill relationship with it just kind of like yeah i'll throw a thing out there whatever you don't care one way or the other also you're i'm not like an elon musk fan per se but i think he especially grates on you so i'm kind of surprised that i was the first one off the platform between the two of us because i guess i would have thought you're just like you have such a limited you give such a limited shit about it anyway that i would have figured it'd be like yeah I'm deleting that thing yesterday because, like, who cares?

Well, a couple of things. First of all, it might be that – I'm going to use the word passion here, although maybe misguidedly. But, like, when we feel passionately about something, our emotions will swing passionately both ways. So the fact that the platform was closer to your heart might have made your earlier reaction. And, again, I've never said – I think you made a smart decision. And I I I admire that decision. I almost said proud. I'm not proud of you, but I admire that decision. I legitimately do. But it wasn't my good enough dad. But it wasn't the decision for me. And I also feel any shame about not feeling it that way, because and maybe that's why, because for me, it's more of a we are using the example of televisions the other day. Right. Like some people watch TV, some people make TV shows. and i think i was more of a twitter watcher you know like and i would throw things out there like you say i i hey i like getting likes and thumbs up or whatever too but it wasn't as much part of my experience and it just didn't seem to affect me too much and and then again the and i know i keep using this as an example but it's not a random example like quite seriously like i love baseball season i am already waiting for baseball season to begin and it's snowing outside i don't know if i mentioned that i'm not supposed to be here today um and so like that will be a huge difference in my baseball listening to and baseball watching it and just following the mariners and breaking news about acquisitions and injuries and whatever like and just the snark and the jokes and like just mariners twitter is a thing you know and i don't have to be a part of it as far as adding content but like it is just like it's a huge part of of the season for me so So that is kind of a, that's a football less so, but like, that's kind of a big deal for me. So anyway, I'm looking to get off of it and I know this is boring, but I just.

got to kind of figure out what is my game plan do i just like delete it from my phone and those who know know and others who are trying to get a hold of me via the platform and they don't get a response they can find me some other way that's probably what i'm going to do if you go to a twitter account and you see that they haven't tweeted in two years or whatever like i think that's that's the answer to your question about whether or not that person is still on that platform it's kind of like um

when somebody tells us that they're quitting listening to our show yeah right those are people who i mean lots of people stop listening to this show for all kinds of valid reasons yes exactly but there are some people who decide to take the time to let us know that it's happening and my guess would be those are people that are very passionate about the show and have felt like maybe disappointed in something we said or whatever and so because their passion level is high then they feel like they need to tell us whereas if your passion level is low you just stop listening right and fade off into the you know whatever the sort of rest of the pod world so that's that's me I'm basically like the person emailing Twitter going, well, guys, sorry, but you lost me. And you're more just like, yeah, I don't have to be on there if I don't want to be on there.

In a certain way, though, I think if you have a voice, it's important to use it. I'm not going to totally, you know, I see what you're saying there. And we definitely do, you know, we would make fun of, we definitely kind of roll our eyes when people write emails saying, I am going to stop listening to TBTL. And this is the reason it's like, dude, I stop listening to podcasts every day. like they just fall in and out of favor with me you don't have to write a a thesis on it or what would be the word um uh dissertation or yeah a manifesto maybe is the word i was looking for but um having said that that's also a backhanded compliment as well it means that we meant so much to somebody and that we're such a part of their world that was it and so and also with twitter it's like if you are somebody with a bit of a following and a bit of a voice whether it's It's your following, Luke, which would be more moderate compared to who's I saying like Jack White or some other like somewhat aging rocker made a big splash by saying I'm getting off this platform. And I sort of teased that person on the show. I made a somewhat snarky remark. But like, honestly, like that's good. Like if you think that something is causing ill or harm in society and then you're going to use your voice to say, listen, I think this is causing ill and harm and therefore I am out. I think that's a good thing. And so, you know, I I'll snark aside. I appreciate that. I don't really have that voice. I'm just trying to figure out for my own like for my own personal bullshit, which what makes the most sense.

um my personal bullshit usually involves petty anger around the travel process andrew and i was actually very gratified today to see a piece by david zipper in on slate.com annoyed with clear the company that fast tracks its customers through airports question mark and the answer is yes i am i've been flying a fair amount the last couple months and i found myself off and you know i jump through the hoops of like the tsa pre-check stuff right do you have that by the way i don't

it's ridiculous genevieve does so when she books tickets for us i often get kind of um grouped in with her and so i can do pre-check but we're talking about the official government pre-check here not the clear thing which is a private company right i always got confused i didn't

realize that so if genevieve books a ticket her tsa pre-check actually covers you as well

potentially sometimes not all the time it's not a guarantee but there have been times i've been able to breeze through because when she books the tickets then the tickets come out and they both just have the pre the pre-check stamp on it yeah it's really slick i mean i've been writing her

coattails for 22 years yeah why stop now yeah you know to get that thing you've got to um send in an application and then go uh you know have a meeting with someone and the whole idea is i it's funny i've had this for a long time and i of course use it quite frequently but i've never really thought about what was sort of behind it and in this piece david zipper kind of explains like the idea of the tsa pre-check was a way to get like very frequent travelers like myself streamlined so they could get through the tsa line faster but so that it would improve the lives of everyone because if you have a system where you're moving uh you know a basically if you can move me through the line faster because i've jumped through these hoops and i'm perceived to definitely not be a security risk it also means i'm not standing in the regular line so this is something that's benefiting everyone we're moving people through faster and we're moving through the people who we have decided are probably not a risk or as much of a risk um this thing clear is a completely different model it's just business it's just a way of paying money so that you can jump the line and then they do take your biometric data they scan like your eyeball and your fingerprint and stuff but there's not any special security check this does not serve a security purpose this is just a way for basically this company and then it turns out airports to make a bunch of money lax gets three million dollars a year from clear because they get a cut of the of the sign ups and and basically you know you sign up you pay like a hundred dollars uh a year or something and uh and then they can cut you to the front of the line and this guy david is writing from the perspective of someone who has tsa pre-check and has found themselves often in the tsa pre-check line and you finally get to the front this has been happening to me so much and you're about to go through and then somebody from clear walks over and they just like go well these people are going through next because they're with clear by the way the people who work for clear are allowed technically to give instruction to people in the line not just the clear customers even though they're not part of the tsa they don't have any formal tsa training as far as i know but they are there's some weird thing where because they're involved in this process they're allowed to give instruction to people in line which is also kind of weird that's very weird you know me i'm not like you know a huge fan of the existing tsa process because i feel like i often say it's sort of security theater in a way but even so i feel like the tsa people as much as they might sometimes sort of get on my nerves a little bit they've gone through a fair amount of training like they're the authorities in this situation a random person from clear who's mostly there as a salesperson Because I don't know if you've noticed this, too, but yes, every time you're walking to go get in the TSA line, there's like a few very pleasant people from clear going. Would you like to get through the line faster? Would you like to sign up for clear? Like it's mostly a sales job.

And I always get this weird vibe from them like they are. I could be wrong here. This could just be like my weird perception. But like in my I've had some confused interactions with them because there is also clear was also a way of verifying your vaccination status. If you were flying to Hawaii during the pandemic, which we did like near the end of the pandemic exactly a year ago. And like there are various services that could sort of like, I don't know, I guess kind of secure and present your vaccination information and other information. And clear was supposedly one of them, but it didn't quite work for me. It was a strange experience, and every time I talk to somebody at Clear or if they approach me and try to, like, make the sale, I always get sort of like a – they're usually younger people, at least in my experience, and it feels like they're, like, not letting me into a club, sort of, or trying to sell me on a pass to get into some cheapo club in Pioneer Square that I don't want to get into. You know what I mean? Yeah. Did you have any – here's the best example. This makes no sense that I'm going to take – Now, I'm not even going to use that analogy because it just gets us too far afield. But it's just like, I don't know. I can't explain it. I always feel like it's like some young person who potentially wears Axe body spray and is kind of like, hey, man. Hey, man, you want to get in the club? I'm like, no, dude, I want to get in the club. I'm too old for the club.

Shouldn't you be kind of flattered that they look at you and think this is a person for whom being in the club might actually be appealing? Because I feel like, you know, I don't think I even give off that energy anymore. i don't think i look like i think they would see me and be like let's not waste our breath on this guy he's not going into club am i even right about any of that though well i haven't been down there in a while at that hour so i couldn't i couldn't tell you i did have an experience i was in new york recently and i was walking through the village with a friend of mine and um and it's where like a lot of these uh comedy clubs are like you know the comedy cellar and these kind

the famous places oh that i meant i meant am i right about the vibe of the i'm so confused by what you're talking about i meant am i right about the clear people kind of being younger and having that sort of vibe or am i just off my nut on that no no they're always younger okay yeah my guess

would be that they're probably heavily incentivized about signing new people up it's my guess would be it's the kind of job where um you are told by somebody that uh who's hiring you or trying to get you to come do the job that you could make a phenomenal amount of money if you know based on how many people you sign up a week on clear my guess would be the base pay is probably um fairly uh standard but it's the kind of thing that draws in young impressionable people who are who are being told that they can really kill it in this game and so there they are standing there smiling and being very pleasant and trying to get you by the way it's worked on me before i did sign up for clear okay at one point because it was one of those things where the the pre-check line was out of control or actually it might have even been a place that didn't have pre-check you run into that sometimes too so i was like i need to get through this line okay i'll sign up for whatever and i think it was one of those like free trial that's also how they get you is you can sign up for it for free initially and then they'll start charging you they're just figuring you probably will forget that you're paying for this deal or gonna pay for the deal So I signed up for it, and then I got through. And then I actually, this is one of the few times that I actually said, no, thank you, I'm not going to do this anymore. So I got off of their little list. The thing I was going to say, well, two things really quickly. One is, when I was in New York and I walked past one of these comedy guys that was basically handing out flyers on the corner going, comedy show, comedy show, and I asked him if it was a bringer show. Bringer show just means a lot of times comics who are getting started in comedy in New York, they will be allowed to have stage time if they've gotten X number of people to come into the club so they're standing on a corner with like a you know like a whatever you want to call it a ticket or something or it's not really a ticket but it's like a thing that you would take down that has their name on it i think and so they've got to get to a certain level of tickets sold or butts in seat so that they can get their time and this guy was like comedy comedy and i was like is it a bringer show because i was literally thinking if this if i am the person who can help this poor sumbitch get his five minutes of stage time i will do it and he was like no not not actually and I was like okay well have a great night I was like the difference between me going to a comedy show I had no plan of going to and not going to it was if this guy needed me to help do that that was the one thing I want to say as far as the clear stuff goes it's another point that the author of this piece brings up it is a weird thing because guess what the more that clear interrupts the natural flow of people trying to get through the tsa pre-check line or even the regular security line the more that just bringing in these waves of clear customers and cutting them to the front of the line makes the actual line worse the better it is for clear's business right they're both the problem and the solution as homer since one said

about alcohol which has been very true in my life um in both cases but like which i hadn't thought about that either but it's like oh yeah that is messed up that like the worse this is the better it is for their business because the more the more that you stand in the tsa line and i've even thought about this i'm like okay a hundred dollars a year that's less than ten dollars a month what it you know if one time i'm late for a flight or the tsa line is i mean i think i told you when i was uh heading to maybe it was new york two times ago the tsa line at pdx was wildly long and i almost got in trouble with the TSA people because I was harrumphing so loudly and then I had to dead sprint to my flight so in other words sometimes I'm thinking well you know maybe I should just sign up for this silly thing because if it's $8 a month and it allows me to make one flight a year that I wouldn't otherwise make that's probably a good use of $100 but again they're sort of adding to the problem and then they're the people that you go to to get the solution. Then they win

then they win like the republicans in education let's destroy let's starve the public education system so bad that you have to have a private education system uh the other thing they point

out in this article that i hadn't really given a lot of thought to is the sort of proud history of other things that are like this this is hardly the first time that the united states has brought the profit motive into a part of public life where it does not belong consider bail bond companies which charge usurious fees to those desperate to get loved ones out of jail the industry has long fought reform efforts to eliminate the bonds which disproportionately burden low-income americans and are of dubious value in reducing crime like whether or not you have access to a bunch of money should not be the thing that determines whether or not you have to sit in jail while awaiting your trial right that's cat they call it cash bail and there's again a lot of movements to try to get rid of that or consider and this is the one that just had me really in feeling furious. Consider TurboTax into its tax filing software whose entire raison d'etre lies in the needless complexity of IRS forms into it collects as much as one point six billion dollars in annual income from TurboTax products and investigations by ProPublica and OpenSecrets found that the company has spent tens of millions of dollars lobbying congress to keep the irs from simplifying

its process yep i think i learned that from dave ross that is in please go yourself for fucking ever exactly exactly like i don't know why that makes me extra mad of all of the corporate

misdeeds that go on turn into it arguing for taxes to be more complicated than they need to be for

average americans is grotesque to me and then politicians taking that money and having it influence them it is in i think about that all the time especially obviously around tax season so you have taxes as we sit here i just made 60 bucks and i'm not even talking about my paycheck

um let's let's elaborate please because i could use 60 bucks in my life i told you i'm going straight t2 on the christmas that's right today

A long time, a long, long time ago, mostly when I was kind of transitioning from New Hampshire to Seattle, because I was so active on this website called Flickr, which was a photo website, there was some opportunity to like upload a bunch of my photos to the Getty services, you know, the Getty stock photo services. And I didn't know that I'm still a part of this thing. I have not added any new photos. I wouldn't even know, no offense, but like a real Luke Burbank, I would have no idea how to even get into the system to submit more photos in this day and age. Actually, it's been probably more than 15 years since I've uploaded a new photo. And back in the day when I was uploading a lot of photos, I would get more notices. Hey, somebody somewhere bought one of your photos. You never know who bought it, and you never know what photo it was. Well, it's so rare that I get one of these notices. but just now sitting here i just got 57 and 75 cents i was exaggerating a little bit when i said what's your best seller and i have no idea i have no idea what they bought but somebody somewhere just licensed a photo or two or three i don't even know but didn't you have a best seller for a while

that was like a particular thing that was kind of performing pretty well on that site for you

not sure either you might be referencing something that i told you like a long time something else that must have sold i felt like there was something on there and it was kind of

funny because it was maybe not what you would expect oh well i do remember one of the first

photos ever sold that wasn't through getty it was actually a textbook company reached out to me because i had taken a photo not even this was before i even had a decent camera i was like you it was the very first time i even held a digital camera i think i was visiting my mom in arizona she had a little point and shoot digital camera this is late 90s early 2000s and there was a sign that said can i remember exactly what it said it was an example of a comma splice it said keep our desert clean comma please throw away your litter or something and that's like that you don't you don't put a comma there those are two sentences if you need to punch first of all it's a sign i don't know if you need punctuation but um it's like it was a comma splice it was two sentences combined with a comma and so i took a photo of it and posted it to flicker it might be the first photo on there and i just said comma splice and then there was some some textbook it was like mcgraw hill or some textbook company emailed me like we're looking for a way to illustrate a comma splice it must be difficult like you wake up one morning your boss says i need an illustration for a comma splice you're like well screw you like how am i going to illustrate a comma splice well they found me and so i got a couple of checks from i don't or was it mcmillian or mcgraw hill i don't know for my comma splice photo which was just a shitty photo of a sign in

the desert that's what i'm saying there i bet you people who like you know how there's all this like sort of arbitrage that goes on with amazon and stuff where people have figured out that you can go into like a walmart and you can scan everything and and like figure out what it's selling for like what these physical products that you can buy at Walmart that are on deep discount are selling for on Amazon and you can like list them and send them out and make some kind of money or you can basically be just this pointer on Amazon where you don't even make the product but somehow because of SEO and stuff you're like when people are searching for a certain kind of bamboo steamer they get your page and they buy it from you but you're really getting it from someone else there's all this like kind of like in between stuff I'm sure in the world of stock photos and licensed photos, there's probably a whole way to take a bunch of pictures of certain things that people just tend to need and then just really game the SEO. So you're like the number one guy selling pictures of a traffic light, and you're just like printing money because of this one photo.

Yeah, click all of the images that have traffic lights in them. Suddenly you're like, oh, it's my payday. Yeah, who's doing that CAPTCHA game?

Who's got the CAPTCHA contract?

Exactly. Anyway, I didn't mean to brag. I didn't mean to be gauche and talk about my wild income. Dude, are you kidding me?

That's pretty dope. It makes me kind of wish that I could get that side hustle going. I'm excited for you. Passive income here. That's very fun, too, to just have some passive. There you go. Speaking of business people, this is when I wish I was still on Twitter or something, but I'll just tell you about it. While we've been talking, because I do have this burner Twitter account now, I still see stuff on Twitter, And a guy named Matt Ishpia is going to probably purchase the Phoenix Suns. And he has sort of an interesting story. He's a business dude now, but he actually played college basketball. He was a walk-on at Michigan State, and he actually played in three straight Final Fours. So he was like a basketball player and presumably not a particularly wealthy person. Like he was a college athlete. I don't think he went to the NBA or anything. and then he went to business school and he founded some kind of mortgage company and he made like a ton of money and enough money that he's now going to buy the phoenix suns but what

funny is i guess his nickname must be ish because his name is matt ishbia so you have draymond green from the golden state warriors tweeting excitedly about this friend of his whose nickname is ish who's going to buy the team and he says draymond green must also be a michigan state spartan that's probably why he knows this guy and he's like spartans win congrats ish congrats ish because the guy's nickname is ish but it sounds like draymond green is saying congrats ish yeah right yeah like congrats ish yeah ish like that would be a tweet that i would send out that would get no interaction but still i would be able to do it if i were still on twitter but instead you just

have to talk about it on your podcast that tens of people listen that is actually my real job so

at least i know that people listening to this right now are not eggs andrew michigan state

university that those are the spartans right the spartans yes draymond tom izzo is the long time head coach yeah so that is that is from where draymond green from whence draymond green emanated

yep nice 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 righty emails and vmails and dmails yeah no dmails um okay good

two uh quick uh voicemails here one um from a listener who apparently learned something from

our show which is shocking hey dummies what's up this is dan this guy cough button i just got just had like a crazy thing i just finished teaching i teach a two and a half hour long cloth so my throat was all sore and then on a whim i got a bag of chips and as soon as i started eating the chips my throat uh stopped being sore i think uh billy corgan's onto something you know he might know what he's doing all right so i share the good news the life hack kid buddies

all right bye thank you um of course billy corgan had some laryngitis and some throat issues on tour And he was seen on stage during drum solos eating chips, something that he later addressed and then actually had to pause the tour. So that just seems so it seems so counterintuitive to me. But glad to know that it actually, you know, I tried that. Yeah. Yeah.

I was like I was having a sore throat one day or just kind of a froggy throat. And I had a bunch of CBS stuff I had to do, like voiceover recording. And I happened to have, because I was in a hotel room, I had a bag of chips that I had gotten downstairs the night before and then not eaten. And I was like, well, this is perfect. I need to kind of, like, try to warm my voice up. And I'm hungry. And there are potato chips here. And Billy Corgan told me it's okay.

Yeah. It's all right. It's okay. It's okay. To eat these chips. Billy Corgan told me so. Oh, by the way, somebody wrote in about Billy Corgan. And I mentioned that it's not Corrigan. It's Corrigan. But somebody wrote in, and I can't remember who it was, and I was reading it verbatim, and they referred to him as Billy Cortana, I want to say, or something. Yeah, that's his real name. And I said, oh, that must be his real name. And I just immediately jumped to that conclusion. And no, the person wrote in later and said, oh, I'm sorry about that typo. It was like an autocomplete thing. He wrote Corgan, and the computer just switched it to Cortana. And the next thing you know, I'm on a podcast broadcasting that that's his real name, which I looked up later. It's not. It was just a typo. But I believe so much in our listeners, Luke, that I decided to change Billy Corgan's name based on a typo as opposed to question whether or not that was proper.

So basically, you're like me reading The Washington Post after I've run it through Print Friendly. Yes, right.

I was changing people's names.

Just coming up with completely ridiculous things about Julia Roberts.

One more quick voicemail here. But before I get to it, I do want to give a quick update on something everybody was super interested in, which is have I found and consumed any barbecue flavored Fritos since I made the grand announcement a couple of weeks ago that and this was actually I had missed the announcement. I think it was announced maybe in October or November that my favorite flavor potato chip, which is regular shaped, regular sized barbecue flavored Fritos. I don't know if it's my favorite overall, but it had gone out of production for years. And it took me a while to realize, like, I haven't had those things in forever. Then I looked it up and they really had taken them off the market. And then Frito-Lay announced, hey, we're bringing them back. This isn't a promotion. They're just back. And I was very happy. And I'm seeing them everywhere. I bought a bag at the store. I don't like to keep too many potato chips in my house because I don't trust myself with them. But I did go through that bag rather quickly. They are good. They are back. They're exactly how I remember them.

Also, I got some notes that some listeners are sending me some, too. So thank you, Garrison, at all, because this is how I operate now. I just get free money while I sit behind my computer, and I tell listeners I like things, and they send it to the P.O. Box.

Must be nice. Meanwhile, I'm elbow deep in Billy Corgan's wife's Instagram, and I'm just telling you it's hard out there for a semi-public figure. So I started by trying to figure out What Billy Corgan's last name was If it was not Cortana And it turns out it's Corgan As you said And then I clicked on some kind of link He's married to somebody named Chloe Mendel And then I ended up on Chloe Mendel's Instagram page Where she was posting a really cute Well, it's a really cute picture of one of their kids And this kid is on stage with Billy Corgan Who is smiling beautifically at his kid But he's also in full makeup Because he's clearly just been doing a show so his head is like painted all white and he's got like a heart paint on his face and just in the light he looks kind of like a guy from like a house of a thousand corpses or something like there's which again I'm not trying to roast Billy Corgan at all it's just like if I was his kid I might be a little bit like ooh why is daddy kind of look this way

but daddy often looks that way though

right so maybe they're used to it anyways you know the his wife and the mother of these children post this cute picture and then somebody just jumps into the comments and says, I'm a light worker. I felt a connection to you when I came across your page, and the ancestors burdened my heart with a message.

Is that from Radio Free Walsh?

So far, it looks like Billy Corgan's wife has not responded. I don't mean to define this person as Billy Corgan's wife either. So far, it doesn't look like Chloe Mendel has responded to that, but I just thought, I don't know how I would deal with that if when I put a post up, someone tells me they're a light worker, and the ancestors have burden their heart with a message like uh out of here with that shit yeah that's peace and love to

our light workers in the audience all right let me play one more voicemail for you here before we get out of here i got a note after our um holiday zoom party which i don't think did we mention that on yesterday's show friday of course we had our first ever tbtl holiday party via zoom it was a really fun time people showed up with food and drink um and again i i don't know how i came off during that but i had a really good time i don't know if i quote unquote performed well but i definitely had a good time um this is what i put on my dating profile um but anyway so i have so

much punch left oh from i guess i just gotta dump it out i've got an entire punch bowl of cranberry vodka punch that i that night i just like covered it in cellophane and put it in the fridge thinking i don't know maybe i'll have this some of this later and then i never did and now i think that

ship his sail you need a pitcher oh yeah that would be nice that would make it a little bit more easy just to kind of have but then you get into this thing it's like midday that picture of yeah booze juice is kind of winking at you you're like no should i should i not anyway i had a really good time thanks for everybody who showed up and turned out um and also big thanks to our colleagues john and may huge thanks they basically put the whole thing on and really did most of the heavy lifting um but and i'm not just saying that i'm not just saying that to be nice like that's the truth uh i don't know what that voice was um and we you know we had people mention in the chat if they wanted to show off their food or drink they could get a little moment in the spotlight and we'd see what they brought to the occasion of course had a lot of people on the line so we couldn't get to everybody and i got an email after the show um from listener libby who said that Libby's Five was a little bit bummed that they didn't get to be on the Zoom call with us, and so we received this voicemail from the child in question.

He said, you forgot to do our turn to talk. And now the competition's done. Now it's all dirty, you didn't let us talk.

I'm sorry we didn't let you talk, kiddo. I apologize for that. It was Luke's decision. That's the thing. Like, I was advocating for you the whole time, and Luke was like, no, no, we're not going to go to them. So my apologies for that. I'm also sorry I don't know your name.

I just feel like kids are generally not, they just, they tend to underperform on the program, whether it's the Zoom stuff or when they call in. It's just, there's no cuteness there. Me sitting in a velvet tuxedo power drinking cranberry juice with vodka in it is, that's entertainment. Yeah, that's the show. Some cute kid showing off a strudel they made or something. Come on.

Strudel. Strudel is one of those pastries that isn't worth the climb for me, if that makes sense. You mean making it or eating it? Well, not making it. How much of a climb is there to eating it? Well, I guess not worth the climb is not the right term there. I am not. very much like this in my life but you are more so especially during phases where you're really kind of counting your calories or whatever and you make these decisions like is this is this little treat worth the calories and like yeah oh i see what you mean and strudel for me is something that takes the shape and you know and and has the sugar of a dessert but i never find it satisfying enough it's too much air like maybe i'm just too much of a too much of a glutton like you know give me some pumpkin pie that's something dense you know that's now that's a dessert but like a strudel has is such a light thing that i just remember being a kid like oh donuts are great oh strudel oh okay yeah strudel so mostly air donuts today then so you're saying basically it's a letdown

because the biting and the chewing the masticating all of that i just wanted to show off that i know two ways to say chewing uh it's like it just feels like you're doing a lot of work but you're not

getting a ton of roi i don't feel like you get a lot of roi from strudel now here's the deal i think there are probably some people who absolutely love it as a german dessert and almost a delicacy i think it's just probably because i have just more um again gluttonous instincts that i just want to like really pack it on i i don't know i just it's it's too delicate i think the same thing of people talk about a little French word for pancakes. I don't like crepes. I don't even know if I've really ever had a proper crepe. It doesn't seem to appeal to me. It seems too dainty.

You know the thing that I'm not crazy about is it's more the more Swedish like not a Swedish pancake but what do you call that? Usually you put like lingonberry in it or something. I'm looking it up. This sort of rings a bell. There's a name for like a big and you make it in a big pan and it's kind of like a it's sort of like a crepe but not quite. Is there a chance it's just called Swedish pancake because that's what I'm getting. Maybe it's just called Swedish pancakes but it's a big delicacy for some folks and you put powdered sugar on it and lingonberry but it always tastes a little bit too much like egg for me. Like it's made with a lot of eggs and but it's like it doesn't seem like a dessert to me because of the flavor of egg that is in it because it's primarily egg like it's like i'm putting powdered sugar and jelly on an egg whereas like a regular pancake an american pancake which is how god intended it is so much just like kind of dough which i like you know what i mean it's like i like i very much enjoy the experience of eating a pancake with a bunch of butter and syrup on it but these other like swedish pancakes or whatever you call them they're kind of um no no no they're oh my god the name just came into my head and then and then

left again i'm not getting the only thing that's babies they're called dutch babies i've never heard of that google dutch baby okay so a little different than a swedish pancake which is something different in and of itself but i'm seeing yes oh or the dutch baby are do these things come out all puffed up and then yeah and then you knock it down the dutch baby is what i'm

talking about it's the dutch baby pancake but yeah it comes out as almost kind of like a souffle of something don't uh google cute dutch baby that's a whole different side of the internet oh no really don't don't google buff dutch baby because they've been goosing

they're goosed they're goosed man they're goosed they're goosed all right anyway that's uh that's

me finally weighing in on the red hot topic of dutch babies for more on for more strudel talk

Tune in to my own podcast To Strudel to Live

I was trying to think what would be A good name For a podcast that's just about European breakfast pastries Simmer down Strudel Okay Let's see I'll think of it, I'll have it by tomorrow By which I mean I'll completely forget about this As soon as the words power outplay Alright thanks for listening everybody We'll be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you until then have a great Tuesday uh stay safe out there on the roads hit me up if you've got chains ideas and please remember no mountain too tall watch the s curves and good luck to all s curves that could be a name for the podcast you forgot to do our turn to talk power out