Muse

From the podcast, Too Beautiful to Live, welcome to the stage, Andrew Walsh and Luke Burbank.

Wow. Holy moly. I think they're here for you, Luke. Was this tonight? I am so glad I was in the neighborhood. I thought this was next week. Hey, thank you for coming out to see TVTL's 4,000th episode. Andrew and John and I were sort of having a moment backstage. Probably it was that song by The Faces. It gets me in my feelings. but really, like, this is a really incredible thing that we're getting to do this with all of you here. You are the reason that we've been able to do 4,000 of these, so give yourselves a round of applause, please. We're here to kind of celebrate that milestone and also celebrate you, the tens of listeners, but Andrew, we're also here for a higher calling, right?

We have a lot of special guests here tonight, including you guys including some people you'll see on stage but we have some very very special guests as well luke and they are um to your left these these goddamn lunch boxes hold up your lunch boxes i want to see those we're everybody who doesn't have a lunch box you gotta go get one

all right i don't know if you've aunt marie lou i'm sorry i swore i'm trying to keep it not fresh tonight, but I gotta be me. You know when you go to the Mini Mart and there's like a leave a penny, take a penny? This is like that, but it's take a lunchbox, take a lunchbox. Were you saying that it's actually a new city of Seattle law? There is, yeah. The fire

marshal says that everybody must take a lunch box on the way out. You have to.

They will spontaneously combust if three of them are together. This is a very dangerous scene, so really and truly, please take those because my parents are not going to let us put them back in their yard. The amount of money we spent on ferry rides getting them here tonight

is already a wash.

I don't want to spoil anything for the Monday episode, but let's just say Andrew and I set out on a mission to get these lunchboxes and other stuff from my folks' house, and it did not go the way he expected. Tune in for that on Monday. All right, should we get to the show here? Should we try to do this thing? All right. All right, these work. This is good.

All right. My computer did not... Hey, what do you think the chances are that my computer turns off in the middle of this show?

It would be in keeping with what was a very technically challenging but ultimately redeeming story of sound checking that we did at about, I don't know, from about 4 p.m. till about 6.45 today. We're doing some kind of complicated technical lifts here. Oh, and by the way, can I introduce somebody else? Yes, yes. TBT employee numero uno, John Sklaroff, please. Get out here. Get out here. Part of the hazing ritual of being the first actual employee of Too Beautiful to Biz is not only do you have to sell the merch, but you also have to run the most complicated technical part of the show, which is video and Zoom and things like that. So John has been doing an incredible job. That is to say, Andrew, I fully assume your computer will

bite the dust. Yeah, it's a 50-50 chance at this point. I got stories

on stories from the last couple of days, so much of it involving these lotions. There's a disturbing amount of lotion on stage right now. Can there be can there be a disturbing amount of lotion so if your computer goes out I'll be able to keep these folks entertained for the for hours and hours and hours until Ross Matthews comes on tomorrow night never thought I'd be opening for Ross Matthews but dare to dream. You're not opening for Ross Matthews alright so you already know this because you're TBTL fans and you're wonderful people but if you have fun and are energetic tonight we have y'all miked and that will be picked up on the recording and it will be a great thing to help kind of sort of spiff up the parts that aren't going so great from this end content wise so have fun hoot holler the whole thing uh and

And I'll see y'all, see y'all, see you at the bar at the end of the night, okay?

That includes you, Genevieve. This isn't house rules where you don't get to laugh at my jokes. You have to laugh at my jokes tonight. It's part of the contract. Hey, speaking of the recording, Luke.

Oh, yeah, Chris, are we recording? Excellent. We good? It's dark. You're holding up a, is it a middle finger or a thumbs up? It was a hell of a sound check. By the way, round of applause for Chris. Chris? I'm not being overdramatic as I often can be when I say most of what we were trying to do tonight was in peril of not happening until Chris downloaded a driver for something called a Motu and with the help of Andy, our monitor person, did some real national treasure shit. I don't know how they did it, but there was Da Vinci Code all over this place and here we are.

That's right. Thank you, everybody, for being so wonderful to get us actually audible tonight.

But seriously, we are recording right now.

We are recording right now.

Because that will take away all the goodwill from before if we don't record the show.

We got a master, we got a backup, we're all good on all that.

All right, all right.

Y'all ready to do this? So that wasn't it? There's more? There's a little bit more. All right, let's start it. Okay, here we go.

Have you ever had a dream that that you um you had you you what you could you do you what you want you you could do so you you do you could you you want you want him to do you so much you could do anything

ah i've been waiting for this moment for months and it's finally here take a hot dog stuff it with some jack cheese folded in a pizza you got cheesy blasters and then all the kids say thanks meat cat and then meat cat flies away on his um skateboard this is not your mama's podcast this is too beautiful to live this party is gonna be off of the hook sweetie have a good show what

you do is so important well all right hello and welcome everyone to tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live. I was just calling about the too beautiful to be heard. I can't believe you're still on the air. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your

host. You're still doing a pod card?

Coming to you tonight from the Neptune Theater in beautiful Seattle, Washington. This is special. This is special. We are seeing something we ain't never seen before here on TVTL, I'll tell you what. I'm so excited about this show. It is episode 4,000 in a collector's series

Let the fun begin

We have all kinds of things planned for you during this episode

Apparently you're spinning around and apparently every time you get dizzy

We're going to look at the past of TBTL how we got here, but of course because we're a forward-looking show because we like to just break the rearview mirror off and look right out the windshield at the future We're also going to talk about the 8,000th episode of TBTR. The past is history. The future is a mystery. And we're also going to be talking to this young man, the longest-running co-bro of the show.

That's a tuna, bro!

Maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships, their grace, their splendor, and all that intricate rigging. He is a soulful rocker from... New Hampshire? He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Hey, everybody!

Wow. Am I the only one who legitimately got a little teary-eyed when the entire audience started singing along to Liz Lemon? Like, I momentarily lost control of my emotions.

It is a weird universe that we and the folks here have constructed where you have, like, the Berlin Wall falling when, like, you know, Scorpions sang Winds of Change, And then you have a bunch of people quoting 30 Rock, and they have equal emotional resonance, in our world anyway.

It's not even our joke, yet somehow it made me proud. I don't know how we worked that, Luke. How do people hear that and think of us?

You just have nothing else to talk about, and you play almost exclusively 30 Rock Drops over the course of about 15 years. And eventually, you just break the listeners down, I think, has been our approach. How are you feeling, my friend?

Oh, aside from the crying, pretty good. A lot of people were asking me, you know, like an hour before showtime if I'm nervous. And I was weirdly calm. I don't think I got nervous literally until about.

two minutes ago. I'm being quite serious about that. Wait, because we've been on stage for like eight minutes. Yes, I know. I was like, oh yeah, this is fun. Look, all of our friends are out there. And then, oh wait, you have a family member here who doesn't like coarse language.

Am I right about this? Let me get, mom, can you check with Aunt Mary Lou if it's okay if some fresh happens? Not too fresh? Okay. How fresh would you say this is going to be, Andrew?

You know what, it's more. Aunt Mary Lou, plug your ears. It's kind of coarse. Now I regret bringing it up but let's just say i was shaking like something that my uncle has a disgusting

phrase for oh that's not bad they used to see that in russia all the time you know what i'm

talking about a dog shitting a peach pit shaking like a dog shitting peach pits that's what started happening when i was standing right over there before the show after we were on stage it set in

it's set in it's like here we are your body was on some sort of autopilot and then all of a sudden and it realized... Suddenly it realized I was talking to it. This is just an incredible thing to be here with all of you, and having done this, like, 4,000 times, and I want to just be really transparent. This may be my final episode of TBTL, because I may be facing a fairly serious amount of incarceration. I don't know if you all enjoyed the lack of road signs in front of the theater, but... I took it upon myself this morning to personally move all of that. And like anything heroic and worth doing, there were moments of real terror for me, including when I realized that the road close sign, when you pick it up, completely falls apart. This is a stress dream. This is a stress dream. I was not here for this. No, and that was intentional. Yeah, no, I know. Like, that seems like it's pretty sturdy and heavy. First of all, it's not. It's light and flimsy. That's why there's sandbags on it. I picked it up, and immediately the bottom parts just fell off. Oh, my God. And now I'm, like, carrying this thing down towards, like, the Boba Tea Place or whatever's next to us. The occult bookstore, I think, that's next to us.

Now, obviously, you would have done this no matter what, but I do want to remind people who maybe are not caught up on the podcast that you had permission from the road crew.

This is officially now that we're all here together and you can't do anything about it. The real story is what the guy, Rich, said was if people needed to park and drop folks off, we could move it, they could drop folks off, and we could put it back. Oh, not like put it back tomorrow. Right, or even never, which is my plan.

I see. Really? You're not going to go out there after the show and put all the cones back the way you found them?

No, not unless those cones are outside of Goldie's. I did not like the aesthetic of all of that, you know, sort of construction noise in front of the theater where all these fine people have come out to help us celebrate this thing. But I will tell you what, it is addictive, because from my hotel room across the street, I can see where the road sign that I moved now is. And I was watching this afternoon cars just obeying my traffic laws, and it was intoxicating. Like, this is how God must feel if he moves a flimsy road sign. I was sitting, I'm not even kidding, for like 45 minutes. Did God make a sign so flimsy that even he can't move it? I was just watching people get up to where, like, the sign used to be there. Now it's there because I carried it. And now they get to where the sign is now, and they go, I got to get over it. Like, they're obeying my whim. They have to. You need more. One that says, honk if you're lonely. You need to, like, just start controlling people. I really get how people get into, like, you know, dictatorships and running countries. It starts with moving a road sign for your podcast, and it ends with, like, naming a month of the year after yourself, like that guy in, like, Turkmenistan did.

You guys ever wonder how it begins? This is how it begins. You were here for it. Oh, which also makes you complicit, by the way. So congratulations.

The one other thing that I want to try to just address right here at the top of the show, and then we're going to get to the real programming, is if you take a photo with me later, or if we're just chatting, or if maybe we were chatting before the show, and you thought, oh, it looks like Luke's entire forehead is sloughing off. That's only because that's exactly what's happening. Because I got very sunburned this week in L.A., and this afternoon, what was kind of a reddish but tolerable sunburn decided to just slough off of my forehead, and I immediately called my girlfriend, Becca, and was like, tell me how to fix this. and she was like, like, get to a beauty department. Okay. So I went to Target on the Ave, and I was, like, standing in the beauty section with, like, it was, she was telling, I was like, apricot scrub? Salic acid? She was like, no, absolutely not. Wrong thing. And I was like, I don't know what to do. And she was like, just look for something that says, like, Cetaphil on it or something, which is why I now have, like, $50 of creams and lotions up here. It was like when the pilot has a heart attack and the tower has to try to get a normal person to land the plane. That was me trying to buy the right thing to fix my forehead situation, which, by the way, totally unsuccessful.

Are you going to be on the stage now because you plan on applying this?

Yes, that's why I brought this CoverGirl TrueBlend mirror. I have been using this so long, there's not even any foundation in it. It's just the mirror. Sorry, I'm flashing this on the audience, too. How's that going for everybody? I've been carrying this around on my dop kit so I can put my baldness powder on and stuff. This is probably one of my three oldest friends. This CoverGirl TrueBlend whatever it was at some point. And yes, I will be using it throughout the show.

Okay, good. I like to think that I'm a yes and kind of fella, especially when it comes to TBTL stuff. I will not be applying it for you. One last thing. I really need to get going.

We've got important people waiting, but the one last thing that I would like to sort of, I guess, just get off my chest here at the beginning of things, which we're rapidly getting to not the beginning of things. We're rapidly getting to the middle of things.

Are we still rolling, by the way? We're recording, right, Christopher? How much tape did you bring, Chris? Okay, good, okay.

Double middle fingers. What does that mean? Double dicks. I love this hotel that we're staying at across the street. They're not paying us anything, although they should be. It's called The Graduate. it. Most of you are staying there if you're from out of town. But I have not been able to access my room for the last two days without a chaperone from the front desk, because the little thing that you scan your key card on on the door is broken. It turns green, but nothing changes. But if they use their fob, it unlocks it. And no one in that entire hotel can figure out what the problem is.

i say this with love but one thing i've learned about you in the past several years as you've been doing more and more traveling for work is i know that you will ask to change rooms if a shadow cuts across the parking lot in a way that you find somewhat i mean off look why if the shadow

looks poor. Because here's why, Andrew. It looks down on the marquee. Oh, you don't want to change the room. I love, right when I got there, I made a video going in and then zooming in on the marquee and then texted it to Becca. Okay. And I can also observe my road work. This is a primo room other than not being able to get into it. I'm the foreman now. But I actually took a picture of my solution i think we have that john i went i took this is a real life hack it buddy i took you know when you check your bags they give you that little sticker in case like shit hits the fan i i taped down like another little piece of cardboard and now the door no longer locks problem solved i hate this so much right now anybody could walk in your room You know what? They got a one in like 800 chance of guessing.

Of finding the room? Yeah.

Good luck. Have at it. Well, we know what side.

Sorry, I'm not trying to help here, but we know what side of the building it's on.

I didn't think of that part. That's actually a really good point. Down to 400. Oh, I think it's probably like 200 now. This feels like a time when we should maybe get to like the real show here a little bit. Now, this is our 4,000th episode, obviously. And many of you, thank you. Many of you have been listening for a long, long time. But maybe there are some new folks here in the audience that don't know what we do. Maybe there are some folks who are listening to this broadcast, and they're new to the show. So we thought we would just catch you up on what we've done for the last 3,999 episodes. A little thing we're calling TBTL, In Case You Missed It. We paid so much for that licensing, for that version of We Didn't Start the Fire. Sorry, John. Almost every dollar we made from tickets tonight went for that. And I don't... Listening to it now...

here on stage, Andrew, it doesn't feel like the best decision. No, that's the original.

That's the original.

Okay, TVTL started on, I'm told, January 7th, 2008. We were a radio show, a nighttime AM radio show on Cairo Radio, and it did not start off super great. This is, like, let's just play what, like the first minute?

Yeah. I've heard this. I like

it, I gotta say. I don't I don't like it so much.

I will critique it after you play it, but I like it. I think it's good.

This is, from 3,999 episodes ago, the first one minute of TBTL that ever existed. Here's what it sounded like.

This is Too Beautiful to Live with Luke Burbank on News Talk 710. Cairo.

I heard about that thing on the AM radio. What a fun, sexy time for you.

I'm levitating. What's the F? By the way, a lot of these drops are now racist. I just want to get in front. I want to get in front of some of this shit. It was a very different time in 2008, okay? Okay, thank you. I feel warm and I'm levitating. What's the F?

It's that woo-woo.

Right after the break, we're going to interview Eric.

This one's also on the line.

I had mayor who climbed the highest mountain in the world, Mount Everest. But he's gay. I mean, he's gay. Excuse me. He's blind. So we'll hear about that coming up.

Okay. As we head to the break, a look at the six.

Could be a crackhead. That one. The guy hold to the wrong stuff.

Not at my watch. We may need emergency surgery in the studio.

Well, congratulations, America and parts of Ballard. You did it. you just listened to the first 90 seconds in the history of the show too beautiful to live also known as tbtl i'm luke burbank just weighed in at 188 pounds i'm a taurus oh my god you didn't tell me that was in there part of my forehead just sloughed off some things never change jen andrews pre-show weight 135, I'm also a Taurus. Good, excellent. This is, in fact, TBTL, the show that is in all likelihood too beautiful to live. Here are some of the people you're going to hear a lot of on this show. Susan Burbank, the pride of St. Hubert's Catholic School, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania. Also happens to be my mother.

Hello.

Addie Sandstrom, 13 years old, hails from Linwood, my kid. Hi, you reached Addie, I'm not available. Oh, my God. Jason Andrews, former team captain, Hillsdale College men's basketball team, architect, husband to our producer. This is Jason. I'm really excited about your new show. You're also going to be hearing an awful lot of Tracy Jordan. Who's crazy? Me or Ann Carvin? French Canadians.

Who's that Selena?

Bindi Irwin.

Hey there, Komodo dragon. Why you got your big tail wagging?

Joe Blue. I think that was where the crocodile hunter, Steve Irwin's daughter, Bindi Irwin, said she could rap.

Oh, I didn't know that tale as old as time.

Yeah, exactly. Okay, let's just get through this together, guys. There's only 45 more minutes of this. I heard the jury's still out on science. Banana-rama. Wow, banana-rama, that's left field. Banana-random? Barack Obama. It is our turn. Britney Spears Sean DeTore Hi He's a quiet one, Sean DeTore Also, you'll hear some Jen Andrews That could be the part where you sing, Jen But, you know I'm here We'll get that together for the next one That was going to be your beautiful window commercial We put together a lot of tape for that open I think that might be the most tape I feel like we've heard enough of this. That's rough. I am still a fan of that show. The nerves. I love that. The nerves in my voice. That was before I started drinking gin during the program.

That was when you were drinking gin before the program.

Right. More on that coming up, by the way.

I love that. I am still such a fan of that. I wish I hadn't ruined the show, in fact. You stop it. You stop it right now, Andrew. I love that so much. Also, I was driving with you yesterday, and I told you, oh, you make a comment at the beginning. You said something like, well, America and parts of Ballard, we did it. I changed the order of that a little bit. And I thought that was such a good joke. I want to know how you feel about this. I thought that was such a good joke, I asked you where you got it.

You did.

I'll tell you what, we were driving through Fife with the lunch boxes in the U-Haul cargo van. And he goes, was that an almost live joke that you used at the top of the program? Which hurt. We did a lot of things in the early days of TBTL when we were a radio show that were just aggressively trying to get canceled. We did a whole sort of special on Prezine, on the kind of food that one could cook if one were incarcerated, which involved us trying those recipes, which involved us frying a bunch of fish in the soundproof, hermetically sealed. Like, you guys remember that submersible that was recently in the news?

Yes, be careful. Kind of that.

It was that level of kind of sealing. And that didn't go particularly well with the other shows on the station. We did push-up contests. Oh, we did solve some mysteries, but they were mostly about, like, is a local ice cream parlor having kids, when they turn 16, kiss all of the employees?

Forcibly kissing children.

Forcibly kissing, and that was true. That turned out to be the case at Farrell's Ice Cream Parlor. We did a lot of drinking on the show. I mean, to a degree, that was pretty irresponsible. We had, of course, Andrew, Margarita Fridays, which...

What are you going to do on a margarita Friday? You have to.

You have to love the alliteration.

Yeah. I guess margarita Mondays were out of the question.

It's like there are other drinks that start with F, and then there are other days that start with M, but we just decided to miss on both counts. We had some pretty rough interviews on the show back in those days. We interviewed Patton Oswalt, the comedian. That went very badly. We interviewed Rachel Dratch, the fine comic actress, And she came very close to leaving the interview because I was bringing up every painful, unintentionally bringing up every painful thing from her career.

So I assume you learned how to be better at interviews?

No, Andrew, we made up a fake story to get out of interviews that were going badly where we were basically lie to the people who we were interviewing.

How did that go exactly?

It was about as good as the plan sounds. We called it Digstown. It was Jen's idea. that had to do with the movie Diggstown, the plan was she would tell me there's a traffic incident in Diggstown and we have to go to it.

I actually did not know until this week that Diggstown was a movie. I only knew it was your break glass in case of emergency. I thought it was just a town in Washington somewhere.

I mean, the irony of that being our cover story is that if you are doing a nighttime AM radio show on a news talk station, the reason people turn it on is because they want to know is there a traffic accident? Is there something on fire? Is it going to snow? They want news and relevant information, and we staunchly refused to produce that or provide that at any time, which, of course, ultimately led to us... And I hope... Is everybody sitting down? Is anyone in the bar, please come and sit down, because you're going to need to be sitting down for this. We were fired, in fact.

Because you provided nothing of use to the listener.

Yes. The speech that Rod Arquette gave me was we're moving some things around in the programming lineup and we're taking TVTL off the air. I said, okay, well what else is moving? And he said, that's it. That's what we're moving. But this is the amazing part about life. We apparently are still on fairly cordial terms with that person, the Rodfather, Rod Arquette.

Hey Luke, this Rod Arquette, Remember me, your former boss at Cairo? Remember? You know, I knew you when you were, boy, just a pup. I remember the first time I met you and I said, this guy's kind of an odd duck, but man, he's interesting to listen to. Congratulations, Luke. I can't believe you've gone this far. I mean, celebrating, what, 4,000 episodes of TBTL. I'm still trying to figure out what the show is all about, for crying out loud. Yeah, that's fair. But you've had tremendous success, Luke. You do a great job. I can't believe this many people showed up to celebrate with you, but you're doing fantastic work. I love your auditions and the pieces you do for CBS this morning. Sunday morning, but whatever. And I remember years ago when we first met you and you tried to explain what you wanted to do, and we said, really? Well, let's give it a try. Now, unfortunately, it didn't quite work on radio, but it certainly is working on the podcast. So congratulations, Luke. Have a big celebration and wishing you nothing but the best in the future. congratulations Luke

so congratulations Luke thank you I would like to echo that

yeah I don't think he realizes you work on the show

no no no no that's fine I know he says it really works on podcasts this is not a man who listens to the podcast that's fine that was really sweet I had never met the

rod father i didn't know what he looked like we weren't sure if you would track him down to get this video i'm glad you did however luke and you know this this is not a surprise to you there is one thing that is bugging the hell out of me let me give let me give these folks yeah can

you guess the setup which was i was very excited that i tracked the rod father down at the talk radio station in salt lake city where he now works luke was smiling and dialing i was pretty excited because i haven't talked to that guy in 15 years since he fired me and i was like would you record a video for the show? I'm all excited. I sent it to Andrew. I'm like, we did it. We landed the Rod Arquette account. And Andrew's response was, what is with that framing in the

video? Why are we turning our cameras up and down just so that we can have at least half of the frame taken up with a drop ceiling and some sort of fluorescent light bulb. I mean... Can we move our cameras the other way and get rid of that garbage, please? I don't understand it. Andrew. Hot talk.

You get a... You splash out for a beautiful drop ceiling like that. You're not gonna find ways to show it off.

Anyway, yes. I know that that slightly derails what we're going for here, but I'm not wrong. Am I... No, you're not wrong. You're not wrong but i do appreciate do you think that he'll hear this uh i would say there's a low likelihood

okay then i'll just leave it there that he'll but he may catch me on cbs mornings yeah well i hope that's your next i want to be honest with you i knew that was my in with him like he doesn't care about this but he is geeked that i know jane paulie that was like the first thing he asked me when i got a hold of him so as uh you all know and have figured out by now uh we had to stop being on the radio station because they took away our key cards. And so we started doing this show at my house. And there were some really great things about that, which was that a lot of you all came with us and kept, you know, listening and supporting and going on this weird streaming thing, stick-am and talking to each other. The problem was the table, the shelf that had the recording equipment was literally held up by a stick. It was not a very professional production and it sort of went downhill from there like eventually i went through a breakup i was doing the show by myself now jen was off gallivanting in her barbie trailer with j before it was cool by the way that trailer was called the barbie and um you know there was this kind of period of time for the show and i don't know if you all remember this or if you picked this up energetically but I was like doing the show by myself I was pretty sad I was turning in like half hour episodes sometimes I was wearing like a puffy pirate shirt that I was about to wear to a state farm convention where I was going to be handing out 3D glasses it was rough it was kind of like it was a moment where there was real questions in my mind and again I wonder in your minds if the show was going to go on and then a miracle happened an angel fell from heaven and save the show. Yes.

Oh, I didn't know that was going to be a picture of Andrew. Oh, yeah, who are you talking about? I just realized something. I'm not joking. I just realized. I only wear one thing on stage. Are you wearing... Is that what you're wearing right now? Look how new that jacket was.

I gotta go shopping. That, my friend, is the photo we're putting in Current Magazine, the leading magazine that covers public radio. Of course, Andrew joining the show was a godsend. And it was, Andrew, like, we haven't, like, this isn't part of whatever our little shtick is tonight, but, like, the shtick of us pretending to like each other. No, but, like, from the very first moment that you sat in on the other microphone, and it was just supposed to be, like, hey, do you want to come by and, like, hang out and, like, fill in for a while or see if you like it? From, like, the first moment we were talking, I was like, oh, yeah, this is the person. Thank you. This can exist. Because at the point that you got there, it was really close to not existing. Well, I'm glad you were in such a low place that I seemed serviceable.

I appreciate it. No, it's been, I mean, honestly, I mean, you think about, I was on a certain career track, and I met you. Okay, all right. And now here I am with 400 or 500 people pity laughing at my jokes, and I love it. Which is ironic. Keep it coming.

Ironically, the...

Holy shit, that works. No.

no no no please i will die of embarrassment thank you though ironically you were hired to pity laugh

at my jokes that is true that's why you've enlisted them in the project i'm not joking

when i was new on the show people be like that's so great you're so good on the show i'm like i'm there so that when luke tells a joke it's not just silence like so that's you have some sort

of feedback that was my job uh and you did a damn fine job out of my friend what you were what you were less great at what you were less great at was like being on my roof when the blue angels were flying around. We used to do these secret shows. Remember we did that secret show where we went to Arby's? Yes, yeah. And I remember we were out of things to talk about, so we just started playing Cisco audio.

I don't think that's the Cisco.

No, the other Cisco. That's the Cisco. There we go. We would literally just... By the way, John, when John was putting that slide together, he was legitimately... His mind was legitimately blown that that's the Cisco that we've been talking about and playing for all these years. I don't know who he thought the guy that says ooh-la-la was. Ooh-la-la. But that's our guy, that's Cisco. I mean, really, when you do 4,000 of these things, there are going to be days where you just point a microphone at a different radio station where a guy is giving gardening advice, which is literally what we were doing with Cisco.

We drove up I-5 with my microphone recording a show We ran out of things to say We turned on Cairo radio Cisco was on It was awesome And we just aimed the microphone at the speakers for a while True story, it lives online

It was really one of the best shows we've ever done It really was Of course, at some point I moved to the small maritime village of Port Townsend, Washington Andrew Andrew moved to La La Land to make it in pictures

Yes, on the silver screen

Did you make it in pictures?

I didn't make it in pictures, Luke.

But something more exciting happened, which is somehow we got this dude at APM to agree to hire us. Steve Nelson.

Luke and Andrew, hello. It's your former supervisor, Steve Nelson, also formerly of American Public Media, congratulating you on 4,000 episodes. Pretty good framing. that TBTL is the only time that I've ever given my direct reports a performance review live on the air. So I thought I would take this amazing experience to do the same again. Unfortunately, I don't have access to the American Public Media performance management tool, which you might remember was called Thrive, which I think was an acronym for something, but I never knew what it stood for. Lacking that, I just want to say this. You are both meeting and exceeding expectations. Oh, good. Great work. Truly, congratulations on 4,000 episodes. Congratulations on this amazing community of tens that you've built, and congratulations on your newfound independence. There it

is. El Ropo himself.

Steve Nelson.

Steve Nelson. Do you know that I will always live for that man's approval? And I'm not even joking.

It is. He does have a kind of like friendly but slightly disappointed father vibe for us he really does i will he used to call us his boys he is by the way not here tonight but guess what he is in the state of washington but he's seeing boy genius at the gorge priorities i don't blame him when we got to 8 p.m we really entered what i consider to be our doing weird shit phase as a show like uh trying to like solve a murder that happened in the outback. Like a lot of podcasts from Seattle do.

Sure, yeah. Where are we on that, by the way?

The case is open. Okay, cold case, okay. Warm case. Okay. Once I get some of those DNA tests back, I'll be able to crack it. We try to hitchhike down the Mississippi River. Well, not the river. Well, I mean, roughly. Okay, gotcha. From Minnesota to Mississippi. I mean, we're following the kind of contours of it. We rented a weird Japanese van and hand-delivered the show to people during the pandemic to people's houses.

Broke down in the desert.

Yes. And by the way, didn't rat people out to ice. That's right. That's a real story.

There were choppers flying overhead looking for...

We were so on the border, and the place where the van broke down was... It would appear that there were folks that were, you know, coming into the country undocumented and they were, after they got through, like, Border Patrol showed up and we did a real Three Stooges. They went that-a-way. It's called allyship, people. Look it up. God, we're heroes. We were deputized by the Waffle House Corporation.

That's right. I still have my badge.

Temporarily to work behind the griddle to do the show. Was anybody at that Waffle House show in Florida? Heck yeah, make some noise. If you were in Florida, okay, one person. Chris was there. Thanks, Chris. Is Nick, is the perfect 10 here? Oh, Nick was there. Okay, good. Are you wearing the hot dog suit right now, my guy? Okay, good. Um, we, we also really kind of became the, the sort of, the podcast of record for people that were struggling with either, uh, garbage anxiety or, and this is by the way, even more deadly, uh, polite car syndrome.

It's an acute, if you have moderate to acute polite car syndrome, please talk to me after the show.

Can you expand on those two things for the, for the new listeners?

I have some balm for you up here. Yeah, good. It's called Cetaphil.

Yeah. You know, that was a, I don't want to say a rough time for you, but it was a time, Andrew, when you got into that thing with the pink ink. Yes. I was legitimately worried for the other guy, because what I have said about you on the show, both on air and off air, is you haven't, like, punched anyone in a long time, probably 30 years.

I punched someone in high school, but he wasn't facing me, so I don't know if that

counts. When you do punch someone, they are going to fly into the ionosphere because of the amount of pent-up anxiety and rage you have. And that guy that got in your face about the parking job and was screaming at you. My neighbor? Yeah, also known as your neighbor. The guy I had to continue to live next to. What was the sort of resolution of any of that? Did he just kind of calm down eventually? No, for as long as I left. Because I know No, you didn't.

For as long as I lived there, I had very dark fantasies about property damage, and then eventually we got a different apartment, and that's how you solve your problems, people.

Social mobility. Look into it.

That's right.

We also made some lifelong friends at APM, like this guy.

5,000 infinite gas coffee mugs. I need them to be gone. I don't care if nobody wants them. You sell them, that's your job. If they're not gone by Sunday, you're fired. Get it? Acting. Sounds good. Okay, love you too, mom. Buh-bye. Oh, hi, I didn't see you there. This is Stu from the internet, former TPTL associate producer, just wanted to congratulate Luke and Andrew on their 4,000th show. And I guess congratulate them on not getting fired by APM so I can maintain my two to nothing lead on the both of them. He was fired twice. Annie Heimer. Figured I'd do a little list, a funny little fun list that I used to do when I was the associate producer for TBTL. So without further ado, here are the, let's see, I pulled it up here. The top six early 90s Seattle Seahawks that make Luke Burbank smile and shake his head just a little bit. I'm already smiling. Let's go. Number six, Trey Junkin.

Oh, long snapper. Sure.

Number five, Rick Tootin.

Oh, punter, Rick Rootin Tootin. Number four, Stan Gelbaugh. Stan Gelbaugh, quarterback. Number three, Nesby Glassbow. Safety, free safety, Nesby Glassbow, sure. Number two, Kelly Stouffer. Kelly Stouffer, another mediocre quarterback. And number one, Carlester Crumpler. Tight end, underrated.

Anyway, congrats again, fellas. And before I say goodbye, my youngest child, Pip, would like to apologize for all the times the show posted late in 2015 because I had to take them to dance practice. Isn't that right, Pip? No. Well, we tried. Anyway, have a great night, everybody.

Beef not settled with me and Pip.

Can I tell you guys something? So Luke has seen that video before. I think it's okay to say that. But please, will you get my back on this? What he did just now is exactly what he did, only with more peals of laughter, uncontrollable laughter, the first time he watched this. We got this video when we were in my studio together, and you were dying. What was the, I can't remember the middle guy's name, but you were just like, it's not Snake Plissken, that's something else, right? No, that's, I think, Escape from L.A. Right, exactly.

But Nesby Glasgow. Nesby Glasgow was a very, I think, like a slept on free safety for the Seattle Seahawks back in the day. I've always said it, I know. Yeah, you know it. Things, as you might have noticed as listeners of TBTL, at some point when we were at APM, they started to like shift a little bit. We started, I mean... We still, of course, loved our employees. In fact, we've even hired some of them. By employees, I mean colleagues. Colleague-turned-employee-turned-colleague-turned-co-owner of the business. Turned boss, I think. Turned the only competent person on the program, John Sklaroff. But we started to sort of set records and do things that we weren't setting out to do. For instance, we actually currently hold the record for the most Carvana ads to ever play during one podcast. It's 67, by the way.

It was 66. You always do that.

Look out, Joe Rogan. And we started to kind of feel like maybe there was like a different way that we could, you know, do this show so that it could be better for you all, the listeners, so it could be better for us, so we could have fewer kind of weird ads jammed in. And we decided to try to take on a different, more dangerous, but definitely more sexy version of the show by going independent. It says hold for applause here So I'll just hold for that applause

And I just want to point out Luke For real it didn't hit me until I just saw Stu say it again Like can we take a moment We weren't fired We weren't fired We weren't fired We weren't fired We weren't fired We weren't fired I mean from the moment we were hired I was planning what I was going to tell my parents when I finally got fired from a job. And we made it eight years and left on our own terms.

Because, honestly, because of the tens of listeners, that's a real thing.

We left on your terms. Thank you.

Which is how we ended up three hours ago lugging hundreds of lunchboxes into this theater that nobody really wants without healthcare or a 401k. So we're good. decision-making. Please take a lunchbox. So yeah, that's pretty much what we've been doing for the last 3,999 episodes in case you missed it. So good. All right. So that was really kind of like the Cliff's Notes version. I don't know. We may have left a few things out of the course of 15 years but really the early days of the show when we're on the radio there was some really wild shit going on and it sort of bears uh i think remembering and so we wanted to take a little trip down tbtl memory lane of the first year of radio times memories are made in in your mouth

Thanks for the memory of Schubert's serenade, little things of jade, and traffic jams, and anagrams, and bills we never paid.

Now, if there's one person who knows about the early days of TBTL, it's one of the co-founders of the show. So joining us via Zoom, please welcome the one, the only, Jen Flash Andrews. I love Jesus, but I drink a little. We are efforting Jen Flash Andrews. We are currently efforting Jen Flash Andrews. You know what I really want to play for you, Andrew, is that full TBTL memory song, because I did an edit that only you would appreciate. Okay. I took the song, and I reversed the order, so they'd be singing about memories the whole time. It was one of my greatest audio productions. Can you all humor me while we're waiting to get Jen dialed up? This song does not occur in this order This is me making it so that the lyrics are germane By the way, the first part is definitely not from the original song Hold on, let me turn this up We got this, don't worry

Memory of Schubert's serenade Little things of jade And traffic jams and anagrams And bills we never paid

That right there, Bob Hope He's not singing that at that part of the song She goes into a bunch of real gendered stuff that I don't think really works for our audience. Stuff we would have played on the first episode of TBTL, but not on the 4,000th.

Is this that AI thing that the people are literally protesting in Los Angeles right now? You're just taking artists and sort of like...

Honestly, I think Bob Hope had a pretty good rhyme. I'm not super worried for him, having just been in Los Angeles and seen all the things that are named for him. But as I was editing this today in the hotel room, I was editing slash staring at my traffic revisions. And when I made that, I really wanted to send you the, I know you don't work on a Mac, I wanted to send you the GarageBand file so you could see what I did.

So I could see all the splices. I would enjoy that. That is our version of sexting.

Yes. Hey, man, look at these edits.

There are, like, so many things where Andrew and I are really different, but then there are so many things where we're really similar. And one of them is, like, geeking out on little audio things. Like, getting a piece of tape to work because you have to, like, take a breath out or whatever. Oh, no. Oh, no, no, no, no, no. Luke, they don't care about us anymore. Luke, they don't care about us anymore. No, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no, no. We were on a roll, Gen Flash Andrews. We had some momentum.

I love Jesus, but I drank a little. Did I interrupt a bit?

Oh, Jen. Jen, Jen. Hi, guys.

Hi, there. Happy 4,000.

Can you hear the crowd? They apparently, they like you. I don't know if you're surprised to hear that. They like you a lot.

I love you guys so much. I wish I was there.

Hold on, hold on, hold on, we got this. Jen, did you unplug my microphone? With some sorcery from east of the mountains?

Yes, I did.

Listen, Jen, thank you so much for joining us tonight. Now, we were hoping you would be here in person, but it turns out you chose Taylor Swift over us.

I don't think anyone's surprised.

That's my girl. How was the show? You went last weekend here in Seattle, right?

Yes, it was just magic and, you know, everything that is good in the world and we need more of it. And I was thrilled to be there.

Did you make charm bracelets or do any of those? Friendship bracelets. They're not charm bracelets. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry. Excuse me.

This interview is over. Digstown, Andrew. Digstown. Digstown. Oh, we have a, apparently right around the S-curves in Digstown, we have a traffic situation.

Luke and I can start a fight on whether it's sex in the city or sex and the city next.

Oh, wow. And just like that, we're back to it, Andrews. Oh, Jen, it's so nice to talk to you.

Oh, it's so great to be here.

I have been, you know, over the last few weeks, because we've been delving into some of the history of TBTL, I've been, like, finding old photos of us and pieces of tape from the early days of the show. And it's like so many things that I sort of forgot about, but that are so fundamental to who I am, even as a person now. And it's all thanks to you. I remember we had a meeting at, was it Uptown Coffee in Lower Queen Anne? Yeah. Like years and years and years ago where we said, if we ever have a chance, let's do a show together.

It's not amazing. And we got to do it. Exactly how we wanted to do it.

Yes. Nobody else at Cairo liked it, but we loved it. That's right. You didn't see the video from Rod Arquette, but it wasn't great. Not a great reception.

Not our biggest fan.

what are actually i'm gonna i'll share with the audience i did send that video to jen and what

was your response jen so many backhanded compliments i believe you said classic rod

arquette also did you notice the framing on the video it was really disturbing wasn't it

yes it was yes it was looming kind of looking down on you i just wanted to i think so much

ceiling in that shot jen i'm wondering um what are some of your as the co-founder of this show and really like honestly much more the brains of the operation when we were i mean really and truly like you this whole group people that's here is because you crafted this community in the early days of the program that was so strong you had all these ideas you're like we should have a prom we should do roller skating parties like you were just the idea machine of the show what are some of your kind of like favorite memories from the early days um well definitely our show meetings

at azteca okay um we were one of the one of the rare seven to ten shows that started with drinks across the street yes and but it always you know i just loved that i loved the the whole vibe of it and that everybody knew that they could find us there about five o'clock putting together the show and i just loved it it always i thought set the show off in a great tone but what about didn't we

have like that there was that one server who i think was also maybe the co-owner of the restaurant she seemed to do a lot she nicked us so hard we were her best customers all we did was drink alcohol which has the highest markup and i feel like she was always annoyed when we were there

i just i couldn't we i couldn't win her over and it was two years of trying but that wasn't gonna happen i finally realized well i mean when they closed down well now it's

a condo so f them didn't you guys try to have a concert in the mexican restaurant try to oh sorry i didn't mean try we didn't try there is no try i know i know was it miniature tigers yes that's

amazing yeah yeah the fact as luke you kept saying

this is probably one of the greatest events to ever happen at a mid-range family Mexican restaurant.

Maybe the lady was mad because I kept calling it a mid-range family Mexican restaurant.

Could be.

Jen, what was your whole thing with the...

In celebration of this historic event, the Sterlington Collection is making available a limited edition replica of this timeless heirloom.

I vaguely remember this had some kind of royal connection. Why were you obsessed with the Sterlington Collection?

Because they had a copy of Kate Middleton's engagement ring. And I was so excited for the wedding, and then I could get a copy that was in no way real. And they, right down to the fact that the box was velveteen, not even real velvet. How much would that cost?

Today it can be yours for just $19.90.

I don't remember, was it $19.99?

Screamin' deal, $19.99, which makes it sound better, right? $19.99.

Today it can be yours for just $19.90.

I got the ring, and I was so excited about it. And you were just so tickled at how excited I was.

I was excited you were excited, yes. But now, how is it the case that, Andrew, you're in possession of the ring?

Jen, we are opposite in so many ways. You remember everything. I remember nothing. I don't remember a half hour ago, but I am holding the ring right now. I don't know if you can see it. By the way, this is the camera over here.

We're looking at Jen in the camera.

You gave this to me. Do you have a whole bunch of these? Do you give these to all of your fans? Why do I have this?

So I had it, and then a 10 won it from me.

Oh, okay.

And that was Heidi, our Latin tutor. Oh, sure. Heidi from Minnesota. And then I made a bet, and Andrew won. And so then I gave it to Andrew.

What was the bet? I mean, this is, tell me my life. What was the bet?

I don't think it was nice I think it was something where I was being a jerk and then I felt bad

Wait a second Hold on, no, I remember actually now That ring had to go into Mount Doom Okay You were not strong enough to get it there yourself And Jen carried you I think that's my memory of things

It sounded like you said that you called me a jerk I don't think that that happened No, I was being I think I was being a jerk I don't think so, but do you need it back? I mean, do you want me to keep it for another

No, you're not supposed to hold it It's like the traveling pants

Oh, I've broken the rules So we have to give it away tonight? Tonight, yes

Oh, okay You know, it'll be back at the merch table It'll be reasonably priced

Today it can be yours for just $19.90

I'm gonna hide it in one lunchbox Oh my god Jen, are you Jen, have you heard anything? have you followed anything about this lunchbox debacle we're in right now?

Well, I saw the piles of them during the TV telephone. Piles?

We call those stackings.

Was there not enough?

There were too many. I think they either over-ordered at APM or we under-delivered on the sales pitch but we have a lot of lunchboxes we're trying to get rid of.

So we're trying to get rid of all the lunchboxes and so maybe, okay, I don't know, we don't have to come up with this on the fly because this was actually not a planned bit. Definitely put that in a I had this in my drawer, and I'm like, well, Jen's going to be on the show. We should talk about it. But I didn't realize, for real, Jen, I didn't know that I was breaking the rules by hanging on to this. So I will find a way to make sure that gets into somebody else's hands tonight.

I mean, that was one thing about my desk at Cairo. Like, everything that came into my desk, it just moved right on out. We gave him away his prizes. Remember we had that Christmas party, and I wrapped everything from my desk and gave it out to the ten?

Yes. You were very good about that stuff, Jen, just like very organized. keeping a very clean, very clutter-free desk. I had five cases of muscle milk I got from Brock Huard and a spindle of CDs that was two years of the show. It was on my desk, and John Curley had the desk for about four years and it was still on there, so we just rolled differently.

You also had so many salt shakers. You were, so many salt shakers. You constantly were salting your food.

Well, that makes it taste better for me. Why do you think I'm so hypertensive? It's because of my... Jen, this was a memory that I had forgotten about until you reminded me, but this was a very weird little moment in early TBTL history that I'm not sure how many people even noticed. But you and I once had this band called The Kills come into the studio and do an interview with us. At the time, they were one of the cooler... You're from the UK, and they were like a very cool, edgy band that should never be coming to a radio station owned by the Mormons to talk to you and I in a studio where we're hiding. from like tom tangney or something how did that come together why was one of the coolest rock bands in the world at the time talking to us on like a tuesday at noon well i would love to i mean

it's one of my proudest moments except that they thought that they had scheduled it they thought we were kexp yes i believe that was and i absolutely did not tell them we were kxp i just i think they just thought what in what world does some radio station have the right to call us unless they're KEXP so they just assumed we were KEXP and I booked them for 10 a.m on a Friday which they're rock stars I'm sure they never have been up that early I called that morning to confirm they realized we were not KEXP and they just were like well we said we'd be there so we'll be there and they kind of crawled in at 10 o'clock in the morning it was kind of one of the coolest things

that ever happened to me what was their demeanor like for real were they like super bubbly just

Just sunshine and lollipops.

They were tired, but they were very kind. Remember, I was showing Allison my, well, I mean, I'm not proud of this, but I showed her my bunion. I said, do you want to see my bunion? And she said, definitely. So I showed it to her. But, I mean, they were really kind and very cool. But they were very tired. And clearly, just they knew it was the right thing. And that's why they were there.

I didn't even realize, because you were much more, like, aware of their thing, Jen, when you got them there. But then after they left, I started, like, Googling them and figuring out that they were, everything else they were doing, you were like, it was, like, KEXP. It was, like, cool stations in New York. And to this day, I was looking at pictures of them this week. They are still terrifying. Like, they're still super cool, super, like, you know, I don't know, like, punk rock, looking into the camera in a way that means they might fight you. And we had them at Cairo. Coolest people ever. I love that we forced that on them.

I know.

One last thing before we let you go, Jen, because you were, of course, the founding producer of the program and the heart and soul of what we were doing. But we did also have another producer who I think, you know, kind of was getting second billing, which was guest producer Doug Schreckengost.

Guest producer Doug Schreckengost.

Which I'm playing an audio drop. I don't think you can hear it down the line, Jen, but I think it might be David Bowes saying guest producer Doug Schreckengost.

Guest producer Doug Schreckengost.

Is that possibly what's happening?

Yes.

Why did we do that?

Well, I wanted it to feel, like, real, you know.

What was the story? Who was Doug Schreckengost, and why was he our guest producer?

He wrote me a really mean letter. He said, I've never listened to your show, but I had a late shift, and I was driving home, and I heard it, and I can tell you're going to be out of stuff to talk about within the week.

Oh, he was being generous.

So here's a list of topics.

Do you remember what any of the topics were?

Yes, one of them was Explain Super String Theory. Oh, right. I do remember. Wait, was that where the song came from? Yeah, so I went and learned what it was, which I didn't learn it very well. But I took what I did learn and I put it to a Beatles song. And it happened to be that Dave Bazan was in with us that week. So he played guitar.

And didn't you do it to like Super String to the tune of Let It Be?

Yeah.

Okay.

And then another one was Dutch Harbor, Alaska. and remember I called and found a bartender in Dutch Harbor, Alaska to tell us what it's like when the fishing boats come in. It's just booze and whores.

Yeah, that's like tonight here at the Neptune. Sorry, Aunt Mary Lou. Did Doug Schreckengost ever hear any of these segments that you produced taking a real kind of like, taking a sour email and turning it into something fun?

I think, I feel like I remember him calling and leaving a voicemail just saying, you know, way to go. Well played. I knew it would work for you.

Guest producer, Doug Schreckengaard.

Well, Jen, that was like one of so many strokes of genius you had where you just like found content and a fun thing and also just like a really loving, heartfelt thing to do when it would have been easy to just be like, screw this guy or whatever. And that was like just one of your many incredible, incredible qualities that you brought to the show. And we would not be here without you. So I just want to thank, from the bottom of my heart, Jen, I love you and thank you.

Thank you, I love you too. I love everybody. Thanks for having me. I really appreciate it.

And Jen, can I just add really briefly, if you don't mind, we have a traffic situation in Diggstown. Oh, no. I think we've got to cut this a little bit short.

I'm sorry. We didn't plan that. How dare you?

Are you Diggstown eating?

Jen Andrews, everyone.

I taught you that.

Hey, let's do some Top Stories. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. You pointed out in the...

the sound check, Andrew, that it's ironic that we're actually doing top stories. How are we getting to top stories today? Considering that happens about 0.01% of the time on the actual program. The top story that I want to talk about, it's really more of a mystery than a top story. And it is the mystery of why I am not featured on the key cards at the Graduate Hotel just across the street, okay? Now, we're in the University of Washington neighborhood. And so the Graduate Hotel, a fine, fine hotel, as long as your key card works. They have, the key cards are the student body ID cards from notable University of Washington alums. It's a very cool idea. You went there. I did. I am, I think, a notable University of Washington alum. Let's just run through some. These are actual key cards. These are actual people that are on the key cards at the Graduate Hotel just across the street. Kelsey Plum. Okay, Kelsey Plum. That makes sense, right? Amazing basketball player. I believe first overall pick in the WNBA draft, Kelsey Plum. These are really cool ideas for key cards. I mean, I'm telling you, they got it. Other than the whole door situation, they got it really dialed in over there. This is awesome. Right. Okay, Kelsey Plum, that makes sense. They also have Beverly Cleary Yes Right, okay Beverly Cleary Legendary author The voice of many of our childhood She's Ramona Quimby, age 8, right? Yes, exactly I would go for this one Can you choose the card? I bet you could They seem really kind of agreeable over there So you could probably ask

Can I tape my door open? Sure

Yes I did not tell them that, but I do believe housekeeping reported me. True story. You're not going to be able to get in tonight. Who knew Beverly Cleary went to the University of Washington, by the way? Did y'all know that? Oh, okay, a lot of these. Well, they're pretty smart people here. I didn't know that. Also, Bruce Lee. Bruce Lee, right? Yes. American treasure, proud University of Washington graduate, legend. Also, they told me the most stolen key card.

Yes, that makes sense.

At the hotel. Now, this is where I start to... Okay. Marianne from Gilligan's Island. Don Wells. Oh. Crowd likes it. I mean, you know, okay. Wasn't that one of those shows that was, like, not actually very popular when it was out,

I think you're thinking of Dobie Gillis, I think. Oh, the many loves of Dobie. How dare you?

Mom, what did Maynard G. Krebs say when the subject of work would come up? Exactly. That was not an afterthought of a television program, my friend. All right. Okay, now this is when the rubber really meets the road. You can also get a key card featuring problematic artist Chuck Close. Thank you. That's the appropriate reaction. Featured on TBTL

Just recently In an episode I believe I titled Chuck Close for Comfort

And that was one of the allegations Against him He is still This problematic podcast host is not on the key cards And that problematic artist is I feel like that's a real slate It's the final card though That really sends me It is Matt Dillon the actor Pretending to be A character from the movie Singles. It's Cliff Ponsier. Not a real person. Not even a real boy. I don't think the character even went to the University of Washington in the movie.

Are you planning on addressing this in any way?

I'm planning on turning this hive mind loose on the front desk later. How many people are actually staying there? Round of applause. Can we start? It's actually fewer than I was expecting. I don't know how this movement's gonna go

I have an idea I did not run this by you because this might be a bad idea and you might want people not to do this but I could also see you wanting people to do this what if we asked everybody who hears this both here in the Neptune tonight and on the podcast to write Yelp reviews for the hotel just saying everything is great lovely place we should have Luke Burbank on one of the key cards

Okay, as long as, I mean...

Positive reviews. I'm not against it. But the only thing I would nitpick is we couldn't get a card with Luke Burbank's face on it.

That's, but again, please, generally positive reviews because it's a lovely, lovely place. But I wouldn't be sad if I showed up one day.

Actually, I would because right now I'm remembering what my associate students of the University of Washington card was. Not great. It was no Kelsey Plum. Yeah, I believe it. I'll tell you what. Hey, let's do some emails. What do you think?

I like it.

Oh, let's turn up the sound effect for the emails. Now, here's the fun thing about doing this show live with all these awesome people here. that we don't have to just rely on emails. We've actually had folks checking in on the question of what we might be talking about during the 8,000th episode of TBTL. Because again, we're not just here to reflect on all the accomplishments of the last 15 years. But if you'd like to tell me about them in the lobby, I'm all ears.

Put it in the Yelp reviews.

If you'd like to add it to your Yelp review at The Graduate, I'm fine with that. We're really here to look to the future. And so we want to know what you think we will be talking about on the 8,000th episode of TBTL. So we'll meet you back here 15 years from tonight, right here. And here to help us with that project is our dear friend and friend of the show, one Phyllis P. Fletch. Fletcher! What's your name? Fletch. Wow. Phyllis, I think they like you too. You didn't get that kind of reaction at the New York Times. Who? Exactly. They're dead to us. Hi, Phyllis.

Hi.

Thank you so much for, well, first of all, just thank you for being you. Thanks for being such an awesome part of our community. And thanks for helping us out with this tonight. I do think we need to kind of start things, though, at the very beginning, which is that Andrew has something that he would like to say to you.

I do have something I'd like to say to you. This is something that you know about, Phyllis, and Luke knows about, and I don't think anybody else knows about.

Oh, dear. Okay.

Nobody in the crowd knows about this. But I know you remember this moment. It was a mere two weeks ago on a Friday.

Okay.

Three, two, three. It was during the TBTL-a-thon when we were doing live shows and streaming them on YouTube. I had a really good idea, which was to bring on a very special guest on Friday's episode of the show. It was Phyllis. Yeah. And I texted you from the backseat of a Jeep on the way back to an Airbnb. And I said, hey, would you like to be on the show on Friday? And you said, of course I would. And of course, we were asking people to donate to TBTL to keep this thing going. You're already waving a fan. you're still angry. She's still angry. And you said, of course. You said, I'll be standing by for the call. And then two days went by, and Friday's show began, and we talked to Remco in Germany or something. This is really Remco's fault, honestly.

I blame Remco.

We talked to other callers, and then, as I later found out I was also coming down possibly with some foodborne illness, I texted you possibly from Luke's parents basement bathroom and I said oh my god Phyllis we never called you

information I already had

and what I wanted what I was hoping to hear from you was yeah no big deal

fuck that it was a big deal I was ready to close you were making the case all week and I was ready to close.

I know you were.

Get that money.

What I wanted to hear from you was, oh yeah, it slipped my mind too. I was mowing the lawn. I wanted something like that. But you're Phyllis. Of course that's not what was going on. And you wrote back, yeah, I noticed you didn't call me. I was behind my computer with a headset and a microphone for 94 minutes waiting. Yeah, we're sorry, Phyllis. For the phone call. Sorry. And I have literally no excuse. And I apologize to you via text. And I would like to apologize to you here sincerely. in front of all of these people to say that I treated you very poorly and I'm sorry about that.

I'm sorry. So sorry.

We just keep this on, like, on ice because we have a lot of apologies there. And I actually just had an idea.

Would you... Would you accept a fake Kate Middleton?

Yes. Is that a yes? Would you make me the happiest man in the world and accept this as an apology?

I won't make you kneel because my actual husband is here.

I know, Josh, sorry this got weird. Where's Josh? Apologies.

I did not even...

That was not part of the plan.

Isn't it amazing? I have to shout out DJ who predicted this.

Oh, yeah?

DJ, as soon as he heard that the ring had to move, he was like, maybe you're getting the ring tonight.

I want to be clear.

I'm not proposing, but I am heartfully. But I want to just, if I can, if I can do a little victory lap, I did have $1,000 at DraftKings on the first person Andrew proposes to would be Phyllis Fletcher. And that ship just came in, my friends.

I didn't realize how weird that was getting until you pointed it out. My apologies. Take the ring or give the ring away, but I am sorry. I have no excuse for my behavior.

We feel very bad for wasting your time after what an awesome, awesome person you've been to the show. Thank you.

You have done more for the show than I think either Luke or I, and that is the truth.

There's always next year, as they say in terms. Yes, absolutely. Let's book it now. I accept your apology. Thank you. It fits. thank you so much and I need to point out that just my intuition when you were apologizing you were like oh I was ill, I wasn't feeling well I don't know what happened and I said tell me the diarrhea story

that's what you want receipts or it didn't happen

I want to see the paperwork on that

I want to say that I was back at Luke's parents house very briefly yesterday to pick up the lunch boxes and it seems like the bathroom has recovered, so that's good.

Mom, how's that bathroom, that downstairs one? Okay, all right. So here's the idea. We want to go through some of these suggestions from the listeners, ideas about what we might talk about on our 8,000th episode. And because, of course, we're trying to appeal to a youth demo, we're retiring like awesome, not awesome, and we're trying to bring out new, more youthful terminology. So we want to define these as either being weak or fleek. So that, you know, we can hang with the... Can we cut back to the picture of Andrew B-boying?

Yeah.

So we want to find out if these are weak or fleek. So, Phyllis, we're going to have you read a suggestion, and Andrew, you're going to play like a horn thingy for like weak or fleek, okay?

I don't have the weak or fleek sound, I don't think. The computer didn't die, but I don't think I have that. I thought you were going to play that.

In fairness, you had a lot. I was putting a lot on you this week. It's not surprising you. You seriously don't have it? Is this really on me? I thought that you were doing it. Do we have anybody on the horns? Is there a trombonist in the house? Is there anybody who can play trombone who can save us? What are the... Gus, nicely, the pride of the Robert Eaglestaff marching band.

How many times is this family going to save my bacon?

Gus was also waiting on the line last Friday to talk to us, and we left him hanging. Gus, thank you for being here, man. We really appreciate you. So here's what we're hoping. We're hoping that you, with this fine trombone of yours, could you play us a sound effect for if one of these ideas is weak or a different one. Well, let's hear what's the sound effect for something that's weak. and also if you need a translation for these youthful terms that I'm using I can kind of break it down it's like not awesome like like weak is like not awesome yeah bad like a bad thing okay what would this if it's a bad idea wow that's also that's also actual audio of Andrew in the bathroom after he was not feeling well That's really good. Okay, how about if something is fleek as the kids say? If it's a good idea, if it's a happy thing.

Happy sound.

Yeah, happy sound. What can you do? Nice. Great.

Those are perfect.

That's so good.

That is so good. Can you, wait, I don't want to.

Can you tell me quickly, though? I heard there's a story on this trombone.

Ooh, like where it's from?

Yeah, where it's from.

Okay, so Will, right? Will the pilot?

Yeah, our buddy Will. right here somewhere in the in the darkness he he played this i think when he was about my age

i don't remember he said this was his nice horn it's really nice to box stradavarius 42 for all

the trombone nerds um and they'll name a trombone a stradavarius yeah i don't know what that means but sure dude that's fleek all right fletch lay them on us what are some of the things that we may be talking about or people at least think we'll talk about at the 8000th episode of the

program all right well the first one comes from jessamine specimen of burien okay right who organized the pre-party i believe oh word okay phaser balding helmets Phaser balding.

Set phasers to stunning pew pew. Okay, wait, hold on.

Because I'm like a well-known on the show for using this laser balding helmet that I bought on Amazon, which is supposed to shoot red lasers at your scalp and stimulate hair growth. But this is a phaser. So is it self-defense? Like it will shoot phasers as well?

It has to do both, right? Okay. To be functional. I think, yeah.

Look good. Stay alive. in the future. We don't know what's going to be happening in 15 years. Gus? Weak or fleek? Phaser balding helmet. Alright. Good. That'll work.

Now can I establish here that some of these are going to be weak as topics. It doesn't mean that the submission by the audience member was weak, right? This is not a comment on the submitter.

It means we would not be good at talking about

a topic. Or that they're prejudging you to be weak. Yes, that's true. They know we're weak.

Yeah, or that he's weak, and I'm kind of flake.

With love, of course. Respectfully. Yes. Okay. Amelia from Bellingham, the Bay City.

Oh, I know Amelia. Amelia got me tickets to the Doug Marsh show. Oh. At the Wild Buffalo. Is Amelia here? In spirit. Maybe so. R.I.P. All right. Amelia recently passed away, but we love her.

Wow.

Hey, come on now.

I want to hear the weak sound. I want to hear the weak sound after that joke. Come on. Can we hear the weak sound? I just love the weak sound. No.

My bad. No. No. No. No. No.

I never knew what that little, like, what do you call that?

I mean, it's kind of a vibrato, I guess, when you go like one.

What's the rubber thing actually called?

Oh, this is a plunger meet. Usually it looks like a toilet plunger. Yeah. Usually it is a toilet plunger. but yeah this one was like 40 bucks for a piece of for a piece of rubber so yeah it's cool though

i like the coloring all right so it's from amelia all right r.i.p uh they'll be putting off their colonoscopies still oh you picked this on purpose you picked this on purpose i have an agenda yeah

you do okay um i tell all my 46 and 47 year old guys what do you think andrew will we still be

putting off i have made it as a matter of fact this is kind of real talk here for a second um i've had a lot on my plate as you know as i've been complaining to you as we transitioned away from the network and just all these things that i had to get done right like one after another one of the big ones was plan a 4000th episode in front of a live audience and now we're doing that and the only other thing on my list after this was to get serious about my health. And I need this show to go on for another couple of months because as soon as this show ends, I have to make an appointment to get my butt scoped.

I've already said that we need to do like a Martin short, Steve Martin, like they hang out, they drink a bunch of whatever, although they apparently have a new pill now that's less bad or something that, you know.

I've heard about this.

As far as the kind of night before stuff, we hang out we record a show we get some really good drugs the next day okay okay wait tell me more about the drugs david sedaris i believe in like calypso writes that he's getting colonoscopies every like three weeks purely for the whatever they give you so uh gus uh unky andrew and i putting off our our medical medically necessary things would you call that weak or fleek wow okay somebody's in the will that hurts all right tough but fair all right another one okay we have some tbtl uh traditionalists

don from west seattle says luke's construction project

John is accurate

Andy from Richland says Andrew's garbage bins and Michelle from Bellevue says Luke's missing suits from UPS

every time I think about that I become so angry because I most of the time when stuff goes sideways in my life it's because I directly did something and I guess this is also an example of that technically because I try to somebody else mail this stuff but i mean this is one of those few times where i feel like i was i was really wronged by this large institution united parcel service and there is no there's no way to get those suits back and in fact the other day i saw some clip of something from cbs where i was wearing the suit and i thought damn that's a nice looking suit so i will still be talking about that and the eight thousandth episode what are you

feel about that, Gus?

And keep in mind, the full prediction is you get them back. This is when it happens.

Oh! Okay, okay, okay. Unky Luke finally getting some justice. Me using the term Unky Luke. Yeah. That's the sound effect for Fleek, right? Is that Fleek?

We're gonna need a bigger plunger.

Alright, one more. One more, Fletch.

Alright, one more. Oh, one more. So hard to pick one more. Man.

We'll be reading these together at the bar later. Give me two more. Two more. Okay, two more.

All right, okay. Lisa from Chicagoland. Luke needs to move his studio equipment out of the lake house now owned by his fourth ex-wife. Oh, shit.

First of all, second. That hurts. Second. Well, this is 15 years. I've also never lived at a lake house.

Well, this is, remember, this is. Oh, this is, oh, I see. This is the future. Yeah. The premise of the bit? Fifth? A fourth? Yeah.

God bless.

Sorry, bro. That's generous. And into his workspace above broadcast coffee, Andrew is almost ready to get a dog. Oh!

Dude, that's really solid. Gus, what do you think? Weak or fleek? Yeah. That is accurate.

All right. And we got to end on a high note. So Amanda from Linwood says, Mariners World Series win, baby. Thank you.

Yes! Let's go. Phyllis Fletcher and Gus Knisley with the TBTL 8000. Thank you to both of you. Thanks, Gus. Thanks, P.

Yeah.

Alright, I think that's about enough 4,000th episode for for one night um i want to just say uh i want to say thank you to all of you um for coming out tonight and and really more importantly for just being part of this thing for all these years um i was thinking about i was thinking about the 4000th episode when i was i was flying up here on thursday and i was uh the plane was kind of kind of landing at sea tech over all the twinkly lights of seattle and i was just thinking about how much i love this place and how kind of amazing it is that we've been doing this for so long and that we were going to have this night together. And I realized that I have this tendency to have a really hard time being present in these kinds of moments because I'm thinking about the last joke that didn't work. Not that any of the jokes didn't work tonight. Oh, I'll get a list later. Or I'm thinking about the next thing that we need to do or whatever. And so I got in the lift and I did the kind of thing that I tend to do a lot, which is something fairly impulsive. I had the Lyft driver redirect us to the one tattoo parlor that was still open in Seattle at like 11 p.m. on a Thursday. Really? Yeah, really. And I got this tattoo. No shit. Yeah, and it's... By the way, I'll just mention that if your claim to fame is the latest tattoo parlor open... You know, the preferred choice amongst drunk sailors on shore leave when no one else will do it i wanted to get this tattoo that says are you here and i wanted it to be a way that i could kind of like look at something and i could think like am i here in this moment like am i really here i went in i said i'm already feeling a little emotional i'm now not then i went and i was like can i have you tattoo that really in little letters are you here on my hand and she said legally we can't do that so i was like okay well how about on my wrist for real what's the the on the hand some there's something about like either it doesn't doesn't age well or couldn't get you knifed in prison i don't know she wouldn't put it on my hand that was probably just as well but she put it right here and it just says and it's my handwriting i wrote it first of all she was giving me fonts oh okay one of them was papyrus i'm not this is not a joke this really happened she was like what font and then she was going It was like Times Helvetica.

And at this point, you didn't know that you wanted it to be your own handwriting?

No, I just wanted it to not be... We could not find the right font. Okay. So I was like, could it be handwriting? She goes, yeah, of course. You just write it, and I scan it, and then we put it on your, you know. Yeah. So I wrote it in my little handwriting. You can see it, Andrew. It just says, are you here?

Oh, with the letter R and the letter U here.

I'm not big on spelling.

No, yeah.

But I've had this now since... By the way, Becca, I got a tattoo. But I've been looking at it all night, and I've been trying to really be here with all of you. I am here, and it's the only place I want to be. So thank you for making my dream come true. Does anybody need any Cetaphil? We've got a lot. All right, thank you again to all of you for being part of TBTL. we just absolutely would never be here without you. Thank you John Sklaroff TBTL employee numero uno who killed himself to make this happen thank you to the staff here at the Neptune, the best venue in the world and thanks to my pal Andrew Walsh Alright as we like to say have a great rest of your day, we'll see you tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio, in the meantime please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all Power out.