Muse

Do you want to exchange Christmas presents this year?

I would love to.

Great.

How about the most we can spend on each other's gifts is zero dollars?

Really? You want to exchange creative gifts? Oh, well, you are the one that's in trouble now, buddy, because creativity to me is just like, it's like a bird, like a friendly bird that embraces all ideas and just, like, shoots out of its eyes all kinds of beauty.

Wow, Lemon, this is like watching Hemingway ride. Mark Hemingway.

Yeah. TBTL!

I'm so excited about this show. It is weird, it is beautiful, it has a plot that goes in fascinating directions.

It's so easy. All you do is point and click. But how does it work? All you need is a computer and a regular phone line.

Well, with all due respect, I mean, I hate to admit this, but I mean, I don't think I've been online in, you know, a couple days or weeks or whatever. So that's really not an important thing to me. My face, your face, instant face. Go talk to whoever you want that does that stuff. I don't know.

What's on the website probably isn't going to be where it's actually going to be. Okay. A lot of times we will play like a Home Depot parking lot.

This is not your mama's podcast. This is too beautiful to live.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

Feast your ear tongues on these memory pops.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

Another day, another victory for the OG, taking down the sweats, the impostors among us.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where we're actually getting some sun breaks here on December 18th.

Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful.

Beautiful night last night. It was very cold but very clear. You could see the Big Dipper, the Little Dipper, the Medium Dipper was even out. I don't know. That's a real thing. But I'm not super dialed in on the astronomical situation. But there was a lot of stars going on is what I'm trying to say. We had a lot of show to get to here on this Monday. It's episode 4,099 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. I was flying to L.A. and back this weekend, and I noticed something. I flew out of the Burbank Airport on Saturday, which I always feel like a bit of a celebrity, walking around Burbank Airport. Nobody knows that they're dealing with someone whose last name is also Burbank, but I have a certain, I don't know what you call it, pep in my step. But I also noticed it's a small, small airport, and the waiting areas and the concourses and such are very small. And boy, oh boy, when people were lining up to get on the flight, a lot of people who were, you know, not going to be in the first even four or five groups that are boarding the plane. um there's a term for folks that sort of do that within the airline industry that's not the nicest there's a waste of time to do that but there's actually now some writing around the psychology of doing that of being one of these people who lines up real early even though it's not really your turn yet and the psychology says you might not be nuts for doing that actually a little empathy for the people that the airlines call gate lice coming up speaking of not losing your mind if your favorite snack or soda has not been tasting a snacky or soda-y lately if something has been kind of off holy shit snacks you are also probably not losing your mind an article about what the snack makers are doing to your snacks coming up plus we'll talk to this guy longest running co-bro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships i would say this is more or less his mentality around co-broing the program it's a relief in a way it's not fun he's andrew welsh and he's joining me right now good morning my friend good morning

luke is that still called bob hope airport or nah it is i call it burbank but it is actually bob hope you are correct sir well it's officially listed everywhere online as hollywood burbank airport so i wasn't sure if they had stripped his name of the entire project when i was inputting

the data into the lift program on saturday uh-huh it said bob hope okay so at least our friends at ride share company lift are keeping the dream alive for bob hope and his estate they know what's

up they know what's up i i don't have to do this at the top of the show i don't have to do this at all no i don't know i'm gonna ask you i had a little bit of i meant to truth be told i meant to ask you this before the show i had a little bit of a mystery maybe maybe even an ongoing mystery with my cats this weekend Oh really?

I'm into that one. But you had mentioned also that you have some stuff going on in your life. We can push the cat story back.

I think if the listeners have the option of a cat mystery or me just talking about the construction project this week and also that Walt had sort of an all-timer this morning, I think the cat mystery is going to win out every single time and twice on Sunday.

I couldn't remember what term you used before the show, but you keep saying all-timer, which I don't think I've heard that phrase before yet. I've heard it four times today.

You know who I learned that from? This sounds like such a name drop. But I hadn't ever, I hadn't heard somebody say this. And then when they said it, I was like, oh, that's a good one. I got to remember to use that. I was interviewing the actor Juliette Lewis doing a, Lewis, doing a profile of her. And she was kind of assessing her career. And she goes, yeah, you know, I've had a few all-timers, which I feel pretty lucky about. You know, not everybody gets an all-timer. And I was like, heck yeah. I like that. I like that term, all-timer.

You know, I'm pausing here because I heard somebody on a podcast a couple of times yesterday use a term. It's a very off-color term. It involves the F word, but I think I need to say the whole thing in order to make it work. So I guess consider that the warning. I'm going to be using the F word here while the intro music is still playing. But I heard somebody say fuck all a couple of times in conversation. I know it's a little rough on the ears for our show, but it's a good term as far as, oh, I don't know. He's been playing for the team forever, but he's not getting fuck all in return. I know you're just trying to be stupid and ass funny, but it's not f***ing funny. I'll stop swearing now. But it is kind of a fun use of the F word, right?

Well, you know, as is so often the case on this show, Andrew, what you have said has now kind of launched something in my brain or reminded me of something which is a lot of the tick tock that's been delivered to me lately algorithmically is people talking about their time being either incarcerated or in trouble with the law there's one particular podcast that i think this is kind of interesting it's just a lot of people talking about their their it's sort of like the dateline nbc no it's more like there was a show called like american greed on um cnbc narrated by one bill curtis from wait wait don't tell me fame and it's it's just about like scams he was the he was the real estate robin hood of florida until it turned out to be a scam this is like this sort of like i don't know the post mort on that this some of these podcasts will catch up with so basically like this you know one guy in particular i'm thinking of went to jail for a long time because he ran this scam where he would um he would basically like he became a real expert at stealing people's identities and what he would do was he would find a house that was for rent he would move into it he would figure out who the owner was he would take over their identity he would create fake paperwork that said the house had been totally paid off and had a zero mortgage on it then he would borrow lavishly he would refinance lavishly against the value of this home which allegedly there was no money owed on he would do this around multiple different lenders and then get pocket all of this money and then go on to his next thing and so this guy went to jail for a good while and now he's out and i see him on this podcast so i let that run which means now i'm just getting a lot of like and this one guy that comes on was in the he was more on the let's say uh violent criminal side uh he was in in like the northeast i think in massachusetts and he talks a lot about i think he was from massachusetts but But he got arrested in Florida turns out a lot of people getting in some kind of trouble down there in Florida And he was using the f-word in a way that I hadn't heard and I didn't know if I actually loved it he He said he was talking to the guy. Sorry This is so in the weeds, but he was talking to the guy about how if you're convicted in Florida you have to do 85% of your time Florida is not a state where some states you have to do a minimum of 50% of your time. There's different rules He says, yeah, well, Florida doesn't fuck off Florida doesn't fuck off and I thought I don't know if that's right and the funny weird the weird part is I've seen this guy in a different video where he also says oh, yeah, they don't in county They don't fuck off like that's the way this guy was sorry. This is so many f-bombs I know such a Only a maybe 10 minutes into the program, but like anyway, I that one whereas I like I hear what you're saying about the podcast You were listening to and I think that's a nice use of it or a fun use of it This one is not sitting with me correctly Because I feel like it misapplies Like Florida doesn't fuck off

That's not right

It's not correct Although I don't want to get into it with this guy Because he has a fairly violent history

It's called like 1049 Ted or something Those are some DMs you need not slip into Right, precisely

So I mean let's just hope he doesn't hear about it

That's like Mr. Spock when he comes down to Earth In Star Trek 4 I haven't seen that movie since I was a kid. But if I recall, one of my favorite parts of that movie, which I thought was comedic gold, was Spock swearing wrong. Right. I think that's a thing.

We talked about this a little while ago because that's oddly enough, I think, the Star Trek movie that you and I both saw in the theater as kids. That's the one where they're on the city bus, right?

Yeah, exactly. And for me, it was like, you know, I loved it because, first of all, just the idea of time moving in this way where these guys come to the past, but they're in my present day. It was like really exciting. Yes, very fun.

It's like fish in water.

Right. Which is ironic. The water you're living in. Exactly. And it's about a whale, which I know is not technically a fish. But either way, I thought that was pretty.

That is illogical, Ensign. Voters cannot travel through the vacuum of space. You know who it was? I was making a little joke, sir. Sorry. Extremely little, Ensign.

I forgot that's the long version, I apologize

Did you catch that?

It's actually kind of great, can we play that again? I apologize, I often play The Odors Cannot Travel I didn't realize Chekhov There's a little call and response And then we get what constitutes humor from Spock

That is illogical, Ensign Odors cannot travel through the vacuum of space I was making a little joke, sir Extremely little, Ensign

Wow, so much shade That's a belly buster coming from Spock Or Skawk, as I like to call him

That's almost like ASMR to me because there was, I mean, first of all, you just have the sounds of the ship, and I'm not like a Trekkie. I'm not somebody who loves any version of Star Trek. Genevieve is well into that world. I just don't have strong feelings about it one way or the other, but for me, that sound of their voice is recorded in that way, especially with the backdrop of the humming of the starship behind them or whatever you call it, the deck or the, what do you call that area where they all captain the ship from? The bridge. The bridge, thank you. So, again, if I had to prove that I'm not a Trekkie, I think I just did. But anyway, like for me, that show would come on. Usually I'm thinking like an early Saturday evening. So my parents might be getting ready to go out for the evening. So like maybe they're like, you know, like the babysitters getting ready to come over. We're going to watch movies all night. Or maybe my parents are staying home and they're getting the pizza ready for pizza night. But what's happening in the background is Star Trek is on probably like five o'clock, six o'clock on a Saturday evening as a kid. And it just meant, like, weekend times and fun times. And is that not sort of a calming sound anyway?

Yeah, absolutely. We didn't watch a ton of it, but I know exactly what you mean. Like, you know, when I would catch it on, like, a Saturday afternoon at 4. Do you think our show would be better if we just did the show over Star Trek USS Enterprise bridge sound effects?

Yes, I do. I think the show would be better if we just chose a scene every day, and sometimes it's in space. Can I do the one where I make out with Uhuru? Oh, is that a plot?

Yeah, that was a famous moment where James T. Kirk was a lieutenant. I forget what Uhuru's ranking was, but that was, I believe, the first interracial kiss on television.

Oh, I did not see.

There was also the trebles scene that looms large. You know, those little furry things that would multiply.

Yeah, I know those more, but not from my youth. I know those more from popping up and pop culture later. Pop culture, they've kind of come back. You know what the Star Trek sound sounds like to me? It sounds like my mom's perfume. Does that make any sense? Or my mom's perfume smells like Star Trek. I don't know.

We've already established that odors cannot move to the vacuum of space, Andrew.

That is literally illogical. Is literally illogical a possible show title? I don't know. I got something you said in the intro already. I like literally illogical, too. I got medium dipper loaded up, too, as a backup. But anyway, yeah, like, you know, it just meant like my parents were getting, you know, dolled up to go out for the evening.

Right. No, no, I understand that exactly. Like, I mean, Andrew, its memory is so crazy. It ties into all of the senses, taste, smell, et cetera, et cetera.

The others.

You know, I went and tried to find that audio this morning. That's a callback to this, I guess you would say documentary that Becca and I watched while I was in, we were in Leavenworth. and it's kind of about the city of leavenworth the town of leavenworth washington and how it became this kind of bavarian village and something that cracked me up was one of the people being interviewed was saying how it appealed to all of the senses and then they said like taste smell etc etc but what i realized this morning when i was going back through the audio is they decided with this movie to put like inspirational music under every second of the movie and so even when i didn't even realize this when i was watching it but every moment that the people who had like built the town are being interviewed there's like rights free kind of schlocky inspirational music underneath them which i thought sonically was going to be like kind of too weird so i ended up not grabbing it but what i'm happy to do is just repeat it from memory over the years so that that it slowly morphs.

kind of like maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships, their grace and their majesty. Whatever it is I say on a day-to-day basis, I will now bring that kind of rigor to the five senses, taste, smell, et cetera, et cetera.

And of course, yours isn't in the clear either. Yours is over top of Star Trek sounds for some reason. So, you know, it's all canon now.

Let's get to this cat mystery, my friend.

Okay, so I'm trying to figure out a way not to tell this story in a way that I then go back and listen to it later and regret it. So let me just try to be somewhat disciplined here. But let me give you some setup. A cat is like it's, well, it's an angel that puts in a box. An angel? Okay. No. Our boy Bingo, two years, a year and a half now or something, just a food monster, Luke. Like a freak. Every cat I've ever had, I feel like, or at least the last three. Everything about Bingo makes me like him more, honestly. I mean, like every cat I've had has been very food motivated. But Bingo is, well, ironically, Bingo is bananas. He will, I mean, from chips to, I got some bulk food mixed nuts in some of those little plastic bags, you know, like I went to Sprouts and I filled them up. I don't know why I said bags like that. It just came out that way. Everybody give me a break. I had him sitting on the counter for two hours.

Doing well on not regretting the story early on, by the way.

Do I say bags, buddy? I have the bags. I'm going to put them in a little Tupperware thing. I know that if I leave them out for a second, he'll get to them. I turn my back. I turn back around. He's already chewed through the bag and is chomping down on my mixed nuts, man. Like this type of shit happens all the time. So point is he is very food motivated and he does not let, you know, dinner time go by, you know, without letting us know that it's dinner time. And so anyway, that's why it was concerning for us when Genevieve and I fed the cats the other day and then we went to, I think, Genevieve's company holiday party. And we came back home and all of a sudden I looked down and, you know, hours have passed since cat dinner time. It usually takes the cats like one minute to eat their can of wet food apiece. And I looked down and Bingo's bowl has a bunch of food in it. Like he's licked off some of the gravy, but the rest has clearly just been sitting there for a couple of hours. We feed the cats separately, by the way, so their bowls are in different places. This is why you need pocket doors. Yes, actually, yes, we do close the door so that they can both eat their food in peace because otherwise he'll race through his in, like, 50 seconds and use the last 10 seconds to go upstairs and bully Bananas away from her thing. But anyway, what I'm guessing here is that I almost called Bananas Genevieve. What I'm guessing is while we're gone, Bananas never comes downstairs to see that Bingo has left his food, otherwise she would have eaten it. But it's concerning to me, like, this cat, Bingo, who's, again, a young cat, is not eating. And I don't know, man. Maybe it's because when Theo died, like, you know, he was a food monster, too, and then he stopped eating. Like, I didn't think Bingo was dying. I want to be clear about that. But it triggered something in me that I did not like.

Sure.

And so I'm like, oh, God, why didn't he eat? So I go to give him – I'm trying to think if I gave him another can of food or something. He would eat these little churrus. I don't know if you get into them. They're, like, little skinny packets of, like, gravy that you tear the end off of cats. Oh, Luke. Oh, my God. I would actually enjoy that. They have a vegetarian one. Luke, for real, I think that you would love giving Bubbles chew-roos. Bubbles is very non-food motivated. That's not true.

Here's what Bubbles likes doing. Because Bubbles and Holly now, that's Becca's cat, are kind of inseparable. And so when Bubbles likes to just Nudge Holly away from Holly's food For no reason other than to just flex Like it's not even that Bubbles Wants to eat all of the food She just wants to be annoying to everyone So are these little gravy packets For nourishing the cat? Is it a reward? Is it just for funsies? Like where do these fit into the overall food Sort of approach for these cats?

It's more of a treat I feel like whenever we take the cats to the vet, the vets always have them. So they kind of are a way of calming down the cats. But you know what they look like? They're kind of like the shape and size of the icy pops that you would have eaten as a kid. Oh, sure. Only these aren't frozen. Yeah. Are those the ones that come in the little plastic sleeve and you work all the contents out of it?

You know, just saying the name of those hurts the corners of my mouth. Because if you got to, first of all, they made ones that were like, there was the regular size ones that Peter Williams' mom would buy but then there was also the mega ones sometimes that you might get at the 7-Eleven that were like humongous

I think I can picture that, yeah not wide same width but super long

like the handle of a baseball bat like the thin part of a baseball bat and the problem with those was the edges of the plastic were you know it was sealed by some industrial process but they were also kind of sharp Thank you. and if you put down too many otter pops or icy pops in an afternoon you could kind of like cut the corners of your mouth you'd get some real sort of jack nicholson post look what i have to work

with i might have talked over you and said something incorrect which is kind of my brand um so when you said that these things were sort of mega pops they weren't the same width and just like much longer they were actually wider that was also one yeah that was long ones

But there was also ones that were just like also, if I remember right, and just as you're being self-critical, let me just meet that and exceed it by saying I'm usually wrong about these things lately. But I have a memory of there being like ones that were not, they were actually wider, which was kind of crazy. And in that, it meant that the plasticky edge was pushed out closer to the kind of corners of your mouth and created more of a hazard.

Yes, and it smelled like my mom's perfume for some reason. Precisely.

Oddly, it smelled like your mom's perfume to me.

Yes, that is very strange. Years later, it would all make sense, sort of. So anyway, picture a normal size one of those things, only instead of frozen, it's filled with a tuna slurry. How does that sound? Anyway, cats love these things. So I am encouraged that Bingo wants to eat one of those. I think I gave him a new can of food right then and there on that Thursday evening, and he rejected that as well. So I'm like, oh, that's a bummer. So I give him some treats. And then I give him a bunch of dry food and he eats it ravenously and probably too quickly. And he ends up throwing it up. That actually might have been the I think that was the next morning. We gave him another can of wet food. He turns his nose up at it. We give him dry food, eats it too quickly and throws up. But I assume that this is all still because he's got some tummy issues and he's sick. Looking back, I think that that I think he just ate too much dry food too quickly because he gets over whatever his illness is. Genevieve goes to the store. we're doing some reading and it says like some cats will just turn their nose up at the food they've been eating their whole life just like on a dime like there's all these stories online of people saying like i don't know been feeding the cat his whole life the same brand of wet food one

day he won't eat i can't imagine when we get old about that yeah right yeah i'm kidding obviously it works differently but if you think about it like i don't know i've just been feeding this person the literal same dry ass thing for eight years of their life and suddenly they're like yeah that's enough now I know that doesn't apply to pets necessarily but but um uh but that is I haven't hadn't heard of that that's a weird phenomenon yeah so I'm starting to think maybe

he just got tired of that food like what is it um but at a certain point over the weekend I don't remember exactly when I I think it uh I was here by myself Genevieve was at the Eagles and I just noticed what I thought was a change in him like he is like he was just more excited there's more fire in his eyes around dinner time I or so I thought and I'm giving him these these other cans of food that Genevieve had brought home like pates and what have you and this whole time by the way Bananas is eating her food no problem until I think it was Sunday morning I feed them both a can of the same cat food and we buy the stuff kind of in bulk from this like online retailer named Chewy but the brand is Blue Buffalo which is like a pretty healthy

yeah no that's high end

and they each get a can of it it's wet food and suddenly she's turning her like Bananas is now not eating the food and I'm like okay what's going on is there something weird about this food or did you catch the same stomach bug as bingo and I'm not sure at first and then I go and I give bingo another can of like the old supply of it's not it's not old that we but you know like the the regular supply of food instead of this new fancy stuff Genevieve comes home with he turns his nose up at it I think after much much testing I think there's something about this last batch of blue buffalo quality canned food that the cats are turning their nose up on and like it's not it doesn't seem off to me like texture wise I didn't taste it but smell wise texture wise like everything looks fine the expiration is like in 2025 or 2026 like I always assume that that stuff stays good until the apocalypse based on like the comic books I read but well right and we're going

to be eating it that's what i mean yeah yeah right that's definitely that's a big part of the lore is us eating you know alpo or something so to me i mean i guess that's the mystery like first

of all i think this whole time bingo wasn't really sick i think he was turning his nose up at this food and i retroactively put a bunch of evidence on him that he was sick like that he turned a corner and he's feeling better and he threw up the dry food i mean it could be that he ate some bad food and literally did kind of turn his stomach a little bit and I don't know but either way when Bananas turned her nose up at this food like Genevieve went to Chewy and like was online with some employee there you know some I guess it's not a call center what do you call it when you chat with somebody

online but anyway why yeah some help i just love i i when i think about calling chewy for help i just assume it's a room full of dogs and cats wearing those time life operator yep headsets

yep exactly on the internet nobody on the internet nobody knows you're a dog yeah uh so anyway apparently they say apparently um they are going to refund our money and genevieve ordered a different brand of food that's coming our way now but here's what i thought was funny they want us to send what's left back like we bought a lot of this stuff like i'm trying to think there's like i think four packages of 24 cans so oh wow the math on that and so but we went through so much of it in testing this and like putting the food down and oh and by the way if you're wondering why did but why did it take bananas a couple of days for her to turn her nose up at it i think she was probably still eating from a supply that was from an earlier shipment you know what i mean Like I bring certain cans upstairs for for her cupboard. And so like my guess is like she got to the new stuff, too. I can't like I it's just like I can't prove any of this. I don't know what it is like and I don't know where the line is. And now I don't know if even if we get this brand again and it's all fresh and good, if they'd ever go back to it, they might both have a bad association with it now. Like it's just a very strange mystery that is kind of unwell, as the listeners now know, unsatisfying because I don't know. I would be interested in knowing if anybody else has had a situation like this, not just your cat changing his or her mind on food, but that you get a just a bunk batch of wet food. It doesn't make sense.

I will. This will sort of indicate my. What would you call it? My sort of my tendency towards thinking that things that are more natural and healthy are also maybe more likely to go to turn on you. sort of like you know you go to the farmer's market and somebody is selling you a bunch of raw unpasteurized milk and they got 11 million reasons why it's better for you but i'm like i'm gonna go ahead and go with pasteurized on this it feels somehow to me my gogurt sir some somehow it it feels to me like the fact that this is like real healthy high end you know kind of more more natural less preservatives less of the of all the things that are probably actually bad for your pet But maybe every once in a while that in the way that you and I talk about every once in a while on cleaning supplies here and how you and I do, unfortunately, sometimes like a harsh cleaning process that's probably lining the pockets of Clorox or Unilever. And it's bad for the world, but it just feels like, yeah, but they got this dialed in. It is probably causing a silent spring somewhere. Right. But it does mean my bathroom is really germ free. It's like there's something about this being that fancy ass pet food that makes me think, yeah, I think I'm a couple of hippies churning this shit out and probably didn't QC it properly.

That's funny. That did not occur to me because it doesn't seem like – listen, Genevieve is the one who did the research and said this is good food to get. But it doesn't seem like it's like on the far edges of – I'm sure it's not. I'm totally like I just am an idiot. Have you seen like those commercials? I don't know if it's for cat food, but definitely dog food that, like, you just keep it in your refrigerator along with your regular food. You know, it's not like that. These are just cans of cat food, you know? Right, right. It's probably better. I'm guessing it's better than Purina. I don't even know for sure. But, like, you know, the reviews. Genevieve said she was trying to find a new cat food yesterday, and she goes to some, like, supposed news website, like NBC, and all they do is quote, like, the highlights of each one's press releases, like, quite literally. So you're like, oh, well, this one says it's the best. And we're like, okay, we could use some better journalism than this bunk.

Is that like the – I forget what I was listening to the other day. Actually, it was in L.A. It was two trips ago, but it was somebody talking about how – you and I have been on this subject a lot lately, but basically the way that a lot of the major American retailers have blamed theft for uh shutting down certain locations and and losing money and stuff and and that's a lot of that is proving to be very very questionable from a kind of fact based uh universe and uh this might have even been was it on the media or maybe i don't know planet money it was some public radio show but they were they're basically saying the the retail association of america was quoting some number of like what their loss was this year and um it's you know in billions and then uh this reporter went to them and said well where'd you get this number from and they said from this guy like some consultant and then they went to him and they were like where'd you get the number from and he was like the retail association of america two spider-mans pointing at each other exactly like they had floated the number and then he had repeated it and then they had cited him as the source of the number it's just like that's basically like what's Let's go ahead.

on here with the with the with the nbc coverage of the best cat food yeah yeah that's actually

that i that feels validating to me because i had just told you about that uh specific issue with the targets here in seattle like two kind of ill-proposed targets that the funny thing is i love hearing people talk about the targets i overheard somebody i think maybe like somebody tangential to a friend group or something maybe at the eagles not even like knowing that there was a controversy around the closing of these targets and like the targets targets claimed it was it was because of crime when the crime numbers of those stores were lower than their other stores but people just have always complained about these targets because like they're in good locations they have half of what the other stores have and it's not the half you need like they just weren't they were just business failures but for some reason to make somebody feel better to say well

it's because Seattle is full of crime right well two things on that one is that I was always kind of trying to figure out okay you know why why do they want to grossly overstate the effect of like shoplifting and and shoplifting rings on other than just like it makes it look like they're a lot bad business people but why would they do this and one of the things that was proposed in this show that I was listening to was basically what it allows the retailers to do is put a lot of shit in that's very annoying to the consumer but not get they don't take any reputational damage on it and it saves them a lot of money like they're able to continue making money because they don't have to stock a bunch of the stuff they lock everything up like they basically turn they turn these stores into like a prison commissary but then we the customers if they can spin the narrative enough that this is because of crime rings then we the customers don't go like this is a pretty shitty drugstore right now you know so like they they can basically they can kind of like get everybody on their team and get away with a bunch of stuff that just from a consumer experience from a ux experience is not great but they don't take any of the hit on that um it just gives them a ton of latitude to do a bunch of stuff that ultimately benefits them but they don't have to they don't have to explain to us why they're doing it because they can just kind of put it under this banner of like well it's anti-theft um that was one of the things The other thing is, this is now kind of a different spin on this, but did you hear that the National Labor Relations Board has ordered that Starbucks has to reopen? I think it's three Starbucks in Portland that they closed because of, quote unquote, crime, except it was because they were trying to organize there, according to the NLRB.

Yeah, including, I think, five here in Seattle. But the weird thing is. Oh, that happened up there, too. Yeah, it's like there's maybe maybe there's 10 of them. And I think three are in Portland, five are in Seattle. So I was looking at the addresses, and I might be wrong, but it seems like one of them is the one that has been coming up a lot on the show lately because it's a former Boston market, but then it became sort of a fancy Starbucks that was right by my old house.

Honestly, I think the NLRB needs to make it go back to being a Boston market as far as I'm concerned. Where am I going to get my cream spinach?

Right, exactly. At noon on a Wednesday. But I feel like I've got to be wrong about that because I feel like they're already doing something else with that space at this point.

Well, they may have moved on, and who knows what happens then. Do they have to come back? They just set one up right next door. But Becca, we went up to my sister Hannah's for a big, oh, man, we had a giant family X-mas blowout yesterday at my sister Hannah's. It was like pretty much everybody showed up. It was really fun. But driving back, Becca was telling me about this, and she was saying, I was always mystified why they closed this Starbucks. She goes, because one of them that closed was right by where she goes, And she does this like, you know, kind of exercise bike thing. I don't think they call it exercise bike anymore. But one of those studios where you go and they play like really upbeat music and yell at you that you're not doing your foot position right. And she was like, yeah, she was like, the Starbucks is right by where I go to burn. And it's like in a really nice neighborhood and was always busy. She was like, this made no sense. And of course it made no sense because it appears that they just didn't like that the people at that Starbucks were trying to organize.

Really, that was one that was organizing. That was one of the ones that was according to the National Labor Relations, which I don't know what kind of I don't they can make statements like that. But what kind of power do they have? Like, I mean, can they actually I don't think they can.

I think Starbucks is reopening the stores in Portland because she was reading me in the car. Becca was reading me a quote from the Starbucks. By the way, we probably have people in our listening audience who work for Starbucks. I actually have friends that work there. um i don't i'm not trying to say everyone associated with starbucks is some sort of uh certainly not a bad person and you know it's a company like any other company but she was reading me a quote from like the head of pr and it was as you might imagine andrew just utter shite it was like in our continuing in our continuing journey to serve starbucks customers a world-class experience we open and close stores you know

based on like it was basically this big bullshit statement that seemed to indicate that they've

reopened these damn stores they had to stop serving their coffee with olive oil because

burglars kept on burgling the olive oil what happened to that by the way that was we covered

that we had led to too many christmas blowouts we were the podcast of record they're like there's too many unhoused people trying to use the bathroom psych it's too many people that drank your goddamn EpiCac coffee.

Thank you, baby.

Alright, let's thank some of our donors who are keeping TBTL in business with their financial support. We could not do this without you. This is listener-supported podcasting. I know you hear us and you're like, these are two high-level expert broadcasters there must just be advertisers lining up um what was chewy.com starbucks there must just be the blue buffalo green buffalo you just think that's the cannabis store that i go to now and green buffalo um you would just think there'd be a line of advertisers looking to get in on this sweet sweet content there's not it turns out so it's on folks

like steven baugh of portland oregon one little correction there actually is a line of advertisers they're all just facing the wrong way oh yes no there's a line there's a mass exodus they're running from us as fast as they possibly can why am i going to do this right now andrew why why is

this where i'm taking it we did have one advertiser i was just thinking that yeah and what was amazing You know, TBTL employee numero uno, our vice president of operations and finance, one John Sklaroff, came to us and said, hey, we've got some interest from a company. In fact, it was a company that had advertised with us before.

Is it okay if I give the total details here? It was a company that had not quite finished its prearranged flight of ads with us.

Oh, is that how it happened? Yes. I missed that dazzling deed.

I had a note that was like, okay, you know, technically we still had an agreement with your show to run X number of impressions or whatever. And we did not realize that you had left American Public Media. So do you want to enter into this business agreement to run some more ads? And I think we decided not to. That's even less flattering.

I thought they just thought we were so good. I'm not kidding. I thought that this company was like, man, Andrew and Luke, they've got that. They've just got a special relationship with their listeners. And so we would love to stay in the Andrew and Luke business. It's more like, oh, we broke up, but can we get that sweatshirt back?

Right, exactly. We had already made plans to go to homecoming. So should we just continue?

I still have this ticket for Third Eye Blind. If you want to come, fine, but we're just going to be friends. Like that's, oh, wow. Well, anyway, this company did approach us. And I will be honest with you, because I didn't know the full story. I was like, yeah, all right, TBTL. We're lining it back up with the advertisers. And then when we found out what it actually paid, like what it would end up putting pre-tax into the TBTB coffers, it was like, I don't understand.

It wasn't worth what it would do to our audience. Like, that's literally a conversation we had.

It also wasn't worth what it was going to even pay. Yes, it definitely wasn't worth adding an advertiser and kind of changing the dynamic and relationship with our donors, thing one. But thing two, it was shockingly low. It was like, was it like 20 bucks a day or something?

I think it was maybe slightly more than that. But for the amount that we would run, and it was just like during a time that we were saying, listen, we went independent. We're, you know, supported by listeners. Like what we're talking about right now And it just did not make financial sense

I feel like it was going to be like We're going to do eight ads And it's going to be like $200 Or something Which you know $200 is not nothing

I think it was more than that

You can't Okay Sklarov hit us up You already know more about the story than I do Andrew So I'm actually going to defer to you But whatever it was I was just I was like oh this is why This is why the advertising model is really failing The podcasting industry at large Now, granted, we have a very boutique audience, so part of why they weren't going to pay us very much is probably because we don't have that many people listening. But all I'm trying to say is thank you, Steve, and thank you also, David Gabala of San Francisco, California. Steven and David, keeping TBTL in business, because I'll tell you what, it ain't going to be Skylight Frames.

Is that who it was? I think you're right, it was.

I don't know. I feel like I've already probably been wrong on it.

No, no, no, I think you're right, it was, because I remember, like, I still like my Skylight Frame. I'm looking at one right now, it's a good product, Angel. Now we're doing the ad, now we're doing the ad for free.

You better give us $25, you sons of bitches.

Well, first time we've called the donors of the day that.

No, no, no, no, no, I'm telling Skylight Frames to give us $25, I would never say that about Christopher Borgia of Seattle, Washington, no.

No, I, honestly, it's a good product. Yeah, it was not a product that I was like, oh, I don't know about this. It was no blue buffalo.

Thanks also to Matt Jones. Matt Jones of Mountain View, California. There's a reporter who covers the Baltimore Ravens named Mike Jones. And I just love every time he has to ask Lamar Jackson a question, he goes, hey, Lamar, Mike Jones. And then you see Lamar Jackson just stifle the urge to yell Mike Jones. And then eventually he usually does It's one of my very favorite things going on in the NFL He doesn't yell Mike Jones But he does it in the Mike Jones voice? No, he just said like I saw a clip of it the other day somewhere And it was like, he basically like Started to answer the question and then somebody else said Like Mike Jones or like And then Lamar Jackson just laughed in a knowing way That was like, we all knew that Lamar Jackson was thinking He wanted to yell Mike Jones

I'm going to put you on the spot I would never have remembered this, although I knew it at one time Do you still have Mike Jones' phone number in your head? He would shout it out in his songs all the time. No, I do not.

I don't think I even knew. To be honest with you, my knowledge of Mike Jones' sort of catalog is limited to just knowing he yells Mike Jones a lot. He would yell his own phone number. That's a great way to do that. We should do that.

2-8-1-3-3-0-8-0-0-4. And he would just work it into rhymes.

2-0-6-4-1-4-T-B-T-L. Can we get him to start yelling our voicemail line?

That would be great. What is Mike Jones up to these days?

Mike Jones. a great great question um it's doing ads for skylight frames thank you matt jones of mountain view thanks also to reed schumann of lafayette colorado one of many places likely named for general lafayette who was an american war hero though originally from france thanks reed and And then Rina Lopez is in McMinnville, Oregon, a place that I definitely have been to now, proud to say.

There must be a McMinnamins in McMinnville, McMinnaville.

They call it, yes, if there isn't, they need to get on that right. There's nowhere in Oregon, Andrew, particularly in the greater Portland area where there's not a McMinnamins. It is an unbelievable, it's a thriving business. And like, even when I used to live in Portland, kind of in what I called the Hollywood neighborhood of Portland, although it was technically more like Sullivan's Gulch, but I was trying to keep the paparazzi away. I could probably walk to, I'm not exaggerating, four McMiniman's properties. Because what they do, and it's just kind of genius, is any time a kind of a cool older building would be between tenants or would be falling into disrepair. And it turns out a major American city has tons of those buildings. More and more. Yeah, right? And then they just like turn it into McMinimins and suddenly, and people love it in Portland and in Oregon, so it's a smart idea that's been working out for them. They've actually, there is a McMinimins that's not super duper far away from where I am here on Madrona Hill and it is in the town of Kalama, Washington. And it's kind of a, the style would be sort of Hawaiian, I guess. And it's a cool place. And it's like an anchor of the local community. And I will be honest with you, what got me thinking about this part of Southern Washington and maybe someday kind of living here or maybe having a house here was when I was still living in Bellingham and it was during the pandemic and I was, CBS sent me down to this area to do a story about the 40th anniversary of the explosion of Mount St. Helens. And the closest kind of interesting looking hotel was this McMinimins. And so I booked a room there. And I was on the side of the hotel that looks out on the Columbia River. And I remember it was just a really unusually warm April day. And I was standing out on the balcony. The sun was shining. I was having a little white wine. And I just thought, what is this magical place that I'm hanging out in? And it kind of got in my head. And so I guess we can all thank McMinimins for the fact that I'm here, perched high above the mighty Columbia, rapidly running out of resources as my dad. As my dad. Sands away at the floor We are going to have floors by the end of this week Andrew, which is a big, big deal And only possible because of The donors who make this an actual job That the three of us, Andrew and John And I can all have, so thank you very much To our supporters for making TBTL Possible

hello and welcome to top story the all-timer that walt uh rolled out today which is this there's not a lot to say about this it was just funny i mentioned a while ago how um my dad will just like talk to me from another room in a way that i just am shocked that he thinks it's audible to me like it's audible that i i can hear something's going on but there's no way i can make out the specifics of what he's saying and i'll be like halfway up the stairs and he'll just be saying something to me in like a normal speaking voice today the all-timer was he's running a power sander and he's in a mask and i'm two rooms over and i hear the quiet i hear i mean i hear the loud thing of the sander that he's running sanding down kind of irregularities in the floor before we put down this glue and this hardwood floor but i hear this just muffled like over this like kind of amidst the sander and i'm like there's no way this guy thinks that is getting to me right now like and i went i was like what he like turned off the sander took off the basket was like yeah these uh this concrete's really tough to sand i was like okay well thank you for that but like i'm just shocked that his brain thinks through the mask through the sander through Through the wire, that's just a through the wire reference. But anyway, through the Sander sound and the mask, and I'm two rooms over. And that he's not even yelling. He's just speaking in a normal conversational voice. That that's going to be information that's going to be received in my ears in a way that I can then do something with.

Well, this poor son of a gun just can't get it right. You're either yelling at him for being too loud when you're on the treadmill or too quiet. Well, yes, that is true. Well, that was another thing.

Okay, check this out. Today, I was on the treadmill. I was about to go on the treadmill and I was like, all right, dad, you need anything else for me? I was like, I'm going to go hit the treadmill real fast. And he was like, no, no, we're good. And I was like, I know this guy. We're not good. So then I came in here and did a little bit more work. I kind of cleaned some things up. I did some organizing. Sure enough, five minutes later, which would have been treadmill time if I went for it, he pops his head in and has something else he's got to tell me. And I was like, thank God I wasn't on the treadmill when that happened because I would have freaked my chili, man. So I have to basically tell him I'm going to be on the treadmill, wait him out till he comes in and does his thing and then I can get on the treadmill because you

don't want to be interrupted while you're on the treadmill because you have to no no I don't want

to get scared oh I get in a zone me and Sabrina Tabernice or Mike Barbaro whoever is helming the daily we're in a we get we're going deep we're we're jogging we're listening to the daily we're

in a zone it's very important for Barbaro to keep you calm too we know this like he does not want

anything to shock you no he's he's very he's he's you know it's it's breathy but it's engaged but it's it's a it's a kind of it's a whole it's a whole vibe going on there with the daily but um anyway no i it's not that i don't it's not that it's sacrosanct like no one interrupt me while i'm jogging on the treadmill it's i will seriously get freaked out because i'm like in high concentration mode so um you sent me this story recently andrew and uh i thought it was actually quite interesting it's a piece from business insider written by jiraj uh deva diga rising costs mean food companies are making snacks and sodas taste worse um this writer talks about how they uh sort of was used to drink a lot of soda and then stopped drinking soda and then decided to reward themselves with a little soda treat recently and was noticing that like it doesn't taste it was coke and said that it doesn't taste the way that coke used to taste and so then the writer started i don't actually know the gender of the writers why i'm being kind of non-specific here but like then this writer went about looking around to see if it was their imagination or if it was a thing going on with coca-cola side note it was and then started finding all these like reddit communities and other places where people are complaining about their snacks not tasting the same way and that there's actually as you might imagine a profit motive behind that um somebody on reddit was saying ritz crackers stopped tasting the same about five years ago they went from being nice and firm and dippable to nowadays easily crumbling to bits even with the lightest dip can confirm by the way i haven't had an actual i grew i grew

up with ritz but i haven't had a ritz in a long time because we've been buying club crackers luke if i feel like more of an adult buying a club cracker than a ritz but i know this sort of mealy sort of situation that we're talking about here where it's almost like I think there are several foods like this where it's less of a crisp cracker type of thing and it's like more of an emulsion, you know? Right, exactly. I don't eat a ton of Ritz, although this is the time of year that I

will because I'm in more holiday get-togethers and, you know, like I don't typically...

pirates and bring them home but boy if there's some out at a holiday party I'm going for it and yeah forget they they feel like they're made out of very tasty sawdust but they want to they're like they're just ready to dissolve at any moment or break apart like there's no kind of structural integrity to them somebody else was complaining about Twix you could bite into a Twix and feel your teeth travel through a heavy layer of caramel that was in the olden days now they snap in half and tastes like a sugar cookie with some chocolate on it. I can also confirm this. One of my go-to late night, having had too much alcohol, probably hotel lobby purchases would be a Twix bar, maybe a king size where you get like six of them in there.

Can I ask you about this king size situation? I don't need a lot of Twixes. I like them okay. But when you get like a king size Twix, are they still the same dimensions? You just get more of them? okay good because like if you're changing the dimensions you can really change the you know the satisfaction level like sometimes you don't want a big ass twix well there's also just a

practical thing too which is they just want to make one size of yeah that's true too so they they're not gonna like yeah they don't even though they're trying to convince us there's a left twix and a right twix factor i don't think that's real i don't know if that's real but stupid idea i think i was always thinking a i'm kind of drunk right now so this tastes weird to me and b maybe these are just stale maybe these have just been sitting in that kind of like little snack area of the hampton inn like next to the like starbucks jars of starbucks iced coffee at room temperature and whatever else like a couple of aspirin and like a you know whatever lives in that weird little space i just assumed like well these are these are i've been thinking that every twix i got my hands on in a long time have been stale and i think it's that they're just using different

ingredients now and you probably weren't even like thinking this consciously or at the front of your mind each time right it was more like you read this article the front of my mind was probably a lot of merlot right it was just sort of floating there but right um yeah no and then you read something like this and it all comes together it's like the you got blue buffaloed is what

happened precisely i've been vomiting everywhere and i've become basically not interested in my food um uh the the term for this and this again is from this business insider piece is well they they say manufacturers are quietly modifying their recipes to save money and maintain their profit margins the phenomenon has been called skimpflation and flavorflation is a way to hide the impact of inflation and avoid passing higher costs on to the consumer but by replacing expensive ingredients with cheaper ones companies are also making food less tasty less healthy and less satisfying this raises a kind of a larger question which is Andrew I could not for the life of me tell you what a twix bar retails for oh yeah like down to the 10 cents but i could tell you that they all taste stale now so don't you think they would be better served raising the price by 10 cents and making them taste i mean these are impulse buys these are not nobody's buying uh these these particularly these snack foods these very very highly processed snack foods no one's buying them in my mind uh as a good decision we're buying them because they're tasty because we want to treat ourselves because they're comforting whatever like i feel like people will pay 10 cents more for a twix bar and and they won't go on they probably will be less likely to go on to reddit and be like i paid 10 cents more for my twix bar than they would be like hey

every time i get a twix bar it kind of sucks i have a more important issue to raise here okay If you can believe it. I can't. I'm just having this thought now, but I stand by it. Flation is the new gate. For the longest time, Watergate set the tone for any scandal ending in the word gate. Deflategate, or as I used to like to call it, inflategate. And the Sklar brothers would always correct me. Whatever the scandal is, it ends in gate. Now everything is flation. Shrinkflation. What was those skimflation steps? Well, stagflation is a real thing. But I just mean like all of the, you know, in this era of inflation, I feel like every article has some new term. The industry is calling it podflation. It's your podcast costs more, but they're shorter.

Not here, buddy. This is a king-sized podcast. It does taste stale, but it is a lot.

The stories are stale, but you get just as much, if not too much.

There's an interesting example in this article about a company actually walking this back, a Conagra, the food processing giant. They make something called Smart Balance Margarine, and they reduced the vegetable oil content in their Smart Balance Margarine to 39% from 64%.

So if you're a if you're a smart balance margarine head and you're enjoying its it's it's, you know, rich taste, they replaced the vegetable oil with water and then they didn't say anything about this. And then apparently the smart balance fans of America were so pissed that they went onto the ConAgra website and listed put down one thousand one star reviews. when do you turn the comments off on that if you're con agra yeah it's not going well right yeah i would i would be like uh you know maybe we take what good comes from your first of all you're called con agra i doubt you're not exactly a sympathetic company just based on the name what's even the point of having a comment section yeah that is a really good do you think it's like you know people are gonna keep coming go god i just love your partially hydrogenated products conagra like thank you so much for you know for for pushing out small farms and for genetically modifying everything like no good is going to come from the conagra comments just turn those off but anyway they got so many bad comments that they basically apologized and said they're going to go back to their old formula for smart balance margarine and i have another thing to say about

this article and the language used herein i think i might have even hinted at this to you when i sent it to you the headline focuses on snacks right but when you actually look at this entire article it talks about um this phenomenon happening with cough syrup um a salad dressing i think wishbone maybe mouthwash margarine like you just talked about yes also twix and yes also they bring up soda but this is about all different kinds of products not even just foods it's about all different kinds of products but the headline is they're quietly ruining your favorite snacks and i don't know why i feel like finger wagging business insider on this but that is like that's kind of clickbaity right it's like you're coming after my snacks i want to push back on this i

think that there's i think that there's a sufficient amount of snack talk in this article to justify that headline because the dazzling deets to me they refer or they they relate to snacky stuff like briar's ice cream reducing the amount of dairy fat in his ice cream by so much that they could no longer legally call it ice cream. Oh, yeah, right. That's a dazzler, my friend.

That is a dazzling detail. And I'll call ice cream a snack.

Sticking out your ghiat for the dazzler.

But mouthwash having half as much sodium fluoride, I would say.

Are you kidding me? You don't consider mouthwash a snack? I used to, but I got better. Dude, I got some of that smart mouth, which definitely is not only a almost borderline medical mouthwash that they advertise on NPR a lot, but it's definitely something someone's mom once called you yeah right you got a real smart mouth buddy absolutely but i the thing is becca uses smart mouth and her breath is impeccable so i was like all right i'm gonna get on that and the thing is it's so complicated it's got like a dual nozzle system that you have to like just getting the container operable is such a nightmare and then it's got this plastic lid that clicks over this whole kind of mixing system and then you're supposed to i basically what happened was uh when i was traveling um a month ago i tried to bring this stuff with me this smart mouth and somehow while it was in my dop kit the top came off of the smart mouth and it just filled my entire um like uh what do you call it my toiletry kit was just full of mouthwash by the time i opened it which luckily doesn't smell terrible so things that could spit like it definitely refreshed my my toiletries kit but I was like this doesn't need to

be this complicated do you know I washed I threw my toiletry bag in the in the wash a while back I think I'm back from a trip and I could you do that ever like I don't think ever in my life have I done that but I was like emptying some stuff out of us like this thing how long have I had this I don't think about it much cheapo grade dop kit that I've just had or you know like the bag forever never really think about it how many times has that gone on trips collected all kinds of sand and just residue from toothbrushes or what have you and uh and one crushed up Advil that's in the bottom of it

that's just making it every time you open it like a red dust cloud just kind of comes out so I threw

that into the wash and uh it felt satisfying I don't know if it really oh dude it's so I haven't

really washed mine mine's from filson but what i do about every six months is i'll just be in a hotel room somewhere and i'll be like this has to end now and i'll like basically empty it out and then um hold on i'm about to sneeze i'm fighting a sneeze you got this i'm winning make it funny i'm winning um uh oh wow okay i did i survived that it was a scare but i got through it um i'll just be like a letdown i know it kind of is um sorry i'll uh punch myself in the knows later. ourselves sneezed during the email segment but um what I'll do is I'll just empty everything out because I you know obviously travel so much that that thing just gets you know what's mostly in the bottom it's a graveyard for the plastic thing that clicks over a disposable razor oh sure yeah that little clear plastic thing there'll be like 20 of them down there they'll just be like all man just the weirdest just graveyard of things and so I'll take everything out I'll throw out everything that's kind of you know that or just even other like i have these mighty patches they're called which is like a little clear circular sticker that you can put over a pimple that's supposed to kind of take them down overnight like heaven forbid i'm somewhere to film something and i've got just like a very inopportune zit going on but they'll just be like little remnants of those down on the bottom and basically i'll get rid of everything i'll just like and i'll kind of like maybe get one of the towels in the hotel bathroom kind of wet one of the hand towels and Just sort of like really wipe it all down and get it like turn it inside out and get it clean ish and then put everything back in very carefully. Like this is where this is always going to go. Now this lasts for by the way, like one day. But like, OK, you know, foldable toothbrush, you go in here now and like now we're organized and then it just becomes it's like entropy kicks in and just becomes completely disorganized by, you know, within six months.

And I have shocked myself recently realizing how much of a putter I am, even when I'm in a hotel room. And this is how I know I come by it naturally. Like we talk about me puttering quite a bit, like, and that's what I do around the house. Like this weekend, I ended up staying home both Friday and Saturday night, which I was going to go out on Saturday. But honestly, well, whatever. I don't have to get into it. I didn't want to go out. So both nights, Genevieve went out and I was at home and, you know, I was doing a lot of vacuuming and folding of clothes and all the puttering types of things I that I like to do and that make me feel kind of cozy and safe um but when I'm in a hotel room and this happened like the last time I traveled was a few months ago and I was visiting some family but I was staying in a hotel room somewhere and um I was getting back to my hotel room you know you know early evening or whatever and spending my entire evening there I got myself a pizza hut pizza now I only eat pizza Hut pizza in hotel rooms sure um and uh I would just find myself like not cleaning the sink I don't want to overstate it I don't like have a sponge and some soft scrub but I was in the you know what it is is I think if I switch over to listening to a podcast I will without even realizing it almost like a cartoon ghost like leaving my body all of a sudden I realize I'm in the the like the bathroom of a hotel room a generic hotel room and I'm taking paper towels and I'm like shining up I was like polishing the chrome or whatever and it probably just started with me like washing my hands and then getting some drips on the counter and then drying those up with a towel and then realizing well if I and then not even realizing that oh now I'm just buffing this whole sink like and I found myself doing that on my last couple of trips which have been kind of few and far between this is not an isolated thing I just even at my parents house When I was visiting in November, there was one evening where they went to bed and I was just sort of watching movies. Then I put in a podcast and then I found myself, I think, rearranging the towels in my dad's bathroom. I'm like, wait a second, what am I doing? These are not my towels to rearrange.

They love you, though, down at the hotel housekeeping staff. Yeah, right. They tip me. Leaving that place so much better than you found it. That was my feeling when Becca and I were checking out of the Airbnb in Leavenworth, which I'm, I, we don't need to go into this. I've spent, I've spilled tons and tons of pod ink on the topic of Airbnbs, but, and, and the, the place where we stayed, I have to say the people were pretty nice and responsive and like, I don't have an overall negative review of it at all. other than to say i will never get over the fact that you both play pay an exorbitant cleaning fee and that the directions are almost always to more or less clean the house or clean the apartment or whatever it is and they just that just seems so frustrating to me not that i want to make life harder on the people who are cleaning the airbnbs because typically that's a person who's just trying to make a living or make some extra money they're not even the person who owns the airbnb necessarily they're a person who lives in the area maybe and and again i want that person's life to be um better not worse so i don't want to like leave the place trash to make their life worse but i will say this like we when we left i was furiously recording the show with you and becca was going around like kind of taking care of things like the dishwasher was run we had stripped all the bedding we had like i had taken the garbage out the night before basically this place was like other than remaking the beds this place was like as nice as when we found it and again on the one hand it's like i like that the person who uh who's going to be cleaning the airbnb will roll up and look at and go hey this these people were nice these people left this in good shape but i'm mad at the person i'm paying two hundred dollars sure

yeah it's just like

Can I ask you one more question about mouthwash before we leave that too far in the rear view mirror? Yes, please. This is just a nostalgia bit, nostalgia bit. A nostalgia play? A nostalgia play. But you were talking about, I had never heard of Smart Mouth before in this contraption thing that you were talking about. But it did remind me of the, I don't know, like joy and amazement when ACT came on the scene in the 1980s. like a bottle that you would squeeze it to pre-measure how much mouthwash you need and it would make that little make that little gurgling sound if you like over squeezed and then you let go of it and it would suck the rest back into the bottle like what a delight yes it was also

priming me for wanting to do shots right you kind of you just like you get this this like perfectly measured little something or other i mean look i'm not a you have a jigger for your mouth right I'm not a dentist, so I don't want to be giving out questionable sort of dental advice or oral hygiene advice, but something that I had actually heard, because I'm very concerned about having bad breath. I would like to not have it if possible, so I'm usually thinking of solutions and things, and I really like a good mouthwash that just stings the living Tweedle out of your mouth. I don't enjoy the experience of it stinging, but I like the feeling that I'm just like burning out every possible thing that would smell not great. But that's, I've heard, actually kind of not necessarily super awesome for your mouth because you're sort of neutralizing a lot. Like the pH balance or the whatever it might be, you know, our bodies and including our mouths are kind of, you know, pretty, what do they say in the Bible? Fearfully and wonderfully made. and like it's whereas i want to just be like basically gargling battery acid because i feel like i'll never have bad breath for the rest of my life it's like maybe don't reduce the ph balance to zero maybe don't like kill your entire biome because it's kind of doing something yeah if i don't have a mouth it can't sting i mean that's just simple math my friend here i go once again

with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not from a female all right

We can talk about gate lice tomorrow because I do think it's actually kind of interesting. It's not just a Sky Jinx clickbaity story. It actually, I think that there's, I think there's a little bit of useful information there. So we'll talk about that tomorrow. In the meantime, though, we've, we've got emails. We've got emails. They call it gateflation, Luke.

I mean, I think we can get into it probably.

The irony is that that, that absolute piece of human garbage, Matt Gates in down there in florida who has some really credible allegations of really heinous behavior there should have been a gates gate the gates gate yeah you're right there wasn't enough of a gates gate as far as i'm concerned that's a good point thank you it's also interesting that

i went with with gateflation because that combines both gate and inflation anyway let's move on you told a story on the show um a few weeks ago about your experience watching the huskies uh play the Oregon Ducks. This is a... Puck the Fuskies,

Andrew. That's what...

Zuck the Phipps, as we would say when we were pretending like we cared about the Kent State Golden Flashes. The Akron Zips. The Akron Zips. Yeah, I just gave you some... I just gave you some... I gave you some Maction right there, Luke,

is what you just heard. Yeah, right, buddy.

But anyway... It's the laws

of... I don't know. I'm going to try to make a laws of attraction joke with the MAC conference,

but no. I'm going to assume most people know this story. You know, it's a very fierce rivalry between the Huskies and the Ducks, and you are a Huskies fan and you were watching upstairs as quietly as you could at a party that was just filled with Ducks fans and of course the Huskies end up winning that game and you were trying to celebrate quietly and not be obnoxious and what have you anyway that prompted listener Kristen, our friend Kristen, to call in with this story that I thought was pretty

charming. Hey, it's Kristen from Kansas City and I was listening to Luke talk about watching the Washington game at Oregon and, you know, just potential sports rivalries and how that can go. And I wanted to share a quick story about when I was watching the NCAA championship game in 2022, when my Kansas Jayhawks were playing the North Carolina Tar Heels. And we were at a bar, my family, my brothers, it was a whole big thing. And a table next to us was cheering for North Carolina and we were losing terribly like down 15 at the half and this guy comes over to us and I swear to God he makes an L on his forehead like it is 1995 literal in the shape of an L

I was going to start singing that wait what is that I didn't know that that was a song that's a smash mouth all star she was looking kind of dumb with her finger and her Ha! I'm in the shape of an L on her forehead.

God bless you both.

Literal in the shape of an L on her forehead. And I was like, what the hell? Like, you know, clearly you're winning. Like, don't rub it in. This is so ridiculous. And, well, long story short, best comeback, greatest comeback in the history of the NCAA championship. And Kansas ends up winning. And when I tell you that I had a very rough year, actually, that year, lost my mom, and I would think about this man with the L on his forehead, and it would bring me so much joy. So please unnecessarily taunt people in bars. It may be a light that they need in a very dark moment.

Twist. Power out. The lesson is do taunt people because then if it backfires on you, it will bring them joy the rest of their life. I did not, I didn't see that coming.

I really, as it relates to that particular game, the Pac-12 championship between the Huskies and the Ducks, I actually was very glad that I had not gone into any kind of taunt mode when the game had started because there was much like this person who was taunting our listener, there was a moment where the huskies were really really doing well and i was in a room full i was i started out at this pub that was full of ducks fans and the huskies were kind of way up and there was a mild temptation to be like you know go huskies but then the ducks came storming back and actually took the lead and i was like oh thank god i wasn't like you know i thank god i didn't like i didn't like in your face everyone when when the when the huskies were doing well because that that that really burns you in the end when uh when when the other team comes back and i again i i'm glad this turned out well for uh listener kristin um but i do hope that guy is suffering wherever he is i mean honestly like i hope because that's not a that's not the first

time that person's done that there was that is not like another wire went off and now he's permanently got like an l on his own forehead that would be so great somehow it's like emblazoned there can i ask you a question luke we are not gonna have time to do like a special like you know no point conversion leading up to the sugar bowl i'll do one from frankfurt hey maybe we can but can i just ask you a basic question about about college football because yeah i think because first of all like i never really had much i just didn't follow college football at all my entire life and i think this year um was sort of a culmination of both like the huskies being in the national conversation and all of the the sports you know radio shit that i listen to and and you know talking to you and genevieve and and watching um the the championship game and everything i guess it's just way way way more front of mind for me where uh where you know like who the final four teams are famously they call them the final four i believe in football

they kind of do now i mean not really but like you're not they don't call them the final four i know that's a basketball reference but you're not wildly off yeah there is four teams and they're

in the final exactly so anyway I just never paid attention to it before and I didn't realize that there's such I alluded to this on the show the other day I just want an explanation for this there's such a wide gap of time between a lot of these teams like you know regional or what would you call it their divisional playoffs not divisional but conference playoffs or championship games and then you wait a month before you play your next game I mean can a football team just take them i mean clearly this has been happening i'm sure for for decades but like yeah you just take a month off i mean wouldn't the teams be so rusty well you're practicing yeah so there's that

and also i mean i think that i i think literally this whole schedule my i don't know this for a fact but my guess would be this schedule sort of was implemented back when maybe it was more the case that these were student athletes that these were folks that were like playing football for a team but also going to the college i mean you know technically these football players do that as well but like the idea that like everybody wants to take a break for the holidays and folks will go home and have christmas or whatever with their family and it was like so of course we're not gonna i mean we're not gonna play these bowl games and also i think it there was an idea i think of letting of making sure that everyone had the maximum amount of time to get healthy because you're going to play this big national championship game uh it'd be ideal to have all of the best players on both teams kind of ready to go that was probably a little bit of a calculation it was something that everyone could look forward to like hey we're going to be back here in january we're playing the national championship game um the irony is that now a lot of the best players don't play in the bowl game because it doesn't make any sense if you're like one of the best players in college football right now and you have millions and millions of dollars

on the line why are you exposing yourself to the risk of even one additional game where you could have a career-ending injury and um and then cost yourself you know all this money in the pros so my guess is for like the national championship game or the final four as it were probably the good players will turn out because it's a cool thing but if you're in any lower level bull for instance Oregon Oregon when they played the Huskies if they would have beat the Huskies I think there would be a strong argument they're in the final four instead they're in a different bowl i forget which one it is but i would i'll be curious to see which of their best players actually end up playing at least the ones that are on their way to the nfl so this idea that originally the start of it was the the schedule was to allow for like people to get healthy and play in the national championship we've arrived at a point where a lot of people don't play in

these games because they don't want to get hurt yeah coaches leave is bo nix a senior like is like Bo Nix is like a ninth year senior Bo Nix is actually my age I'm not saying that to be critical by the way It says that in the Wikipedia it says the same age as Luke Burbank That's interesting Yeah he's older than Jason Peters So is he not playing? I don't know who Jason Peters is

He's the Seahawk lineman who's the oldest player in the NFL I believe at age 41 The oldest active player Oh gotcha Or as I believe it's our friend Durs Will often say in the comment section The Jason Peters experiment has failed as as Gino Smith is being harassed in the pocket. It's like maybe there's there's a reason why you don't have a lot of 41 year old offensive linemen in the NFL. It's a tough position, particularly when you're starting to get mailing from AARP.

What was the I'm blanking on the name of our charismatic kicker who was 45 and would smoke cigarettes while kicking Sebastian Janikowski.

Janikowski yeah he was an old one I knew people that had heard stories of like seeing Janikowski

sleeping on a park bench in Denver I heard those I believe on a game I think you're right waking

up there on a game like waking up as we were shaking it off probably smoking a couple of heaters and heading for the field yeah he was a real one Sebastian Janikowski all right uh

Thank you for explaining that to me.

I mean, I don't – listeners now, this is the process. I quote – and I'm putting this in air quotes. I explain something to Andrew, and then the listeners explain it to me, but with facts.

Right.

With the facts at their disposal. So somebody get at me and explain why it is, what the history of that sort of interregnum is between the end of the college football season and then the postseason.

And more to my point, does it look like a team that hasn't played in a month? Like you say, they're practicing, but it's a different mindset. I think there's something about the regular grind of a season, whether it's every day for baseball or every week for football. That's how you stay in football shape, I sort of feel like.

Yeah, they talk about that contact being important, which is just, I can't wrap my mind around that, to be honest with you. That's just its own kind of crazy thing. You just got to get hit really hard so your body goes like, okay, now I'm good at football again. That's just shocking to me as a thing.

Your head really hard in order to play the game.

You need to concuss it up to speed. Speaking of which, go Seahawks tonight. I've got, Andrew, this famous last words, but I have a weird feeling that the Seahawks are going to win.

We're either going to lose by 40 or we're going to win.

No in-between. I just think there's no statistical reason to think that the Seahawks will beat the very, very, very talented Philadelphia Eagles. they have us they just and but we have just been on such a bad run we've played so many good teams lately and we've been on such a bad run i just feel like we might surprise some people tonight

and buffalo beat you know buffalo upset dallas yesterday sort of in the air i feel like yeah buffalo has josh allen though josh allen did not i mean according to my fantasy stats he did not play that well i said something last night that i never thought i would say which is i should have started baker because i have baker on my bench he got like almost 40 fantasy points and josh allen got under 20 yeah tampa who yeah exactly that's bakertown baby all right thanks everyone we'll

be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio in the meantime take care of yourselves and please

remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all and that's how you sneak in a no point

I don't use foul language, and I don't like to hear anyone else use it either.

Power out.