Muse

So then I was like, screw it, Grandma. I'm going to become a street artist, yo. I mean, most people see a wall, and they just see a wall. I look at a wall, and I see, like, a goat in a backpack. Right. Like a ninja handing out cheeseburgers.

Whoa.

A chill alien, you know?

Well, who doesn't see a chill alien? That's my question.

A lot of people. A lot of people. It's sad. TBTL!

Anytime you can do something that's fun, you like to do it and make money doing it, hey, it's a win-win-win. And anytime you can win-win-win, you're win-win-winning, you know? If you're just winning or win-winning, that's just winning or win-winning. But when you're

win-win-winning, you're win-win-winning. Doors go up, doors go down. That's what garage doors do.

I feel like we're just like in that tired mode where you're delirious and you're laughing at

silly things uh-oh he's starting that funny talk again well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a monday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live oh and the adventure begins again my name is luke burbank i am your host as jay would say uh he's got flow coming to you from the madrona hill studio first high above the mighty columbia where we are still enjoying some truly lovely weather.

I feel warm and I'm levitating.

And I've got this thing pretty much dialed in because as the weather is starting to change a bit around here, I will be heading down to Los Angeles this week and then later Palm Springs where I will be... Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. I'm just looking at like five to six straight days of warmth and sunshine and happiness and high fives and good feelings, which is a lot of the things that will also be happening here on episode 4,164 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. It's a Monday. Wall Street, the NASDAQ. Business things are happening again, and we've got some business news for you.

Well, I guess I just have my first taste of the filthy side of this business.

Joanne Fabric, she has declared bankruptcy. And also, Dollar General has admitted that they overemphasized the self-checkout kind of element of their business model. And it's for a reason that even before I heard the reporter on NPR this morning explain why they decided they're going to actually sort of scale back their self-checkout endeavors, I knew exactly why they were going to do it, so we'll talk about that today. And we'll probably also end up talking about the fact that I had to sort of let the big dog out this weekend during a radio recording session.

I'll say, what's up, dog?

Doesn't happen that often. And then Andrew also had an interesting weekend. He was playing a lot of bingo at the Eagles in Seattle over the weekend. You play to win the game. And something happened there as well. Speaking of my good friend Andrew Walsh, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Oh, hey, y'all said my name. Joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Luke, I don't consider myself a victim, and I don't want to complain about things, but there are small things in life that other people don't have to deal with that I do have to deal with. Like when I text you on a Sunday night and I tell you I have a bingo story, I have to make it very clear I'm talking about bingo the game and not bingo the cat.

You're a victim of You're actually a victim of having too much good stuff Happening in your life You have an adorable cat named Bingo And you have access to one of the hottest Bingo games in Seattle Mother Airy Numero Uno Which I am also technically a member of

It's an underground bingo game, Luke You're not supposed to say where it happens There must be underground bingo games, right? Like underground card rooms Like somewhere

That's a good question I would say that the the question around illegal bingo is sort of related to the question around illegal cannabis. When something is readily available above ground everywhere does it do something to eliminate the kind of underground marketplace? Like certainly I put it this way. When bingo is outlawed only outlaws will play bingo. But for now you can sort of head to any senior center any fraternal order a number of casinos just like there's a lot of places that you can play bingo legally i wonder

what the interest in the underground version would be do you know that my cat bingo his personal slogan is when they outlaw bingo only outlaws will play with bingo i don't know if you know that again just to add more complexity to this it's on his linkedin page i believe so it's also on his back tattoo. Yeah.

Which, honestly, as a pet owner, I feel somewhat irresponsible letting him get that. I had to sign off on it, but, you know. Yeah.

Well, I mean, it's not an exact science cat parenting.

No, I mean, you sort of learn as you go along, you know.

He's our third cat, so. The thing about the illegal card games is that usually, in my experience, and this is something I know a little bit about, like the not, let's just say, the not technically legal poker games that I used to play in much more when I lived in Portland, The reason they popped up was because all of the legal poker games had closed for the night.

Uh-huh, right.

So you don't—the game that should not be happening, according to the vice—the Bunko Squad of the Portland PD. By the way, one of the first squads they eliminated when the Portland PD ran out of funding was the Bunko Squad.

I don't think I've ever heard that phrase before, but it sounds fun.

the bunco squad in the like 50s in the kind of the frank drebin era the drag net era of policing i i always associate it with the guys that would bust up the flim flams and the okay the illegal

casinos the the stuff that you shouldn't all the words were very frivolous though the bunco squad

busts up the flim flams okay now i got you the bunco would would uh would would bust the flim flams it wasn't it was like bunko was never it was it was never like you're not solving a murder right you're you're kind of like you know you're again you're busting illegal gambling operations and the like but vice kind of like a vice yeah exactly yeah vice but but but but more whimsical

exactly the gonzo squad was also a lot of fun so the uh but like the game that i used to play in

more often than was good for my soul or my bank account was it would start at well it would actually start at about midnight but when it would really get going would be about 2 a.m when everything else that was legal would close and then people would sort of start to kind of drift drift on in as it were to the game throughout the night and sometimes that game could go for a couple of days straight and and and and again the value the value of it and i put that in air quotes for people not watching this on instagram the value of that was just that you could be playing poker at three in the morning and you couldn't do that anywhere else but during the the regular hours when all the other places uh were open it was less it was kind of less um

appealing to sure yeah um and i'm sure you're all taking healthy breaks to have a bowl of soup here

and there keep your yeah you know just yeah exactly staying hydrated hydrated i'm a couple people making sure everyone's very well hydrated with whiskey right exactly well here's my here's

my little bingo story that i wanted to tell you um i think i should uh predicate this by saying when i play bingo at the eagles which actually i haven't in a while it's like the first time i've played in a few months um i don't i i truly mean this i don't really even think about winning that much i guess i wouldn't say i don't care about winning but like i'm just there to hang out with the gang you know what i mean and just sort of like make small talk during bingo like that's

it's also kind of hard to win there's a lot of people there you have a lot of people a one in 100 chance on a given game probably right and yeah and i don't want to i don't want to exaggerate

this part but also i don't love winning um at bingo i mean because you got to get up you got to yell bingo i don't like i don't like yelling things i could never be a barista for a lot of reasons but the hardest part i think wouldn't be making the foam leafs on the coffee drinks but instead the yelling somebody's name luke your order's ready like i just like i don't i yelling

well there's also the dynamic in bingo that's it's it's one of the few group gambling activities where everyone hates you when you win everybody well kind of fake hates you i guess they all throw their well it was real when i was there well i really hated the people that won no no No, come on.

They didn't hate you over bingo, Luke.

Somebody's mom kept winning when I was there.

Yeah, Elmer's mom. I think she's 86, man. She was winning too much.

I was like, the game is rigged. You've had your run, Elmer's mom.

Yeah, that wasn't the only time either.

But it is, I mean, to me, it's like you say this, Andrew. It's kidding on the square, I think. Maybe for me, it was depending on how many alcohol drinks I'd consumed that night. But yes, there is the kind of thing where you ball up your little piece of paper that you were playing on you throw it at them everyone kind of goes but i do think for some of us and maybe this is where i'm more of a compulsive gambler than you are five percent of that was real five percent that was like gosh darn it like i didn't win yeah you know so there's a weird element to winning at the game that you're talking about because you have to yell and also that you're

coming in for a certain amount of group scorn well if that is if there if there is a bit of truth to that paper throwing and groaning.

And that really kind of plays into the story a little bit, because so Genevieve and me and our crew of people, Anita and Kevin and Katie and everybody, we're all like kind of we're sitting kind of in our normal place in the bingo hall. And Genevieve basically is the first person to win yell bingo for the first two games. Oh, wow. So when you win just a normal game, I think it's like Elmer's mother. Yes, it's like a $40 payout, I think. but Genevieve yells bingo for both the first and second game but then somebody else yells bingo after her so she splits that pot but right away all of the scorn is directed towards our corner of the room right because we have kind of a a winner twice in a row although she had to split the pot both of those times and then I think we let somebody else win the next time and then let them win and then I can't remember what happened next I think I won the next one and I didn't have to split it with anybody again this was just like a normal bingo card so it was a payout of 40 bucks so genevieve has now won like 20 twice i have won 40 we've basically paid for

our main tickets yeah your household is up 80 on this work we're not even quite broken even because

i think now this is where things get a little bit complicated you can buy you buy the regular bingo sheets which i think is a book of six of them for the regular games and those are like 20 bucks a pop so but then you can buy these special little games you know extra squares um for special games that they roll out during it. And so I think all told, Genevieve and I probably individually paid in $40, right? And now so far between the two of us as a couple have gotten $40 back. So that's only stolen like half of our, not our nut, but half of our investment, right? So anyway, that's all fine and good. But then, oh, and then Kevin wins one too. So Kevin's sitting to my left, Genevieve's to my right, he wins one. So maybe there's some scorn in the room. middle i'm not sure exactly um and that's the regular and that's the regular game i was fine with my winning they threw paper at me i yelled bingo i did the whole thing and i and i got 40 um but then the last game of the night and i know you know this luke but um i i kind of want to carefully explain in here for people who are unfamiliar but yeah it's the blackout round so you can buy as many of these little individual squares um on top of you know the regular game as you want and instead of just having to get a line across or a line diagonally like most bingo games it's called blackout you have to get every they'll call out the numbers and you have to black out every single one on your bingo card that's pretty self-explanatory but it's also a progressive pot which means each week they play this game and there's a certain amount of money in the pot let's just say let's just say it's like four hundred dollars the the first week right and they're gonna call out maybe 55 bingo numbers and if anybody gets blackout in that first 55 calls then you win the entire pot let's say it's 400 bucks yeah if they i deeply misread how that game

worked by the way when i played it with you all that night i thought i was supposed to get blackout

drunk oh no you well you are supposed to as i did this this saturday as well by the way it's called a double blackout oh okay i was playing congratulations yeah exactly it's it's a side game so anyway um if nobody gets the blackout bingo and let's say the first 55 calls the game will continue but the winner will no longer get the big pot they'll just get like a payout of 150 bucks right okay and then the next week that 400 is carried over and so for that blackout now the kitty is up to eight hundred dollars right and now they're going to extend it though on this night they're going to read 60 numbers and then if nobody gets it in the 60 then it rolls over and rolls over you get a little bit of a payout and i think you get 150 bucks right um tonight and again when i play the blackout especially like it seems like a pretty tall order and so i i was going to buy two of the blackout tickets genevieve told me to buy four of them i do what i'm told i bought four of these things she said she literally said when the woman came over to sell the extra tickets Genevieve's like I got mine so you just buy whatever you want I'm like okay I'll take two she says he wants four I'm like okay I want I've never felt I've never felt closer to Genevieve than in this story it literally went down like that so anyway she literally said you have autonomy do whatever you want and I said what I wanted she's like he doesn't want that he wants

something else so anyway so I got four did you say to her I'm curious what would make you feel

feel comfortable saying that to me i did respond to our uh an email from my friend phyllis fletcher with that line uh yesterday she was asking about some appliances we have and i wrote back i'm surprised you feel comfortable asking me about that anyway um call back to friday's show so all of this is to say when i sit down to play blackout i definitely am not thinking about winning you know what i mean it just seems like a pretty tall order to do that and there's a reason that that pays so much, it's hard to, it's really hard. to do and uh saturday's pot was up to two grand it was up to one thousand one thousand nine hundred and eighty nine dollars or something like that right that's hand-pay territory if you're at the

casino you have to sign tax documents i think you do yes a pot that big that's that gets on the radar of the state of washington i speak from experience exactly and i even remember thinking like oh god

if you win this then you got to deal with like i don't even know where to begin tipping on that And you know me well enough to know that one of my least popular traits is me starting to worry about things that should otherwise be good news. But I also am thinking, like, you know, like, what are the tax situation? Like, I'm not going to win this. It doesn't even matter. But when I hear how much money it is, I'm like, wow, that's a lot of money. And so we start playing the game. And I don't know how many numbers they're going to call on this night. I feel like it was up there. Like, let's I'm just going to say, like, it was like 65 or 70 numbers they're going to call out. And if anybody gets a blackout in that time frame, then you get the full kitty. If not, you get 150 bucks. And so we're all just talking. We're playing the blackout. It's a long game, obviously, because it takes a long time for people to get blackout. And also I notice and you were sort of like saying out loud to our friends like, oh, I only got five more to go until I get a blackout. Like five more. That's pretty good. I'm like, yeah. and then Jen the bingo caller calls the next two numbers are mine I'm down to like three I'm down to freaking three away from winning the two thousand dollar blackout and then I got to say at this point I think for the first time ever I'm thinking about it I'm like what will it look like if I win and my heart is actually I can feel my heart racing a little bit yeah that that might have to do with my diet but I think it had to do with the adrenaline in the moment as well and I'm like damn and then she calls another number i'm down to two and people are like oh my god andrew you're down to two and then she says all right we're at number whatever i'm gonna call three more numbers i believe or maybe i'm gonna call two more numbers y'all have two more chances she calls one of the numbers and i'm down to one and i i might have the timeline on this wrong a little bit but i am down to all i need is i believe a i want to say a b21 or an i21 i can't remember which column it's in all i need is a 21 and for her to say 21 and i'll have won this pot but now i think i'm down to two more calls she needs to call 21 she calls the next number it's not 21 we're down to the very last call for the big kitty it's not 21 nobody wins the big pot okay what do you think the next number called was oh my gosh 21 21 i was what if she had just said

something for a 21 that's a great reference i try to keep the try to keep the stuff really

really relevant here so i won 150 bucks but i mean oh wow i mean it was literally the one after if she had if things had just shifted a tiny tiny bit i don't know how things shift it's bingo it's literally ping pong balls coming out of an air fryer or whatever that thing is air popper um but like i just couldn't believe that and so then i have to go up there anyway and still absorb the

scorn of the room because if i'm if i'm if i'm tracking this correctly we're now at you've won a regular bingo vive has won a regular bingo camaro kev has won a regular bingo now you win the diminished but still kind of insane blackout yeah and actually Genevieve won two although she

had to split the pot because she won the first one and the second one yeah this is like your

your your table your corner has really dominated exactly this round of bingo this night but I just

couldn't believe how close I mean I think I was a little shaky again I'm not somebody who gambles much and I and I also don't take it that seriously like I said like I didn't go into this being like oh we're gonna we're gonna pay off that human door we just installed in the garage or whatever like i didn't i wasn't like counting on it but then when you get that close to it you're just staring at this number and then for it to be called the moment after like i don't think i've ever won 150 bucks before and felt like i lost you know because of how close i mean andrew

welcome to the very very beginnings of a of a a complicated relationship with gambling yeah Because that, I mean, that's the thing about gambling and in particular things like bingo or slot machines are a really big one where people become, well, first of all, are just wildly superstitious about things. But also I'm always shocked, you know, when I'm playing slot machine or near someone who's playing a slot machine, how much importance people put on the fact that like three of the four things they needed.

came out because i'm always thinking what this machine did was it just generated a non-win and anything that happens i mean they're all computers now and this is different than bingo but but the same in a sense these are being randomly generated numbers and with the slot machine it's a randomly generated thing it's basically either this wins or this doesn't win and if it is if it's a win it's a win for this amount and then my my sense of it is it just populates the screen to then support whatever the decision has already been made in the randomizer within the machine right so in other words if you got like three dragons but you needed four you weren't close you were just that's just how it decided to show you a non-win on that particular spin unless you're

in which case that's still pretty good like you can do a lot with three dragons i mean honestly like the possibilities are nearly endless you got three dragons and one dragon egg

but like don't pick that up if you're not the khaleesi though yes it's very um but like you know I mean so it's it's but it's the thing that it does to your mind about this close miss and it's very much a very much a principle I mean because they could also program these slot machines to when you miss just you really miss like nothing you know what I mean like it's like zero dragons it could be zero dragons because the difference between zero dragons and three dragons in this this hypothetical game I'm constructing because truthfully if you if you are playing triple fortune dragon unleash three dragons rules so really i need to back obviously we know two dragons sure of course well two dragons and a coin or three coins or three dragons i don't think three dragons is even a thing in that game but man if it is you're farting through silk yes point is the near miss factor it really does something into your it does something to your brain to feel like oh my gosh that was ah and and and and and that's kind of for certain people and i don't i don't think you i don't think you have this again And the thing I think your armor against a problem with gambling is your kind of feeling of low self-worth that you don't think of yourself, generally speaking, as a person who is going to win the Powerball. So then you don't feel like engaging in it, whereas somebody like me with an overinflated sense of self thinks, why not me? In the words of noted nanobubble spokesperson, Russell Wilson, why not us? Right. Why not me? So my mentality is this could be my lucky day. And I think you and I'm just I'm repeating what I've heard you say. You tend to think that's probably not going to be my day. No, exactly. This gambling, which puts you in the exact right headspace for gambling, which is why you have a good and healthy relationship with the operation.

I mean, I really don't gamble. I mean, I don't even think again when it's bingo night. I just I don't think like, oh, it's the night that I could potentially come home with money. I just think, oh, we'll go hang out with Liz and the gang or whatever and like and catch up with folks. but like then um and then pull tabs is kind of similar like i guess there have been a couple of times if i'm just sitting at the bar board and i kind of start chasing a little bit but i mean just a little little tiny bit like i just don't i don't expect it i don't care it's more something to do for a little bit because i'm a little bit fidgety and it's about looking at the little cartoons on the pull tab so yeah i don't have an issue with that earlier in this conversation when i was

talking about how when i was there for bingo how like i was playing along with the like pretend being mad at people the kayfabe but that you know five percent of me was a little disappointed that it wasn't me particularly on a game where speaking of close misses when it's a bingo game where you're like most you know you need one more number for like a standard bingo and you and right when you're like okay okay okay and then it's not your number and then or letter or whatever exactly it and then someone else gets it there is for me a feeling internally of like disappointment like oh that wasn't me you know and so you said that that might come in um into play in the story later my question is when you got up to go get your blackout prize did you sense people were legitimately kind of annoyed with you and the table for too much winning it didn't occur to me until you and i

started talking about it i'm serious like i think of that as all just sort of bluster and that like

we mentioned it probably is for normal people i mentioned like elmer's mom i mean there was one

time so i i forgot that elmer's mom who i don't believe is even an eagle but was just there visiting i didn't know remember that she was there running the table when you were there too because she was definitely there one time that you weren't there and she ran the table and i remember maybe that was like being a little tiny bit of like oh come on elmer's mom is winning again but it's also hilarious because it's elmer's mom you know like yeah a guest at the eagles is just like embarrassing us at our own game of bingo so like i don't think i've ever felt any kind of real true animosity with maybe that one exception in fact like i don't remember ever feeling truly disappointed at bingo except for the moment i won 150 dollars which is so bananas right And I mean, somehow snatching defeat from the jaws of victory.

Yeah. And like, so all told my winnings for the night, my winnings, not counting Genevieve's were like one hundred and ninety dollars, which definitely covered, you know, that was one hundred and fifty and forty. And that covered clearly, you know, like the my buy in and, you know, drinks and I bought some drinks for some folks or whatever. Like I came out ahead like I came out ahead. It was fun. um but i but i it didn't occur to me until you started talking now that there might have been some people in the room who are really like jesus christ man that that corner of the table you know is kind of taking all of our money i don't know but maybe because i don't have those feelings myself it didn't occur to me that other people were maybe burning a little bit i i think

that my guess is that most of the people there are um you know are just having fun and they're not having those kind of complicated and again i would say it was 10 for me when i was there it wasn't like you know it wasn't like my overriding experience was one of frustration but it but 10 of it was because i was like it would it would be fun you know for me to be getting the money from this game or the blackout because again that even that night i was there it's a pretty significant amount of money like that's you know that's a big like a couple of grand boy you know that could get you out of a out of a couple of jams i know and again i'm like sitting there like

holding my dollar being like oh my god my heart is racing right now when i was down to five and then i watched that thing disappear to like three and then two in pretty short order i was like is this actually happening and i try to picture my life after the two thousand dollars and you know like i have a private jet now like i want to know things clicking in for what your bingo

holler would have sounded like because here's something that i've learned from spending too much time in casino settings is in my experience when somebody wins a significant amount of money they go quiet i'm talking in the fifty thousand dollar range one of those nutty things on a slot machine where it's like whatever that ludicrous amount that's being you know sort of displayed at the top the progressive like when you my rule of thumb is if you're in the casino and you hear someone yell really loud it probably means they won 20 bucks the louder that somebody yells usually the lower the amount is down to a floor of about maybe 20 or 40 bucks but when someone when you really win a significant amount of money like you go it's almost like so stunning like your brain is trying to kind of process you almost kind of get quiet and I wonder what for you as your heart was beating if it would have been b21 if you would have been like bingo like like the world starts to fall away like i is this happening or if you would have been like if you would have been adrenalized and you've yelled bingo i think i wonder what you would have done i think i would

have yelled loudly and i bet you i did yell pretty loudly like loud when you got at the next the next yeah because my adrenaline was already up and i would say like loudly by my standards i was going to ask you too um well i'll follow up with a question about you and how you you would handle winning um but uh i think that i yelled and also like if it's a big amount of money if i had hit this like you know one turn earlier and i'd actually won the big kitty like i think i would have been like my yell is dependent upon it like you don't like one time the only time i've been there where somebody won the progressive pot which i don't know how much it was that time it was pretty big i think three or four people all had to split it because the game had just gone on for so long and then and then they all got blackouts on the same turn at least three maybe even four so that you know again diminished it significantly but they all probably went home with like you know a few hundred bucks or something like that but um yeah so i uh i think that if i i would have felt the need or like my body would have just yelled bingo because like i'm claiming this i want to be the first but before somebody else yes exactly i'm claiming this um but let's just say it's not the big pot luke and it's just a regular bingo and you won 40 i guess you did not you did not win any of the games when i don't think i did no what do you think you were thinking because there are very you know i go up there and i kind of just slink up there as quietly as possible and i don't look at the crowd and i just look at jen who will then give me the money you know she's the bingo caller um but then there are other people who and this was charming not obnoxious like there was a person uh who won kind of near us and she went up there and it was um It was a St. Patrick's Day theme, so she was dressed like a leprechaun, I think. But just kind of walked up there and spread her arms out so that everybody could nail her with the balled-up pieces of paper or whatever. Some people are really drinking the moment. What would your – you would slam dunk the ball? I would be sheepish. I would slink. Yeah, I'm a slinker.

Yeah, because it's – and actually this – we don't have to get too into it later, but the LiveWire 20th anniversary show happened over the weekend on Saturday night as well. and there was a whole segment where I got in, I was interviewed on stage by the former host of the show, Courtney Hommeister.

and I was, it's, it was, it was remarkable to me how uncomfortable, I mean, not in a terrible way, but just in a, like there, I guess my takeaway was there was a certain kind of attention that I desperately crave and need. And then there's a certain kind of attention that's just one click over from that, that I absolutely want to avoid at all costs. And it's nonsensical because it would seem like you're either a person who wants attention or you don't want attention. But for me it's like there's certain things where i'm like i really want it but then like somehow winning bingo when everyone else in the room lost potentially yeah that's not a thing that makes me want to be like do a hulk hogan where i walk up to the thing and i go and i listen to for all the hulka maniacs right and i'm doing like i'm dabbing like i don't that's not in me if in that situation it's more like i'm so sorry i i want to apologize to everyone for existing yeah right i will of course accept the money but i want you to know i just want you all to know as i'm taking this money i do hate myself yes right so as to kind of blunt the emotional pain for all of you about not being the winners of this i just want you to know this will go straight into uh pull tabs and alcohol and other self-destructive things if that helps and none of it will go to therapy none of this i promise you this will only make my life worse if that in any way improves your experience here at this eagles tonight right that would be like living in my head you know so and in fact again i don't want to how do i i the the people that are kind of like winning and they're just like doing a little you know they're they're they're doing the running man as they enter the stage or whatever they're like enjoying themselves that's a more normal response yeah i think so too yeah we're all here we're having fun something good has happened for this person Now we're celebrating the fact that for me, it would be a moment of almost deep embarrassment gets into a much more complicated and unhealthy sense of of who I am in the world and my relationship with things like gambling and gambling.

Yeah, it's funny because I thought that I would be more shy. But the way you describe it and your complicated feelings about I almost wonder if you would loathe going up there more than me. And again, I don't even loathe. I wouldn't like the right word. But I seriously, when it's for like $40 or something, I'm just like, part of me, I think sometimes I seriously think I hope I don't win. I know that sounds absolutely ridiculous, but it's like I'm just kind of, it's not part of the calculation for me to think about what I'm walking away with. You don't get out of bed for more than $40, for less than $40. Yeah, I know, it really makes me sound like some sort of Scrooge McDuck situation. But I am a little bit shy. Again, I'm not mortified, but I am a little bit shy about those kinds of things and what the proper reaction should be.

yeah I even when I've been in a casino setting now here's the thing the weird part is it also has to do with the game like if I was playing blackjack where it's me against the dealer or the house and I win I could be very excited and I wouldn't feel you know a sense of embarrassment about that or certainly roulette I could get really excited if I win it's just that zero sum nature of a game like bingo i think where you winning means most everyone else didn't win there's something about that dynamic that makes me feel that would that just makes me feel less

than just like triumphant in the moment i guess you're talking about the part of my personality that sort of feels like or always felt like i i'm i'm always gonna lose anyway because i remember being i remember saying this like as a as a young person i don't know if it was high school or college but saying like no i don't because i never had any interest in gambling of any sort i always said i don't need another way to lose things but i know i was kind of kind of getting in the square

and yet i could have used a little bit of that in my life it would have served me well but i wasn't bullied enough and therefore have lost a lot of money gambling well speaking of bullying i mean

that's the that's one thing that still lives in my head and i know that this is an answerable thing but the other thing that really um inoculated me from a gambling addiction was and i know i think this makes you wince a little bit and i don't mean to it has nothing to do with you other than the fact that like you and i were hanging out a lot and like i wanted to learn blackjack and and i knew that you and i were going to go to goldie's i was going to play blackjack against like real people like i think i learned it on my actual ipad and like and then one afternoon after we got off our radio job or something we went to uh goldie's and i think that my first experience was good it was maybe me and one other player i don't know i i i haven't played blackjack in so long i can't even remember sort of the ins and outs of like what my own personal like kind of rules or policies were um but like i remember the first experience being really fun and being like oh this is great but then the next time i went there i think also with you but you might have been at another table or something there i was playing and there were a few other people at the blackjack table and i did something you know as a novice that pissed off the other people at the table. at least one guy started muttering at me why'd you do that you screw me and i like and the thing is i'm so bad at understanding like kind of the the calculations of math and cards that i still don't understand it and you could explain to me now and it'll go over my head but like i was listening to the levitard show i don't know a few weeks ago or something um it was actually during the super bowl because their whole gang was down in vegas and they were trading stories or whatever and they were like talking about that experience from both sides of it but i think mostly from the perspective of people they are people who know how to play blackjack and they were sort of complaining when other people play a card that f's the table and i'm like i still cannot do that because i would not understand i do not understand how my personal actions affect other people in that scenario every other scenario i'm uber focused on that but in blackjack i don't

understand it bro well you you're your your instinct is actually correct in terms of on the macro level a person taking a card that they quote-unquote are not supposed to take does not change the fortune of the table over the course of the entire shoe of cards but on a micro level in that particular round let's just say that uh there's a the dealer is showing a five that's a terrible card for the dealer because we think in blackjack every card we can't see is a 10 so we think the dealer has a 15 and then we think the next card the dealer is going to take if it's a 10 or worth 10 is 25 and they bust so when you see the dealer sitting on with a five face up the theory is and again remember you can't actually see you cannot see the card that's underneath and you cannot see the next card that's coming out for the dealer so this is all already we're getting into the realm of kind of squishy data analysis but this idea is that like when the dealer is in a disadvantageous position you do certain things and as opposed to when the dealer has a face card showing and we assume then that the dealers got 20 yeah etc but again this theory does not bear out a lot of the time it's not i mean if it was ironclad there would just be professional blackjack players that would just clock in and play blackjack all day like all of this is just kind of the the best guess that you can make and maybe if you did it 10 000 times statistically it would come out slightly you know in in favor of what you're trying to do that being said like it's a really it can be a frustrating feeling if you have a lot of money out and somebody does takes a hit somebody in that little round of play does something that's against the sort of prevailing wisdom and it causes something better to happen for the house like it causes the dealer to then when they turn that card that's under their five over it's a 10 now they have 15 we're thinking sweet they're going to get 25 but the next card they pull is a six now they've got 21 and everyone wants to look over at that person who hit their 13 against the five because they changed the mojo and the literally the card that came out so in the short term you can get really sort of mad at someone but in the long term now two hands later when that same person who was pissed when they get a 21 they wouldn't have had that 21 yeah right if they're still if not right it's all connected and so that's where it's to me there's a sort of a fallacy there of you blame someone when something bad happens and i mean i've been so guilty of this that's the sad part i have absolutely in fact it's part of i don't play you know what when when i am at the casino which mercifully has been a lot less in the last few years but um when i've been at the casino i don't even play table games very much anymore because the problem is that there are human beings involved And it's an opportunity for me to be frustrated with human beings, whether it's other players, whether it's the dealer. I mean, the dealer is not doing anything wrong. They're literally turning the cards over.

But there can be this feeling, particularly after a certain amount of alcohol or if there's a certain amount of money in play where you're you're bummed about the outcome. And if you're being immature, as I am sometimes sort of, you know, unfortunately capable of being, you want to attach it to someone. it's either another player at the table who did the wrong thing or it's god this dealer man you're just killing me right now and i don't like that side of me and i don't i so i will play slot machines even though they're worse odds because i don't even get i don't get mad at the robot i'm like the robot's doing what the robot's gonna do what robot's gonna do but like it's all it's honestly caused me to go away from table games because i don't like the feeling that i get if i go on a losing streak and i start getting mad at human beings around this because this is totally my decision to be there um and so all that is to say i'm i'm i'm bummed that somebody ruined your blackjack experience by by sniping at you over your play because really and and you'll listen to people you'll hear people and they're almost always a person who's at the casino way too much and they'll be like if the table plays together we'll beat the house every time and i'm like is that why you took the bus here and i don't say hey hey that's not a slam on the e-line It's not a slam on public transportation.

If you see me at Shorty's, I can almost guarantee you I took the bus there because it's right up the road from me.

I'm not.

You mean Goldie's? Goldie's, sorry.

But that's not a slam on public transportation. Right, right. That's saying that this is a person whose financial fortunes maybe have not. But actually, you know what? But that is a good reminder that maybe, like, part of what we need to do is not have it like you took the bus here. Yeah. Yeah, or like it means that things in your life are not going well. Let's just say oftentimes the people that are most vociferously making the argument at the blackjack table that if the team, the players, just play together, you're going to win every time. It's like nothing about any of our financial fortunes here indicate to me that that is a factual statement.

Right. Let me ask you this, though. By the way, it just occurred to me the other day. I am so bad, even though this show is us talking about little events in our life, I got to say, I let some things go through the cracks. We're not going to get into this now because I've already told my whole boring bingo story and we have the rest of our lives that's trade stories. But how did I not even tell you about the time this winter when a guy started screaming at me on the bus because he thought I was trying to kill him with my big ass hands? I will tell you that story someday.

Whoa.

That was a very scary moment. That was the only truly scary moment I've ever had on a bus.

Because you got some grief over your camera one time.

Yeah, some guys were, like, teasing me, and they kept on asking me if I was a bounty hunter. I guess they saw my camera and were like, and I was wearing some dress shoes, and I was sitting in the back of the E-line. But even that felt like ribbing to me, where I had to, like, kind of keep eyes a little bit in the back of my head. But it felt like ribbing. But this was a scary situation with somebody who had no control over their mind and was getting into my physical space. I'll tell you that story another time. but i will um ask you this going back to blackjack really quickly so yes this is a two-part question uh well it's more of a it's more of a comment than a question no um so you know that story of us like playing um or going to goldie's and whatever afternoon that was back in 2013 luke or whatever it was and like me kind of thinking like okay i really did not like that experience of being grumbled at at the table you know me i don't like being hollered at i don't like getting in people's way it just made me feel bad right and so i stopped i've never played since uh my questions for you are first have you at some sort of blackjack table been that person i'm assuming it would be for higher stakes or something but like you were really mad at that person when i told you about it later and it's probably good that you weren't there because you probably would have headbutted him on my on my account but have you been whether it's at vegas or or or a place like goldie's a card room or something have you been the person who um has maybe kind of grumbled or given somebody a hard time at blackjack or do you just look at blackjack differently than other

table games no i have been that person many times and i don't like that about myself i probably wouldn't do it now because i'm on high alert for it in myself but in certainly in my in my younger days in my in my drunker days um yeah i would um i would be i could be pretty pretty cutting and pretty mean to other people at the table who I saw as you know kind of messing it up for people now the difference was I didn't ever think that the again that like somebody taking one card that was kind of maybe a bit of a risky move would then ruin the rest of the like entire evening of blackjack which is where I think it gets ridiculous I do think you can argue that within within a specific event within one round of blackjack somebody doing something silly like taking a card that makes no sense mathematically based on whatever we know about what's happening i do think

that that's kind of annoying i to this day but also hitting the hitting on a 13 of the if the dealer showing a five like that would be that would be bad for him yeah because because it would

again the theory would be that the dealer is on their way to busting and so if you take their bust card we would say um then and then they get a card that keeps them in the game they get a six So now they have 21 or whatever that is like a very like you can kind of like the line is very from A to B on that is pretty easy to trace. And so that will be what I will usually do is if somebody is starting to do that a lot, I'll just kind of like quietly pick up stakes and move somewhere else because I realize this is an opportunity for me to become a little bit frustrated. But if someone's just trying to learn, if someone's kind of new to it, like what I what I know about you, Andrew, is that I'm sure that you were profusely apologizing as the game was happening, being like, hey, I'm still trying to figure out the ropes here, et cetera. And I think that the nice move there, if you're a fellow blackjack player and you've done it a lot, is to say to the person, hey, if you if you're curious and you kind of want to know what the like sort of theory on this stuff is like, let me know. I'm happy to tell you, but also play your play your game, do whatever you want. Like that's a nice way to invite someone into. a lifetime of financial ruin instead of being mean to them, particularly when they're just trying to learn. Like, that's something I wouldn't do. It would be rude to someone who's just trying to figure out how to do this game.

Well, I'm sure I didn't. I probably didn't, like, advertise that I was brand new, but if you sit at that table a lot, you could probably tell just by my body language. I'm sure I was just incredibly quiet. I'm sure I was, like, whisper quiet. Here's my second question for you. Do you think, because I've heard somebody say this, but I'm wondering if they're a reliable narrator because it might have been Genevieve and she might just have a different experience with this. Like Genevieve learned how to play blackjack on her phone or whatever before some quasi recent trip to Vegas and then played in Vegas a couple of times and she didn't experience any of that sort of aggression. Now it could be that she just knows those rules better than me but my guess is she probably had about the same knowledge that I did going in but she says that Vegas is going to be more forgiving. I think it was her. It might have been somebody else but like a vegas is going to be more forgiving because you have a whole bunch of bubble gummers as opposed to like let's just say i was like playing blackjack on aurora at goldie's at like 3 30 p.m the people i'm playing against and goldie's right there are probably people who are playing aggressively is maybe the wrong word but like they're really

chasing something exactly the energy in vegas i was just in vegas a couple of weeks ago the energy is particularly if you're like on the strip if you're in the kind of like bigger casino hotel things the energy is way different people are on vacation people typically people you know had the resources to get a plane ticket to get there maybe they're at a work convention and they're take maybe they're at the concrete world convention and they're just you know unwinding from that like it's a it's a convention it's it's a and that they never go to yes maybe they're trying to reassemble their own credit card that they cut in half because they wanted to not take out more money but then you know but but the energy is is is usually pretty festive i mean with some exceptions but in vegas in those casinos people are kind of partying and when you're at a local card room that's very close to where a lot of people live and like on the way home from work or um a quick bus ride away you get a really different vibe i i think that those in fact that's one of the things that i i mean lots of people lose a lot of money in vegas that they probably shouldn't lose but i think it's actually a very unsophisticated it's a sort of unsophisticated take i was talking to someone they'll remain nameless because they're actually kind of like in an extended version of my family but like they were talking about like everyone just going to vegas and just losing their mortgage on their house and i was like that's not who it is yeah like that's not what's happening there like the the the real danger to most people's financial well-being as it relates to gambling is the state lottery the powerball these little machines they have in oregon in every gas station and every bar where you can for a dollar fifty a spin or two dollars a spin you can just donk off a bunch of money it's these little my in my opinion it's these micro events that are really like it's goldies, you know, for some people, it's these things that are easy to get to and close by and open all day long and available for you to try to interact with when you're trying to numb out some feeling or do something emotionally for yourself that, that you're not capable of self soothing with. That's not everybody who's in there, but I'm just saying for the people that it's for whom it's a problem, that's the bigger thing it's not you know some people sitting around at the venetian playing blackjack that's again i'm not saying it's great for them either but that's not really where the financial lives are being ruined at nearly the rate that it's happening in these small very un-glitzy moments of of small gambling interactions is my that's my opinion and if it is happening in vegas it's not

at the places that these folks are going to right they're private places off the strip somewhere where you might have you know like yeah i could see like vegas having a bunch of locals there who

are very much like well that's i mean that's happening in a terribles yeah gas station that also has a slot machine right like you drive out to summerland and you find me a terribles gas station that has four slot machines it's actually called terribles huh yeah it's like and and no

no perfect what should we name our gas station terribles yep sounds great to me terribles thanks for not asking we gotta do it how many show titles of tvtl are some sort of

a lot terrible thing for thanks for asking a lot a lot a lot but like but like yeah that's those like find me even like the the bar that we went to when you and i went to vegas and we parked the rv whatever five aces or something yeah that is a place where it is to me more likely that somebody is coming in.

And and and having a probably unhealthy financial relationship with those video poker machines that we were sitting at. Yeah, that's more typical. Again, this is not to say that everything that happens in those big glitzy casinos is is financially great for people. It's financially bad for everyone who goes in there, generally speaking.

But it's just Andy Garcia in in Ocean Ocean's Eleven.

Well, I always forget which one he was in. He's in the first one. I see the main bad guy in the first one.

bad guy or Mark now that I think about it like is it a bad guy because you don't want he's a bad guy he's a bad guy though

they make him mean to Julia Roberts I think

yes that's true yeah I think you've got to make him bad in order to root for the real criminals which makes us

be rooting for those ocean the ocean boys yeah and anyway okay well that's 50 minutes wow and 48 seconds on gambling and if anybody wants more on this I am starting a patreon podcast um called games of chance and uh i'm going to be putting that out and for uh you know those who want to subscribe to it uh please uh hit me up i'm starting a sub stack i am thinking oh my god i was talking to cheryl strayed this weekend like off air oh yeah you know she has a sub stack she has a newsletter on that but yeah it's got nine over 97 000 subscribers geez louise no i don't know what the you know you can subscribe to it for free and just get the email You can do kind of a TBTL thing where you donate five bucks a month or pay in this case. There's different levels of access. But if a fractional amount of those people are doing the for-profit version of it, I'm like, this is radically changing how we're making content.

Yeah, yeah. I follow a few of those, yeah.

I do too. I get Lindy's. I subscribe to Lindy West. Oh, nice, nice. Yeah, I hear that's great. I think it's called Butt News. It is. It's really good. It is really good. Would recommend. So I'm, you know, but but anyway, I'm going to start mine where I just I just described. I need to figure out a way to recoup a significant amount of money from the last 20 years of my life lost to gambling by generating more gambling content.

Could it be called? I got a system.

We was hoping for some razzle dazzle, razzle dazzle. That's right, man. Razzle dazzle.

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody razzle dazzle.

Hey, let's thank some dazzling donors. You know, Andrew, in these turbulent times, the only good financial decision is supporting TBTL.

Hey, Luke, it's a sure bet.

It sure is. And we are so, so grateful because it's how we're able to do TBTL for our jobs is because of the supporters, including today's first dazzling donor. It's our pal, Rold Palomaria.

Oh, Rold. I have some questions for you. Rold works in the grocery store industry, and I always have questions. I'm trying to think, have I raised this on the show already? Maybe I have, but you know, Rold, this is directly to you. Before we read your message, I have a question for you that I don't know if I've asked you, but every time I'm in the grocery store and I see this, I think about you. You know, sometimes you see people restocking things in, like, the produce section or maybe even like the deli section or something, there's these carts that people are pushing around. And some of them have signs stuck on them that say, day use only, with an exclamation point. And it seems so, so important to somebody at the grocery store that these carts are only used during the day. And I don't understand why the night shift is not allowed to use these carts. What is with the day use only emphasis on these carts? Rold, get at me.

Rold, we need you not just for financial support, But for Intel Into this business model And we would appreciate that Rold's in North Bend, Washington by the way With his awesome fam Who we also love Rold says, hi guys My youngest five, Val In his short four years of life Has had numerous medical issues And has developmental and speech delays For the longest time My wife and I were frustrated That the doctors couldn't figure out What was going on Then in February this past year We were fortunate enough to be included in a study at Seattle Children's where they did genetic testing. And Val was diagnosed with a newly discovered and rare genetic mutation called CDK13, which finally gave us an explanation of what was going on. The great doctors of Seattle Children's gave us a plan to follow because there could be more complications to come. I shared a slideshow of Val's journey so far in the Stens Facebook on CDK13 Awareness Day, which is September 2nd. Of course, the Tens were encouraging and caring. So thanks, friendos. Val is getting the services he needs and is thriving. So advocate for yourself and your family and don't get.

get discouraged and thanks you guys for all you do listening to you always makes my day wow rolled again um as if we need more examples of the tens community being just an awesome place i'm my guess is and i i didn't see this sort of communication chain with rolled talking about cdk 13 awareness but knowing the tens i'm sure that this was a really supportive place for rolled and his family and probably some really good information from Rold for other folks that may potentially deal with this or have, you know, other people they know that have kids that are dealing with CDK-13. It just, it makes me really happy that there is a place that would be the Stens page and the community of Stens where Rold can go and kind of, again, share this information with them and I'm assuming get some really comforting feedback from folks.

and if i can be completely honest with you luke if i had pre-read this message i might have rethought my lead-in about the day use only carts a little bit i didn't realize

the one time i didn't have the dazzling donor in front of me because i had to restart my computer and i'm doing a lead-in on grocery carts for kind of a serious message although i'm

contains multitudes exactly is both dealing with the real life stuff as somebody said to me recently when i was somewhere life be life in you know life be life in for rold and his family and and in different ways for for all of us and all of our listeners i don't think that the fact that life be life in for rold means that he doesn't have a thought on day use only carts that's the beauty of this program andrew is that we we cover the entire spectrum of the human experience yeah Gambling, grocery carts, family health stuff. Those are the three legs of this stool that is TBTL.

Well, I'm excited to find out how I'm going to ruin this next one. Well, let's find out together. Maestro? On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle.

Hey, look who it is. It's Jamie Julian of Columbia, Maryland.

Jamie Now I don't know what's in Jamie's message I hope this is okay as a lead in Jamie is the person who I believe Kind of intertwined us With Tony Kornheiser's world For a little bit

This Jamie is a little

Exactly I think so

Jamie says last February when I decided To scale Last February I had decided to scale back my donation So that I could set aside more money For my niece and nephew's college funds But then I heard you were going independent and i scrapped that plan after all the kids can get student loans like i did but we listeners are tbtbs only hope jamie you've spoken the truth in this message honestly what are you gonna spoil you were you gonna spoil these kids i will tell you this as a kid who is paying their own way in college actually i can't finish that sentence because i was going to say as a kid who was paying his own way in college i took it a lot more seriously than my friends but that's just not true i was a very bad student even though i was paying for all of it myself um i was and it's probably because i was working a number of full-time jobs while while going to college but generally speaking i don't think it's the worst thing for a person in college to have a little bit of um of their own kind of uh investment tied up in it so i think if anything jamie donating to tbtb is doing your niece and nephew a favor it's teaching them important um it's character

building for them really so you're welcome tbtl for me is kind of like continuing education anyway luke just explained to me some of the ins and outs of blackjack and it's kind of the vibes at various card tables and like that was educational for me and you supported that so that's another

way to look at that and then this is where Jamie's message takes a serious turn this February my dad died and I knew that I'd made the right decision whenever I needed a break from reality I put in my earbuds I take a walk and time bandit my way back to 2015 to hang out with my imaginary friendos talking about whatever I now know that TBTL isn't a luxury item it's a necessity you make us laugh you keep us sane you ease us through the hard times and thank you with my waning character allotment I don't think I knew there was a character allotment for this there is yeah with my waning character allotment I'd like to plug second story cards out of Washington DC they employ folks experiencing homelessness to create unique and beautiful greeting cards every year I buy my holiday cards for the 10s card exchange from this wonderful company please check them out

at secondstorycards.com. Okay, this is so cool. I am 100% going to buy a bunch of cards from this place because have you experienced this, Andrew? I don't know what your card buying kind of, I don't know, approach system is. I have figured out there's one place in Portland I like. It's called Oblation. It's kind of a little, you know, paper goods store that has some good cards that I like. You know, what I what I find not particularly useful would be the card section of your local grocery store or something. And so I've migrated towards this oblation place because they have some cards that are that feel more like kind of tonally what I would say in a card, whether it's a birthday message or sympathy or what have you. And so when I go down there, what I've started doing, and I think this is just maybe middle age, I'll buy like $50 or $80 worth of cards because I'll be like, I'm going to need birthday cards for people. I'm going to need Valentine's cards. I'm going to need cards. And if I don't do this right now, I'm going to be going down to the Safeway and Longview and trying to get something. So anyway, I've now become the kind of person who spends a lot on cards. and I might as well be getting them from somewhere that's helping support people who've been experiencing homelessness and I'm also looking at these cards and they're kind of great that's what

I was going to say I'm on the website now I didn't know about this and I'm looking at them there's some of these designs are really cute a lot of them kind of kind of like cute little tweed designs that I really that really speak to me to be honest with you Luke I'm somebody who because I'm with you like when I was a kid we always had to send grandparents and relatives like you go to the literally go to the hallmark store and buy cards and then like i don't know i got to a certain age and it just sort of seemed like that just didn't seem like the vibe anymore but basically what that meant was i very rarely give people cards anymore like very occasionally with the gift uh along with a gift to genevieve but even like i'm trying to think i just gave her a birthday gift i don't think i gave her a card to go along with it so whoa my god i thought we were just done with cards honestly i thought the internet sort of um stopped it but i'm looking at this and it's proving me wrong because this literally makes me want to buy cards and i'm not

just saying yeah they're good right yeah like they're they're funny they're not hokey i mean i think that's probably for our generation where we are probably the first generation andrew who were like the part of why i think you're sensing that you thought we're not doing cards anymore is because most of the cards that we would get we would get get and give as kids sucked and they were saccharine and they were not they just didn't feel like uh they felt hokey to us they felt corny and we were probably the first generation that wanted to expect that expected more out of our greeting cards or like this isn't just something that says like you know as you walk through the journey of life may you forever find the blessings happy birthday in like a curt like a you know ridiculous cursive writing kind of thing or whatever like we are the first generation was like no that's not enough that doesn't work and so you could either try to get into cooler cards or you could just kind of like opt out of it sounds like you opted out i opted out but i'm

opting back in because right now i'm looking at a very cute little illustrated card that says the only thing i hate more than being away from you are people who park in the bike lane oh and this speaks to me this speaks to me deeply deeply thanks for letting us know about this jamie and thanks for thanks jamie sorry to hear about your father as well yeah yeah i hope that you're hope

that you're doing as okay with that as any of us can do around loss it's um it's not as you know a straight line as far as the grieving process it it jumps around a lot so hope you're having as you hear this one of those more okay days with it and rolled as well to you and your family we're thinking about you and we really appreciate you uh thanks to both of our dazzling donors today hello and welcome to top story so we had the big 20th anniversary celebration of the radio show that i that i host called live wire um over the weekend in portland and it was a boy was it a hootenanny tell you we had like it was basically two shows first there was this in the in the daytime there was this this kind of look back at the history of the show where i was interviewing the original host and also the co-founders of the program and then that was really fun then there was a bunch of sketch comedy from our sketch troupe that we had for a lot of years and then and then it was like uh outfit change and then time to do the main radio show that night um which was really fun it was like a packed house we were at revolution hall which is a bigger venue than we're normally at I think it's about maybe 850 or something. And it was sold out Which is I have to be honest with you A good feeling you know Like I've really tried to I've really tried to separate My sense of the show And a particular week of the show With have we sold a bunch of tickets or not Because those are not necessarily related We can do a really great radio show If we have a fairly light attendance And we can do a bad radio show With a packed house Like I've tried to not see that As a referendum on me And I've actually made some progress in that I'm pretty sanguine about the whole thing now like we're doing the show at town hall in Seattle in two weeks on a Friday and I haven't even asked once how the ticket sales are going which is big for me that's progress but I wasn't mad when I heard that like we were totally sold out for this 20th anniversary show and that actually plays into this moment that I did not expect from the night which is normally when we do the show we often do it at a place in Portland called the Alberta Rose Theater and it's a smaller venue I think it's maybe like 400 people And I feel like we kind of almost know everyone in the room by now We have a lot of people who buy season tickets And people who come to a lot of shows And the energy is lovely It just feels like you're hanging out with your friends And it's a really, really good vibe And the vibe was really great on Saturday night at Revolution Hall But it's more people And we ran a ton of promos on OPB So I think this was one of those unique cases where we just brought in some folks that were maybe not familiar with our show or didn't have the kind of real close relationship with the show and with me that a lot of the people that come to our regular things do.

And so I'm talking to, we're interviewing Cheryl Strayed. It's really, it's towards the end of the show. And Cheryl was, of course, she's the person who wrote the book Wild, which became the movie Wild. She's a advice columnist. She writes as Dear Sugar. She's Dear Sugar, which is a TV show starring Katherine Hahn basically kind of as Cheryl Strayed anyway Cheryl Strayed is the best I love her so much she is like this is a word that I don't use a lot uh unironically she's like wise she's like a wise person and I feel like her writing has that in it and just talking to her she's she's like an empath man she just like she just uh she's just someone whose energy is really really good to be around and she wrote this essay recently about her late mother-in-law and it's really beautiful and it's just talking about how the kind of complicated her relationship was with her husband's mother and and and the things about her husband's mother that were hard for her to kind of come to terms with and then also when her husband's mother when her mother-in-law was approaching the end of her life the way that their relationship changed for the better became deeper and more loving it it's a you know it's a really lovely essay per usual from cheryl straight so we're talking about this and and we're talking about the the the the things about her mother-in-law that were also kind of not ideal for her like one time when cheryl was pregnant i believe or maybe just coming off of being pregnant her mother-in-law gave her a weight watchers gift certificate jesus not yeah no a thing that probably feels great and she writes about that so we're talking about this and out of of the absolute blue i hear a noise coming from the balcony like a kind of almost like initially it felt like you know when someone is in the british like house of lords like when somebody like says something you know when the right honorable whatever from wherever is talking about some potential rule change and then all the people from the other party are like,

he's in a low voice and he's pounding.

Like, I just heard a noise like that from the, and I was, initially, you know, I didn't really understand what was going on. I thought somebody was maybe having, something happened for them, maybe something medical. I wasn't quite sure. And I saw Cheryl kind of look up and then a person, a woman's voice came down yelling like, why are you saying this about her and we all just kind of froze and then Cheryl kind of looked at me and I I was like um I was not exactly sure what to do at that moment and Cheryl kind of started to answer the question sort of to me and Elena

on stage a little bit and then someone else like I talk about this stuff because blah blah just sort of answering that woman's question without like directly engaging with kind of somebody who's being inappropriate in the audience.

Yeah. And then, but kind of to us and then someone else in the audience, I think was trying to heckle the woman, but it was hard. So then a person in the audience, I think kind of starts booing the woman who was heckling us, but that was hard to interpret. where that boo like if the boo was coming towards us or if it was going towards the person who was heckling cheryl or whatever and then the person who the heckler number one like sort of continued on with this sort of saying things to the stage and um and i had this moment where i kind of was thinking somebody should really do something about this and i realized oh i'm the person that should really do something about this you know like I in talking about it after the show with people because by the way Andrew it became essentially the only thing anyone wanted to talk about with me after the program not the fact that the radio show has been around for 20 years and that we've had the good fortune of all these amazing guests and everything it was like wow that was weird when that person started acting up that became the main thing that we were all talking about but I had that moment and I wonder if you've had it maybe at pop-up maybe in other professional in professional settings or even just in your life where you are in a moment where you're thinking well I guess whoever's in charge of this is going to need to do something or okay well this is it's time for the adults to take over and make a call here and you do a quick kind of assessment and you realize you're the adult and like that's always kind of a stunning realization because for so much of our life when we're younger you just get you're used to there's a grown-up somewhere who knows what to do there's somebody older than you with more authority who's gonna basically say here's what we're doing here's what we're not doing and you can kind of like hand it off to them and then there's a point in your life where you realize in whatever that moment that is for you oh shit that's me isn't it and that entire thing went through my mind sitting up there on stage

as this person was acting up which is going on for about how long and I ask that knowing that it feels even longer of course but like in all reality from the moment this person's first started heckling and then sounds I continued to heckle even when the booze were raining down or whatever this whole thing goes on 15 20 30 seconds i'd say 40 seconds tops yeah which is a long that feels like a really long time like it you know in this situation the number i mean the number of

different things that your brain the number of different scenarios that the human brain can cycle through in a matter of just a few seconds is really something right and the scenarios that cycled through my head were do we have security do i ask the crowd to literally physically remove the person wait is that way too is that an over response do i get do i walk down on the stage do i go upstairs and ask them to leave do i do do i ask like do i um ask them to stop talking but answer their question myself do i ask cheryl to answer their question like i played out all these different scenarios of how to sort of try to deal with this and what i landed on was i asked cheryl i was like is that a question that you feel basically the heckler were saying why are you putting your mother-in-law on front street which i will just say i don't think that heckler is going to hear this but what i would say to that person is and i'm going to use a profanity here read the fucking essay like it was not only did it make me feel unhappy that it kind of put a cast a little bit of a shadow on things for that moment but it was so unbelievably disrespectful because if this person had read the thing that they were commenting on they would understand just how off base they were you know what i mean like it's the height the height of disrespect to in a room full of people that are enjoying themselves or you know being informed in a certain way to decide that it's your job to yell something to the crowd or to the stage when you have not even actually read the source material that you're essentially commenting on that was like the thing that made me the most annoyed because if this person had read the essay they would understand how off base their their

criticism was and to be clear you're not you don't expect everybody who comes to a live taping of live wire or any other interview show to have done homework you're not you're not saying that in order to enjoy this that you need to do that but for you i haven't read the book in order for you for you as somebody who's in the audience i mean the only way would be like if you were interviewing somebody of of uh you know you know who is very controversial and there's somebody who is like you know like literally there to protest to hopefully shine a light on something you know like that but like in that case yeah you better have read the person's material so you know where they're coming at but obviously that is not the situation here for you just to be at this live taping and then be like what I don't know if I like this this

guests approach to their interpersonal relationships with their mother-in-law and you're just going to

interject yourself that is infuriating it's so it's so rude and again it's it's so off base because having read the essay as i did it's lovely and it's a love letter to this person who was complicated in the way that we are all complicated at hum as humans so where i ended up landing with it was i turned to cheryl and again it felt like i was sitting there dumbstruck for about four hours But I think it was probably less than 10 seconds And I just said to Cheryl Do you feel comfortable answering that question? And she said yeah And she sort of looked up into the crowd And she answered the question of why Of what her intentions were In writing about her mother-in-law in this way And I said do you feel comfortable answering the question? She said yeah And before she started I said And I just want to be I couldn't see the person But I looked up into that section And I said And I want to be really clear with you right now this is your one question yes this is not a dialogue I was going to say

you have to you have to say like because in a certain way now you've given this person like oh hey look look what I

got what I wanted is this a Q&A yeah

now people can just start shouting out questions

yeah yeah so I and I don't think I realized how stern I was being I because of course internally I'm like oh this all feels not great you know to be like I don't want this is not the energy we're trying to have on our 20th anniversary show you know like like i don't like i don't want to be i don't want to have to be adversarial with an audience member or be be be sort of again like a i don't know an authority figure like that's not what i'm trying to do but i so the reason i i i'm realizing that i was sort of a little more authoritative than i meant to be was because i couldn't believe how many people afterwards were like wow never saw that side of you before that's interesting because

the quote you just gave me does not seem over the top it must have been in your tone but whatever the tone was I back you up on it because if you weren't firm there trust me I don't know who this

person was but they would have taken more I think they would have and they didn't thankfully and also I want to say huge credit to Elena Passarello who's the other uh the sort of co-host of the show And Elena is a writer and teaches English at Oregon State University And jumped in with a really interesting question That was relevant to what we were talking about But kind of moved, sort of like was tied into what we were talking about But also moved the conversation along a bit So we didn't get bogged down And it kind of worked well because I had just now been like I had sort of been the bad cop Of being like, and we're not having this right now You know, Revolution Hall One person at Revolution Hall So she sort of jumped right in with a question that I think the, I think the whole thing kind of worked itself out. Okay. We didn't hear anything else from the peanut gallery. We finished the interview. I think it was a good night for, uh, you know, an entertaining night and an informative night. Um, but I got the, the, the, the live wire staff has started forwarding me. There was, I guess at least a couple of emails from people who were like, Hey, I was in the crowd and I just wanted to say like, appreciate how you all handled that. And also like, huh, never seen Luke be like that before. So now I'm like, I mean, I guess I could, you know what? There's a very easy way for me to find out what the actual vibe was, which is I could just get them to send me the raw tape of the show, I guess. Yeah, do you want to hear that? I will not do that. I want to hear that. I'm wondering if you want to. I will not be doing that, but I guess I could. This is one situation where it's extremely knowable for me what the vibe was. I mean, to be honest with you, I was already mildly out of my body in that moment, as you might imagine. like and and so i i don't know how it was coming off i mean it was it worked whatever whatever happened it stopped the the the dialogue that we weren't trying to have with the audience and we moved on and i think things were sort of fine but um to take it back to the bingo conversation i did not have that on my bingo card for saturday night having to having to shut down a heckler during of all people, Cheryl Strayed, a person who only brings light and love into the world as she talks about her experience. I mean, it was just completely unexpected.

Are you guys still using the Hells Angels as your security, too?

Is that starting next week at Town Hall in Seattle? Be careful. Yeah, we've got Sonny Barger's grandson.

What was I don't even know what festival there was some disastrous festival right back in the 1960s. Was it it wasn't it was the Rolling Stones. it was altamont altamont altamont yes it was altamont yeah i forgot about that yeah um we uh

i think we're gonna just go 10 more or maybe 20 more years before we get another heckler exactly

you're gonna set up you're gonna set up like protocols for it next time and then you have those protocols and then they're never but it's better to have them i guess than not better to have them and not need them i guess i guess but i mean it's it what the other thing i

that I was

Sort of reflecting on as it was all happening was And again this is how the human brain can think Of so many things in just a split second I was thinking to myself How have I never been through this before on this show Like And maybe it has happened a long time ago and I forgot Or maybe it's happened When the stakes were not feeling as high Like I really wanted this show to go well It was a big night for us And so maybe it felt extra kind of weird Because of the larger context Of that episode of the show But like all I was thinking was huh i'm surprised i don't have a better system for this yeah i'm surprised this hasn't happened more okay i guess and then my brain's going yeah these are a bunch of good people generally i do like these like i'm just thinking all of this stuff in the like two seconds between somebody saying something to cheryl straight and me trying to figure out what the next move is there was i

had sort of the opposite experience i mean opposite in that i was in the audience for starters so sort of the inverse but um i was at a taping of a podcast i don't know earlier this winter um that our friends put on the greatest generation is what it's called the star trek podcast and um our buddies host that genevieve uh is friends with both the guys who host that and um and and i am to a degree um but anyway we're in the audience and adam the host who i don't know as well i'm good friends with ben but i don't know adam the other host that well um he had to address some heckle And it wasn't like heckling, like negative or even like pushing back in this way. And again, it's just a it's a comedy podcast about Star Trek. Right. Like the stakes are are not super high. But I think you just had a bunch of people in the room with a lot of I mean, these are people who adore Ben and Adam. Right. And they don't have a chance to talk back. They listen to the podcast all the time. And and when it's you know, it's the type of podcast that we do and that a lot of people do where it's a million inside jokes. I don't get them because I'm not a Star Trek person. I don't really listen to it, but I can identify the structure of a joke. Usually I can tell that that's a joke that I don't get or whatever. But like for these folks who just like feed on this and like in Genevieve is probably amongst them, you know, who probably spoof along with the podcast while they're listening. And the beauty of shows like that is the connection to the audience and that the audience feels like they're listening to their best friends and they're part of the conversation. But when you put all that energy into a room together, sometimes, you know, one person might get too excited and then say something. And then that sort of opens. It can potentially open up the floodgates for everybody to think that this is OK to like kind of like offer your own little spoof from the audience. And I remember sort of this was at the Neptune. So that's a you and I have done shows the Neptune together. And of course, you've done live wire there. I don't know how big that crowd is, Luke, if it's just the floor. like what is that like a few hundred people maybe yeah i think the floor i think the floor is like

uh i feel like the floor might be 400 okay so you know it's probably something around that it's not

like the 800 or 900 that you were talking about last night but you know it feels like kind of a small intimate setting sort of um and then it's like if you don't shut down the first suggested line from the audience or whatever then that person is more emboldened and other people are more emboldened as well and like to lose control of the class yes and like i'm sort of watching that happen a little bit not to the point where i feel uncomfortable in the crowd it doesn't seem super distracting to me but it's it's distracting you know and um and i remember adam finally just addressed it in a way and i i'm sorry that i can't remember the exact quote because that would be that would be helpful in this case but i feel like he couched it really well i feel like he said something like hey listen you know for better for worse a lot of these people came out to hear us tell jokes tonight like they don't get they don't get to do I don't know it was something that was both like it was like it was to my ear gentle self-deprecating a little bit but telling people we're not doing this anymore and I thought he handled it so deftly and then when we were talking after the show I realized he was pissed as hell he was so mad he was like I was just like because first of all it was probably more acute to him they might have yes you know heard it more because they're on stage and so everybody's facing that direction i don't know what's going on it's not it's not my performance but like i thought he did something i thought he like handled it like kind of like in a disarming way that was kind of like perfect and didn't seem super aggressive to me but i sort of found out later and i i think it's okay to say this um but like yeah he was really upset by that and about just like in the disrespect and and that that people would just sort of like kind of like just feel like oh this is my show to ruin basically well that's yeah and

you're exactly right the the calculation that you're making on stage in moments like that is how much is this bothering everyone and how much is it just bothering me luckily with livewire that's really rare um the uh the the the you know idea of people kind of like talking and yelling things out even in a supportive way it's it's pretty it's a unbelievably like respectful nice crowd But But I have been in other scenarios where maybe I'm hosting something like maybe a paid gig or whatever, where it's also it's it's it's complicated as the host because because you can hear stuff a lot more than the audience can. So sometimes it makes the most sense to just power through because it's not bugging the audience. It's only bugging you. And if you stop and make it a whole thing, now you've brought everybody in on this. Now it's potentially weird for everyone. But also there's also a point at which it does become distracting for the audience or you can't continue on. And then you have to like, you know, kind of crack down on it. But, but that's my, my usual thing is like something that happened actually a couple times. I don't know what they were passing out. I don't know if they were giving, if they were serving everyone in glass bottles or something, or like if it's just, it's Portland. So lots of people are bringing out hydro flasks. There was a few different times in the night and this will sometimes happen at the Rose as well where it's like somebody knocked over a really loud sounding drink i assume it was a drink it's like someone knocked over something that was metallic or glass and i was just like and again in my head i'm like the immediate thought is are they are they serving things in glasses here like this is a dark theater where we like you know are what like why did you also So then you kind of get annoyed. You're like, why did you put your hydro flask near your foot? Like, why didn't you handle it? Like, all of this is going through your brain really fast. And in those cases, it's generally just the best move is to just keep moving, you know, just like don't keep stopping the show anytime something hits your ear weird. But yeah, there are those times where you have to kind of, I mean, I guess the good news for me now is I do think I have a system for dealing with this if it ever happens again, which will be basically what i did that night but maybe with a little bit maybe slightly refined but now that i've been through it once i'm like okay i kind of know how this goes like if this were to happen again i think i would feel less kind of um thrown by the whole thing because i would just be like okay this is somebody's yelling at the guest and i'm gonna like here's how here's

what i'm gonna do about that although it might take on its own contours each time you know

hopefully not i hope it's exactly the same you're ready i don't want to develop a system for each and every kind of heckle.

Well, it is the type of thing where I do think, and that's, I think, the challenge of it. It sounds like you handled it well, but there's always going to be a bit of improvisation. I don't mean that in a comedic way. I just mean that you have to improvise the situation and figure out what the right thing to do. You can always just do what Steve Martin does and just say, I remember my first beer.

I mean, can you imagine, though, being the kind of person who goes to something like this and then thinks it's your place to yell at the person on stage. I mean, it's just the level of entitlement or the level of sort of self-importance of that move is just, again, it's one thing if you're going to see, you know, somebody is hosting, somebody is in conversation with Alex Jones and he's saying Sandy Hook was a false flag.

Oh, do you mean Aaron Rodgers?

I mean, vice presidential candidate Aaron Rodgers.

But like, do you see that story? I mean, not to get us derailed, but apparently, I mean, I didn't, I haven't read the whole thing Genevieve did, but I did see a headline that said in private conversations, Aaron Rodgers has some questions about that as well, apparently.

Oh, I'm, nothing would shock me about that. That shocks me.

That is so scary and callous.

I think he is. I mean, the irony is that, of course, they people think that there's a kind of woke mind virus. I really think that the conspiracy mind virus is so is so insidious and it metastasizes so quickly that. And again, you were honestly, I give you credit. You were hating Aaron Rodgers way before everyone else. Just just me and all the Vikings fans. Just based on his facial expression after he got tackled, you didn't like the guy.

That and some smug shit he said about Russell Wilson and Russell Wilson's faith after. And I'm not a man of faith, but I just remember being like, really? You're going to be that smug about Russell Wilson? I remember that being the thing that first I was just like, F this guy.

Boy, you bought low on that. And I think I was like, I don't know. He seems like an okay science-based guy to me. Boy, boy, did we ever not know. I mean, I would think about this, though. how great would it be if rfk does pick him as his running mate and they actually managed to steal a significant number of votes from trump because i could be wrong about this somebody will probably correct me just yell it from the back if you agree with me on this right i could be wrong but i think right now the sense is that rfk entering the We'll be right back.

Race is probably worse for Trump than it Is for Biden that makes sense Logically but then my logic Yeah yeah I mean I do think historically third party Candidates at least the last few times have been Not good for the Democrat But I Think I don't know this this no Label shit is its own whole thing and it's Like I that I don't even Get started on that like if Joe Lieberman Manages To lose the election for Biden because of It's just no labels thing. I mean, I'll be pretty upset. But as far as the RFK thing, I mean, the idea that like if there was a way in which Aaron Rogers, because of his hubris and idiocy, if he manages to somehow tilt the election away from Trump, God, that would be great. I mean, wouldn't that just be, I mean, talk about God using an imperfect instrument for his will.

Well, they were mentioning this on whatever I was listening to, whatever, you know, back episode of levitard i was catching up with just yesterday night they were also talking about also he's an active nfl player right now which then led to the like what is more likely that he becomes the vice president or that the jets go deep into the playoffs with what a great

what a great great prop bet in vegas right here i go once again with the email every week i hope Did it from a female? No, man. It's not from a female.

All right, email or email before we get out of here.

Yes, I would like to play for you a voicemail from... Oh, you know, I'm going to play this one. This is, you know, my apologies. I'm a little bit behind on checking some of the voicemails, and this one comes from back in February when you were talking about going to the American Film Institute, Luke, and feeling like you wanted to just sort of upend your entire life.

start over and that was before i got heckled during livewire that's right well amanda heard

that one to talk about it a bit andrew this is amanda calling from scadgett county um i just was calling because i so often i'm listening to the podcast and there's actually something happening in my real life that's so related whether it be a many year renovation or i don't know just something that's said um anyhow i just um a topic of afi a very very good friend of mine just got accepted to AFI last year. She is 43 years old. She's a couple years younger than me and she was just having the exact same thing that Luke was saying about just always wanting to go to film school and so she applied two years ago got accepted and just couldn't bite the bullet because it's about $100,000 to go to AFI. And then she applied again the next year with regret and actually made it in so she knew she had to go and moved down there last summer. So she's down there in her mid-40s, getting her degree focusing in screenwriting and possibly doing some directing. So, you know, stranger things can happen. Anyhow, I just thought that that was funny because you were talking about it today and maybe you even saw her there. I probably did. Hope you guys are having a good one. Power out.

It just occurred to me now, I probably shouldn't have played that for you if I want the future of TBTL to remain strong. Are you going to leave us for the AFI?

I, well, no, I'm going to continue doing the podcast, but I'm going to pivot. It's just going to be a film cast where I break down specific cinematography decisions by Tarantino. Because I think that's what the world needs more of. It's me just going, he was using an Airy Flex. It was so interesting to me on The Hateful Eight that he decided to use that Panaflex for that kind of, I'm, can you hear me running out of even pretend? photography terminology when it comes to

films yeah yeah I would I would you know I think I could maybe hang with that

honestly you'd be better you'd be better at that podcast than I would be I mean you're like actually interested in and know a little bit about photography well

I'm not to be honest with you I'm just worried about your gambling sub stack like are you able to like kind of do both of those the Burbank Stone Cold Locks Burbank Stone Cold Locks the the the substack on that the podcast about film and all the while being a full-time student at AFI I don't know yeah I mean let's just uh take it one step at a time I am encouraged to know though that the

there is at least the possibility of me becoming the world's oldest AFI student like that there's a path for that yeah because I think at 47 and I'm going to be 48 soon so I think at 48 I might get some kind of a record um but uh but thank you for the thank you for the call and thank you for you know what it is it's a good call it's it's the knowledge that potentially i could do something like that that's all i need i'm not gonna do it but i like to know that there's other people in roughly my age cohort

who are doing it you know what i mean like i was never going to go to afi when i was 23 but it was a thing that was out there as a possibility and it's the feeling that it's not a possibility anymore that was causing me to be a little wistful so all i needed was that voicemail to just kind of say yeah you could do that and then i'm going to not do it but i know that i could do it and that's

enough yes exactly so you know and as we like you've you and i mentioned years ago that we were past the age of the oldest professional sports player like now by a lot there was something always well there's always some 42 year old punter or something that you can say well i still have a

shot there are no 47 year olds left i think probably no i don't think anywhere in the nfl right there's some price darts darts sure i mean you could do that for for although i'm sure eyesight is part of it i'm sure that there's like you know kind of like um muscle kind of memory and also tendons and i'm sure you know i was going to try to use darts as an example of something where it's like age isn't relevant but i bet you even in darts it is right it probably is now that you say

that i mean you certainly see older dart players so i don't know i know that my eyes are pretty rotten there are times where i get to the board and i'm not even sure exactly what i got um i also pretty bad lighting in my little dart alley but um you know what i did the other day is i watched i think it was a mistake i don't know uh you know i just started you know when we moved in here i didn't realize how much i was going to be obsessed with playing darts and again i don't know none of us did honestly nobody saw that one coming um but i knew that i liked playing darts we had a we had a dartboard in um in the basement when i was a kid we had a dartboard that we kind of just inherited in our barn in New Hampshire when I'd go outside and smoke heaters and listen to like well probably TBTL and other first generation podcasts but anyway point is I've always liked throwing darts but like I you know don't know much about it and then when we got this one for our basement you know I said to these oh man it'd be so fun to have a dartboard she's like well let's do it it's our place so she made a nice backboard for it and now I play darts literally almost every night that i'm home at least like one round against against the dart bot right um and i truly do enjoy it but i've never taken it seriously so what i'm getting at here is the other day i made the mistake of of watching a couple of youtube videos about like proper stance what you should properly be doing lining up your eye to the point and how to hold it exactly in the parallel and some of it i'm doing naturally but certainly the way i'm sort of like eyeing it is not right but like once you have that knowledge i'm like well maybe i'll just try practicing but it's kind of like when they say like if you drive for a long time you just develop all these habits that you're not even doing it really properly anymore something like i sort of feel like it's that way with my darts like if i try to retroactively sort of change my stance and be more thoughtful about it and do it the way all of the youtube pros tell me to it's a very uncomfortable stance It takes away the fun for me, and so then I just revert back to just slinging the dang things, which ends up with better results in the short term. I'm sure if I was disciplined, if I was a real disciplined daddy, is that from Arrested Development? Why does that phrase live in my head? Maybe it's just the websites I go to. I don't know. Maybe. But if I was a real disciplined daddy and really like kind of got myself into a into like trying to be a better dart stance and made it like muscle memory for me, I'm sure it'd be good in the long run. But I don't I just don't have the willpower to do that because I just want to like I don't want to think about it that much when I'm listening to my podcast and throwing darts.

It's like Ty France completely reworking his swing during the offseason, Andrew. You've never mentioned that before. Is that something that you've been following? Well, unlike you, Ty France decided that it was worth the time investment to retool his swing and to come back, maybe return to form of a couple seasons ago. And all reports are it's going well.

It is going well, right? I mean, I haven't been following him closely. I know that spring training started pretty hot for him. So I don't know, Luke, we're close. Oh, I don't think I told you this. So first of all, our fantasy baseball draft is tonight. I have done zero homework on it. So I'm already like kind of feeling anxious about that. But I thought for sure our fantasy baseball draft was tonight because I thought that the season begins this Thursday. I didn't realize until this weekend when I took a closer look that we are still a week and four days away from opening day. And that was a major bummer to me. I thought we were days away from the crack of the bat in the world.

Aren't they starting the season in Japan this year?

They are not starting in Japan this year.

Oh, I really thought.

Wait, oh, are they? I knew that they did one year, but I didn't think they did.

Not the Mariners, but just Major League Baseball. I thought I had read something about the first, like, you know, the sort of.

kickoff game if you will being in japan but i could have been wrong about that oh okay maybe

no i i don't know anything about that i thought you meant the mariners because they are i'm trying to remember that back in the ichiro era right um uh it was ichiro's last game remember it was about five i'm trying to think was it just pre-pand i think it was the season before the pandemic maybe we woke up super early to watch that game and then we recorded tbtl at like five in the morning or

something or six in the morning i think oh you know what i think it's in south korea oh interesting The San Diego Padres and the Dodgers will be playing the start of the MLB season in South Korea. It will be the first time that an official MLB game has been played in South Korea.

Oh, that is interesting. I wonder why they chose those teams. Well, I guess they're both certainly West Coast teams. So that helps.

Yeah. So anyway, I'm getting excited for it too. I've been too busy to really kind of like deep dive on these here Mariners. But I've got that on my schedule for probably – I'm actually – I'm relieved the season doesn't start until next week because that gives me a few more days to develop all of my theories and my pet peeves and my – to start basically, like, dragging promotional photos of these players onto the desktop of my computer so that when they fail me, I can just tweet their face out. Right. I'm pretty excited about that.

Well, remember Stu Gotts' theory about hot takes, like, before a season or something? look nobody remembers the wrong ones just have as many theories as possible and then when the right ones come true just uh trumpet that as much as possible nobody's gonna remember your wrong

ones exactly what do they say uh success has many fathers but failure is an orphan that's right

did you see or can you see what i just did it's you got your nose water we know spring is here

because i just had to kill my first fly of the season nice nice nice i gotta say you know vives

and I were grilling last night and like I just couldn't believe like I came home from my volunteer gig and I was kind of like really rushing I'm like we're gonna run out of time it's gonna be dark but it was sort of a spur of the moment I went to the grocery store just to pick some stuff up and I'm like you know what let's just do this let's grill I had just cleaned the grill anyway I'm like let's do it and Genevieve and I had the most wonderful night and we were done grilling and done eating it was still light out it was warm and Genevieve at one point turned to me and she said it's not even spring yet this is winter technically spring isn't until next week either or no later this week right yeah i was like officially god you're right this is amazing we had such a god we were blessed

with such good weather this weekend man it was awesome becca and i were belatedly celebrating her and her brother's birthday out at her other brother's house the whole family had gotten together their whole family and it was a lovely afternoon the weather was great and then we were going back to like where her apartment is because I was going to get my car and and we were going to go our separate ways and we just were sitting in the car just kind of chatting with the windows down and it had just gotten dark but it wasn't like dark dark and it reminded me so much of being in my 20s for some reason I feel like there's just a I don't know a certain kind of energy and conversation that goes on in a dating relationship when you're younger that for some reason for me feels very associated with like kind of warm spring and summer nights there's just like i said energetically something different and i we were just having a just chat about life in the car and different things and it wasn't overly fraught it wasn't like we're having a like we need to talk about just just talking and i was like and the back of my mind i was like god this feels this feels like this reminds me of different a different era of my life which was a good thing because i just said the other day how my my issue with being my age is not even that my life is actually bad because in a lot of ways my life is better than it's ever been it's that my outlook is bad because my when i was 22 my outlook was just so positive i just was like yeah what are we doing great okay that sounds fun or that didn't work out but you're doing something else i was just like i don't know i just was upbeat and then i've gotten older and i'm not as upbeat about things because i just had more experience and it's like i want to reconnect with that and somehow this one little thing of sitting in a car chatting with my girlfriend while it's still warm out and it was sort of kind of in the gloaming it felt like it felt connected to the time in my life when i

was more upbeat so i took that as a positive the changing of the seasons always makes me feel a little nostalgic in some way or another and sometimes it pops up in sort of um in sort of surprising ways i'm thinking of i i kind of yeah i'd probably talk about uh smoking weed maybe a bit too much on the show recently but it does remind me of a time like was it last summer no i think it was two summers ago um i i'm gonna leave everybody's name out of this not that it's a big deal but um we were visiting um our friends who has who have a lake house a family lake house and so a bunch of us descend there about once a summer uh usually i'll spend one night other people will spend maybe a couple of nights or whatever but it's just like a beautiful That's cool.

summer evening out at the lake the only downside was i couldn't listen to the mariners because there's really bad cell reception so i couldn't play it on my phone and i was also just getting bad i'm trying to think maybe there wasn't a radio in the house i think which is strange for a lake house i think i would pass a law that says every later's digest large print and a radio yes yes baby and maybe some uh maybe some mystery novels too but anyway so me and one of our friends who also uh likes baseball a great deal even plays baseball uh i said let's just go out to my car and smoke a joint and like listen to the game on the radio and we were just sitting in in my car with the windows rolled down smoking a j listening to the mariners and um it was like i i had not felt like a teenager in so long it was like honestly i think that was like two summers ago and it's still like that one of the highlights of my summers yeah it was wonderful well we've

We've got a few of those days in front of us here for the next few months, which is going to be great. That's going to do it for today's episode of TBTL. TBTL, up in smoke. But the good news is we—

No more references of weed from me going forward.

We are—listen, it grows in the ground, dude. It's a lot better than the ethyl glycol or whatever it is that I've been pouring into my system for years. Wait, what is that? that's like i think the technical name for booze i think oh okay i think that's the like the the

active ingredient or whatever in alcohol i thought you were talking about like your your hair

medication or something no dude that's finasteride andrew get it straight that's actually i think yeah i think is finasteride the generic version whatever it is i'm using the off i'm using the generic hair regrow whatever pill you ever go out to your car roll down the windows take some

what is it, Finestraside? Finasteride. And listen to the Mariners game?

Right after we're done here. Right after we're done here.

Summer, baby.

All right, thanks for listening, everybody. We'll be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. I'll be in Los Angeles, so we'll see you from there. In the meantime, have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves. Go Mariners. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to you all.

This is Holly in Alexandria. Just a quick note. I went to clear my phone because I was starting a Zoom call with some stuffy important people. And instead of clearing the pod catcher screen, it turned it on. So in the background of my very stuffy Zoom call, the song about secret food and poop starts playing and the looks of befuddlement across Zoom was pretty amazing. So thank you for that. It made a stuffy meeting a little less so. Cheers. Power out.