Muse

When we tear all the wood out, we want to get rid of anything that seems natural, authentic.

Get rid of the espresso machine, get rid of that, that all goes.

Anything rustic is gone. Anything authentic, anything organic, anything permanent. Also, this is a vape store. Yeah. So we want a carpeting that's going to absorb, and I don't mean mask, but literally just absorb the odor so that when people come in here they're just overwhelmed.

Okay, you want it to be pungent. Jaundice. Sickly, vomitous. A piece of vial. You want it to smell like old bubble gum.

Yeah, have you ever huffed an air wick? The lighting is too warm in here.

This is too, I'm feeling too good about this. You know, I want to see my own zits. Like an old thrift store or something, maybe. No, that's even too descriptive.

That's too kitschy.

It should just be like part of an airport that you ignore.

Think of hanging out inside a vending machine.

A cell phone store or a...

Batteries Plus.

Make sure your bathroom really has got a toilet that's way too high and kind of big. Also, two plungers.

Two plungers says it all.

TBTL.

for more bodily functions in the news this morning the next time you pass gas

make sure no police are around that's science these are facts i'm just i'm kind of flabbergasted when you say things like that it's weird thank you not a compliment so maybe this isn't exactly the most polished radio broadcast you've ever heard no you're you're going to tell a story

I don't believe that I can bear to listen to another one of your stories right now.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Thursday edition of TBT All the Show that just might be too beautiful to live. Is it too early to get a fish sandwich? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Another day, another victory for the OG. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio.

Bring it back home, baby. Bring it back home.

Perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it's just going to be a spectacular day.

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

I believe we've moved north of 80 degrees for the first time. I mean, it's not 80 degrees yet, but my understanding is it might have been yesterday, and that'd be the first time in like 200 plus days that it's been that warm, and we are that levitating here in southern Washington, and it is a great feeling. We've got a great episode of the program in store for you today. It's episode 4202 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

Got home late last night, was too tired to wheel my garbage up to the area where they come pick it up, and I thought, you know, what are the chances they're going to be by at, say, 6.30 in the a.m. to retrieve it on Thursday morning. Well, they did, so I guess it'll be another week before we can get that taken care of, but I've got bigger problems, including the fact that I treated my Roomba really poorly this morning and said some things that I regret and had to apologize to Randy. Huh? Because that's the key to any good relationship, is being able to take ownership of your mistakes, And that's, thankfully, the kind of relationship me and Randy have, so we may end up talking about that. Also, speaking of the rise of the machines, Apple is getting some heat about its latest television commercial for the iPad Pro and their idea of sort of how it relates to the subject of art.

Well, I guess this is the part where the art gets made.

We'll definitely talk about that. Oh, and it's a Thursday, a.k.a. a Blur's Day. My bell is... Okay, there we go. Having problems with my bell. It's Blur's Day today. It's Blur's Day. We'll do those. And we'll talk to this guy, longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. As he said on yesterday's program, because we're using a video link today, he's now got to really think about his outfits more carefully. Beneath the clothes, we find the man. And beneath the man, we find his nucleus. He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now Good morning my friend

I made you a promise this morning Luke And I failed to deliver on that promise I want to apologize here But I also want to tell you why I failed to Why I failed to deliver Not why I failed to apologize You've got to be more specific

Which promise did you fail to deliver on

The promise was I will never let you down

I think honestly That's setting the bar too high And that's honestly on me for accepting that promise You're right I should have stopped you when you were, first of all, I should have asked you, sir, have you been drinking? And I was. The answer would have been yes. Based on the hour of the night that you texted me, I promised to never let you down. I should have just said, you know what, why don't we revisit this in the light of day, and then we'll kind of like set some achievable goals.

It would be interesting if you just received randomly a text message from me at, let's say, like 3.15 in the morning on a weekday that just said I promised.

I promise to never let you down, Luke. I've probably sent you a text like that. I mean, that's the thing about this is I don't even want to go back in my sort of sordid text history of probably some thought that seemed very important to me after a certain amount of alcohol was applied to the situation where I thought, I just got to let Andrew know about this.

I can't recall anything like that ever coming from you. I think we're both pretty reserved folks, but I did get a couple of emails, work-related emails from you the other day when you were staying at that hotel room that was less than adequate and you were describing how awful and weird the bathroom was. And so you sent a couple of photos to me so that I could use them on the website.

By the way, that was at like noon West Coast. I want to let people know I'm not sending Andrew 3 a.m. emails with pictures of my toilet.

But do you remember what the subject line was on those emails that you dashed off quickly? It was just bath pics. And so I just had like, from Luke Burbank, bath pics. I'm like, okay. That could have been a show title. We're doing it, man. We're sending each other bath pics now. No, let me get back to where I was going with this here for a moment. So the promise that I made was a small promise. I texted you this morning and said, hey, I have an idea for a new intro that we can start the show with. You had sent me some tape the other day from Tiki Taki, and I said, oh, let's dial up a little bit late, and I'll turn that into some intro for today's show. And I ended up not doing that. That's why we heard some Portlandia tape that we have heard before. But the reason, and this is the important thing here, the reason I did not fulfill my promise of some production work is because I was doing something else. And that thing that I was doing, Luke, was I was writing to the journalists at my local newspaper.

Oh boy, the folks in charge of both the rants and the raves?

I was writing to rant, let's see, what's the actual, rantandrave at seattletimes.com. Indeedly do I was, my friend. It occurred to me that you had this idea the other day. I'm in an ongoing battle. Stop the show. This is exciting and scary.

This is a big deal in TVTL history.

I have a feeling, well, we have a lot to talk about here, but I have a sinking feeling that this might open a door for me. A portal. That may be difficult to close. Like the first time I texted 710 ESPN Radio with one, just one quick little thing I wanted to contribute to their on-air conversation.

This may be a Jumanji that you don't need to enter, sir.

And now I'm like texting them on the daily. Did you get my last text message? No, it's not quite that bad.

Or have you started that? That's what I sent you last night, by the way. You sent me something last night? I just sent you three. I texted you three names.

Oh, I didn't get that. I thought that that was an erroneous text.

No, no, no. Egbert, Keith, and Neo.

I don't remember that reference from the show.

Those are the names of, without spoiling anything, those were the proposed names for some children.

Oh, gosh. I did that.

I don't even remember that I binged that show I watched like five episodes in one sitting and I bet you that because of that I might have ran right through you yeah there's a point where I again without getting too specific too loud or too specific there's a point where a character who's quite besotted with another character presents him with the she's been thinking about their baby names and proposed baby names and the names are Egbert Keith and Neo and for some reason the detail of those names It's just, like, really great to me. But anyway, sorry, back to you ranting and raving, because that's honestly, that's a big deal.

So I will do, I promise you, the briefest of recaps. But I've been finding these extraneous extra garbage, or these mysterious, I should say, extra garbage fees on my monthly trash bill. It seems like about once a month my garbage collector says, hey, this guy's putting out extra garbage, and we should charge him for it. And I have not done that. this man loves bins and so and i am uh i am meticulous as all get out on that i have not been putting out extra garbage the lid has not been propped open because i've overstuffed my garbage pail which is what some people at the city have claimed i might be doing i have been meticulous about this so i told you last week that i was going to start a blue sky account it's like twitter if you don't know what blue sky is uh where i can document me pulling my bins out to

the curb uh blue sky the service similar to x formerly known as twitter i think is what you

meant to say which is a ripoff of threads that is the full yes that is what i meant to say so um yeah so i decided to use the social media platform that literally nobody knows about to um kind of document some photos as i take my my bins out to the curb I take them out on Wednesday night and they should be picked up sometime on Thursday. This way they are time stamped. There will never be any issue about whether or not they were out on time. And also it will document that when I took my bins out, the lids were closed. No extra garbage. And also it's a nice wide shot. Like the people at the city said, well, maybe people are maybe your bins are too close to your neighbor's bins. Uh-uh-uh, friendo. I have no neighbors with garbage on this block.

Osama bin, uh-uh.

Osama bin. Oh, no, you didn't. um you suggested i go straight to the top with this uh when you want to take it right to the

high council at the seattle times and the consistently the most read article it is true it is the most read i'm just telling you man when we've got a formula that don't mess with success the rants and raves are consistently the most read article in the paper turn the whole thing into rants and raves that and ryan divish that's all i know and you know one other thing that's

sort of tickled my brain this morning as I was thinking about this because I you know I posted my first post on this Blue Sky account last night as I dragged my bins out and took some you know a couple of very I would say tasteful photos of my garbage bins and posted them I will be on KUOW again next week and I was wondering can I sneak this into my agenda on the radio sneak it in I'd start with it enough about the city council yes exactly I did get some suggestions from people that i should write to my city counselor but i i don't like my city council i'm not gonna be doing

that so what has been transpiring that this has been escalated because when when you and i last spoke about it you you'd had a conversation with some folks you were starting the blue sky account as a kind of a almost a preventative measure you were you were frustrated that the the system is designed in such a way that when they make a mistake you're only allowed to basically have two improper charges taken off of your account and then you're out of challenges which makes no sense if they were improper charges but now something else has happened that you're actually

reaching out to ransom rate well nothing has happened yet because it's only been a week since this has happened and so today will be the first test of whether or not my garbage well my garbage has been picked up fine so i won't have any answers today it'll be the next time i get my bill will there be any extraneous charges on there and if so i will have the documents to prove that I've been a good garbage boy Having said that you suggested that I do When you want to Fight the halls of power You go to The press right and so you suggested That I write to the rant and rave Column of the Seattle Times Not just the most read But For a reason the most read I would say My favorite part of the newspaper The rant and rave I do love it And so a lot is going through my head here because here's the thing about when you send in a rant to the newspaper, you simply cannot sound, no matter how carefully you choose your words.

I believe the word you're looking for is measured.

You cannot sound balanced. Exactly. As I'm writing this, I'm like, there's no way I can write this in a way that won't make me sound like I'm just at my wit's end. Like, I'm the main character, I guess, the secondary character of the movie Misery, played by Kathy Bates, I believe. That's not how the show ended.

He doesn't get out of the cock-a-doodie car.

I don't believe that. It started making me think about the editors of the Rant and Rave column, too. Like, who are they? Have they been doing it for a really long time? Or is this the beat that you put the young people on, the people who are newest to the times? Do they start at the rant and rave?

Because it's such a high traffic, you know, there's so many eyeballs on it. Are you giving it to your elite, you know, content creators who've earned the right to – with great ranting comes great responsibility? Or is it kind of just press and play? Do you put like a Luke Burbank circa 1997 when I worked as what they called agate monkey for the sports department, where I would sit there with a time-life operator headset and type in the high school sports scores on a Friday night with my friend Aaliyah Saperstein? Do you put that guy on the case, or do you put one of your more senior people on it? Why did you need the headset? Because what we would do is field calls. We would take calls from all of the high school coaches of the various sports. And in those days, the computer system, I guess software, that the newspaper used to publish the paper every day was like basically DOS. It was an incredibly rudimentary system. And what we were doing was typing in like, you know, Seattle prep volleyball beat Garfield. and this player had these many points and this player had this many blocks, but you would have to enter it in. It was like war games. you would enter it into this screen in a code way so that when it went into the paper it would actually sort of format correctly there was no kind of easy system where you just typed it in and then it just said it put in so you were kind of like doing the not the program you're doing the formatting with all these weird like symbols and things that you kind of learned it was probably

basic html right so if you're bolding something you use a little b and inside carrots was it like

that it kind of although this wasn't even on the web i don't even think they had a website at the Like this was going into the print edition Oh I see okay so it was for The printing press I guess and it was It was a job that you would get if you were A college newspaper Person as I was And you wanted to make 10 bucks an hour And you wanted to critically to get a Seattle Times key card Like you know badge with your picture on it which felt Pretty cool to me But anyway we would sit there with these Like we'd get there at like 7 o'clock at night And we'd put our headset on and then we'd just spend the whole night you know taking calls because the the way that the coach would call in and say this was the score you'd put it in and I always remember thinking you know if you got a rogue actor in here if you had a coach who just wanted to I don't know really screw the other team I think the rule was like the either the winning team calls it in or the home team calls in there were some sort of there was some sort of you know way that this worked but it was all kind of the honor system you could have just called in and and and just wildly inflated someone's stats you could have reported the wrong team winning i had no way to verify any of this and i believe as i typed it it went into the system that then printed it at the very back of the sports section it was being read

by some old man in ballard as you were actually typing it out exactly right the guy from up well i exactly well i assume that my email went directly to the desk of page cornwell today and sure probably gene bulk the fyi guy um but uh do you're all talking about it they're all just kind of like but okay so i do want somebody yelled stop the presses they don't even have a press anymore somebody went running it i want to um i want to explore something with you before i read to you what i sent in to the seattle times and we can we can judge it on a on a nutso scale about how nutso i sound sending this in from from zero to kathy bates how is andrew coming off in this interaction but um like do the people who produce this column which is a daily column right they don't want us to be super measured right like the the column is better if you sound like somebody who has been battling the seattle public utilities department for the past five years of your life and you're at your wit's end and you can barely articulate

your rage anymore you used to screen calls for a commercial talk radio show you used to host a

commercial talk radio show of course sometimes i did that at the exact same time the more the more unhinged you sound the better copy it is well i tried to maintain a certain amount of dignity in my message to rants and raves at seattletimes.com here's what i wrote rant to the garbage collectors who keep adding unexplained extra charges to my bill each month rant to the person at the seattle public utilities who says they can't reverse the charges anymore because i've challenged them too many times now the the readers started to get started to see the contours of who they're dealing with here this person who's constantly on the phone or ringing the folks at spu uh rant to the person at seattle public utilities who says They can't reverse the charges anymore because I've challenged them too many times. Rave to my new social media account where I am now documenting my bins to prove that I am not breaking any rules on pickup day. Parentheses. Double check your invoices, folks. You might be paying extra fees, too. And then I link to my Blue Sky account. What do you think?

Rant to the cell phone company who is accepting the Seattle Public Utilities choice to block me. rant to the police who are outside my house right now with a bullhorn rant to the person

who came up with the idea of ceasing and or desisting well okay i love this so much um i

love that you work the blue sky and i am i am hoping hoping that the rant and rave people will include the blue sky uh the blue sky link because i just think that would be so funny and it would also be for them really stepping into a kind of a new new media a new era really of the way the rants and raves work you know um like i don't i've never seen somebody linking to a separate account i don't know if that's allowed but i think it's high time that they started doing it now i also think it's a great it's a it's a great rant This is...

If it doesn't get published, I think this thing, honestly, is a bigger conspiracy than we thought. Honestly, the only thing, because I'll tell you this, I read the rants and raves pretty much every day, and sometimes they're great. Sometimes they're only okay, which tells me that there are the occasional day, and we would never do this on TBTL, but there's the occasional day when the Seattle Times have to scrape the bottom of the proverbial barrel. Sometimes they're just kind of – somebody is, you know, mildly annoyed. I don't know. They're not all winners in my opinion. Definitely not. Which means that it's not like they have every day an embarrassment of riches to pick from. So I think your rant is on its face of a high enough quality to get into the Seattle Times. Unless. Unless they're in the pocket of big waste management.

Is it the Frank Bleffen sanitation company that is emptying my bins? Of course, the owner or I believe the publisher of the Seattle Times. So, yeah, I was having these thoughts, too, because we mentioned a moment ago that the Rant and Rave column is a daily column, something that always kind of surprises me when I remember that. I always think it's just something to read on Sundays. But no, no, no. You can just wake up on a random Thursday and read a rant and or a rave.

And what about this, Andrew? Yeah. What if either the garbage collection service or more likely, what if the city of Seattle in some capacity is one of the main advertisers now in the Seattle Times? Oh, sure. Because I could actually see that because, like, you know, a lot of the sort of traditional businesses are probably going with online and Facebook ads. And I mean, that's a challenging part of the business model. But, you know, like the city of Seattle, that's an old stalwart. they've probably got a good relationship with the times over the years at least in terms of like publishing you know notices and ads and things like that could be a big account for them and you're essentially calling out the city of seattle with this well i certainly am but i i am not

actually worried about that but i will say that as i was saying this thing publishes every single day the rant and the rave and if you go to it on a random tuesday let's say sometimes you'll open up and there's only one rant or rave in there now here's the automatic reply when you write to the rant and rave um uh i guess department you get back this reply thanks for your submission to rant and rave we appreciate each one and use as many in the column as we can note that we do sometimes have a backlog so we can't print all of them or print them immediately but we do read and consider every submission now as somebody who's worked in the media myself my entire adult life This is exactly the type of auto response. I used to have almost a very similar auto response that would go out to listeners just saying, hey, you know, we did get your email. I do read them all. They're all they're not all going to make it to the show for time reasons, for all kinds of different reasons. So I need to set the expectations with our listeners. And I've done that in every job I've ever had. And so, of course, the Seattle Times is going to say this, but also the Seattle Times here is writing back to somebody who is so invested in the Rants and Raves column that we understand how the Rants and Raves column works. And we know that they are not choking on too much content.

Like, again, I have to the Rants and Raves column for pretending like they have so many rants that they can't run mine.

That. Oh, my God, that would be. Oh, my God, that would be so great. could you write that one they already have my address that's a real i mean that's a that's a

supreme court test case oh my god it's a real like that's designed in a lab to really kind of to see what this how the system will respond to this particular input right maybe i have too much

baby reindeer in my brain but i could really see this being like a show or a movie that focuses on somebody who fixates too much on the rant and rave column and develops an uncomfortable relation An uncomfortable one-sided relationship in which the messages to the newspaper get more and more erratic.

Rave to my sons, Egbert, Keith, and Neo. You know, Andrew, by the way, I just had a moment of clarity. I think I can say with very, very strong confidence that this is a job that is given to a new person at the newspaper or a person who's kind of still sort of building their resume. And the reason is because as you started talking about your auto response and I started thinking about our time working in radio and the media and how like, you know, let's say there are 10 emails come in and let's just say a given week. If there were 10 emails, like three of them are actually genuinely very interesting. Three of them are kind of like just somebody needs help with something. Hey, what was the name of that person and thing? They're just kind of like practical. Two of them are like I don't even know what this person's talking about And then one of them is like oh this person is Fighting with something bigger than Our radio show right Like and when you're the rant and rave Person all you get is that one percent unless they're raves i guess there are some nice raves but as far as the rant side of it goes like what i mean is you're it's not like you get 10 emails at rants and raves and like their breakdown along that distribution it's like this is the whole point of this is to get people that are at their breaking point yeah these are people that are setting up social media accounts to document their garbage these are people who have already been pushed about that They have been pushed To a breaking point And so I don't think that you want to give You know Like a senior person at the Seattle Times Also it's really sad that I can no longer name a senior person At the Seattle Times Like there would have been a time that I could have thrown out A Don Shelton I could have given you an Eric Lissetus Are these editors? Well Eric Lissetus was a columnist for many years Don Shelton was the sports editor Actually when I was there doing the Agate stuff But like But like I'm thinking That this is probably When the emails do come in Unless they're a rave And my guess Andrew Is there more rants than raves

Oh I'm putting it at maybe One out of ten Yeah or something around that

I mean because the thing is And this Now we're bringing this full circle One of the kind of like Organizing principles of TBTL In the early days When we were a commercial radio show That was supposed to be generating A lot of like you know buzz and get heating up those phone lines and stuff and we used to always say it is so much easier to generate anger in people than it is to generate joy in people um a lot of things make us mad and oftentimes when we're mad we're very motivated to do something and uh so the the raves the raves are honestly like water in the desert when you're and i like that you worked a rave in although it was for yourself so that kind of that's to my social media account it wasn't to myself but still i like i like that there was a rave i think i think if i were the rant and rave if i were the person in charge of it i think i would try to keep i would i would wait to publish the rants until i had some decent raves as i just feel like you've got to have some some you know some some sweet with the bitter that's that's the rule of my yelp account you

know this i assume yes like i i always one in one out yeah i try to keep it kind of one in one out i try to keep it balanced if i'm writing a negative review of something because i've kind I've reached my wits end on something or I experienced something very untoward with a business that I dealt with. Well, then I don't want my Yelp account, which, you know, I write like maybe one Yelp a year or something. I don't want it to be just a bunch of griping. So I always try to remember when I have a nice experience somewhere to head on over there, like whatever that cantina was that I had dinner at a few weeks ago. I told you I really enjoyed it. I never did this, but it was like my intention to like kind of give them somewhere on social media, a little bit of a hey you know what had a really nice experience here that i wasn't exactly expecting

given my situation that evening i had a really great experience down in california when i was in like a zoom meeting thing that i couldn't get out of and i had the door dashed some el pollo loco and it fortunately the hotel the the one that i moved to eventually was i guess the kind of hotel where you didn't have to um use a key card to move between the floors of the of the hotel in the elevator right and i was i couldn't get out of this meeting and i just timed it poorly i was super hungry i had raced back to the uh to the hotel and i had like ordered like a burrito and some tortillas by the way god i love el pollo loco so much not as much as i love taco time but

i really do miss that about being in california really there was one near my house and i would go there from time to time because it was convenient but I never really I remember even at the time thinking like god I just wish I liked this more because I'm not here to tell you it's high quality yeah or it's well made yeah no I mean like and again like yeah this isn't like a I'm not I'm not being like oh Luke I only went to this authentic food truck down the street which there were a lot of good food trucks but no like I also I love Chipotle like you know it's just like for some reason El Pollo Loco didn't um it didn't sing for me but and I do not mean to be this big of a snowflake but don't you think that the the pollo should find the help it needs instead of just us like kind of profiting off of its loco yeah honestly to see a pollo have a meltdown in

the public space like this exactly kind of like you know hold my nachos right exactly it's like

oh hey well this is fun their their big thing is guac right isn't yes and that's what i like

lean into the guac yeah as a non a not huge meat eater and also unlimited sides of like they have this really yummy like avocado hot sauce oh that's right they had a little salsa bar didn't they i do like a and when you're okay door dashing like i was in this case like some places now and again i actually understand this but there are some places now that if you're trying to get like hey can i get three sides of whatever there's like they start charging you they might say you can have one for free but and it's like there's packaging it's a hassle

for them it is a product like i don't actually begrudge them that so i was kind of like i really like this sort of spicy avocado like salsa that they have i also got the guac but and i was like i'll have two of those and then i just looked at the drop down menu i was like can i get five of

these what you mean five choices or five of the one no five little like you know plastic i guess you'd call it a ramekin of them yeah no but i mean like you wanted five of the same stuff yes

wanted to try because i didn't want to run out okay remember we were talking about ketchup the other day and how a packet of ketchup is just not enough yes for french fries i i have real scarcity i have a fears about about scarcity and it's usually my fears are generally unfounded but so what happened was i can't leave this meeting but the i can see i'm on looking looking on my phone i can see that the dasher is getting close to the hotel and then i get a text from the dasher through the app saying hey I'm you know I'm here or whatever and I just take a flyer because I order a lot of DoorDash because I'm often in hotels and places I don't know where everything is or whatever and it has become very very very unusual that the person brings the stuff up to where you are and again I understand that as well DoorDashers are not making enough money and for them to be like wandering around a hotel trying to find my room I think I feel that that is asking more of these people than we should so i don't begrudge someone leaving it in the lobby it's that i was so hungry and it was like 6 p.m i would had been on my fast and i was like so i just like threw a hail mary and was like hey i'm in room 202 uh could you bring it by and and then the person was like okay and then what unfolded up that was the longest three minutes of my life because what that felt like to me was a real ask of this person and like I would have been unsurprised if when I opened the door I like I like slide I slid my laptop over so that the folks couldn't see that I was kind of like stepping out of the frame and walking back to the door of the hotel room and I like so it looked like the computer was walking out on you

Not that you were walking out of the meeting Was that your thought process?

I just wanted them to know this is not me This is a hardware issue And so I opened the door And this guy has the biggest grin on his face And he's got the food And he's like here you go man And I was like oh my god thank you so much He's like no problem And I was just like wow That like made my entire day that interaction Because I was expecting him to be annoyed And he wouldn't have been wrong to be annoyed To just be like I got too many of these to do I can't be wandering around this hotel trying to find your room.

My car is out in traffic blinking with the flashers.

I was expecting it to be like a begrudging and brusque interaction. And it wasn't. It was so nice. And I have not DoorDashed since, nor will I, Andrew, because that was the top of the mountain. But the next time I go on DoorDash, what it will do is say, how was your experience with so-and-so? And not only will he be getting five stars, but I'm actually going to kick him an extra tip on top of the tip because I just I found it. It saved my bacon because what I could not have done is gone another 35 minutes in that meeting. Without consuming some kind of food, I was I was extremely hungry at that point. And so that that guy did me such a solid and such a solid by being so pleasant about it. So I didn't like spend the rest of the time, you know, reliving our interaction in some kind of negative way.

So where you're both like where you're kind of irritated by them, but also irritated by yourself or being irritated by them for asking for service above and beyond. I know that cycle. Yeah. And it's nice because that if you write a nice little note, that person will see it as well as it going into the maw of the DoorDash machine and plus the money on top and whether or not he recognizes it as you specifically, the guy who is in the hotel room. but just generally speaking the guy in the bathrobe in the hotel room Charlie calm down but we are living in the midst of a podcast boom anyway by the way I think I might have just heard one of the garbage trucks go by you know it's the big day we got recycling and yard waste out there too so

how soon can you check your account I mean you think they can like on their iPad right where they are oh yeah i don't think they can just like they can ding you no i don't think they can add the 13 dollars to your to your account just from the truck if that happens andrew you are getting baby

reindeer well let's just let me wrap this up i will say and this is this this begins a bit of a journey for us to find out whether or not like i get published in the seattle times this could be my big break i will say i'm not a very confident oh and the adventure begins again i'm not a confident person in most things, but I

I am betting that this ends up in the pages of the August Seattle Times.

I have to. OK, look.

Oh, really? Oh, oh, look at this body language. OK, so I'm going to get some tough truths here.

Hold on. Let me turn this chair around. A little BG on me. Hey, kids. You know, I used to think I was cool. And I thought, you know, what's really cool? Being respectful. No, that posture had nothing to do with what the news I'm about to deliver to you It was, I think that's a strong rant And I think it should be published in the Seattle Times on its own merits Forget the fact that you're a local media influencer, Andrew Walsh But I have a weird, this is a little bit like your text story of texting sports radio I think I've mentioned this in the past But I had a little moment, I don't know, a few months ago where I got really kind of into this internet call-in radio show that was being run by this guy who runs a motel in New Jersey just outside of New York City.

Have I told you about this on the air? No, this is a few months ago, and this is the host of the show.

It's longer than that, maybe six months ago. Okay. So there's this account on TikTok that I started following that is this motel, this like, let's just, how do i describe it accurately but but in a way that doesn't sound pejorative it's it's uh definitely a reasonably priced motel and it is a motel in that you can drive your car up to the door of where you will be staying and it's right on the it might even be called the lincoln tunnel motel it's right on the like uh jersey side that is jersey right i believe um you're you're you're not in in manhattan yet but if you enter the lincoln tunnel you will come out and you'll be in manhattan okay so it's it's sort of on the jersey side and the guy who um like i think he owns the the motel i'm i'm i'm not sure how he became the owner of the motel but he is the owner of the motel as i understand it but what he also is is a performer and a person who's been involved i think in like improv and comedy and things like that and what he's done is cultivated a really fun tiktok account about this motel and he's got like a guy who i think maybe works with him there and they do these little skits and things and these do i believe fall under the category of skits like not but i just thought what's that not sketches not well no i i don't think it rises to the level of a sketch okay but it is entertaining and i just thought it was kind of a charming little thing and so i started following them on tiktok uh and then at some point saw this this thing pop up that was like i forget how it's called but it's like nighttime radio or something And what the guy literally does is he sits in the office of this motel in Jersey and he just takes calls and he'll throw out a topic. I mean, it is a very much the kind of old school talk radio that I think you and I love. Right. Absolutely. Yes. So I like one time it just it sort of prompted me, hey, there's a live thing going on. And I clicked on it and I was like completely transfixed. And I just was like, this is the great this is like kind of my dream thing. Although I wouldn't actually want to do it Because it would involve staying up all night And you know taking calls Like in theory It would be my dream job Which would be just to host an overnight call in talk show It just it seems like the purest Expression of talk radio to me And so anyway I was listening and you know He gave a phone number and I I'm guessing I'd had One to nine drinks at this point And I called In and I got through And we had like a really long conversation I mean I was on for probably 45 minutes And It was really fun Although I couldn't stop myself from As we used to say in swing dancing Back leading Which is kind of like I just ended up interviewing him How did you end up with this motel Do you get any sleep Because you have to You run the front desk in the daytime But it's like It's like 5 in the morning in New Jersey But regardless

I found it to be really fun and I kind of got a kick out of it and of course I didn't like get into what my job stuff is or anything like that there was I will tell you this Andrew and this is where I'm not proud of myself of how fragile my ego is and how much I need uh approval in the weirdest of places but there was like a live stream going and there were people because I don't know there's maybe a few hundred people kind of like watching this at all times and people were going like in the chat they're like this is one of the better conversations like we've heard on this like people were enjoying it and i will be totally honest with you that was making me feel

really good well of course i can't i'm trying to figure out if i'm surprised that this has not been brought up on tbtl before were you somewhat bashful about this probably i mean yeah like because it it feels it's like like i don't first of all like i don't get to talk into enough microphones in my life like at like two in the morning i'm like drunk dialing an overnight internet radio show on tiktok like really this is what it's gotten to burbs but this is the this is where i'm going with this with you in the rants and raves so uh we had a great i thought we had a really great interaction and then we hung up uh and then eventually i don't know it was a week or two later or maybe a few weeks i don't know when it was but then it came back up on my tiktok and i log i logged back on and like i could tell because i have hosted a lot of call-in radio where there's no one calling i couldn't tell when he's treading water in there and i called him back because i could tell that he was like he kept giving out the number which is not that there is even a thing called talk radio anymore where people call in i mean it's very rare but but if you if you find one where people are taking calls and you hear them giving out the phone number a bunch that's typically an indication that no one's calling he's giving out the number he's playing music he's talking over it he's restating the theme he's telling some story he's giving the number he's doing this like talk radio water treading that I'm very familiar with and I'm calling in and I feel like he can see my number on there and he's never taking my call and I'm calling and it's and it's just ringing and ringing and ringing and he's not taking anyone else's call and it's ringing and then it's like so that went on for like an hour and then I like I hang up and then it's I don't know a week later so wait hold on

you you you called in you let it ring but you did that several times throughout the show like you you keep trying back during this live broadcast or do you just try it once it rang it rang it rang maybe 10 times you said today is not the day and you moved on I tried it probably a few times then

I probably went to sleep and then a different time I probably tried it again I think there must have been like two or three times after we had our breakthrough conversation where he just like didn't pick up on me and I'm just like it's and it's not like he's taking calls from other people it's like I don't think he has any calls and he's he wants calls he's giving the number he's saying call in right now but he's also not picking up my call and I was like what's that swerving on you kind of swerving on me and I don't know if it's because maybe you got too real for him maybe it's because I wanted to name our kids Egbert Keith and Neo but like uh but so it was it was the it was the weirdest thing because I went for like I was I was basically getting negged by an overnight internet talk radio show being hosted from a motel front office in New Jersey and I just don't want that to happen to you Andrew with this rant and rave I just want

to so that's where that story ends how you never got through again and yeah and and I've been

spending fewer late nights in that particular manner sure yeah so it's kind of cut out the like, you know, it's sort of, you know, less being drunk at three in the morning has led to less calling the overnight motel radio show. So I, you know, I, I don't know, I don't know, I assume it's still going on. And I don't, again, I don't really know what the, if it was a technological thing, if it was that he actually was intentionally not taking my call or I don't know what was going on, but it was just a weird, it was, it was, what was weird about it was that I cared.

Yeah. No. i mean once you're once you're involved like no it isn't weird that you cared like once you're involved and also you're thinking like he see he's it's hard not to take it personally when you're like i've talked to this person for 45 minutes he sees my number because you you think that he he recognizes your number coming in there's like a you you i don't know oh that's true we can't

assume that there's a caller id or anything like that right so i don't know i just figured i part of it too and this is where it gets where the layers of of complexity continue to stack up i'm also feeling like i'm trying to be a real hero here yeah like i'm trying to swoop in and and be like oh this guy's like this guy could really use a call and guess what he's not just gonna get any call he's gonna get professional podcaster luke burbank in disguise which is like such an egotistical ridiculous small petty way to be right which is probably part of why i didn't bring it up in the first place but like some part of me is just like literally tearing a rotator cuff patting myself on the back of just like if only this guy knew that professional podcaster luke burbank yeah we're calling him which again i can't even begin to unpack how sad that is but um anyway i'm just saying prepare your heart because you could fly real high with the rants and raves and then you could send another rant and you could just not even hear from bethany gene clement here's what actually doesn't work there anymore if i remember it

Oh, is that true? No, she does.

Is she still there? I thought she had moved on.

If so, that would be very new because I think I was reading one of her pieces. She's the food writer there. What about Todd Vinn?

I wrote Todd Vinn like a teary message from an airport saying that a piece that he wrote was one of the best pieces of writing that I've ever read.

I've read in a long time.

He interviewed me once for a piece that didn't end up being published. So actually my interactions with, I guess I'm. He really, he really New Jersey motel radio showed you. Right. Actually, maybe I won't ever get published in the Seattle Times. That was regarding the kind of disastrous Thanksgiving meal that never showed up. I think you reached out to Bethany and Bethany reached out to Tan and then he interviewed me about that. But they both were kind of like, listen, we're in a pandemic here. like we don't want to be like we're bummed that a bunch of you know people paid good money for food that never arrived like if there's a story here we'll write about it but we're not really in the business of just like kind of slamming restaurants during uh an extremely tough time for people running restaurants so i totally respected that also he and i were on a podcast together once one time one of those um kow podcasts so i i sort of know ton as well but as a matter of fact you bring up a good point like the fact that i'm pretty sure bethany i'm pretty sure bethany is still that bethany gene is still there i mean the newspaper industry is struggling obviously but it makes me happy to know that the seattle times is doing well enough even though i you know take issue with some of the things that they publish in and out of the editorial pages like it makes me happy to know that the newspaper is at least healthy enough to have at least two people on that specific food and restaurant beat here in seattle i guess they're both really good writers

too exactly and my guess is that that's one also one of the more popular sections that's true yeah of of the paper um i'm not saying that to undercut your point you're exactly right i i love that that they are able to support two two food writers because they're like you said they're they're

also both really really good right yeah exactly great feature writers i wanted to say just one thing i mean you keep on changing the subject away from my rant and my rave uh to myself um I was just going to say, I think that what I'm more worried about, I'm not worried about them not running it. I mean, if they don't run it, that'll be interesting. I'm more worried about them, like, neutering it in some way or, like, over-editing it. Like, I understand.

It's like eight words. I know.

Well, I tried to. That's why I wrote it that way efficiently. I tried to put myself in the mindset of the rant and rave editor, of course. So, I don't know. We'll see. I would prefer it not to run than to see it mangled in some way. But hopefully they will appreciate the fact that I'm a professional communications major. Wait, what? Can you be a professional student?

Kent State Communications School Hall of Fame. That's right. Nominee. That is how I signed it. Later disgraced. Andrew Lewis. Not Gregory. Edward.

yeah Edward indeed we do oh my bell is all the way across the desk Genevieve was playing with I got it right here baby so there you go I will let you know and I do think like no joke like there is a um on this you know roundtable I'll be on next week there is a point at the end of the show where they all say where the host Bill will say what made you smile this week and it's supposed to be not something from your life like it's not supposed to be like well my cousin

graduated or whatever you're supposed to say heaven forbid it's something interesting and

personal i know i always think that's kind of a strange rule too i'm like general keep it about

bruce harold why do people actively like to take the nothing sorry why did that touch some weird for me no i just feel like saying hey let's talk about what made you smile but keep it keep it light don't talk about your divorce that's the good part i think they want you to share something

that other people like the listeners can partake in in other words like what made me smile

personal joy related to a cat is something people can partake but like the second season of my

favorite show came out like you guys should all watch you know top chef or whatever i don't watch those shows i have a feeling they have more did you call it top shaw which is the show we're too short aka todd shaw goes around oakland cooking thing the season two of todd shaw is out it's great um anyway i'm not being super articulate today but i realized that this could be my back door of talking about something personal if i get published in something public right what made me smile was i made it into the seattle times and also it's not you know what this is actually great

because it's not strictly personal it's not like oh my niece just starred in the shelton high school production of mean girls which my niece maddie did do congrats that's overly personal for them but you can say i mean you're connecting it to the city of seattle so that's definitely a that's a That's a broad enough news related enough thing that you could you could just full. Yeah. I mean, and again, I if I were you, I'd I'd say in the this is something I learned on season two of Todd Shaw. Like I would do rant three ways. I would work it into the beginning of the show, the middle of the show, and then make it a callback at the end of the show.

Well, I mean, I couldn't even just pitch it as a story.

I honestly do think. Let's wrap this up. I'm boring myself, but I really do think that I'll bet you more people are paying these made up fees than we realize. Slunk sleep because if I if I the most like meticulous garbage bin maintainer of all time are seeing these charges well then I'm sure there are people who are stuffing their garbage bins and just not thinking about it even 116th as much as I am and so like I honestly do think it's a public service that people should be looking at their bill in Seattle to see you know if something's going on here.

It might be a Get Jesse. It might be. I sort of, when you said that the other day, by the way, thank you to our friend P. Fletch for confirming with us that Get Jesse is still a thing.

People are still getting Jesse, as she says.

Yep. But the bad guys are still getting Jesse. But, like, you're right, though. Like, to expand this out, if you're getting slunk jeeped with this to the tune of $13 a month how many like apartment buildings that have dumpsters where it's just a person at some kind of property management thing is signing something like this could really be a big story where you have a a a contractor with the city just kind of like racking up a bunch of junk fees that i mean literally i just realized that this is this is the definition of junk yes right good point like rat you know racking these up and because it's 13 here 13 there most people aren't checking the bill it's it's like you just don't realize it and next thing you know it's a significant amount of money every year that if ever you know if if we were to really hold this up to the light we'd be like a lot of this stuff is kind of bs that this could be a actually pretty big story

i that's why i it was a last minute decision to add parenthetically check your bill folks and i

love that that's my silver bullet that's what gets me in they're gonna be saying get andy soon

They certainly are going to be like, how can we get this? Do you want to be the new editor of the Rant and Rave? That's what I'm expecting to get back now. This becomes a job at the Seattle Times for me because I'm clearly so good.

You went from listener, you went from civilian to four-star general in my friendship army.

That's right. Get out with Rants and Raves. Watch this space. And I guess keep your eyes peeled on the Seattle Times as well.

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

Alright, let's thank a couple of dazzling donors who are donating a dazzling amount of dough making TVTL possible We couldn't be more thankful for folks like Lorraine Goyette who's in Dennis, Massachusetts It feels like a town that's always getting into it.

Dennis! Dennis. Are you thinking of a specific Dennis, or that's just a name that sort of sounds like it?

It seems like a name that would get yelled, but also I guess maybe subconsciously I was thinking Dennis the Menace, who was always getting into things.

So Genevieve and I, if you'll allow, did a After These Messages episode recently about commercials that focus on the dentist-going experience. In other words, not not advertisements for dental supplies. Are you thinking of Dentist the Menace? I am thinking of Dentist the Menace. That's a show title. We did. We did a show all about like, you know, how using the experience of going to the dentist is used to sell all kinds of products and services. Right. And usually they're kind of horror scenes inside the dental office because people don't like going there. But one of them starred Dennis Quaid, and it was a quick commercial, and it's very self-referential. I can't remember what he's selling, maybe insurance. I can't recall. But they didn't make the dentist Quaid joke. And I don't know how you work that into a 15-second commercial, but I really felt like it was a missed opportunity.

But it was for something dental-related.

No, none of the – so we were just using the trope of going to the dentist. We didn't do a show. It's no fun to do a show just like, here's another commercial for toothbrushes. That's no fun. And it was like commercials for all kinds of things, from video games to, again, insurance or whatever.

Where in the people, somehow a dental visit or dental something shows up in the commercial.

Yeah, and usually it's the trope of them, like their mouth is, you know, stuffed full of some sort of like.

Their eyes are darting about wildly.

Right, and then the dentist is talking to them and they can't respond or whatever. But I do sort of feel like.

But the Dennis Quaid one, was the product related to something dental?

No, again, I can't state this enough. The products and services we were talking about were not dental related. They were other things like video games and insurance. I'll find out here if we really want to know what Dennis Quaid was selling.

But I just sort of felt like it took place in a dental office, and it was a lot of dentist humor. And I just sort of feel like they could have made a dentist Quaid joke in some way if they truly cared about punnery, which maybe they don't. Maybe the world has moved on.

Here's what I understand. So it would be an ad for a video game with no reference to dental anything. So how was the show? There's something about this I'm not grasping. How was the theme of the show things related to the dentist, but then there were ads that had nothing to do with the dentist?

Okay. So first of all, the name of the show was—

Mostly walk Lorraine through it, because she's got the same questions.

The show was called Be Dental With Me. Very good title. I wanted to call it Going Dental, but we skipped on that one. And they were commercials from everything from Geico to e-surance. It was Dennis Quaid selling e-surance. It was a video game called Best Fiends. There was something called metal end caps that go under your hood, and they somehow used an analogy of going to the dentist. You wouldn't go to this dentist, would you? Well, you wouldn't use these bad metal end caps either. So, in other words, these were all commercials for non-dental related things using a scene in a dental office.

Okay. That was my – so the Dennis Quaid is somehow when he's in the commercial selling whatever, he's at a dentist's office? He's at a dentist's office.

But you kept asking me – you kept asking me was he was selling something dental? And I kept saying, no, he wasn't.

I think the first thing I said was there's something dental related about the ad. We can go back to the tape.

Okay, yeah, but no, so he was selling e-surance in this commercial, and it was a postmodern commercial because you could see the commercial you were watching also playing in the background. That's all I'll say about that.

And you thought it was a missed opportunity that he didn't go Dentist Quaid.

It was a real hokey-style commercial where I feel like Dentist Quaid could have been a funny punch-up to that.

I feel like Randy Quaid would do that ad if you could get him down from Canada.

He would, but it would have to be for Candy Quaid. It would be Candy Quaid. I don't know how to make that pun work.

uh lorraine says last spring 11 and i completed a cross-country tour with our car sporting a tbtl bumper sticker when beeps and gestures seem to be aimed our way we uh we interpreted that as greetings from other tens you keep doing that lorraine you just keep doing that as all these

cars were driving directly at us and swerving out of the way honking how do they know where we're

going we said we're going the wrong way deep until served as a reassuring presence on the adventure replete with holiday and expresses subways and other entities mentioned by andrew and luke over the past year oh and by the way over the past week i believe i had a delicious subway sandwich recently and talked about it also i was thinking this the last three days that i was at the residence in in fairfield california on business center drive or whatever you cannot go wrong with a newly built residence in if you are anywhere you're going and maybe you got to get on the google and like look at it because if it's older it just it'll still be totally fine like residence in i think is the most reliably good very like a relatively affordable hotel experience i've ever had and it just happens over and over again including this week when i was in california i was just like this is a totally good hotel like it's clean it's nice they have everything the people are nice like it's great like i'm constantly impressed with the residence in particularly if they were newly built so that's just a just a little you know hot tip little bg on me you should write a rave backwards on this chair

have you considered writing a rave about residences andrew what if i write what if i write a rant and rave and it gets published before yours what a dick move no i i i would

i can use the competition it breeds may the best may the best rant win sir indeed and i i also love

that yours would be a rave and mine would be a rant like you're taking the high road uh since

we haven't traveled or hadn't traveled for a long time i'd wondered whether being from a blue state would matter as we pass through red ones it didn't we encountered courtesy friendliness and even unsought helpfulness throughout our 45-day journey. Wow, Lorraine, that was a heck of a road trip. 45, huh? 45. We may do another trip this year, but this time accompanied by an unplanned adoptee rescue dog, Luke! Who came to us pre-named? Hey, Lorraine, it'd be fine if you let me believe you named your rescue dog after me.

Rant to Lorraine for not letting us believe. For clarifying that the dog is not named for me.

John's recent recounting of interstate travel with three dogs was helpful yeah that's a whole adventure when Sklarov gets the dogs out on the open highway that sounds like a whole production I remain grateful for imaginary friendos when I'm too depleted to interact with real ones or they're unavailable thing.

for consistently being there, Andrew and Luke. Well, thank you, Lorraine. We really do appreciate you and very glad that we can provide a service that Lorraine has described, which I hear pretty frequently from people, which is the thing about this show is you can put it on, you can kind of feel like you're being in a conversation without having to actually be in the conversation. Like you could just sit there staring into the middle distance on the couch in the room at the residence inn and just feel like you're getting kind of a little social recharge without any actual responsibility to be part of it uh in terms of adding anything and and that's a service we're very happy to provide you can even miss

things that i mean that's we need to lean into that more in our marketing like tbtl you don't have to process every word you know what i mean like other podcasts you really got to listen to

it's actually better if you don't yeah exactly it's just a vibe it's just patter thanks lorraine Appreciate you. Maestro?

On your mark. On your mark. Get set. Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dattle.

It's Julie Lim in Phoenix, Arizona. Ahoy, friendos. I just love the show. Listening has made me laugh, made me cry, and gotten me over some rough patches. I want to say how truly brave I think Luke, Andrew, and John were to make the leap to go independent rather than just accepting a way less than ideal situation at 8 p.m. Bold move, and I found it very inspiring In some sappy way Ah, Julie, thanks Thanks a lot This is the part where I say It only worked out Because of folks like you, Julie So it was a Bold move that could have looked Really bad If the Julie Limbs of the world We did a trust fall, essentially And the Julie Limbs of the world Put their arms out and caught us, Andrew Financially nothing worse than a trust fall when nobody reaches their arms out for you then that's just called a sciatica injury that's called a coccyx injury it yeah indeed and one thing i've learned

about trust falls is you should really tell the people around you that you're about to engage in one yes like surprise trust falls do not work out well no they don't i believe that's called

being laid off and it's happened to me before it'll happen again yes uh julie says uh i'm so glad that it worked out for you and that the tens of listeners looking forward to more content and I hope to make it to a live event one of these days too Julie we hope you make it to a live event we hope we do a live event Andrew wait we're in control of that I guess

yeah we are we're talking we don't have any solid plans I know sometimes people hear this and they're like well let us know your plans as soon as possible so we can make arrangements but we don't have anything specific right now but we're we're talking we're

Oh, yeah, we're in a situation ship going.

Sure. Yeah, exactly. It's complicated.

Absolutely. Julie, you'll be the first to know, though, and we'd love to see you out at the next thing. And thank you for your support. We really do appreciate it. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right, Andrew, if you could and actually this is not as easy to find as you would think. but if you could go on the internet while i'm talking to you and just maybe uh dial up this new commercial for the ipad pro that apple has released okay um and the reason i say it's not it's not as easy as you think is because i was looking for it this morning and i kept finding people who had basically recorded their own soundtrack to it or edited it or done one of those there i fixed it for you kind of a moves okay i know nothing about the story i'm very

intrigued by it by the way you've set it up in the at the top of the show and also what you're telling me now makes only heightens my interest more i saw this headline which was apple ipad

pro commercial criticized by hugh grant comma others tell me more about these others i was like uh this sounds like a real tempest in a in a tea kettle you know like it was it was like um Hugh Grant and Justine Bateman both had gone on to some social media platform and expressed their displeasure for this ad. And I thought this seems like somebody was just trying to make a thing out of out of, you know, out of not much just to get the clicks. And in fact, maybe they were. I don't actually know what the organized pushback on this is other than maybe a few tweets and posts. and there I fixed it. But I will tell you this, when I went and watched this commercial for the new iPad Pro, I was really surprised that it was made. My brain said, who are the ad wizards who thought this up? So the idea is that...

You've got one of these huge sort of like crushers. And if you spend too much time on TikTok like I do, there are tons and tons of these accounts where these industrial sort of crushing machines will just crush all manner of stuff. You know, it could be a bowling ball, a jar of mayonnaise, you name it. And, you know, it's always interesting to see what the sort of what happens when you apply this much, you know, PSI onto an unlikely, you know, sort of object is. Right. So, yes, this is a huge, huge crusher, probably like a car crusher or something. And in it. Are a bunch of things that are associated with art, you've got a piano, you've got a trumpet, you've got paints, you've got, you know, that sort of movable. three-dimensional figure that people might use for painting or for sculpture. Addie had one of those that we got at Ikea when she was a kid and we named it Marshall, as in Marshall Art. And so all these things are set up on this big crusher. I think it's like a Elton John song that's playing or something. I don't know. It sounds Elton John.

I just watched it quietly while you were describing it.

Okay, will you play a little bit of it with the music?

So all this stuff is piled up all at once.

Is this something good?

Maybe not. Yeah, I don't know who this is. I can look that up later. But, I mean, it's a real stunning visual, especially as the paint cans start exploding over top of the piano and the metronome and all of these things. The bust, some classic-looking kind of bust sculpture. But the weird thing that I'm kind of not understanding is also they have just for reasons that I don't fully understand. Like you said, it all has to do with art, literature, whatever, but they also just have emoji dolls in here, which doesn't seem like high art to me, but whatever.

Well, you, my friend, have not seen Emojis 3. Oh, yeah, that's true. And that's why you sound so foolish right now.

Honestly, Emojis 2 got a little bit preachy for me, and for that I was out.

Oh, my God. I meant to tell you. Wait, what was I loading in yesterday? There was something. There was a piece of tape that I grabbed. Oh, you know what it was? Stop Luke Stop Focus All I need to do is say this very quickly And then I'll get out of my system We don't need to expand on it But yesterday when I was talking about The Little Sluggers I grabbed the music From the TV show This Week in Baseball Which was a show for many years In the 70s and 80s Where it was just like on Saturdays And it would be like Everything that happened this week in baseball And it was hosted by a guy named Mel Allen And I loved it as a kid And somebody had posted the theme like the actual audio theme the music theme on like youtube and that's where i was grabbing it from so i could play it while we were talking about the triumphant return to the w column for the junior sluggers and it just so happened that the guy i think his name was al who had loaded it in just wrote wanted to post this theme from a show that i really loved in the 70s and 80s before sports got so political you had to get that in al you had to get that in you couldn't just couldn't just post the this week in baseball theme which i love because it reminds me of my child you had to just you had to just slip that in before sports got so political hashtag i kneel

for the flag exactly okay so no i'm sorry well i just totally butchered that because you don't

Neil what is it I I'm sorry I was calling Kaepernick who posted yeah I'm trying to remember what that expression I stand for the flag and I kneel for the there you go thank you thank you um this was

a Sonny and Cher song by the way for what oh nice okay all I ever need is you so the uh the emoji

balls that you're talking about like kind of as everything is getting crushed down that one of them rolls out and gets caught right at the front of the crusher and its eyes kind of pop out and And after all of this stuff has been smashed, and then the thing kind of retracts or opens up, you've got this new iPad Pro. That's a very thin iPad Pro. Very thin, very beautiful object. And, of course, the idea is that you have compressed all of this cool stuff into this thing.

Yeah.

But the pushback from the Justine Batemans and the Hugh Grants of the world. Finally, what does Justine say? is just basically that like when you have ai coming for folks and you have a technology that's increasingly digital and you have like it's you know fewer and fewer people who kind of make art in certain ways in the kind of analog senses are maybe having opportunities to make a living making that art when you already have this kind of you know i when you already have sort of art and the ability to survive financially as an artist, being sort of crushed by these larger economic pressures, etc., to literally crush art into your...

iPad it's just so tonally off to me and again you really have to watch the ad like the trumpet that gets the first thing that gets crushed looks like a Pixar character the trumpet if you go back and you play this I swear the trumpet goes like the trumpets the trump is like please I have a Family, I plead for you. It's like so kind of like it's such an obvious visual representation of a sort of generalized feeling that a lot of us have about art, which is that you have these gigantic, often Silicon Valley-based entities which are just scraping, scraping life and hoovering up everything that used to be sort of boutique, artisanal, one-off, and kind of figuring out a way to disrupt, break things, fail fast, and then emerge with something that is very enriching to them and kind of works for all of us, but is in some way making things a little less good culturally. Now, I've just given an extremely broad critique of that, and there are lots of exceptions, but you know what I mean? That's just a feeling that some of us have. so to put it in the ad like this is just crazy to me and it does really like it's clear that they kind of know what they're doing because they're not going to put the emoji getting smashed so its eyes fly out they've essentially anthropomorphized everything in this crusher they've basically murdered art with this commercial and I'm just shocked that they clearly they think that this is an edgy thing that's going to work for them because there's no way that this they didn't realize what this looked like they made i think they must have made a calculated decision to just say like we're going to say we're going to be very um sort of provocative here with this and we're going to just be like yeah yeah we kill emojis what guess what you can watch it on your ipad pro like like this just seems very unapologetic to me and i guess maybe i've talked myself back into respecting it because there's so much stuff that is so kind of bland because we're like, well, what if it looks like we're killing the trumpet? Like, that could be a piece of feedback. And they're like, no, we are killing the trumpet. Look at it. We're doing this on purpose.

Well, yeah, this is really interesting. So I'm processing this all at once, and I sort of do want to take the counter argument here, although I just need to sort of- Well, how do you do it when I've made both arguments? I write to the Seattle Times. Well, okay, I also want to point out one other thing, too. So you're right. The vast majority of this stuff is like representing some sort of like kind of artistic endeavor. I see there's a drum set up there as well. Like I said, a full piano. But it also has like a globe up there representing, I'm sure, like the mapping software in the planet Earth. But also, you know, like I said, a map. It's got a big like it's representing Microsoft Encarta.

Wait, that's it. That was actually like that was an encyclopedia. Sorry.

It's got one of those like classic looking arcade games. So in other words, you can use this for video games as well. It's got like an old tube television showing some cartoon. You can use this pad to play games, to watch TV.

You can use this for watching nighttime comedy with Jerry Seinfeld.

To create music. Genevieve started watching that movie last night, The Unfrosted. So it was pretty good. It's just like a series of sketches, essentially, with all the most famous comedians in the world or in the country. And I'm going to go back and watch that. So here's where I am right now on this. So this wasn't like I'm already biased because this was presented to me as a controversial commercial. You set it up in this way. I didn't just happen to see this like while watching a baseball game or something. So it's really hard for me to sort of separate myself from my experience with this. Here's what I like about it. These tech commercials for phones and tablets have gotten so boring, like I don't even recognize them anymore. where they wash over me, and it's like, I don't know, the iPhone something or something. And if they're going to focus on the technology, it's like the object, like let's say the smartphone sort of floating in space with some sort of marbled art behind it, like, you know, and some sort of like graphic text, and then it just says iPhone or iPad or something afterward. And it's just like so boring. Those commercials, like I don't even notice them anymore. So they have to say, like, let's do something that is eye-catchy. And here I am now thinking about the new iPad. So in a certain way, like they got whether or not they knowingly did this to get sort of the backlash and then get the free press.

Was it worth it to lose the Hugh Grant?

Right, exactly. Like I don't think for anybody complaining about this ad, I don't think it's going to result in lesser sales because this commercial was offensive. All it did was get.

people talking about the ipad something that you and i would not be talking about i know we say this all the time but quite seriously like there's just no way i would be thinking about whether or not i need a new ipad except for this commercial and also it is just stunning like when the paint and stuff starts exploding it is really stunning and so which is why those videos are so fun to watch exactly getting crushed exactly and they have the kind that are also like kind of the spinning gears oh my god those make me so anxious somebody will throw like a an entire an entire wheelbarrow into one of those things you know what i mean the the the wheels with the um the sort of gears crush it and it goes down into you know those crushing videos yeah yeah yeah those ones are

they scare you right it's it's so terrifying it's so terrifying you cannot help but picture what would happen if you fell into one exactly oh not even fingers i'm talking just your feet right yeah exactly taylor sacedo right into it they'll just by the way well is he fine or does

he have a bad injury well that's well that that's what i want to talk to you about off air okay i was wondering what your reaction would be if you heard yesterday's news that the injury was not as bad as they thought and so therefore when he was yes yes whatever it's yeah well you're every instinct you have about mandrew is exactly right let's not put um let's not put our reputations in a giant crutcher right now.

No, there's a reason I texted you personally, specifically, and with no one else, my very bad take on a certain Mariner situation. And then, of course, I bring it up here kind of obliquely. But anyway, yeah, let's just keep it moving.

But I will say it was not an oblique. So anyway, I don't know. I honestly think from an advertising standpoint, even if you rankle a few people, I think that the outcome is you get a lot of people talking about something we wouldn't be talking about otherwise. And honestly, from a visual standpoint, it's super beautiful. Now, as somebody who actually does have concerns about like, you know, lately, I feel like on the show, I'm just more and more complaining about where we are as a capitalist society right now and how we as individuals have less and less power as more and more power is accumulated by, you know, a handful of companies that run everything. If you want to watch a baseball game, you got to engage with Apple, you know, like all these things. And so and then if you have any complaints about it, your only recourse is to write to the Seattle Times because you can't actually talk to somebody as they're selling you this product or service.

I love this idea of just like a dystopian future where we're all underground trying to get messages to the rants and raves. It's like the last functioning ham radio set up. And it's like, it's like, did you did you get a message to the rant and rave? Surely, surely they'll be able to hear us in Montana.

somebody's like scanning a radio through static to hear they're not picking up my garbage here's where i am on this right now is i am trying to think of because the other thing is here the reason they put it in the smashing device as you mentioned is because that's also very trendy right now it's taking advantage of something that is already kind of eye-catching online and so i get all of that i'm just wondering is there a way they could have shown all of these things blending together in a way that seemed less destructive you know what i mean is sometimes when we do

this on after these messages we call it doctor doctoring doctor doctor what should i do tell me that's not an ai song is we the fact that we've played really spectacularly well done ai songs on this show and that in fact was made by humans that was what humans came up with

that's right that's why AI is like yeah come on just let me in the door just let me in the hear me out I believe I have the only living copy of that because that thing got scrubbed from the internet that doctor doctor children's song from like Sweden or something but I'm not surprised

I believe you can still find it on the dark web

yeah so anyway I don't know would there have been something that could have been eye catching and that would have had this idea.

It indicates that we've combined all of these things into this one very compact thing.

Exactly, but not in a destructive way. And I think it's clearly the destruction here of, again, it looks like some of this is like, again, like kind of classical art, a bust, you know, probably hundreds of years old being crushed because we don't need history anymore. I get it. I get the complaints. But on the other hand, it's stunning.

yeah i i was just trying to think of of of other like you said other ways to convey this message like hey all of these things all of this creativity art etc it's all in this one thing but of course also what they're very what they've decided is the real sales pitch is it's thinner yes which is kind of interesting in a way because i'm both receptive i'm both receptive to that generally speaking like oh this ipad is so thin but also have i ever been holding an ipad and I thought, God, this is. thick uh you know honestly as well first of all i don't think you've lived the ipad life as much as i have i do have an ipad you do have an you have but don't you have like kind of a first generation ipad from like probably but i've never thought it was too thick well you would if you were traveling somewhere and you were trying to get as much as in your like knapsack as possible like that is a real thing for me like sometimes you slip in you're slipping your computer in there but you're like i think i also need my tablet for whatever reason yeah you know and then you're just kind of like just it's funny how in situations like that when you're packing up a bag you're like oh like if i could anything i could use to cut down on the bulkiness of it as i'm going through the airport would be nice so that actually the sales point actually for me as somebody who you know does have these things that that works i would say that's a good point the thin idea is

good but so that's why i think they wanted it to be yeah you know they decided like okay the appeal of this is it does all this processing but also that it's very thin so what sells that notion what really well compactor you know so it's like yeah you couldn't just throw it in a blender because that's not that's not keeping with the with the sort of branding of it like you know we're blending this all together or like we're gonna you know i don't know whatever i mean this is this is this is the result of a lot of people being paid presumably a lot of money to in an iterative way come up with this and then again at some point and i i'm with you i may have talked myself all the way around to thinking good for them i think to being sort of unapologetic about it um although i don't know if they if they were they might have they were unapologetic about the idea that there's a certain anthropomorphizing of these products in there at least to me like i feel bad for the trumpet and the trumpets family but i think maybe what they weren't considering was there's a

coronet weeping somewhere right now wondering where its parent is right please like there's

a coronet just waiting like a fisherman's wife in the northeast just staring out into the bay and gloucester wondering if this trumpet will come home but like i so i clearly they they decided this is you know i mean again putting the emoji in is a very intentional act of being like we know this looks like we're destroying we're in a way kind of murdering these things and we're okay with that what i wonder if because they're so i've also by the way just spent a lot of time in on the outskirts of silicon valley this week talking to silicon valley people so i've kind of got this thought very much in my brain i think what they may not have asked themselves was is this a commentary about the larger sort of issue of the digital world sort of consuming the the the the brick and mortar world and culturally and creatively in a way that some people really don't feel good about you know I don't think they ask themselves that question because why because they're all in it they're living it they're right in the middle of it like I've been talking to these people who want to develop this area of California in Solano County that's twice the size of the city of San Francisco and I've also been talking to the farmers that live out there some of them don't want to sell their property they're like we would like to just keep living here raising our sheep and it seems to me that it's very hard for the people from Silicon Valley who have put a billion dollars into buying all this property to sort of understand why somebody wouldn't want to sell them their land at like three times the value like it's just like but why wouldn't you and it's like well because i don't know my grandparents started this thing like i feel like the people when you when you're very much in a sort of incubator society or incubator environment where it's like you know i you can see how you sort of like you stop even asking the question of do people like it when all art gets compacted into an ipad right because that's just like of course they would it's so thin you take it everywhere why would you want an old-fashioned bust of beethoven when you can have it right here on your ipad right right i can see this group think setting in where no one

actually went does this look bad on that level yeah or somebody said hey this might look bad at that level but you know what hugh grant might say something about it and then we get in variety and on tbtl if anything they're disappointed that it was hugh grant you know what i mean like no offense yeah speaking of i think i saw him in that uh he's tony the tiger oh is that who plays in that i i was just sort of uh in the room for a moment while genevieve was watching unfrosted last night but um yeah uh interesting what i would love to do and i don't know if so genevieve and i record on tuesdays so this might be a tall order i would love to somehow shield genevieve from any of this coverage and just spring this on her and hear what her unvarnished reaction to this commercial is without the context of knowing that people were already complaining about it because I know that she also has complaints about these tech commercials being pretty dang like boring these days just looking at like sort of what do you call it um the form of the of the device form factor maybe is the word I'm looking for and they've just gotten so boring now the best

news here, Andrew, is that we've stacked. stashed this. I said this about something else the other day. We've stashed this conversation

in a place you'll never hear it. Yeah, that is true. Yes. But but you got to get to her before

like the wider world. This was a piece in Variety that I saw. So it hasn't hit the times yet. And maybe it never will. So we may be able to keep it off of her radar for like six more hours.

Yeah. The amount of time you need. I'll try to let you know what her reaction is.

There's a right way to rock And a wrong way to roll You can just listen to your soul Just remember that life is number one You can be having so much fun Just remember that life is much fun You can be number one

I'm trying to multitask here, Luke, because there is a visual component to our first Blur's Day today. Whoa. Let me see here. Yeah, I'm going to forward this to your email address right now. And I want you to check out. It better be a bath pick. It is a bathroom pick. Bath pick. I'm sending this to your TBT. Do you know how to log into your TBTL account? Wait, seriously, you're sending it to my TBTL account? Well, it was an accident. Let's see here.

Let me see if Gmail will let me in to the back door of this system that we use.

I apologize for starting the segment this way. The problem is I have never emailed you in our new email system before we have a new email system here. All of that is to say, I sent it to you in a couple of different places, a visual component of this Blur's Day from listener Brian, who mentions that he lives up in kind of in my neighborhood here up in North Seattle and says happy birthday self you made it to 50 and things seem to be holding up pretty well you also managed to rope your two favorite podcast hosts i think that's us into your celebration by using their main catchphrase as the centerpiece of your how many tattoos can one man get in the last six months before he turns 50 project see it whoa yes so what we're saying here

guacamole from El Pollo Loco. Andrew, I'm looking at the visual component of

Brian's arm. That's right. Let me unpack this a little bit because of the way I read that out loud. Brian, apparently in the last six months leading up to his 50th birthday, has gone on a bit of a tattoo bender, it sounds like. And the one that is related to this particular show is this big beautiful left arm tattoo that says no mountain too tall and good luck to wall like i say it's spectacular and it takes up a lot of real estate there the whole upper arm it's

beautiful brian that is amazing um we're honored and um and and happy blur's day wow that's you know there there's there's been a tattoo here or there there's maybe been a a 10 or a maybe a no mountain maybe the script of a no mountain too tall or something apologies if i'm forgetting some specific tattoos over the years that folks have gotten. But to my memory, that has got to be the most sort of, you know, front and center, visible.

It's a big one, yeah.

And notable tattoo related to the show. That is incredible. Wow, Brian.

Yeah, thank you very much. I mean, can I be honest with you? It makes me nervous. Like, now I feel like I need a list of everything that won't, like, kind of alienate Brian. because, like, if I say something on the show that wrinkles and he's kind of like, I'm out on the show now. Now he's got this giant tattoo. This is perfect, actually.

So tonight we're doing Live Wire down at the Alberta Rose Theater, and one of the guests is a woman named Amanda Montel who is a writer and has a new book out about sort of things that we tend to get confused about as people in terms of the realistic, for instance, confirmation bias. If we're really into, say, astrology and we're like, I'm just being such a Taurus. In fact, yesterday, Becca, jokingly, she's not a big astrology person, but she read me, because yesterday was my birthday, she read me the thing that was, if you're born on today. And you know what? It was freaking spot on.

Really? You call them the late night TikTok shows?

Yes. It's like, have you been calling a motel in New Jersey and not getting through? You may be a redneck. But anyway, so that's, you know, confirmation bias, of course, is this sort of thing where there's, you know, many days out of the year when your horoscope doesn't really relate to what's going on for you. But then it happens maybe once out of every 90 days and it feels really intense. There's another thing called the sunk cost fallacy, which is basically this idea that once you've committed to someone or something, some person. personality style, a job, a relationship, a podcast, Andrew, you tend to stick with it because you sort of feel like I've got a lot invested in this. And Brian has sunk a real cost into this show. This is true. I believe, I feel confident saying we've got Brian listening for as long as we can keep churning these out.

I certainly hope so, but I still want to make him good. This tattoo makes me want to be a better podcast. That is where we differ, my friend. I thought confirmation bias.

In the words of Hugh Grant, you make me want to be a better podcaster. No. No.

I thought confirmation bias was when you tell me that you don't like my confirmation name and you're biased against my confirmation name.

Well, I honestly think you could have done better. Andrew Garfield hates Monday's Lewis Walsh.

What if I told you after all these years that my confirmation name that I chose in 1989 was Fargild? like how did that how would that not have come up sooner our pal ruby says mom's birthday is today of course we're talking about susan here long time friend of the show oak that's right ruby says i'm consistently two months behind on the podcast these days but that can't stop me from wishing the best damn blurs ever the best damn mom ever susan every year you get younger and younger and you have oh look into that because That's not how that's not how that is supposed to work.

Something medically could be going on there. Yeah, or magical. Oh, wow.

Every year you get younger and younger, and you have long since outpaced me in being young, hip, and cool. I'm proud to be your kiddo and your TBTL offspring. Love you tons. Happy Blur's Day, Susan. This person didn't leave their name, but they said, Happy birthday to my sister, Riley. She is my horse whisperer, a rainbow in my life, An absolute science freak and much-loved auntie KK to my not-so-baby Gary. If she weren't my sister, she would still be my friend, and that is a true gift. I appreciate her toughness in the face of adversity and her tenderness in the face of all animals. I hope your 35 is beautiful and joyful. Nice. Wow. Happy Blur's Day, Riley. Jeremy in Vermont. Our pal Jeremy in Vermont says, happy Blur's Day to my cousin-in-law and TBTL baby, Lady Jessica, sending love from Vermont to Rhode Island.

Happy Blur's Day, Jessica.

Yeah.

I'm meeting a Jessica tomorrow, Andrew, the actor from Baby Reindeer.

Oh, that's right. Oh, what is her? Do you remember her name? Her name is Jessica. Jessica.

Oh, what's her name? Her name in the show is... Terry in the show, right? No, no, no. Terry's the other woman in the show. It's Morgan, Mary I just couldn't remember the actor's name

Something about Mary Margaret, Margo How far into that show are you now?

I woke up At like 5.30 This morning to start I watched an episode last night When I got home really late And then I got up this morning at 5.30 And started watching it and I'm on like episode 6 now

Wow, watching that show in the morning That was a weird time to do it

Like, just drinking coffee. Because I have to, because, you know, from here, I'm going to do Live Wire, and then I'm getting up and getting on an airplane really early tomorrow. So I just, I wanted to sort of, like, make sure I knew what was going on with this show before I was, like, sitting on a set talking to the people from it. But, yeah, that's an odd time to be watching that show. Six in the morning, just, like, again, like a weird morning frame of mind.

Is your plan to, I feel like it would be difficult to do this interview without having finished the whole thing. I don't feel that way about it. Oh, I'll finish, yeah. You will, yeah. I think you kind of need to.

I'm staying in Portland tonight, so either after Livewire tonight or on the aeroplane tomorrow.

You might want to watch Lindy's conversation with it too. Who is her friend, the comedian that she is? Guy Branham. Thank you for covering me there because I started that sentence without, the name was just out of reach for me. Right. But I watched that yesterday too.

Yeah, no, I definitely want – I mean, it's a very, very complicated topic. It is. But I will tell you this. It raises a ton of questions.

This is – I'm going to be completely honest with you here, and I don't know how this is going to come off, but I saw a lot of people talking about Lindy and Guy's conversation about this and, like, the depiction of fat people, the depiction of gay people in this show, and I knew, you know, obviously I love Lindy, and I really wanted to hear what she had to say about it and I was also nervous though to click on it a little bit because I enjoyed the show so much and I was kind of like I don't know you know there are things to discuss in here about the way people are depicted but in a certain way I kind of

of don't I don't I don't want to feel bad about it if I like it too but then I then I watched it and it was so good watch this conversation between Guy and Lindy and I was really bummed at myself for well of course like these are nuanced people with nuanced thoughts about this show they're not just like this isn't this isn't I don't know what I was expecting but I almost felt like it was disrespectful for me to assume that it was just going to be like cancel culture or something like that which it most certainly is not it's a really smart conversation about a really good show that delves into some very difficult topics and is this like over the top i'm not i'm not even kidding

you and i'll just tell you this um during the blursday section because this is where this content goes i was actually considering like kind of striking up a conversation with lindy as a sidebar and just kind of saying like you know i i'm trying to i'm just trying to approach this from with as much awareness and with as with as much feedback as i can i mean also this is for cbs sunday morning so it's not probably the place where we're going to be able to get into the most deep and nuanced discussion about all of the questions that are raised in this show but i was almost like not to put lindy in a position of speaking for all you know fat people or whatever but just to be kind of like hey what could i do in this conversation from your perspective just you as one person that would make this not be a bummer for you if you watched it you know what i mean yeah like to just kind of because i just don't i don't come to the viewing of this from the same experience as anyone except me you know and i don't want to like i just don't want to put out a tv story that just makes anyone not doesn't make anyone feel bad but i just don't want to have a bunch of blind spots and there's so much stuff in the show that is stuff that i'm not personally experienced with and i kind of don't exactly know how to cover it in a way that's that that incorporates experiences and people's experiences that i haven't personally had well i i mean

obviously lindy's your friend and i'm sure she'd be happy to hear from you but i also i just sent you the link to the conversation she had with guy i would also i mean it's 15 minutes long the version i sent you 15 minutes and i would and especially because then you get the perspective of a queer person as well like i highly recommend carving out 15 minutes to watch this maybe and then see if you have any follow-ups for lindy um because i just again i'm not going to go into what they say on their podcast but it's just like really it's just so dang kind of thoughtful and they just chew on it for a while and and it's good and it does not you know if you're a fan of the show it's not going to kind of like put a damper on your viewing experience i think or your memory of the show it's just going to give you like kind of even more sort of context and things to think about so um let's get back into blurs days did you hear me restart the music there nobody even noticed that i did that that's how good of a producer i am uh let's see here so that was happy blurs day to lady jessica from jeremy um sure was that actually you or was that to drop that time i don't even know what's real anymore i'm never joking that was fake virginia in texas says happy blurs day to holly you are stronger than strong bad that's good that's me laughing i'm sorry i'm pausing because i don't want to say this this is wrong i think this is listener holly from my old stomping grounds of lakewood ohio if i'm wrong about that apologies but uh virginia in texas says happy blurs day to holly you are stronger than strong bad you are cooler than the Eclipse, you are awesomer than a party full of dogs.

Whoa. That's a hell of a blur. Oh, wow. Now bring all of those together. That's right. A Strong Bad themed Eclipse watching party featuring a ton of dogs. Nice. No.

Judy says, First, happy Blurzay to one of my two favorite podcasters, none other than Luke Burbank. I'm wishing you many happy returns and many more years of TBTL casting. Luke, I actually want to address this. Yesterday on the show, you mentioned briefly in passing that it was your birthday and I must have been kind of in a tear or something and I didn't even, I think I said, oh yeah, because I was like, oh, happy birthday. I believe it was in the context

of me openly weeping on the show, which, you know, puts everybody in a kind of a weird mood. Is that when you

mentioned it? Because later on last night, I'm not joking, because I have three friends now and I'm just realizing, I just realized this last night i have three friends and i'm on the cusp of a fourth no i have three friends who all have the same birthday you and broadcast barry were born on the same exact day same year same day i knew that i forget that every year sorry barry our friend genie over at kow it was her birthday too so i didn't realize that you guys both have the same birthday and it was also her um she told me it was her high school spanish teacher's birthday as well uh but anyway that as well dang that's the fourth person i'm working on here so anyway your hofbraumer as i was texting barry and genie yesterday it occurred to me that you told me on the show that it was your birthday and i i don't did i even stop long enough to say well happy birthday luke because i remember being like oh yeah it's your birthday and then we never addressed it i never wished you birthday tidings i didn't ask you what are you doing for your birthday and i won't i'm not lying last night i felt like a bit of a heel and i almost texted you a happy birthday but i'm like well i could

have done that when we talked for 90 minutes earlier today no no no no no no no no no no No, no. So a couple of things. One, I am not, I threw that out yesterday kind of as a joke to try to get myself out of this emotional thing I was in talking about somebody I encountered on my little run in the morning. And I really was, you and I have talked about this, when it's happened more rarely for you than me, but like when we're in that moment of being overcome with kind of real emotion, it feels like time stands still. Like every second feels like a minute and I just wanted to get out of it And I saw an opening, which was making a joke about you not acknowledging my birthday. That was mostly to just try to change my mental state so that I was going to not just keep with the blubbering. And also, like, I didn't nobody on the shoot that I was on yesterday realized it was my birthday. How would they? I don't I didn't bring it up with anyone. It's I'm not a person who's particularly obsessed with other people recognizing my birthday. What was nice yesterday was getting messages from friends and family. It's always nice to people sending them a text saying, hey, happy birthday. I mean, that feels good. That's really sweet. That was the exact right amount of birthday-age for me, which was people that I know reaching out, even some like tens via Instagram, like, you know, messaging me saying happy Thursday. Like, that was super nice and appreciated. That's like the extent of what I need in terms of acknowledgement. And I would have been, had I not found myself in that moment of, like, crying about unrelated topics, I would have literally never brought it up. And I would have been not offended. Like, again, I am still unclear. I know the month of your birthday, and I think, is it November 15th?

It is not November 15th. 12th? November 12th? No, it's not November 12th.

Is it Movember 12th? It's Edward.

No, I was probably, okay, that makes me feel a little bit better, because I could not remember yesterday evening as I was reflecting on this. at what point during the show you had mentioned it, and I couldn't figure out why I wouldn't have stopped for a moment to wish you a proper birthday, but I was probably giving you your space a little bit. You know, I will say one other thing. While we're deconstructing this over the top of this ridiculous music, this seems like the perfect time to have this conversation. I'm just thinking of this now. This isn't something that I've pondered a lot, but you mentioned that you have gotten more choked up on the show more than I have, and I actually wonder, Luke, if that is true or if it stands out more because of the way the other person reacts when somebody is getting choked up I've always really appreciated on the moments where I've gotten choked up like I'm thinking of like geez did I get choked up on the show when I was talking about David Burnham dying um I know I got very emotional in my pride but there have been several things I've told stories where I have gotten choked up but I feel like I'm so scared of like those awkward pauses is that you jump in and sort of help me along because you can tell I don't want to get choked up, whereas I don't do that for you because I don't want to interrupt a moment that you are legitimately having, and maybe you want me. I mean, I don't know. Like yesterday, as you were kind of telling a story and your emotions got the better of you, which I thought was a sweet moment and you shouldn't feel embarrassing, would you have preferred me to jump in and try to help you along a little bit so that you don't have those long pauses?

Short-term, yes, but long-term, no. And actually, I should think about this as it relates to you because I think the same-

Don't change a thing. Really? Yeah. No, I don't want to be hanging out there. I think people can hear when my voice gets a little constricted and I'm trying to power through it. Like, I don't, I kind of don't, I'm still not, like, comfortable in that space of, like, kind of breaking down.

Well, I'm not either, but when I say long-term, like, short-term, yes, long-term, no, I mean short-term, yes, I want you to bail me out. But long-term, in terms of what I think sometimes sort of is, appealing is really a weird word to use. because that's none of this is is is intentional like the moments where you and I when our emotions really do kind of come up on us it's never because we're thinking well this will be compelling but I do think it's compelling as a listener to hear human beings in their having their real experiences and I think that whether we're getting emotional because of something that feels beautiful to us or something that feels really sad to us or whatever it is I think those moments of real emotion are powerful and to just kind of tap dance through them in the short term feels better like but in the long term I think it makes the show less compelling and not that we would ever be trying to gin these things up but you know what I mean like if I just if I'm putting myself in the place of the listeners I think I want to hear us

now i'm talking about you and me i want to hear luke and andrew really experiencing their lives and not and not pushing through an emotional moment that being said you have the right to not be emotionally hung out to drive on the show if you don't want to be so i will continue tap dancing over that if if and when it happens um with your with your permission to do that but But if you ever want me to back off, I can do that as well.

Hey, I'm crying here. I like the way you. How about the next time you get choked up, I just do this. I just start playing that. This is a Halloween sound machine that I believe listener Veronique, I think, sent to me a long time ago. I keep it in my drawer here just in case you ever get choked up. That's how you podcast. Good stuff, yeah. No. Any more Blur's days, Andrew? Yes, we have Blur's days. What? Are you kidding me? It's a Blur's day-rama. Okay, here, let me get going here. So we said happy Blur's day to Holly. Oh, okay, wait. We're in the middle of Judy's, I think. So anyway, Judy was wishing you a happy Blur's day, Luke. And also, I'm hoping you'll give me a shout out for my Blur's day. This was a big one. I've just turned 16. I'm feeling great and grateful. this fall I'm starting a doctoral program which I'm super excited about and which I hope is a reminder that it's never too late to pursue your dreams well how about that congratulations Judy and happy blurs day that is awesome that's a huge undertaking I'm a doctor in podcasting Heidi says I want to wish my wife Amy a happy blurs day early I was about to say we were just thanking Heidi and Amy for donating to TBTL earlier this week. Heidi says, earlier this week you read Amy's dazzling donor message and I think getting a shout out from you, let's see here getting a shout out from her friends Luke and Andrew twice in one week will make her birthday complete. I love you Amy what you do for our family is so special from your adoring wife Heidi P.S. Happy birthday to Luke too Hey, thank you P.P.S. because somebody forgot it's me and finally dan says happy b-day rhoda oh this is our pal rhoda i'm out of music for the second time during this break um this is our pal rhoda who got some uh okay good does it sound like

wait i don't play that music i was trying to play this week in baseball but then sports got

so political i couldn't that's what i was gonna say don't bring your politics into this um okay So we did hear both some Blur's Day Wishes for Rhoda and from Rhoda last week. I did hear from Rhoda who sent an email saying, yes, I am the same person. TBTL does not have a huge Rhoda contingent so far as Rhoda knows. It's the same person.

Are you saying, Andrew, we don't have a Rhodan problem?

You can't use Barbaro to laugh at your own dad joke. I'm not allowed to do my own laugh track? Well, that kind of endangers my job a little bit. It doesn't hit. You're just talking about AI taking it over. I love also that that is your version of AI, hitting the applause button on the sound machine.

Very limited understanding of how AI works.

Dan says, happy B-Day, Rhoda. I'm super excited to spend summer back in Portland with you after so long away. Here's to many more. P.S. I told you I'd remember eventually. Happy Bluest Day, everybody.

Andrew, are we in, like, how long have we been going today?

Jeez, Louise, yeah, we're knocking on the door of two hours here.

Can we just chop this baby in half and make it Thursday and Friday show?

Just mid-sentence?

Can you talk to our boss and ask if this could just be, could this just be, we, I mean, it was fun. Don't get me wrong. No, I had a great time. I didn't realize it was so long.

Well, let's just maybe tighten it up a little bit for tomorrow. Do a little quick Friday. Maybe we just start with music for your weekend and then get out of here.

Love it. Start with music for your weekend and then decide we're not doing music for your weekend. And then Bob's your uncle, man.

Exactly. Now, I don't know what we'll do tomorrow, but we'll try to keep it a little bit tighter, maybe. Okay. Well, thanks for listening today, everybody. Happy birthday. Somebody's going to cry in Jag.

We will be back here tomorrow with more imaginary. I just cry when I look at the Mariner score. Oh, no. It's weird when they play in other time zones, and we're just getting messages that, like, 10 a.m. where Durge is going, it's too early for this kind of pain. You never want to see that on the sports text where you're just trying to podcast for a living as professional podcasters.

Oh, no.

We'll be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. In the meantime, have a great Thursday. Take care of yourselves. Maybe we'll see. Jeez, eight runs. It was six. It was six one when I last checked. That's what I just typed it in. I was like, look away, look away. Wow. Have a great Thursday. Maybe we'll see some of you at LiveWire tonight. Alberta Rose Theater. Come say hi. Anyway, for the rest of you, have a great Thursday. We'll see you tomorrow. And please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

I should not have brought up baseball. I understand. My mistake. My mistake. You got to know your crowd. Power out.