Muse

Ah-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha-ha it out are you supposed to have a pain under your rib yes that's natural the body doesn't want to swallow its emotions but now you go ahead and put that pain inside your stomach too i think it's working uncle hank i feel sick but not sad there you go tbtl

A lot of times in a meme war, it's all about speed. You've got to get to your memes quick. If you can't get to them quick, you're useless. They'll just keep blasting you with memes, and you can't fire back. You have to know where your memes are.

Hi, T.B. Tail. It's me, Langley. I have one joke for you. Here it goes. What did the water balloon say to the kid? Squirt. Bye-bye.

You shout like that, they put you in jail. Right away. You're stealing, right to jail. You're playing music too loud, right to jail, right away. You're driving too fast, jail. Slow, jail. You're charging too high prices for sweaters, glasses, you're right to jail. You undercook fish, believe it or not, jail. You overcook chicken, also jail. Well, I've said a lot of things in my time. Not all of it's worth listening to. But let's just say this time round, it is.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. You're still doing a podcast? My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I think this guy's sense of humor never developed past junior high school.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia, where it's a, um... Didn't know you like to get wet, though. Just absolutely gloomy day. I messed it up by saying on the show recently, we've entered that phase of the season of the year where it's just going to be smooth sailing blue skies and 360 slam dunk pointers. And boy, was I wrong because boy, is it terrible out. My sister, I think it was my sister, Sarah, sent around a text on the Hawk Squad group chain, which was just one of those. If you have an iPhone, you know, the weather app. and it was some I don't know if she did this or somebody got really clever on the with the photoshopping but it was listing the Portland weather but it just said North Pole on top of it and I was forced to wonder is it worse weather here in southern Washington slash Portland than what is happening currently at the North Pole and would I be surprised to find out that we now have worse weather than the North Pole and that the polar bears are sipping Mai Tais and surfing because of how messed up the climate is wow what a what a wonderful way to start episode 4211 in a collector's series that was the desk ding that that intro deserved just kind of sad sad little ding anyway okay we've got a great show for you i promise that's i'm getting all this out of my system and we're going to be uh it's going to be smooth sailing here on episode 4211 in a collector series let the fun begin because we've got an interesting top story today about an unlikely place where some some art has been happening well i guess this is the part where the art gets made or more um accurately where art has been stolen from and then sold on the internet

and it is taco bell i might have tacos when i go home i'm not quite sure yet uh we'll get into that

Plus, we'll talk to this guy, longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He brings such a sort of varied toolbox of skills to the show. But I would say being able to tolerate my four stories day in and day out is one of his greatest strengths. If you want to talk, I've got two ears and they're tuned to the listening station. He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Salinger had nine stories. You have four. What can we say? And I'm the recluse, believe it or not.

Does that mean Lisa Loeb and the nine stories? That must be a Salinger reference. I didn't know that there was a Salinger nine stories thing. I just know I know Catcher in the Rye, which blew my mind grapes as a as a teenage boy.

And then I knew Franny and Zoe, and that's the extent of my knowledge of J.D. Salinger.

Nine Stories was a collection of short stories. Do you want to guess how many there were in the collection?

Hmm. Can I get a hint?

Less than 10.

Okay, but more than 8?

I'm going to say more than 7 1⁄2. The line is 8 1⁄2. I don't really know how that works. I just like saying the line is. Do you want me to

Once and for all Throw out a quick Description of what the line is

I think we just did this recently It just doesn't stick with me But I could Give the explanation But in the style of an example What would be the line If I were betting as to how many stories How many short stories are contained In the J.D. Salinger collection Nine stories If you set the line at eight and a half, what does that mean?

Well, that'd be more maybe an over-under.

Oh, okay.

So if I said over-under, what's the over-under on how many stories Lisa Loeb was working with? And if I set the over-under at, like, six, you'd be either betting that it's more than six stories or that it's less than six stories. That would be the over-under. Okay, that makes more sense here. So, like, are the Seahawks, how many, what's the over-under on how many points the Seahawks are going to score during a game? And I put the over-under, I'm like a Vegas odds maker. I put the over-under at 17 points. So if you think the Seahawks are not going to score a lot, you might take the under. If you think that this is going to be the time when Geno Smith really goes off, King, you might take the over.

But let me ask you this. Am I right that sometimes they set these things not on a specific point but a half? And what is the theory?

That's the spread.

So you wouldn't do that.

Well, the line and the spread are kind of the same.

Okay, but you wouldn't do that on over-under. You wouldn't say Seahawks over-under 17 and a half?

I don't think you need to because the 17 and a half is the spread, meaning the Seahawks are playing Lisa Loeb and the Nine Stories. I don't know how this got decided. The NFL is trying to expand beyond just the U.S., beyond Europe, but into people who are fans of music from the 90s. And so, uh, and it's available only on Hulu plus the Seattle Seahawks versus, uh, 10 people.

It's only available on Tufi for some reason.

It's on Tufi. It's the Seattle Seahawks against Lisa Loeb plus the nine stories and it's being played in Belgium at seven in the morning on a Sunday. Oh, is it week one?

Okay, great.

and uh and so it like the so you might say well that god i think that lisa lobe and the nine stories i think they're going to be out i think they're going to be really overmatched against a team of professional football players and so no one's going to bet on them to win the game because it just it's it's it's an obvious they're at an obvious disadvantage they're older i mean think about just the timeline lisa lobe is 56 years old she's from bethesda maryland so what you do in that case if you're las vegas if you're an odds maker is you say well the seahawks have to win by 61 and a half points so now you're doing that you're like okay i know the seahawks are going to beat lisa lobe in the nine stories but are they going to just run rough shot in such a way that they'll score and now you're going to have some people going well i don't think they're going to score that many points they might have some non-contact injuries they might just get Winded running a hundred Yards at a time with little defense From Lisa Loeb and the nine stories So now you've created a situation where there Are some people that will take the bet That Lisa Loeb and the nine stories Will lose but not lose by so many And what you're doing when you're setting the Line and I'm sorry that I'm Luke Explaining this so hard but I do feel like it comes up often on the Show they call her

They call her defense the legion of stay By the way that's so bad i'm so glad you're laughing at that that is such a terrible joke

i love it so um so i mean i'll tell you what man those cornerbacks are on an island i mean you have to have lockdown corners if you want to play the if you want to play the way the legion of state does um anyway so so that so the idea of the spread is that because this is This is the fundamental thing, and I don't know why I decided on this Wednesday morning, this rainy Wednesday morning, that I would be so obsessed with this particular point or trying to make this point. But what I think a misconception is around gambling, around sports betting, is that the casinos think they know who's going to win, so they've bet a bunch of money on the Seahawks versus Lisa Loeb. The casinos are completely apolitical in this. The casinos, what they want to do is create a line that is so enticing that exactly fits. 50% of the money will be on Lisa Loeb and the nine stories winning, or at least not losing by so many. And 50% of the money will be on the Seahawks. They don't ever want a situation where a bunch of the money is on one side of the ledger because then if they lose, they have to pay out a bunch. They want the losers to pay the winners and they keep the juice. They keep basically the service fees. That's their business model. Get everybody betting against each other in a way that we're totally fine no matter what happens. And we just keep the vague. We keep the little extra juice money that comes in from all of this. So that's why the line is what it is. And that's why the line moves throughout the week if somebody gets hurt. They are constantly trying to create a situation where you're like, well, I don't know. Like, I could see Lisa Loeb in the nine stories kind of playing their stay defense. They could kind of, the Legion of Stay, they could jam up the Seahawks a little bit. They might hold the Seahawks to a mere 58 points. So that's what that's all about.

Lisa Loeb gives great post-game pressers I will say that I feel like she's like A lot of athletes will just sort of Like give you like Coach speak Or just like gotta give it 110% every time or whatever I feel like she digs deep And actually tries to give decent answers About what she was trying to do out on the field

Kind of the Mike McDaniel style The coach of the Miami Dolphins

And similar glasses honestly

Which works in both of their favor That's a very good point That is a very good point. Boy, I have to say, it wasn't, I wish that the answer would have been a little bit more, I wish it would have been more of a rebuke, but he was asked, Mike McDaniel, okay, is the coach of the Miami Dolphins, and he's a pretty beloved coach figure because, one, he's very young, he's pretty unorthodox in how he puts some of his plays together, how he relates to his players, and also he does seem like the kind of person that in those press conferences, those post-games, He's really listening and trying to answer the questions in an interesting way, not just in a real coach-speak-bro, meaningless way.

He's a goofball, too. He's definitely trying to make people laugh at times. I mean, he knows he's funny.

Yeah, well, to my point, he was asked to respond to the Harrison Butker commencement speech stuff, which I don't know how familiar you are with that whole situation.

Yeah, no, I'm on board with everything he said. Is that what you're asking me?

I mean, that's a given, Andrew.

But do you think so that was a one thing I didn't realize was so this is a Chiefs. Who does he play for on the Chiefs? He's the kicker.

He's the guy that famously made me hundreds of dollars during the Super Bowl because he's going to kick.

I forgot about that. Right. And so he's giving a commencement address, I believe. And he says really retrograde things about about specifically about women. I mean, I don't even know if it was dumb. I mean, I think it was him shooting a shot in a certain I mean, he's dumb, obviously. And the like I say, the things he said about women's place in society are absolutely disgusting. I'm not co-signing that, obviously. But I also don't know that like was it a dumb move by him or was it a calculated move where he was just going to like get his his gross comments out there. But anyway, so what does McDaniel say about it?

Well, so a reporter is is trying to ask Mike McDaniel, the coach of the Dolphins, by the way, has nothing to do with this speech. right he's trying to ask him about it but in a roundabout way so that it's kind of relevant so he's asking he's going like well this Harrison Butker thing have you uh you know talk to your players about the comments they make in public or I mean this reporter is just trying to get him on the on the record about this thing that's the hottest story in football right now because there's nothing else really going on and Mike McDaniel said something to the effect of I'm so glad you asked and everybody laughed because it's like no one is less glad you asked than mike mcdaniel i mean there's there's no upside at all for him in getting asked a question about that all he can do is get himself into some sort of a predicament with somebody no matter what he says about it i mean obviously what you'd hope he would say is like that was that was ret like that was caveman retrograde bullshit from harrison butker but he can't say that either because you know that will alienate the whomever out there so he kind of you know he tapped dance and said well you gotta he goes we do have talks with our players about how they have a pretty big platform and so you know when they say something it will definitely reverberate so they really want to be mindful of that he didn't come out and just say like boy is that guy a moron well and I guess that

wasn't the question either I mean you could I mean honestly I'm trying to think in football I mean obviously in basketball which is a more progressive league you have coaches and I'm blanking on his name who's one of the most famous coaches for um golden state who is often steve kerr steve kerr he's often outspoken on issues and he'd be the first one to say like oh yeah what that person said is bull um so you can as a coach i guess i can't think of a lot of nfl coaches that do that but i also guess if the question is like i i actually appreciate mcdaniel's like kind of approach of being like Okay. It's so clear that, like, you're not even asking me what do I think of these awful comments of this person. I mean, you're trying to make it somehow relevant to me and my club.

Well, you want to – I mean, the reporter does want to ask him what he thinks about the comments. But he knows that if he asks him that, he'll have made an enemy for life. So he nominally attaches it to something Dolphins-related.

Which is pretty, like – which is, like, honestly, like, I'm only hearing about this from you for the first time. I mean, I don't I don't really appreciate that approach from the journalist either. If they want to ask a question, just ask him, what do you make of those remarks? And and, you know, and then instead of doing this sort of squirmy thing where you're like, you know, asking a tortured question to try to apply it to his locker room, I think that's kind of that's kind of bull. So he just said, I'm so glad you asked and then just gave him some sort of a non-answer pablum.

Yes. Yeah. But the I'm so I'm so glad you asked was the was the laugh line.

for me that's pretty good yeah i can he was acknowledging picture him saying that yeah hey

um this is a uh an odd pivot but i i want to get an update from you about how it went when you visited the doctor about um the uh you know the sort of the potential carpal tunnel that you've been dealing with or what you think might be carpal tunnel what's going on with that how'd

that go well yeah so i went to the doctor the other day we talked about on the show before i went i've been having like um it started with sort of pain like one day and i and this is kind of key to the story i remember it was one particular morning i woke up and both of my wrists and hands were very achy as if i had been clenching them very tightly in my sleep and so this area around my wrists and where my wrist kind of meets my thumb and then other areas of my hand as well but especially kind of that area um was in a lot of pain and so i wanted to kind of keeping an eye on that and then that sort of ended and i was getting advice from friends who were thinking maybe you know some sort of tendinitis or whatever genevieve was wondering if it's some sort of a like rheumatoid arthritis because that's kind of an autoimmune thing and i've dealt with other autoimmune things but i was like okay well let's see where this goes the biggest disappointment was i couldn't throw darts um but then it started to become like kind of a tingling and numbness in my hands and fingers and then people were saying oh yeah that definitely sounds like that definitely it sounds like carpal tunnel. And so I looked up the symptoms of carpal tunnel and a lot of it does sound like carpal tunnel, but I wasn't sure if it was like, yeah, but something is causing that, you know, carpal tunnel is a specific thing where things are happening inside you where nerves are getting pinched or whatever, but also could there be something that has caused, you know, some other health condition that is causing that. Um, and so I went into the doctor, I've, I had the symptoms for about two, two and a half weeks and I went to the doctor, which is actually pretty good um ground speed record for me honestly usually it'd be like a year later and I generally was dragging me there by what hair I have left um but uh but this time I was like really excited to go to the doctor because I wanted to get to the bottom of this and it's scary too you know like pain is one thing and I don't like pain I don't know if you know that um I'm kind of an outlier on that um but uh but with the tingliness and the numbness just like happening is like it's a very disconcerting feeling and you want to know what's going on with you right so i went in yeah and um a lot of people said they're probably going to give you these night guards to sleep with on your hands um to keep them from kind of curling up at night and i had read that as well and that's i go in and he kind of i'm telling him about all the symptoms and he kind of does various tests on me to sort of test my strength of my hand because i'm sort of implying to him i'm like i don't know if this could be like some sort of arthritis-y thing that's causing this but he kind of does a bunch of like kind of physical tests with me very quickly like does when i when i push here does it you know trigger any kind of tingling or sensation or whatever but also some of these i grip my fingers as hard as you can or or i'm going to try to compress your hand you try to you know spread your fingers out or whatever and i think i passed all those with flying colors which made me feel good kind of gave me sort of mixed emotions It's like, oh, OK, yeah, that is true. If I probably had a if I was really suffering from some sort of a arthritic kind of thing, maybe I wouldn't have the strength to do these things.

And then he also did send me down to get like x-rays taken of both of my hands and and then also drew blood down in the lab. And so I had blood work looked at. Apparently, some of those things should show indicators for various ailments. um and he sent me home with a couple of like those wrist guards to wear one for each hand the moment the um nurse put one of those on my hands and just like tightened it up a little bit it felt so good I said to her I'm like oh my god that feels so good she's like I know doesn't she's like just be careful don't like don't swaddle your hands so much that your fingers lose like blood you know blood circulation right because I know that feeling I had a foot injury or an ankle thing and I'd put this on and fell.

so good and then my toes would start turning blue and be like all right too tight but it was amazing how because I'm the type of person I don't like I think a lot of people are like this but I think you especially would understand how I like I don't like medical gear you know what I mean like it's just kind of like putting on like I've avoided getting like a CPAP machine and like I don't know I just don't like I don't know I don't like I don't like having to put on medical gear to go to sleep at night but I will say that I've been wearing these things but then the blood work comes back luke already it's termites i got termites in my hands now i don't know what it is basically all i did get the blood work back literally the next day and a bunch of lab results and my doctor had like sort of written on each one this means no indicators of anything bad no indicators of anything bad um essentially but then just today but i was so i'm like well that's good news if This is just classic carpal tunnel. A lot of people have dealt with this. That's workable. I have these fins I can go to sleep with now. They're not even like fins. You know, our camera is malfunctioning, so I can't show you this. Yeah, I can't see you. I'll just have to listen to you. Yeah, this is the sound of Velcro on these things. The only way I get through it is by pretending I master Shredder from the Teenage Mutant Ninja Turtles as I kind of strap these babies up.

Of all days for the camera to not be working.

It was working before.

The day that you're showing me your new sleep fin.

It might be kind of good. Maybe I don't want to see this on Insta, but that does feel good, actually. Just give me a moment here. I don't like that I can't see you, but you're making those noises. Just like the good old days. Anyway, but then as I'm thinking about it more and more, I'm like, yeah, but I was really advocating for myself in there. I wasn't trying. Before I went in, Genevieve was like, I need you to advocate for yourself in there. I'm like, yeah, I didn't think that was really a problem with me. But I told him the whole story. I told him all the details. I told him I had a pretty bad outbreak of, like, eczema. I'm like, that's probably unrelated. But if we are talking autoimmune stuff, you should know I have a background in that. I thought I was advocating for myself pretty well. But then, like, you know, basically I'm getting all these results saying that everything is fine. Just, you know, it's probably carpal tunnel. Where are these things? But I'm like, and I don't really have a – I'm not going anywhere with this. It's just like kind of this morning I'm just waking up like, yeah, but two – like, I just wake up one day. I have no symptoms of carpal tunnel. And then one day I wake up and both of my hands hurt really bad. Like that doesn't seem like the way carpal tunnel works. That seems kind of odd to me. Yeah. But I will say, so here's the bottom line here. I will say that wearing these shredder gloves at night does help. I had forgotten. I had gotten used to the idea of just like every, I think I was waking up like at least every 20 minutes or something throughout the night. Like waking up, turning over because I was just constantly having to turn over because my hands were numb or painful or my shoulders or my whole arm or whatever. So wearing these things stabilize my wrist and my hand in a way. And I also think lightly compress it. So some of the swelling is going down, which is good. but i'm also getting less and less satisfied with this idea of like this is just like some sort of you know some sort of function of of me using a mouse and a laptop every day it just doesn't seem like it should just just burst onto the scene in both hands like that and then moments now i don't want to get super detailed into what test results i got back but i thought that we had already gotten all the blood results back until you and i were just dialing up and i just got pinged apparently another blood result just came back that is the first one that looks high the doctor has not commented on it yet and i just googled what it is and it is something that it can be an uh kind of an arbiter or a measure of it sounds like rheumatoid arthritis or similar types of swelling so it would be kind of nice if there was it would be kind of like i don't want arthritis it's like be careful what you wish for right like i'm not saying that but it would be kind of nice if it's not just kind of like yeah i don't know put these two things on at night and you're probably fine

because right because that's dealing with the symptoms that's not dealing with the cause that's

or it would so it would seem so anyway it's a journey the bottom line is i'm going back in a month and i'll wear these shredder gloves for a while and continue to take a lot of ibuprofen it is weird in the mornings man i think the past two mornings since having these gloves has helped a little bit um but you can tell how much you can tell how much function i don't have in my hands in the morning because i can't get the ibuprofen out of the bottle it is like a commercial it's like a commercial of like trying to get pills out but you can't because your hands don't work and it's a combination of both like really stiff pain combined with numbness and which is and the numbness

is is part is partially because it's just been happening and because of the wearing of these

these these gloves no the numbness started the numbness started about a week into all of this so at first it was just pain but

Thank you.

then i started to get really concerned when i started to get pain along with numbness and tingling almost like this perpetual sense of like varying degrees of when you're when your you know hand falls asleep or something only it's like that kind of all day i mean not all day there are moments where it's better and moments where it's worth worse but like yesterday it's just like it's a very uncomfortable feeling i was on the um you know like the elliptical machine yesterday and just doing my thing, listening to my Sirius Radio hip-hop station. And I'm really all in on it, Luke. And then out of the blue, my arms and hands start feeling numb and tingly. And so I kind of got to remember to raise them up a little bit. But it just gives you a sense of lack of control over your body. It gave me this very bad feeling of being on this machine where a man built like me maybe shouldn't be on this machine anyway. It's always a bit of a precarious situation. And then I'm just like suddenly like, oh, man, I don't even know if I can trust my hands anymore. What if I suddenly got this in my feet? Is this machine going to eat me? I don't know. It's just kind of a it's in my head a little bit because it's not like a cold. It's like I feel like my hands shouldn't just be going numb in the middle of the day.

Have you considered any change to your ergonomic setup? I know this sounds incredibly, like, sort of unsexy as a solution, but, like, literally where your wrists are resting when you're doing your editing and stuff. Like, have you—what I know from people I've worked with who've had stuff kind of like this, a lot of it comes down to that, obviously computer movement, things like that. Is there anything—did they recommend anything around that, for, like, the stuff you're doing for most of the day that could be making this worse?

That's kind of interesting that he didn't really even bring that up. He brought up the idea that he had some word for it, not just carpal tunnel, but generally like something with the word tech in it. But just basically because we're like we can be kind of hunched over, especially if you're like stressed out with spreadsheet. That's exactly what he said. It's funny that I couldn't remember that term. But he didn't necessarily recommend that. I think what we're going to see is like, let me come back in a month and let's let's see where we are there. And I'm pretty good with that. It's not like, hey, put these on, and if you have any more issues, call me, and then I have to wonder, like, well, what are the issues? You know what I mean? Or, like, am I – because part of me was leaving the doctor's office just thinking, oh, maybe I've been making too big of a deal of all of this, you know? Like, maybe other people just deal with this, and it's like, for me, I'm making it sound like it's, like, the end of the world.

See, that to me is, in a way, even though it was after the fact, that's what I think Genevieve was probably trying to hype you up on about advocating for yourself. because knowing you I could see and again I tell me if I'm incorrect on this I sometimes when bad things happen to you I think you tend to personalize it like you tend to think like you did something to deserve this or to other people have figured out how to not have this happen and well I'm a sinful boy I'm a sinful boy you're you're pretty you're pretty hard on yourself about that stuff and so if you're leaving the doctor's office thinking well I was able to push back against his hand it's not like I'm unable to operate my my appendages at all therefore maybe I just everyone has this and I'm just being a baby about it it's like I don't think everybody has it I don't think you're being a baby about it I think sounds like you're really dealing with something so I hope that you I hope you did I hope you stopped going down that road of thinking well maybe this is maybe actually everyone else has this and they're just not complaining and I'm just being a complainer about it because I don't think you are well the good news is you and I are

not talking about starting a project where we'll need to use our hands to do any kind of fine motor

skill activity oh yeah now andrew that's a real interesting angle on this that i had not even considered the timing is and this will make more sense in the coming weeks when we make some announcements around let's just say future projects um very interesting that you would be developing these symptoms right before again I can't say too much right now but the timing

I've leaked more than we agreed to but yeah anyway

well I'm sorry man I mean are you getting some relief from these braces they gave you and have you been able to take up to the darting life again

you know what the funny thing is I was darting a little bit and that's where it comes down to how much of this is sort of a mental thing sort of because I did say to the doctor i'm like hey i play a lot of darts or whatever and so that's why it sort of makes sense why i would feel this in my right hand but i don't understand why i'm feeling it my left hand and but i will say that everything is more pronounced in my right hand it was more swollen over there and that's where i have more pain although it's definitely in both hands and he even said something like he's like yeah i'm trying to think that even say near the end of our appointment he's like yeah and you can maybe maybe try taking a rest from the darts or he said something that was so mild i don't even know if it was a suggestion of that or just like

you know see how it feels when you're so that's like asking me to take a rest from breathing

well no because i

said like i honestly have not been playing that much darts i was like i looked at him i was like well i haven't really been playing darts because every time i throw a dart it hurts like like i i sort of felt like that was sort of a disconnect between what i was telling him and and what i wasn't but on the other hand well here's the deal here's where we really get into the um the sort of um not self-flagellation but the the sort of the the mentality that maybe i have going into doctor's offices, especially in the past like 10 years or so, whenever I go in for just like a regular checkup, I've been really, really lucky that I haven't had any actual health issues that have had to be addressed that have, you know, need to be addressed except for when I hurt myself, you know, falling and, you know, trying to save my camera. I broke some fingers a while back. But like there hasn't I haven't suffered from any actual, you know, diseases or anything like that and so when I go into the doctor's office to get a checkup one of the reasons I don't do it more is because it always just comes down to like I guess it's a lecture and it's I say that both this doctor and the doctor I had previous to him are both very good men neither one of them said anything to me that was inappropriate or whatever they're both very kind people who gave me long lectures about various aspects of my lifestyle Luke you know I mean like weight diet drinking all these things I'm really glad I don't smoke cigarettes anymore but even you know marijuana consumption it's kind of like I know none of these things are good for

me none of them by the way this is what you're describing is what keeps many people out of the

doctor's office yeah and that's kind of it and it's kind of like I want to be honest with them but I also don't want it almost always feels like kind of a and again they're not bummers about it but it's just and maybe I'm again it comes back to my own mentality of being like not just taking that and be like yeah that's a good idea and i am trying to you know like i am trying to get a little bit more uh exercise these days by going to the gym i'm not i always say that to you i'm not i don't think i'm on some plan to become you know the adonis in the back seat in the back pages of an archie comic book where i'm kicking sand on the weakling i don't think i'll ever become that

guy luke no matter how ripped or how do we get our hands on some x-ray glasses though so we could see we could see through walls

I do have a line on some sea lions sea monkeys I knew I was saying it wrong I was slowing down I ordered sea

monkeys yeah they didn't work right it was powder or something they're brine shrimp and it was such a let down because they did you know like they did come alive but they are maybe a tenth of an inch if that and I thought they were going to have a couch because in the picture it's like a family it's like a royal family of very humanoid shrimp that are sitting on a couch in like a fishbowl and there's like a mom and a dad and kids i thought i was just going to have this whole family that i was going to be taking care of in my bedroom and there were just these guys like barely qualifying as as a life of form brian shrimp swimming around in the

water i wonder if the simpsons ever did that as a couch gag oh good point i feel like now i'm already forgetting i keep my one to say sea lions they're sea monkeys why can't i keep that in my head um but anyway yeah you're right i mean that and that's where it's like if you're a doctor and you see a patient who's in his middle age and he's generally like lucky that he hasn't had any big health issues but also hey you're at the time of your life where you need to be you know not living recklessly and keeping an eye on diet and everything like that's totally that's totally reasonable feedback from a from a medical professional but then i'm always kind of like I don't want to go back in there because anything I have, they're just going to tell me, you know, the same thing over and over, like, well, watch what you're eating and, you know, all these other kind of bad habits. And so then like, it does make me not want to go to the doctor. And I think that this time I was going in there thinking like this can't have, I mean, maybe again, my, my setup at my desk or whatever, but I was kind of relieved that it didn't come back to, well, you got to do this, you got to do that. And, you know, we told you like, you know, get a better chair or whatever, which are all real things i should consider um honestly these days like honestly this the plastic chair i have is not so bad the one i had before it was it was quite bad i think but it felt kind of good not to feel like this was somehow my fault or something and we just got to like it's not lifestyle related per se per se i mean it could be some things around the edges

but it's something to like kind of kind of like not sausage consumption it's not it's not sausage related it's something more probably kind of you know neuropathic more nerve related or something

yeah which everything is connected though like i you know it does say that uh carpal tunnel you know it'll affect you more if you are overweight and all these things it's like none of this stuff happens in a vacuum and again like i should live a better lifestyle but there are also people who suffer from a lot you know worse things than i do who live much cleaner lifestyles and vice I know. that's always the that's always the the the sort of what's the word I'm looking for that's always the dilemma is you know if you're there are people that are extremely extremely healthy they live very healthily they eat really clean they're all this stuff and then there are the people the normal people most people are probably somewhere in the middle most people probably make some good decisions and some bad decisions and it's like though it's like if all I made were good decisions would that improve my life enough that it's worth not getting to indulge in the things that are fun and bad decisions right and i i think about this a lot like do i want to live and i'm not trying to be like a like a bad you know kathy comic what's like yeah i could live to a hundred but if all i can eat is celery who wants to like but seriously like do i want to live um a really really long life um that is where i'm really healthy but i'm not getting to like just absolutely house some rice krispie treats that becca made like i was last night at 10 o'clock at night like i don't know it's a trade-off it's like there there are the and then there of course many examples of people who who live really who are super make really great decisions and unfortunately they suffer health issues and or their life you know comes to an end at some point you know like there's just there there is in a broad sense a predicting of this like if you take a thousand people and they all do one kind of thing and a thousand people do something else you can say pretty reliably the group that's doing the better choices is gonna like live longer and have a better quality of life or whatever but there's so many like anecdotal exceptions to that and it's just like i don't know i that's a that's a push pull in my life as well everybody wants to be

this is an antiquated reference now but i remember in the 80s everybody was like everybody would say look at george burns you know like he would wake up and eat bacon and eggs every day and smoke five cigars and drink too much and he lived to be what actually what do you think he lived to be i feel like he lived to be into his hundreds 48 but he also was probably he was born looking like

that too that's i i actually something came up on tiktok the other day which was like i don't and by the way absolutely no way to verify this but it was like you know famous like the last thing that these celebrities said right so it was like but they were this is this it might even be ai generated at this point because it's so like it's hard to explain but what it was was just kind of like a scroll from left to right photographs of a kind of well-known people and like a quote that was attributed to being like the last thing that they said you know one of them was marilyn monroe and i was like i don't think anyone was with marilyn monroe when

she passed so i don't know how we're really verifying that well the kennedys were well

yeah exactly i can't i'm not allowed to talk about that on this frequency but um but but i was looking at it and what i was really struck by regardless of if these last words were actually accurate or not was how not old a lot of people were when they passed away people who in my mind i was like well they must have been a hundred when they died it's like no 50 4 60 you know like it's as we get as i get older i'm constantly shocked at how not old people you know who i thought were old before and also people who you know aren't alive anymore like they they they weren't that old when they died now it's weird how that number starts moving as as i get into you know as i approach 50 although becca will be mad if she hears me since it was like my birthday three weeks ago like she does not like me calling myself a 50 year old even though at this point i

feel like rounding up because you're 49 no you're 48 now yeah yeah but let's be honest i mean it's 50 is around the corner dude for whatever it's worth george burns really did live to be 100 years old but do you know good do you feel like there i don't know why i group these things together but i feel like there were two things that i heard a lot when it came to health in like i say the 80s but maybe this is the early 90s i don't know whenever i was like just like getting information filtered to me through overheard conversations between adults but i always feel like it was always like well look at george you never know look at george burns he lived to be 100 and then also I don't know one day eggs are good for you the next day they're not I don't know anymore I feel like everybody was figuring out eggs and cholesterol in the 80s and 90s like I don't know good cholesterol bad cholesterol I don't and we're all get like I'm getting my information from adults who are half paying attention to morning quote-unquote news shows

I'm right now I'm having one of those moments that happens a lot on the show where I'm having to really rethink uh re-remember my whole childhood because the sea monkeys were not on a couch they were sitting on some dirt on the bottom of the floor of this fishbowl they live in i don't know where i got the couch from i just remember that they were sitting like the mom is sitting and then the dad is standing with the son and then there's a little baby with the mom so the mom was sitting down and i took that in my mandela fide memory of these they were on a couch like they were in a living room like they were like a 1950s like a i love lucy sitcom but i mean that's

not what they were doing but are you

sure that you're seeing yeah the one i'm looking at is definitely it's definitely the one and and andrew can you imagine being a kid being a lonely kid and getting seeing this ad enter the wonderful wonderful world of amazing live pets own a bowl full of happiness instant pets so eager to please

they can even be trained man can you send me that i want to see that because is it like the back of is it like black and white or just like rudimentary colorful they were it were only a dollar 25 i'll see if i can um oh yes i oh i know this well you don't have to send it to me i got it yes i remember this perfectly yeah they're sort of like they're sort of lounging on dirt it's way more text heavy

than i remembered and there's a few different ones that i'm seeing but yeah it you know what it looks like it looks like um some of the dr brauner's bottles they're just like covered in like uh all manner of writing yes it's like the ranting of an unwell mind exactly right i'll also say and i hope

this is appropriate to say but one of these sea monkeys can really get it well that's the other

thing this is probably why it captured my attention because i was like i don't know what's going on with that mom sea monkey, but something is stirring.

I can't believe you went with me on that. Oh, no, I was thinking it the whole time.

I was trying to be appropriate for once. All right, let's thank some dazzling donors.

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.

First off, we've got to thank Julie Billen of Vermont, France. Look at you. Ooh la la. Vermont, is that how you said that? I don't know. I just, when in doubt, I mean, I'm just, I'm legendarily poor with my, with French pronunciation. Not that I'm great at any other non-English pronunciation, but like, I'm especially bad with French. I just kind of get, I just get vague. Very mohon.

You start dropping letters here and there and just start talking out of your nose more and more. That's what I do.

Oh, we cool. Oh, no.

Oh, no. You're the only person who gets what that's even a reference to. Do you know the show that that's from?

Yes, that's from Modern Family.

It's from Modern Family, exactly.

That's Phil Dunphy, I believe. I was going, very mohon. No, we not.

No, we not.

Julie is in France and says, howdy, Luke and Andrew. By the way, Julie is supporting TVTL with a dazzling amount of dough, and we are grateful. I've recently been in despair about finding something to say in this dazzling donor message. Wow, Julie, please, don't take it so hard. In despair about finding something to say in this dazzling donor message, since the dazzlers before me have pretty much said it all, and said it in the cleverest of ways. Just think about yourself, Julie, as standing on the shoulders of giants. And disappointing them. No, just joking.

Don't be a meaner. How do you say despair in French?

Then I remembered that this is my opportunity to thank Danielle Charpier, who so kindly snatched up a lunch pail for me at the 4,000th episode and sent it to me in France on her dime. Merci, Danielle.

Oh, wow. That's the TBTL.

That's also a very French name, Danielle Charpier.

I'm assuming that that's why they connected.

i bring the lunchbox to work every day and it really makes me happy keep up the good work julie okay first things first andrew um i the i would have never predicted the second act for the tbtl lunchboxes they i mean it just proves that you never know what's going to happen in this crazy life um because we you know obviously we ordered or somebody at apm ordered more lunchboxes than we ended up needing there were some of the design elements that you and i were really happy about others that of the lunchbox that we maybe if we'd had more time we would have done differently and you and I had kind of written them off mostly because there was hundreds of them that were just in the warehouse somewhere as like you could say maybe a a bit of a stumble for us as as as podcast fundraiser gift givers and yet between bringing them to my parents house stacking them up down there taking them to the 4,000th giving them away and them ending up in France and then Julie is like putting her lunch together in a lunchbox with you and me and Rudy and walking to or I don't know, taking the what's the mass transit in France? I don't know. I know it's not like the tube is London. The tube is London, but anyway. The idea that Julie is just like in France going to work with this lunchbox.

it makes me very very happy it makes me um ambivalent that my doctor says that uh he's weighed in on these test results and says that these are not concerning so whatever i saw earlier today that had me thinking that i was um in bad shape the doctor says i'm okay so that's good

right julie i guess although i feel like you want there i'm not saying you want there to be a problem but you want there to be a concrete thing that can be pointed to that that would like then be uh something to work off of towards a solution yeah i mean i think what you're dealing with right now is what so many people deal with in the medical uh sort of experience which is uh lack of specificity lack of specifics a kind of like let's just see where this goes approach and people will often say about things more serious than what you're dealing with it was really upsetting to get the diagnosis but in a way it was a relief because now we know what we're dealing with and maybe it

can be remedied and what you're dealing with here is a lack of filter from me sorry that email just came in and i was very curious to see if they had you know solved the termite problem inside my body i'll just put on my glove again and um because i can't see you it is a real theater of the mind

as i hear you sheathing and unsheathing your hands from that thing anyway julie thank you so much we could not do this uh merci beaucoup julie merci beaucoup maestro on your mark on your mark get

set get set now ready ready go everybody rattle it is weird andrew that you're mild i don't mean

weird like you're um how do i put this i don't mean weird like like um uh you're rooting for something bad to get a bad diagnosis but it is an interesting position to be in yeah you're mildly disappointed yeah by hearing that things are okay there's nothing detectable going on with

this yeah and being like oh the email that i got this morning was hey new test result in and i look at it it's got like this little slider where it's like kind of green in the middle and then yellow on the low end and yellow on the uh on the high end right and this is the first test result i saw where the little indicator relating where i am was way over to the right in the yellow and i was kind of like boom there it is we found it you know i like pro i like um what do we say like when we have a technical issue troubleshooting things right like oh well here it is this is the loose wire these are the spiders that are living inside of me right because of the time i was playing in the stairwell as a kid you knew i believed i had spiders living inside me for a

long time right um and sir you've tested positive for jim beam i mean well there's that but also

would it be satisfying if they're just like oh yeah you have a family of spiders that have been

living in you for like 39 years like and and despite what you've heard they don't have a couch yeah they do not have a mom is kind of hot

attractive definitely attractive as far as spiders go this is exactly andrew the kind of um

off the cup but very real very honest very transparent conversation that samir koreshi of porter ranch california can't get enough how do we know this because samir is our second Dazzling Donor today And is supporting the program So he must like it Samir says hi friendos I must say that the magic you create With TBTL is something else I've tried driving into I've tried diving into other podcasts Looking for something that might come close to the vibe And the quality you two deliver But nope it's like you set the bar way up In the stratosphere God Samir That's exactly what I needed on a rainy Wednesday Let's see The effort, the love, and the sheer production value you put into each episode don't just set you apart. It's like you're playing a whole different game.

God.

Samir, would you like to be our pro bono promotions person? That's a lot of Ps, dude. I know that.

I need you to read this slower, Luke. Make this moment last.

I'm going to read it slowly while you... Okay, I'm ready. Okay, ready? It's like you've got the bar way up in the stratosphere.

Nice.

The effort, the love, and the sheer production value you put into each episode don't just set you apart. It's like you're playing a whole different game. Wow. It's like... You know who you're like with those things? Who was the mariner some years ago whose kind of tick at the plate was constantly adjusting their batting gloves, but by undoing the Velcro and tightening just the wrist portion?

It wasn't Evan White, was it? Was it Dee Gordon, maybe?

It was, I forget. I just know that there was a Mariner who, they would stand at the plate, and they would, in between pitches, each time, they would, and then they would tighten their batting gloves, each of them. And they had this kind of technique where they could hold the bat, step out of the box, tighten the batting gloves, step back on the box.

box i am i'm googling this this doesn't necessarily i mean i'm trying to figure out if it rings a bell or not like just the very corner i always think of um i always i know that this is not what you're talking about but i always think of ichiro's stance because each road might have been ichiro well ichiro would always like remember he'd hold out his his arm straight and then he would with his other hand like sort of just like loosen the loosen the jersey around his shoulder a little bit sort of pull the sleeve up and I know our buddy Durs works in radio and for a while he was like running the board at KOW when I worked there and he would always like when it was time for him to open there'd be me and maybe another producer in the room but he had to like get ready to open up his microphone and he always did this thing where he would take his hand he'd take his left hand you can't see me now but you can probably picture it he'd take his left hand and swoop it across his hair can you picture that ders move swooping it across his hair then adjust the microphone which was on one of those boom arm things and like undo it and then um hold up his hand and say stand by and it was like the most like it was like it was such a ritualized thing he was like each row at the plate every time he went to crack his microphone and i can still get him to laugh

by just yelling stand by at him at any moment hey his system worked he was really good yeah here's what samir says it's not just the laughs of which there are plenty or the stories you share Of which there are four I put that part in It's the feeling of Hanging out with my friends Every time I hit play Whether I'm stuck in traffic Or just chilling at home You've got this uncanny ability To turn ordinary moments Into something special And for that I am truly grateful Wrapping this up I want to say A massive thank you again You guys have created Something truly special With TBTL And it means a lot To so many of us Out here Well, Samir I mean You just like Really put some wind In my sails I'm going to be I'm going to be Coasting off of this message And just how kind and complimentary it was for a good while. So, right back at you. And Samir, we wouldn't be here doing this without the support of you and many other folks like you. So, thank you very much. Was he opening a candy bar? Hello and welcome to Top Story. Okay, I was going to talk to you about this taco bell art thing which is actually i think fairly interesting but can i just can we do that tomorrow and can i just get something else off my chest that i think is is a is a sort of an update to another although it's funny it's another restaurant related story that we've talked about but i feel a little chagrined because i feel like i kind of helped a little bit buy into this false narrative that i'm now embarrassed about and it's related to red lobster oh okay have you been kind of following the like the second and third wave of the Red Lobster reporting reportage on the topic?

Oh, no, because I feel like I was the one who sort of pushed the Red Lobster thing, and that was about a month ago now. And then I saw one of the newsletters that I follow that sort of is kind of a roundup of interesting news stories and important news stories called Next Draft. I saw that they just had the story yesterday about Red Lobster and the all-you-can-eat shrimp being part of the downfall, the financial downfall of this company that was declaring bankruptcy. I thought, my attitude when I saw that headline was, hey, we were kind of out in front of this. And when I say we were out in front of it, we never talked about it on the show, but we intended to, and that's what's important. Did we ever actually get to the Red Lobster story? No, it was on a bunch of different show sheets. Oh, my God. We were going to talk about it. I believe we were going to maybe even talk about it on Super Show.

No, no, we talked about it on TBTL because you said that it was like a challenge and that you felt your take was that you felt like it was kind of like, go us. Like, we did it. We broke the casino.

We, the shrimp eaters of the world. said that we we did it we beat the house but anyway so i thought i i thought i was seeing validation in the headlines this week are you saying that we got something wrong and it's

probably more on me than you we didn't get we didn't get it so wrong but we and we even acknowledged this when we talked about it a little bit that the sexy part of the story the the part that jumped out to everyone was oh they really screwed up with this all you can eat shrimp thing like that was really that was a a really bad idea because never underestimate the american Publix appetite for shrimp Right and But I remember even when I was reading That story back then they were saying you know That caused him to lose 11 million Dollars and my Spidey sense was tingling because to be Honest with you when you have as many restaurants as Red Lobster has it's a big operation 11 million Dollars is not that much money I do remember us

Saying that specifically I had the same thing Like yeah 11 mil like that's not

What like the way that A lot of people talked about this was Boy, Red Lobster, you really screwed up When you basically Tempted the American public To eat all the shrimp they could And they said, hold my beer They said, hold my Cheddar Bay Biscuit Now give it back to me, because those are delicious Hold my cocktail sauce So

I mean, what's emerging now really is a kind of a is dark, really, the way to put it. Just like a sadder story about the sort of economics of of of the world that we now live in. What? Because like the fun part of the story has been like, well, you Americans eat a lot of shrimp. But the real story is this. It appears to be anyway, at this point. Red Lobster was purchased, you know, a number of years ago by a company, a private equity firm. And things went great. That was it. Oh, wait, that's something. Sorry, that's never been said. In the history of commerce, it's never been. They were acquired by a private equity firm, and then everything weirdly improved.

And then they found their soul and their character. They got their groove back.

It's more of a groove. Like, they were acquired. Look, say what you want about, like, Red Lobster. I mean, it's a pretty down-the-middle, mostly landlocked seafood restaurant experience. It isn't like I thought that Red Lobster was itself some mom and pop that needed preserving. But when you hear about a private equity firm acquiring them, and the thing about Red Lobster when this private equity firm acquired them was really what Red Lobster had that was valuable was real estate. All of those Red Lobsters, those were all, you know, they generally owned the property the Red Lobsters were on. So what did the private equity firm do? they sold all of the real estate they basically acquired they they sold all the real estate off for like i think they bought the whole thing for two billion and they sold the real estate for like one and a half billion and then each individual red lobster location had to like lease back the property from this company at some kind of very elevated cost so you basically had a private equity firm that wanted to just do a real estate acquisition and just happened to have a bunch of

red lobster sitting on the real estate and i'm sorry i kind of lost out there and then the

franchisees had to rebuy their property back i believe that because the franchisees had to then like lease the property back from the company from red lobster now i don't know what they were paying before i'm a little sketchy on those details too but what i know is that this main asset that this private equity firm was trying to really acquire was all this land that all these red lobsters were on and somehow in buying red lobster they then owned that land as well which and I don't know what the exact details of the franchisee's agreement was between how much they were paying before, because obviously the Red Lobster Corporation owned the land. It couldn't have been that it was owned by the franchisee or else there's no way that Red Lobster, the new private equity people could have just had the right to sell it. Somehow they did something with the real estate which then made these Red Lobsters a much less sort of legitimate business operation because suddenly they went from owning the land or or paying something nominal on the land or whatever to having to lease the land at what was above market rates is what i was reading the other day that is then bummer this is also the crazy part then that private equity firm apparently once they had kind of like basically stripped this thing for parts they then apparently sold it to a company that is wait for it andrew a shrimp company like a seafood like a company that's you know main thing is like harvesting seafood so you want to talk about some serious vertical integration and the word on the street i should have you can tell that i didn't plan on talking about this to you because i don't have the details right in front of me but this the the most apparently the most recent owner i think the one maybe that's gone that's gone into bankruptcy now was actually a company whose primary thing was you know see like producing seafood and then the question becomes like were they selling their shrimp to red lobster at over market price because they owned the shrimp but then they also were the owners of red lobster somehow so was that also making it you know and there's also questions around some of the quality control of it you just had this kind of weird world you don't want too much quality control around shrimp no no and so i know that i'm kind of like i'm i'm i'm really kind of shooting from the hip and i'm also i'm getting a lot of the details probably a little bit wrong but it seems like the larger real story here is one of how unfortunately our economy now tends to work which is you have these private equity companies that come in and they basically buy something up because they see some there's they want to get the catalytic converter off of it and then they just like plasma torch it they take off the parts they want they they you know they get some return on their investment and then they just leave and there is definitely some kind

of a lobster reference here just the husk just the shell of whatever it is they came in yeah and And then, and this is something else.

that i was thinking about the other day is that this is a lot of jobs like it's actually a lot of jobs it's like i don't know how many red lobsters 400 or something red lobsters think about all of those red lobsters and all the people that worked at each one of those that's a that's a sizable number of people who were supporting themselves by going to these jobs at these red lobsters and because this private equity firm and these other series of what i would say are sort of of like not particularly uh well-intentioned owner groups people that just want to come in now granted it's their money they bought something they guess legally they have the right to do what they want but the idea they just kind of came in took out what they could got their money got out of there and just left something manifestly worse than they found it and now it's just going to go away uh it's just it's just a shitty feeling and it's like and i feel like this whole it's it's not a maybe a red herring but definitely a red shrimp that we're all talking about like they gave they they set their shrimp prices wrong it's like no these these profiteers came in and profiteered off something and now i can't go down the hill actually i might i don't know i drove by a red lobster the other day in android i was like is it open is it not open am i still am i in the goldilocks zone of red lobsters that are still

operating oh that's funny because i was just i was looking at google maps to see where the nearest one near me is looks like there might be one way up in linwood or way down in tacoma but nothing in between permanently closed the one near me andrew let me check out uh the wait no that's a different town the one in by the way they they're always described as a and i didn't realize this a new england themed seafood chain i didn't realize it had a kind of i guess i could

see that with the the like the architectures and like the style of it is a little um yeah it feels

a little new england to me it looks like the ones um yeah this one well actually is this in linwood or is it an Edmonds? No, it's Linwood. Culturally Red Lobster. It's culturally Alderwood Mall. But anyway, that's right. Did I tell you, I think I might have mentioned this off air. I went out with some friends to dinner and it was, oh, it was Korean barbecue, which I haven't had Korean barbecue since I was like down in LA. And I lived in Koreatown, so there's a lot of like kind of authentic Korean barbecue places. And I had this sort of standing dinner date with a group of six of us. And they're like, hey, well, let's try this Korean barbecue place. It was up in Alderwood Mall, which I always hear about. Like, again, it's one of those things I never I mean, I never leave Seattle. I never leave my, you know, three mile radius of my home. And so when I hear things like at Alderwood Mall, it's all just theoretical to me. It's a theoretical Alderwood Mall. It's Schrodinger's Alderwood Mall. Like, I've never go there. I don't go to the mall. But then every now and then for an adventure like this, I find myself there. And apparently this Korean barbecue place is in that area. And I'm just passing all of these places that I've only heard about on the radio. And I almost want to get out of the car and take a picture. Luke, I passed a video only. And it was like I saw John Lennon on the street.

I was like, there's a video only. You'll be sorry. It's not that it's not.

What about the prices at the big box stores? And it's not the warehouse club. They have these commercials that air. Luke, I talk to myself so that the commercials will answer me. Do you know this about me? they're always like so are you interested in a new tv where do you think they have the best prices i'm like i don't know is it the warehouse club it's not the warehouse club is it online and it's not online it's a video what about the big box store or the big box store is the triumvirate there um but uh yeah and there were like all these like it it gave me this cozy feeling and this place we went to was like fine you know it wasn't as authentic as like a korean barbie place in LA, but it also didn't feel like we were at a Applebee's or something. No offense to Applebee's, but I was, you know, I grew up like solidly suburban in the suburban restaurant chain too, because I was, I know that you didn't go out to eat a lot as a kid, but like, I was very lucky in that way. Maybe even spoiled. My family loved to go out to eat, but it was often very like middle brow chain restaurants, TGI Fridays, Applebee's, what have you. And so I, when I'm in a place i'm looking around this alderwood mall and i can't even believe i'm like this is the alderwood mall and i'm seeing all of the and it gave me it it literally gave me sort of a cozy feeling luke of like being in the suburbs again where all these places exist it's like it's like i forgot that these places exist can you relate to that at all well um sure i except for i well

i wouldn't say i grew up going to alderwood either or but but like i know what you mean like would you hear about something in these places being advertised incessantly on the radio and and and then you're actually stand you're driving past one or you're standing or you're looking at it you're like shanko corner of you know whatever like there's what you realize is that these things have it weren't like a worm entering rf

jr's brain these things have wormed their way in oh man dude did you see the times just absolute takedown of rfk jr's running mate no in the times today is that today or yesterday today it's today i know it's like i mean honestly it it scans with exactly what i perceived this particular person to be his running mate who's a very well a very wealthy person now who uh was married to uh one of the google co-founders and in the terms of the divorce uh got a billion dollars and uh is re it seems to be channeling a lot of that billion dollars into propping up this campaign but it was just kind of like it was just about some inconsistencies in this person's like uh you know narrative that they've told about about their their life at different times and and various things that it's just kind of like i was like oh man it is complicated though because a lot of it sort of focuses on her personal life and it it gets it gets kind of close to this question of like would would we be saying this if this were a man who was running for vice president with rfk junior i kind of think we would because it's like one of the allegations that she had an affair with elon musk and i just can't imagine that wouldn't be a story regardless of who the person was yeah because we're talking about just such high profile individuals but anyway it's a

it's a I'm I just Luke I just saved it to pocket so it's a scintillating read for what it's worth

for my last time read but I know what you mean like like these things just kind of like become the soundtrack of of of our lives in a way when you're talking about like you know things that get advertised all the time on sports radio or during the games or what have you if I could Andrew just try to uh let's see because if I could try to return quickly to this Red Lobster story but i want to try to fill in this and fill in some of the details because yeah and i have a

i have a sort of a related follow-up to a to a chain restaurant story that i want to offer you

as well so uh this was a something somebody named michael hiltzik in the uh los angeles times was writing on the surface the story of red lobster's bankruptcy is about one of the seven deadly sins gluttony and then he goes on to talk about this 20 all you can eat shrimp promotion but that doesn't account for the gluttony of Red Lobster's former private equity owners, San Francisco based Golden Gate Capital or its subsequent corporate owners the huge Bangkok based seafood conglomerate, Thai Union so that's, I just wanted to put some names to those things I was vaguely describing it sounds like the private equity firm is called Golden Gate Capital and then the seafood entity that bought them I think they might be the one who is, anyway Thai Union is the folks that

had the uh the seafood do you remember a long time and i just looked this up now because i i've been wanting an update on the story that we talked about way back in 2022 do you remember the story of the raising canes location that was told after they'd already signed contracts to build a new raising canes restaurant in this like specific sort of like development this commercial development space that they are not allowed to sell chicken because there's because mcdonald's had the exclusive on it exactly so essentially raising canes goes to move into some restaurant that's vacated in some area and raising canes is famous not just for chicken but specifically they're chicken fingers right they're chicken sticks or chicken fingers um and um do we say chicken we say fish sticks and chicken fingers right why is that well because i mean why do you drive on the parkway and park on the driveway i wasn't even trying to do a bit there i just heard you laugh when I said chicken sticks, and I'm like, wait, that's not a thing, is it?

I've definitely never heard of chicken sticks, but I kind of like it. But you're right. Like, why did that, well, I was like, what are you, insane chicken sticks? But it's like we call them fish sticks.

I feel like chicken sticks is what, like, that's what you would call the drummer in a funk band, maybe? Or like, some sort of, yeah, I don't know, like,

we got chicken sticks manning one of the bop guns for Houston Collins.

We got Luke Burbank. We're going to Chocolate City. We got Luke Burbank on the chicken sticks. Let's hear it. And then you do a little solo while the crowd just loses their goddamn mind. Anyway, so there was this, and it was in Indiana somewhere. And so Raising Cane's like, hey, yeah, we'll move in. They signed some lease. They're going to start selling chicken fingers. And then it turns out, oh, a nearby McDonald's has, like, in their contract, there's some lean on this entire area of restaurants where McDonald's can only sell, like, fried, like, breaded chicken boneless products or something. And they were like, ah. And I've always wondered, like, whatever happened to that? Well, apparently, I think they sued Raising Gains. Wasn't that, like, in Indiana or something? It was, yep. It was in Indiana. And it says that they were suing at the time to get out of their lease, which I assume they did. And as of two months ago, March 14th, 2024, in the Times of, not New York. Hammond. Of Hammond, Indiana. Indiana. Says that they are finally, three years after that debacle, finally opening another Raising Cane's nearby. And speaking of, by the way. Wow, and on the third year. That's right. Be erased. They're going to roll back a stone and everybody's going to eat chicken sticks.

They're going to roll back a fried pickle section, and cane will raise. Let me put my hand in the wound, see if he's real.

But also, I heard, Luke, that there's going to be a Raising Cane's in the U District, which, by the way, the U District here in Seattle, Washington, around the university, is not, the one thing it is not wanting for is a fried chicken place. There's a lot of, like, Korean fried chicken and all kinds of fried chicken in that area around the university. But right on the corner of 45th and the Ave, as we call it, where there used to be an Urban Outfitters, the other one.

Well, yeah, well, that was in my in my childhood. That was a Pier one import.

That's like two or three store story building right there on the corner.

And it became an American apparel many years later.

And then it stood abandoned for a long time. Yeah.

That's going to be a Raising Cane's.

And one of the floors, it's a little bit unclear, but I have some insider information that's supposedly slated to be a Raising Cane's, which could be very exciting.

When I used to work at Dick's Drive-In, I had a manager that literally would say to us, unironically, time to lean, time to clean. Yeah, I love that. I'm not saying I would be a good fit to be the manager of the Raising Canes, but I would love if I found the employees to be kind of slack and go, these canes aren't going to raise themselves. Oh, I like that.

That's wonderful.

Not crazy would be overstating it. There's a semi-interesting story about the whole Raising Canes thing, which I feel like I might have heard about on Guy Raz's How I Built This. and it was the dude that started raising canes and what i find interesting about it is how uninteresting it is he was a guy in i'm gonna say like uh maybe louisiana he was a guy who lived in a town that had some major huge university might have been louisiana state i'm not sure and he just thought like i just want to make the best chicken fingers i'm just gonna have a restaurant and we're just gonna sell chicken fingers but they're gonna be so good and everyone's gonna love them And then he did it And then they were good I guess And everyone did love them And that's the story of raising kids It's not like my grandmother had a recipe Or I opened You know Like an ice cream parlor But we had this one little fryer The story was I thought well what if we made really good chicken fingers And then we did it And they were pretty good And then everyone loved it And now we do that everywhere

And then a private investment firm comes And buys up all of our

Golden Gate Capital Golden Donut came in I'm tempted to try to read you The real estate situation with the Red Lobster But it is largely what I said Which is, they said This is from that LA Times article If you're looking for the original sin in Red Lobster's decline A good candidate would be the deal that brought it Under Golden Gate Capital's ownership The private equity firm bought the chain From the previous owners for $2.1 billion Financing the sale In part by selling the real estate Underlying the 500 restaurants To the real estate firm American Realty Capital for $1.5 billion. This was a sale-leaseback transaction, which Red Lobster was instantly converted from the owner of its property to a tenant on the same property. The leases were typically long-term. So, in other words, I don't think this was franchised out. I think that's why I was confused. I don't think that these are owned by franchisees. I think these are owned by a company, Red Lobster. So what they did was this equity firm buys the whole thing, sells the real estate off, but then continues to run it as a business where it's now basically a tenant. And those were bad real estate deals, and it made it apparently hard because of how long these leases were. It made it very hard for this company, Red Lobster, now owned by Golden Gate, to get rid of underperforming restaurants because they had these 25-year-long leases now. So anyway, they just put themselves in a really bad position as a company, but of course they didn't care because they weren't trying to run a seafood company. They were trying to buy up real estate and resell it, and they did that effectively. yeah I got like 5% of that I got that 5% more right than I was worried about thank you that's

where the bar is yeah I kind of regret bringing up the Raising Cane's thing because I'm like I have an update and then I'm like frantically trying to get the update while I'm telling you

I have an update which is not exactly but they weren't able to put it in in the same location

no but it does look like that so they lost that one for the but I think they were able to sue to get out of their contract so they don't have to have this just empty building there that is not selling chicken fingers or chicken

sticks. Well now it's a phrasing cranes which is just a

which is just a Frasier Crane fan shop Frasier Crane's Boy if you started a bar called Frasier Crane's I'll bet you a lot of people would go

He has bad politics now

Oh, yeah. I think he's always had bad politics.

He hangs out at Mar-a-Lago.

What is it about people who had a cocaine situation who then, because like Tim Allen has bad politics, and he was like moving heavy weight back in the day of cocaine. And Kelsey Grammer's thing was he loved cocaine too much. You'd think that would make you a cool guy. Makes you an uncool guy.

Hey, kids, listen to Luke's after school special. I thought doing cocaine made you a cool guy.

It doesn't. I mean, I guess it isn't. It's look, I guess it isn't something that famously makes you more chill. So maybe not. I don't know. Seems like, gosh, really? What is that's the through line that I've established?

I feel like, you know, having read American Psycho, I feel like there are a lot of bad 1980s go go Reagan knots who probably had bad politics.

That's a really good point. That's a really good point.

Yeah. Here I go once again with the email every week. I hope that it's from a female. Oh, man, it's not from a female.

all righty quick email or v-mail before we are out of here yeah i think that listener sarah

will uh set this up herself but i'll uh i'll do it so that we have copy echo luke but um i'm pretty

sure that this dude i heard the worst copy echo the other day lay it on me it must i can't remember the specifics it must have been i i don't want to throw opb under the bus because it might have been on the national broadcast but i literally heard the first line of the piece so the recorded piece was literally the last line of the intro and i thought maybe something got transposed here it might like somebody and for those who don't know and don't care which would be everybody listening to us except for phyllis wetcher one of the things like when you're coming up in public radio you try to avoid something called copy echo which is where the intro or the lead as it's called you know the today is the uh today we're getting the results of the portland primary and there are some real surprises you wouldn't want the first line of the recorded piece to be there were some real surprises today coming back from the portland primary you don't want it to say the same thing and so you sometimes that's actually hard to get around because you basically want to kind of say the same thing but a little different but it was like verbatim whatever this person said and then the next the person on tape who started talking just said the same words yeah i'll bet

you a million bucks that was like kind of a copy thing because when I was stacking newscasts which was a fun part of a job I had for a long time like a working morning edition like I loved writing and stacking newscasts and we had a digital system but I still think at the like when it was time for me to bring them into the morning edition host slash newscaster I'm pretty sure I was still printing them out and I remember going down to like WBUR and shadowing them which really makes me sound like i'm sort of a sting-esque stalker but you know i would go down to wbur which was like the big public radio powerhouse right and in their beautiful studios and i would just sort of like hang out with their morning edition crew like in new hampshire it was like me and a host and we were surprised we had two people on that staff you go down to bur and it was like cnn you had like a whole room full of producers like tapping away at newscast headlines and chasing down stories or whatever is quite the thrill for a young i bet a young andrew professional but um anyway like i nowadays i mean the idea of printing out a newscast must be so archaic like you're you know i would still do that though i'd be that kind of freak if if i had that job which i wouldn't

um i would be definitely printing it out because that was i mean well whatever now i'm just sorry

For more on this story, we turn to Brother Printer.

I feel like I can hear sometimes when someone's reading copy, and of course everyone just reads it off of a screen now, but there's a page break. Either the computer is kind of like being slow or there's a page break, and you can hear them waiting. I love that I'm here to criticize other people's newscasting techniques when I did that Red Lobster story the way that I did, going, I think it was a thing that maybe where this happened. Like, I love that I'm sitting in judgment of other people, but I feel like I can hear when someone's trying to scroll through to the next thing. And I'm always like, you could have printed that.

Yeah, but their printing also will create mistakes, too, that you don't realize that you don't have the last page. Remember the thing that now I'm just now I'm just putting you on Front Street, which you probably don't appreciate. Remember the one time I never appreciate you were. But Front Street is such a beautiful place. I want to put you there. Look at the architecture. Look at the I can't afford it.

I wish I wouldn't have sold my place on Front Street. Now I'm priced out.

But remember the one time you were using that print free program or whatever it was to like kind of print friendly to take all the ads and extra pictures and stuff out. But there was one graph in this article that you're reading that just seems so out of the blue and so bonkers. And then it turned out, oh, that was just a caption for another story that if you were reading it online, you would have realized was actually point with something you could click on to go to a totally different story. Do you remember any details beyond what I just said?

like what the what the inserted graph was that we were taking i don't remember the inserted graph

but i believe that i almost did that on live wire again when we were doing like a the best news because the way the i think it was in the washington post i know that much and i think the way the washington post structures things is god this is so esoteric yeah why did i shouldn't have when you convert the washington post over into this program that makes it more print friendly they have so many things that are like oh you're reading this kind of article you'll probably like this other kind of article and i think if you're if you were to be looking at on their website it would be a hyperlink or something but there's something about the way that they write that copy it fits right into what you were already reading of an unrelated story so you're going along going along going along and then there's just what looks like the next paragraph which you could if if you get unlucky and it seems like it it could exist in the universe of the original story you're reading you could just read a totally unrelated two sentences and then think that was now part of the facts of the case of the first story and it has happened to me more than

once did it have something to do with Cher I feel like we were just like in the middle of the story and then there was this outstanding I think it was I

do think it involves Cher and I and I think I was like how did you bury this lead or what what and and instead of realizing oh this is off I was like trying to bend us the bend like reality into a pretzel where somehow Cher was

relevant to this story anyway so all of that is to say I'm gonna try to avoid too much copy echo here with sarah's story but essentially what inspired this is our um occasional conversations about what it's like when you see somebody wearing like fan gear uh in another city so in other words like maybe if you and i were in uh toronto but we saw somebody wearing a mariners cap like do you sort of give them a little a little head nod and say you know i see you or go mariners or you know what's julio doing on the base paths or what have you so um anyway that is what inspired this from sarah who is can we call sarah this is my friend sarah who also uh was our realtor when we were purchasing purchasing this house so i don't know if that makes sarah the official realtor of tbtl do we have one um are we can we give her that designation i think too much no i don't know i don't think it's enough it's not enough all right take it away sarah hey friend

it's sarah nickel smith i am time banding right now because i was recently in japan for a couple of weeks so i missed the shows so i'm listening to the april 16th show where you talk about randomly mentioning something to somebody else because of an item of merch they're wearing like whatever this twitch star says or a mariner's hat that you see so when i was in osaka coincidentally the very same day that you posted this episode I saw this group of clearly American men who were very tall like mid-six feet just imposing men who had all been to Universal Studios and they were wearing like their fake Mario hats and um they were having a really fun time and they were in a McDonald's line and my husband noticed that one of them had a St. Louis Blues tattoo on well I'm from St. Louis, so I grabbed our kid's hat that had the St. Louis Blues logo on it, and I just walked up to these men and held out this hat to them, and the guy who had the St. Louis Blues tattoo looked at me like a little befuddled, but then he, I was like, your tattoo, you're from St. Louis, and he's like, oh, yeah, and so then I looked over, one of the guys has a St. Louis Cardinals hat on, so we're all chatting, and I said, oh, I grew up in St. Louis, but I live in Seattle now, and he said, oh, I played for Seattle and I said what team like what and he said oh the Seahawks I was like what's your name um I just casually walked up to Sheldon Richardson and started a conversation because as any good midwesterner does I notice somebody wearing something from the midwest and repping a team and I say hi and that's how you end up talking to Sheldon Richardson and a bunch of his high school football buddies um when you're all the way across the world in Osaka Japan so power out

do you think it's refreshing for somebody like him to to be approached but not recognized

for what I bet recognized for I yeah I I think so probably I mean I have to say I would have done the exact same thing there's something about being in Japan where it's like if you recognize if I saw Sheldon Richardson wearing something St. Louis related but I was in St. Louis I wouldn't say anything or even in seattle i wouldn't but if i was in japan it's like come on we we people who are aware of uh of the existence of st louis missouri have to stick together um also pretty hard to miss sheldon richardson in a room i think yeah just like body type and

yeah i mean that well that's the thing though like i always wonder about that too every now and then i'll see somebody who i'm like that person has the physique you usually height has to do with it, but body mass, whatever.

you might see somebody you're just like that person has got to be a professional athlete like i saw somebody like this i don't know in the past several months at the grocery store but then i was just like yeah but there are also just like i'm i'm face blind to anybody and i'm also not really great at sports stuff you'd have to it would have to be like somebody very obvious for me to recognize them and sometimes i'm like yeah but this could just be like you know somebody who's in really good shape and is going to college or whatever like they don't all have to be professional uh players but i do wonder how many people i've missed like just by not recognizing them especially when i lived in la like celebrities not sports figures but celebrities i'll bet you like oh just tons and then genevieve i need to start take a photograph of everyone you walk by and

i'll tell you if you're famous okay sounds good by the way sheldon richardson the holy trinity of football teams that we sort of care about here he was a seattle seahawk a minnesota viking and Cleveland Brown Cleveland exactly exactly yeah all right good story well thanks for the update Sarah and congratulations on being the official uh realtor of a TBTL yeah it's quite an honor

except because we're gonna sell all of our properties and then sell and then sell shrimp

to each other what if TBTL was just what if what if we sold this to private equity and they just wanted to buy the madrona hill studio be like good flipping luck did you hear that little power

out behind you a second ago i hit the wrong button sorry everybody um i got numb fingers

yeah that's right you know i just i did think about that like you're you're playing hurt here so so thank you for uh thank you for your service i mean that feeling good all right hey we're gonna be right back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio i'm wondering if maybe tomorrow night i'm going to be in seattle at the paramount we're doing wait wait don't tell me there and maybe there'll be some tens out there as well so uh that's happening tomorrow night but before that we'll be bringing you more tbtl so please do join us for that in the meantime have a great wednesday take care of yourselves go mariners and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

your mouth might be saying hey we cool but your eyes are like no we not nice to meet you no it's not it's all good snows isn't it power out