Muse

Ciao, honey. It's mom. I'm calling from northern Italy now. Your father and I rented a car and drove up to the mountains on some very windy, narrow, and steep hills, and I loved every second of it. Cool as a cucumber, really. It didn't bother me. And the great news is your father, God love him, drove with the same passion as the Italian drivers and tailgated the whole way, and we cut three minutes off our trip. So that's what I was hoping for on vacation. So that worked out beautifully. I'm sure it'll all be fine but if I don't make it back alive I just want you to know that there is a new espresso machine in the kitchen that you and your brother can fight over. It doesn't make espressos as good as here in Italy but last time I checked you didn't have one so fill your boots. Also in my underwear drawer there is an envelope with about $800 in it. I have been saving to do some laser work on my face in the fall but if I don't make it back you guys divvy that up and buy yourself something nice love you to the moon and back

hello town jubilation committee yeah i got something that's gonna make you a lot less jubilant i don't talk trash i talk smack they're totally different trash talk is all hypothetical like your mom is so fat she could eat the internet but smack talk is happening like right now like You're ugly, and I know it for a fact, so I get the evidence right there.

So it was you. I was going to expose you. I know. So I choose to expose myself.

This isn't what happened last week. Have you all got amnesia? They just cheated us. This isn't fair.

Sweetie, have a good show. What you do is so important.

Well, all right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Friday edition of TBTL, WTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. I hate podcasting. It's just ruined my life. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. As Jay would say, he's got flow. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill Broadcast Center, perched high above the mighty Columbia where we're looking at another gray morning. Hopefully it'll turn into something a little bit nicer in the afternoon. It wasn't thankfully raining so much that I couldn't get down to the lake this morning and put in my little jog as I'm doing this 75 hard-ish thing. It's day five, so five down, 70 to go. Although technically today is not over. So it's really like four days and one morning down. I've got it written down somewhere. I can show you later. but i um i did get down uh to the lake to do my jog this morning and i just want to say shout out huge shout out to the guy walking around the lake with the bluetooth speaker at about 6 45 a.m blasting i don't mean this guy was like just enjoying a little bit of music kind of in an external way um as he walked around this lake i'm talking about you could hear it from across the lake just blasting Tom Sawyer by rush oh go off loud king I was there uh pumping the daily into my ears while I was building the the madness that is my upper torso needs to see the madness that is my upper torso okay I mean the thing is nothing I've done on this little exercise and clean living kick in five days has done anything to my upper torso so I don't even know why I played that drop. I do know we're at episode 4,293. Let the fun begin. In a collector's series. And, oh, it's an exciting day. My friend, noted actor, and all-around good human being, Misha Collins, is going to be popping by in a minute here. Oh, wow. Which will be fun for all of us. I know he's got a lot of fans out there in TBTL10 land. He's also got a lot of fans on Instagram. I didn't know this. I mean I should have intuited it but he put an Instagram post up this week where he mentioned me and all of a sudden I had like a lot of people seeking to become my Instagram friends I couldn't figure out what was going on and then I realized it was because I had been mentioned on a very popular person's Instagram feed that popular person being Misha who's going to be coming by here in not too long it's Friday the 13th I don't know if that's spooking any of you. I was listening to Morning Edition on NPR this morning,

and they were saying that Friday the 13th is a surprisingly recent invention. And that, like, there are rumors that it's because, and I think they are incorrect rumors, they are apocryphal, as it were, that the beginnings of Friday the 13th sort of superstition is that there were 13 people.

at the last supper or something but that it doesn't really go back that far it's pretty recent and in fact has gotten a huge boost from the friday the 13th movies that that's like so let's go you know like even like maybe 40 years ago when was the first friday the other thing that was in in classic npr style they they clarified that the friday the 13th movies involve uh jason with the mask on so just in case you were unclear on what the friday the 13th movies are that's you got a little clarification but anyway they were saying that yeah basically if you were to go back before those movies it was not not nearly as much of a conversation in the culture as uh it's become because of that popularity i am not superstitious about things like that be it black cats or ladders or friday the 13th however sports jinxes are very very real to me and i absolutely believe that talking about like saying this guy never misses a kick like this is a guarantee that he will miss the kick or you know saying this pitcher is throwing a no hitter it means the no hitter is just about to end at any moment like i i believe deep deeply in my like mitochondria, that jinxes are real. And I cannot explain it because I don't go in for any other kind of foolishness except that kind of foolishness. So anyway, happy Friday the 13th to all of you. Oh, by the way, also, shout out to listener Alicia. I assume Alicia is a listener because Alicia sent me a DM in Instagram with that audio tape we heard at the top of the show, who is you know what i should actually look this up let me do this on the fly everybody bear with me please i'm a one-man band here i'm missing my longest-running cobra of the show and i mean that both literally and figuratively i miss andrew i cannot wait to talk to him on monday he will be back lord willing and the creeks don't rise and did i mention this on the air i probably didn't i think i mentioned it to somebody off air remember last by the way i'm getting to this thing with Alicia don't don't worry um but uh actually I'll just do that first because it'll be easier uh the audio tape you heard at the top of the show was from a comedian named Colleen Landry and it was sent to me by again I'm going to assume listener Alicia um uh because you know we've been talking so much about driving in Italy and trying to navigate that that that country when you're in a rental car that is not designed for that country as was the case for me and to some degree our friend chris hayes by the way also quick shout out chris hayes's new book is available for pre-order you heard that on the show the other day i had to low-key that because after chris very

nicely mentioned on our little show that his book was going to be coming out and it's called a siren song it's about the attention economy uh he was uh mentioning that like people could go pre-order it and uh you know that that it was basically giving us the scoop on the fact that this book is now out for pre-order um but the pr people at the national broadcasting corporation the peacock they very nicely got at me and said could you they didn't say can you cut that out of the show which i was glad about because we had already published the show but they said could you not put that like at the top of the page when you're promoting the show because we don't want to we don't want to steal any of the excitement from the big announcement tomorrow. And I wanted to say to the PR person from NBC, you are in no danger of excitement. Our little, this little artisanal podcast, I promise, will not be, you know, kind of stealing the excitement from Chris's announcement on national television and various other places that his book is coming out. But anyway, so now that we can trumpet it from the mountaintops, do go pre-order that book. Let's try to get that book on the bestseller list, because I think it's going to be really good, and you're going to be hearing a lot about it as we continue. Anyway, where was I? I feel like I was saying something very important, and then I lost my own train of thought. That's all right. It'll come back to me if it's important. I do know something that we need to do real fast here and real efficiently, which is to thank some of our daily donors these are the wonderful generous amazing tens of listeners who are supporting the show uh financially and we just couldn't be doing this without you let me tell you what i mean i just said that there's like this is a boutique podcast that's true it's artisanal it's hand forged and it's very small we have a very small group of listeners, but those small group of listeners are mighty and are somehow keeping us in business. 4,293 episodes into this. I'm talking about folks like Karen Jenkins in Kenmore, Washington. You all knew I was going to say Karen Jenkins in Kenmore, Washington. Shout out to Karen. Thank you so much. Appreciate you. And then Tiffany Johnson over there in Camas, Washington. We love Camas. I know I'm starting to get dialed in on southern washington i've only had a house out here for like what three four years why is it taking me so long to dial in to lock in but i'm i'm locking in and i can tell you camas is a very cute little town they've got a great little downtown area um and uh you know you should check it out if you're passing through that area if you're on your way to washugal you know grab lunch in camas maybe you'll run into tiffany johnson terry hamburg our friend terry

Hanberg, longtime supporter of the show, is in Meridian, Idaho. Thank you, Terry. Joseph Baruch Warren is in the Boogie Down Bronx, New York. The beautiful Bronx, New York. You know, even though I lived in New York, I did not spend, maybe it's because traditionally it's where Yankee Stadium was located and I just didn't like that sort of grigri, that sort of energy, but I didn't spend a ton of time in the Bronx and then I was doing that TV story about the origins of breakdancing and I went to the Bronx to talk to some of the like real OG break dancers and it was absolutely lovely out there I need to do some more exploring I'm going to be in New York next week first I'm going to Rochester New York where I'm working on TV story and then I'm going down to New York New York because I'm going to be interviewing Maggie Rogers the singer but maybe when I'm in New York new york i'll swing through the bronx and see joseph uh kelly blower is in or blower i'm gonna go with blower i'm gonna go with uh the i consider it traditional pronunciation because of course mike blower actually he's got an s on there i don't know if the s modifies it in some way we're going with kelly blower and we're going with whitehall michigan whitehall michigan that part's easy and kelly blower i think we've got it dialed in and i think we we know how to say it now kelly thank you. And then thanks to Krista Gilbert, who's in Seattle, Washington, another city, Seattle, Washington, I need to spend more time in. So thank you so much to all of our donors for making TBTL possible on this Friday, even on a week when we're missing our dear, dear longest running Cobra. I don't know what Andrew said when I was gone, honestly, because as I said to our friend P. Fletch, I'll tell you a little story. I invited our friend Phyllis Fletcher P. Fletch onto the show this week to be part of the festivities and Phyllis in her incredible humility and also let's be honest radio professionalism said you know I was just on and maybe we'll just give the listeners a little time to sort of have a little time off from the P. Fletch experience and then be even more excited when we reunite with P. Fletch now I would know that if I had spent a little more time with the content when I was not here hosting the show and as I said to our friend Phyllis I'm a little bit of an absent father when I'm not working on the show you could take that one of two ways you could say that's a lack of professionalism on my part or you could say that that's good work-life balance that when I'm on a trip and I'm not responsible for the show that I can just completely unplug from the show I'm going to choose to see it as door number two but anyway I didn't listen to the episodes when I was not on the show and I don't know how Andrew talked about me he could have said all kinds of

mess he could have he could have slandered me I have to do this thing every single time I'm at the fork in the road between saying slander and saying libel, I have to remember in my mind, this is a little kind of mnemonic device, I guess. Slander is spoken. And just sing it in your head to the tune of Silence is Golden. Slander is spoken. I know the song Silence is Golden because my mom used to sing it to us when she wanted us to shut up. But anyway, I don't know. Andrew could have been slandering me all last week. I choose not to do that. When he goes low, I go high. And I'm just here to tell you, I miss the guy. And I'm very, very excited for him to be back on Monday. But here we are. We've been plugging along, me and John Sklaroff, in a merry band of fill-ins. And this week has been made possible by the donors. That's my point in all of this. The donors are making this possible. So thank you so much for being a 10, and thanks for keeping TBTL rolling. We could not do this without you. hello and welcome to top story all right our top story today is that we are joined by a very

special guest he is a a fine fine actor you know it's just living truthfully in imaginary circumstances but an even finer person i love you he is misha collins and he is joining us

right now from i believe santa barbara california is that where you are no i am in on lumme island

in washington state oh one of my favorite places on the planet um to try to write a book did i tell you the story of my, my, are you serious? Yeah. Yeah. I, um, this is, if you want to know my, my attempts at, um, my attempts at, at sort of, uh, doing grandiose things in a nutshell, I'll tell you exactly what happened. I went to Lummi, I rented a cabin on Lummi Island for a weekend. I went there to, when was this? Well, I was living in Bellingham at the time, which is where you and i met yeah but um uh so it would have been like maybe five six years ago so i i rented this cabin um to go out there and to be like to put to completely shut out the world and write this um this treatment for a book and i got there and i thought i should have some wine as inspiration for this treatment for this book just to get the creative juices flowing i did some literal juice to get my creative juices flowing. And I then got pretty drunk and decided to catch the last ferry off of Lummi Island so that I could go to the Silver Reef Casino, which you go right past to get out to Lummi. I got to the casino, hung out there far too long, then basically slept in my car waiting for the morning ferry to get me back out to Lummi Island, and then spent the next day or two recovering, wrote zero pages of the book.

Wow. Yeah. Well, I mean, it is, it does, this place does have that party vibe.

I mean, it's, it's, it's a, it is.

There's one, there's one little like dinky little corner store that has, it's basically like a glorified 7-Eleven, but it's, you know, not a chain store. And then there's one little restaurant that's open three days a week.

Yeah.

And that's it. A post office.

I mean, the reason I've called one of the Internet's foremost celebrities here is to talk about the grocery store on Lummi Island. So let's do that.

This is where I am right now. I'm going to show you. Isn't that? I know this is great material for a podcast. Look out my window. Oh, and now you can see my toilet. The roll of toilet paper. Good. The framing is much better now.

I mean, there's just no way you could have shut that bathroom door. There's no way you would have the time or energy to do that.

And now I see from this vantage point that I've also left the toilet seat.

All right. Go and fix that.

I've got to fix that. Sure. It's just not classy.

Okay. Here's the thing about the grocery store on Lummi Island. It is surprisingly down market in my experience, considering it's on this very cool little island that has a lot of really amazing farms and homes and what I would imagine is a certain kind of foodie potential clientele. And again, my dream version of living on Lummi Island is I'm buying fresh-baked bread and I'm picking some tomatoes that I've grown in the garden near my little home or whatever. But you go in that grocery store and that is not the vibe.

It is very, very, uh, a lot of, it's like frozen burritos and wonder bread and French's mustard on the shelves and you get that. And there is some produce. They have this tiny little section of produce, but it's all stuff that they clearly drove off Island to go to Costco to get. And it's all, it's all been sitting there for two weeks and it's wilted and rotten. It's a, and now I feel bad.

Well, yeah, I just think there's a—

This is going to be a public, basically, takedown of the one market that I have access to here.

Well, I don't mean to—

And then, of course, there was a restaurant here.

Yeah, the Beach Cafe.

It went out of business. No, no, there was this fancy restaurant.

Oh, yeah, well, that one got into some trouble, I guess.

A very fancy restaurant. It got into trouble. It was written up in the New York Times, and it went out of business.

Yeah, yeah, that was where—that place was called—

The whole restaurant got me-tooed.

Yeah, that was the Willows Inn. Yeah, I did. I once did. I don't know if you ever did you ever spring for that? God, this is so, so uninteresting to most of the listeners. But like, you know, why start now on TBTL? It's only episode 4,293.

This might be an interesting thing. You say uninteresting, but it could be interesting to see if the podcast itself can sustain itself.

Deeply, deeply uninteresting material because you could potentially start isolating the variables here and see what is it that people are tuning in for? Are they trying to get information? Are they trying to – is it because they're familiar with you, they know you so well, they feel like they have a friend in the room when they hear your voice? Or is it because you are conveying some sort of information that's valuable to them? And what we're going to do today is take that last one off the table.

spoken like a university of chicago graduate very data-driven very like you know just like

it's the social sciences that we're dipping into here yeah um okay so uh did you ever go spring for that can i just tell you one more thing the willows in yeah we talk can we keep talking about it yeah that's where i was going i'm currently staying in i have this airbnb this is my place that we're staying at and it's mostly i i almost i'm never here it's an airbnb and it's rented out a lot um and i bought it because all of these people come from far and wide to go to the willows inn because it's this destination restaurant it's like foraged food it's very fancy um it's you know eight courses and fixed menu and uh people you go with two people and if you have a wine pairing it's like nine hundred dollars i mean it's a very expensive place but it's a destination and people need places to stay on lummi island so this this place that i bought was a kind of no-brainer because the people that were managing it had a relationship with the willows inn yeah so they they were like we're gonna be we're gonna be in fat city and i bought it and then uh four months later the new york times wrote this article about basically meet me toing the willows in yeah and they had to shut it down and now uh the whole island is almost post-apocalyptic nobody comes here anymore um you can see you know tumbleweed going down the main street and the only attraction of course is the store that we mentioned earlier well this

is a business opportunity my friend you and i open a very very high-end kind of grocery store slash hang uh I don't know make it we got to make Lummi Island a destination I actually was thinking about that this morning really let's do it okay yeah do I need any capital for this because I'm currently uh heavily leveraged in fixing up cabins in southern Washington where I'm broadcasting from right now um oh this is your cabin well I've at some point I started it's well this is the thing it is technically a house but I've talked about it for years now on this show on tvtl and i realized that when people finally came out here they were surprised at how kind of humble this thing is it's not so i i've i've basically from just like a kind of um expectation or level setting i've started calling it a cabin so that people kind of understand what they're coming to which is a funky little thing that was built in the 1930s that i've been kind of sprucing up um but uh but yeah as long as i don't need any capital to start our our new business on Lummi Island I'm a hundred percent in great okay we're gonna break we're gonna break this down speaking of not being a hundred percent in I was under the impression when you and I parted company in Santa Barbara the other week that we were both doing this hard 75 thing and uh I've seen no evidence that you're doing it I mean and you look handsome as always but I haven't seen you posting your water intake was that your way is that your way of calling me fat? No, I just mean, I don't see you posting on to your 4.8 million fans on Instagram about how you're reading 10 pages of nonfiction like I am, or how you're drinking a gallon of water a day

like I am. I thought we were in this together. Okay. Well, you know what, Luke? Maybe I am not somebody who measures my self-worth by other people's take on me. I am somebody who can who can monitor these kind of successes internally. I have been thinking about hard 75 quite a bit since. So here's what happened for those of you who don't know, and it's possible a couple of you aren't keyed into this yet, but Luke and I had dinner recently and, and was it last week or the week? Yeah, it was like last week. We had dinner last, last week. And of course i thought you know luke was uh in town he was in santa barbara where i live and he reached out to me and we had dinner and of course i thought oh this is wonderful luke is just reaching out because he wants to have dinner with an old friend of course now i realize he was just greasing the work so that he could get me coerced me into coming on to his podcast yeah but um but while we were at dinner luke mentioned that on monday monday of this week uh he was

You

going to start this hard 75 fitness and health regime yes um and it requires two workouts a day of 40 minutes each a gallon of water a day reading 10 minutes of something enriching it was a little bit ambiguous what you described about what the reading material had to be and uh was there

something else um well i added to it get up like at five in the morning which i've been pretty good about this week, which has been actually, it's not on the list, but I think it's the most, it's actually been the best part of the whole thing for me because it's just giving me a head start on a lot of things in my day. I feel like things are, for me, I am, again, this is with five days of experience on this, my anxiety levels or my stress levels are lower in the morning because I've had like an extra two to three hours to just kind of like set things up and problem solve and what have you. So anyway, that is a thing that I sort of add. I actually printed it out. Let me read this to you. It's a no, no alcohol exercise twice a day. As you mentioned, drink one gallon of water. I'm the follow some sort of diet. You get to pick it. What I went with is I'm trying to eat less processed foods. That's, that's my goal. It's not a specific, that sounds like a challenging diet to stick to it it is um i mean again i've only been doing it for five days so like talk to me in you know in in 70 days from now but uh it helps that i'm dating someone who is a very very uh kind of clean eater just generally so if i just follow her if i just kind of mimic what she's doing it it takes care of most of the problems there so i'm trying to but i did also by the way another thing that i kind of tweaked about this one thing is the afternoon workout i'm calling any movement that i do in the afternoon the workout so if i go on a walk if i'm gardening here kind of actively anything like that but the other thing i decided was i have been a kind of a pretty big intermittent faster for the last few years but what that's really looked like is i don't eat breakfast i don't eat lunch and then starting at six o'clock i just eat i don't know two to three frozen pizzas um i consume probably 20 000 calories of high sodium processed food but because it's between six and midnight i'm telling myself it's okay that is not a good system and what the system that i'm now embracing is i am going to eat when i'm hungry but what i'm going to eat and eat as much as i want when i'm hungry but i'm going to the thing that i'm going to be consuming the goal is for it to be whole fruits and vegetables and unprocessed things But as much of that as I feel like eating, so this is going to be a different approach for me. We'll see how it goes.

Well, I love it. And believe it or not, Luke, I've been thinking about texting you, but I'm almost participating in this hard 75 thing too. I'm not doing the two workouts a day because I still want to be a productive member of society. And that's just too time consuming.

It's ridiculous.

But I am doing a minimum of one hour of exercise a day. and i have been drinking a gallon of water a day really and what that result i have is that why the

bathroom door is open behind you because you need at any moment to race for it because that's been

my experience so here's been the problem with that and i and i'm trying to stop drinking earlier in the day but i had to get up to pee four times last night four times it's ridiculous yeah it's So, yeah, I mean, I'm I'm feeling not at all well rested because I'm getting up all night constantly to pee. And and I've been reading my my nonfiction, my I'm reading that book that we were talking about.

Oh, nice. The way of art, the work of art, the work, the Adam Moss book.

Yeah, it's so good. Right. Yeah. It's so fucking good.

Well, it makes me feel it makes me feel really better, Misha, that you and I, even if it's strictly the one gallon of water thing, I love to know that you and I are probably getting up at around the same time in completely different parts of the state of Washington and going to the bathroom angrily. I feel connected to you in that way. So thank you for going on this journey with me.

Yeah, yeah. You know, it's it's been nice. It's been good having you as a co-conspirator in this enterprise.

I've been trying to follow your lead a little bit on something. One of the, I admire a lot about you, but one of the things I really admire about you is that you really put your money where your mouth is and your time where your mouth is when it comes to things that you believe in. And, um, particularly when it comes to like the politics in this country. And I know that I was impressed. I have to say that you were out when we were having dinner, you mentioned that you were, you've been out like stump, you were stumping with like the i guess the second dude uh doug emhoff and uh and and like you you do a lot of like campaign stuff you you go to a lot of things you raise a lot of money like this is a big thing for you and so this week in the very very very small dipping my toe into the water of that i tried to phone bank uh in arizona um unfortunately no one showed up for the no one answers their phone well no i didn't even get that far i was waiting for the i was waiting for my training by way of zoom and the arizona democrats never showed up to train me as to how to phone bank. So I'm going to have to circle back and get the proper training. So then I can plunge myself into a world of calling people who do not want to talk to me, but I'm, I'm here for it, but I got

inspired by you. Cause this is a big thing for you. Um, I, I, whether that, whether what you just said is true or not, um, it's a, it's a lovely sentiment. And I, um, I think that some of these some of the there are so many different things that people can do to first of all I want to say I actually think that it's boring to talk about politics and a lot of people want to tune it out or think it doesn't have an impact on their lives but actually it is incredibly important and it potentially has a life and death impact on people's lives I mean our leaders are the ones who decide whether we go to war or not. Our leaders are the ones who decide, you know, our federal government decides how to spend a quarter of the money that we collectively as U.S. citizens make. You know, that is such an enormous amount of resources. And you either have people who agree with you on how that money should be spent, or you have people who don't. And they also put all kinds of laws out into our society that either provide us with freedoms and protections or restrictions, and you want those things to be in line with your values. So having the right people in office is so important. I think a lot of people put more energy into volunteering for nonprofits or doing work with their church or something like that. And that kind of community engagement is something that I certainly spend a significant amount of time on. I started a nonprofit and I'm still on the president of the board of directors for it. But the fact of the matter is there's nothing higher impact than moving the needle with politics. that is that's the most important thing for us to do and i think people lose sight of just how important it is but um it can be frustrating to actually move the needle there you know it's a lot of work and it can feel i mean just get just just converting one person to your side of the political spectrum or convincing one person to register to vote or helping one additional person get to the polls. Any one of those things can take up your day. It can be a big project. But the fact of the matter is, I think that if each of us who does care about and who understands how important getting the right leaders elected is, if each of us were to just persuade one additional person to show up at the polls right there that turns the tide in an election it doesn't take

each of us getting a hundred people to show up it takes each of us getting one person in each election cycle to make a different choice and when you think about it on that more granular more manageable level then it starts to feel like something that we can actually wrap our heads around and you find phone banking is a great example you get you do a phone banking session and nowadays because of caller id and the fact that everybody's on their cell phone so they see who's calling like i don't know this number it's hard phone banking to get in touch with someone in the old days when everybody had a landline and there was no caller id everybody just picked up and that doesn't happen anymore so you can go and you can phone bank and you can spend you know an hour and reach one person and that can feel really frustrating but if you reach one person and you get through to them and you get them to check their registration status and get them to find out they've been purged from the voter rolls that's important you know and so i think that the more of us that commit to making some small contribution also frankly you know in our fucked up system making a donation to a candidate actually makes a difference because then they can hire somebody to go knock door to door and you know it it just

We should all be doing everything we can as far as I'm concerned. And it's also a really good investment of time and money, because if you don't get out there, I mean, and I'm going to, you know, just lay it out there. Like if you don't get out there and make sure that Harris and Walls are elected, we're going to be looking at potentially devastating economic impact of Trump's tariffs. You know, it's going to it's going to cause runaway inflation to come back and that will hit all of our wallets and savings accounts in ways that are totally dwarfed by making a five hundred dollar contribution to the Harris campaign. But that actually turns out to be a really good investment in my mind. Also, you're investing in things like, you know, reproductive rights and the freedom to choose your partner and all sorts of other things.

But I heard somebody say that I heard somebody say that this presidential race is within the margin of effort. That's a great right. Pretty genius. Right. I wish I came over that I didn't. But it's been kind of banging around in my head. And I'm being totally serious, Misha, that like. After our conversation and after hearing about you being out and doing, I asked you where you're, basically I was telling you, I've rented a fancy hotel room in downtown Portland for election night because I want to be like where the action is when like the good news comes in. I was like, where are you going to be? And you were like probably stumping somewhere, like probably moving states to like move even a few persuadable voters. And then I thought, well, that's probably a better way to be handling this. So I have been thinking about you and all of this. I'm curious if you're ever tempted, like, if you've ever been phone banking and you've been tempted, when you're dealing with someone who's maybe, like, kind of a little suspicious of you, have you ever said, I'm televisions, Misha Collins? Have you ever tried to, like, identify yourself to see if maybe that would help?

I have. I have.

What was the response?

I got incredulity once. Like, no, you're not. And then I, you know, tried to convince them and then they, and then they had to go like their mom called them for dinner or something. And then other times I sort of played that card. I was like, do you know who I am? And, uh, the, the short answer was, no, I do not know who you are. I've never, my, my girlfriend, um, for my birthday, uh, she was putting together this little compilation video. She got like my family to all contribute little clips of videos saying, you know, just talking about me for my 50th birthday, which happened this summer. And I didn't I didn't get any gift from you, by the way, Luke.

You know what? Honestly, the the mail to Lummi Island has been crazy lately. I sent it there. That's what I assumed. It was. Well, you know, it was an edible fruit bouquet. It didn't make it?

She went around with her iPhone recording video in crowded places, airports, ferry terminals, shopping malls, going up to random strangers saying, I have a question for you. I'm just conducting a little survey. Do you know who the actor Misha Collins is? And she must have talked to a hundred people. She got no yeses. and her intention with the video was to have it all culminate with finally finding somebody who did know who i was but she never found anyone i find this like so i find this to be so fascinating

about the very very unique world of celebrity that you kind of inhabit which is to the people i mentioned this to you when we were having dinner but i was doing this like job thing in nashville And one of the people I was working with is a really, really big fan of the TV show Supernatural that you're on. And when I mentioned that I knew you, it was like I, you know, it was like saying that I was best friends with like the Pope or something to the people who are fans of your work. It is everything. And but yet there's also it's kind of a blind spot for a lot of other people. What is that exactly? That seems like maybe it's kind of the best of both worlds.

it is and it isn't i think that i'm not quite famous enough for it to feel like the best of both worlds and i'll tell you why because i can go into a crowded place and you know if i walk around for long enough eventually someone usually says hey are you is anyone ever what they say is has anyone ever told you you look like that guy from supernatural people don't usually know my actual name and they don't really believe that i'm actually the guy from supernatural because i've aged so much since the show ended but they um but that recognition feels nice you know and

And people can people come up in a restaurant and say, I'm sorry, I don't mean to bother you, you know, while you're with your family. And I can, I can give them an expression looking like I'm a bit annoyed, you know, but of course, inside, it feels wonderful. Yeah, right. But the problem is sometimes I will go out into a crowded environment and no one will recognize me. And that's not enough. I need at least those occasional touchstones. And as more time elapses from when my series ended, the one thing that I've ever done that anyone has seen, it's dropping off a bit. And that's concerning.

we have a rule on this show which is i mean you want to talk about niche it is i mean we're talking a handful of people out there in the world who know who me and andrew the co-host are but we always say if you see us if you see something say something if you see us in the wild you have to you have to identify yourself for for two reasons one because i might be acting up in some way and i want to make sure that i'm not doing that in front of someone who's a tbtl listener and two because it does feel very nice to occasionally and again it is on a very rare occasion hear from somebody um that they like this podcast that we do so maybe you need to start putting that but then also here's the thing you like you put up this very lovely nice post on instagram i think this week where you kind of were talking about this thing that you and i had been talking about and i the flood of people who reached out to me about it was like i didn't even realize you had done this and then i looked at my phone and there's like my instagram page was like it was like mel it had shut off it was like a fuse a circuit breaker had been thrown because of the amount of people who were suddenly like what's this luke burbank guy so you do have also like on instagram and places like that there's a tremendous number of people that are following what you're doing and saying um so you are getting a lot of attention over there and again using it for good things. I'm proud. I'm proud of you name checking me in the show for that thing you did

this week. Well, I enjoyed posting about that. When we were at dinner, you probably talk about

this on the podcast. Endlessly, probably to the complete boredom of the listeners.

You know, it's ironic. It's probably ironic for listeners because you so I'm going to I'm going to refrain what Luke has has been going on about ad nauseum on the podcast for the last year or so, probably. But he said to me that he had had this epiphany, which was there's a potential reframe in life where you can say when that this, you know, Luke, let me let me see if I can articulate what you what I remember you saying. you said that for most of your life you have spent your time sort of with your head down working um and thinking about that good thing that you're going to be doing like you're going to be going on this vacation you're going to be renting this villa and you're going to be sitting by the pool and that thing in the future is going to be the good part and you're you're just biding your time until you get to the good part and and then while you're there at the pool at uh you know in the villa you're like this is the good part um but then but then you're sort of consumed by the fact that that in and of itself is fleeting and it's going to be gone soon and then you're back

to that yeah there's less and less of the good part that now every minute you're in the good part means there's less of the good part that exists because the clock is running

and you said that you would have this realization like wait a minute what if everything could be the good part? What if getting up at five o'clock in the morning of a Tuesday could be the good part? What if even getting up for the third time in the night to urinate? I haven't gotten there yet, but that's a very, very good way to look at it. You framed it as if any given moment actually has the potential to be the good part. You just have to look into the crevices to find it. And I loved that notion and so and i thought oh this is something um that i could i mean it's a beautiful concept luke it really is and it's spiritually enlightened and it shows a deep wisdom that you are gaining um in your middle age and and i heard that and immediately thought how can i use this to my advantage. And so I ran home and plagiarized your insight and posted it on Instagram. And that's what I guess I actually did credit you.

You absolutely did. It was not plagiarizing. And you have a very nice—what you did was, in the iterative process, you took this conversation we'd had and you presented it in a really nice way and in a clear way and added some of your own clarity and insight on it and put it out to a much wider audience than I would have. So I think this was a this was a good all around. And I appreciate you doing that. I I had a moment that again, it's hard for me to separate out emotional growth from low testosterone because I feel like I'm I have these emotional moments where I want to cry. I've always been kind of a crier but I feel like it's happening more and I don't know if I need to see an endocrinologist about it or if it just means I'm being more open to the world but I was on my little jog this morning and I jogged by this guy and he this was such a small moment, it happens all the time but it helped that I was I'm very, music really stimulates a kind of emotional thing for me so i was it was just like jogging too well that yeah for me it does anyway absolutely but i was kind of not you mean this is sort of what you already said i was kind of not really feeling it this morning it's friday it's like i had a lot of energy in the beginning of the week now i'm a little like all right enough with this getting up early and going down for this little exercise thing and i was at the kind of like tail end of it so i was a little tired out but this song comes on i'm um i'm really into this band from australia called royal otis and this song oysters in my pocket came on and as i'm kind of coming around this bend there's just a guy an anonymous i don't know 60 year old dude or something and he's just jogging the opposite way and he just like waves at me and i like wave at him just the quickest moment and we just passed each other and there was just what came into my mind and what made me like again the song was hitting exactly the right note the right moment this very brief anonymous moment of two people that don't know each other and will never see each other again having a brief interaction that said we're both humans we're both doing this we're both out here in this morning neither of us is running particularly fast but that's okay like i was overwhelmed with like positive emotion and i just thought this is the good part you know it's just like it's hitting me a lot and the more that i talk about it and think about it the more that it feels like it's maybe even manifesting it in my life. So, you know, that's kind of where I'm at. What a lovely thing. Also, and maybe this is

also a symptom of low testosterone, but what a lovely thing to be talking about. You know, what a lovely thing to be sharing with other people instead of feeling like, oh, this is, I think that there's this tendency among us liberal intellectual elites to keep these kind of emotional, personal growth epiphanies to ourselves because, come on, who really wants to hear about that garbage, right? But actually, it's so good to talk about and share and remind each other about things like that and and try to, you know, give each other nudges of inspiration or accountability. You know, your sharing that, I think, has improved my last 10 days, and I've been thinking about it a lot. And the hard 75 has also caused me, well, I don't know if my life is better because of that or not.

Well, I can tell you that my life is forever changed because I have to pee so bad right now, so we should wrap this up. But I do want to tell you, I stole you want to talk about plagiarism. And this is legit plagiarism, Mish, because I did not credit you. I stole your joke last night when I was doing my radio show Livewire in front of a big crowd of people in Portland. I had brought my water bottle on stage and I was talking and I said 75 hard. And then the crowd looked kind of confused. And then I said, basically what you had said when we were having dinner, which was, this is not like a male enhancement product, despite what you might have heard. And the joke killed. And all I could think in my head was like, that was Misha's joke. I just fully stole that in front of these and did not credit him. So I want to say here, I apologize.

I think that that's a genius approach, too, because what you can do with that is you had a much larger audience in that scenario, right?

Well, yes, definitely. There was a lot of people in the room.

Right. So you can take credit in that bigger room, but then sort of exonerate yourself about the plagiarism issue by quietly whispering this to a select group of people.

Oh, wait, wait, hold on. Wait, there are more listeners to this show than were in the room is the good news. It's a small, I mean, this is a small audience. It's not under, it's not under. Oh, yeah.

you know what? Yeah, you're right. There is the, I forget, I forget it's a radio show.

Yeah. More people. I'm not just talking about the physically in the room. I'm talking about the people to whom that show was broadcast. And I think what you've done, you played your cards

well. You know, this tells you how bad I am at that job. It hadn't occurred to me till you even mentioned it, that that does go on the radio. I think of it as a live theater performance to like 500 people i was i was not factoring in that it does go on radio stations that's a really good yeah so i did i did steal your joke to a much broader group of people than are going to hear this on tbtl that is true but um you know i'm just trying to i'm just trying to be better misha i'm just trying to be better each day so hey um listen i really appreciate you taking the time to do this

today before you cut us off yes for your urine break um i i would like to say you seem like you

are um you are middle aging so gracefully wow i don't feel that way i'm glad you think that

well i'm i'm just reflecting back to you i mean we we don't see each other that often and we don't um we don't stay in touch uh in the in those we're honestly not not even friends this is a purely professional endeavor right um but uh seeing you i would just it really did strike me how great you seem. You seem like your energy is up, you're wrestling with, I think, the right ideas, the big picture ideas, the meaning. You seem to actually be caring about the meaning of life in a really thoughtful way. And it was you, by just having dinner with you, I messaged you about this but um you know just having dinner with you improved my week um and made me think about things you know in a different light and if you're having that impact on people that you're

coming across then you're doing something right well thank you for saying that and and i feel i'm i really feel the same way about you i you and i whenever we hang out i leave the experience feeling like so enriched and like i'm thinking about things and it makes me want to hang out more so i you know i it is very very mutual and i appreciate i appreciate your um there was some stuff we talked about uh on dinner that we're not talking about on the show but like life stuff for me that i relayed to the people uh who that was relevant to and uh let's just say uh there was a high approval rating for that that feedback that you've been giving me on on various topics so I appreciate that too I love how elliptical and secretive this is it's like incredibly dumb and coy and elliptical is the exact right word what I'm trying to say is your advice to me on that particular topic that I'm not getting into specifically has been resonating with me and it's really made it's given me some confidence in that area that I didn't have previously and I know this is wow you would have thought pointing the laptop out the window on Lummi Island was the least interesting part for the listeners. But no, I found a new least interesting part, which is me saying thank you to you for some encouragement that I will not get specific about on the air. But anyway, I appreciate you, my friend.

You too.

And all right, with that, we have reached the end of our broadcast week. Thank you again so much to all of the guests. Thanks to Jen Flash Andrews. Thanks to Daddy from The Basement. Thanks to television's Chris Hayes and also Petey and my friend Misha Collins. Mostly, though, thanks to all of you for spending this week with us. We are going to be back here on Monday with more imaginary radio for you featuring the triumphant return of the longest running Cobra. And we're all very excited for that. Also, thanks again to TBTL employee Numero Uno, John Sklaroff, for making sure all of this got onto the Internet, including today, where he's pulled over on his road trip to upload the program from Duluth, Minnesota. Who loves you, baby? Duluth. All right. Have a great weekend, everyone. Take care of yourselves. We'll see you on Monday. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Power out.