Muse

I used to be able to name every nut that there was, and that used to drive my mother crazy, because she used to say, Harlan Pepper, if you don't stop naming nuts, and the joke was, of course, that we lived in pine nuts, and I think that's what put it in my head at that point. So I'd go to sleep. She'd hear me in the other room, and she would just start yelling. I'd say, peanut, hazelnut, cashew nut, macadamia nut. That was the one that would send her into a... going crazy. She said, you stop naming nuts. Pistachio nut. Red pistachio nut. Natural, all-natural, white pistachio nut. Pine nut, which is a nut, but it's also the name of the town. TBTL!

I'm going to suggest that we have a little constructive talking time. What, you think I'm dressed to talk? I'm dressed to party hardy like an MC Scat Cat. I don't know what you guys are up to, and I certainly don't know what butt hurt means.

memes. Well, if it makes you feel better, I'd rather be up here with you than down there with those teenage people with their memes and their hashtags and Drake, Drake's Dusty Man Time.

Well, all right. Hello. Good morning and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. This is where the good times happen. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

See how I come to work.

Coming to you from Rochester, New York. That's right. The flower city, a.k.a. castle town, nestled amidst the Finger Lakes here.

All the way from the Finger Lakes. There are lakes that look like fingers, I guess. I don't travel.

I came out here starting last night, so Monday night. leaving Portland and then flying to Seattle and then flying to JFK airport and then switching airlines and then flying from JFK up here to Rochester. And I'm going to be very honest with you. I'm a little bit sleepy from sleepiness is the most common side effect, but I am going to just absolutely summon my inner strength and my inner charisma. I'm going to grab that Riz and and I'm going to stick this podcast out for the Rizzler and bring you episode 4296, 4296 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. I have a new favorite TV ad. I have to say that legitimately caught me by surprise on Sunday when I was like puttering around in the style of my friend Andrew and getting my vegetarian chili fixings going, And I just heard this ad that was playing during the football game. And I have to tell you, I went on it's only 30 seconds, but I went on a bit of an emotional journey from being like, you've got to be kidding me to like, oh, that's good. That's real good.

Who are the ad wizards who came up with this one?

So I'll play that for you. And speaking of my friend Andrew, he is the longest running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's, of course, back from his big trip to Croatia. He's getting all settled in. He's getting all comfortable again in normal life, which means now it's time to start stressing about TBTL Live in Philadelphia, which is a mere, I don't know, 10 days away or something.

You know, the only problem here is a big fat brain that misses eating all them big fat problems.

He's Andrew Wall. She's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Start stressing. Did I not tell you that I had at least one stress dream about the Philly event while I was on so-called vacation? Did I tell you that? It was very specific.

I'm actually, to be honest with you, surprised it was only one. And I'm not, you know, saying that to try to be funny. But, like, I know that there was a lot of question marks. And you're not usually, in my experience knowing you, is you'd rather not go on a European vacation with a bunch of question marks hanging over a thing that's going to be happening pretty much right when you get back from your European vacation. That's not ideal for you.

I'm actually, and I was going to tell you this story at some point during the show, although I don't know that we should lead here. But yeah, I am somebody, I've been thinking a lot about this the last 24 hours. I am not somebody who does well with loose ends. And right now I have a lot of loose ends. I have some loose ends regarding the Philly show, and I have some loose ends regarding my personal life, some of which I will tell you about later. Some of which I will carry with me to the grave because they are shameful, shameful secrets. but

Yeah, so I do have a lot of loose ends right now. And I'm not at my best when I have loose ends. This is the truth. But I'm trying to look through it a little bit here.

Now, I have probably too much comfort with loose ends, which leads me to have just constantly loose ends hanging off all different parts of me and a lot of things not getting done. So probably somewhere in the middle is healthy. Maybe if we add your your kind of, you know, concern about things and then my lack of concern about things. And if we put those together, I think we make one hell of a team where John Sklaroff fits into all of this is still, you know, it's still to be determined. I think he's actually probably about somewhere in the middle.

He I don't think so. I think he might be he's more he's definitely more towards my end of the spectrum. If not, is he more Andrew than an Andrew? in some ways. Whoa. I feel like... Could God microwave a burrito so hot he can't eat it? I mean, these are... I mean... These are the essential questions of our time. Listen, John will obviously hear this, and I hope it's okay that I share a note that was an internal memo sent to the TBTB biz boys. But, and by the way, again, I really appreciate this. I really appreciate this. I don't know if you saw this. He sent a note. We have a meeting later today, a planning meeting, and he sent the agenda for the meeting out yesterday. And the first agenda item is Philly Just, you know, broad stroke Philly But then he breaks that down under three subcategories The first one being an hour-by-hour day of itinerary That's the first thing on the agenda And again, not making fun of John here But when I say things like more Andrew than an Andrew Is an hour-by-hour day of itinerary Potentially scripted out in military time I don't know, I'm adding that part But, I mean, does that make the case?

That is a very, very strong argument that John Sklaroff may be one click to the right of you in terms of thinking these things through and being very concerned about the details. Now, because I am less detail-oriented, I haven't actually looked at that email. So this is news to me that we've got an hour-by-hour itinerary for Philadelphia. exactly i've just been i've just been fighting for my life the last uh i don't know 12 hours uh just trying to get out here to rochester which guess what my hotel is adjacent to andrew guess what i could i could just walk over and touch or throw a rock from this room and hit the eastman kodak world headquarters nice rochester new york i felt a legitimate thrill I think they're doing better than you would have imagined because of, you know, the kind of durability of the Polaroid concept and things like that. I mean, you know, the obituaries for Kodak have been written many times. And I think that they sort of managed to kind of always stay sort of one step ahead of whatever the seeming, what's the word I'm looking for, irrelevance of their product might be. i can tell you that when i was on the freeway and i just looked over and saw the this big and it's interesting because it's a very industrial looking place like it has a smokestack i'd like with smoke or steam coming out it's like is that where they make the polaroids well i don't think there's somebody in their polaroid for whatever it's worth were they ever is that a different company

altogether polaroid is polaroid and kodak is kodak i could be wrong okay so okay back to your

question what does kodak do what does he do that's why i asked we're generating a lot of steam

because i was thinking you know way back in the day i remember when things were shifting to digital digital as we say on the show um i think kodak you know made some digital cameras but clearly they did not like corner a market on that it's still i think the the standard bearers of you know nikon and canon and then you know probably sony and the other ones but you don't see a lot of like kodak branded digital cameras and also even digital cameras aren't you know aren't really what people are buying because everybody has them on their phone so yeah that's that's my question i'm looking here it says i'm seeing the first line of something is is after kodak emerged from bankruptcy so they they definitely declared bankruptcy at some point so maybe not one step

ahead of the industry maybe maybe am i thinking one step behind am i maybe where the steps are Let me put it this way. I felt legitimately psyched when I saw that Kodak, like I'm, my hotel shares a, essentially a parking lot with the Eastman Kodak company. That made me for some reason very, also I'm in a weird emotional place right now because of the, even by my standards and, and, you know, for work stuff, I do travel sort of a lot and I'm, I'm pretty like pretty used to it. I guess I didn't really quite realize what I was biting off, um, in this trip to try to get out here to watch. chester because here's what's going on oh my god one second though really quickly i i'm looking i just wanted to look at the kodak site it seems like they're big in printing and then probably chemicals and stuff to help people print so that's it's kind of less interesting or it's less consumer ford but is this the build does it say kodak and like individual bright letters like individual light up k-o-d-a-k on a grand grand building this this it's like the banner across the top of their website i'm sorry to interrupt you but now that i have eyes on this building i'm way more excited this is a that's an amazing building well now wait you're not looking at

the kodak tower are you okay yeah maybe i am because i don't see smokestacks on this thing and it's right in the middle of the city i don't know i think that's a different thing i'm out we're out kind of here and i'm in uh oddly enough named it's like greece new york like like then the country not the john travolta olivia john sure entertainment vehicle um and uh so i'm i think i'm slightly in the suburbs of rochester um which is i i found out this morning it was known as the flower city but what's cool about that nickname is both spellings apply because rochester new york was at one time a hub for a lot of like um flour like what you would cook with f l o u r but also a lot of agribusiness, so F-L-O-W-E-R, so you could call it the Flower City, and it would apply in both uses of that word, or both

styles of that word. Okay, well, I'm going to let you continue your story. I apologize. They do have a big photo of the Kodak Tower. It's the top of the Kodak Tower that I was seeing in this photo that had me very excited. Is that also here in

the greater Rochester, New York area? It looks like it's

downtown Rochester, yeah.

Maybe I'll go visit that later after I take some kind of a nap, although I've got to be honest with you, uh the napping i'm on my sleep cycle is really really um is pretty funky funky little sleep cycle because uh i got to the airport in portland last night so the big the cliffhanger for everyone who listened to yesterday's show was will luke be able to sleep on the plane by the way i did send you a photo a show pic for today potentially andrew of what my get-up was on the plane oh wow

situation was okay yeah big neck pillow wearing it apparently backwards or it's a different style than i've seen before because it's going all the way around your neck it's very fluffy in front

and then i blow your mind yeah i think that's the correct way to wear it i think we've all been wearing it wrong this whole time because and i only learned this recently because if you think about it when you are trying to if you are trying to sleep on a plane is the issue that your your head is going back so much that you need to support it i've always worn it with the opening on the front kind of like a horseshoe around the back of my neck because i just assumed that's what that's the whole point of this thing and then i saw somebody probably on tiktok or something that was like turn it around because the issue on a plane is always like your head nodding forward yeah and it has totally changed my it's changed my whole experience with one of those pillows

i've never used those before but i've always seen them as you describe with sort of the opening of the horseshoe in the front and that's why i've always assumed that they're used in fact you I even think, though, in advertisements we see them that way. I could be wrong about that, but this could be a viral moment here. We could be blowing people's minds, unless you said you already saw this on TikTok, in which case somebody else.

I think I saw someone else blew my mind on, like, you know, some probably TikTok or something like that. But since, so when we went to Europe, so I'm also not a neck pillow person. And, in fact, actually that plays a little bit into this story, which is, so I flew from Portland up to Seattle and then had a little time to kill in seattle and what happened was everywhere i was i had like a two three hour layover which taken individually didn't seem like much but you kind of start adding them up so it's like i leave portland and then i've got like two two plus hours in seattle so i'm chilling there now it's like uh it's midnight seattle time and now i'm leaving for jfk but then i get to jfk and then i've got like to switch planes switch airlines because i'm now going on Delta because Alaska Airlines does not fly from JFK to Rochester so now I've got to go to a totally different part of the JFK airport meaning I got to get on this air train I got to do this whole thing and I think that all these like you know three hours here three hours there and then you throw in a cross-country flight and then you throw in two regional flights and it was it was a pretty long a long journey to get here I will tell you that i slept pretty well on the seattle to jfk portion that's the that's the big one that's like five hours probably five and a half that's five hours five hours and change and the plane like there was a couple of there was a couple critical moments one the plane started taking off and I'm sorry. And I didn't, like, I was, they were serving food. Here's what helped. I did manage to get upgraded to first class. This is a major perk of flying a red eye. Nobody wants to be on that. So you will probably get upgraded if you have a minimal amount of status. So I was in a comfier seat than if I was in coach, so that helped. And I kind of, like, I got my crazy neck pillow on, like my neck brace that you can see. I got my, I had my, um, you know, my, um, whatever I cover little mask on my sleep mask. I had this all kind of like, and they gave me a blanket. I had the little blanket over me and I woke up at one moment cause I smelled food and I noticed that they had actually like, they were doing some kind of dinner service. And the part of my brain that doesn't want to miss out on a freebie was like, well, I should probably just like ask them if I can have a cheese box too. And I thought, are you hungry right now? No. Luke? Are you sleeping You're kind of This is kind of working You're kind of sleeping Don't like Don't wake yourself up And take all this Stuff off And then order a meal Just because it's Being offered And then like Throw off your whole schedule So I just like Put the My little sleep mask Back down Kind of Sort of repositioned myself And I'm not saying I was having like Deep REM sleep But what I can tell you is I Looked at At some point I looked at my phone And it said 5 a.m. And I thought wow okay so that must be like seattle timers i don't know i was confused about what time it was

but i was like there's no way my there's no way that the phone is telling me we're in new york and literally a minute later i hear ding we're beginning our initial descent into new york so like i basically slept the entire flight now again not the most restful sleep i've ever gotten in my life but i didn't know what time it was like i was i pretty much was in some form of sleeping for all five hours which was amazing which means dream that is really the dream i think if you would have taken out if i could have taken out the regional flights if this was just a thing where i got on an airplane in say portland flew to new york slept and then got you know went from new york to whatever i was going to do i think it might be doable like i have not other than that sleeping on the plane andrew i have not had any other sleep since you and i last spoke yesterday And I don't feel incredibly like out of I mean, I feel about the normal amount of out of it that I am. But I guess I'm trying to say it was I think it was sort of a successful test run as to if I can become a red eye guy.

You know, speaking of red eye guy, I saw on your notes you were saying Luke's a red eye guy now. And I was wondering since we're kind of like we're business partners, we're podcast partners. It'd be fun if like if that's you're like Luke, the red eye guy. And then I want to kind of be part of that branding. Could I be the pink eye guy?

Because it's close to red, you know, the conjunctivitis, the conjunctivitis guy. It's the red eye guy and the pink eye boy. Why do I got to be the pink eye boy? Calm down, Buscemi. Is he the one who's mad about being Mr. Pink in that movie?

Oh, wow. I didn't you know, I didn't even realize you were referencing that.

It's like Reservoir Dogs. It's Reservoir Dogs.

It's been a really, really long time since I've seen that. I loved that movie. The couple of times I watched it in like college. but it's also kind of so upsetting it's hard for me to return to it you know what i mean it's a

very yeah no i'm with you like i don't particularly like the stuff with like tim roth's character when he's been you know injured let's just say um now here's the thing i i felt like i was pleasantly surprised with how okay the the big long cross-country flight went and then i was in jfk and uh then i was like moved over to the delta terminal and i was waiting for the flight up here And then that Andrew was when I got I was pretty cocky. I was like, hey, this is amazing. I just slept five hours. I'm ready to take on the day. And then when I had like two more hours to wait for my next flight and I was just sitting in the kind of waiting area, I was like one waiting area over from the actual like gate I was using. if that makes any sense i just wanted to have i wanted to be somewhere where i kind of spread out i could kind of be comfortable i got so tired all of a sudden that i had to get my stuff and move myself to gate a12 which is where my flight was because i thought if i fall asleep i need someone from delta to wake me up like i need to be i need to be so close to the gate that they'll they will figure out something is up with me and they will come over and be like sir is this your flight because that's the kind of tiredness that set in all of a sudden was like oh if i close my eyes here i could wake up and it could be like 3 p.m and i missed my flight so i had to go get near where i was supposed to be boarding my next plane um because the so it's it's been kind of coming in waves and i got here to the hotel by the way i love heidi at the front desk here at this residence in i want to just say i will put a residence in a by marriott i will put a residence in up against any other

budget hotel experience like particularly like this one is it's this one's not brand new is probably built maybe 20 years ago but it's nice and clean it's got a kitchen in it like a lot of these residence inns that i stay in are actually newly built and they're like really nice like i just i can't recommend it highly enough heidi was great she was like checked me in early because you know i got here it was like i don't know 11 30 in the morning she was like no problem i got a room for you um i said rochester new york i go i've never been here before i'm excited to kind

of check it out and she goes yeah it's fine that's the thing about the people who work the front desks they live in these places you know what i mean well that's what she said she goes i've only lived

here for 50 years i was like well i guess you would know like i when she said it's you know it's fine i was like thinking that she was going to be like i moved here from you know a different part of new york state and i've never really connected with the area no no she's a lifer and by the way not a not even slightly a downbeat person like this heidi was like a complete charmer was had a lot of positivity a lot of energy it wasn't like if you were to list if you were to do a survey with heidi about a bunch of things they would all be kind of mid to her she's like a person who is generally positive she just wasn't gonna over sell me on the concept of

rochester new york she's like it's fine it's fine she's down to earth so i was like all right classic heidi good to have expectations managed in all of your travels luke did you by any chance happen to come across a black hard-shelled suitcase that has my name on it oh that's yours

i saw that at sea tack well that's good at least somebody has eyes on it okay we got to get into this my friend your luggage with your needed medication and your very expensive camera lens is still in the wind i'm getting um these are some of the loose ends

in fact i i have a lot of loose ends that i'm sort of working on and yesterday i had to like create a bunch of new loose ends and try to wrap them up because of this so yeah i mentioned to you on monday and today's wednesday right yes okay so i mentioned you on monday that we i'm sorry today's two no today's wednesday wait is today seriously wednesday i did after these messages with genevieve yesterday right yeah so it has to be wednesday well then i definitely promote i called this a tuesday edition oh did you wow you and i between between my jet lag which i think today might be the day that i don't feel it at all i'm hoping we'll find out this afternoon i think by today i should be clear of my jet lag but the last two days once okay well i want to

apologize to everyone everyone who drove off the road earlier when i said we're this is a tuesday edition of tvtl that's what i wrote could you see this on the twa hotel stationery that i stole

between your red eye though and my jet lag neither one of us are in control of like we can't tell

what goddamn day it is anymore oh my gosh i can't believe that i actually did that i'm sorry everyone And I apologize for the confusion.

I can't believe that I had to really think about it when you said that. I was like, wait a second. What did I do yesterday? No, I definitely – I honestly for a moment was like, did Genevieve and I record our podcast too early? I was very confused there for a moment. But, yeah, so today's Wednesday. We landed Saturday night in SeaTac Airport. Genevieve got her bag back off the carousel. We had to check our bags. And we stood there, as I was telling you, and then eventually everybody left the baggage area. And there were no more bags to be had except for one sad, empty plastic cube that just kept going around and around and around on the carousel. And I realized my bag is lost in the wind. And so an employee approached us and said, are you missing a bag? It looks like we forgot to put it on the airplane in Reykjavik. And so they're like, we'll get it to you and then we'll ship it to you. And then they called me Sunday night. This is like a night later, almost 24 hours, 26 hours later, they called me and said, we have your bag here at SeaTac. We're sending it to you via FedEx. They didn't give me a FedEx tracking number. They woke me up with the phone call because I was jet lagging it. And so I was like, damn, I should have got a FedEx number if they had one. It didn't show up. And I'm thinking, OK, at first, I'm mostly only worried about my lens. I have a very expensive camera lens in that bag. I should not have checked it. obviously that's on me for everybody who wants to write to me and tell and scold me and say don't put expensive things in checked baggage I realize that now I will learn from my mistakes um don't make me feel worse um also you shouldn't put needed medication in a bag that could get lost that had not occurred to me as somebody who has been blessed and fortunate enough not to have to take medication most of my life it didn't occur to me that oh if they lose my bag I'm effed if I land in Seattle and I can't take it and so um this is from my rheumatoid arthritis which is still a new

diagnosis i'm still trying to figure out the contours of all this and um is that if i can ask a clear hipaa violation question is this also the medication that's like 20 000 a month or

something insane no i haven't actually started that one yet which is and again that i i shouldn't have to foot the bill for that it'll be a combination of like insurance covering some of it and then you have to apply for a special discount card that car wash that we're doing It's so – we have to do a bake sale. That bikini car wash that we're going to be holding on Aurora to try to raise the money. It's a bikini bake sale. It's a night pants car wash, actually.

It's just me in a bikini trying to get you to take some zucchini bread.

I was going to say zucchini bread, too. Why is that the funniest thing to have you selling in a bikini? It just is. There's no arguing with it. Maybe a second would be a scone. But anyway, so yesterday I had the the privilege and the honor and the joy of dealing with, I guess, what are becoming my two least favorite industries, which is the airline industry and the health care industry, both of which you really question whether or not they're really looking out for the people that they serve. So I call the I've been getting phone calls, at least on Sunday, from both the airline, which would be Iceland Air and the people at SeaTac trying to give me updates on the bag when they first told me they were shipping it to my home. I got calls from both of them, but I didn't have callback numbers. And so yesterday when I'm like, where the hell is my bag? I call SeaTac and it's like, in order to find out where your bag is, you have to go through the airline. So press three for Iceland Air or whatever. I'm like, OK, fine. So I make it through to somebody. I mean, luckily, the phone tree system wasn't too bad in this case. And I talked to a nice but, you know, I don't know if it's fair to say ineffectual employee there who says, oh, yeah, we have a record of your bag. But, you know, we don't have a tracking. I'm just like, can I just get a tracking number for this FedEx thing? I want to know where it's going to be. I don't want it sitting on my porch for a long. I've never had anything stolen off my porch, but I certainly don't want my suitcase stolen off my porch on the off chance that that would happen with this expensive lens and all my stuff in there. So they're like, we don't have a tracking number, but here's this. By the way, OK, quick. I'm going to back up for one second and then I'll tell you why it's relevant. When we are at SeaTac Airport, very bleary eyed on Saturday night, and we're dealing with this woman who, again, seems very nice, but not like instilling tons of confidence in me about our lost luggage. And she works for SeaTac proper. She has us write our information down on a form that she creates on the back of a piece of paper. It's just I would show you the photo of it, except it's got all my personal information of it. She just writes a client name, whatever. We give her our address. I'm not going to give you the name of the road I live on, but let's just say that it could be two words. But we said to her several times, that's one word. And she wrote down my email address, my personal email address, which I will say ends in my last name, Walsh at something. And and so she takes all this information down. I take a photo of it. But it's just like me writing it down on a blank white piece of paper. Right. And then I take a photo of that. So for the record, that does not instill confidence.

no you want to you want there to be a digital form that this is being entered into that is the thing they always use for this you don't want it to be something that seems that ad hoc the reason

i go into so much detail about like my personal address there and everything is yesterday when i'm talking to this person at iceland air and she's like we don't have a tracking number for that but i will elevate this with the airline or i will elevate this with seatak airport or i will I'm like, I don't know what that means, elevate this. And she's like, okay, well, I'm sending you an email. She's like, you should have received some emails from us already so you can track your bag. I'm like, no. She's like, well, what's your email address? And I give it to her. And again, I won't tell you my full email address here, but it ends in the word Walsh and then the at symbol. And she said, so I spell it out for her. And then she says, wait, is it Walsh then an A? And I said, no, it's Walsh. And then that's the at symbol for the email. She's like, oh, well, somebody wrote it down wrong. I go to my phone pick of the quote-unquote form, the blank piece of paper that the woman filled out for me. There's no extra A in there. Somebody was just transcribing it into the system and saw the at symbol and added an A to my email address. So right out of the gate, I was probably missing emails from these folks. When I click on the button that says track your bag, there's no information to track it other than the wrong description of my bag. It says a soft-shelled black bag. We insisted several times it's black. I pulled up. I looked up my bag online and I showed it to the woman. My my street address is wrong because it's they wrote my street as two words instead of one. Hopefully that's not a huge deal to FedEx. But every. single one of these things is making me more and more anxious about my bag and so now i'm like three days past the the prescription that i was supposed to take for my rheumatoid arthritis right and i wasn't sure if i should just gut this out or not i'm new to all of this medication and it's medication that takes a long time to work so i don't know what kind of the danger zone is and it's kind of hard to explain i kind of don't want to go into all the detail only because it's super boring but like i take one medicine right now that i think i will be probably taking the rest of my life in addition to this other medication that will be prescribed soon for me and that medication that i take i take once a week but i take a whole bunch of pills of it once a week so on monday mornings i wake up and i take four of these pills and monday evening it's one pill that's the size of a summer sausage it is weird also i take one summer sausage but that's just for me that's just a little candy on top um that's just a little casing on top genevieve hides your medication in the summer sausage it's called a meat pocket that's how i take my medication um but anyway so my routine right now is on monday mornings i take four pills and monday evenings i take four pills and then that's it and then i'm also taking this sort of um this sort of bridge medication in between while i while i will eventually sort of um what's what i'm looking for you know start my new medication and so i finally write to my doctor because i realize i'm starting to get really sore again I to the credit of the the medication cocktail that my doctor prescribed

for me a while back it took a long time to work I remember I was on the meds for a while and then I still went back to him like I'm still not good I told him about this I think I mentioned this to you a month or so ago we went on this garage sale adventure and it was like so hard for me to get in and out of the car like I just couldn't enjoy my Saturday it was so rough and then in the couple of weeks since then the meds started to kick in and like during my trip to Croatia where there was a lot of walking and some pretty like kind of arduous getting from one place to another with all of our luggage across cobblestones and everything I had some days where I was a little bit sore but generally speaking I was so thankful for how I felt I felt more like my old self than ever not a hundred percent but to the point where as I mentioned to you um when we got back here in the states on sunday i took a bike i needed to get from point a to point b to point c and i took a bike several different places on sunday and i was like i don't even there was a moment not long ago where i wondered if i'd ever feel like i could get on a bike again so everything was going really great for me but then sunday turns into monday monday turns into tuesday and i was really sore yesterday and i was thinking well is this because of the medication or is this because i went overboard with the biking you know what i mean that could that could cause it too i might have gotten a little careless with it but then by yesterday midday it might have even been Monday night I start noticing oh shit my wrists are starting to look bad like they did before I even knew what my diagnosis was and like last night I went to throw a dart for the first time in a while and I was oh I can't play darts again so clearly this is not being caused by me being careless and riding a bike around town prematurely the meds are wearing off you know so I decide yesterday It's time to, like, kind of reach out to my doctor and explain the situation via, you know, this online portal you can use to communicate with your health care providers. And so I wrote about, you know, I've been feeling really good, very encouraged about all of this. However, my, you know, luggage is missing. I don't know when I'm going to get it back. I was hoping to gut it out, but it sounds like you should probably re-prescribe me or prescribe me a refill for two of these medications that I'm taking. And so the doctor does that. He said, I just, you know, I just called them into your pharmacy. you should definitely be on both of them again so I'm like okay great so I'm still feeling very anxious about my bag but I'm like well at least I'll get this medicine I call the pharmacy I'm like hey I think my doctor just called in a you know a refill for me is it ready now can I come pick it up I just want to make sure that that it went through okay and the person says oh it looks like two things came in but insurance is blocking it they won't let us fill it I'm like what do you mean it says well insurance says that you already have plenty of that medication. And I'm like, well, it was lost. I mean, it's kind of in transit and I don't have access to it right now because they kind of lost my luggage. He's like, let me try the lost prescription override. Nope. The insurance company won't accept that. He's like, you can just pay for it out of pocket if you want. I'm like, well, how much is it? And he's like, well, this one,

the kind of the one that is the bridge medication. He's like, that's only $10. You can pay for that. And I'm like, okay, how much is the other one? Tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap, tap. And He's like, about two hundred and fifty dollars. I'm like, geez, he's like, well, I have an application here that you could apply for a discount through the far through the drug manufacturer and get that down to fifty dollars. And I'm like, I said to him, I'm like, no, like I wasn't trying to be rude to him. I think those pharmacists are I think all pharmacists right now are overworked and understaffed. And so I'm trying not to waste this guy's time.

But I'm like, no, like my insurance, I pay for insurance to cover my medication costs. I'm not pulling a scam here. Nobody's getting high off of this, you know, rheumatoid arthritis drug that I need. And it's like, oh, thank God we pay. You are taking Roxy's, though, for your rheumatoid arthritis. I am. I'm taking.

You're taking blues. You're taking Roxy's.

Uh-huh. I was trying to think, what is the proper name of the roofie pill?

Rohypnol. Rohypnol. I'm taking Rohypnol. i um i by the way i don't want anyone to make any judgments around the fact that i knew that immediately that was a very quick response by that was actually a test and i don't want that doesn't indicate anything okay except that i know a lot of stuff hey becca if you're listening

right now we are a green light on the intervention a green light on the intervention yeah um anyway so i'm now really irritated so like i said i'm irritated with the airline industry which we paid a lot of money to to get me and my luggage from one place to another and they didn't do their job and now the company that we pay through insurance to make sure that we can get health care is saying no we are blocking you from your health care because you don't because you should already have these pills or whatever so like i'm irritated to say the least so i call the health insurance company and i get you know the through the phone tree or whatever i get placed on hold I'm waiting for a representative representative named destiny answers the phone and you know she seems nice enough and she says and I explained the situation I was probably on hold maybe three or four minutes nothing excessive um but you know I was waiting for her then she picks up and immediately she says I can't help you with that I'm going to transfer you to somebody in our pharmacy department or whatever who works with pharmacies I'm like all right that doesn't sound write to me but whatever fine she puts me on hold probably another five minutes or so because this

is not a pharmacological question this is a uh we lost this and now i need a replacement it does there's no reason somebody who has a pharmacy background needs to get involved in this

in in this i don't need an ombudsman i just need my meds and so so i'm holding i'm on hold again again i don't want to i don't exaggerate this i mean i have been in some customer service situations where you're on hold for 15 20 25 45 minutes you know what i mean like it's not that situation but it is frustrating and i'm also just kind of in a bad place i'm in pain i'm jet lagged in the afternoon i'm really getting anxious about my bag um and now i want my medication and the whole thing is sort of galling to me that the insurance can sort of withhold it like that and so destiny puts me on hold again she's like i'm gonna transfer you so i'm on hold again for like again a handful of minutes and then she picks up again hey i got so-and-so on the line i can't remember this person's name i got so-and-so on the line here please hold i'm trying to think of the other characters names in the sandman comic book but it was dream um anyway she's i got death on

the phone um so i she's like she's like uh i have inevitability standing by i'm gonna transfer you

over i have fate on the line okay so she's like okay fate on the line um i'm gonna transfer you over and then okay hello okay she makes the introduction and then destiny is gone uh destiny is gone show title uh and then this person i i explained the situation again very briefly she says i'm sorry i can't help you with that your insurance is provided through an employer and so So Targus, Targus, your wife's new name is Targus. And so she's like, I'm sorry. And you can hear it in her voice that she doesn't want to be relaying this. But it's just like so complicated, right? Like I'm calling my insurance provider. They're now saying after the second transfer, well, your insurance is provided through an employer. And in this case, it's the University of Washington, which is such a huge organization anyway. It's like you mentioned before, as far as employment is concerned, it might as well be a city all of its own. And so, you know, these things get really complicated in ways I can't even begin to understand. She's like, I got to I got to connect you with somebody else who sort of like what's the word like operates that plan or handles that that part of the plan. I'm like, all right, all right, all right. And by this point, I'm trying not to be a jerk to any of these people because they're all doing their jobs and they're not doing it poorly, by the way. They're they're they're they're trying. But and this is a little embarrassing to say, but it's they all start by saying, how are you doing today? and this is the time where I start getting honest about that. You know what I mean? When you start saying, I've been better, Destiny. You know, or like whatever. I've been better, but I appreciate the help. I'm not trying to make them feel bad, but I don't want to say good because you know what?

I'm not good.

I'm like really having a day.

The facade is starting to crumble that we all kind of put up. You know, in most normal moments of life, we just say, I'm doing fine. And in this case, it's like you can no longer maintain that. I said, terrible, thanks for asking.

And then I said

I talked to our friend Nora yesterday

Oh really? she doing well actually terrible thanks for asking it's right in the name despite the name she's doing well i'm glad to hear that um so i've been enjoying her videos on instagram anyway so this is so this the second person says i'm going to connect you with somebody who manages your plan through you know the university or whatever like okay great um so then i'm at hold again and then somebody named um i think it was a bonnie no it wasn't johnny it wasn't bonnie It was something along those lines. Let's go with let's go with Bonnie. Bonnie calls me or picks up the phone and I explain the situation again. And she's like, yeah, OK, so it's lost medication. I'm like, yeah.

She's like tap, tap, tapping. Let me just say that has to be a fairly frequent occurrence, whether it's the airlines lose someone's luggage or it's in a purse or something that is stolen out of a car or misplaced. like it seems to me like lost medication and again if we're not talking about one of these medications that are commonly abused it just seems like it there just should be a button for that right like yeah the medication got lost uh and we need to replace it that just it the amount of heaven and earth that's needing to be moved for this is really considering this is like you said there's probably no black market for this particular medication you know where it's commonly being you know abused or whatever i'm just surprised that they don't have an easier

system for this meanwhile we have a society that has you know a huge problem with addictions with addiction and i have people in my neighborhood who are like walking around like zombies because they were making they were flooding the the society with with oxy and like it's just told

them that you lost your tranc fentanyl right yeah oh no problem quick replacement by the way i found

my sticky note in the garbage can it was destiny then abigail then bobby bobby not bonnie um so anyway i'm talking to bobby bobby and i are kind of close now so the interesting thing about bobby is she doesn't sound like she's at a call center she sounds like she's a person behind her desk and it's like she's not filling out a form or just kind of going through you know talking points with me she starts composing an email to somebody who she's composing an email to i'll i'll never know but bon bobby keeps saying like okay well i gotta write an email about this but here's the irritating thing she's like has this happened before i'm like what do you mean has it happened before i'm like i'm only been on you know i've only had to deal with this kind of thing for the past several months or whatever she's like okay it's like well i have to tell you that like this lost medication exception you can only use this once every two years so like i'm already this like now i'm like wait a second is that maybe i should maybe i shouldn't use this up now i don't know if my bag am i gonna get off the phone and my bag is gonna be arrived on my front porch you know and i'm like Am I using up my once every two years allocation of oopsies so that I can get my goddamn health care?

You're like me last night at the Alaska Airlines Lounge at the end gate at 10 p.m. I had one free pass left. They were open for one more hour. And I was like, do I want to use this free pass now or do I want to wait until there's some kind of snow event and I'm going to be trapped in the airport for nine hours? And just think about how much chowder I could – free chowder I could eat in those nine hours.

Oh, I'm sorry. I misunderstood. So a free pass to get into the lounge? Is that what you're saying? No, you always – I thought you always have access to the lounge. You don't have always access to the lounge?

I did not buy the – well, what happens is – boy, sorry. I really derailed this to take it to a not interesting place. But I get a certain number of free passes just based on how much I'm flying. And I realize that that's actually about the number of times I ever go in that thing. so instead of like buying in years past i have like bought the pass i have been not doing that lately trying to just see if i can if i can make it work with the amount of freebies they give me i had one freebie left and last night i was like you know is this i said how many free passes did you have one left and i was like uh do i use this now or do i wait until some kind of like again sort of thing where i'm literally trapped in an airport for a full day that would be the so your mind's doing the same thing you're like okay do i use up my one lost medication kind of like freebie here uh but you know but then the medication shows up and then that was like a waste

you know like so what did you end up doing so i'm talking to bobby bobby's like you can only use this once every two years this exception or whatever i'm like okay fine but now it's sort of like hearing this is again like i don't know what this is going to be what my life is going to be like two years from now or whatever and i don't know but it's just adding to my anxiety level which i'm starting to feel more and more and more and so i call so i'm like okay bobby and she's like okay what i need to do is i need to send an email to somebody she didn't say who i'm going to send an email to somebody and then they'll be able to override it and then you'll get a phone call from me later today and i'll give you the green light and then you can call the um pharmacy back and then they'll be able to fill your prescriptions for you i'm like okay fine so i'm like okay i'll I had some errands. to run and then i was going to go to lunch too and so i uh i i'm going to my favorite pho place by the way listeners who are in the seattle area who are fans of tan brothers pho which is kind of a standard bear around here we'll be happy to hear profiterals are back baby luke i'm not sure how much of a pho person you are or a tan brothers person you are but they were always famous for having a dessert profiterals are something that you can get um from the sacklers no So, yeah, a profiterole is, I think, a generic term for a small dessert. Maybe it's always cream-filled. Yeah, it's French, I believe, right? Yeah, so anyway, there's these Tan Brothers, a pho place. When they come out and they bring you the traditional plate of bean sprouts or whatever those are, and a lime wedge, and then, is it basil leaves? It's not basil. Yeah. It is. It is basil leaves. the Tam Brothers little like kind of claim to fame was they would also put a little profiteral a little cream puff on the plate as well it was like kind of a thing when I first came to Seattle and started eating a lot of pho that was always like some people would talk about like I remember a stranger article like do you eat it first as an appetizer or afterwards and it was like kind of always a very cultural thing around here at some point I don't know if it was pre-pandemic or pandemic related they stopped serving the profiterals and then I went to Tam Brothers yesterday to get a bowl of pho and what was on the plate i took a photo of it maybe we can use as a show pic if people want to see my profiteral anyway um i am having my pho and the phone rings and so i didn't want to have the conversation in the middle of the restaurant so i rush outside i answer the phone it's it's my new pal bobby bobby's like i'm giving you the green light you're all set i sent the email we got approval call the pharmacy and they'll be able to fill it i'm like okay so i'm like can i just go pick it up now or do i have to call him she's like call him and tell him that you're good to go so i call the pharmacy back i talked to the same guy who was trying to help me last time who is like helpful enough but you know he's certainly not going out of his way to be super friendly he's very business like i think he's also super busy he's like the only guy there and i've just seen him take shit from other customers before so i'm a little protective of him so anyway i i call him back i'm like hey uh i'm the guy you were talking to earlier i need these medications he's like going back in the system uh i'm still being blocked i'm like

what do you mean you're still being oh he's like yeah i don't know whatever it is man still being blocked and he's like well if i put this other code in here which isn't a lost medication code but a uh but a change of therapy code i can get it to go through that way i'm like will will that work will i have to pay for it he's like it might come back around you i'm like well then don't do that like i'm not i don't want to kick this can down the road like i'm like reverse that this is a lost medication thing like whatever he's like yeah you already you already decided to play that

chip to play that card that you only get to play once every two years yeah you might as well play

it because i know if they say oh it's a change of treatment then it's going to go back through the system and it's going to come back and they're like you did not have a change you know what i mean i just felt like i i knew that it was going to come back and have you my life walking it off

and or rubbing some dirt on it yeah just a much more i would say kind of naturopathic approach to this whole thing i mean it seems like these medicines are just very complicated and also i

want to say in the background of this is also since this started in may and since i've been getting various treatments again including that weird like running electricity through my nerves and all this stuff like this stuff has been racking up but it's also um it's just like i get bills from all different sources like i go to my main portal from my from my the the medical center i go to and i got bills in there but then i'll get bills from a different department and those don't come through the my chart app those come through something else and then things aren't aligning and i've just been spent and then i from the lab core that does my blood those bills come in from somewhere else then i get these random bills for these wrist guards that i got but they're not so anyway it's just been like it's not just the money but i've spent the past like summer like on the line with people trying to say why is this bill here why is my deductible not kicking in and like all this stuff that i'm not super comfortable like that i have never had to deal with before so it's all a bit foreign to me and it's all just like wrapped up in the anxiety about you know my health where it is right now and my unfamiliarity with this stuff and it's just it's a whole thing right and so when he's like well i'm gonna try this other coat i'm like don't do that like i don't want to be like two months from now in november trying to explain why i was trying to get my meds because the airline lost my bag and now I'm on the hook for 250 bucks or whatever the hell it is you know and so anyway I'm like reverse that I gotta call Bobby back Bobby didn't give me a number but I did I was able to like kind of use the number that was saved in my phone so I call Bobby I get a different person and she can tell like I am so jet-lagged at this point too I'm like in my car after eating a bowl of pho that's a good move too if you're really tired try to eat a big bowl of phoze and wake them up you're follow following up on the major success from monday of red robin right exactly i will say

i was better yesterday but i was starting to feel uh i was starting definitely to feel like kind of groggy here and also just at the end of my rope right i'm trying not to be rude to anybody in fairness yeah i'm not trying to be rude to anybody but they can definitely hear in my voice that like this is a fellow who has no energy left not even cranky energy just like just just downtrodden i could hear myself just like I got nothing left in the tank for these conversations so I call the number that Bobby called from I get a colleague of hers I just gonna say hey listen I guess I'm trying to reach somebody named Bobby I'm trying to get medication because it was lost in my luggage and it keeps on getting blocked and she fixed it and it's not fixed or whatever and this woman I could just tell she she she talked to me like somebody who was she was on a like a hotline like a self-harm hotline she was like okay okay bobby's a colleague of mine i'm gonna tell her to give you a call back and i have your information i'm like yeah and please just tell her that the deal is whatever she did for me to get my medication is still being blocked so then i'm running my next errand or whatever and then bobby calls me back while i'm driving maybe 15 minutes later she's like hey this is bobby i heard you're trying to reach me i'm like yeah bobby i'm trying to reach you like whatever you did it didn't work it's still being blocked at the pharmacy she's like oh okay well i'm looking at this which like well it looks like they it went through but then they reversed it i'm like bobby they reversed it because they used a different code and i don't understand your guys's job but that was because i told them don't use the wrong code to bypass the system should be all set for me now and then she's like okay and then she's like kind of tip tap tapping away and she's like oh i think i see what happened like i assumed they were gonna fire the override but i need to fire the override i'm like okay just fire the override bobby like let's just let's fire the override here like i'm just i'm just i shouldn't even probably be driving at this point i'm drunk on pho and frustration and like and she's like okay i'm profiterals in profiterals and she's just like okay it should be good to go now and i'm like parking my car and she's like yeah and i'm like okay are we definitely good to go here bob she's like yeah call i'm like are you calling the pharmacy or am i she's like call the pharmacy it'll be good to go and so anyway not a huge power out i did end up getting my medication well this was also kind of a kick in the pants i i call my buddy back at the pharmacy i tell him this should be good to go now sounds like it was of miscommunication somebody didn't fire the override blah blah blah he's like yeah yeah it's ready to go i'm like okay can i pick it up in like a half hour he's like you better give it

he says sir your erectile dysfunction medicine is all ready to go right when i say rheumatoid

arthritis what i mean is pp meds well there is an issue with stiffness just kind of lack of you know like water water everywhere yet not a drop to drink you know what i'm saying no so he's like we're i said hey can i pick it up in like a half hour he's like you better give us two hours we're giving out flu vaccines today i'm like two hours oh god to like 6 30 at night or something i'm like all right fine that was it i go back at 6 30 i get myself my medications i'm on them again i couldn't take them last night because you're not supposed to take them at night i took them this morning uh you know there's no immediate effect on these things in a certain way I think I would have been weirdly this sounds very weird and counterintuitive I'm very anxious about my bag I'm hoping that we'll wrap up this show and I can go to my front door and open it and my bag will be there I've done that move about a hundred times since Sunday night it hasn't come true yet I think there would have been an extra frustration though if my bag arrived like if I'd come back finally with my meds after spending about three hours of making calls and taking calls on this, and then to come back and find my bag at my doorstep would have been kind of rough. Having said that, I want my bag back. I want my bag back. I want my lens there. I want my lens to still work. I don't want it in pieces. But that's where we are now. So still no bag. I got some meds. I don't know, man. I'm so tired. I'm still – I'm shocked.

I am just absolutely shocked that they have not been able to figure out getting this bag back to you after that many days like again i said this awful on maybe was it monday show i don't i'm also a little unclear on what day of the week it is but like i with the fact that everything is scanned and digital and tracked and there's barcodes i don't understand how something like this can i don't understand how they let the plane take off from iceland without your bag like they should have just been like okay hey guess what everything except this one bag is on this plane and we we have to put the bag on because the computer tells us don't take off until you have all the bags on this plane this one bag is missing let's put it on there like and now the fact that it seems to be kind of i mean slightly accounted for but like they can't tell you exactly like can they tell you exactly where it is is it out on a truck right now or

anything i mean it's supposed to be in fedex's hands right now but i don't have a fedex fedex number to check it like they gave

me this when when they realized that they're that the at symbol wasn't an a and they finally sent me the email which by the way you'll love this it's not a lost luggage report luke it's a property irregularity report oh it's an irregularity uh no it's not an irregularity it's you not doing your job um so i'm so i've clicked through and i'm looking at it now it just says tracing continues please check back later tracing continues luke maybe i should call bobby maybe bobby can get my

bag back for me honestly if anyone can help you at this point it's probably body body or one of the tan brothers exactly that's it those are those are your only well i'm sorry man that's really frustrating and and and um and i i totally understand uh kind of your feeling and also just how sort of beat down and run down you are over the whole thing i'm hoping that by the time we do tomorrow's show you'll have all of your stuff i mean you've got your meds now but you'll have your lens it'll be working you're kind of like you know your body will be catching up from the jet lag and we'll just have like a really solid wednesday show tomorrow where i don't complain about anything i did tell you like i really that was a joke because tomorrow's show is going to be

the thursday show but uh oh what uh oh did you say when did you say wednesday yeah i was trying

to turn i'm trying to turn my mistake about what day today was into a comedic goal i see gotcha by now intentionally misstating what tomorrow will be.

Well, it was comedic bronze made. It was comedic brushed stainless steel. If that. Iron pyrite. What's the fool's gold? But I say this earnestly. I don't think, and I could be wrong about this, I don't think TBTL is at its best when I'm just complaining about customer service or just like these types of things. And so I told you before the show, I'm like, I don't even know if I want to get into this. I mean, some people might find it like, oh, yeah, very relatable. But I do promise tomorrow I will come to the show with no complaints, no matter what's going on with my bag. Unless something really dire happens to me between annoying now. Yeah, exactly. Tomorrow is going to be Sunshine and Roses.

Thank you for being a tan. All right, let's thank some of our daily donors. These folks are supporting TBTL with a financial donation, and it's the financial lifeblood of the program. We exist basically on two things, arthritis medicine and financial lifeblood. Those are the two things we just got to have every day.

I feel like it's only a matter of time before listeners can just just donate meds to us directly. Like as we get older, as we age, you know, like pretty soon people can just like skip the middleman.

That's right. It's a sort of combo of Kaiser, Patreon and GoFundMe. You can donate to my KP account. Oh, I did. Did I tell you again? I'm not doing this for effect. My brain is actually kind of like sort of scrambled eggs today. Did I tell you that I Zoomed with my doctor on Tuesday to get my colonoscopy back on the schedule?

Oh, you had to – oh, that's right because you can't just like – I think I – yeah, you can't just like reschedule it, right? You have to have another appointment so that it's recommended or whatever.

Which is just kind of funny to me because, like, what happened was I had one scheduled, and then I couldn't go because I had a work thing, and so then they said, well, the referral has expired. You have to get a new referral. And I'm like, well, if you think about how the human colon operates. I didn't get younger. Guess what? It ain't getting fresher.

They say that you do it at a certain time in your life at a certain age. I've never had one before, and I haven't gotten younger, so I'm still in the window of needing one. Like, that's so ridiculous.

this but what was great was so i i you know i'm i'm doing this 75 hard by the way today is day 10 although this is a major ish day i am going to work out but i'm only working out once today and i did not bring my giant water bottle with me because i could not i basically meant to kind of like go back to a normal amount of water intake while i'm traveling because i could not be getting up every hour on that airplane to pee yeah i'm in like lots of places where i don't have total control of the stuff whether it's the shuttle bus from the airport like i just like this is not the time for me to be always about to pee my pants um but i am trying to stick with the other stuff with the relatively healthy eating and things like that but anyway i so as part of this kind of get your stuff together luke mode i'm in it was like i'm gonna get that colonoscopy appointment back on the schedule and i went on to the website of my health care provider and i was gonna have to drive you know my primary physician is like i don't know 45 minutes

drive from my house and i was that's part of why i've been putting it off and then i went to make the appointment and said do you want to just do this on zoom and i was like and they're like how's tomorrow there's 30 times tomorrow you can do this on zoom i was like great yes i do yes i was like it never even occurred to me and then yesterday morning before we got together to do the show i just like chopped it up with my doc and he was like what do you need i was like i got to get that referral again he says no problem he's like put it into my system he was like that's

they're gonna do they're gonna put it in your system exactly yeah exactly precisely so it was

like i was like oh this is for something that's like purely kind of paperwork this isn't you know he's not gonna hit my knee with the rubber you know reflex hammer or something like for this this is great this is this is technology actually really really coming in handy here because i don't need to drive all the way down there to ask him if he can just re-up my little yeah recommendation or referral so he just did it there and now and it took like five minutes of my life instead of two hours of my life with full-on round trip so uh i got to give a shout out to uh telemedicine

that really came in handy i only had the opportunity to use that once and it was during the um pandemic and it turns out i had an alien living in my chest um the doctor was able to take

care of that and the fact that they were able to talk you through the surgery yeah exactly i think It's pretty remarkable, actually. It's pretty intense. Yeah, yeah. Yeah. I also have to give full marks to Jolene Tashner of Portland, Oregon. Hey, Jolene. For supporting the show. Jolene is our first donor today. Thank you. April Bingham is in Seattle, Washington, and is keeping TVTL going. Thanks, April. Thanks to Scott Hartley. Oxford, Ohio. that's home i believe of uh miami university of ohio oh yes yes yes yes i was trying to think of

what its claim to fame was i believe you are correct about that that confused the hell out of me when i was a kid growing up in ohio and then having a place called miami but you're like but miami is something else right it's like is that miami vice no it was not yeah we've i think might

have even been scott's support or somebody else in oxford over the years where i i do i've talked before about what a man you almost wonder much like you just declaring just using your lost medication exception you wonder if miami university of ohio might want to just go with like a different name oxford university of ohio or something because they're they're much like the democrats when it comes to electoral college to use our friend chris hayes's terminology they're running uphill but running uphill on trying to make sure everyone knows they're the miami that they're at versus the other miami that kind of lives larger in people's minds yeah so why don't

you clear things up and just call yourselves oxford oh wait that's already a school we're

gonna start calling ourselves harvard it's so confusing that reminds me located in oxford ohio

my friend um well a bunch of my friends with my friend paulie who i mentioned the show a lot went to ohio university um which is in athens ohio on the hawkins river and he used to call it harvard on the hawkins anyway that's just an anecdote made me chuckle uh we also have to thank kathleen

lockhart who's in buffalo grove illinois where they make the sauce i love that song buffalo grove or wait what am i thinking uh-huh is that a that's a uh that's a who does that that's the

um crosby stills nash and young oh no i was thinking of the other one the the 80s song the buffalo groove or um oh uh sure buffalo stance the buffalo stance is that nana

of cherry buffalo yes it is looking good today you're looking good in every way and do you know

that it was part of like well you know what sometimes you just shouldn't tell a story if you don't really understand the facts well enough i was looking up buffalo stance one time because i was like how does this fit into culture because i don't remember it for i'm only vaguely remember it from my youth and then i feel like it kind of gained more prominence in my consciousness as i got older but then i was like what is it do you know that it was like part of like some sort of it wasn't just Nena Cherry is that how did you say it maybe I'm saying her name incorrectly I don't know I said it the way that like

you know like Chet Buchanan said it in 1983 or something Nena Cherry but I guess it was part

of a sort of a collective like the reason it was called Buffalo Stance was it had something to do with like kind of a collective of musicians that were like trying to I don't know do something with music good story

Walsh well because well well there's because there's there's this part of that song where i guess nana cherry is going what is he like anyway and i just remember being a kid going what who let mary poppins in on this what is happening in this song it's all over the map i didn't realize that she's swedish i thought that

was solidly american okay yeah i i don't know so she's swedish but there yeah there is this

there's this part where like this maybe it's not her i always assumed it was but somebody comes on of the

track and just starts going what is he like what is he like anyway and it's like completely out of

left field for the song i had this pretty wrong there was a seed of truth of what i was trying to say here i'm on the wikipedia page here i mean it's understandable that i got this wrong because i read this a long long time ago and it's kind of confusing it says the song title refers to quote buffalo a group of photographers models musicians hair and makeup artists formed by fashion stylist Ray Petri of which group Cherry, Morgan, and McVeigh were all members. I assume they were all musicians on that track. A Buffalo stance is according to Cherry, an attitude you have in order to get by. It's not about fashion but about survival in inner cities and elsewhere. Wow. I was just trying to make a

Buffalo Wild Wings joke.

I know. I was going in a much less interesting direction. Much less interesting? Okay, let's move on. sorry but i do want to say once again thank you kathleen and thanks to michael went who's in

puyallup washington oh do the puyallup the um is the is the evergreen state fair currently in in effect are they doing that right now the puyallup what i will always call the puyallup

fair i think it's the i think it's the washington state fair now right because the evergreen is up north in edmond uh in um is it edmunds or everett it's up at the no you know what i think I think that might be Monroe. Monroe, yes, yes, yes, yes. Anyway, Puyallup Fair, which I will Google Puyallup Fair, and they can fix it.

Well, I don't think they call it that anymore. I don't care. Now it's the Washington State Fair. They know.

It still pops up. I think that it's—

You know, I'm in the market for a hot tub. I should probably go to that because I used to always see all those hot tubs that were for sale and think, Who in the hell is—

Who is doing their hot tub shopping there?

Who's buying—and I'm like, maybe me. Oh, I got to tell you a hot tub. Maybe on tomorrow's show, can I tell you a hot tub story?

whoa can you tell me a hot tub story indeed it's the only kind of story it's very family it's not

even that much of a story but it's just i've been i've been doing remember there was like the first sea hot game and two minutes in some folks in our text chain were saying the season over and i was like i was literally hot tub shopping that i wasn't doing that wasn't a flex i was literally like looking at hot tubs and which is not something i ever really expected to say in my life but something happened in the hot tub store oh that was just surprising to me um that maybe i can tell you about on tomorrow's show i'm intrigued i have the important work of thanking nancy melton of seattle washington as our final donor that we are thanking today thank you to all of our donors for making tbtl possible we could not do this without you all right one more thing before we get out of here on this wednesday slash tuesday edition of the show andrew i just wanted to play i've already overhyped this so it's not it's it's definitely not going to deliver because i've made too much out of it but i was i will say i was sort of pleasantly surprised by this tubi commercial that was playing during the football game and played a few times during the football game on sunday now picture this i'm not actually looking at the television i'm just kind of half listening and i'm getting my um getting my little vegetarian and chili stuff going and part of what what got me with this commercial was where it sits in terms of the day part they would call it and the thing going where it's on during a period of time an nfl game when there's so much kind of crap ola there's so much like i don't know kind of jingoism and uh you know usa usa and all i don't know just like a lot of stuff i don't love about the NFL and also the kind of like ancillary events. And so when I heard this commercial, I was like, oh, wow, Tubi, I expected better from you. But anyway, here, let me just play this for you, okay? Hopefully the levels are.

Tubi is proud to be free for all the first responders who risk their lives to keep us safe. The teachers illuminating the minds of our children and the volunteers who build our communities. Tubi is also free for women who take day naps with way too many candles burning. Couples who steal copper pipe out of the walls at open houses. And kids who skip class to throw rocks at windows. Because Tubi is free for everyone, and we mean everyone. That is so great.

Isn't that a good ad? I was looking up Tubi ads right as you said that, and we did something amazing there that nobody can appreciate but me. But I hit play on this right as your audio started, so I was able to watch it exactly in sync. And so I was totally along for the ride there. And it begins just like a Super Bowl commercial where we're, you know, we're celebrating our firefighters and we see people in Clydesdale is jogging in front of a flag. They're like doing that thing where they were kind of building a habitat for humanity and they're like doing that wall raising thing. The frame of a wall is being raised by volunteers and then it goes right. Then it goes right to a. shot of a woman just kind of slovenly spread out on her couch in the middle of the day as she's

sleeping that is great i think the part that my ear didn't even detect anything funny was going on

until the part about people who steal copper out of open houses you see a man and a woman just like ripping into the wall of a house and collecting copper pipes that's great i more of that i love

to be to be had a great super bowl commercial too where they were showing they were kind of interviewing people out in a field and they were like sort of i were they farming content or something i kind of am blanking on the details of it but it was one of my favorite commercials of this veves and i sort of rank those on our show and i think it might have been my favorite

of the entire super bowl last year i also think that i saw a headline i may not have actually read the piece but i sort of saw a headline somewhere that basically said tubi is actually doing really well like it's sort of punching way above its weight in terms of like the streamers um and especially for the free streamers right right right definitely but it's it's actually giving some of the other pay streamers kind of a a bit of a run for their money or at least it's it's eating up slightly more of their kind of you know customer base than would be expected because you know there's this kind of thing well if it's free it's going to probably be some stuff that's not considered to be primo content or whatever but like the word on the street is that tubi's actually doing surprisingly well which is just that any streamer could break through at this point with the number of different things i just realized the other day that i'm still paying for mgm plus because you wanted to watch one thing once with my dad something called like rogue rogue rogue detachment or something it's basically like a show about these this was a real group of british they were called the sas and they were basically like these they were this they were a ragtag motley crew of british and then french soldiers who were in like in north africa during world war ii and they were they had basically kind of like no support and they didn't really exist on paper but they were going out trying to like blow up nazi airfields in like places like libya and stuff it's the kind of thing only a dad knows about because he read the book that it's based on you know likely on an ipad you know but anyway so yeah i was like i'm just signed up for so much of that crap and i just feel like every day there's a new streamer that has a name that vaguely sounds like to be um and so the idea that they've actually managed to to to differentiate themselves in some way and be successful is is really something a couple of things on that first

of all also going back to that commercial it's kind of like it seems like it's gonna be one of those cliche patriotism and you know we're all in this together commercials i think it's you know to be is owned by fox and so i think that makes it sort of like fox is where you'll often see a lot of those um you know those super earnest like types of ads and so the fact that they're kind of taking the piss a little bit i think is all the more notable there also i think that to be is interesting because this might be part of their appeal there's to be and one other that is like this that i'm blanking on now it's very similar to to be but they both um they're formatted differently than your netflix or your hulu's because they're they're created more like a um like a like if you've cut your cord but you have to be it feels like watching tv because they're streaming live stuff you can choose a channel and you can find yourself in the middle of an episode of Family Ties you know like so sometimes when you just feel like the thing about cutting the cord and then just relying on your Disney pluses and your Apple TVs and Hulu's and all those are you don't get to channel surf anymore and there's something about Tubi and this other one that I'm blanking on that it gives you that feeling of channel surfing because there are things that are constantly sort of being served with commercials and you can dip into them but if you land on something you like you can start it over from the beginning like an episode of columbo or something like that and so i it's i'll bet you that's part of the appeal and one of the reasons

why they're successful you know my dad was like channel surfing the other night back at my place and it was shocking to witness and yet i miss it as a part of my life because it's not a thing that i do but it was like it was a night where i think i had to live wire was the next day so i was working late that night i was like dad you're kind of on your own with this and he was like had the remote and he was just like going through the channel guide and i was i was like is this like uh do we need to test you for some sort of dementia sir like is this a sign is are we sun are we sun setting you here sundowning you here because it's been so long since i actually did that just cruised the channels and yet i also very much miss that as a thing well you must do it in

the hotel right or do you not turn on the tv as much as you used to in the hotels i don't because

of stupid stupid tiktok we should at some point as the as the time approaches approaches andrew um when tiktok will it seems very likely tiktok will literally be phased out of the u.s we should we should talk about that a bit because i'm i have as you might imagine pretty mixed feelings about it like january i just heard on the radio like january 15th right now is the deadline yeah yeah bobby allen has been doing some nice reporting on that um and uh you know it i i really really am of two minds on it i am i'm kind of bummed because it's a thing i look at all the time but i also feel like it'll kind of be liberating to not have it because it's it is the it is probably the thing that i look at the most now outside of live sports and maybe like you know our friend chris hayes's show or something but like it's yeah i'm not cruising the channels here in this residence inn in greece slash west rochester new york because probably tonight uh when i'm getting ready to kind of like uh hit the hay finally i'll be more likely to be scrolling on my phone than i would be to be like looking for forensic files which used to be my whole thing in these hotel rooms yeah it's really shifted my behavior so um i wanted to say pluto

tv is the other one i was thinking of uh when i was talking about streamers to be in pluto i get those confused to be i believe is better but both of them you can pretend like your channel surfing which i like um for what it's worth i don't think tiktok's actually going to go away i think even the lawsuit will stop it or at least we'll stall it long enough to keep it. And thirdly, I have a question about TikTok, which we don't have to get into right now. I'm not going to ask it to you because we are going to wrap up this show, but maybe on tomorrow's show or when you want to have a broader TikTok conversation, I have had a TikTok question on my mind that I've been wanting to ask you for a couple of weeks now, and we will ask it at a later date.

What did I say I was going to talk about on tomorrow's show? I forward-proved something. I've already forgotten it. Let's see here. Was it something from our personal lives or a headline? It was, I think, something from our personal lives. It was something from your personal life. Oh, your hot tub. Your hot tub story. Hot tub. Yes, yes. I just need to make a quick. Hey, look at me. So, good job, buddy. Thank you. I remember something. That medicine is kicking in.

That's right.

All right. Thank you for listening, everyone. Sorry about the rambling nature of today's show. I can't promise tomorrow will be better, but we're going to try hard anyway for what that's worth. In the meantime, everybody have a great Wednesday Take care of yourselves And please remember, no mountain too tall Is it Wednesday? And good luck to all

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