Muse

Excuse me, can I talk to you for a second? How can I help you? My date's eating all the fully loaded nachos. All the ones with the meat and cheese and everything. The ones that are fully loaded, she's hogging them. So I'm mostly getting just like, just chips. Like mostly just chips, like nothing on them. But like a little bit of cheese and maybe one little nugget of meat. Okay. Can you say something to her?

Say what? Maybe go up the table and just say like, hey, stop that! Or like, hey, that's not allowed. You want me to go over and say stop eating the meat on the chips?

No, just say the restaurant has a rule. It's not you. It's the rule the restaurant has that if you get an item to share, you can't... One person can't just eat all the fully loaded ones. Like, don't look around. Find the one with the most meat and always eat that one.

Can't you just ask her to share with you? Can't you just say the restaurant has a rule? TBTL!

In the next hour, we will present information that's both shocking and enlightening.

Everything is not an anecdote. You have to discriminate. You choose things that are funny or mildly amusing or interesting. You're a miracle. Your stories have none of that.

I'm a Grammy Emmy Tony and Webby Award winning and nominated songwriter, artist, designer, director, editor, animator, producer, collector, party thrower.

That was great. That was good. You went for it. I appreciate that.

You embarrassed me in front of Derek Jeter.

You embarrassed yourself in front of Derek Jeter. And I also think it wouldn't hurt you to talk to a therapist about your bathroom issues because there's clearly something going on there. All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

You know all this bullcrap don't matter. What you're saying right now is irrelevant.

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. I don't want to work. I want to get bonkered off the yoinky. Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio, perched high above the mighty Columbia. Bring it back home, baby. Bring it back home. Feels real good to be here in southern Washington. Once again, getting to be home for a few days before we head out to Philadelphia, PA, where we'll be doing TBTL Live in Philly on Saturday night at the Friends Center. If you're considering coming on down to Philly or over to Philly or up to Philly, I would highly recommend that you do so. It's going to be a very fun night. We've locked down the after-party location. Maybe we'll announce that today. I meant to ask Andrew off-air if we should announce that today, but I've been a little discombobulated of late. You know what's re-combobulating me? That it is technically fall, but we are going to have an absolutely stunner of a day. Just beautiful day. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. It's going to feel summer-like, and I will be able to trick myself into thinking that it still is summer. There's no tricking myself out of the fact that I am still in this 75 hard-ish situation that reaches day 16. I've really been leaning into the ish. Like, while I was flying, I was not necessarily getting my entire gallon of water down each day because I just thought that was going to create some problems for me on the airplane. It created a big problem for me the other day. I had to pull off the freeway and run into the parking lot of the firefighters union of Portland, Oregon, and relieve myself in the far corner of the parking lot because I was about to have an accident in my car. Anyway, I'm going to make sure that doesn't happen here as we embark on episode four thousand and three hundred in a collector series. Let the fun begin. Love to see that round number. How auspicious. I've had a lot of time on airplanes and in airports, and I've been in quiet meditation. I've been learning some things. I'm learning. A couple things I'd like to tell you about. Also, if I said to you, mall-based rodeo situation, would that sound like something where anything at all could go wrong? It was literally a major disaster. We had a situation this weekend in Attleboro, Massachusetts, which we'll talk about. And we'll talk to this guy, longest-running co-bro of the show, Maybe best known for his depictions Of the tall ships He is one of my dearest friend-o Call it friend-o He's Andrew Walsh and he's joining me right now Good morning my friend Good morning Luke How you doing? Gosh I am so good I forget how much I love doing the show From the Madrona Hill studio Until I'm not doing it from the Madrona Hill studio Like a bunch And then I get to come back You're like the equipment works better I like looking out at the river

I like having my little coffee set up like I uh I love being here and

And I need to remember that when I'm agreeing to do all manner of ridiculous things that take me away from here. I like being here. Yeah, no, I've decided.

I don't know if I've told you this, but after the Philadelphia show next weekend, I have made an oath that I am never leaving my home again. I mean, I will leave my home and stay in the AMPM. I'll give myself like a, you know, I'm going to go big here. I'm going to live large. give myself a go big and stay home the andrew waltz story 10 block radius 10 block radius

you know that is that when the is that when the gps monitor goes off yes my my social my social

alarm um i uh let's see i'm sorry that i had to shoot down your idea of zooming into the

philadelphia show i did insist wait that's a heart that's a hard no uh yeah i don't know if you saw the fine print i had john drop some contracts it wasn't fine print it was actually

It was 42-point gouty, heavy face. Well, I don't even know if I should tell you this, but I had a little scare this morning. Genevieve went to a concert with a friend last night.

I saw that on the Instagram. Some last-minute tickets to, who was it? A big band.

It was like, I guess, Green Day. I didn't even realize that I guess Smashing Pumpkins played. Rancid, the band Rancid played. I stayed home. It turns out I was on the text chain. Genevieve came home from work yesterday. He said, well, I'm leaving now. And I said, where are you going? She said, I thought you were on the text chain. I'm going to see this concert. And I was like, I didn't know anything about that, but have fun. I was glad to have a night at home. And then later on that night, I opened up my phone, and it turns out I was on a text chain. I had missed about 20 text messages. Were you invited to see Rancid and Green Day and all of that? Yeah, I don't think I would have gone anyway, but I would have at least responded and told my friends no. Our friend who works at the radio station had some good tickets. But anyway, all of that is to say-

I can't believe the Monday Night Green Day show didn't sell out.

Well, I do think there were some people who were, Genevieve was saying there were some people in her office who were kind of jealous of the setup. I think it was like at a Lumen Field or something. I think it was someplace huge. All of that is to say, then Genevieve gets a call and says that one of her mutual friends who was at the show last night tested positive for COVID this morning. So then I slowly just backed away from her and I said, I can't do this. I can't get sick. I break with thee. In the words of Steve Martin, I said, I break with thee. I break with thee. I break with thee. she said you don't we don't have to break up she said we can just what movie is that test i think it's from his stand-up bit it's really corny he says i can't even remember what the joke is it's something about like he thinks that divorce should just you be you saying i break with the i break with the i break with the three times and then you thought that would have saved me a lot of money yeah manure on each other's shoes or something it was a ridiculous joke yeah um but anyway so i am avoiding genevieve she took a test she is tested negative for covid but either

way i was like i literally coming to the big show on saturday she's a critical component of this as

well but like i certain but i also can't have her you know i can't we need her there but she's more expendable than me i think or maybe not honestly i'm fine with soundboard i'm telling you man if she can run the soundboard maybe you're better off but i was like i cannot i don't know what would happen if i caught covid today like i just don't know what we would do about that i'm supposed to leave here in two days to head to the great city of philadelphia well that raises the question

i'm not listen don't come at me okay i'm asking this is a real question he's asking questions what is the protocol these days around testing positive for covid because i seem to remember that at some point like the cdc or someone said it we no longer have to quarantine it can be treated more along the lines of if you you know if you found yourself with a cold or something like it isn't my sense is it's not being treated the way that of course we were treating it in the absolute sort of uh apex of the pandemic yeah i'm looking for the latest here because i thought

that here i'm going to say this off the top of my head because when you're talking about science and health related pandemic news it's good just to go off robin williams yeah exactly details aren't important when it comes to this stuff but i think they say that if you have it just say i break with thee i break with thee that's what the cdc said um no it wasn't the last thing and it was gary fauci early who's been filling in for tony fauci while he's been taking some well-deserved time off i hear you guys have been listening to my brother tony um i don't know what that accent was uh let's move on but um wasn't something like after your last symptom you can just spit like you can like after your last symptom i think maybe just be careful for two days or something after that does that sound right to you i thought that was i don't

know and listen i know we have listeners who take this as well they should very seriously we have people who are immunocompromised etc etc we're not going to endanger anyone in philly

I'm literally asking. I don't know what the latest protocol is, but that's not me trying to make a statement about, you know, public safety or public health. When you mentioned Steve Martin, I had this experience the other day. I actually wonder if I could just find it on the fly here. Steve Martin, John Candy, script. I saw this clip of Steve Martin talking about John Candy, on Candy and so I guess my thoughts on Steve Martin are obviously he's very funny, he's a national treasure, he's very erudite and very smart, but I don't think of him as an overly emotional person, you know what I mean? Like I think of him as a very composed person and in fact his comedy seems to be sort of the, and he would I think say this like in Born Standing Up, to some degree his comedy is kind of the result of him intellectually solving the problem of comedy. Him approaching it from a very kind of, sort of, cerebral angle and kind of going what makes people laugh, what's funny, etc. And I think that's sort of how he's known. I don't think of him as overly emotional. He was just talking to somebody, it was some little interview, he was talking about John Candy. And he was talking about a scene that was cut from planes, trains, and automobiles, or at least was greatly shortened. And it's the scene at the very end, almost the very end, when John Candy basically comes clean that he doesn't actually have a home his wife has been passed away for some time you know this whole thing he's been sort of doing this whole life he's been describing is kind of made up because he's you know very sad and and you know very grief stricken and i guess that that scene was originally much much longer it got cut down to just john candy saying you know my wife hasn't you know has been dead for years or whatever but steve martin like had i think he might have had the screenplay and he was just looking at it and reading it and was talking about this scene in its fullness that John Candy had done and he would just started crying and it was like I'm emotional talking about right now which is very weird but like there was something about seeing Steve Martin get like choked up that was like I like I texted to Becca she was like why am I crying right now it's like I basically my point is along with the champ uh I think Steve martin crying about john candy is one of the most is something that is guaranteed to make any human with any sort of soul cry there's something about steve martin not being able to keep it together that means i can't keep it together as a viewer yeah you're not allowed to send people stuff

like in the middle of the day without a trigger warning like you can't just be like hey i realize you might be running into a meeting with um right with you might be popping on zoom or something you don't need to have your mascara running yeah but quickly watch this thing but do you remember a couple of years ago and i think it was around the holidays because it's kind of a holiday movie they re-released it with a bunch of uh deleted scenes and i think only in physical media i don't think this was on any of the streaming services and i think it's like literally double the length because there was so much cut out of it and i just i feel like this was two years ago that everybody was posting all these deleted scenes that are just so funny just so funny like there's one that i don't think is in the movie i think i have this right that it's a deleted scene where steve martin lays eyes on john candy's character for the very very first time and john candy isn't doing anything in particular other than sloppily eating a hot dog across that's how we met yes across like the airport waiting area or something and steve martin has no idea who he is but it's just like two minutes of steve martin just simmering and giving him the dirtiest of looks while I think John Candy might be trying to eat a hot dog and smoke a cigarette at the same time I think that might be what it is and it's just like how is that like you're laughing at that by from my poor description only because you know those two actors and you can picture that but like yes why is that so inherently funny it's only inherently funny because it's those two people I think I also of course

the end of planes trains and automobiles is really touching because Steve Martin takes john candy's character into his family uh christmas you know it's a very sweet ending and yet i think part of why this thing hit me of like seeing steve martin get so emotional thinking about his friend john candy who's of course not alive anymore because i think i somehow conflated their actual relationship with the relationship in the movie uh-huh like somehow i thought steve martin didn't like john candy irl because we play so much audio on this show of him just like roasting john candy scare in fact in fact i believe today's intro package actually is steve martin roasting john candy that's right did we just play the one where he says you have to have

a point to your story he says you're a miracle your story has none of those things yeah that's literally wow what a coincidence yeah i forgot that was in today's intro but i think i thought

somehow in my mind i was like yeah those guys don't get along and it's like no that's called acting yeah that's that's portraying someone in a movie that's not their real relationship and again there was just something about

about steve martin being overwhelmed which i just guess i'd never seen before i feel like steve martin is strong for all of us yeah uh him him being affected by by that really it was very clearly

it was very emotional for me to watch for some reason i remember kind of i feel like i was relatively early on in my uh public radio not just career but like kind of exposure to public radio um you know i fell in love with public radio pretty hard when i first sort of quote unquote discovered it and i was like wow i just had never heard anything like public radio before i was obsessed with um well now i'm gonna blank on everybody's names but um what was the what was the midday talk show that ray suarez yes ray suarez's talk of the nation that would begin with like a five minute like kind of commentary setup or whatever but i remember i think this was fresh air which i don't know if people have heard but fresh air is a pretty good interview show But Steve Martin was the guest on some show like that, and I was so impressed with the fact – I don't remember what the question was or what the answer was, but I just remember him really pausing and really thinking about it, and the producers left it in. The editors sort of left that in, and I remember that being sort of like, man, they really do it right here as far as leaving those moments in.

Probably Anne-Marie Baldonado.

Is that a fresh air producer?

It's just one of the many names that get Audrey Bentham, Anne-Marie Baldonado. This is my version of those two young women trying to name NPR hosts, but it's just Luke names fresh air editors, Naomi Salat.

Throughout the years. But I was just so impressed, not just with the production, but also with Steve Martin. Like, I just love the fact that, like, here's a guy who, let's say that this was the early 2000s or the late 90s that I heard this interview. this is a guy who's given a million interviews about his work over the years i feel like this interview and me you know maybe i'm painting myself in the corner by trying to give too many specifics and then i'm getting it wrong timeline wise but i feel like this might have been related to um his he wrote a novella called shop girl which i think was turned into a movie as well i never saw the movie i don't think but claire danes was in the movie but i read the book because i'm more of a i'm more of an intellectual kind of guy but anyway he was giving this interview and i just remember thinking like he's really trying to figure out an answer to this question not just like what is expedient in the moment you know and there was something so I don't know I just have so much damn respect for that guy also do you know he plays the banjo I'm not familiar with

that side of his career I'm more of a Picasso at the Lapine Agile guy that's you know I've seen that play so many times oh is that a play that he wrote yeah I was just trying to I was just trying yeah out erudite you on having read shop girl i have absolutely not seen that play uh well i'm

yeah i'm i'm i'm fan i'm a big fan of his opera trains oh planes oh automobiles oh uh

speaking of planes trains and automobiles i i keep saying i'm not going to just talk about travel but i did have a a semi instructive experience last night andrew as i was flying home from New York. Um, and I, I guess what the, the takeaway from this is don't be afraid to advocate for yourself, you know, but politely and within reason, but I go back and forth on stuff because I am, I tend to be very high strung about certain things. Like for instance, will I get upgraded on this flight? And I, in fact, sometimes we'll pick a flight, a particular flight on Alaska Airlines at a certain time, even if it's inconvenient for me, because I've looked at the layout of the seats on the plane and I have seen that there are like four seats in first class that have not been sold. And that will make me take that flight because it increases the chances that I might get to go and sit up there. And I will tell you that the difference between being up there and being as I was in row 15 non-reclining seat the other day coming home, because on Friday I had to change my I decided to change my ticket quite at the last minute so I couldn't really get a primo seat I was in a non-reclining regular seat and boy that was a long six hours wow so you would if you had the option you would have reclined well it wasn't that I don't just added insult to injury in fact I picked it because I thought I don't really recline it doesn't matter but then I guess I just didn't realize how cramped the rate like so this wasn't even in the part of coach where there's, I always thought the little bit more leg room and coach thing was just kind of BS, but I think it is a real thing. And I was on the window and I had a very tall woman sitting in the, so I booked the seat because there was no one in the middle seat. So I was like, I don't care that doesn't recline, but there's no one in the middle seat. So maybe I'll have a little extra room, whatever. Well, that was not the case. They sold the ticket at the last minute or puts it and it was a very tall woman. And the only reason that matters is because when I did get up to use the bathroom at the very end of the flight like I held it for like six hours this woman did not actually get up out of her chair she just kind of swiveled to the side and I was like well your funeral dude you're gonna get a significant amount of my backside kind of pretty close to your face but I guess that's your call anyway just wasn't like a chill environment the person next to me was also pretty tall and so I just went and I you know wanted to give her the armrests because I feel like that you should give the middle seat person the armrest but she did avail herself of that right away and then that meant that I had kind of one it's my right arm I was just kind of I wish I had a sling to put it

in because there was nowhere to put my right arm down yeah you sort of twist yourself in this funny way that like I always yes on the long flight back from um I guess that was uh from Reykjavik it was like an eight-hour flight and like we Genevieve and I had somebody sitting in between us and luckily she was a kind of a small person but i same deal i'm like well then this person gets the armrest i didn't say anything but that's a that's an you know an unstated contract right and so she did like sort of use the armrest because she was reading on her kindle the whole time um and i just sort of found i had to keep telling myself like don't when i'm next to somebody at a ballpark or in an airplane or something like i tend to like try to make myself as small as possible without even thinking about it and i'm like i will destroy my body if i stay this tensed up in trying to respect this person's personal space like i i do try to respect her personal space where i'm like but you can't do this thing that you can maybe sometimes get away with for an hour or two where you're like crimping up your body in order that was literally exactly

what happened to me was i was twisting to my left to really make sure i didn't want to be bumping into this person you know anything like that and i realized after like three hours i was like oh my gosh my back is kind of killing me now because i've been doing this thing well so all that is to say with all the back and forth thing i've been doing it was highly important to me that i at the even if i was in coach that i was maybe hopefully in a little bit more comfortable seat in coach or ideally maybe get to go up to the front of the plane so yesterday after we're all done here and I had recorded Livewire and been to the UN, et cetera. I dash to the airport and I am like obsessive. I'm sitting in the back of the lift and I'm obsessively monitoring the wait list, which I'm the number one person on the wait list. And then the number of empty seats. And the only way you can find out the number of empty seats is pretend to buy a ticket from the app. So you're like, hey, I'd like, sir, I'd like one ticket from Newark Liberty to Portland. um and and like now the idea that i'd be buying that ticket 40 minutes before the flight is slightly ludicrous but whatever the app doesn't care it's just going to show you here are the

seats you could buy yeah because the app won't show you the available seats once you already have your ticket and it's that close to takeoff right like it does if you're trying to use your you're saying that you have to do it because you have to pretend like you're buying a ticket to see it because otherwise like the day before you can go into the app and just like check your seat and move it around right and but then at a certain point before boarding the app doesn't allow you as somebody who already has a ticket that privy to that information is that why you yes it also

doesn't show you first class like ever because once your ticket is coach they don't even bother to show you what's going on up there so you have to kind of broadcast barry and i have been feverishly texting away the last few days because he's been on a bunch of flights and we've been trading hacks and things like that of of how we do this thing well anyway what i know is that there There are three seats available in first class. I'm the top of the list, and I am, you know, of course, I get to the airport, and I'm standing in the waiting area. And what is supposed to happen is one hour before the flight, they release those seats. And I really, really would, I'm going to be relieved when they say, even just in the app, it changes. It just tells me I'm in the front of the plane now because then I can kind of relax because the other thing I don't want to do is board and go sit in my coach seat and put all my stuff up and then have them come to me, which has happened. before and have them go, oh, Mr. Burbank, there's a seat in first class, we can bring you up there. But the other thing I don't want to do is let everyone else board get all the overhead space filled and then have them tell me, sorry, we're not putting you in first class, you can go to your coach seat. I wasn't sure how to play it. So I'm standing there, and I'm trying to not be extra because the two nice people working for Alaska Airlines have their hands sort of full, and I feel like me asking about first class upgrades is such a low priority compared to people who are trying to sit near their family members or who have some kind of real needs maybe they don't even have a seat assigned yet but I override that courteous thought and I decide I'm just going to go kind of check and so I go up and I asked the the woman I said um are there um still seats in first class and she says oh well he's going to release you gestures to her colleague he's going to be releasing those tickets here in a minute so are you on the wait list I'm like yeah I'm actually the top of the wait list and she goes okay well you'll you know you'll find out when he when he does that and I was like okay so then I go stand because this guy was dealing with someone else was having a ticket problem so now i go stand it's now like 40 minutes before the flight and i'm just standing and i'm just staring at him and now he finishes up with that person and then he just kind of like starts staring off into the middle distance he's just like not engaging with anything that is changing my status right and i start to get these intrusive thoughts of like what if somebody in the next 10 minutes for some reason decides they're buying a first class ticket and i don't get on there so i don't know these like not very likely scenarios but i'm just kind of spinning out which is silly of me but it's happening and i'm just being like do i go up to the guy and because he i'm like did he hear her say to me that he's going to be doing the thing or can i get away with going up to him playing dumb and going up to him and saying hey are you going to release those those seats in first class so i finally like decide i'm just going to go check very politely i'm just going to go check with the guy and kind of see what the scoop is and i'm going to here's how i'm going to frame it I'm going to say to him, I don't want to board the plane for my coach seat if it seems likely that I'm going to get into first class. So I'm trying to frame it as kind of like a practical consideration when really I just want to know. I just want it handled and done so I can calm the heck down.

And I go up and he says, he's like, oh, you know, yeah, they haven't sent me the wait list yet. It's kind of gotten weird now. But like, what's your last name? And I tell him and he's like, where are you on the list? And I'm like, I'm actually at the top of the wait list. He goes, okay. And then he starts looking at his iPad And he's having trouble on his iPad To find this thing And then I'm looking at the wait list And it goes away I've never seen this before There's no wait list on the app For the flight and he can't find it on his iPad Or any of the computers He goes to a different terminal and can't find it He comes back and he's like talking to his colleagues The upgrade list has disappeared Andrew We're in We're in free fall at this point We're in no man's land because now there's no record of if I even really was at the top of the list, which, by the way, I was. And the guy – so I'm starting to really get kind of nervous now because I'm like, well, how do you solve – like, what do you do about this? Like, how do you figure it out when you don't even have an actual list to refer to?

Feast of strength, I think, no?

I just started picking people up in the waiting area.

Yeah, sure. Spinning them around.

Had a horse mask on.

Oh, perfect. Yeah, the Genevieve school of strength.

Pulling the beaves.

Yeah.

and so I'm just like oh my god what are we gonna do and then I'm starting to get my whole like I don't even want to say like my my I'm starting to like put together my case in my head of how am I gonna prove that I was actually the first one on the list and like and then I'm again I know this is a very ugly side of me but then I start thinking what if they give the seat to someone else because I can't prove I was really on the list I'm just spinning out of control over this thing that's really not worth getting this worked up over and then the guy just goes like well what is your last name and I'm like Burbank and he goes okay show me your ID and I show him my ID he just puts me in first class like not because the list told him to but because i was over there squeaking like a squeaky wheel but again politely and he even said to me hey thanks for being patient i was like no problem i i could never seen that happen before but basically had i not been being kind of a nudge i don't know what would have happened and again the world would have kept spinning this is not the end of the world but it was just interesting that i was i was very on the fence about like just being chill and just waiting for the process to do its thing or being a little bit extra of like kind of checking in a lot. And I ended up feeling really thankful that I checked in because there would have been a moment when the list just went away and they, I don't know what they would have done. I would have been sitting in coach. They might've just, in fact, I noticed something, which I thought was also kind of a good outcome. Although I do think somebody probably got kind of screwed was, um, the flight attendants, by the way, I had the same flight crew flying home last night that I had flying out on Sunday. And they said, sir, that is not enough time to have been in a place to be flying home. And I said, you're absolutely right. Um, but I, you know, I recognized one of the flight attendants and I recognized her mother who had been flying with her, you know, I think on her kind of like flight attendant benefits standby, her mother who seemed like a real sweetheart kind of older woman was also in first class. I noticed later, and I'm thinking they put her up there because that's not how that usually works. They don't usually like, you know, if you're flying standby, you're flying on someone else's mileage or points or whatever that's called, you're generally not getting to be in first class. But I think because this was literally just like a free for all, they put her mom up there which i was super happy about also if you were flying if you're gold 75k and you were flying home from newark last night and you didn't get the first class somebody's mom got your ticket yeah but i don't know i guess i just sort of i don't know if it's a good takeaway for me to think do advocate for myself in these things i was thinking without yeah i don't know

if it's a good without without his teasing too hard as genevieve would say yeah the idea that Luke Bergbank learns to advocate for himself is not the headline that I thought I was going to be seeing. Well, I guess maybe

maybe my point is other people who are not advocating for themselves, maybe maybe take it as a kind of an example or something.

Yes. I am. I'm not somebody who suffers from, um, I used to say to an ex, uh, I'm the strong silent type. It was one of the most reliable jokes to get her to laugh her ass off when I would describe myself as the strong silent type. But, um, but like, yeah, obviously I don't have any problem, um, you know, sort of, uh, trying to maximize my experience, but it was, it was an interesting one because again, I was just like, do I say something? Do I not say something? And And had I not said something, the worst-case scenario would have happened, very likely. Like, that was the worst-case scenario, and a scenario that seemed very not possible. I've never seen the upgrade list just evaporate to where it does not exist anymore anywhere. Like, I've never seen that happen. That's like a stress stream I would have or like a panic I would be in. And in this case, it actually happened, and only because I'd been up there being kind of a nudge did everything end up working out. So, again, you're right. The lesson here is not Luke Burbank be more pushy. But maybe it's if you're wondering if you should speak up for yourself, it might be worth doing because it's sometimes it actually is very helpful.

A couple of things you said they remind me of, well, more anxieties that I'm having about our upcoming trip. Sort of one thing that you mentioned was about a seat that doesn't recline. I just remember that I believe on my flight out to Philly, which will happen later on this week. So I'm going to get there a day ahead of you. I am in the very, very, very, very last row of the airplane. And it was my choice because there weren't a lot of aisle seats left over, but one was the second to last row, and I chose it. And there was a little warning that said, this seat does not recline. And I'm like, well, that's okay. I don't recline. Then it occurred to me, you should book the seat behind this seat. That way, for me, like you have all of that anxiety going into a flight. My anxiety is, will the person in front of me recline their seat? And the person on the long 10-hour flight I took recently did do that. And it really impacted my experience back there. And so for me, if I can get on a flight, like ideally I'll get an exit row if I'm going to pay the little bit of extra money or whatever. In this case, there were not a lot of options to do that. But at least I was like, OK, this is like poor man's exit row is the is the row by the bathroom. But at least the seat in front of you can't recline. But let me tell you this, Luke, I mentioned to you, I believe, on the show that, like, I was surprised at the sort of lack of easy flights from Seattle to Philadelphia. I think of us both as very modern metropolises. You would think there would be a lot of cross-country commerce and a lot of business people flying. Just amongst my family. Just amongst your family. Just amongst the Kellys. Exactly. But it was kind of strange. And at first I looked at – maybe we didn't talk about this on the show. But anyway, I looked at various, like, you know, the Travelocity websites. Look at Iceland there. Yeah, right. But then eventually I remembered, wait, there was just not a lot of great options. And then I went directly to Alaska and I found flights to and from Philly that were not listed on the other sites. And I was happy to find them. And they're relatively doable, although I am flying out on Sunday morning quite early.

So I noticed, was that a cost-saving measure? Was that because you wanted to?

Very few options for flights. Very few. And luckily, the one both coming and going, they are there. They're nonstop flights, which are good because all the like I'd be flying down to Texas. It was like everything else was just like so arduous and and expensive. And just I don't know why it's so hard to find flights. But here's the deal. I did lock down my flights directly through the Alaska website, which I was kind of proud of myself for thinking to do that. But since then, Alaska has been sending me emails trying to buy my flight back and giving me vouchers for like a different one. And like, obviously, I'm not going to take that. But it is a forewarning, I guess, that this is going to be a pretty packed flight and we need to get there early because I cannot miss this flight. It's an important work thing, obviously. What what would you and the listeners do without me? And so here's what here's what bugs me, though. The only other flight from Seattle to Philly to get me out there, I'm leaving. I'll just say I'm leaving on Thursday morning now and getting there Thursday early evening. The only other flight is a red eye. And so Alaska is emailing me saying, hey, buddy, I was wondering if you want to maybe take the red-eye flight that leaves at, like, 7 at night and gets you there at, like, 5 a.m. Friday morning. And here's what we're going to do to sweeten the deal for you. A $70 voucher.

Oh, I'm surprised it's $70. Really? Becca was just telling me last night that, because she's got a work trip coming up, and Alaska keeps asking her if she'll consider moving her ticket by three days for a $25 voucher.

What? See, okay. I thought I had an extreme example. So I'm like, not to sound like Mr. Moneybags, but I'm like, what person needs $70 that badly that they're going to take a reasonable midday flight? instead do a red eye i mean i guess maybe your mom is a big deal hunter maybe she would take something like that but 25 and three days later like who is that person what is that trip that they're taking that they want 25 so bad but they're just like well yeah sure i'll just go to i'll just go to cleveland three days later than planned forget about the conference i'm going for

you just made me realize something it's 50 50 if my mom will show up on saturday Only because if she was offered a bump, like, you know, $500 to take a bump, she would, one, nobody loves taking a bumped flight or getting bumped off a flight like my mom. It's one of her great joys in life. And has led to...

I knew your mom loves doing bumps. I had a different interpretation. In her younger days.

Yes. Back in her, we'll ask her about that on Saturday. But she absolutely loves getting, you know, free airline bucks for, like, letting her seat go on a flight. But it has caused a lot of trouble over the years because there have been, I believe, a couple of incidents where it's like, and if my mom hears this, she might correct me. My mom has started listening to the show a lot, which I appreciate. My mom also donates to the show, which is very sweet, but it's really crimping my style. she listened to the show that david and i did while you were out of town david from the basement now daddy from the basement and forget what she said it was it was like she was like even though there were some mean things said that really hurt me i very much enjoyed the episode and i was like oh mom what was you know what what was mean but um so i'll try to be careful but i believe there have been a couple of times where like my mom was supposed to like land in philly but because she took a bump and ended up like rerouting her to some other city completely on the eastern seaboard and she was like like to her friend jody or my uncle chuck whoever was coming to get her from the airport it's like okay actually it's going to be baltimore now yeah that's a joke i was about to say literally i think i you know what we'll find out on saturday night i can ask her about this but um if she makes it i'm just praying to god that nobody offers her uh you know five hundred dollars of alaska bucks to not get on the flight here's the other thing that i've been thinking about and this is so unrelated to anything having to do with air travel but it's on the subject of learning i was reading something i was reading like a harvard psychologist was talking about steve martin in conversation with a harvard psychologist i was reading this in jamma um this psychologist was talking about i think i saw something on tiktok which was a guy in his 50s who was saying i did not expect this but i am really really enjoying my 50s he's like when i got to be 40 i really felt like i was old and i did not i just felt like my life was kind of sort of beginning the glide path but i did was not ready for the fact that i'm really enjoying my 50s and i do not feel like my life is all in the rearview mirror at this point or whatever and then anyway as this psychologist was was saying you know basically like if we start telling ourselves that we're old if it becomes kind of this self-talk and this go-to as it very much is on this show for me and just in life i think my thing is i want to get in front of stuff like i want to get in front of the aging process by admitting it's happening and by maybe even over describing it happening and using it as an excuse for everything and constantly trying to let everyone know all the time that i understand that i am 48 and this um psychologist was saying you know there is a certain amount of like the power of suggestion like you say that enough and your body kind of starts to believe it maybe i don't know if there's good evidence that it leads to physical degradation

but certainly just your overall sense of who and what you are in the world like i guess i've been kind of thinking lately wouldn't it be amazing if my 50s were the best decade of my life like i've really have slipped into this, unfortunately, into this mindset that like I'm at the middle of my life. In fact, I'm, you know, I'm past the middle of my life and my life was, you know, when I was in my twenties, my life felt like it was always getting bigger. And now I'm like, well, I guess my life is just going to get smaller every year from here. And, and I know, Andrew, by the way, you've been going through some stuff. And so I don't mean to sound like I'm lecturing you or anyone else who's, who's dealing with things or, or I'm not trying to rub anything in, or I don't know, maybe this is a weird thing for me to bring up.

Fine. I'll make it an 11 block radius. I'll go in an 11 block radius of my house.

It worked. My strategy worked. But like, I guess I was just like, maybe I'm what I guess. Here's my point. I think I'm going to try, I don't know if successfully or not, but I'm going to try to not start and end most sentences with, well, because I'm an old man now. I mean, first of all, Becca is not a fan of that kind of talk. And I wonder if, if I might actually increase my experience of my years of my life that I do feel like I'm pretty vibrant still and like I

learn new things and I can, you know, like, I wonder if it starts with me not just giving up on myself and the way that I talk about myself and my age. I wonder if I can make a difference in that, in how I feel by just kind of not always going to that, you know, calling myself old.

Yeah, I do that a lot too. I have mixed feelings about it. In a certain way, there's a, I think maybe I lean into it because there's also a freedom around it as well, which I enjoy. Like, i i don't know i i think it's pretty clear that freedom to not go see green day on a monday night right exactly um so anyway yeah i uh i i sometimes it's kind of nice like i can't explain it sometimes i'm wandering around the the fact that the grocery store is my like happy place i think really does speak to maybe my age and where i am but i also sort of like i sort of like it you know like there's i i refer to this way too much and it's in this case i'm stretching this example um pretty far i think but a long long long time ago when you were still a very young and vibrant person with your friend i can't remember i i who it was but you said you were walking with a friend one day and there were some attractive people walking by and he was just like they don't even see me there was a time when i would have felt uncomfortable adam davidson it was adam davidson i had a feeling it was a public radio person and was the quote something like there was a time when that would have made me uncomfortable but now they don't even see me

anymore no i think he said there was a time when this that woman would have observed me and said absolutely not and now she doesn't even notice she doesn't even say absolutely yeah yeah like it was never happening but there was a point there was a moment of recognition and a dismissal of him and now he misses the dismissal because it doesn't even have that doesn't even happen which is funny

because i i think about i i think about that generally speaking i obviously didn't have all the details proper but like because there's a certain sweet release of that as well and I'm leaning very far against what you were saying but like there is something kind of nice about about feeling um I don't know sort of innocuous in the world and just saying and like I don't know I'm I'm kind of a born putter so there's that there's that side of it too but I think you're right that I'm doing myself a disservice if I think that like I'm not going to grow anymore or change anymore I mean chances are you know whatever whatever our 50s look like um will be significantly different than our 40s you know what I mean whatever defines us good or bad

and it does come down to what makes you happy like if I mean there are lots of people who are quote-unquote old souls and they really just like being cozy and kind of you know like you know quilting with their cats or whatever their thing might be that brings them great joy and maybe that's associated with you know somebody in their 20s that might seem like well that's not a thing to do in your 20s i mean everyone should just do whatever makes them happy and if for you andrew kind of like being best friends with the people at the grocery store and kind of like living your life a little bit like you're a retiree you know in certain ways um and if that gives you joy then absolutely i think it doesn't give me joy because i think where my happiness comes from or where a kind of happiness for me comes from is feeling like there is potential in the world for me like i and by the way this maybe this itself should bear some examination because you know maybe this is not a good way for me to kind of um hype myself up is to think oh there's this exciting thing happening and therefore i feel good because what i should probably figure out is how to just feel happy regardless of what's going on but i think it's something i've kind of struggled with in, since maybe at my mid forties, this idea of like, is anything interesting going to happen to me for the rest of my life in terms of like new opportunities or, you know, new career stuff or whatever it might be, or am I just going to be living this every year, a smaller version of this life that sort of peaked at some point. And that is the kind of thing that makes me feel kind of like bummed out. So I, so I'm not telling you how you have to talk about yourself or any of the listeners, how they have to talk about themselves. But I think I'm going to try this and see if it if it kind of helps me a little bit to just not basically like figure I got one foot in the grave because I really don't you know and I'm very fortunate that my body still is you know functional relatively and I know I mean god just absolute murder seeing these clips of these tv interviews Andrew it's just brutal like I was recording this promo yesterday at the UN and our camera guy was like do you want to see it I was like no but I had to see it because we had to see if the angle was right i was just like oh dear god when did i start looking like droopy the dog the cartoon i look like the dog that talks like this now i'm starting to get kind of i'm just getting jowly this is what happens at my age now this is me doing exactly what i said i wasn't going to do you know what it is i need to find a way to split the difference between not giving up on life but also not not sort of like fighting wars that i can't win with the natural process of getting older right like I just I look like somebody who's 48 years old and that's totally okay and it doesn't mean that I can't ever push myself and have new interesting experiences, even though I also do look like a 48-year-old man.

Yeah, and also, I mean, maybe yours doesn't go back this far, but it's always a good reminder that I hated photos of myself when I was like 19 years old. Like I would just hate if somebody took a photo of me. I'd hide from cameras going back that far. And of course, now I see photos of myself from my early 20s. I'm like, oh, what was I self-conscious about? So that's just, that's sort of just a mindset. I think that that side of things doesn't just have to do with aging. It has to do with sort of who we are and our insecurities. And that is something that I'm trying to purge myself of more and more. But yeah, like this doesn't really this doesn't really tie into what I don't know. This doesn't maybe tie into what you're saying, but I'm sort of thinking about like my life and like even even though I was really stressed out about going on that trip to Croatia, which I did recently and had a had a nice time. i've been reflecting a lot about like kind of my friendships recently and just sort of how yeah you know i hadn't and there's a reason for like usually i don't like traveling in groups and stuff and so i mean i think it's kind of good that maybe i was pushed out of my comfort zone a little bit on this trip but it also you know does reinforce that like it's probably not you know the majority of my vacations in life are not going to be with big groups of people not that anything went wrong but it did cause me some agita ahead of time like sort of like thinking how am I going to navigate this but having said all of that like now that it's kind of behind us and I'm thinking about all the good times we had like it's really made me appreciate where I am in my life with friends and like not to not to be um flippant about this like I struggled with friendship a lot as a young person as a kid I was bullied all the time I had no friends as an adult and I always I used to like kind of um attribute this to my career in public radio It's like the fact that I was in public radio meant as I moved from city to city, I was kind of automatically introduced to like minded peers, sort of, you know, and so there's so I've never struggled mightily to sort of have a friend group move to a new city and then have a have struggle to kind of have a friend group or make friends. that sounds very cocksure the way i put it i'm just such a likable guy is what i'm saying here but generally speaking like when i think about some some memories i have from my 20s of going on trips with friends where we were just broke as a joke i remember going to atlantic city from new hampshire breaking down on the way home like literally renting a was that when you broke down on the bridge in new york i think that's one of the times we broke down on that same goddamn bridge um and then like but i also remember like sleeping in like the worst i mean just one of the worst hotel rooms in atlantic city if you can imagine it just like cash for gold signs flashing through the window right and sharing that room with i think six people like two beds six people like even for me back then being like oh my god i don't know if i want to go in this shower and Like I've never been super like precious about that stuff, but like the, the trip. And I think about the, the friends that I went on that trip with and another one to

like the outer banks, uh, maybe around the same time as a young adult. And I think about those friends who are now scattered around the country, you know, and I don't have them as a group of friends, but like here in Seattle, having this group of, of really good friends that I can go, you know, kind of, um, to a, to a location. I keep on wanting to say across the globe, maybe that's a more grandiose way of saying going to eastern europe but like taking for me what which is a pretty significant journey with this group of friends and just thinking like wow there are not a lot of people that i could do this with and just thinking someday i'm it doesn't have to be someday that i look back and appreciate this you can appreciate this right now where i am in life you know what i mean yeah and also this

this idea of putting in the time to maintain relationships with friends because it's very easy i think in adulthood particularly if you have kids which we i mean i have a grown kid we don't have young kids like you or i or vives or anything but like it's it can be really hard to maintain friendships in adulthood or it takes work you have to be intentional about it and i'm it's i'm the worst at that and yet every time i spend time with my friends i feel so enriched by the experience i'm always happy i did it and yet why is it that i'm so avoidant why do i want to just be you know in my little world of like i don't know sitting on my deck listening to the Mariners or something. I don't know. It's, it's, it's a, it's a strange thing. And it's like, I almost have to sometimes force myself to be social. And then I'm always really happy that I was social, you know, particularly as it relates to friends, not necessarily like some kind of job obligations where I have to go and maybe shake a lot of hands or something. But I just, yeah, I knew Luke Andrew starting today, episode 4,300 in a collector series, not going to say that I'm old all the time and I'm going to make myself be social starting with the tbtl after party in philadelphia are we going to i mean is there a reason we can't announce where that's where that's going on because i think you know genevieve god bless has been helping kind of run point on this and i mean we've got something kind of locked in right

sort of yeah let's talk about this off air and then maybe we can come back later this week and give more details on where that's going to be i did want to say this joke is way late now but i was going to say to their credit the mariners um really did everything they could to get you off your porch and listening to the mariners and have you engage with your friends you're like let's look what we're doing here look what we're doing on the base paths here luke like get out there Grab life by the horns because we are not worth watching or listening to.

Can I play you something really quickly here before we go thank some donors that I found to be, for some reason, just like very, very cathartic on the subject of baseball? It's not actually Mariner related. It's Oakland Athletics related. It's a guy on ABC7 in Oakland slash San Francisco. I'm not sure which side of the Bay this TV station is. on, but he is the sportscaster for the local TV station, and he's just going off on the Oakland A's owner, and it's the kind of thing you never see somebody in the local sports media do because, well, it probably helps that the A's are moving to Las Vegas.

Yeah, I mean, it's an extreme example, like, of mismanagement.

Right, like, I guess he doesn't have to worry about trying to play nice with the ownership, but, like, for any sports fan who feels like the owners of this team, what could be, you know any sport really refuse to invest in the team because there's not really a financial incentive for them and if you don't know the Oakland A's as a as an ownership group the they've just so mistreated the wonderful people of Oakland and their long-suffering A's fans we just never since the you know Mark McGuire Jose Canseco days have never invested in the team they've had a terrible ballpark they've just consistently basically said we're going to just put a crap product on the field and you're gonna like it or not we don't really care this is the local sportscaster just i think speaking for every fan of every team that doesn't spend money

so you heard fisher statement let me tell you what reality is okay dot you tried five extremely flawed stadium proposals you never got even close to a shovel in the ground open politics is often a mess i will give you that You surround yourself with incompetent yes men. And because you were born into a billionaire family, apparently never learned you have to spend money to make money. See Joe Lacob and the Golden State Warriors, your buddy, who still wants to buy the team. John, you're a serial penny pincher. You've destroyed your family's great name and legacy because of your cheapness. As for the statement about loyal A's fans, quote, I wish I could speak to each and every one of you individually, end quote. Seriously? John, we've been trying to interview you for years, but you always choose to remain invisible unless you're begging politicians for public funding. And then you're out in front in Las Vegas.

OK. OK. OK. So let me just deal with it. And then I love the other two anchors are totally flummoxed like they have no they like I don't think they were ready for this. They look genuinely stunned, and then he proceeds to rip up this public statement, I believe, that was released by the ownership group, like, very dramatically.

For all A's fans, I can't do this enough, but here's the thing.

Anyway, I, you know, again, I guess it's easier to do when the team's on their way out of town, but I still thought that was sort of, probably felt kind of good if you're an A's fan.

Absolutely. I feel terrible, terrible for A's fans, and they're in our division. I mean, there are times when I was rooting.

Oh, and we need them to just absolutely get their behinds spanked for the last three games they'll ever play in Oakland. I know. We need that. Are we hosting or is it in Oakland? I thought that was going to end on the road.

Yeah, I think that, wow, are the Mariners.

We need them to literally lose their last three games they ever play in the city of Oakland.

Wow, it didn't occur to me that the Mariners are going to be the last visiting team in Oakland. That's kind of a sad designation.

It's like a college in Sacramento or something for a few years while the stadium's being built. It's a sad story all around.

It's really, really, really a bummer. We should thank some donors. Yeah, we should. Yeah, you know what? I'm not going to say what I was going to say, but we should thank some donors, and then we'll come back after that. Thank you for being a 10.

Thank you, indeed. Did you know who bears zero similarity to the Oakland A's ownership group, Andrew? Our donors.

Oh, they're going to say me. No. You bear a striking resemblance, and honestly, I'm getting tired of it. I'm mismanaging this entire thing. Our donors. Owners are the exact opposite of the Oakland A's ownership group. They are generous. They are supportive. They are amazing. They are the reason Livewire exists. And they are folks like Matthew Roberts.

They are not the reason Livewire exists. I would take issue with that.

Well, this is the thing I need to tell you, Andrew.

I would say that other people are responsible.

I've been siphoning a lot of the funds for Livewire. Much to your chagrin, but not to your surprise. They are the reason that TBTL exists. I'm surprised I don't do that more, honestly. in uh as i like yesterday i'm bouncing between i'm on riverside with you doing this show which is called tbtl in case you were wondering and then like i hang up with you and then i immediately call up a different riverside where i'm then doing that show anyway sorry for the confusion matthew i hope you knew you were supporting tbtl matthew is in rolling meadows illinois beautiful Thanks to Michelle Coggin in Ridgefield, Washington, where we just got a Costco, Andrew. Oh, yeah? Boy, am I excited about it. And this is not an old person thing. Would an old person be super excited about a Costco, Andrew? No, this is a young, virile excitement I have when I drive past that Costco. You can see it from I-5. It's just gleaming like a beacon on a hill. And it just makes me so happy for some reason.

That's one of the more surprising things about you, I think, is your love of Costco. Oh, I say love. You haven't clocked a lot of hours there, it doesn't sound like, unless you did during a different period of your life.

I've now got a number of things that I now buy exclusively at Costco. Becca and I will go together and use, I believe, her mom's membership. Because, again, would an old man need to use his girlfriend's mom's Costco membership? All evidence points to me being young and vibrant.

Did an old man need to sleep on his in-law's couch? No, of course not.

After eating way too much food at Easter? Uh-huh. Oh, you meant just more like I'm couch surfing. I thought you meant like I'm doing the corner Barka lounger, like scratching my own head, falling asleep, which is my dad's move.

No, I meant more like if I'm so old, why am I living with my parents?

Exactly. Why am I existing due to the generosity of others? others like uh megan sibert who's in shehalis washington also not too far from here the thing i was going to say is i they have these um these salmon burgers these salmon patties that are just so good and i mean according to the labeling they're actually somewhat sustainably harvested i don't know how true that is but it helps me sleep at night but they're really really good and they're hard to find other places so i get those there um they also have a really good albacore tuna also allegedly you know somewhat sustainably uh captured and a few other things that i like you can just they're you know it's it's i think reasonably priced and just like a quality

product that i like to get at the old costco i know that i already offered some pretty banging ideas for restaurants um on yesterday's show based on um wordplay but i am thinking that a great restaurant idea would be to have a diner called sam and patties and also serve salmon patties so you could have salmon patties salmon patties yes they're famous for their salmon

patties just something to consider yeah i'll think about that i've got a lot i could probably open a some kind of pop-up here because that's the other thing now anytime i'm in the costco because i ran out of those salmon patties at one point and i was like having i think my family over or something and then i went trying to find them down in town at like your safeway and your other regular grocery stores i couldn't find them i didn't have them so now i'm like i'm always buying them even if i don't even if i'm not done with my latest batch but um i will say that uh they are pretty delicious and i've gotten through all of them they're not the the other thing where i buy something from costco and then i just never consume it like i've been pretty good like last night when i landed from my flight driving home part of it's because i'm trying to do the 75 hard thing but i knew that i had some minestrone soup in the fridge and so instead of grabbing some kind of subway sandwich or other type of thing on my way i was so hungry on the way home i came home i ate the food that i had here we have food at home luke and it was reasonably healthy and that was a good decision by me i'm nice this is i've told you it's a totally new luke you're not even

going to recognize your friend luke anymore i am worried about your um your reliance on um costco becca might know more about this than than i do because i am not somebody who knows the ways of costco but i remember when um it was about two and a half years ago i think that genevieve and i joined costco i mean genevieve really joined costco for the first time but it really became a huge a huge point in our lives we bought a house and then we immediately joined a costco and then we got credit cards associated with our costco and then we got insurance through cost somebody handed you 1.5 children right it was just suddenly just at the nuclear family you're living in an atomic ranch exactly so happening when that happened i got a lot of

emails from listeners who were very excited about my burgeoning relationship with costco especially since i had zero um history with that store so i was getting all kinds of advice from what to order at the snack uh corner etc etc but a lot of people were like um a lot of people were talking about the various levels of products at costco which i've now experienced a little bit of which is there are some things that sort of and you can tell by like the price if it ends in 95 cents as opposed to 99 cents or if it has an asterisk behind it or something there are certain products that sort of come and go that are like kind of cyclical and then there are other things that you can count on being there all the time and there's a whole code i feel like there's five different levels of it and i'm just just a little bit of a warning there i have no idea if these things that you're buying you know which category they fit into but it will be a real shame it'll be a real shame if you show up one day and and you think that you can just rely on this forever and

suddenly it's not there you know the job that you will never find me signing up for and i observed this the other day at the costco being the person at costco who's trying to convince people to go through the self checkout line oh yeah yeah that is nobody's buying what you're selling like it's you know it's because of course everyone has eight million things it's a whole i mean the the whole box culture of costco is fascinating to me like i don't know if you remember from your brief times going through but like their whole system because it's this is too much stuff for bags it's not like do you need a grocery bag here's a paper bag it's like we've gone far beyond grocery bags at this point you need boxes and the costco way is to save all of the cardboard boxes that the stuff they sell comes in and then they've just got these boxes floating around and then it's like you need a box do you need a box and then they put all your stuff in a box that says like you know rayos tomato sauce on it or something and i never think the box is gonna work like they're like you need a box and they'll pull out like three boxes that don't look like they're gonna fit all the stuff that i did four hundred dollars of groceries i just bought but they know what they're doing and somehow the boxes are totally effective it is a very it's a very specific to

costco thing but it's a it's impressive to watch i i tend to not do the boxes i think i just load the card up and then i go out to my car and i put what can fit into tote bags in the tote bags and why do you turn down the box uh i actually usually do self-checkout and so it's just not

You're the person. You do self-checkout at Costco.

There's, I mean, the only Costco I know, Luke, is the one in Shoreline. It's the only Costco I want to know. The whole wide world. There's a pretty good memory. Good picking up on that weird reference. There's a robust, robust line for the self-checkout at Costco. I don't know if that's because they've reduced all the other ones or whatever. But the people, the hardy people of Shoreline, Washington, are not afraid of a Costco self-checkout, apparently.

I'll tell you, my friend, the people, the semi-hardy people of Tigard, Oregon, want no part of it. I was watching these poor Costco employees just going around going, there's no line at self-checkout. Come on over. Are you paying cash or card? Card? Great. You can use your card at self-checkout. Like, you know what? that's not a card or that's not a cash or card conversation that's a am i going to be scanning all of my groceries conversation like they were trying to get the camel's nose under the tent by opening the conversation with are you doing cash or card and then you go card and then i go perfect

self-checkout takes cards they should do what in alaska does is you give you like 70 to go to

self-checkout would you like to wander around the store for one to two more days right and then when the line's really short uh then uh we'll give you a 25 break on your bill andrew was bound to happen we were bound to have a donor from dunwoody georgia there it is where my name is absolute mud and it's david webster who's in dunwoody what'd you done my name is in dunwoody yep uh my name is mud because i made dunwoody sound like a tiny little georgia town and really it's a suburb of atlanta and the thriving place i believe i may have even described it as tiny dunwoody georgia that's bad that's pretty what in the tv piece you mean yeah so ryan seacrest is from david and ryan seacrest probably know each other i was trying to make the point that he ryan seacrest grew up pretty far away from hollywood which is true he grew up in dunwoody georgia i didn't need to add tiny dunwoody georgia oh interesting yeah i'm surprised nobody fact checked that though we do have a fact checker but i think she's overworked and uh and but the good news is the

Thank you.

viewers fact-checked me and i got a lot of emails do you get those you don't get direct emails from

viewers when people really no i don't have any kind of cbs um you know email profile but when people are really mad at me they find tbtl it's one of the main way we get new listeners i will get emails at the tbtl address from people that have just located this as a way to talk to me oh

like your neighbor when he wanted you to mow your grass the first time precisely i think i told you this right they've got a harris waltz sign up now too no i don't know if i got that update there are

dozens of us dozens that's great by the way my signs survived me being out of town i came back it was no no worse for wear yeah that's good so yeah everything seems to be um turn out okay with that jessica lucas is in haddonfield new jersey nice and the new jersey party doesn't stop there because connor mulcahy is in verona new jersey hey fair verona isn't new jersey kind of close

to Philadelphia? It is. Maybe these folks will be showing up at the TBTL live show on Saturday.

Connor, Jessica, David. David's in tiny Dunwoody, Georgia, but maybe. I don't know. Come on up. Yeah. Hopefully we'll see you in Philadelphia. I mean, Jersey and Philly are inextricably linked, in my mind, because of course my mom was always going down the shore. It's culturally almost the same place. The part of Jersey that is very, very close to Philadelphia and Delaware County and all of that. Alright, we'll see you guys there then. Congratulations. Jessica and Connor, we will absolutely see you on Saturday night for TBTL Live in Philadelphia. And thank you to all of our donors for making the show possible today.

Hello and welcome to Top Story.

Update from Attleboro, Massachusetts where the final bull of the eight bulls escaped from a massachusetts mall rodeo has been recaptured peacefully all of the bulls that escaped from this mall rodeo are now back in captivity are apparently doing fine i don't have very much to say about this andrew that doesn't sound very i don't know moralizing judgy unpleasant bad programming but when i saw these bulls this was kind of making the rounds over the weekend because it was a kind of a it was a pretty striking scene this these eight bulls broke out of this rodeo at a mall and we're just running down the streets of massachusetts and my first thought this is always my first thought in these kind of things is run free little bulls god i hope you get out of here i gotta hope you they never catch you like and because i feel like when you see an animal that is sprinting away from whatever you were doing to it it's probably an indicator that what you were doing to it was not it was not loving it this is where i just sound kind of like i'm in pita or something i don't mean to be a scold but like i don't know i just rodeo at a mall just seems like not the not the best life for these bulls they're like in a parking lot literally i think they might have been on cement or something how do you feel

about the water uh the water skiing squirrel in the mall of america because apparently that guy is out again i saw it on social media yesterday are you familiar with this i'm definitely have seen the images yeah i don't think i knew it was at the mall of america i liked i know that it's ridiculous and it's probably not true but i like to think that the it just helps me to think that the um squirrel is enjoying that well you know it's funny you bring that up i've never given

that a moment of thought i do think it's funny when the squirrel is water skiing but again if i can lean into my being a no fun i doubt that the squirrel is is loving it as much as we would be loving it as humans potentially like i it's very unnatural for the squirrel and my

guess is the squirrel is kind of hating it well i was reading a piece by a harvard professor called the mouse and the motorcycle and according to my research are you did you i must have asked you this before you grew up reading the mouse and the motorcycle books right are you familiar with that the mouse no i don't think i don't think i'm familiar oh man i loved these books you wouldn't know it from the title but it was about a mouse who rode a motorcycle um and i'm trying to remember the name of the mouse i'm googling it on the fly because he had a specific name stuart little was it um oh the mo the mouse and the motorcycle was a beverly cleary book i did not remember that uh at all um and was then it was the uh mouse's name ralph or something it was just such an adorable story absolutely right am i right you did you fact check me out there oh nice good i took a swing at that uh yeah ralph and his motorcycle and it's just you know i just remember i don't remember the details of it other than just being enamored by this this mouse that would get into these adventures on his little motorcycle around a house or whatever he does look like he's having

fun because he's a fictional although by the way definitely looks like a rat

look at the cover of the mouse and the motorcycle look at that tail look at the whole kind of even the face we're talking about a rat this is the rat and the motorcycle is this a um is this a well

see the problem is i'm seeing a whole bunch of different book covers over the years so which one are you looking at i'll send you the one this is great well all of them even the what looks like

the og one the mouse and the motorcycle by beverly cleary i the tail i feel like the tail not and there's an updated one where it's very clearly a mouse the mouse and the motorcycle and he's walking over towards the motorcycle he's not on it and that one he looks very much like a mouse he's got the big mouse ears he's got the big eyes he looks uh very mouse-like but some of the other ones it's definitely on the line of being a rat interesting and and i feel like it's a really different story if it's the rat and the motorcycle the rat and the rotor cycle the rat and the

rototiller show title i'll let you pick whichever one you want all right anyway um back to these bowls i did not know about the story until you put it in the show sheet today but i generally speaking get the same vibe from you now i haven't read into this you you have so when they say a mall like i don't know how much to take that into consideration because like i doubt they just sort of cleared out an area between like the radio shack and the bead dalton and the and the pretzel place or whatever um you know i'm yeah i'm assuming that this is maybe some sort of big facility that is associated with them all you know i mean i don't know how that i think it was

literally the parking lot of the mall it was an outdoor i mean they're just like concrete and here's what i i think the term rodeo is kind of misleading i don't think people were riding buck and broncos i think probably kids could take a ride on a donkey or something you know it was like kind of something where they bring some animals out and they put them in these big pens And you can come out and see them or whatever That's my guess because on cement I feel like there's only so much you can do But it did strike me that a mall seems like Not the ideal place to do something like that But again, I'm just no fun though Because I just pretty much would like us To leave animals alone almost all the time Like, just stop Like, let's see, I'll be delicate here There's a big thing called the Pendleton Roundup, right? It's in Pendleton, Oregon And there's some people that I'm really close to And I really love And they love the rodeo And they love to post pictures from the rodeo It's a big yearly tradition for them And I love that they have fun But I have to admit when I saw the photo the other day Online of them at the rodeo All I thought was like Is there something fun we can do that doesn't involve Trussing up the testicles Of a bull so that it's Trying to knock someone off it's back And again that's the most No fun answer That's the most no fun read on someone else having fun That is the definition of yucking a yum but I just I feel like that's kind of where I've landed with most stuff that it's like almost always if we're involving animals for something that seems fun for us where they're doing something unusual most of the time my guess is it really probably sucks for the animals petting zoos I

think we can get away with petting zoos if we treat the animals right and that what is actually more fun than being able to touch the animals anyway there used to be a stand-up comedian

who said any zoo can be a petting zoo if you're brave enough yeah right exactly you know words to

live by um i'm not sure if this contributes to the conversation but i was flipping through the radio recently what my my move now is as you know i'm kind of a p1 for the am sports station but then when they go to one of their long commercial breaks or if they're interviewing like an mma person or something that i'm not interested in or really interviewing almost anybody my least favorite part of local sports radio is when they interview athletes like in Unless it's like an interesting baseball pitcher who can talk about his different pitches or something. It's just so goddamn boring. It's always the same platitudes. It's awful. So what I do is I switch over to satellite radio because I'm a satellite radio guy now, Luke, as you know. And there's, I feel like, a growing block of stand-up comedy channels there. I don't know if you've noticed that, too. I feel like it used to be five. Now there's like a block of almost ten. And you can just sort of flip, flip, flip. Some of them are playing, like, comedy podcasts, like Conan O'Brien Needs a Friend or something, but a lot of it is just stand-up, and I love that. In fact, that's one of the things I liked about TBTL was hearing the intro packages before I was a part of it, and sometimes just, like, starting the show with just, like, a random piece of stand-up reminded me of listening to, like, drive-time radio as a kid in Cleveland. Like, you would just be listening to, like— The 520 Funny? Right, yeah. I don't even know if it was labeled in what I'm remembering, but just like you listen to a song by Dexie's Midnight Runners, and then there's a station ID, and then it's just like somebody's comedy set for two minutes, and then a song. I just freaking love that. So I was flipping over, and I'm pretty sure it was friend of the show Chris Gethard? Could that be? Oh, sure.

doing a stand-up bit yesterday that had a pretty profane i remember the name of the bit but i will not say it because it's pretty profane um but it essentially was built around his uneasiness of fishing because he did catch a oh no i think he um he shot a bird with a bb gun as a kid and he felt so bad about it for so long that he like made an oath to never hurt another animal and then as an adult he finds himself on some sort of like kind of a what do you call those like big fish fishing expeditions or something or somebody fishing charter i don't know if it was like something that like a buddy some buddies were doing it and he felt compelled to go but he said i'll just be on the boat i'm not going to engage in the fishing but then like you know those boats have just like fishing rods off the side of them so he like so apparently one of them caught some sort of a shark and all of his friends were like you have to grab the pole he's like i don't want to like i'm not here to fish i don't want to i don't want to herd an animal and if the captain And the boat says, don't worry, we're going to catch and release it. The shark will be fine. He said, oh, OK, great. Then I'll just grab this and hook him in the face.

This is my whole point. Again, I know this is like, I know like going fishing, you know, with your dad is like a rite of passage. And in fact, I loved fishing with my dad when I was a kid. I loved fishing. It was so fun. It was kind of gambling to me because you just never knew what you were going to get. You throw the you cast the line. The bobber is sitting there on top of the surface and then suddenly it disappears and you might have a huge one. But the difference is, back then, I did not think at all about, like, how does the fish feel about a hook going through their face? Would you say pro or con? And again, I know we have listeners who love fishing, and it's a big hobby for folks. And again, I think fly fishing is just an absolutely beautiful kind of art form, like the tying of flies and the being out in nature. There's something really great about a lot of that stuff. so i don't want to be i just wish could we do it with velcro is there a way can we go fishing but not not a hook i mean then you get the guys like that i see when i'm down in town who have these big lifted trucks and they're like have these like decals on their car about literally like ripping lips like that's the name of the fishing brand of like stuff yeah and like are like addicted to fishing it's like can we get you some suboxone for that like what is going on like again i i'm not i didn't start out today trying to rain on everyone's parade because i know that fishing is a big part of american culture and people love it and people really have a fun time and if you have fun i'm not here to tell you not to do it but for me personally i just don't think i can take any joy in putting a hook in the body of an animal even if i let the animal go back into the water it's like i'm just gonna skip that middle step where i put a hook through their eye and pulled them out of the water and terrified the shit out of them and then what let them go back down below you know i'm just gonna skip that middle part and let them just stay there how do you feel about fish tanks well i haven't actually thought about that but i guess probably bad like i mean i don't know listen i god i'm really i am not i'm just gonna keep i'm not motivating people to come see us in philly on saturday night at tbtl live in philadelphia i mean i guess this would be my thought i've given this no thought until this moment but i guess my thought would be if there are fish i don't know enough about fish if there are fish that are perfectly happy in a pretty small place a small enclosure and that they're just living their life and it doesn't make them you know have kind of mental problems then i don't have a problem with it i guess also because i'm working this week on a story about the guy who made that hbo or that max series chimp crazy and very much is it is very much the case that like chimpanzees when they're kept socially isolated it's so bad for them kind of their mental state so i think i've got that on the brain which i know is not a fish but like you know i don't i mean also it's like you're talking about a goldfish i don't know how many brain like how many brain cells do goldfish really have like

is it that are we if we really i don't know i guess i don't have a problem with someone having a goldfish but that's me assuming that goldfish you know have a pretty small brain and so they don't really care that they just live in a little tank how do you feel about the conflict in the

middle east i'm just going to keep on asking questions that just love it hot seat only get you only get you in trouble with the listeners one way or the other yeah i want to i want to see

if we can get down to no attendees on saturday night i think i'm well on the way honestly make

our lives easier in some ways i um you can zoom in i can just not go i'm just zooming in on an empty room uh i am excited about this space by the way where we're going to be doing this at the friends center uh i was going to say when i was a young person like i always loved the idea of a fish tank like there's something about like an underwater you know me i like things that are kind of in scale so i like scale models of things i sort of liked trains a little bit as a kid and Like, or like model trains, it's not like.

the idea for the big ones um and i loved the i always wanted i always wanted a fish tank and like i wanted one of those little one of those little fake um little treasure chests down there i wanted a scuba guy with an old-fashioned scuba helmet on you know diving diving bell or whatever whatever you call that helmet i wanted the um i wanted the uh unnaturally bright stones on the There's something so peaceful about a fish tank. And so one year for Christmas, my parents did get me like, I don't know, I would just say kind of probably a standard sized fish aquarium. And I had like this tall bookshelf that it's fit perfectly in a big, tall, heavy bookshelf. So I had books above it, books below it. And then kind of right at eye level or whatever, mid level, there was a fish tank which had all of the things I described, just no fish because I just never got around. And I would plug it in, and I would let it bubble, and I would love to bubble. And at a certain point, I was like, I don't know that I need fish. I might not have had, now that I think about it, I don't think I had the ideal little diver down there. But I do think I had an action figure. It might have been Captain Jean-Luc Picard. I had some action figure that was down there at the bottom of the sea, I believe. And honestly, that brought me a lot of peace, even without the fish. There's something that I do find very calming. I love going – if you go into somebody's office or even like a restaurant maybe in the lobby, they might have like a fish tank. I remember there was some old-school steakhouse, like pretty fancy steakhouse in L.A. that had fish tanks kind of prominently by your table. I love it. It's a very calming feeling.

This is like – if you just want to know my sort of bad tendencies, just a snapshot. i went to a wedding where the centerpiece were beta fish so it'd be like a plastic a little plastic bowl and then a beta fish which are also known as fighting fish they're very violent they but they offer this kind of beautiful plumage i don't think you call it that on a fish but you know you know what i'm talking about and at the end of the wedding as is often the case they said you can take home the centerpieces i even take the fish home and i am the kind of person this is a side of myself i do not like at all that like there was tons and tons of tables so there There was, like, fish that were not being taken home. Instead of just taking home one fish, because that's what they instructed us to do, and that would have been sufficient, and that would have been fine. I was like, well, free fish. How am I not going to take two fish? But I didn't want to carry both of the fish bowls, so I dumped two of these fighting fish into the same bowl like a complete moron, and then the next day there was only one fighting fish in the bowl because one had eaten the other.

Yeah, it turns out that was the alpha-beta fish.

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man

it's not from a female all right emails females the like yeah i have a voicemail i'd like to play for you i'm curious about this one i'd like you to offer a little bit of a setup for it um however i would also i'm asking you to kind of thread a needle here because um this is a voicemail that we got from listener julie and there's a lot of details in here of her sharing her memories of a sort of what sounds like it was sort of a local institution i want you to explain why this came up on the show and a little bit of background without hopefully spoiling what julie's memories are but what is java jive was this a place in tacoma that you and jen were talking about on

the show when i was out yes we must have must have been me and jen or i forget exactly how it came up but i saw a piece in the seattle times like i don't know maybe four or five months ago about this place in tacoma java jive that is shaped like a giant coffee pot and has this like amazing storied history of like you know allegedly nirvana playing there and stuff and like they've all these bands have been through there and like i just thought that i knew every quirky thing like that in the northwest you know you've got famously the hat and boots and there was a period of time where they were making a lot of like restaurants that looked like other things. But I was unaware of this Java Jive thing and the article really piqued my interest and I would really like to check it out.

Oh, interesting. Okay, so I thought this was a place that you were going to have memories from. No, I've never been. That's really interesting. Well, then that's great because Julie here has some memories that she'd like to share. And I will say, I mean, I don't think this is a trigger warning necessarily, but it does kind of tie into what we were talking about before as far as using animals for entertainment and having kind of more than mixed feelings about that.

Hi, my name is Julie. I'm a longtime listener, and I just never call in about this. But I wanted to say thank you to Luke for mentioning Java Dive the other day. In the episode with Jen, you talked about the Java Dive in Tacoma. I went

to Pacific Lutheran University in the 1980s. And my friends and I were very frequent customers. I just remember all the crazy, crazy things about that place, the leopard skin, beer coolers, the fake vines on the ceiling. They had an enclosure in the back that had two monkeys in it, Actual live monkeys named, of course, Java and Jive. And it was so awful, but very funny. They had a sign on this big plexiglass window that said, please do not tap on the glass. And, of course, everybody would tap on the glass. And then the monkeys would stop whatever they were doing and flip you off, both of them. They would just flip the people off with both hands and kind of jump up and down for a little bit and then go back to doing whatever they were doing. And then, of course, the Java Drive had a Hammond organ, and there was a guy that they called the maestro, Bobby Floyd, and he would play. He was kind of a musical savant sort of a person. So you would make a request. didn't matter what the song was any song he could play it but the deal was that he had a kind of an internal sense of rhythm that caused him to rock back and forth pretty much all the time i think but certainly while he was playing he just rocked back and forth and the rhythm never changed so didn't matter what song you requested um you could request a terrible ballad or you could request Some, you know, at the time, punk was very popular, so anything, doesn't matter what song it was, it would sound exactly the same as every other song because Bobby only had one rhythm. Anyway, it was just the funnest place to hang out for a bunch of goofy college kids, and I haven't thought about it in years and years. So thanks so much for reminding me.

love it that sounds like such a special place well this is this i think further builds my case that i think you're culturally tacoma yeah right because you would love i well i think you would love this place i think you would you would uh and i think there's a lot of things in tacoma that would really be your speed i think it's a low pretension area in the best sort of way honestly

yeah i mean it's like i whenever i'm down there which is too too rarely unfortunately i always think boy what would be because i know people who've moved down there from seattle and i you know i'll have kind of fantasies about like living in tacoma i think i like the bigger city like i love you know i love as much as they frustrate me i love being able to just like hop on a train and be in a mariners game like literally somebody can say hey i got tickets to the game tonight uh in an hour from now can you meet me down there and like being able to have that access to like you know seattle related stuff i love that but if it you know if i weren't already sort of invested in that kind of lifestyle i could definitely see tacoma be like if i'd gotten to tacoma before i got to

seattle i could see myself staying there exactly um yeah we should we should uh at least go down to that theater little theater yeah i'm there and do some kind of maybe when the seahawks make the playoffs this year i mean the three i know how could they not yeah when i'll tell you what i

will expand my 11 block radius okay uh to tacoma for a one night only tbtl show at the tacoma little

theater how does that sound okay perfect we'll put that on the calendar all right that's gonna do it for today's episode of tvtl but we are going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you please do join us for that in the meantime have a great tuesday enjoy this last bit of uh truly spectacular weather if you're in the northwest and we'll see you tomorrow in the meantime please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

Power out.