Muse

Ah, look at that kooky old cookie jar. You like cookie jars, Kenneth? Well, I guess I've never thought about it that much. We had a nice one back home in Georgia. Had a bear on it. I remember when my mom's friend Ron would come over. They'd go into the bedroom to sort out their paperwork, and I'd just go ahead and stare at that cookie jar. It was almost as if I took every problem that I ever had, And I put it inside that cookie jar. And I sealed it up so tight that nothing would never, ever, ever get out. So, I guess to answer your question, I'd give cookie jars about a B. TBTL. I'm starting my own podcast. Hey, that could be fun. All right, everybody, who's ready to laugh?

i can't hear you that's not true of course but cheer louder yeah are you seriously detaining me again am i being rendered no you're being friendered so just please accept our compulsory

hospitality if you had a favorite saying what would it be life's a party rock your body it stinks

all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show just might be too beautiful to live it's a tuna bro my name is luke furbank i am your host i'm joking i'm joking coming to you from the madrona hill studio perched high above the mighty columbia where it was really warm yesterday like uh it was like i don't know upper 80s like felt very summery beautiful evening and then you wake up this morning and um didn't know you like to wet though the dang rainstorm fall appears to have fallen upon us here um i was able to find a window of dry weather to get out and do my little morning exercise for this 75 hard ish ish day 17 of uh that and uh i'm hold on just gotta take a drink of this gallon water drink okay thanks just had to um tastes like soot and hot water i'm hooked i'm just trying to stay on target here with my consuming the gallon of water a day so that i am in the right headspace to bring you episode 4301 in a collector's series let the fun begin breaking news here in southern washington where i am there is apparently a powerful odor that is uh originated just down the hill from me in the tiny town of kalama washington that was so pungent the fire department was out looking for it last night now they think it might be moving towards port that

is illogical ensign odors cannot travel through the vacuum of space so we'll give you an update

on the big stink here in southern washington uh and we're going to talk to this guy he's the the longest-running co-bro of the show, may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

If you had wanted to introduce me and transition by saying, speaking of the big stink, I'd like to introduce my co-host today. I would have accepted that. It was right there for you. I know that you're too kind to do that, but it was right there.

It also doesn't describe you. We don't have that kind of friendship or professional collaboration where you're like you know it's like oh andrew man don't share a hotel room with him he just rips them yeah that's very much not your move you're extremely concerned about matters of

hygiene and and the like yeah you're the you're the stinky one everybody knows exactly i am the

stink one just like that olsen twin song that i love so much famous would have been a really different kind of direct to video project if the song was i am the stink one i like to take very

obscure songs by television stars from the 80s and then do my That's not that obscure. Maybe it's not that obscure, but I don't know if it needed my weird alification of it. I was going to ask you a question. Is there any product, I'm assuming it would be a food product, in your life that you sort of find yourself hoping you accidentally buy incorrectly? Here's an example, actually two. One from Genevieve's Life and Now I find myself in a similar situation. For Genevieve, she loves milk, actual dairy milk, right? It's always in the house, but she tries to drink skim milk. That's almost always what we have in the house, organic skim milk. But every now and then, if they're out of skim milk, she'll be like, oh, well, I guess I got to buy 2%, and it's like a special treat for her, right, because it's got the fat in there. I am not a dairy person, but I do like to have Cheerios in the morning. I'm going to make myself out to be.

A real party animal here. I like to have a bowl of Cheerios with almond milk in it. And this is a relatively new thing for me in the past several years, experimenting with almond milk. The other day, I had my first spoonful of Cheerios with almond milk, and it was a special delight. It was a special treat. I was like, what did I buy? Vanilla-flavored almond milk? That's literally what I did. And I looked, and I had never had this before. I had never had. And, again, I'm eating Cheerios. Like, I'm not buying sugar cereals. I've never been into sugar cereals. But I guess when there's sugar in the – that must just be sugar, right? Like, they're just adding a sugary vanilla taste to it.

Did you accidentally grab a jug of, like, coffee creamer from the AM, PM?

Oh, the vanilla-flavored stuff? Yeah, yeah, yeah. The little beige mini tub? Yeah, exactly. I'm just pouring chocolate milk on my cereal now.

one of my construction jobs i had in college or rather in high school when we'd be like you know it'd be the kind of thing where you'd have to meet super early at the at the yard where the trucks were but then you'd go the next place you'd go was a.m. p.m. before you actually started the day and i remember there was a guy who would just have one of those actually probably not a lot smaller than this gallon jug that i'm holding by the way i left my half gallon jug jug at becca's house um because i was leaving there on a flight out to new york and so i'm back to this gargantuan thing which is very that's a full gallon there this is a full oh you didn't see this because this all started when you were still in croatia so i started off with this gallon jug this is how much i'm supposed to drink every day and it was kind of unwieldy and kind of intimidating and what i realized was oh get a half a gallon jug and just refill it once in the day and that was uh uh i felt a life lesson for a lot of things like if you if there's something that feels overwhelming just break it down into manageable amounts but i'm back to the unmanageable amount of this but anyway i used to work with a guy i swear he had like a coffee cup cooler thing you know with a handle on it that felt it seemed like it was almost this big it probably wasn't quite this big but um he would just make this coffee where he would just like pour however much coffee in there he poured and then he would just be he'd put like 30 packets of all those different irish cream and hazelnut and whatnot and i think i thought that's how you drink coffee because i was young and impressionable i was probably 15 or something and i think i was like well someday i'll be a man and i'll drink coffee from am pm and it will be mostly those international delights hazelnut flavored whatnot and that's the world that

you're entering with cheerios is the point of this well i need to not start accidentally doing this on purpose or purposely buying almond why what's the downside i assume it's not as good for you i mean it can't be right not that i'm like trying to like win any health awards but like i don't need to i assume that that's just sugar in the morning i don't you are enjoying

you're enjoying your your previous uh existing cheerios relationship you don't need to amp it up with something that's maybe a slightly less healthy for you yeah you know i i don't want to

this sounds strange because i i usually have you know i don't have like a lot of willpower and i don't have like a lot of boundaries around stuff in my in my life but it's like i kind of don't want to get used to it i don't want it to be i don't want it to be that if i ever don't have vanilla flavored almond milk that i'm going to be disappointed you know what i mean like i don't want that to be my habit sort of it was a sweet sweet treat and i really enjoyed it but i don't think that that needs to be my my normal my normal daily dose you know what i was thinking about this

the other day about how the differences in the way that you and i sort of think about what we eat and and on and the sort of stuff we consume because you give yourself a lot of grief for you just said you don't have a lot of boundaries around what you eat but i think that you're actually stealthily a pretty good eater like at least more so than you give yourself credit when i say good i mean i think that you like first of all we've already established you're not a big takeout guy. I'm not a big fast food guy. So that's a pretty good thing. You know, we're just talking pure calories and sodium. That's probably a pretty good thing to not have as one of your go-tos. And also, and I've said this on the show many times, I have eaten with you. So I will eat with you. I'm sure we will break bread in Philadelphia this weekend. And you always think you ate a crazy amount of food. You always eat what I think is a pretty standard serving of food. And you don't, as far as I know, have some kind of insane sweet tooth where you've like, you've always got to have you know uh you know a pint like my dad a pint of ice cream to end every night like i think that you you i think you naturally have a pretty reasonable relationship with food whereas i am either like doing this 75 hard thing and in like full denial and white knuckling it or I'm just indulging.

indulging in large quantities of really not great for me food. Like, I don't have a chill relationship with food, and I think you have a pretty chill relationship with food, which I think is actually a better way to be.

Maybe. Yeah, I'm definitely not at the extremes like you are, and I don't think I think about it maybe as much as you do. Yeah, which is good. I will say, though, I always feel a little bit like a phony when you say that, though, because it is true. Like, if I go to eat, like, I don't like feeling bloated, And so as I've gotten older, I sort of will look at the menu and be like, yeah, but do I like, for example, when we were in Croatia, I had some meals that had fries as a side and I'm fine having a couple of fries. And my friends were like, for some reason, Croatia has really, really good French fries, apparently. And so everybody was all gaga about these various fries I'd get at places. And I was fine just having a couple of them. And I wasn't as into it because like fries just I'm not like I'm not like counting the calories, but I just know that they kind of make me feel bloated. And so I don't obsess over them as much.

That's a perfect example, though, because I, you know, leave no fry behind, my friend. I am I will not I will not rest until all of those fries are cleared off. If I've made the decision to have French fries, I'm eating every one of them. And you're just kind of going, I might not feel great from those later. Maybe I'll just have a couple. I don't have that sort of willpower or whatever.

Here's where the phoniness comes in. And I don't know if you've ever seen that episode of 30 Rock where Liz Lemon is temporarily housing one of her colleagues. Who's the guy who always has the goofy hats on? Not Lutz. Oh, not Lutz.

Frank Russitano.

Yeah, Frank. So she and Frank are living together for some reason. And he's trying to quit smoking. And I think she's trying to not have her midnight snacks or something like that. And they set up like kind of one of those nighttime cameras. Like a trail cam? Yeah, and it turns out, like, he's very disciplined, and she's coming out in the middle of the night and doing all kinds of just horrific things, starting with eating, but then, like, I think eating his cigarettes and just, like, going—and I just sort of think, like, if you were to put, like, a nighttime security camera in my kitchen and you were to monitor me, like, there are times that you would see me probably on all fours with, like, an entire kielbasa, like, gripped in my jaws, and you'd be like, okay, well, this is the stuff that we're not seeing when we're at a— at a sandwich shop in St. Paul for work.

Yeah, but I mean, honestly, like if you're having a kielbasa at night, that's, I mean, maybe the soap.

I'm shaking it until it's dead, by the way. I need you to, I'm in my boxers. I have an old t-shirt.

If you're taking a kielbasa into what herpetologists describe as a death roll, where you swim down to the bottom of the river with it until it suffocates, that might not be the best behavior for you. Can you tell I'm working on a story about a tortoise conservancy? That's why the word herpetologist is front of mind.

I just, oh, goodness, that really painted. In my own head, I painted just an awful picture of myself. So, yeah, I guess maybe because I feel like there are times where I have, like, zero willpower that it's, like, in the morning if I can exercise a little bit of willpower. And, again, like, I don't know. Like, I'm not somebody who does go around. Also, for sweets, I guess I don't have that much of a sweet tooth. maybe because i drink so much beer and that that's where the sugar is but um yeah it that's kind of that doesn't take a lot of willpower for me like my friends i think were pretty i don't know if disappointed is yeah i think definitely disappointed is a correct word along with maybe shocked and somewhat bewildered they were eating gelato like literally three times a day like little cups of gelato in croatia and apparently it was really really good and genevieve kept saying like just have some I was like no and I wasn't not eating it because of any kind of discipline I just literally wasn't in the mood I kept saying I'll be in the mood later I'll be in the mood later and I and I never was and that was just for sex and then for the gelato I was kind of a similar story and Genevieve's just like I cannot believe you did not taste any gelato while you're there and I was like I just wasn't I thought I'd be in the mood eventually and I never was but also

So and I don't folks from this friend group might hear this and I don't want to sound I don't want to say anything that sounds like I'm being a little bit kind of critical. But there is a strong culture of talking about food in this friend group. It's my experience. By the way, I've been officially and unofficially ostracized from this friend group and that I'm on zero text chains anymore with this group of people, maybe because it's of takes just like this. No, but there's a lot of talk about, like, French dip sandwiches and, like, the, oh, I got this, and I went to this place, and, oh, have you tried this? Like, I feel like food and snacking and treats is a really big, like, oh, and I got this kind of candy gummy that, like, they don't usually make, but it's a special release. It's a big topic of conversation.

release you know what i mean it's like oh special i'm sorry i thought i was picturing i think my head is too much in pharmaceuticals i thought you meant like you eat like a gummy and then the joy is just like sort of time released throughout the day i didn't mean see i'm this is how this is uh

how naive i am when i say gummy i just mean like an actual gummy no i i had you on that i didn't

think like a weed gummy but i just sort of i was just like oh yeah like you eat it and then the sugar slowly throughout the day it's a special release i see what you're saying yeah no well

yeah unless andrew unless you chop it up and snort it yes it just hits you right away all it works your way right you could totally get around that time release but all my point is just it's a group of folks who do a lot of talking about and a lot of you know a consuming of in a healthy way i would say like treats are a big part of the conversation so i can imagine everybody being really excited about gelato and the many flavors of gelato yes and all that i'm not surprised to hear that there was a lot of people were very excited about the gelato situation yeah

it's a gelato centric trip and again it's one of those things it's like you would just think at some point first of all i'm not into sharing ice cream or dairy at all like i mean genevieve is literally the only person that i would share an ice cream cone with and even that i'm not huge on like just like do we need to lick the same soft dairy like i just feel like we can all do better than that and so certainly like somebody's saying hey just to have a little bite you know people are passing around ice cream cones i'm like that is not that's that's not my culture um and then i i don't know like i can't i think one time i actually got in line for a gelato but then i don't know the i didn't have enough money or i don't it really paints me a picture i had to like i had to um put a little cardboard sign that said we'll work for gelato no i don't know there was something like a dog with a bandana on just sitting next to you i came close one time i She got in line, and then I got back out. But, again, I wasn't trying to – that was not me being disciplined. It was just, like, that's kind of easy for me, not being drawn to that. Having said that, like, what I love is – and actually, I did get into a conversation about this with my friend, Tune, because apparently she does the same thing. Like, I love having, like, a pint of ice cream. Is it a pint – the kind of big tube of ice cream? You know what I mean? The big round thing of ice cream. Not a small Ben & Jerry's, like a full thing of ice cream. I think that's, like, a half-gallon. half gallon but i like the round kind you know and then you again you put on the nighttime security camera on me and there it is it's like the middle of the night i'm watching like reruns of benson and just like scraping the outside of that like i love like the maintaining of a trough do you ever yeah like you start the trough and then you like i like to take the ice cream out of the freezer and just like give it like three or four minutes to like kind of let it get down to room temperature a little bit and then that softens the outside of it and you just kind of bury your spoon in there and sort of you just start you spend the evening maintaining the trough and laughing at 1980s comedy like that how does Benson hold up by the way along the kind of like racial lines well here's the truth of the matter you caught me in a lie I haven't seen Benson in forever but I have been watching a little bit of the TV show Soap which also had Benson in it are you familiar with this Robert Guillaume he plays the character Benson in Soap I didn't know that but the Benson in Soap is a he's like the butler he's a butler in Benson in Benson he's a governor he's a assistant I believe he's the butler I thought he was the butler who's the smartest guy in the room on Benson no I let's look up Benson maybe you're right but I'm pretty sure I'm pretty sure that he's like the same actor with the same name but has a totally different job.

Butler Benson Dubois is the smartest and possibly only sane member of the widowed Governor Eugene Gatling's household staff. Benson always manages to keep his head no matter what the staffers or governor's family members throw at him.

Look at that. That makes so much more sense. So he's literally the same character. They must have had some sort of swap where he leaves soap, but he's still like has his same role as a what do they call him here as a servant or a butler head of the household if they're calling him servant yeah yeah that's definitely rough jump to the end of the question of how's the racial stuff right exactly and soap is a weird one because if even I started watching the first season of soap the other day is that about a soap opera it's kind of a parody of soap operas um and it's like a comedy it's very broad um and i remember being a kid and seeing it and thinking it was pretty that i thought it was pretty phenomenal when i was a kid or like at least like um kind of groundbreaking and sort of shocking and you watch it now and it's a little bit i think like billy crystal plays a gay man right and he's one of like the main character's adult sons how's that pulled up not great But the thing is, I think it's supposed to be in the tradition of All in the Family, right? Like, I think the joke is supposed to be on the bigotry, but it doesn't feel like the joke is on the bigotry. You know what I mean? It feels like in the first episode, it's just like, oh, yeah, we're just going to openly make fun of this guy. Like, literally, the voiceover is like, so-and-so has her problems, and they are this, this, and this. And her sister has her problems. She has a gay son. And that's just the narrator saying, like, the problem is you have a gay son. Now, that's like, what, is that 1979 that soap first came out? I'm not sure. But, like, it's, I don't think the show itself is trying to lean into bigotry. I think it's trying to maybe shine a light on it, but it's rough. It's, I find, I, as a snowflake, I find it hard to watch.

It's funny because, you're pretty close, by the way, it looks like 77 is when it came out. Okay. And, okay, so I didn't even know really what this was until you started describing it to me, and I already have a take on this, which is the rapid—honestly, the rapid response takes that I bring to the show are why people tune in. Like, just looking at this list of people, including Billy Crystal, and, man, it's a long list of folks that were involved in this Gordon Jump later of WKRP and Cincinnati fame and other things. My guess would be that this was At the time a very progressive show Or at least made by people who had Progressive values It's Hollywood elites Granted it's 1977 But this is probably These people are probably about as progressive as you get While still being part of the mainstream Relative mainstream It's really funny to see How even people that would probably Be considered champions of let's say Gay rights, again whatever that looked like in 1977. I'm sure it was pretty bleak. Um, it's funny to see how wrong they get a lot of it because you think about now and, and, and like, you know, I would say that you and I are both people that are pretty progressive and are trying to be as inclusive as possible. And I would, I would say like, I think I've figured out most of my blind spots. I think I'm walking through the world in a pretty inclusive way, et cetera. And yet I'm probably swinging and missing so much like billy crystal doing uh i guess you know sort of doing gay face even though probably his heart was in the right place at the time but it just everything shifted after that so like there's no way it can actually be um you know there's no way that the performances and the jokes and the comments like he has a problem which is a gay son can hold up even though the people making it at the time were probably on the right side of whatever it looked like at that point yeah and

And I will say to Billy Crystal's performance of what I've seen so far, because I maybe watched four episodes or something. And again, this is season one. So it's the earliest one. I wouldn't say that Billy Crystal's performance. I'm, you know, I'm not gay. I don't know how I would see it if I were, if I would have a different perspective on it. But I've certainly seen more insulting depictions of gay characters by straight actors before. Or they don't have him being like some sort of super like gross, exaggerated version of whatever a negative stereotype would be. I would say that they write his character OK, but it is just like the the the what's the name of the actor who I know better from Empty Nest is like his stepdad in the show. And he's just Richard Mull. No, that's wait. No, maybe you are right. No, no. Boy, this is great. You know, the Empty Nest guy. Richard Mulligan Mulligan, yes, yes, yes, yes, yes Martin Mull recently passed away, right? Yeah, RIP Yeah, that's a bummer

Also Richard Mulligan, just a quick aside Richard Mulligan played a character on Little House on the Prairie whose narrative arc terrified me to my core In fact, I would like to go back and watch the scene from Little House that absolutely rocked my world as a child and by the way, I think this came up like a year ago on the show Richard Mulligan of Empty Nest and Soap fame plays a guy who had been fighting in the Civil War and had become addicted to, you know, whatever they would give you, you know, in those days to treat pain, you know, would it be like Dalladnid or something? Dalladnid? I don't even know how to say that word, but you know what I'm talking about. Some kind of opioid back in the day. and he's addicted and he's and which is by the way a weirdly progressive like it's a weirdly progressive issue not progressive but a weirdly current issue for little house on the prairie to be dealing with circa 1983 which is like civil war era opioid addiction i will because there's

probably the 80s and they're looking at other kinds of drug addiction and they're like yeah and they were trying to make it relevant yeah yeah but they had but it had to be set on the

prairie so he comes back from the war and he's not okay but the thing that really scared me was there's a flashback scene for Richard Mulligan's character of being on the battlefield and he's wandering around and this is to this the point of this scene is to explain why he's not right in the head i mean it's really he has ptsd right and there is a guy a fellow civil war soldier who's on the battlefield and is i think maybe dying or close to dying and is all his color is real green and he's reaching for richard mulligan like save me and man as a kid that scared the living tweet out of me because i never got to see anything like that i was very sheltered as a little kid so anyway sorry that's my no that's fine tangent

i you know i don't i think i'm out of believe it or not only 15 minutes in and i'm out of hot takes on the tv show soap from 1977 i've got one more footnote okay please no fully fully um done i relinquish the remainder of my time to the gentlemen in Calama County.

Rod Roddy was the announcer you're talking about, and he was the announcer for many years on The Price is Right.

Oh, okay, yeah.

Yeah. Bob Barker would always be like, what's the showcase, Rod? And then they'd cut over to this guy in some ridiculous gold lame blazer. Yeah. And that was Rod Roddy, and he was also the announcer for Soap. And I'm just reading Rod Roddy's Wikipedia page. And I just I love this era of Hollywood, which was I mean, he graduates from Texas Christian University and then just starts working as a disc jockey in Texas. He's at KNUSFM in Dallas. He's doing the overnights in Buffalo, New York. He's on WKBWAM, you know, doing like, you know, the overnights and stuff. And basically, like, he's just Rod Roddy was a guy who had an entire career because he sounded like this. Yeah, right. You know what I mean? Like, that's it. That's what you had to do. You know, like that was like there were so many guys that made their way out and ended up in in like some version of Hollywood because just because they talked like this. It was like that was all you had to do. It was an amazing time.

There were some people in radio that I would know in public radio, too, where it's supposed to be kind of ideas first. And people would be like, yeah, but he's got such a great voice. I'm like, yeah, but what is he doing with his voice? I was surprised. I'm thinking of several things. And if anybody's trying to suss out who I'm talking about, I'm thinking of like different people in literally different states at public radio places where I've worked, where people would really put a high price on the idea of the quality of somebody's voice. But what they were doing with their voice did not seem to live up to the standards of public radio. I'm like, are we still doing this? Are we still just saying, yeah, but he's got that baritone?

That's so funny because I feel like I have the opposite thought a lot about public radio of late. i don't know if it's just some of the folks i've been catching here and there like some of the announcers but i have said this for years like for for something that is still on some level a performance medium it is surprising to me how many people in public radio do not appear interested in giving the performance doing a good job with the performance i'm not saying they're not interested in it although that's literally what i just said i guess my point isn't that they're not interested it's that they're not cut out for it like it's this is maybe the tension of something like public radio is it's not it's not supposed to be rod roddy but i guess sometimes i wouldn't mind 10 percent more rod roddy because it's okay i get somebody who's just like you know this is a broadcast right you know people are hearing this like how about you pre-read the script how about you how about you put a little put a little oomph into it how about you kind of like sell the sizzle and the steak here like there's i feel like there's almost this sort of monastic like anti-performative thing sometimes that pops up in public radio for me where it's like you know we're so not obsessed with if you sound like rod roddy that we're gonna actually

just sort of be actively bad at this when i mentioned earlier that i'm going back to soap here uh i guess i am not done and see when you thought you were out of takes So I'm setting this up for probably this is probably a bad idea based on everything I just said about the show not holding up. But I mentioned that soap is sort of a parody of soap operas. Well, these and I started from the very, very beginning and it sets it starts off, you know, just, you know, they're laying out the characters and what the issues are. It doesn't seem super soap opera. But then as the show goes on, the intricate plots get more and more ridiculous, like the love, the secret love triangles and and whatnot. And so what the bit on the show was, was the announcer, Rod Roddy. It's very much kind of like, you know, decades later, Arrested Development, like kind of this idea of like we're setting out like with the narrator, like where we've left things off. but it's kind of a joke about how unbelievably complicated the plot has gotten. So I have one here to soap.

opening intro i don't know what year this is but i'm hoping that this is like kind of deep into the run a little bit and so that the plot is pretty uh complicated again soap famous for dealing with adult issues in the 70s and also not with the 2024 lens so i'm i have no idea what i'll be playing here but you know let's just say this might be our last episode of tbtl if it's too

raw in the last episode of soap chester told jessica he fools around with other women because he's sick and needs help. Mary convinced Jody to move back home, and that way he could get help with the baby. Danny met a girl named Polly at the cemetery who might help him get over Elaine, and Bert, who has trouble sleeping, went to the doctor for a physical, hoping that might help. Confused? You won't be after this episode of Soap.

That wasn't... Come on down! Now that you say that, I totally hear it, too. I did not make that connection of the voices.

thank you for being a town all right let's thank some of our daily donors these wonderful folks are keeping tbtl going maybe we'll even see some of them in philly on saturday for tbtl live from philadelphia i'm doing a quick scan oh these people are they're a fur piece as you might say away from philadelphia but you never know maybe we'll see kristen reicher there kristen is in austin texas it's worth a trip thank you kristen definitely make it over to schaefer's spot the front page yes i believe in austin that's a that's a 10 friendly environment also shannon fitz is in boone north carolina that's i mean it's on the east coast of america i've driven from philadelphia to north carolina before andrew uh when um we went to visit we went to philly because that's of course where my mom's family is from we rented a car and then we drove all the way down to north carolina to newburn where my grandpa farnham burbank farnham moss burbank was in retirement so i know it's possible shannon i'm saying it's possible it can be done it can be

done certainly yeah and also north carolina uh in play let's just say in in play absolutely

which is very exciting yes i mean are we when we're in pennsylvania andrew are you going to make your way out you know i'm going to be in harrisburg pa on monday the monday after uh the tbtl live in philly i'm actually filmed by total coincidence i'm filming in harrisburg pa on monday and i'm like will i have time to door knock yeah right yes i'm being totally serious do i extend my stay in pennsylvania and try to be of use of service as it were i love it i love it

this is the man and i i swear to god luke i do not say this to bring up painful memories but to just applaud the journey that we've been on together with you but remember we got into that spat like what i was i was in los angeles so it would have been i remember where i was i think i

was actually in a production room at cairo and i remember i remember this and i remember i was in

of kind of a studio I rarely used at KCRW and we were just doing TBTL I was done with my work day or whatever and we got this whole thing about whether or not you know every vote counts and whether or not it's worth like actually voting and I remember being like I can't believe you're advocating for people like not vote I don't know I don't know if that maybe that's putting too sharp of an edge on it but certainly like the importance of voting and like when you chose to vote and when you didn't and now you're out there saying I'm gonna be in PA maybe I can spend my meager extra

time knocking on doors I love it tell you man anything that any of us can do to to make some sort of impact I would highly highly recommend even just as an anxiety management tool right like I don't think that I'm going to personally be the reason that the election goes in the way that that we hope it does I've been thinking about something lately by the way which for Our listener, Alicia Nicholas, in Atlantic Beach, Florida, is usually the last thing she wants to hear me say. I've been thinking about something lately, Andrew. By the way, Alicia is another donor today. Thank you, Alicia. Also, Brooke Latsky-Davis is in SLO, San Luis Obispo, California. Very nice. Very, very beautiful country. Also, Jason Lumpkin is in Little Rock, Arkansas. Home to a president. Thank you, Jason. And then Matthias Wager is in North Richmond, California, out there in the Bay Area. Not in play, thankfully. I think probably going solidly blue. This is what I've been thinking about lately, Andrew. And obviously, all predictions are that this is an incredibly, incredibly close race for president. For Vice President Harris, it's an uphill battle because of the electoral college and that particular map and how it tends to reward Republicans for a variety of reasons. But I've also been thinking about something, which is, I feel like... culture changes before politics does like if you think about you know although i guess there's an argument against this and the overturning of roe because although that might be like judicial decisions can still do what they want to do even regardless of what culture does my point is if you think about gay marriage in this country what changed was the culture changed on it i think you know people just got over it enough people just had a gay friend or family member and realized that there were absolutely no threat and if they wanted to be married there should be no reason you can't do that I feel like the culture shifted and then the politics sort of followed and I feel like their culture is shifting around just like having this alternative to Donald Trump and this I don't know I what I said when we had my pal Misha on the show when you were out of town was I'm both absolutely terrified about the stakes of this election as I think we all are and all should be and i wouldn't be shocked if it's a landslide i i know that and i'm listen i'm gonna vote i'm gonna door knock i'm phone banking none of this is a reason for anyone to stay home or for anyone to be i even by the way was i did double check my voter status andrew if you want to know how far i've gone with this now i wanted to make sure i wasn't still registered in oregon and it was going to somehow invalidate my vote out here because uh i am i'm not of much use in Oregon I also don't live there anymore but I'm of a lot of use here because we're trying to get Marie Glusenkamp Perez re-elected again mostly because she's not Joe Kent but all that is to say

I'm holding these two really kind of weird contradictory thoughts maybe three one is the trauma of what happened in 2016 because I think we all went into that just thinking there's just no way that this person who has all of these obvious defects could be elected president and then somehow he was and so I don't think anybody dares relax for a minute or take anything for granted or think you know we've just now been trained through this trauma to think that like there's almost nothing Trump can't do which is really effed up put half of the E up will you because I kind of muttered the beginning of that word under my

Weirdly, half of an E is an F, so that works out well.

But I don't know. I've just been – something inside me, it tells me that it ain't even going to be close. And yet, I obviously would never – I would not be – I'm setting myself up, by the way, for a lot of grief if something awful happens in terms of the election going the other way. I just I feel like something has fundamentally shifted in this country and it's not measurable based on the typical ways of measuring. And I think it has to do potentially with ground game. I think it has to do with enthusiasm gap. I think it has to do with Trump fatigue. I think it has to do with Harris Waltz, you know, representing a thing that was I think that the big takeaway was a lot of people were not excited about the two options that were being offered to them. And now there's a different option. And one of the parties changed options and one of them didn't.

And I just, I think it has a lot to do with nude Africa. I think it has a lot to do. Is it naked Africa or nude Africa? I don't know. I always get it wrong. Do you think that there's a. Would you care to unpack that? Nah, I think people can either hang with that or just dismiss it.

I do think that that's like, I'm saying there's these little things, like we're talking about Boone, North Carolina. I mean, he's bringing down, he's depressing the Republican vote in North Carolina.

That's what I was thinking of. And because I was reading this morning about how that whole, I don't know what you want to call it, development scandal, whatever it is, how it impacts the chances of Kamala Harris. In fact, I think it's funny that you were saying everything you were saying about sort of our hopes versus our fears, because I think it was literally this morning I was reading, you know, probably a post or a Times article specifically about how that gubernatorial race could affect the top of the ticket, et cetera. And I had literally while reading that article this morning, this moment, this rush that I do not allow myself to have very often of just being like, I can't explain it, Luke. It was a split second notion that I had, but it was like me on election night just being like, holy shit. It's just a blue wave, you know, like just being like, just watching. But then I immediately just shoved those feelings back in their cage because I'm like, don't, don't do that. i guess i give politics about a b um yeah exactly i was like do not because i remember 2016 so well and also this is also just part of my demons as a human being you know like my whole life i've never dared dream for the best you know like when it comes to something that might be slightly out of my control or whatever like i remember or... I'm sure I've told you this many times on the show that at a certain point I realized that the things I worried about didn't necessarily come true, but then I would get sort of like, like, um, uh, hit, like, what's the word I'm looking for? Sideswiped by something in my life that I wasn't worrying about. Exactly. And so then I would like sort of have like, not unlike Arya Stark, I had my like worry list at the end of the night, like that I would worry about. I mean, that's effed. I mean, you want to talk about like a messed up thing when you think about of a child laying in his bed, trying to think of everything you can worry about. So as to ward it off. Yes. Yeah, no. Yeah, so anyway, that's where we are.

Well, here's a little good news. They didn't get Nebraska. That's enormous. I mean, that's very – are you following this? No, no, I'm trying to figure out what you're talking about. Okay, Nebraska and Maine are not winner-take-all states for electoral votes. Yes. And and they're one of the one of the ways that Kamala Harris could get to 270 electoral votes involves winning a number of states that she has a pretty good shot of winning and then getting this electoral vote from Nebraska by way of Omaha, which is a city. And you know presumably probably more blue than the rest of the state and There was this movement in the by the Republicans in charge of the state house in Nebraska And this is so this is so devious So basically they waited until because they have this policy and Maine has this policy and And and and if they were to change to winner take all that would very likely deprive Kamala Harris of by the way believe trump has actually won this area before so it's not even like they're just giving it over to kamala they're just not like they're devious yeah they're just like you know what i mean like it's like it basically like anyone could still come in and win both like these votes or this vote from from the state of nebraska by way of omaha but they were the thought was if the republicans in nebraska changed this over to win or take all thus likely depriving kamala harris of this extra electoral vote then maine was going to change their policy because i think they might have a democrat state legislature and they were going to change their policy to winner take all thereby giving kamala harris back this vote back this electoral college vote so it was gamesmanship but guess what nebraska did it takes 90 days in maine for a law change to go into effect and we are more that we are less than 90 days out from the election so maine hit this point where there, nothing they changed would even matter. And would you believe that the day that they hit that deadline, the Nebraska Republicans said, oh, actually we should really consider doing this, which is just nakedly, nakedly a way to try to outmaneuver Maine and try to hand more votes to Trump. And this, by the way, could have resulted in a 269 to 269 tie, which because of the vagaries of how Congress works would have been tiebreaker to Donald Trump. So this Nebraska thing was actually like a very big deal. And there is one dude, he was on Chris's show last night, one state legislator in Nebraska, who's a Republican who refused to go along with this and thereby thwarted the entire thing. He also probably wants to be mayor of Omaha and probably didn't want it on his resume that he got Trump elected, but Hey, whatever, we'll take it. Like that's a thank god for small mercies like that was something that was keeping me up at night

and it appears to and then the governor said he's not going to call a special session over this so

that that that threat appears to have stalled out yeah that chicanery i think of um well whatever i don't have to get into it there's the the seattle city council um who i'm not a huge fan of was doing something very similar like just like with um just like kind of moving things around in such a disingenuous way about like these these these funds for the social housing measure that is sort of already passed within how you're going to fund it it was supposed to appear on the ballot I believe this coming presidential election which would have swung it in in the way that the council the conservative council wouldn't have liked so they did something where they like they did something unprecedented where they held it a little bit too long so that it couldn't show up on that ballot it'll show up on like kind of a a midterm ballot of some sort where fewer people will show up and then they added like their own measure a conservative measure that is sort of

like when you say conservative are we talking maga people on the seattle no but i don't think

they should call themselves democrats like i i i oh so they are d's they're yeah i don't know anything about the current they're huge i get i get do you know i did something with Yeah. OK, this gets a little complicated and it gets me off of that track because I have major issues with the current current city council, like major issues with them. And I get really hot and bothered when I think about it too much. But I'm also not articulate enough to talk about it on the show. And also, it's not interesting to people. So I will I will I will move off it. But that's not interesting. But I will use this opportunity to tell you about an interesting conversation I had with Genevieve related to all of this, which is we were chatting the other day. and I don't know why or how this came up and it's a dangerous topic but we were just like sitting on the couch I think I don't know just sort of maybe watching TV or chatting or something and she's brought up something like well I don't know if you like that topic or something I'm like well I just like talking with you like it isn't based on topic I mean it started as a compliment let's make that clear

yeah that's a very sweet thing to say I'm basically like I just enjoy being in conversation with you Yes. And it's not topic dependent. I think that's an incredibly sweet thing to say to your partner.

Especially if you just leave it there.

Did I?

No. And then I started thinking, like, what is a topic that I don't like talking about? I'm like, I can't even think of one. And then I was like, well. Thought of one. And then I'm like, I guess I don't really like talking about, like, any kind of, like, not our relationship, but, like, other people's relationship or matchmaking sort of. Like, oh, our friend so-and-so is going on a date with this person or, you know, Genevieve loves like kind of, you know, in a good way introducing people. She loves, you know, I don't think that she's a busy body in this way, but she really does like talking about it. She has a single friend who's going on a date with somebody that we all know or whatever. She's very interested in that and invested. And there are a few things I care less about, and it almost makes me a little bit uncomfortable. I'm always like, just let people do their own things. I don't want to talk about so-and-so's dating life. Like, and so I sort of said, like, that is something that I don't like talking about. And so I took this nice initial compliment of we can talk about whatever. I just like talking with you, too. Boy, I really don't like it when you talk about relationship stuff too much. And so then she's like, hey, that's smart. I'm like, well, do it to me. Like, what do you not like? Oh, no. Are there any conversations that you don't like? You know, and I said, not that you don't like, but that like of the conversations that we have that I am bringing to the table, like, what could you do without? and she said anytime you bring up luke um she said well you know city politics she's like when you get on your high horse about like city politics i was like first of all i didn't even realize i did that that much like i thought i was like kind of keeping those in my in my rage brain um but uh also it was just kind of interesting i was like oh wow that that's interesting she's like i just don't follow it that much and she's like i guess it's i guess it's good that you care that much but i just don't i'm like all right well there you go so i haven't brought it now so now you have to here on tvtl so now you have to absorb my half-baked explanations of legislative chicanery of this of the what i call the conservative seattle council well we'd like

to thank our donors today for making it all possible here on tvtl hello and welcome to top story top story here in southern washington strange odor reportedly wafting south along i-5 corridor towards portland yeah what's up with a story to hear on opb as i'm going out for my early morning jog is it are they tracking it and is

it following you we just made jokes about us being stinky boys earlier on the show what if it was It's kind of like you're just getting into whatever town it is that you need to go buy some stuff at Home Depot. And it's like, news update. The stench is now outside the Home Depot. It's just following you.

Right. We're just like, we don't know what the source is, but we see it moving to Lake Sacagawea and now circling Lake Sacagawea 1.5 times.

Exactly.

Here's the thing. I was really on the hunt for this smell this morning. But it's hard because there is also a pulp mill down in the other town, which is called Longview. So there is just kind of generally a pulpy smell. And it's hard for me. Becca asked me, she was like, have you smelled the smell yet? Because they're covering this like, this is like big news on OPB this morning. And I said, it's hard to distinguish it from the regular smell that's a little fibrous, if you will. So I missed it But I guess last night This is from OPB Cowlitz County emergency responders Have found no abnormal gas readings Officials are trying to sniff out The cause of a strong and pungent odor That drifted down the I-5 corridor From Cowlitz County To the Portland metro area overnight By the way there's no It just says by OPB staff Or I would credit whoever wrote this Emergency officials did not know what the smell is Or whether it could be harmful The smell was so strong in the Kalama area Tuesday night that the Cowlitz... county department of emergency management began investigating the agency monitored the air and found no abnormal gas readings the agency also reached out to manufacturers and operators of gas pipelines in southwest washington said there was no operational issues detected railroad operators washington ecology officials also did not know the cause of the smell by late tuesday reports were dissipating in washington state but people in portland started to file their own stench reports across multiple social media platforms after midnight. This is what I love, though. This morning on OPB, their advice was, if you smell something that smells bad, go inside and shut your windows and doors.

What should you do if it's hot outside, Luke?

Well, that's it. I mean, they just took that template. They just said, like, they crossed out hot, and they put bad smell. And then they crossed out air conditioning, and they wrote closed doors and windows. Right, right, right. Like, do the exact thing you'd probably do if you smelled a super weird funk. Probably go inside and close the doors and windows.

Authorities suggest if you smell the stinky smell to take your T-shirt and raise it above your nose and wear it like a little bandit mask.

That happened to me on the plane the other day where I feel like the airflow around airplanes are so kind of odd in that someone could be hit by a smell. Somebody could be sitting right next to you and get really hit by a smell And it totally isn't hitting you Even though you're six inches apart I don't know if you've noticed this I don't know, I feel like airplanes Airplanes don't follow the normal Like if you're sitting in a room And there's a bad smell And one person smells it, you're probably going to smell it pretty quickly If you're sitting next to them I was on the plane the other day and the woman sitting next to me Was like, oh, I saw it She kind of said, oh, that's not good And she kind of did that thing with her shirt And then I couldn't smell anything but i put my shirt up because i didn't want her to think i was responsible for whatever the smell was that she was smelling so i then had to be outraged about a smell that i couldn't even

locate do you are you ever the source of the smell but you pretend like you're off put by other you're like looking over your shoulder like who would have crop dusted this area not on the

airplane i try i really try not to do that obviously i feel like that's just it's hard enough uh air travel i don't want to make it worse i do make many trips to the restroom though uh so if something like that needs to go down or whatever i uh i take care of it in the in the bathroom um i almost because of this water intake thing i got seated on the aisle the other day you know i'm usually a window feller but being on the aisle so that i could just get up and go to the restroom unfettered i kind of got the whole appeal of it like because again i'm normally pretty good at holding it for most of the flight but you throw this gallon of water thing in and even on a day i haven't done that i feel like my whole system is just like i'm just on like you know i don't know what you would call it but it's like i'm going to the bathroom a lot and i was what i lost in not being a look out the window i gained in not having to ask anyone permission to

go to the bathroom it was pretty nice can i tell you a little hack that maybe you know about but i'm gonna assume that maybe you don't because you don't sit on the aisle very often and there's a sweet little treat about sitting on the aisle that i love and i don't know if it's just because we have it's like a an airplane is a bit like a prison and so like just like small little things that we can find happiness in bring us even more happiness did you read that thing by the way yesterday that was kind of like why we cry on planes it was like the perfect i saw the headline

yeah and i actually meant to grab it for the show because i have been saying this for years and years where somebody i feel like i said that to somebody i can't remember if it was this show or somewhere else or in my private life and they were a little dubious are you dubious of that or do you agree that you feel a little more emo when you're watching something on a plane i don't know how

much it affects me i mean i think because i've heard about this for a long time and not just from you um and i'm trying to think there might have been a time when i was watching a movie and maybe it hit me a little bit harder i don't know though that that is something that i i feel today

or that i can think did you find the argument compelling in the article well that's what i was

going to say i don't know if you heard i copped a little bit of a tone when i said that maybe it would have been okay for tbtl that's why i read it because i know it's something we talk about and i even expected it popped up in that same i know it's one of the newsletters that i know that you and i both get together um we don't get it together but then we're both signed up for and uh we share a password we share a mailbox uh right outside your house it's got a little cute little flag on it when we're going to send out mail i'm actually doing that today by the way oh you do you put a flag i'm sending mail and i put the flag up i love that i don't know if i've

done that in four evs a because like i don't mail stuff that often if i do it's like i'm returning some you know shoes i bought on amazon i got to drive it down to the ups store i don't think i've ever sent a letter from this address and put the flag up until today.

That's how we used to mail a letter?

when I was a kid out in the country. We had a black mailbox with a little red flag and a little metal flag and you put the flag up. Love it. Okay, so I'm on three different engines.

By the way, Andrew, flags down. Oh, really?

Right now you just looked?

Successful. The mail has been successfully mailed.

Well, you assume. They could have put the flag down and left the letter in there with a little note that says, don't be presumptuous.

Well, I actually wedged the letter. I wedged the letter in the side of the door because it's a locking mailbox and I forgot to bring the key. I was going up to my jog. So I folded the envelope and put it so that it was sticking out of the mailbox But it wasn't really in the area I guess I could have put it in the top Why do I think I have to put it in the bottom locked area?

Yeah, because they wouldn't be able to get to it If it's locked, right?

Of course not, they don't have a key to that What's wrong with me? This tells you how inexperienced I am with this All I needed to do was open the top part Put the letter in there, close it, put the flag up That did not occur to me, Andrew I just thought, well let me just Let me wedge it in here so it's kind of sticking out So then they can just grab it Instead of just putting it in the place Where you would normally put an outgoing letter That just, that, boy, that was the wrong way to do that.

Well, the article about crying on planes, and I'm wondering if I'm burning it here or if you should just read it and we can talk about it on another show. But I found it to be somewhat less than enlightening because they talk to one, well, not convincing. I mean, I believe that it's a real thing that you feel that I have probably felt in the past. I'm not saying it's not convincing, but it's one of those things that's like, why is this? We're going to explain it. And then the answer is like kind of obvious. They talk to one, like, sort of expert from some sort of scientific field, you know, who says, well, there's a cabin pressure thing that can affect you. It's like, OK, that makes sense. And then everything else was just like, and just think about your day. You woke up early to get to the flight. And, you know, there's a lot of stress. And it's like all these other things that are just kind of like, yeah, you're worn out. It was just kind of like I felt like there wasn't a I felt like there was not a lot there that wasn't kind of obvious. You know what I mean?

Like, I think for me, too, it's very alcohol related. like there you know would have been particularly in my more my more robust days with alcohol there would have been like a pretty good chance that I was going to be a little buzzed or more than a little buzzed so you add in the actual factors of the flight and then you throw on the like the being kind of like I talk about one time flying to Europe and watching this movie Tree of Life this Terrence Malick film where there's I think the movie is kind of a mess really probably as films go but he's very terrence malick is very good at creating these like emotionally iconic moments of just like a hand going through the like a field of of like hay and like these very visually beautiful moments and there was this one scene in tree of life where i think brad pitt is the father and he's being really really hard on his kids i think this is it's a flashback scene because the kid has become an adult in the film and we're understanding some of the backstory of this kid and i don't know i was i'm sure a few wines in it's the middle of the night i've no we're over greenland somewhere like and i just lost it watching this movie tree of life so again i think that what they're not factoring in is and maybe most people aren't drunk on the flight but i also you know what for me has affected this is and this is really sad i now have two modes on a flight either i'm working or i'm probably looking at tiktok i don't even watch movies on flights anymore it's so it's very sad like if i if i'm if i made the decision to zone out on a flight and kind of watch something mindless i'm probably just scrolling tiktok on the plane which is i should probably try to actively not do that like it's a good if i am going to not work it's a good time to maybe get into a series my problem also is that for all of the uh technology that i use in my adult life and i'm fairly familiar with i can never crack the code on downloading stuff for the flight i know that i should be able to do it in my netflix account i mean i probably something i can just take an hour and figure out but i've just never successfully downloaded a bunch of content and then watched it on the plane i can never i'll it'll i'll think it's downloaded and i'll get on the plane and it's like not somehow or whatever it's always a

problem for me so i i downloaded tons of stuff for our flight out to croatia because that was going to be a 10-hour flight and so they've changed the rules on a bunch of these streaming services so the way you need to do it for a streaming service to truly download it i think or at least this is the way they the way i do it is you need to download the app even if you're using your laptop download the netflix app download the hulu app download the amazon prime app and then log in when you're you know at home or whatever log in and then you download these things and it's and it's saved within the app and that's the only way you can watch it so then when you're on the airplane you don't have to like kind of log into their wi-fi or anything you just open the app and there it is however i got burnt all over the place because like hulu was like oh um i think it was Hulu that said,

if

If you only pay for the Hulu that is – oh, no, I think Hulu said for Windows 11, we no longer support this. You just can't do it anymore. And then Netflix said, well, if you're buying the Netflix level that also has ads in it, then you don't get this service. So it was only Amazon Prime. And then I just bootlegged a whole bunch of shit. And I was like, fine. I literally bootlegged a bunch of shit that I pay for because the apps wouldn't let me download it to watch it in the sky. But then I didn't watch any of it because the guy – this was literally it. Like I had my tiny I was using my smallest little laptop, which is a tiny little guy. But because the guy in front of me put his seat back, there was just like no room at all for me to do that. But luckily, they end up having like the screen on the back of the seat. So I watch a couple of movies and then I played like we played poker. We played like cartoon, you know, basically no stakes poker, Texas Hold'em on the back. There are all kinds of games you could play on the screen on the back, which I don't usually play because I don't want the people in front of me to accidentally feel tap, tap. tapping but as soon as this sob put his seat back i'm like you're gonna feel all my taps buddy boy

but see that's interesting because you were on iceland air flying home as we were and this was

flying out no this is flying out this was a different this is a different airline because

you i'm guessing you were subjected to the same chuck lorry verse yeah on the way home as i was of bob hart's abishola and other such delights yeah like it was the weirdest specific show

because you had mentioned it on TBTL recently. I'm like, what? And then as I got on the flight, I was like, this is why that was front of mind for you. It was one of a handful of shows I could watch.

Like a very interesting content catalog on old Icelandair.

Here, let me give you this quick life hack that I was talking about, about the aisle seat. And then I do have a relevant voicemail I'd like to play for you that we can play quickly. But you might know this already, but if you're on the aisle seat, you know how you have the armrests that are kind of like in between the seats and those you can just raise and lower as much as you want. But the one that is in the aisle is locked down. Do you know that there's a little tiny secret button all the way in the back, underneath the arm, all the way in the back that you can push it in and then raise that arm up for ease of getting in and out of that aisle seat? I don't think most people need to do it, but as a guy of somewhat larger carriage, I just find that to be so convenient.

I had no idea that you could do that.

Yeah, I don't know why it makes it... So if the person next to me wants to use the restroom and I have to get up, The first thing I do is I, like, poke that little button way in the back, raise that armrest that is on the aisle. You have to have it down for takeoff and landing and all of that. But, like, I find it to be, like, it's just so much easier to get in and out of the seat if that thing is up.

How did you even find out that was a thing?

I was trapped on an airplane overnight one time, and I was just kind of exploring all the crevices. No, I think I saw somebody do it one time, and I studied them, and I learned. And I'm going to give you a quick update. I've checked in for tomorrow's flight. I'm flying out early to get to Philadelphia, and I still have the very last row of the airplane next to the bathroom aisle seat. I took it so that the person in front of me, apparently those seats do not recline. I think I told you this on the show yesterday. So I was like, fine, I'll take the all the way in the back seat, knowing that the seat in front of me can't recline. And there's still an empty seat to my right. There's still no middle seat because the only seat on the plane that is worse than mine is the middle seat next to me.

Wow. Okay. So you're happy about this. This is working out because the person can't recline into you. Yep. And you might be able to spread out a little bit to your right.

Yeah. I don't love the, I mean, the problem is I think most human beings would hate the seat I have because it means on a long flight after the first drink cart goes through, you're going to start having a bunch of people lining up right by your seat. Yeah. People really, really hate that. And I dislike it as well, but I don't dislike it as much as somebody reclining on me.

Oh, yeah, because you're on the aisle, so they will be standing right next to you, too. Yeah. I did something on the flight the other day that I hope was okay. I mean, I think the person responded okay to it. I think she took it in the spirit it was intended. But, like, I was flying back home, and I was seated next to a woman, maybe in her 30s. We chatted before takeoff. She seemed very nice from Gresham, Oregon had been in New York celebrating her dad's birthday and she was reading this book and we I noticed it was it had gotten pretty dark on the plane and she was just reading a book and she seemed also like maybe she didn't fly all the time. So even though she was in first class, I don't know how that had come together, but like she was I could just tell when she was like working the tray and things like that. It was all kind of like seemed like maybe this was not something she was super duper familiar with. and i just reached up and just clicked the light on for her because she was reading in darkness and then she laughed she's like oh thank you and i was like okay good i'm glad because i could also see that being a slightly weird move to somebody that you don't know just like huh here you'll be needing this like i don't know i'm glad she took it the way that i intended it but afterwards i was like oh that could have kind of that could have

looked weird or something here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from

a female oh man it's not from a female all righty what do you got for emails and females i think it's

okay i think it's okay to play this it's kind of weirdly personal but also very related to what we were talking about on the show earlier about volunteering um and and like kind of getting the vote out i'm assuming that this is in reaction to something that you said on the show when i was out last week that you were uh you were trying to volunteer i think doing some phone banking and you ran into some roadblocks of some sort and i just want well nobody showed up to train me

was the roadblock i was in a zoom meeting by myself with the arizona democrats i see okay

well jen listener jen here is here to help good morning friendos this is jen from arizona Mia. When Luke was podcasting solo, he mentioned that he had tried to do phone banking for the Arizona Dems and that no one showed up on the Zoom call. So I, of course, am part of the Arizona Dems and I reached out and just let them know that Luke was trying to help us phone bank. So you might be getting an email from someone named TJ from the Arizona Dems, but I gave them Andrew's email because andrew i know you check your email all the time maybe you could just forward it to your betty luke there all right love you guys what you do is so important power out you know i forgot

the part of the voicemail i don't think i've got anything from tj but let me make sure that i didn't

see it and delete it this makes so much more sense i have been getting plenty of like text messages and other things from uh the arizona dems but i just assumed it's because i'm now in their system You know, my phone's in their system. Are you getting every single day, like, just increasingly sort of dramatic text messages from various famous people, you know, that are spammed to your phone? This is what happens, I think, if you volunteer or donate and you get kind of on these lists. So I'm getting one. I got one today from Ken Burns. I mean, I was on a list of people who got one from Ken Burns. I've got one from Oprah. I've got, you know, it's like every day that's like some new high profile person that's like, Luke, it's Tim Walls. I'm like, oh, wow. God, I feel special. Don't be weird. But I've been getting so much stuff from the Arizona Democrats, but I assume it's just because I'm in their system now. I wonder if some of that was TJ trying to reach out to me.

I've been getting a lot of like messages that my phone is automatically marking as spam and shuffling away somewhere. some of them like if i see the notification before the the phone sort of like kind of deletes it for me i don't know what this speaks of my volunteering but i get a lot of trump stuff actually do you ever see trump stuff let me actually look i don't i get into my spam folder here this might not i don't at all um and um obviously you've been yeah you've been poking around some corners of the internet you shouldn't be my friend i'm just i'm just trying to keep an open mind about everything

Are you one of those elusive, persuadable voters?

I am. Let's see here. I got Chicanos por la causa action fund knows how to activate Latino voters. I got that.

I'm a fan of activating Latino voters.

It's Angelo with the Democrats this Sunday. We got some, let's see here. It's Senator Schumer, apparently. This is all in my spam and block, so I don't see these things. Okay, yeah. So, okay, this might have. Oh, here we go. including uh oh no this is uh anti-lauren bobert i thought that was from okay this is pretty good this is pretty good yeah it's mostly stuff from the democratic side and then somebody who says andrew we saw you at the trump rally last week if you'd like to get a coffee and talk more about his platform um let me know so i'll respond to that one so definitely get right back to them

yeah good stuff well i appreciate thank you um to uh was it what was the name i think thank you jen for for um i'm i'm trying to think about what that conversation must have gone like and at the the other folks at the az dems were like jen's like hey just so you know i listened to a podcast and the guy tried to phone bank and he was in a zoom meeting and no one was in the zoom meeting you maybe want to reach out to him and they're like what's the podcast he's like tbtl you've heard of it no we have not heard it yes he's kind of a big deal right really because i can't i don't see any indication that he's a big deal that must be a could you reach out could you give him some

white glove service please i don't know i don't i just check my deleted items because i was like maybe i got something from tj a while back and deleted it not knowing that it was you know i was supposed to keep an eye out but i don't see anything so i don't know anyway so you still

thinking that you might do that luke that's your plan absolutely oh i mean like no i very much am going to phone bank um any night that i can and i and then i'm totally serious that when i'm in pa i'm gonna try to see if there's literally anything i can do in an afternoon or maybe stay an extra day or something and just try to i don't know whatever move move one needle somewhere and and uh and do what i can so nice anyway i'm just saying the word hero comes to

mind sure absolutely as a hero sandwich that i'm gonna eat i'll be the guy knocking on doors in pa

asking if i can use their bathroom because because i've been having too much water they'll be like

Well, what a sweet relief. You're not trying to get me to vote for somebody.

No, they're like, this is apolitical. I just am about to pee my pants. Anyway. All right. Thanks for listening, everyone. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So do join us for that. In the meantime, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.