Muse

Hey, look who's here. Maestro. Hey. And you couldn't play something good, huh? Did Hank Williams do something? They broke the door down before I could take requests. Was it worth it? Two weeks in the hall? Easiest time I ever did. Oh, shit. There's no such thing as easy time in the hall. That's right. A week in the hall was like a year.

Damn straight. I had Mr. Mozart to keep me company. So they let you tote that record player down there, huh? it's in here in here that's the beauty of music they can't get that from you haven't you ever felt that way about music wow i play the main harmonica as a younger man

lost interest in it though didn't make much sense in here here's where it makes the most sense you need it so you don't forget forget forget that there are places in the world that aren't made out of stone that there's a there's something inside that they can't get to that they can't touch It's yours. What are you talking about?

Hope. Hope. Let me tell you something, my friend. Hope is a dangerous thing.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Wednesday edition of TBTL, the show. it just might be too beautiful to live. I'm your host, Luke Burbank. Let's start with some much-needed good news. I do not have COVID. I just sound like I do. I am a little under the weather, not just emotionally, although that as well, but physically. My immune system picked quite the day to give up the goat, so I'm not feeling tip-top, but I don't know if any of us are and i just want to measure and level set here measure everyone's expectations and level set i don't know if we got the answer here on this wednesday edition of tbtl um but we're going to talk about how we're feeling and uh maybe someday from now we will have the answer but for now we're just here with all of you my good friend andrew walsh is over there hey buddy hey man

you know i like to say thank you this is something that is an interesting phenomenon of doing this show i'd like to say thank you to the people who texted us this morning just to check in we got a text here from the 303 i don't know where that is hope you guys are doing okay today some people sending me in like kind of their wordle results and saying just trying to stay sane hope you guys are doing okay um and heard from our friends um kim and sam down in florida just people and like I think that you and I on days like today like to think that we are here for the folks who maybe need a distraction or or need something, need some sort of audio support to the best that we can provide it, which is something that I'm not necessarily comfortable providing, probably.

But to know that people will mention that we're an experiencing higher than normal call volume.

Exactly.

As far as our audio support goes on this Wednesday.

But to know that there's just a bunch of people out there who are just saying, hey, just thinking about you guys, too, and hope you're doing all right. So anyway, thanks to everybody who reached out. I had a couple of kind of very thoughtful emails and text messages that maybe I'll share later on in the show as well. How are you doing, Luke, aside from just being sick on all days?

I know, right? And I've been having to talk to various people. We're re-recording some Livewire stuff for this weekend, so we match the tone. And so I've been texting and corresponding with folks about various things and saying, I'm kind of sick. And they're all like, yeah, I know. And I'm like, no, of all days, this is the day I'm actually also kind of legitimately sick. Of course, my little head cold pales in comparison to sort of the emotional journey that I have been on that I think pretty much everyone tuning into this right now has been on, that you have been on, Andrew. And I was I was I stayed at Becca's house last night. So I was driving up here today to the Madrona Hill studio And I was trying to kind of think about Ways to talk about what's just happened to us into this country and I thought I want to start by saying this one thing which is Anything that I say about how I feel about how sad I feel or scared I am for this country or the anxiety I have Absolutely pales in comparison to the legitimate fear that people who are actually going to be under threat from this new reality in America are going to be marginalized people trans people so I just want to put that out as a blanket statement because I'm feeling a lot of feelings today but I'm one of the quote-unquote lucky

ones i'm as a you know straight white dude i'm i'm not under any new particular threat other than deep embarrassment about the person who's at the you know head of the country once again or will be but that's a mild thing for me um compared to the real danger and harm that will be threatened and potentially done to a lot of the people in our listening audience so i want to just like i wanted to start with that yeah no i'm getting deep into my feels people know that we've got the perspective of that we're actually still reasonably privileged in this

whole thing. Absolutely. No, I wanted to say something similar, and you said it better than I would have. You don't get credit. Glad you did. And also, when we get the inevitable email of somebody saying, please stop saying how privileged you are, which I still don't understand the impetus to write into a show and scold somebody for acknowledging their place in the universe and acknowledging that they're luckier than many. But have putting shadow boxing from the occasional negative email aside here for a moment it's one of our main deliverables well and we're all working on we're all working on coping mechanisms and actually i wanted to and one of those coping mechanisms for me is to shadow box the one out of 100 emails we get that happens to be slightly negative um but also a coping mechanism like so you know this is still very raw for us although not as i honestly feel like in the past i don't know you and i were on the phone earlier this morning maybe we've been up and talking to each other in some way for like maybe even just 90 minutes now and that i feel a world of difference between how i felt last night or and how i felt when i was slowly waking up this morning and having that that that pit in my in my stomach um but i've been i've you know obviously whipsawing all over the place with not my emotions my emotions are holding pretty steady in a low kind of way but like you know like how how are we going to deal with this how am i going to deal with this what are the coping mechanisms and and all of that is to go back to what you were just saying about our role in all of this or our place in all of this just our place in the country and in the class that we occupy and everything is you're right like part of me wants to just like proverbially i don't know crawl into bed for the next four years or maybe stick my head in the sand That is my plan for the rest of today, but I feel like I legally am allowed to do that, but just for today. Can you blow on my face so that I can get sick and do the same? Nobody had that on their bingo card today.

Taking a kid to a chicken pox party.

Jesus Christ.

Do you want to get in the stay in bed all day club? Come let Luke blow on your face.

But yeah, part of me, this thought has flashed through my brain, and I'm ashamed to admit this, but a couple of times in the past actually more than 24 hours because you know looking ahead to this election and knowing this could be the the outcome i would find myself thinking like you survived the first four years um and a lot of this stuff doesn't affect you personally like you could just like there's an amount of tuning out that i could choose to do or an amount of just telling myself that like well don't don't again shadow box or don't don't don't let them gaslight you don't let him gaslight you whatever like just just go on just like tell yourself everything is the same and maybe trick yourself into but it's like no that's that's wrong in fact you know maybe if you if you don't mind because i need to i need to counter what i just said i got this text message from ashley in royal oak michigan that says just out of the blue just texted this the listener line this morning just to say I found that I despair less when I find ways to be useful to people around me we are so pushed into focusing on national politics which of course does matter but that can also create the sense of disconnect that we feel like well I can't write legislation so there's nothing I can do except watch the world burn I'm sure I'm speaking for myself here I'm not the only one who sort of had that instinct this morning of just like you know yeah let's maybe just watch it all burn but you know what Ashley says is there's tons we can do as volunteers in our neighborhoods. I'll be starting soon as a literary tutor, or I'm sorry, a literacy tutor and a speaker of English as a second language. I want to remind everyone that everyone has skills and knowledge they can offer to make the world a little bit better. I know a lot of people are sad today, and they just want to be sad and not think about taking actions, and that's fine too, but I just wanted to share what's been helpful for me to keep from doom and gloom. And anyway, sorry I messed up. I stumbled on some of those words there, Ashley. I know you're not learning English as a second language. Well, thank God she's the one teaching people literally exactly but uh you know that that's what i need to like when when i start to slip into the despair of wanting to just like give up and just say well this is the world we live in this is the country we live in like we are who we are like that's one thing we learned yesterday it's like this isn't a fluke this is who we are as a country

um i have gone through that exact same journey of like well how am i going to how am i going to get through the next four years right uh ideally it's four years and not some other you know extended nightmare that goes beyond that who knows where we'll be constitutionally by then but i was thinking well maybe i'll just decide that i'm not a person who looks at politics like i'll look at the top of the new york times website the way i look at my text chain when i'm doing live wire but i know you guys are texting about the seahawks i'll just kind of put my hand up so i or like the way you watch pirated content or used to and you'd have to put a piece of paper on the bottom so you couldn't see scores that were ruining other things for you like maybe i'll just not maybe i'll just avert my gaze when the topic of u.s politics comes up but then of course i realized like that's not an option uh because if anybody needs to be out there trying to change it It's somebody like me who has this position of privilege and who has the resources and the safety to get out there and try to do it. And I was thinking about the idea of being of service. And as I started talking about this, I already feel myself getting emotional, which, Andrew, I want to tell you, because we've been through this before, I've planned ahead. Anytime I start crying, I'm just going to play this. Perfect. Okay, so that's on standby. That's Stan Getz.

That's on standby. Stan Getz on standby.

Now, if Stan gets by me, I don't know. It's a confusing show title on today of all days. I'm not going to play it for you if you get emotional, because I don't want to assume that you're as uncomfortable with your real emotions as I am being out on the air.

I'm also notoriously stoic.

I just want to warn people, you may hear a lot of that today. I don't know. because i'm talking about being of service and the idea that um i think when we feel the most filled up as people i think it's usually when we're being of service to other people and that can take a lot of forms right just checking up on somebody the stuff that you do with the with the pop-up andrew just there's a million ways that we can be useful to other people be it our families be it strangers somebody on the internet attend and that's what fills us up even though and i've I'm unfortunately somebody who's lived a lot of my life pursuing the things that I thought were going to fill me up, you know, of having this happen or looking this way or whatever. And that, of course, it never works. And we are now entering a moment where we are going to need to be more of service to each other than like ever. right so it's an incredibly depressing Wednesday morning to consider like you said Andrew that and it's actually a majority I believe at the final count like this isn't even one of those things where it's the the you know electoral college stole the election away from the person who got more votes unfortunately this guy appears to have actually gotten more votes so trying to reckon with that the majority of people a slim majority but still let's call 50% of the people in this country chose that is such a difficult thing to to reckon with because of what it says about us as americans um and so it's a very depressing wednesday morning but i feel a little less depressed when i think about the opportunity to be of service to other people you know that really gets it out of me wow honestly it really fixes it we should have been using this for years i was fully going into crying and now i'm fully not crying i don't i'm

embarrassed to do this because it's so your bit and I'm biting your rhyme here as you might say but I've picked out my music in case I get too emotional if I get emotional a little choked up I'm gonna play this do you think that strikes the right tone today here's

what I'll say Andrew anything that qualifies as self care for you or any of the other listeners I absolutely encourage you to do that if it involves acdc if that's if that's where you need to be on this wednesday i have no problem with that i i saw somebody say this um uh the other day online about election day she said it was a young woman she said today is airport rules did you see this going around i can't remember if

you mentioned that or if i saw it going around maybe somebody else quoted it to me and it's

like it's airport rules uh cost like nothing applies like it's airport rules andrew's eating fast food luke's overpaying for sunglasses people are having uh if they show choose a double bloody mary at 7 a.m it's like my point in all that is to say for today for wednesday i sure hope that everybody who's hearing this is taking care of themselves however it is they need to take care of themselves you know like i guess i also this push and pull that i think a lot of us are feeling today is the the or this this dilemma is do i like you said andrew do i take a day to just go get under the blankets and just kind of grieve because i do feel like this is also grief right like grief around this idea of of this place that most of us grew up in certainly united that meant a certain thing and meant had a certain promise to it and even though it was imperfect i mean it it aspirationally represented something and what we have to confront today is that it does not represent that at least in this moment it does not represent the thing we were And by the way, not to get totally bogged down in the, like, identity politics of it, but I think part of why this is so hard for people like you and I to take is because it's mostly worked for us as a country. I think there's a lot of people hearing this who are like, no shit, Sherlock. Yeah.

Yeah.

The place ain't been working for a while. Yeah.

It's almost like this. Sorry to interrupt, but I'll just say it almost like this lays bare. I mean, this is what this is kind of how I feel. It's kind of like, no, it's I mean, yeah, for again, for like white guys like us, you can look back and be like, oh, look at the look at the grand 1950s when everything seemed great. It's like, oh, for a lot of people, those were terrible times. And this just sort of lays bare and underscores what maybe has been a reality since literally day one.

Somebody said on online, it broke my heart, but it fixed my vision. You know, it's like, damn. Right. like people have been telling us that we have systemic problems in this country but if you had a certain amount of privilege and you could kind of like squint and kind of trick yourself into thinking well you know uh you know we're all we're all doing our best and and maybe most people aren't actually you know bad or racist or whatever and then something like this happens and you have to really reckon with the how profoundly broken this country is so there's the feeling of like wanting to just take care of yourself and crawl into a hole for one to 10 days and just say like you know i can't engage and it's it's emotionally unsafe for me to engage with this or from an anxiety level it's unsafe for me to engage with it that's one impulse and by the way i'm not saying that's the wrong impulse then there's the other impulse which is like all right as kamero kev would say pitter patter let's get at her like you know what time's a wasting me in bed for eight hours today is eight fewer hours that i have to start figuring this shit out and i i've i've if depending on what three minute interval of the morning you caught me and i'm having both of

those feelings with equal force i have just so many thoughts that are ping-ponging around in my head and have been and sort of have been formulating for the past 12 hours or so um and i

i'm sorry i get emotional when i think about thoughts ping-ponging in your head i was i need to realize that if i'm crying but you're talking i don't need to play the music i apologize i miss my ping pong table i did lose a ping pong table in the last divorce and it was annoying because

i was the one who played ping pong i knew that ping pong table i i love having a ping pong table in a rumpus room you were really living the dream there but um so one thing that um i was going to say was and now i'm all of ping pong exactly now i can't remember which ping pong ball i wanted to grab like one of those things on the the nightly lotto on tv that also by the way went down which

just felt like an added bummer like the i was driving home and on a billboard it was the like one of those digital whatever you call it the powerball thing or whatever i think it and it you know it goes up to some hundreds of millions and i swear it was at like 12 this morning the lowest number i've ever seen it we can't even have how does that happen well someone won it Oh, I like at some point it goes up and it goes down and it builds and it builds and it builds like a jackpot and like I don't even play it But there's something about driving down the road and you think that America is a place that values democracy and inclusion and the jackpots at 400 million and everything kind of feels like all right This is working and then it's Wednesday morning, and you're driving by the thing and it's like the jackpots at four Right it's like the jackpot can't even be good. Well, don't worry Bitcoin is soaring again

I had a friend who we were on a text chain, you know, just friends sort of checking in last night as everybody's kind of in their own corners watching the coverage. And some people were trying to cling to some optimism. And one person who was mostly optimistic but also used to work in the kind of in the cryptocurrency field said, oh, I'm hearing that that Bitcoin is just skyrocketing right now. And this is not that is never a good sign for democracy.

I mean, not to get into the X's and O's. Because I just, well, I said this to you before we started recording, I was like, I don't feel like at least I have anything to offer on the kind of who voted where or didn't vote or, you know, I just like, again, the kind of like X's and O's of this whole election that happened or the, you know, election night. There's other places to get that. There will be many months to, you know, post more at this. I'm trying to stay. from that i will say i was really hoping that all those betting market numbers which were favoring trump a lot i would had written a whole story about that and also crypto which was this is all bros these are just bros and these are the kind of these are bros that think that this whole thing is a joke and that like it's it's funny to cosplay as some kind of a trump guy supporter and they just think nothing matters and i'll have my money who cares anyway i was i was really and again i'm a gambler my normal inclination is towards trusting gamblers and i was trying to talk myself out of that yesterday at various points like i was watching with becca and her brother scott and his wife tiffany and he had like some app open he was like just kept showing me where the lines were moving and they were moving in a way that if you know if i didn't have so much skin in this game and we didn't as a country i would have been like i might get a little money down on that but anyway i was i was as i often am completely wrong about the betting lines as well

I think the ping pong ball that I was grasping at before is one of the things that I one of the many things I'm having trouble wrapping my head around today and will for a long time and honestly have been since since 2015, really, is this idea that you and I are doing this show today, which is, you know, kind of we're trying to be hopeful. But, you know, it's a very special episode, as they used to say in the 80s. It's a and we're treating it like it's almost a funeral for democracy. And when I think about this stuff and especially leading up to Election Day, I think a lie that I was telling myself kind of similar to your story there about the about the crypto bros or whatever, is that the people who are super motivated to vote for Donald Trump are the people who, you know, they're like the guys that I met at that dive bar outside of Phoenix, Arizona, who are all wearing MAGA hats and we're all like basically like it's so it's so imprinted on their identity of being kind of like redneck, you know, Trump people and like one guy bragging about peeling a Biden sticker off of some lady's car or something. i'm doing it for our own good if you remember that story yeah um and um and i think about that i'm like yeah but there's not but you know like what's the casual voter yeah like how many of them are going to vote like some of them are some are very motivated but also some are just probably like trolls and just love owning the libs and all that but i just sort of the thing that i can't shake now is that i think there are just like there's like a huge chunk of america that i mean who would listen to our show today or see the types of text messages or tweets or the things that our listeners are sharing on Slack. And there's a huge chunk of America that just be like, well, I just voted. I just didn't. I just voted conservative. I always vote conservative. You know, like there are some who would be like, yeah, we're owning the trolls. Look at them drinking lib tears this morning. Like, OK, that that's fine. We knew about them. But I think the Tazo tea that I do feel that there's a trap that I fall into of just picturing um that is the trump contingency contingency and and the and the and the sad thing is is just like this is kind for a lot of people out there this is probably a somewhat normal day and we're like we're outliers and i i don't know i i think i'm starting to figure out like have i been being gaslit like i'm actually last night i'm just like maybe i'm just like wrong about a whole bunch of shit like literally maybe just wrong and i don't even mean prognostication Just like, you know, maybe I am just like being fed just a very specific diet of specific news coverage that fits a worldview that is just completely I'm just believing the gaslighting now.

Well, here's what I here's a change of my perspective that has been coming on for a week or so. And I want to also be really clear that in no way am I trying to let anyone off the hook for making what I think is an obviously horrific decision, which would be to vote for Donald Trump. But I had said to you something a while ago that I kind of I don't I'm is like unless you cut it out of the show Which maybe you did or maybe you didn't but I had been observing that like when I'd go into town near where I live And I would see these kind of like nicer put-together homes where they take care of the lawn And they just look like you know there's a soccer goal Like for a kid out there and like you know like it just looks like a life that's being well-lived Those would be the place they would have Harris walls and then I would see somebody who's got you know a bunch of non running cars in the yard and they you know aren't taking great care of the place and there's a couch on the porch and there's a flying all these Trump flags and I in my own kind of I think elitist way the way I interpreted that initially was look at the kind of situation you're living in and ask yourself I'm talking about for the people that are flying the Trump like look at the situation you're living in and ask yourself if my

decisions so far my life have led me to a place that's been great for me right which is a very class-based way to just divide this like you have a shitty house and you're voting for Trump you have a nice house and you're voting for Harris Walls although I will say it seems to map pretty closely over that and I started thinking about it differently maybe a week ago which I think also relates to like the way that people voted for Trump without thinking very much about him and being such a manifestly bad person and it is well if If you live in a piece of shit house with a bunch of non-running cars, and you're struggling every month to pay your bills, and do you feel like America slash democracy is working for you? The system, you know, the sort of status quo? Of course you don't. Of course you think that we should burn it down and blow it up. And if you're living in a nice house in the west end of Longview, and your kids are going to a decent school and playing soccer and you are you know having a pretty good life of course you have Harris walls out in other words I think there are a lot of people who voted for Donald Trump who don't even particularly like him but what they feel like is this country is not working for them they are struggling they are anxious they are unhappy and so why would they vote for the people that have been in charge because the and by the way I think it's probably why biden was able to beat trump when he did because trump was the incumbent like i think we live in a world right now we live in a country where so many people are feeling so left behind by everything and so sad and again i'm not defending people that voted for an obvious fascist but i just mean i think that there are a lot of people who are just really like struggling and they didn't vote for donald trump because they're like i'm into this guy they voted because they don't know what else to do because they're struggling and i don't know if that makes that somehow makes it feel less personal to me that somebody would vote for him because you're right there are there's sort of like three groups of people it would seem that would vote for him one would be the people you see at the rallies with all the gear on who just look ridiculous and they're like die hard that's who i thought his voters were that's who i thought was left that was by the way uh to borrow a phrase from the levitard show i was of course maybe as loud wrong as I've ever been on anything in my life yesterday on the show and I apologize if I added to anyone's pain today by my optimism yesterday although I did get some nice emails from people yesterday saying thanks for your optimism those people have not emailed me yet today Andrew so that's TBD on that one but like I feel like I thought that only the hardcore MAGA people were still with him but what I think I what I underestimated was this large number of people for whom it is not their identity being a trump person it's just they're just like yeah i don't know i wish i had more money at the end of the month i wish everything didn't cost so much and they don't take it so personally all of the obvious issues with him as a as a person and and just the incredible unfairness of this whole

thing i think beck and i were talking about this morning i think one of the things that just hurts the most about this is the deep sense of injustice that a person who has only made the country and everyone in its lives worse by his very existence and who has violated the law many times on about every level you can imagine is getting away with it that is and it's a tough pill to swallow because it feels so unfair um and i don't have an answer that seems so different right too i don't

know if that's what you're getting at but it's just i heard somebody make the analogy i'd have no idea where i heard this but somebody made the analogy of it feeling like just like if you're if you're watching a football game and offsides is a 20-yard penalty for one team and not a penalty for another. I just don't feel that if you had anybody with a D next to their name acting publicly the way he acts, that they would ever... Well, I think maybe the specific quote I'm paraphrasing here is actually probably in relation to Biden making his remark about garbage voters. He didn't even say that but you know what i'm referring to his garbage comment um which was you know a bad thing to say at a very bad time for the campaign but i don't think that that you know that that's not why we're here today but um but it is just kind of like wow like that's the news cycle it's like that's the that's the scandal the guy who's not running said something kind of negative about the opponent's supporters meanwhile like everything that has been said from the from the rally last week to just like it's just that there are it's not an even playing field but the playing field with the exception of getting into conversations about sort of consolidation of power and gerrymandering and everything like that like this was a decision by people who went to the polls you know like that that's what i just kind of keep on coming back to yeah and i i do think that there

is believe it or not an opportunity at some point it feels like

Thank you.

a million years from now but i think there's an opportunity to connect with a lot of these people i don't think a lot of them were voting for trump because they're impressed by him i think they were just looking for something that would help them out of their day-to-day existence that feels unmanageable and i mean that's historically been something that the democrats were able to offer folks or at least say you know we can come in and try to help you um and create a social safety net and things like that I think that the it's gotten pretty twisted and there's been you know a lot of you know there's just been a lot of confusion around things but I don't think I mean here's here's what I will say like for one if you're hearing this right now and you're feeling despair I would like to just say it is not always going to feel this way like you even said Andrew that from when you got up this morning or to when you and I started talking to right now now you did say this at the beginning of the show i don't know what your current temperature is but you you you expressed that you were feeling at least in some way less terrible by virtue of us talking to each

other right yeah but now i'm back down like the powerball no just joking no of course but like

you know and and like i got up this morning and i talked to becca and i mean when i woke up andrew i i did what i think a lot of people did which is i said please tell me that was a dream and like obviously it wasn't and i i felt this just pit absolute pit in my stomach and just feeling of of absolute despair that's just so so complete that i was almost like i don't know what to do next like i don't know what the next anything is because i'm so leveled by this realization but then i got up and started talking to becca and the cat was being funny and it was like okay and i looked out the window and she lives in the south waterfront of portland which is near where ohsu is the oregon health science uh hospital and and uh campuses and there's this tram this is at like 6 30 in the morning so it's pretty dark out still and there's this tram andrew that goes from up like up where the campus is down to where there are some like labs and offices and i looked and the tram was going and it was lighted and there was people in their scrubs in the tram and I don't know why but that shifted something inside me because it was like people are still going to work people are still going to take care of other people people are still going to centrifuge blood platelets or I don't know what happens in that lab but like slow down doctor and then I looked out and like there were cars on the freeway you know and then as it started to become more light there's a park you can see from her place and there was people walking their dogs and like there was when i first opened my eyes this morning it felt like there was no future for this country or me and by like 8 30 i felt like man this is really really going to be hard work but we can do it and life goes on and the sun continues to rise in the east unless you're Jared Goff, in which case, agree to disagree.

The earth face east.

Like, the sun will continue to rise in the east. People will, school buses will continue to drive kids to school. You will laugh again. There will be a funny thing that will happen. In fact, funny things may have already happened on this episode of TBTL. You will, I'm going to eat something, well, I don't know. I don't have a huge appetite right now. Hopefully, I'll be better. But I'm going to eat something at some point in the next day or two that's going to taste really good. and that's like Addie was I'm sorry I'm kind of all over the map here but I'm just Addie and I had been talking about something the night before the election we got together and and she was telling me about this meme which I'm gonna I'm probably gonna misdescribe it but it was it was somebody in like a in like a German nightclub discotheque thing and apparently somebody came in this was after 9-11 and came into the discotheque or the rave or the whatever and asked the person uh what do you think about what happened with 9-11 or something and the person was pretty unfazed because in their world where they were they were just kind of like bopping around they said there's pain in the world but not in this room and that's been like meme-ified now to just become this kind of a thing but i was actually like thinking about it today i was like okay there's pain in the world but it doesn't always have to be in the room that we're in and that's not my way of saying that we don't need to work for each other and do mutual aid and look out for each other what I mean is we're also allowed to have moments where the pain's not in the room

yeah right like you feel you feel a responsibility to to train your eyes on the news and on the disaster um and that that's what I'm trying to balance right like I said earlier like I could I could put my head down for the next four years or for the next four days or what have you and just sort of say you know what let's just look at from look at this from a practical level how this affects my life or

Whatever. And then I start to feel really guilty about that. Right. And I'm glad we shared Ashley's note about like, no, no, we're not we're not hiding our heads in the sand. We need to be there for each other. And that's going to look like a bunch of different things. But it doesn't mean that you have to be living in a constant, constant state of of fear and anguish. Pain and hypervigilance. That doesn't do that doesn't do anybody any good either. And it's going to it's going to do you harm and it's going to make you less helpful to yourself and to the people around you. i did want to say one thing actually i want to tell you about i want to tell you about my plans today which is just like it's kind of a mind f but um i just want to say one thing regarding you and me and this show this is very unimportant but i hope you know that i would never cut something out of this show editorially based on something you said like if i disagree i will say that there have maybe been times where you've maybe made a quick body joke like right at the break or something and maybe i'll click that like we don't need it but like i if i ever cut anything more than a three second clip of you clearing your throat or gilding the lily on a dirty joke that's making me uncomfortable i would of course tell you about that i would never like you said like i hope or you weren't sure if I had cut something out about your thoughts about the lay of the land. The architecture of politics or whatever. I mean, you probably just said that in the flow, but I hope you know that I would... If you ever said anything on the show that I thought was somewhat uncomfortable for any reason, I would talk to you about it. I just wanted to make that very clear.

But I want to make something very clear. This is the level of respect I have for you. I don't care if you do that, and I would assume, yeah, Andrew's protecting me from myself. I have, like, literally, like, and maybe that's how I sometimes sleep at night going, boy, I said something stupid. I hope Andrew cut that out. Like, I can't think of anything I've ever said on the show that if I found out you cut it out, I would be like, how dare you? If anything, I would hope you would cut out more of my stuff. And that's, again, how deeply I respect you and your editorial vision for the show and also how much I trust you.

And how much you don't trust yourself.

Well, you know what? That's another way to look at it, and it's also true. I do not trust myself, and so I like the notion that maybe every once in a while you're just like, let's not let Luke share this with the audience, and let's not let Luke know that he didn't share this with the audience. I would be so not angry about that.

That is true. You and I are the only people who probably never in our lives of producing this show have thought, I hope he left that in. i've never had a feeling of man i really really shouldn't have cut that part out when i said this or that or what have you um speaking of just sort of like kind of carrying on and and and you know and realizing that we still live in a reality where life moves on um i don't i don't know if the word is irony or not but you you know i really like that band dead right d-e-h-g you got to interview him for for um was it live wire i think you got yeah it was in the pandemic so it was a zoom thing they were far away but you know and i wrote this in the newsletter last week like i mean i don't i usually don't like when people say like what's your favorite band or favorite song or whatever but like there is no denying that certainly for the past year or so dead is my favorite band like i am i am obsessed with them in a way that i don't think i've been obsessed with a band since like high school or something and it's a very it's a very fun feeling like i just like they have i think they maybe have a total of six records and i'm really familiar with like two maybe like kind of three of them now but i'm sort of slowly going backwards not like trying to you remember how like back in the live what was it the was it um i almost said live wire again lime wire days of like you would download an entire cat catalog of an artist and it was like too much and you kind of like didn't get to know any of it because there's too much of it like been like slowly going through their back catalog and just like really really i and they're playing a show in seattle and i have had it marked on my calendar for so long to the degree and i should not admit this but to the degree that I remember somebody is asking me you excited to go to Croatia and I said yes and in the back of my head I thought I'm really excited for that dead show I hate saying dead show because it really sounds like I don't know what I don't know how else to talk to them about that but like that's holding their fan base back but like I remember literally I don't know if it was at a Genevieve's party or what somebody saying you must be looking forward to Croatia and me saying yes but literally thinking in the back of my head I'm looking forward to that show when i get back and that show is tonight and you know like i say like nothing substantial has changed in my life in the past um 12 hours it's like something has changed in the nation but i will it's still at the same club that it always was at you know but the music is still the music the music is still the music and maybe it'll be in you know this is an american band they're out of chicago so you know i i don't know that they're necessarily um a hugely political band but also i i think i know where they would stand on issues based on how they present certainly and like and so maybe it'll be a moment where we're with a bunch of like-minded people who are in a similar space and enjoying music and also again in a weird concerty way being there for each other i i don't know what it's going to be like but it was just like how did i never realize until like i think it was maybe monday on the show when you and i were starting to look ahead to election day that i was like

oh that that concert that i've been looking forward to is the day after the election like how i feel that day could be hugely impacted and like i gotta say i woke up this morning and this is maybe where you know genevieve is goes through genevieve learned french eight years ago and is continuing her lessons because she was so concerned about the first donald trump presidency but i think that she's maybe hardened a bit and just sort of said listen this is our reality and we need to just whatever because i said to her this morning i'm like are you still going to the dead show with me today and she said the grateful dead phil lesh just died i said no the dead come on man you know what i'm talking about no i said are you still going to that concert and she's like yeah of course like of course i am and and like i don't know why i would ask that and like there's no need i'm gonna go it's never occurred to me that i would stay home but part of me just sort says well do i even want to go to that thing it's like what am i gonna am i gonna stay home and play madden on the easiest level instead like of course i'm gonna go but it's just like it just feels so much different i've had this circled on my calendar for literally probably five months or something like that and it's just sort of a i don't know i'm just i'm rambling now but it's

just something i'm trying to come to grips with yeah you know what i think it feels like is you know when after 9-11 and there were these very real very serious like think pieces that were like will comedy exist again irony will will laughter happen yeah is the is the time of laughter and comedy permanently over and i'll be honest with you the first couple articles i saw let's say maybe three four days after i thought well i don't know i guess the jury's out and now looking back on that i mean it's a preposterous notion many many funny things have happened since then and you've enjoyed them and like there is this thing that happens and i think it probably is a survival instinct and has some amount of self-protection to it where when we go through a trauma which we are going through right now and it ain't over obviously it's just starting but when you go through something very jarring and traumatic there's this sense of freezing in place and feeling like should i go to this show uh should i like you know laugh at this joke should I like do anything or do I just stay frozen in this moment of like shock and sadness and the thing is and I already said this but I think this is really important it is not always going to feel this way and that seems hard because when we're in the moment we think well this is now my permanent state of being this is now how I feel for the rest of my life I think about it like a really lousy job that you have and the thing that sucks about having a really lousy job is your brain is telling you i might do this for the rest of my life and then you put in your two-week notice and i'll be damned if that job doesn't get a lot less terrible and it gets less terrible because you know that it's not the rest of your life the reason these feelings feel so bad is because some part of our brain says well this is the deal now it's always going to feel this way and i just want to stress it's not always going to feel this way it feels this way today it's going to feel a little less this way tomorrow it might feel more this way on friday because the other thing about grief is it's not a straight line and the thing about what we're going to try to do here to somehow get things back on track is not going to be it's not just a a straight line from bad to good it's jagged and goes up and down but it's not always going to feel like it does on this Wednesday morning at least that's what I'm telling myself because I don't want to exist in a in a life in a country in a whatever a reality that I feel the way that I feel right now but I know intellectually

i'm not going to feel this way all the time true and people should remember that having said that it is probably worth us talking about not today because i don't have any answers for it but maybe in the coming weeks months and dare i say it years how we're going to handle news consumption and media consumption over the course of the next four years because we've done it once we did it in 20 you know 2016 to 2020 and like while you say it's not going to feel this bad all the time is we're not going to have this particular um like kind of sense of a bit of shock um after the election but the thing that did mark those four years and one of the reasons i'm dreading the next four years so much and one of the reasons the the you know the first term was so bad was because it did feel like an absolute barrage of new lows of shocking new lows from the white house and now and i'm sorry like i'm really trying not to be super negative and i hope you do not take what i'm saying right now as a retort to what you just said because what you just said is right i'm also going to slip in here too don't apologize for being optimistic yesterday i'm glad you were optimistic i was more pessimistic it didn't do me any good i was thinking about that last night and maybe this kind of fits into your kind of grief analogy too it's like because i even said this to Genevieve I'm like my stomach was in knots when I woke up on Tuesday um because I was sort of fearing the worst and then the worst happened but I was not any more prepared for it emotionally right right I did not prepare I had a great Tuesday you had a great Tuesday and you did not and I wasn't like well I already saw it coming and so I was braced for it guess what it always hurt it just yeah so anyway putting that aside I just want to say like hope you don't take This is a retort. And I'm not trying to take us back to negative town. But the thing to me that marked that first administration was the fact that it was just a barrage of more and more appalling news that was just so hard to stomach. And like, I use the word gaslighting a lot of just like, what is reality? Like, am I like, do we really just just we're just openly racist and ableist and every and homophobic and trans? what like we're just openly all these things now and we got to figure out a way to kind of protect ourselves from the absolute mental barrage that the next four years at least will bring us

absolutely but i'll also say this and this is the i was thinking about this today you know i've been big on this like perhaps principle thing talking about how the future is not written and something that seems unbelievably bad may turn out to be in some way a positive or it may turn out unexpected and something that seems very good could turn out the other way too we just the future really is not written now this is this is the hardest test of this theory that's ever happened in my life right like which also speaks to the fact that i've had a pretty charmed life right people deal with with death people deal with illness people deal with a lot of really hard shit in their lives and for me a guy that is an embarrassment and a danger to our society being the present this is probably the most that i'll ever have to test this idea of like can i sit with the uncertainty of it and not catastrophize and tell myself that the future is not known the guy all manner of thing could happen i know right now it seems like there's only one script for this and the script is and i won't even i won't even read it out because i saw people doing this online i even saw like i love this guy but like jamel buoy this morning just got on to whatever the feed was and was just kind of laying out like you know the this is like this is what's going to happen these are the at these are the dominoes that are going to fall and this is what it's going to look like and it was bleak and to your point about like i don't know if or you know i think it's like so some stoic said when you worry about something you can't control you suffer twice you know like so part me is like i don't want to just uh just i don't want to think about the worst possible case scenario and lay it out here but i will just say this we also don't know what's going to happen a whole variety like the guy might not live to the end of the the time now what does that mean uh do we like the guy behind him no but who knows could donald i mean for let me say one thing not to get too political but like it's so infuriating that donald trump is getting his way but he is about to become the most hated person in America because he's hated by the half of the people that didn't vote for him and he is soon after going to be hated by a big portion of the people who did vote for him who are going to learn that he can't fix their lives. Like, he's not going to fix the war in Gaza in one day. He's not going to do any of the stuff he said he was going to do. He is not the savior that the people that voted for him think him to be. So he's already got half the country that loathes him and then he's going to have a lot of very unsatisfied customers. And, like, his, believe it or not, I mean, he's getting his way in a way, but, like, he also has to be Donald Trump. And I do think that means something. He has to get up every morning and be this deeply unwell person who probably feels mostly rage and sadness probably 99% of the day. Other than when he's, like, the moment that he found out that he was going to win, he probably felt good for an hour. And then it's probably back to just being this broken, decrepit human being that he is.

So all that is to say the future is not written we can forecast the darkest timeline of this and that might happen We got to do what we can to make that not happen at whatever level we can have impact But also that might not happen. We don't know what things are going to look like in two years We just actually don't know because if you would have said ten years ago The guy from the Trump stakes is going to be ruining democracy. I would said there's no way that's happening There's no universe in which that's happening. So So crazy shit that we don't expect to happen. all the time. And I'm just saying, I'm trying to, when I feel my anxiety welling up, I'm trying to remind myself that the future is not written. The other thing I'm trying to do, I'm sorry I'm getting so self-helpy here, and I'll stop right after this. I was reading something that Ram Dass wrote a while ago about how we deal with our negative feelings as they're sort of happening to us or coming up in our system. And he was saying that the key is to acknowledge them them and to bring them along with you but to not let them take control of stuff but also not to reject them and i was thinking about it as i was driving home today the analogy was like my car i felt myself somewhere near like kalama andrew just being paralyzed with anxiety about the future of this country and particularly the next four years i felt so anxious i don't i wouldn't say it was a panic attack but it felt like it was going in that direction and it came out of nowhere because i've been thinking about this a lot all morning i've been talking to becca i've been talking to you i don't know where it came from it hit me and i started to think about this anxiety like it was a hitchhiker that i just picked up and i said okay i acknowledged the hitchhiker i said all right get in the car and then you strangled him i did and that's why i'll never feel anxious again i i was i was like the key with these emotions whether it's anger fear anxiety rage whatever the I just said the same I said two emotions in four ways I said anger and rage and anxiety and fear those are the only emotions I'm familiar with slow down Brock Huard but like as I guess what I'm trying to just offer is something that helped me an hour ago which was I was in my car so that helped with the analogy but I literally just thought okay hey there you are anxiety get in the car you're coming on this ride I see you but you're not driving the car But I'm not rejecting you because I think if we try to shut our feelings out as they're rising up in us completely, I don't think that's going to work either. They're just going to come back bigger and stronger at some point and less manageable. But if you let it in the car and just go, that's where you sit. I'm still the one driving. I see you. I know that you're here. You're not in control of the situation, but I'm also not trying to pretend like you don't exist. Doing that weird-ass inside-out meets car talk mental exercise for me got me way, way, way less anxious in a pretty short amount of time. So I guess I would just throw that out there.

We all can probably use any coping skill that comes our way right now, and maybe the idea of when you feel an emotion rising up in you, a negative emotion, see it, acknowledge it, say hi to it, hang out with it, but don't let it drive the car. That's something that's kind of helped me this morning.

I just want to kind of return to something here that we mentioned at the beginning, which is that um we've been sort of hearing from a lot of listeners who are kind of checking in on us and and and also saying you know looking forward to hearing the show glad you guys are

kind of here for us we are the show to go to for broken people who are broken by an election right do you think that is a way that we've distinguished ourselves in the podcast landscape but one thing

that's really meant a lot to me as far as again people trying to figure out ways to kind of you know get through this is seeing on social media and I'm only on the the tbtl like kind of slack channels but even there I just saw this morning like kind of notifications coming in and I don't have all of them in front of me but people just saying hey I just I just deleted all of the social medias off my phone and I've downloaded slack and this is my community like you guys are getting me through this and so even taking you and I out of the equation I just want to kind of like shout that out again for everybody who is not and again i'm not trying to i'm seriously not trying to position us in the center of that but more what i'm seeing of of listeners looking out for each other like i've seen that from several people talking to other 10 saying this is you guys are my community like this is you are my people and this is how we get through this i can't even get

the music right i can't even put into words what that means yeah exactly i am are you ready for a a good time i've been thinking about calm down angus i um i've been thinking about that too because because when the 2016 election happened and we were so caught off guard and then we just kind of turned on our microphones and started talking and we had heard from listeners that that was something that was maybe comforting on that day and i was really hoping we would never have to do that show again and then i was like you know somebody actually like i think maybe dm'd me on threads or something that said if you play oh girl again i'm gonna lose my shit because remember we played that yeah um uh in 2016 about that a lot and it's weird to kind of like be both really really just shattered as a person over this and then also as an entertainer thinking well what's the best way for us to like you know an entertainer is a weird word to use but like as a you know as a person who's also here to talk about Thank you. this stuff and and i don't know try to relate to the listeners it's just weird to be both really destroyed by this and also trying to think like yeah but we can't play oh girl again we already did that that's kind of played out like thinking about the programmatic side of this yeah um but uh but you know uh i guess what i was trying to say is to kind of build off of what you were talking about the whole thing with tbtl for pretty much its whole existence has just been the tens of listeners and how they relate to each other and these are people who are there for each other in ways that it's just so incredible and again it's back to that being of service thing it's like man this sucks so much but i'm glad i'm gonna go through it with you andrew and with the tens you know and that they're gonna be able to uh they're gonna be able to go through it that one wasn't a joke but it did honestly really work it really sobers you up yeah right sobers

you're right up these are no edits by the way folks just so you know like that i did not tighten

that um the uh it it feels in a way again i'm i'm i feel like i'm saying a lot of things that i haven't really fully thought through so i don't know if i'm going to stand by all this later but it feels like we're about to go through something really traumatic i mean we went through a version of it before i think this is going to be probably more challenging for a lot of reasons having to do with the politics of this country and the way that trump is going to try to run the country his second time etc and yet it feels almost like the tbtl community was kind of built for this moment like a bunch of people who love each other you know and uh and who are who are already good at taking care of each other and like we just are going to need that the most now so it's like thank god and again ultimately this is credit to you and i and to some degree gen flash andrews but thank god this community of people has been being built for whatever however many years it is to to show up for each other because we're gonna need it you know we're gonna really need it um and so i guess that gives me just uh you know a little bit of hope a little

bit of hope which is a dangerous thing we learned it is a dangerous thing speaking of and i i'm not trying to wrap up the show early you are under the weather but if if we do want to kind of end on that hopeful note you were talking about um playing oh girl uh which after the 2016 election i think about that a lot i don't know why i'm so hooked into the shawshank redemption theme on the show today but i have a song that i want to go out with i'll start it's off of the the shawshank soundtrack but while i was looking while i was producing that intro today i kind of stumbled on this one i was like you know what for some reason i don't know it doesn't really make a it doesn't make a lot of sense but um it sort of hit me this morning so maybe we can we

Can I just read one quick thing? I want to recommend one thing, which is a poem by Mary Oliver called When I'm Among the Trees, which I have been reading a lot lately and which really was giving me some comfort this morning. I tried to read it to Becca off of my phone and I sobbed like a baby. A baby who apparently is testing at a very high reading level because they're able to read the poetry of Mary Oliver. Silver linings. Yeah, you know, I'm in the 90th percentile on baby poetry reading while sobbing but anyway i won't read that poem but i would recommend it if if you know you're looking for something today but i will read this quick thing from mary oliver who i've been really getting into lately she said it's a serious thing just to be alive on this fresh morning in this broken world maestro you ready for the song i so am all right i'm ready to dig through a mile of shit andrew

to get to Z-Wantanejo. I hope this is the song that I was thinking of. I stumbled on it on the Shawshank Redemption soundtrack today.

If I didn't care More than words can say If I didn't care Would I feel this way If this isn't love Then why do I thrill And what makes my head go round and round While my heart stands still

i heard someone say that when when somebody passes away and you miss them that's the price of love like you know and i feel like uh yeah the fact that we feel this bad uh right now is is the price of love that we love each other and that we we love this country and and that we want things to get better so if it hurts real bad

right now it probably means something important is going on so well put uh thanks for listening everybody uh we love you all we will see you tomorrow with more imaginary radio in the

meantime please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all would all this be true if i didn't care for you

Power out.