Muse

Hi.

I don't recall ever seeing you in here.

Well, maybe it's because it's my first time in here. That's right, my mom used to do all my laundry, but I do now. I'm what you call San's parents. Oh. I can go to a movie on a school night like that.

Well, welcome to the neighborhood.

What's your name?

Garth. Garth Algar, what's yours?

I'm Honey, Hornet.

Oh, okay, Miss Hornet.

Would you like to have dinner some night?

Oh, I like to have dinner every night. T-B-T-L.

Guess what day it is. Guess what day it is.

It's Friday, Friday. gonna get down on Friday. Everybody's looking forward to the weekend. I am not going to talk about myself. I'm going to talk about you. And if I talk about you, I think I'm going to talk about

me. Beware of things that cost $1.99. Those are the membership dues for this club that I joined, the Columbia House Music Club. Turns out that wasn't really even a club. It was just a business for making money. Although it is how I found my favorite band, various artists of the 80s.

Oh, I see. Dirty monkey not okay. But dirty monkey dance?

I could really use a win here!

Alright, hello, good morning, and welcome everyone to a Friday edition of TBT All The Show. It just might be too beautiful to live. A good podcast helps you connect the dots. My name's Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I'm here. I'm available for y'all.

Coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where, my goodness, I don't even recognize this weather pattern anymore. It's beautiful, my friends.

Oh, Ma, Pa, it's just beautiful.

Sun is shining. The mighty Columbia River is just smooth as glass. You can see some geese and other waterfowl that are just kind of like chilling down here in a little, I guess, estuary. I guess I'm not sure exactly what makes something an estuary versus just being kind of a small little protected area off the river. Anyway, that's where the geese and ducks are. This flock of geese has decided that their favorite place to hang out, other than the mighty Columbia River, other than this estuary, is one of my neighbors up the hill. They have a huge, like, I don't know, they're on like a couple of acres. So there's this massive, huge, long piece of property. It's, you know, grass. And the geese love to hang out on that hill when they're not in the water. And what that means is that about once or twice a day, they fly over my house. And I hear them before I see them because they are honking. That's not a rumor. They do like to honk when they're flying. Or they're just very, very horny geese. And so I'll be in my house and I'll just hear this honking and I will know what it means and I will run outside and I will stand on my deck as like 200 to 300 geese just like fly 20 feet over my house to go land on my neighbor's yard. And honestly, it's the main thing keeping me going during these turbulent times, if I'm being frank. I'm also being very honest when I tell you we are at episode 4,638 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. The news is bad, my friends. The news is tough, and a lot of it comes to me via my phone. And I'm always looking for some way to change my relationship with my phone. And instead of just working on myself, what I like to do is find new technological solutions. And I saw one today in the New York Times. They were reporting back on the most interesting items that were rolled out at the recent Consumer Electronics Show in Las Vegas. And they've got a phone that doesn't do normal phone stuff. So you know what that means.

I'm trying to use that phone!

That means I'm very excited about it. So we'll get into that and other gadgetry. And we'll get into this guy's life. He's the longest-running cobro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. One other thing about him.

He was king of the tuk-tuk sound.

He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning, Luke. I'm sorry if you hear a little bit of sound of outdoor tennis being played behind me. The music is probably covering most of it up. Yeah, I'm not hearing anything. But did you hear about this story? I'm trying to watch the video now. this is from uh nairobi kenya where they were having some sort of a international tournament

you know i think i thought someone was playing tennis like in your neighbor's yard no sorry

you're going to hear outdoor tennis no no this is outdoor tennis uh from from nairobi yeah the global south um the uh

So the deal is, I don't know, man, I'm just trying to watch the damn game, just go on with the show. No, I wanted to know if you had heard tell of this at all. I had just caught wind of this this morning. Apparently there was somebody who played, you know, this is a professional, it's a low level, but it is a professional match, right? And it's an international event. But somebody got in, somebody from Egypt ended up getting in to play from, I believe she's Egyptian. but she came in through some sort of wild card situation where you can apply to play as a wild card and then somebody dropped out.

Oh, just another ray gun situation?

Yes, apparently she's so bad that she didn't know how to hold her racket at times and that, I guess, whatever the governing body is for this particular tennis match or tournament or whatever, they're trying to figure out how this happened. And I don't think it was like a prank. Like, I don't think this is, you know, one of the Manning brothers dressing up to pretend to be a tennis player. This isn't Chad Al Powers? No, I don't think so. So I was just, there's no, like, I think you might have to know tennis a little bit better to see exactly, you know, to see what people are seeing on the corks. I'm not getting good shots of it here.

The internet says the Egyptian tennis player in Nairobi is Hajar Abdelkader, a 21-year-old woman who recently went viral after a shocking 6-0, 6-0 loss at an ITF tournament where she won only three points. Well, and served 20 double faults in her professional debut, leading to questions about how she received the wildcard entry, which tournament organizers admitted was an error.

I mean, if I'm her, though— Those three points, I just want to say, those three points were errors by her opponent. Like they were double faults by her opponent. Yeah, they were not earned by her, I believe.

Yeah, but still, maybe she was intimidating. See, if you put me in Wimbledon, you put me in any professional tennis tournament, and I at least caused the other person to double fault three times, I feel like I've actually exceeded my expectations for myself.

Yeah, and you get in their head, right? I got a friend who plays baseball, and he says that sometimes when you're in one of those situations where a position player is pitching he's like oh yeah harder than you think is a batter you just kind of don't know what's going to come and you're just like you're just so unused to like a what do

they call those super super slow this pitch you're just not ready for it yeah i've always wondered if i could throw one strike in the major leagues um you know when you're trying to fall asleep you're trying to think of movies that um you know start with different letters of the alphabet etc i'm thinking about uh beating up my political rivals in very public situations using karate right often or not so much karate but more just like sometimes there's like some kind of cool guy move and it really depends on the situation i could give you some different examples off air but um and then i also think about like i imagine myself in triumphant sports moments and then i also just imagine myself in more practical sports moments like could i hit if you let me play an entire nba game could i hit one three-pointer um you know or if you put me in a major league baseball game could i throw one strike that was not hit out of the park and i do think what i would have going for me is that my best pitch would be roughly 40 miles an hour slower than they're used to seeing yeah it would be the ultimate off-speed pitch that could be what

you call your pitch it's called the yeah ultimate off-speed pitch so i have a few follow-up questions here first of all it sounds like you imagine yourself in a lot of different kind of sports situations but in the baseball situation do you find yourself playing around with the idea of being on the mound more than at the plate or do you do both for some reason yes i think

interesting the mound is seems more doable to me than like i just know first of all i think i would be literally afraid of the ball which is weird because i played baseball for my whole life growing up like so it's I wasn't particularly well that's not true my first year of of fast pitch baseball I was not afraid of the ball but I was afraid to swing I literally didn't swing the entire season when I played for the Greenwood Boys and Girls Club everyone's heard that story but then after that I got over it and I was sort of a semi-okay baseball player I'm not quote unquote afraid of the ball but I think in a major league situation I would be terrified of that of

how fast the pitch is coming oh I'm scared of the ball when I'm listening on the radio

you ever hear just like you hear the ball hit the mitt and you think it was the ball hitting the

bat yeah oh yes because it's so loud yeah and i'm always trying to read between the lines of

the announcers particularly if it's rico riz and like so i hear like a crack of the bat the roar of the crowd i'm like oh shit they hit it and then it's like outside pitch and i was like oh that was the ball was thrown so fast that when it went into the piece of leather that cal raleigh is wearing on his hand, it sounded like a nuclear event.

Well, let's – okay, so you sort of fantasize about throwing a pitch because you feel like that is – as outside of reality as it is, it's closer than actually hitting a major league pitch.

Yeah, if you could put me in a game, I could throw a pitch. I couldn't hit a pitch.

But if you were just totally fanciful, you know what I mean? Like, if you could just, like, snap and make something happen, let's say, snap your fingers and make a scenario happen where you get to have one successful, let's not even say pitch, but one successful outing, like, one successful half inning on the mound or one successful at bat. Like, what's more exciting? Oh, easy. At bat, right?

At bat, where I advance the runner from first to second, where I'm able to, like, really go with the pitch and keep my hands in and hit a weak grounder to the right side of the infield. Therefore, moving the runner along in a key situation.

I love this. The glory play. Yeah, and it's still your imagination. Like, literally anything could happen.

Oh, no, totally impossible.

Like, in my imagination, yes, I hit the ball, and then it hits the lights, and then the lights keep on exploding for the next 15 minutes. Nature Boy. It's like the end.

Wonder Boy or Nature Boy? Wonder Boy. I think the Nature Boy was Ric Flair. Yeah, I think so.

Is that what his name is in the natural?

I think it's Wonder Boy in the natural, or the bat says Wonder Boy or something.

It's funny. I saw that once when I was a child, And I believe we were on vacation. I have this vague memory of that. And all I remember is, boy, those lights just keep on blowing up. Like, that was my takeaway from the movie was, like, they just keep exploding from one baseball hitting them.

Yeah, that seems like an extreme reaction by this light panel or whatever. I did hit, when I was in Little League, I hit a couple of home runs. And I got to tell you, very satisfying, even at the Little League level. we played at this place called ross field on third avenue there um and it had the way that the field was because a lot of the fields there's no defined home run area you know what i mean it's just there's the uh it's just a big you know it's a baseball diamond but there's not a fence or a hill or a something that denotes you hit it into where now it's a home run but ross field had that there was a kind of a hill surrounding the outfield so there was a defined thing where you If you hit it out there, it was a home run. And I did that a couple of times. This is, by the way, a little kid field. This doesn't even have a pitcher's mound. This has like a, you know, the pitcher was closer to the batter than it would be in the major leagues. But a couple of times I got a hold of one. And to watch the ball go to a place where the outfielder, let's be honest, it wasn't like these outfielders were about to go out there and Ken Griffey Jr. it anyway. Like, they probably just stood where they were making some kind of necklace out of daisies and watch the ball just go wherever it was going but in my mind like having the ball go to a place where it was deemed to be a home run was pretty fun and then the furthest ball that i ever hit was actually at green lake it was against i think it was against our buddy joe gerlitz's team rug um and it was the farthest ball that i ever hit in my life and it was also it was a home run but it was unsatisfying because that place doesn't didn't have walls so you know how when you're walking around green lake and you get over to where the swimming pool kind of area is evans pool it's got those basketball courts yeah like if you were to look over to the if you were like if the basketball courts were to your left and you looked to your right tucked over there is a baseball field and it was one of those baseball fields so i mean i just this is where they had a really fast pitcher and this was with like a pitcher's mound this was like real baseball dimensions yeah because you're

you're describing little league before but if you're playing with joe here you're a young adult or an old adult?

No, I'm probably like 13, 14. Oh, you and Joe go back that far.

I didn't realize that. Yeah. Oh, okay. Yeah.

So, like, yeah, we played Little League against each other. Oh, cool. So I played for North Central and he played for something called Rug, which was Roosevelt University Green Lake. I always thought Rug was the coolest name for a league.

No joke, Gwen, I thought you were talking about an adult Joe who works in the advertising industry. I thought that would be, like, the name of some sort of, like, super edgy, like, advertising and creative firm in downtown Seattle.

Yeah, it was KUOW against Wexley School for Girls. Rug. Actual name, by the way, for an ad agency in Seattle. But anyway, yeah, somebody, they had a guy pitching, and he was pitching really fast, and I was kind of nervous. And somehow, his very fast pitch, I probably just closed my eyes and swung the bat, but somehow, it was just one of those direct contact deals where there's no vibration in the bat, which is...

Well, that's what I wanted to ask about, how it feels, because I don't think I've ever had the experience of solidly hitting a baseball, even if it wasn't a home run, just a solid hit.

Well, the reason that I can remember this so specifically is because this was also a very rare event for me, but I would say it's better than all the sex you've had in your life combined. Plus a couple of big sneezes and a stress.

throw it all in there and then triple it and that's how good it feels to like connect with a baseball in such a way that there is absolutely no vibration in the bat because it is the exact right part of the bat is at the exact right part of the ball and it's just like from a physics standpoint it's an absolute marvel it's like all of this force being sort of multiplied in this way and and so it was great i mean again it was like a home run i was pretty psyched about it but it but it was kind of unsatisfying because it just kind of like flew over the guy's head and then it kind of like bounced to the basketball court. And then like one of the basketball guys like picked it up and like tossed it back to the kid. And then I was like rounding third. It had none of the theatrics of like, you know, a real home run where the guy gets to the wall and then looks up and sees that it's going out or whatever. It was just kind of like, yeah, okay, good job. And now, um, you know, who's up next?

I think we need to get you in on something, by the way, speaking of Greenlake, have you heard that there's going to be a big, I think, like kind of renovation and maybe even reimagining of that area of Green Lake. I think that they're going to try to preserve that old school building, but maybe move things around a little bit. The Green Lake Community Center and Pool Rebuild. I'm just looking at this now. I'm trying to kind of get eyes on this because I'd only, I'd only, I'm the opposite of you. I'm really bad at sort of like imagining spaces. I'm not joking. Oh, I don't think I'm particularly great at that either. Well, I mean, you've been working for the past four years on imagining your own home space. and thinking about what you want and what you need for the future and creating. I'm like, I'm just particularly bad at that. And so when I read these newspaper articles that talk about, like, kind of plans for a building somewhere or a reno job somewhere, it's really difficult for me to sort of get my head around it. But I was sort of scanning a Seattle Times article about it the other day, and now I'm on the Community Center Projects page. It's a $59 million project, Andrew. Are we funding any of that as hosts of TBTL?

are we donating no in fact we're funding the protest because i don't want my childhood changed

at all at all thank you very much you'd come down to that it did i mean in the brief thing that i scanned in the newspaper it sort of seemed though like they are it's not like there might have been plans a while ago that like talk more about just like kind of demoing it and starting over i could be wrong about it but it sort of sounds like the new plan and maybe that's the reason it's expensive is, because they're not just going to raise it, but instead sort of preserve, but expand.

Well, Andrew, you should visit the engagement hub to participate in the project.

Well, you should, because you're the one.

I'm on it right now, buddy, and I'm already leaving some fiery comments. No, look, without going too far down the nostalgia water slide, for people that don't know, the place we're talking about, it's called the Green Lake Community Center, or we called it Evans Pool for short, because that was the name of the swimming pool that was there. and it was really i mean more than almost anything else i can think of it was the locus of my life as a kid because it was about a you know i don't know 15 minute bike ride from my house it had a swimming pool it is where i learned how to break dance when i was like in the early 80s because i used to have the bite of seattle at that part of green lake it had has a basketball gym where i used to go play pickup basketball every single day it's where i was interviewed the day that it was declared or announced that magic johnson was hiv positive where i said he deserves it if he's having unprotected sex which uh king five decided to cut out because they were shadow manning me even at a young age yes like my mom used to run the babysitting center in this community center where one of the babies she babysat was linda cone the espn announcer's baby like it's just it's that's where when i was a kid i would go every saturday it was one dollar to swim in the pool and it was where i once went i had two dollars to my name one dollar to swim and one dollar i was saving for afterwards to go and get a treat i was all excited but i didn't lock the locker because i didn't have enough money for the locker fee or the uh you know getting a combination lock a quarter in the in the thing something like that but i only had one extra dollar and i was saving that for my treat after swimming and of course i come back and these two kids uh these two you know tough kids had clearly stolen my dollar out of my wallet but i couldn't do anything to prove it like all that is to say i didn't know about that story i mean you want to talk marty supreme that's where i learned how to play ping pong because they had a ping pong table and uh and i think a pool table and i used to sit and there'd be these old like like asian american dudes asian dudes i don't know what their particular uh you know status immigration status was that would hang out in there and play ping pong and they would show me how to play ping pong and stuff it's like i really cannot overstate the the number of life events for me that occurred in this again very old and not particularly well-maintained building and that's actually where i'm going with this like when i i'm sure becca and i were walking green lake i don't know maybe six months ago and we

over there and I think we went in to use the bathroom or something and when I tell you Andrew when I stepped into that place it had not changed one scintilla from when I used to go in there 40 years ago like the smell of chlorine was the same the front desk area is exactly the same the little there was like two front desk there's like a front desk for the kind of community center aspect where someone would sit and then there was this other one that was weirdly enclosed for some reason and that's where you would pay to go in the swimming pool. So it was kind of a glass, almost like a bank teller booth. I don't know if they thought people were going to rob the person who had to collect the swimming pool money, but they were in a more secure window that was next to the—

That's what I was referring to in Marty Supreme when I mentioned the guy with the teeth. Don't you remember the guy who kind of— I guess he doesn't run it, but he kind of runs the door of the ping-pong parlor behind the cage? You know who that guy is? Well, he looked familiar, but I couldn't place him.

I'm sorry that I got so distracted with George the Iceman Gervin the other day. You know who that guy is? That guy is the dude who was on the side of the road, I guess we'll say panhandling, who had been a radio guy. Do you remember the whole story of the guy?

I played him every single night on my radio show. He's the guy with the drop, say something with that great radio voice. That is the guy with the teeth in Marty Supreme. Actually, I guess the drop I play is the reporter saying to him, now say something in that great radio voice. And I would use that as a drop to introduce me every single night on the old radio show.

So that guy, the guy who I forget his name now, but the guy who had who had been a radio guy and then had fallen on hard times and then was kind of, quote unquote, discovered that dude is the dude in Marty Supreme who's running the or who's taking the money in the ping pong thing.

Wow. You know, he did look familiar. But that story, I mean, that was a viral video that went around. Well, it was before I had a radio show in Seattle. So and I think maybe I did that on the air from 2013 to 14. So that was like a viral video that went around in 2012. And, yeah, it was a guy who had a had a radio career, found himself, you know, living on the streets. And then like there was a kind of a news story about how this guy is living on the streets, basically. And so it's good to know that this many years later, he's now in movies. That's awesome. Yes.

And just, you know, it would appear doing well. Like, I don't know if he's quote unquote in movies. I think one of the things that the Safdie brothers really love to do is I don't want to say stunt casting, but like they really they really like to bring in kind of unlikely folks and non-actors and they really go for that. So I don't know how much other stuff this guy is. His name is Ted Williams, by the way. Ted Williams is the and I'm trying to see right now if he's been in some other. He's an actor known for Marty Supreme. the game done changed in 2017 and my crazy X in 2014 but at the very least he's you know I don't want to how do I say this in a way that doesn't sound disrespectful like a lot of times you hear these stories about somebody who is you know plucked out of relative obscurity some something's you know they've fallen on hard times and then there's a go fund me for them or something happens and it's a real life change for them but then you catch back up in five or ten years and unfortunately things have kind of maybe gone back towards where they were originally and it's really awesome to see that that does not appear to be what's going on with ted f williams that's a better way of

putting what i just said make you work for your dollar say something with that great radio voice and then that's where he would usually start talking but i don't also no offense but make

you work for your dollar absolutely right off yeah right no shit right like i think it's funny if we're saying it to you before you start talking on the andrew walsh show but some guy who's on the side of the road and he's got a sign it's like i hope that the end of the story of the guy who

asked that question is bleak bleak the guy who asked that question got smashed under a tub i

believe a bathtub okay good yeah well that's a whole other thing the guy that well i could yeah i could go on and on about the uh the casting of marty supreme but the the the guy who has the dog he's a um he's his name is abel uh farrah and he's sort of like a outsider film director from the u.s but now who works mostly in in in or in italy and stuff and he's got a whole crazy backstory back to if we can quickly to the green lake community center aquatic center and play area engagement hub this is a weird one for me andrew because again i generally like everything to be the way that it's always been particularly something like this that's so core memory to me but the place is honestly kind of a shithole for for the probably the amount of use that it gets for the folks that work there and for also the potential for it yeah like i my guess would be that if they can i don't know where they're going to get this 59 million from but like if they they have three million of it so far so um you know they're part of the way there like Thank you. it's i my my guess would be that if you come back in 10 years and this place has like first of all the bathrooms are absolutely horrendous at this place like have you ever had to use the bathrooms at this joint no i mean i'm talking number one number two any number you need they've got you horrified like it's it is it is just like the it's those kinds of urinals that are like like, kind of overly rectangular, like, steel. Do you know the kind I'm talking about? It's like a welded steel, not a triangle, but not, like, it's not porcelain, and it's not in the kind of what we think of as the regular urinal shape. It's something that's more, let's just say, carceral. It feels like a urinal that would be in prison for some reason.

Or a campground, maybe, for some reason.

Campground, maybe. somewhere where you're just really worried people are going to try to just absolutely break the urinal off of the wall um no doors on the stalls because i think they've dealt with some issues there so like you know if you have to go number two it's a anyway i can imagine coming back to this place maybe with my grandchildren andrew in 10 years and being like wow this is nice wow this is way better so this is going to be the rare instance where i am willing to allow something that is important to my memory and my conception of my young self to be different, because I do think more people would actually get more enjoyment out of it if it gets fixed up.

Well, that's great news. That was the last real big stumbling block was getting your approval on this thing. So I'm going to let them know that you're signing off on this and now they just need

$53 million and we're good. I mean, honestly, like if they're in the 1980s, if there was a Mayor of It was probably me And this developmentally disabled guy Named Larry who used to Kind of hang around there One of Larry's moves was Because he used to walk down my street too On his way to the community center Sometimes he would just drag an entire Rubbermaid garbage can With his stuff in it He wasn't homeless by the way But he just would drag that around As a conveyance or something But he was a super sweet guy He would always introduce himself. He would say, hi, my name is Larry. And I've met him in my life maybe a thousand times. Every time he would walk down our street, we'd be playing in our front yard. Hi, my name is Larry. We'd introduce ourselves. We'd see him at the community center. Hi, my name is Larry. So it was between me and Larry for being the mayor of the Green Lake Community Center. So if they get me and Larry to sign off on this, I do think that they will be able to find a path forward.

Please don't tell anybody that I took my wheelbarrow outside. god what a great what a great scene we need to jump back into the world of friend of i almost said friendship of the chair company yeah i watched i think i watched each episode twice but now i haven't watched it in a couple of months maybe it's time to rejuice on that show

i took a bath yesterday which was odd but um i was uh for a variety of reasons i have a very specific schedule around my, um, like when I shower, when I exercise and you're like sometimes a double shower guy, but I'm, for some reason, I really hate taking two showers in the same day. So it's always got to be after my workout, but I didn't work out in the morning yesterday. So I like, I, um, ended up working out in the afternoon and then my, then it was kind of cold and I thought, well, I'll take a bath. But I was like, but then it's going to be boring sitting in the bathtub. So I was like, well, I'll bring my laptop in and I'll watch something. And then I was like, maybe i'll just start watching the chair company again uh ultimately i didn't ultimately i propped my phone up in the windowsill took a bath and continued to scroll tiktok but just saying i'm i'm open to the idea oh can i clarify one other thing from yesterday's show very very quickly before we get into big weekend plans i cannot believe how loud wrong i was about talk about core memories, about a story relevant to my own life that I was telling you yesterday about Ralph Nader in Harlem and Hillary Clinton. I went back and listened to the actual story that I did about that. And what I had, I have been for years telling this story about how Ralph Nader was out of touch with the crowd in Harlem. And I listened to my story. And what I say in my story is that he got four standing ovations. Oh, wow. So I don't know where it got into my, I mean, I will say having spent considerable time with him uh i do think he's a kind of let's just say i would be unsurprised to hear that he's sort of neurodivergent in certain ways but what i what my report from the ground was on that day was not what i have been thinking in my mind and telling people which was that he misread the room yeah i think the room liked him so i i want to officially retract that because that was a um that was a misstatement by me and like i was horrified listening to i was like, well, let me hear what actually happened there. And I listened to it. And as I heard my own self say, he received four standing ovations. I was like, what the frick?

Did you hear any audio? Were you able to record his actual speech so you could get a better understanding of you in 2026?

And I think, you know, I'm not saying that I would ever put my thumb on the scale, but I think what I was ultimately trying to point out in the piece is that there's a disconnect between the Ralph Nader true believers and in that case the ralph nader skeptics about him throwing another election um in favor of the republicans because this was 2004 and so in 2000 of course he was blamed by a lot of people for throwing florida over to george w bush and i think what i was trying to say is like in the room in harlem with the people that had come there to like listen to ralph nader that are ralph nader heads he was very popular and then he goes downstairs to the press conference afterwards and he's immediately bombarded with questions of, aren't you going to end up just delivering this election to George W. Bush like you did the last one? So I mean, was there four standing ovations? Was there three? Was I trying to make a point about his popularity with his fan base versus his, I don't know. I hope I wasn't misstating it, but definitely if it was crickets up there, I don't think I would have said he got four standing ovations. So nobody except me cares about that. But I was, again, it's a weird experience to have a core memory. I keep using that term today for some reason. and then hear your own self absolutely exploding that memory that you think you have.

I feel like if everything I did was recorded, which more and more of it is, I would find a million examples of that in my lifetime as I try to like it. I'm now at an age when I tell a story from high school or something, on air or off, where I acknowledge that I'm probably conflating some things here.

It's like a land acknowledgement, except about the land that is my memory. We stand right now on stolen brain.

Certainly.

Old Luke has stolen the brain of young Luke, and he doesn't know what the hell is going on.

The one thing, though, and maybe this is because you, even before we met with your experience at NPR at all, i do feel like there's something about going through the process of actually creating a story in your case like a news story or a news feature about something that does it seems like bakes the memory in a little bit harder i don't know if you can bake harder you see what happened there i ran out of adjectives you it bakes it in even more deliciously i um anyway you know what I mean, like, I do feel like in my experiences, it's the things that I go back to if it was a project I worked on that was some sort of an involved audio project or maybe even a video or something. It's kind of like, well, I'm going to remember the details of that better because it went through an editing process. I, you know, wrote around it. I chose the tape and all of that sort of calcifies the memory a little bit better. But you did so I'm not trying to throw you under the bus. You did so many stories and so much more of that stuff than I did.

well I think generally speaking I do I absolutely agree with you and I think the stories putting the Ralph Nader anecdote aside I think that the stories that I can most reliably repeat with some accuracy are things that where I did a tv story or I did a radio story about it because you're right it's a very methodical process it's not like normal life where you're just kind of like hanging out it's like you're you're taking notes and you're there's somebody fact-checking and there's a producer and there's just a lot that goes into it that should cause it to bake harder in the mind and that's why this was so like unsettling for me and I think I think I think I can kind of trace what the series of events was which is basically like and also I've heard other I've heard other stories about Ralph Nader in fact my brother-in-law my brother-in-law's brother so my sister Liz's husband's brother is the head of the consumer organization that Ralph Nader used to run and worked for Ralph Nader for like the last 20 years so I've been kind of like also back channeling a lot of Ralph Nader content and my and I don't know why it's so important for me to always emphasize this but it's like Ralph Nader is a he's a he's a not a typical person um in a lot of ways and he's as I said yesterday very singularly focused and very like not uh not the most warm person i've ever dealt with not bad but he just wasn't like he just is not a guy who um is super in my experience super concerned with how he's coming off in a conversation and you were telling that story about our friend rachel bell and how like he refused to engage with the topic of last meals because he's against the death penalty which is a super hyper literal reading of a situation so for some reason it's somehow important for me to make that point with everyone when the topic of Ralph Nader comes up which again why I don't know but I then at some point overlaid that into the

experience of being in that church in Harlem with him, and then wrote my own version of events to support this thing that I'm trying to say to people. So it was like, I went back and changed the reality of what was going on in that room in order to make a stronger case for what I'm trying to tell people. Today, not in the story, of course. Today, yes. I hope not in the story. Yeah. I think it's more like today, like what I'm trying to say is, yeah, Ralph Nader's pretty Spectrum-y. And then my evidence for that was, yeah, he's in this room in Harlem and he's definitely not reading the room. And by the way, there may have also been some of those moments where like he's saying something and I'm, even in that night in Harlem and I'm thinking like, I don't think anyone in here cares about that. But it clearly wasn't as much of a flop as I've been telling people because in the very story I'm referring to, I'm making the point that he was a hit. So I think I have to be really careful about like, well, I just have to start doing the disclaimer that you're starting to do and also just remember that sometimes i go back in and reverse engineer something to confirm something that i'm trying to establish in the present and i got to be really careful about that the facts that you

hear in this story may be nearer than they appear maybe yeah maybe clear right they appear yes yeah

have they fixed that by the way are we still getting that on side mirrors that's a good question i don't think mine i don't think mine we we of all the technology that we've really improved and i think mirror technology must have improved because i'm not seeing that on mirrors

anymore yeah that's a really good point also can we just take a moment and give it up to cameras and cars like all i have in the back of in the back of my car is just like a one little camera and it is a hidden camera by the way people can never find it oh i know dude behind the vw symbol

that's that flips up like that's the batmobile i love that that's some that's some real spy

hunter. Right. And like, you know, I never had a lot of problem backing in and out of things. I've always been a pretty good parallel parker, not to brag, but it's just not been a big hang up for me in my life. Having said that, I was just backing up the other day. And, you know, so I'm parked nose in and there's cars on either side of me. And so I'm carefully backing out and I'm looking anyway, using just my eyes, but just by the very nature of having a camera in the back of the car, it's like having a set of eyes in the back of the car where I can see if there's a pedestrian with a dog you know like coming in a way that i just would not be able to see otherwise and i'm just thinking about my car here which is like the lowest of the low as far as technology is concerned i'm in my dad's car he's got some sort of like uh and by the way i don't know what his car is so don't even ask i'm so car blind the only thing that rivals your face blindness is your car blindness yeah honestly it makes me seem like i can actually recognize faces so much better like it's just like i look what kind of car was it i'm like grayish and like by

the way all cars are grayish so nobody nobody commit a crime in a vehicle near andrew zero help to law enforcement like literally a brownish area with points exactly like i don't kind of one

of those silver is she wants it looks like you know like all cars that are all rental cars look alike to me but whatever my dad drives which is like some sort of a you know i guess i guess an suv i guess i mean that's i i see i see people park their suvs in parking spots that are clearly marked compact so i don't know because i drive such a tiny little car i think everything is an suv but let's just call my dad's car some sort of a version of a hybrid suv or something like that and um he's got this this technology where if he turns on his camera it looks like you're looking at the car from above do you have this it seems like something i've had a rental car with this and it is mind-bending mind-blowing right so you see the view of everything around you does this

Don't you think launch a drone when you back up?

It is amazing. It really is amazing. And I believe I was in a Lyft or something the other day where the person had a rear-view mirror in a normal place, you know, just hanging on your windshield there. But the mirror itself, wait, was I with you? Was this you? Were you my Lyft driver? I'm actually confused if this is something you and I talked about. Again, facts in this story are further from the truth than they appear. It was you, me, Ralph Nader.

He was not reading the room, but the driver gave him four standing ovations.

And who was the poet that you were driving around with in upstate New York on your way to Cooperstown? Oh, good memory.

That was coming back from, oh my goodness.

You were driving around New England with him before your trip to Cooperstown, right?

Well, it was coming back from Chautauqua. Oh, okay, right. I was at Chautauqua in New York, and they were taking us both to the airport together. And I can't remember who that was, but he was lovely. He was a big baseball fan.

Yeah, right, because I remember. And maybe that's what even tips you over the edge. Poet Laureate, right? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah. Nationally, yeah.

It's not, he's like, in my mind, he's like David Mamet adjacent, but he's not David Mamet. But like, for some reason, when I'm trying to reimagine him, it's not Billy Collins either.

I know it's not Billy Collins because that's like your fave.

But it's like David something, right? And we caught a ride together to the airport in Buffalo, I think, from leaving the Chautauqua community there in upstate New York.

It's not Donald Hall. That's the only other one on this list that I would know. Like you said, and this would have been – I know that we were doing the show. I used to have his business card. I was very proud of that. I think I had it pinned up somewhere. Oh, Pinsky. Wasn't it Pinsky? Oh, yeah, yeah, yeah. Pinsky. Was it Robert Pinsky? Robert Pinsky. David Robert Pinsky. nobody calls him david except me i mean i i didn't plop that out of the air i was looking at a list yeah that's who it was so um anyway yeah so my dad's oh my dad's got a cool car and then somebody who i was in a car with had a rearview mirror that could either act as a mirror or a little video camera instead so in other words you could turn your mirror into a video camera yeah and i was like well what's the point of that and they're like well a video is in a better place

Oh, so the mirror itself, because I've seen this mirror now that is a video monitor. In other words, when you're looking in the rearview mirror, what you're seeing is the feed from the video camera.

Exactly. And I think that this person...

Right, so it's not itself the camera, it's monitoring what the camera is.

Yes, I'm sorry. There's a camera in the back of the car, and you can either use your mirror in regular mirror mode, or you can turn it into a digital mirror, almost, where the camera is looking in the back of the car. Yeah, it's showing you what the camera is.

Yeah, that's mind-blowing.

Yeah, all of that stuff, it's just fascinating, and we wouldn't have it if it weren't for Ralph Nader.

I just, finally, I would say in the last year, fully become confident in the camera that's in the back of my car. In other words, for the first couple of years that I was driving my car, I would go into reverse to pull into a parking spot. It would want to show me on my screen the backup cam, and I'd be like, yeah, right, nice try. and i'd look over my shoulder and i would like manually park because i could not trust it it just it was i for whatever reason i i just you know it was old-fashioned and i would always kind of crane my neck around and just do the typical thing and now i've just fully and completely trust it i've like lost the ability to now you know parallel park in a car that doesn't have a camera you know the place that i i feel like i really have to trust that camera is when i'm at the dump because backing up because the way that the the dump around here works is it's like one of those conveyor belt things i think i've told you about this and so you pull in and i'm not one of those backup parkers i know that we've been around this whole you know flagpole together and listeners don't like it when i say this but i still think there's something very republican coded about backing into a parking spot and i don't care what you say i don't don't I don't care that it's safer because then when you're pulling out, you're pulling out forward. It's like, yeah, but you're backing in at some point.

I just want to remind the audience that we don't speak as a unit on everything. So when you're sending your emails, you can send them directly to Luke.

Listen, I was the person who first flagged that Sasquatch is conservative coded now. And there's been nothing that has changed my mind on that one either. I live in red America. I am a bellwether, Andrew. I see these things before you do.

I just want to say I don't want to argue it with you. I have no interest in the topic, but I also just want to say that that is not a shared opinion. That is not something that I am co-signing. You're not co-signing. No. Okay.

But, all right, so here's the thing. Because I don't back into parking spots very frequently, I also have a small car, so it's not necessary for me. The only time that I really do that is when I'm at the dump, and so you pull, you're kind of pulling into this big covered area, and there's all these big, you know, trucks and landscaping trucks, and they're all backed up. And in this case, it makes perfect sense because we're all going to open our rear hatches or drop our lift gate and throw the stuff onto this conveyor belt. But I'm, like, backing up between two just big-ass lifted trucks. And I, like, first of all, I can't see because there's probably a bunch of stuff in the back of my car. So my view is literally obscured. And I'm just like, camera, don't fail me now because I'm, like, threading the needle backing up in between. I don't want to hit one of these don't tread on me trucks or whatever. But so far it's been working out.

Yeah, when you're driving a little car, or even maybe a normal-sized car, but in my case, and it sounds like your case, maybe a little-sized car, around big equipment, especially in, or even just big trucks, especially in a situation like that, like the dump, you just feel so tiny. You feel like, sometimes it can feel almost sci-fi, like you're a tiny little ship trying to navigate, like in some sort of sci-fi movie with all these big, hulking spaceships around you. I don't know why my brain goes there, but I think that, and the thing, the only thing that can add to that is something that I'm going to be doing next week, which is going to the dump in my tiny little Volkswagen Golf, driving around these trucks that could eat my Volkswagen Golf, and then, and then burp with a little satisfaction.

And then burp out a, burp out a bird scooter.

Yeah, exactly. But what will I be going to the dump to do? My car will be filled with nothing but. styrofoam. Literally the lightest little thing, because you can recycle styrofoam at the dump. You can't do it at curbside or anything. And every two weeks, I think I've told you this before, I find myself in kind of a weird situation. Does your car float to the dump? Exactly. Is it like having helium in the back? I have to hold, I walk below it.

You have all these sandbags that you have to release strategically over various parts of

aurora to control your flight because every two weeks i get special medication through the mail for my arthritis and it comes in it has to remain refrigerated right so it comes in a box about the size of like kind of like your standard medium size box if you like go to um or maybe small medium size box if you're going to go to u-haul or something like that and then inside there is a cooler like a straight up cooler that has like really thick walls and then you kind of unbox that and then inside the cooler is several of these ice packs or whatever because I mean this medication if anything goes bad with it it's like each shot is just ridiculously expensive insurance covers most of it but they treat this stuff like gold right or maybe more expensive than gold and so you open it up and it's kind of like it's Indiana Jonesy as you kind of open up the chest and then that's in there but then you dump all this stuff out and i'm left with they prescribed you marcellus wallace's soul yeah right and i would love these coolers are awesome and i wish i could send them back for reuse because the problem with them is they're so the walls are so thick like the box comes as a normal size box but by the time you've unpacked everything the inside the actual inside dimensions of the cooler you could maybe hold three cans of fresca maybe three you know and there's no handle before there's nothing you can really do with these things, and I get one a month, I guess.

But it's so tempting, because you're like, this is almost something I could take camping.

Yes. Well, actually, I'm sorry. I get one of these coolers with two doses, so I get one of these a month. So I'm getting 12 of these damn things a year, and so I stack them up in my garage, but since I can't find a good... I would love to find a reuse for them. In fact, if a listener is like, hey, that's something I could use on my boat or in a project or something, let me know. I will say though the inside dimensions are pretty small but the best i can do is take them to the dump and properly recycle them in the proper you know there's a very special very special section for that uh at the dump and so anyway just driving my tiny little car and they you drive up on this ramp where they weigh your car and then on the way out they weigh you again so you know like kind of if you hit the limit of weight and i know mine is kind of like how is the car heavier right after You've dumped everything out of it

It's like your food digesting in your stomach Has now made the vehicle heavier On the way out than it was going in Now here's my question to you Because I struggle with this If I get anything delivered that has been refrigerated Whether it's like prepped meals or other things You're saving all of those ice packs, right?

There's too many There's like two in each I can't part with those ice packs

I got them in the fridge in here in the studio I got them in the fridge in my house For some reason it's like free ice pack, even though that's the lowest level of ice pack. It's probably like the cheapest. It probably holds the freeze the least, et cetera. I'm like, you just gave me a free and free ice pack? This thing's gold, in the words of Rod

Blagojevich. Maybe that's what I'll do. I'll start shipping them to you. I'll use the coolers to keep them frozen. Dude, do you have a garage

fridge yet, or a garage freezer yet?

No, but we have a refrigerator freezer upstairs in our regular kitchen, then we have a smaller refrigerator freezer, but you know, like full

standing you need to get a garage freezer exclusively for these for these things uh and then also so you can go hang out there and sit in a folding chair and listen to the mariner game and yeah pull stakes out of there or something i don't i don't i don't even have a garage i'm in what used to be the garage at this house but i would i would kill for a garage

freezer for some reason yeah i think that we have some um practical issues with that plan unfortunately i don't think that's going to happen anytime soon but i'm happy to send them your way

all right let's thank some of our donors what you are listening to right now is 100% listener supported podcasting we do this five days a week 52 weeks a year and um you know this is not on the scale of a 59 million dollar remodel of the green lake community center but it is a full-time job for three people and it is a bit of a community center it is a you know what that's a really really great point andrew it is and um and uh we're so honored to get to do this for our jobs me and andrew and john just had a Amen.

meeting this week a tbtb meeting and we're starting to put some plans together for fun future events and engagements and things and anyway we're talking about things by the way

i think the listeners will be happy to hear this and also just shout out to our co-business boy john like i'm not giving away too much here but we actually had a meeting in which we were talking about plans for tbtl events that stretch further than a year out because we are as listeners have pointed out we have some pretty big things on the calendar a 5 000th episode is less than 500 practicing saying that now yes exactly i don't i think 3 000th was it must have been the worst um but you know 33 000th is gonna be for a lot of reasons uh you know we're we're reaching our we're not too far away from our 20th anniversary and anyway like you and i would have been like one month out from these from these dates and then just being like well what are we gonna do and trying to pull it off at the last minute john's got us looking ahead and honestly yeah i've spent the past couple of days pretty excited about some of the stuff we've been talking about

absolutely yeah no the state of our union is strong and it is because of folks like ali palmer in salt lake city utah of the utah palmers heck yeah uh-oh though i didn't see that coming what

is now i'm going to quiz you like you quiz me where are they from in utah because we can isn't

it like 2l yes it's very no it's not no no it's i'm doing that strictly from memory but it's very

close though you're um uh but it's to willie to willie no i messed it up i'm sorry palmers on this the day the day of my daughter's donor message yes thank you ali appreciate you thanks

Thanks also to Julie Lambert of Julian, California. I don't know if I've heard of Julian, California. I'm not sure either. I thought I knew about every California place. It's where all Julies come from. Yep, that is. It's the, let's see here, Julian, California. I knew it. If you didn't, I was going to. It's a census-designated place. We get that a lot. When there's a place I haven't heard of, it's usually a census-designated place in San Diego County. It was a gold rush boomtown in the 1870s after gold was discovered by Fred Coleman. Not the nighttime sports host, Freddie Coleman, but probably a different Fred Coleman.

Freddie Coleman. You miss those days? Freddie Coleman at night? Is he not on at night anymore? He probably is.

I just mean the days when you were listening to it.

I was about to say, if there's ever a time when I happen to turn on the AM sports radio station at around 1.37 AM and Freddie Coleman's voice doesn't greet me, it's going to be a very, very sad day.

Wow. Okay. Oh, well, come on. I've been out near Julian before I was doing a TV story down there once. I remember Becca and I went hiking and went up to Potato Chip Rock. I think we were staying in Ramona, which is not super far. Julian and Ramona sound like they should be together Don't you think Yes But anyway thank you very much

They have minds you can First of all I did realize something When you said you've never heard of Julian California And that this is like a designate Or whatever they call it Census designated place Do you think there's a chance That our listeners are sending us Burner cities now Because you've gotten a little bit weird In some of these thank you messages Like oh I'll be in your city Oh, I'll be in your city. Oh, come. You know, I'm going to go follow Julian around or Julie around.

Come through or you up are some of the things I've said during these messages.

So now people are just kind of like, you know what? I'll just give a city nearby or within my state or something.

Or maybe a totally different city, like something that's not even, you know, maybe, I mean, who knows? It's possible that Julie is in, like, Delaware. Yeah. Maybe she went to Julian to donate And then rushed back Throw us off the scent I can tell you that looking at the photos Of Julian, California and their little downtown area This is About as adorable as it gets I was looking at the cider shop I mean Just saying, maybe TBTL-a-thon What are we on? 17, 18? Julian, California Are you looking at these mines that it looks like you can tour?

I'm looking at the whole thing

And it just, again, it just looks at charming as all hell. So anyway, well, thank you, Julie. We appreciate that. Sarah Cantler is from Saraville, New York. See what I did there? I see. I was wondering what you were doing. I was wondering. I got confused for a second. You know it's a good joke when it involves a lot of explaining.

I was also doing some, sorry, I was also like kind of marking.

You're stuck in the cider house rules there in Julian, California.

No, I was back to the spreadsheet. But you've got to keep in mind, I'm maintaining a spreadsheet while we do these as well. I'm marking people's names. We're thanking them on this date. Some people say you didn't thank me. You're checking things off.

You're keeping us on task and on time and under budget. Thank you, Sarah Candler. In Brooklyn. Good list. Brooklyn, New York.

Yes, Brooklyn, New York. And now that is also a census designated? It is. It is.

The census has really designated it.

Yeah, designated the hell out of it.

Like, designated it hard. There are stats. Like, I want to say Brooklyn would be the, like, I'm just, I'm shooting from the hip here. But I feel like Brooklyn would be something like the, I don't know, 17th largest city in America by itself or something. I mean, it's a robust place. Thanks also to Ryan Johnson, who's in Arlington, Washington. Thank you, Ryan. Up there in the Skagit Valley, the beautiful Skagit Valley. I keep talking about pitchers and catchers and baseball, but we're only a couple of months out from the tulips coming into bloom there in the Skagit Valley. A lovely time of year. Thanks also to our friend Julie Higgins Who's in Portland, Oregon Now, I don't know if Julie Higgins Has been to Julian, California Where Julie Lambert is from Or allegedly is from

Well, my theory is all Julies Come from Julian And then they spread out across the land

Uh-huh, that's right The Julie diaspora Has brought Julie Higgins to Portland, Oregon And we appreciate it, thanks Julie And then we've got Chantal Leucht From Mill Creek Washington. That also sounds very cute. Lovely Mill Creek. That's where we used to have well, I don't know if it was technically Mill Creek, it might have been Bothell, but when we used to do all those events out there, old Chateau St. Michel wasn't too far from where Chantal is. Oh, okay. Alright, I didn't know that, for real. Yeah. Thank you Chantal. Thank you also to all of our donors for making TBTL possible. We would not be here doing this without you. Hello and welcome to Top Story. I was reading in the old New York Times this morning, and I saw that they had kind of a rundown of the kind of the things from CES, the Consumer Electronics Show, which just wrapped up in Las Vegas that they were the most interested in. I have to say, by the way, just generally speaking the new york times when it comes to the wire cutter column and like they've got an absolute stranglehold on me uh in that every time i'm going to buy something i check with wire cutter they put out a christmas like a gift guide this year that like was just it was catnip for luke's like every single thing it was really smart too because it wasn't a particular price point or a particular kind of item they just went through all the wire cutter staff and they just said like find something interesting that's under you know 50 bucks that that you're intrigued by and it was i thought the best gift guide that i saw all year it just had every single thing on there seemed really appealing for one reason or another um so this is what they published this morning the best of ces 2026 the products we want to get our hands on the most and pretty much i want to get my hands on all of these products andrew but the first one that they showed uh really really got me they call it the 2026 air to the blackberry it's called the clicks communicator and it comes out in late 2026 it's going to be 500 but it looks almost exactly andrew like one of those blackberries that did

you ever have a blackberry a tactile blackberry i did and you know i i was thinking about this this morning because i don't know i don't want to interrupt your story right now with this but i loved my blackberry and i think that's how i ended up getting into being an android person wasn't because i made some sort of decision back like i feel like if you're if you're getting your first smartphone today in 2026 there's a very clear choice of like oh i'm gonna go iphone direction or like the android but mine was very everybody had blackberries when i had my you know blackberries were it especially like as in new hampshire during primary season you said people like of course it's Just like very BlackBerry. And I had like a blood red BlackBerry sort of or oxblood color or whatever you call it, maroon or whatever. I loved that thing, and I loved the hard keyboard on it. And then when things were moving away from BlackBerrys and the hard keyboards, I didn't want to totally say goodbye to it, even though things were moving towards touchscreen. So that's when I got the G2. It was like an Android phone that we've talked about this before. It looked like kind of a thick just smartphone with just the screen, but then it would like sort of like a like a robot sort of slide and underneath it was hiding a hard keyboard. And I loved that phone so much. So anyway, and then once I bought that, then I was already sort of in the Google ecosystem or whatever. So this has me nostalgic for that. I'm also very interested in this device. I had heard about it in passing before you put it on the show sheet.

But I didn't realize that the simplification was part of it. I just heard people all a gaga about the hard keyboard because I'm a little bit of gaga about that, too.

This is the first, at least that I remember. We've established already that my memory is absolute junk sleep anymore. But this is the first I remember hearing about it. This clicks communicator thing. But it's yeah, it's very intriguing because I will say the number one thing that I don't like about. in fact I sent you and John a message this morning that was probably like just one giant run on sentence full of error errors and things and it's because I was trying to respond to an email but I was kind of running around my house and so I did voice to text I have never on my iPhone successfully typed up a text message or email that has not ended up having like a bunch of weird errors in it that I try to go back and fix and I got to do that thing where you're moving the cursor with your finger into the interior of like a paragraph to try to take a letter out and all this stuff like for all the advances of these phones that we have i do not think that the non-tactile keyboard the like touchscreen keyboard has ever rivaled a good old-fashioned like i had a blackberry i remember at npr first they got me i had like a um i want to say it might have even been well first it was i had a very un kind of unsexy like i forget who made the phone but it was just it did have a tactile keyboard but it was like a very basic cell phone even for the time and then i remember eventually getting like as i moved up like when i was a booker on day-to-day i had i got a cell phone that was like npr was paying the bill on which i was pretty psyched about but it was like again kind of clunky it wasn't a cool cell phone I might have gotten a Razr for like a brief amount of time. I might have gotten upgraded to a Razr. And then eventually I did when I was in D.C. and I was closer to the source of the cool equipment and I was more maybe vital to the overall on-air product that I was covering Congress. I finally got me a full-on BlackBerry. Like not one, it was just the kind that had the tactile keyboard and then the screen on it. And I just remember walking around D.C. typing on my blackberry feeling like this is all happening for me like i'm in dc i'm covering congress i have a blackberry and i'm axle rotting it i exactly welcome to the axe files i believe that is the name of his podcast yeah is he still doing that i forgot about the axe files i think so although was that a pod save product if it was i don't think he's doing it there anymore but he definitely was yeah the axe files was i think that was pretty popular there for a while but all that

is to say, I look at this thing... Are you sure it wasn't called How You Live in D Axelrod? I'm sorry to interrupt. I just thought that was too funny. I'm just axing.

You're the one person. I'm just axing questions with David Axelrod.

I do wonder about How You Live in J. Piven every now and then. All right, go ahead.

I checked on it. It is currently dormant. Okay. But anyway, all that is to say, I looked at this thing and I was very intrigued by the tactile keyboard because I do think that that is just still the way to go. And the, the, I mean, I don't, it's, it's not as, it's not as intentionally functionless as my light phone, which by the way, I broke out the other day. I didn't turn it on, but I was showing it to Alexander, Becca's nephew, because he was over here visiting. And he was looking at my kind of the bookshelf behind me here on the screen. And there was the, the light phone, if you remember, came in a book, like a fake book and you open it. And then in the middle, there's this cutout, and you pull out the light phone. And the book, it's very smart, actually. The whole book is just photographs of nature.

Oh, it's an actual book that you can flip through.

It's not just a fake book. Okay. Yeah, let's see here. Actually, I might be able to show you a little bit of it. This is the book it comes in. And the book, when you look at it, is just like nature photography. And the light phone in particular was very, very based on. Super basic. Here it is. I still have it. i was kind of wondering if this thing would even turn on anymore but like so this is the light phone it is it's not much bigger than a credit card no i mean it's it's it's it's very very very sort of understated if you will and the whole idea of the light phone was honestly i think one of the big problems for me is well a i was i'm addicted to my phone and b i actually think it was a little harder to set up than i thought but the idea of the light phone was that it would purely be something you could call people on so that if you were out in the world and you didn't want to have your smartphone with you, people could still get a hold of you. You were not completely out of touch, but you did not have the ability to scroll the internet at all. What about texting? I think you could probably text too. I could never get, I honestly could never quite get it to work with my, with my system. So that was, again, that was sort of part of the problem. Again, the underlying issue is that I have no self-discipline around my phone, but this clicks communicator thing this is what

This is Ivy Liskum, a senior updates writer at the Wirecutter, writing about this thing. If you, like me, long for a smartphone that isn't just a black slab, if you want a home screen that isn't actively trying to waste your time or if you really miss a physical keyboard, the Clix Communicator might be for you. The Communicator will run Android 16 with the Niagara Launcher, which is a distraction-busting interface that shows all of your apps in a clean scrolling list. Um, uh, let's see. And here's the thing, Andrew, I think that you and I both would really appreciate it. It features a 3.5 millimeter headphone jack.

I saw that. Yes. I mean, it's just like, it's, it's embracing the physicality that I miss about, um, this technology.

Remember how I was talking to you about how I was so excited that I have gotten my whole cable management life down to just USB-C. I had forgotten one critical thing. Headphone dongle. Oh yeah. My headphone dongle game. I've got to buy new headphone dongles because I have, you know, like corded AirPods that I could use in a pinch if my my wireless ones die. But I couldn't even plug those into my new phone because there's no headphone out.

And so you've had headphone dongles before, but they weren't USB-C. They were whatever. Yeah, they're like. You're not firewire, but whatever.

I actually have one right here. They go to my old school iPhone. So it's like, there's always one more freaking thing that's not compatible with whatever the new system is, you know? And like, I love the idea that this has just like a mini headphone out, like we were like God intended. And the fact that it's got the tactile keyboard and it's not, it's not the light phone. It's not, you're totally and completely like cut off from your apps. You can use, I saw one photo of it. That's like, you know, you can use all of your normal apps that you would like, you know, it's, it's showing Telegram, Slack, WhatsApp. gmail i wonder if what it doesn't do is well i mean slack is a social media i wonder if you can

get like tiktok on there i'm well that's what i that's why maybe that's the that would be a huge upside for me not having tiktok on it that's where it sounds like so it it it doesn't sound like it limits you like the whole point of the light phone was like literally you can't do a lot with it yeah i think and i'm just sort of catching up on this now and when and when i say i heard about this i mean i had just heard about this yesterday the day before i just saw people tweeting about like oh a hard keyboard that would be cool i like this idea of the physicality of the blackberry i didn't know about this the kind of distraction free pitch but i'm as i'm sorry i read what you sent me this morning and i'm looking at it now it seems like it's an it's like an os that you can sort of choose that it just sort of streamlines things it doesn't seem like it doesn't seem like it would block you from loading any app that you would want i think tell me if i'm wrong but just that the way it's laid out is a little bit more minimal and you're not going to scroll through a whole bunch of distracting apps to get to the one you need

yeah I'm trying to do this thing where I'm like I'm trying to also watch their clicks you know like demo video for it which they all look like they look like right out of tech bro hell the people behind this

oh are they on stage you mean

no I'm on their website site and i'm trying to with the sound muted and as they force me to watch by the way an ad for hellofresh autoloads before you can watch their video which just feels like the most 2026 thing of all time it's like basically like one you know sort of scaled lifestyle disruptor hellofresh leading into another like behavioral disruptor of this phone i don't know it all feels very silicon valley to me but like yeah i'm trying to like look at their little video and see kind of what it allows and doesn't allow for i i think i guess you're right i mean

it's uh it looks like it's just this sort of it's almost like software i think and unfortunately i think they're getting a lot of um i think they're getting a lot of attention right now because of ces and it looks like maybe their website is down but it's very specifically this thing just called the niagara launcher and i'm on their side now and i think i could put that on my phone right now

if i wanted to it's just well that was the thing if i got this you and i my buddy would be uh android bros yeah in a way um yeah i feel like it would be really hard for you no no no i'm fine

with that i just i feel like it would be really hard for you just to get out of the environment of this of of all the apple and i stuff i agree except for this is the thing that they're saying

in the new york times article is that the the use case for this is not necessarily to replace your primary phone it's in addition to your primary phone although they're saying you could conceivably use it as your primary phone but like again i've already got one lining up, there's a graveyard of dead soldier attempts at me modifying my behavior. with hardware purchases but like yeah the idea is you buy this thing you you have your regular phone but you carry this thing around instead of your regular phone a lot of the time because it is better you know for certain things and also maybe helps break the addiction a little bit which to me also again i mean i should have researched a little bit more this i guess really the question is what does this niagara thing allow you to do and not do like it's definitely streamlined it's definitely supposed to just there's something that on this on this clicks communicator phone there's also like a light on the side that turns red when you're getting messages that you've deemed to be from important people versus non-important they're trying really hard to like figure out ways to like only give you the information that you need that's relevant to you or important to you minus all the other noise um so that you could be less on your phone i guess but again i don't know if I could like if I could if you can swipe up on this phone like I don't know if maybe part of the tactile keyboard is this doesn't let you swipe yeah that would be a big that would be a big change for that would that would impact the kind of uh you know social media you could go on

right yeah and the screen itself is just sort of less conducive to that because it's more of a square screen right it's not as long by the way I did I just downloaded this app to my phone I'm And a clean home screen to let you focus on what matters. So I have like a Samsung S25 or whatever they're up to now. So I just have a regular Samsung phone. But yeah, basically, I don't know if you can see this, Luke, and it doesn't help for the listeners. But like right now, it's like, hey, let's get started here. What are the apps that you want on your home screen? Am I seeing TikTok as one of the top ones? Let's see here. I don't know. It might be based on, yeah, it says suggestions based on the apps I have. It's interesting, it starts with WhatsApp, which is one of my least used apps, except for this morning when we got a note from across the pond from Bean. Instagram, which I don't use really hardly at all anymore unless I need to check on a TVTL thing. YouTube, TikTok, Blue Sky, Chrome, Reddit, Spotify, Gmail. So it's only suggesting things that are on my phone. And it's just saying, hey, what are the – it says we recommend you choose eight apps. And then those will be the eight that you see when you start your phone. So I'm not going to actually run this on my phone. I don't think I really need it or want it right now, but it's interesting. So the distraction thing is a little bit separate from the keyboard thing, it sounds like. They're not even the same companies. It's just that they're kind of recommending using these two things together. It's a little bit strange that they're kind of, well, to use the word conflating again.

How about this, Andrew? I'll read you what the AI overview of the Niagara operating system is. In essence, Niagara Launcher doesn't run different types of apps. It changes how you access your existing apps, promoting a less distracting, more efficient experience for your everyday tools like messaging, social media, and productivity apps. So, there you go. Basically, here's what I could see myself doing if I bought this Clix communicator phone. Just having a more cumbersome experience in Niagara trying to scroll TikTok.

Yeah, you just did a little bit. You know what I mean? It's like putting your booze up on a slightly higher shelf.

That's a perfect analogy. That's exactly what will happen to me. I'll just be like walking around with this other phone, just mindlessly scrolling while I'm waiting to get my hair cut.

And I feel like, yeah, not to belabor this, but so this Niagara thing is not available for the iOS right now. It is an Android only thing. But I feel like, again, I feel like we're sort of talking about different things here. If you really want to try to play around with different like sort of systems like this that might change or, as they say, streamline or simplify your iPhone experience, there must be things in the app store that do this on an iPhone as well. Maybe not exactly, or not the one that's being written up right now, but I bet you there's a million different kinds of little launcher apps that'll change the way

you interact with your apps if you wanted to. Right. I mean, it would almost be worth... I mean, I just got this new iPhone, and I'm in a non-contract contract with them for a long time, andrew but you know you want the family everything plan it is it's a one-time fee that you pay once a year um but like uh i could see just purely for the texting factor i could almost see this clicks communicator just being my phone like just being the phone that i carry around because i because again primarily what i do on my phone other than mindlessly staring at at tiktok and Instagram and things like that is texting people and I find the text to this day I find the texting on my iPhone to be endlessly frustrating and like so this would potentially solve for like what I would list as my main issue with my iPhone which is I hate the touchscreen text function so it would almost be worth considering this just being my phone. maybe I don't know but it's tempting as far as it having governors on it what's that it's a

beautiful little piece of technology the physical technology is just so appealing but I'm also

wondering can you place phone calls with it oh I assumed you could but I mean you can text with it so I'm guessing it talks to your existing plan in your cell carrier your cell carrier like I'm you know what I mean like it's it's it's it's gonna be I'm guessing that there's a basically if you have because they're the way they're promoting it is as like an addition to your regular cell phone so presumably your regular cell phone you could just you'd use the stuff that's going on in your regular cell phone in this thing whether it's your phone number your but like what you don't see anyone doing is holding this thing up to their ear and talking into it which is also a function

that i do kind of need on my phone a very quick google makes it seem like yes you can make phone calls on this thing if i'm reading the internet correctly which i don't want to be

i don't want to be i'm not going to be the earliest of adopters of this like they're going put a 200 deposit down now and in late 2026 you can be one of the first ones to get this i'm not going that hard on it but i'm going to keep my eye on it because i don't know if i see people using these and if it seems like it's actually kind of i don't know again purely for the ability to text you and john and feel that feel that satisfying click of the keyboard under my thumbs as I'm sending y'all messages, that could actually improve my cell phone user experience enough that it might be worth it.

And seeing the keys that you use the most because they're worn out. Get worn down a little bit. Yeah, why is the XXX always worn out?

Remember the BlackBerry Pearl that had the track ball? Oh, mine had the track ball in the middle of it, I think. I guess I did too on mine, probably. Yeah, right in the middle. I had the double wide. Was yours a pearl shape? like it was a kind of more vertical than sort of horizontal because i i had the one that had the full keyboard and kind of more rectangular screen it was kind of a squat looked like a shield or

something no i think i just had a classic looking blackberry um i'm looking up which one it is but i don't know if it would mean much to you but i don't think it was double wide i'm not sure but it was like kind of it was definitely near the end of blackberry's run right like i remember like It was an exciting BlackBerry, but it also, you know, when I went to get my next phone, BlackBerrys were already kind of out of fashion. So I don't know which exact model I had. Can I just tell you one thing, and I promise you this is not going to derail us totally. I just want to just say one quick thing. You know that, well, you talked about your garbage bin pickup this week and how you had a scare that you didn't take them out to the curb, but then you remembered, oh, my new system is I leave them at the curb, which is good. We all can associate with garbage anxiety. Something is happening and has been happening the past couple of days that I didn't mention to you, which is my neighborhood is going absolutely batshit because apparently the recycling truck this week was like big garbage day, as I call it, which means it was recycling as well as the other weekly things. Recycling is only once every two weeks. anyway everybody on this text or email chain i should say is just going crazy because nobody's recycling was picked up and people are angry and people are saying that you know i called mine in they came to pick it up but they skipped my neighbor still they're like what do we all have to call and then like for some reason i don't know why but this sounds almost biblical my recycling was picked up this week i mean these are people who are all around me based on my understanding it feels like did maybe maybe putting the blood of the lamb on yes i don't know what it was but i'm just like watching everybody like around me for it's like it's like everybody around me is being eaten by sharks and i'm just floating in the middle just like playing cards with the sharks i don't really know if that stands up but anyway it's just very nice not to be part of this drama

Huh. And you obviously did your thing the way you always do, and presumably your neighbors did their thing the way they always do. Was there a rapture? Was the recycling truck taken up?

Yeah.

Because that person driving it was so holy that they are, you know, and are we about to enter the tribulation? But, yeah, that's very strange why you got a different outcome than everybody else.

I'm guessing. I don't really know the roots, and it's, you know, I have a neighbor who listens to the show, and we were trading notes, and we have different garbage collectors. as we know that so and you know it kind of depends on what side of the street you're on i don't think the same truck is going to do both sides of the same street they probably have routes where it's kind of like mapped out more intricately so somehow i must have just been like on some route that they passed us took our bin emptied it but everybody around me is in some sort of purgatory

i just need to figure out why i thought lentil because i know lentil is a bean and i know mantle we've talked about mantle recently like to take up the mantle but also like the mantle is the thing over a fireplace but i swear to god i have this

why i would believe my memory at all considering the ralph nader situation is is like i feel like i'd heard this word because what you were referring to is like when the israelites put blood over their doorway um during the passover you know in egypt and everything comes back to egypt and uh and uh and and things of the um the what do you call it the southern hemisphere oh

yeah the global south i was trying to talk and watch everything comes back to the global south

today but like you know in the in the bible the the israelites they put blood over their doorway and so the angel of death passes over and doesn't kill their firstborn but instead kills the firstborn of the egyptians and it's part of why pharaoh is like all right get out of here get out of here but like is there something called a lentil no i had no idea what you're talking about i know the lentil soup i'm googling i'm getting nothing on this but like i swear to god i've heard i've heard lentil maybe the maybe it's very possible that someone when i was a kid just didn't know the difference between mantle and lentil and was saying lentil but i swear to god there's some kind of lentil every search that i do gets me right back to the uh the the the bean

a lentil yeah well i gotta say when you lentils last night so good lentil soup is fantastic the

best i hated it growing up and now i freaking love it such an interesting texture too right

like if i were to describe it it wouldn't sound good like the lentil in a lentil soup is almost a dry texture, even though it's in soup. I'm still trying to figure out which BlackBerry I have, but I need to close that tab as well. But not the Pearl. For the record, I had no idea. When you Google BlackBerry Pearl, you don't get that. You're not seeing. Let me look it up. BlackBerry Pearl. I feel like I would have remembered. Oh, no, no. That's more like the shape of a regular phone, huh? Okay, so you have the double wide like I did, I bet. Okay, yeah, just like a fatty. And I don't know what that one was called. No, and with the little track ball, like I'm seeing it there. I mean literally, this is one that I saved. It is in my box of antiquated technology in the closet. It's just a closet that's really, really difficult to get into. So I can't leave the show to go pull it out right now. But maybe when I'm back.

Here I go once again with the email. Every week, I hope that it's from a female. No, man, it's not from a female.

All right, Andrew. Because I can now once again log into my TBTL email, that is Luke at TBTL.net, I actually I've got a message that I saw I guess this was sent to both of us a little while ago but you and I listened to, it was sent by listener Ben and you and I both listened to, I want to say the first five seconds of this

I think you played the first two seconds

and then we're like, oh, let's save it for the show and let me see if I can find I want to get the exact message, it's from listener Ben who said am i proud of well first of all the subject line is old beautiful bastard santa must be one old beautiful bastard to have sent this email uh ben says am i proud of myself for making this definitely not but was it the right thing to spend 54 minutes doing absolutely the fruit of my labor is attached that's all we know and when when we clicked play on this we heard um you know about two seconds of what sounded like ODB, as in Old Dirty Bastard, as in Dirt McGirt, as in Osiris, as in Big Baby Jesus. By the way, sorry if I sound distracted. It appears that they are towing a military submarine down the river in front of me, which is kind of crazy. Like, you don't see that every day. No, you don't. Yeah, it's got a conning tower and everything.

They're towing a submarine?

Yeah, but it's like a regular—it's not big. It's not like a nuclear sub or a trident. It looks like a kind of a mini, and it's being towed by what looks like a non-military towboat. That's fun. Is it James Cameron? You know what? It's James. It's Jimmy Cameron. I should have asked that. Fresh off of Avatar 7, The Smell of Water.

I named the show that.

So we listened to two seconds of this, and it sounded like maybe a remix of the ODB song Baby I Like It Raw. maybe, Andrew, with you talking about things. Now, you, based on two seconds of listening, have a bit of a theory on this. What is that?

Well, no, all I know is it looks like in the show sheet that you think this is going to be a tribute to me, because it sounded like we heard a drop of my voice maybe at the beginning, but I was just saying, I'm not convinced that this is just me on here. It could be both of us. That was all I wanted to say about it. We have no idea what this is.

I think it's you saying things you don't like.

that's my theory

based on two seconds of listening Andrew, it's been a tough day for me on being real wrong

this isn't a test of your memory this is just a prediction

but i'm just saying generally there's you know this is it's just such a hosting these shows it's such a uh what's the word i'm looking for it's so fluky and it's so momentum based and i feel like my momentum is really off today so all right here we go this is from listener ben this

is old beautiful bastard bananas but look at this thing i don't like bananas but look at this thing Hold on a second, Luke.

The painiest little bite of it, is there meaning in this? It tasted like God.

I like them raw. I like them raw. It's so satisfying. I like them raw.

They're weird, man.

Hey, that's even pretty good. Wow, you were right. I'm sorry I was talking over it. I thought that we had a bad connection, but that was the actual sound of the audio when was kind of buzzy at the beginning so i was sort of ruining that i wonder if we should play it again in the clear all right i don't think you could tell that i was talking over top of it i couldn't

hear you but let's just because ben did put what did he say over 48 minutes into this which is longer than we've put into any pre-production in months so here we go i don't like bananas

but look at this thing i took the tiniest little bite of it um is there meaning in this it tasted

like god i like them raw okay so um i like them raw it's so sad i like them raw

they're weird man okay that's legit really good then he put some reverb on you did you hear that like that yeah i mean there's a lot of production in there there's a ton of like i mean that's impressive that's gonna be my new ringtone on my blackberry pearl that i'm buying when i call you it'll play that. Only way do you call me. No, nice job, Ben. Thank you for sending that in. It was 54 minutes, by the way. Feel free to throw any 54 minutes that you want at any other audio production projects, because that was very good, dude. That was legit.

Really, really good. Maybe make some intros for the show, get me out of a few jams. I wanted to mention, we won't play them today, but I do have a few voicemails that were sent in via email, and I always, or like voice memos that we can share. I haven't even previewed them yet but it looked like they were kind of, some of them have been in my inbox for a while and I encourage people to send us voice memos if that's easier than calling the voicemail line. You can email them to me andrew at tbtl.net but I don't want to encourage people to do that and then you think that it's just like going into a void so my apologies. I got a couple here that seem to be, have some promising topics like it looks like another person had maybe a scary moment. We got a voicemail from somebody who had to call in after I had a scary moment with Bingo putting his tail in a candle. So I'm wondering what story that's going to prompt from a listener. So we'll try to get to some of those next week.

Right, but also, yeah, back to what you were saying. If you have a thought, if you see something, say something, and then send that something to us. Like, just rip off a voice memo. That's kind of fun audio texture for the show. Maybe it lowers the feeling of pressure of trying to compose the perfect, you know, email or whatever. So yeah, just send it along. We love to get those things. Luke at tbtl.net, Andrew at tbtl.net. And we'll get those into the show. Well, my friend, we've done it. We've finished up an entire week of TBTL. And it was a fun one. It's nice to be back.

It is nice to be back. I was thinking about that yesterday. It's been a fun week.

Yeah, these shows have really flown by. If I can always, if we can go to, if I can go to the Howard Stern schedule, one week on, two weeks off, I'm always going to be coming in with vim and vigor. All right. Thank you for listening, everybody. We'll be back here on Monday with more imaginary radio for all of you. In the meantime, everyone have a great weekend. Stay safe wherever you might be. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

Power out.