Young MC

Luke Burbank, Podcast Host

By Matthew Halverson

The way that I feel really comfortable is when I’m pretty prepared, I have a real plan, and then I can go on little flights of fancy. A guy like Adam Corolla is so amazing to me because he literally just turns on the microphone and starts talking. And what comes out, in my opinion, is interesting stuff. I’m a fan of his. I’m sort of in awe of him. I’m not one of those guys. I like to know what I’m trying to do.

I think people think I’m a really off-the-cuff kind of guy. Occasionally I am, but with the show, I never just turn on the mic without knowing what I’m going to say. If people saw the show sheet for every show, I think they’d be a little surprised. There’s a real idea behind what we’re trying to do and what the topics are going to be.

We’ve had a lot of bands in now, and we’ve had a lot of pretty legit guests. They come to the house and they have coffee. It immediately signals to them that it’s not your typical radio thing—but it’s not so janky that it doesn’t feel real. The room has just enough legitimacy to it that they don’t think that it’s some elaborate ruse to hit on them or that I’m going to Silence of the Lambs them.

The show is often tedious, but it’s sometimes thrilling. And that’s, I think, kind of cool. I’ve never claimed—nor would I ever claim—that the show is, from start to finish, totally fascinating. But I do think that if you listen to the show for a couple weeks, you will have a few moments of actual, real joy, which is really hard to create.

When you’re listening to talk radio, there’s all these sounders like, “You’re listening to Hot Talk!” and there’s lots of commercials and there’s lots of news people. There’s a lot of stuff that from an aural standpoint creates a feeling of, “Oh, these people are up on a mountain top, and I’m down here.” But when you’re listening to the podcast, it’s like I’m going, “The cat just walked across me, and I’m trying to find this Bill Murray sound effect that I want,” and that’s, like, part of the show.

When we got fired, we did our last radio show on a Friday night, September 11, which, by the way, will now give people a new reason to mourn 9/11—and I would say a bigger one. Too soon? But anyway, we went off the air on a Friday, and we did the first podcast that Monday. I just felt like what I had to do was keep doing it every day, keep making the show as good as I possibly could, keep trying to get legitimate, interesting guests. And if I treated it like a real thing and did it five days a week and I never slacked off and I never phoned it in, I felt like this could actually work and be something.

My mom has a great sense of humor. She doesn’t take herself seriously at all. She’s, essentially, an insane person. The stuff she says is so crazy, but she’s really great at laughing at herself. If I was dying and someone called my mom and said, “You can save him right now by activating his podcast,” she wouldn’t even know where to start. She’s been on the show before, and she says on the show, “How do I hear this? Am I on the radio right now?” And I’m like, “Mom, it hasn’t been a radio show for like eight months.” She is so confused about everything.

I have to be very careful to be really open and honest about things so that it’s fun and interesting and engaging but also pull back at just the right moment, before it gets to be oversharing. I’ve actually never had any friends or family get mad at me about anything that’s been said about them on the show. I don’t know if that’s because they’re terrified of me because I know karate. I actually don’t know karate.

I’ll take reliably mediocre over reliably disastrous any day.

It’s empirical fact that I’m not very photogenic. That’s OK, I don’t think it makes me a bad person. It’s just not my deal. In real life, I’m devastatingly handsome, but in pictures, not as much.

I’m a really big fan of the Howard Stern show, and I think a lot of people on the west coast who didn’t grow up listening to him have a really flawed perception of the show because the stuff that gets famous is when he has a porn star on and he’s throwing bologna at her butt or whatever. When E! made a TV show out of Howard Stern, they just picked the most visually salacious things. But the real genius of that show is more when Howard is arguing with Robin over whether the gift that she brought for his kid’s birthday was nice enough, considering what he brought to her nephew’s this or that. It’s that stuff that I thought was so good about that show. And I was thinking, Why can’t TBTL be the Howard Stern show of its day, of its era?


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