Muse

I don't think it's overstating anything to say that I was the first female to bring notoriety to our field. As Minnie the Moose, the Vernon Community College baseball team's mascot, I once held the splits for the entire length of an extra inning baseball game in spite of excruciating pain And a severe severing of my adductor longest muscle that eventually required four hours of surgery and added two and a half inches to my left leg, forcing me to retire. I wrote a tale documenting that journey. A moosing grace, a mascot's journey to God and success in real estate.

TBTL!

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

This need you have to be the smartest guy in the room is off-putting.

It isn't so much about what it is altogether. It's more about the modulation and what it is once it starts. It's a little bit of a groove. Can you say apple?

Apple.

Can you say banana?

Apple. You say something to someone enough times and eventually he internalizes it. The system works.

All right. Hello. Good morning and welcome, everyone, to a Tuesday edition of TBTL. This right here, this is the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Explaining how a show works means the show's already in trouble. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Here we go again. Coming to you from the Nest Broadcast Center, high in the sky, above Portland, Oregon, where I am happy to report I'm having a great Tuesday morning. I think the key is that last night I had the presence of mind to do the dishes and get them all clean and drying and, you know, handled.

Clean as your mama's forehead.

I think sometimes I will go to bed and there will be dirty dishes and then I wake up And it just feels like one more thing that is already sort of challenging me in the early part of my day. I also pre-made the coffee, had that ready to go. I have these new coffee filters that have, they have, I'm sure that most of the people listening to this right now already knew about this. This is total news to me. They make these coffee filters that have little lines as to how many cups of coffee you could make based on the coffee grounds you've now poured into the filter. Problem solved. So I had the coffee ready to go. Dishes were done. Randy was working away, doing all his morning rituals, and then went back to his home successfully. It's just a real beautiful Tuesday morning here as we find ourselves at episode 3,345 in a collector series. Let the fun begin. There was one thing, I guess, that was a tiny bit of a disappointment for me. So, I feel like there is this kind of unspoken thing that has developed between the joggers of Portland. which is if you have on a mask or a gaiter as they might call it I went to a running store, I bought a couple of gaiters they're those little neck things if you jog past someone and they also have their mask up or their gaiter up, you give them a wave and if you jog past someone who doesn't have face covering, you don't give them a wave it's the way that all of us who are following the rules let each other know that we appreciate each other And today, a guy who didn't have a mask on waved at me.

How dare you people even say that?

And I was very upset because I feel like he violated the unspoken code of what we're doing here in the month of January in the year of our Lord, 2021. All right, let's get to the plan for today's show. an update on what is going on with the stock price of GameStop. Can somebody tell me what the hell is going on? GameStop, of course, that place you can buy video games in the mall or a strip mall somewhere. What's happened is a battle between some of the sharpest minds on Wall Street and some of the sharpest minds in a subreddit where they decided they wanted to stick it to the man.

financially uh and those who had doubted game stop and its viability as a company um we don't usually talk about video games on the show because i don't know anything about them and we also definitely don't talk about taking a short position on a company's stock and we're going to do both of those things today and i i just want to tell you i'm going to make a lot of mistakes what an idiot so sharpen up your pencils and get ready to send some strongly worded emails about things that i got wrong because it's going to happen oh and speaking of video games won't stop there we will take a moment to reflect on the technological innovation that was the nintendo gun used for duck hunt which um kind of has an interesting story actually as to its development it used a technology that was invented in the 1930s if you can believe that so we'll do all that plus emails and v-mails and we will of course do it all with the help of this guy the longest running co-bro of the show he is known for his drawings of tall ships um he is andrew walsh and he's joining me right now from the roosevelt neighborhood of seattle washington

good morning my friend good morning annie prue lives in port townsend by the way the writer

who we are yesterday are you being very serious right now i got a note that i just saw here from

listener genie uh annie prue came up on the show yesterday and for some reason i always thought she was a new hampshire writer uh doing some very sloppy googling on the show yesterday it looked like actually she claims washington state as her home state um and this note from genie says uh annie prue lives in port townsend i know her she's pretty cool pretty cool writer of the shipping news and broke back mountain and her latest barskins barskins that's from genie how

How did this legendary writer escape my radar when I also lived in Port Townsend? Population 5,000. There are not that many people there you'd think you would know if the person who wrote the shipping news and Brokeback Mountain was living there.

You could have been stealing your mail when you worked out of the post office.

I stole so much other mail. It would have been nice if I was at least stealing it from someone who might be getting some residual checks. You know who's male I didn't steal But who also lives there Is an artist named Ricky DuCornet For whom What does Kristen Schall do On The Last Man on Earth all the time? The thing for which whom?

Yes Whatever her character She bends herself into a pretzel To try not to end a sentence with a preposition I believe

The thing for which whom The person for which whom The song Ricky Don't Lose That Number was written about oh right how's that for a dazzling deed do you consider yourself dazzled i do remember ricky don't lose that number the ricky also lives in port towns and we got annie

prue ricky du corne uh that's it that's it i'm looking for do we have well i definitely have um you know post coitus jibber jabber i like this from last man oh i'm famished um after doing the

nasty i need to have some beans oh you want some beans babe no no i'm just gonna just

sit here and you know try to figure out what just happened

actually you have some constructive criticisms for you you should talk more i like to hear what my man has to say just get in there with some sexual jibber-jabber it will be welcomed

when when you said that you just said i want you i mean you said the words post-coitus jibber jabber and i forgot that that was in any way a reference to the last man on earth and i just thought andrew has said the quiet part loud andrew has just shared something with us about his real

life that he didn't mean to share i hadn't heard that in so long i actually had coffee almost come out my nose you know that feeling where it kind of gets up there but it doesn't quite it doesn't quite breach that's what i'm dealing with right now i'm glad it's not it makes me want to go read

makes me want to go revisit that show i feel like it did get you know it's look i have never uh written uh a uh a hilarious uh comedy television show so i can't even imagine how challenging it is to keep the thing kind of working but keep advancing the plot. It did get a little, you know, kooky for me towards the end, but just the first season of that show when it's mostly Will Forte and Kristen Schaal is just, it's just perfection.

Yeah, I had a little bit of trouble latching on to his character, especially as it went on, like as Morn was supposed to be.

like The Last Man on Earth, and it's like more and more women are still on Earth, and it's can he get laid, and I was kind of like, I don't care if he gets laid. Like I found it to be pretty exhausting after a while, but some of the writing was so amazing. I didn't care for the fact that everything revolved around whether or not this guy got laid.

Yeah, he was complicated as a character because it wasn't like he was – we weren't really rooting for him. He was sort of the worst person on the show. Yeah. Right, in a lot of ways.

As a character, yeah.

Yeah. Yeah. No, I mean, great as a performer. But but yeah, his character was constant. See, I think I identified with this character because I'm also a terrible person. And I have a lot of I act impulsively. And then I think that was probably the wrong call. And of course, his character thinks that there's one other person on planet Earth. And it's old sexual jibber jabber, Kristen Schaal. So he's sort of like, all right. And then, of course, he realizes that they're not the last two people on Earth, but he's kind of already sort of been locked down or has locked it down and there's something about that and I don't even mean just in terms of like sexual partners but just in terms of like remorse over acting impulsively is something I know from so maybe I think and plus I've been known to grow a beard out on one side of my face and be clean

shaven on the other side that's the other thing and you filled your swimming pool with excrement

I believe it is it my life has been the story of a man with a pool filled with human excrement

I've been I don't know. I don't know if you have anything that you would like to jibber jabber about here, Luke, because if you do, I would say go for it. Otherwise, I will throw my ego on the I guess the the sacrificial altar of TBTL content, because this is reminding me of like talking about Last Man on Earth. And Kristen Schaal is reminding me of something else I've been watching lately, which then reminds me of a video game I downloaded lately, which is all I think that I'm slipping into some sort of disturbing midlife crisis.

Honestly, if you want to talk video games, this is the show for it. This is going to be wall-to-wall video game talk, co-hosted by someone who hasn't played a video game since maybe he played Tetris on his sister Sarah's Nintendo DS. So, yes, this is the show for it. And also, anytime you set it up by saying you're going to throw your ego on the sacrificial table of TBTL content, I am very intrigued. So, please, sacrifice away.

I don't know how good this is. Well, frankly, here's how I will set it up, though. These are two – well, one, Genevieve knows about now. These are two things that are going on in my personal life that I am trying to keep from Genevieve. I never keep things from Genevieve. And I'm not keeping them from her because, like, I mean, I'm only keeping them from her Because she will just mock me And she even knows I even told her yesterday I'm like yeah there's something I'm keeping from you And I'm trying to figure out if I should tell you Before you catch me in the act or not One of which is I'm watching a cartoon Now here's the deal I think this cartoon I think a lot of our listeners Might have a lot of context for this cartoon Like kind of in the geek culture realm And can tell me more about it And maybe be my tutors or guides into this world But you know how This is so silly So many people know so much more about this But when you and I were kids, maybe getting a little bit older, maybe as teenagers, they released the Batman animated series. Right. And that has been, I believe, a pretty big I think a pretty big cult hit amongst geeks.

geeks do you know it was the one that was yes i do i do remember i don't think i watched it but it was it was um i guess i would say it was very heroic towards batman as opposed to the like adam west tv show that was very campy this was one i remember where batman was very cool and it was very stylized yeah right i think of the same way i believe so and i believe it also

had a lot of like kind of winks and nods to both the culture of people who follow this stuff closely and i think it was sophisticated in a way while it wasn't necessarily for adults my my memory is that it was sophisticated in a way with like an again winks and nods and inside jokes and what have you but again i wasn't a huge fan i just kind of knew of this and probably a lot of what i'm going to say is wrong here i feel like as time went on i kept on hearing in the uh around the the fringes of my of my pop culture knowledge people talking about either reboots of that or other shows that have been like kind of created as uh short series maybe joker based shows that are kind of in that same style and i've just it's not something that i really get into i liked batman a lot at the time but never the animated stuff but i i was looking at my hbo max icon on my um ipad the other day or whatever we call it my tablet and i was like yeah you know i don't watch enough of this HBO stuff that we pay for. What's on here? What's good, my friends? And I must have been Googling around or something, and I saw somebody say that

there's the new anime it was new now it's like a year or more old but there was like an animated series based on the character of harley harley quinn right uh-huh i don't even know how to say that out loud i know that the suicide squad movies were about her and who's that um ingenue who plays her uh margot robbie i believe margot robbie yeah that's range by the way when

you play harley quinn and tanya harding in about a one to two year span i got a tip of the cap i

I never saw that either. But anyway, I saw somebody make the claim in some like Verge article or something that this Harley Quinn animated series that had either moved over to HBO or originated on HBO is one of some of the best TV that they've seen in all year or something. I was like, really? But I was just like in that mode where I got nothing else going on. Sure. Let's see what this cartoon is about. I thought it was still geared towards kids. They make it very clear with like the first line of dialogue that it is not. It is a they they they filthy up the language immediately, maybe as a shot across the bow to let people know this is not for kids. And it's, again, kind of in that style that you're picturing from that that original cartoon. Only like I say, it's incredibly violent. It's some of the jokes are kind of adult. It's got a hell of a cast like Tony Hale plays Dr. psycho a character i didn't know about um i believe you have jason alexander playing like these are oh and this is why i just thought of it now is i thought for sure harley quinn was being voiced by um by our girl kristin shawl but it's not it's the woman from how i met your nerd yeah yeah yeah i always call that how i met your nerd to the point where i can't remember the actual

name of the show that i only know that because i'm on the wikipedia page by the way yeah and

what's her what's her main show it's uh well well well it's the moment i mean i think that

kaylee cuoco is is having a bit of a moment as well because uh she was uh well known for um uh the big bang theory big bang now she's in a new show that's getting a lot of buzz as well about a flight attendant yeah who gets drunk and i believe ends up sort of hooking up with um maybe Maybe it's somebody from the flight, and then wakes up, and that person is dead. And the story begins. And I have actually really wanted to start watching this show and haven't had a chance. I think I'm going to start.

Genevieve's been watching, and she says that she's been pacing herself on it. She says that that flight attendant show is so good that she doesn't want to gobble it up too quickly. And every time she's watching it, she seems delighted. So I want to go back and watch that, too. But anyway, she does the voice of Harley Quinn. This is the thing. And now I just I think I might have just heard the door open in the other room. So I don't know if Genevieve can hear me. But this is my big secret is because like one of these days, Genevieve is going to have is going to walk in on me watching a cartoon of superheroes, especially like in Harley Quinn is kind of like, you know, she's at least in the movie, she's pretty sexualized. Yeah. And so like then it's kind of like, wait, what do you hey, 44 year old boyfriend, what what you watch what you watching in here? And it just seems like the type of thing where like Genevieve and I have a very good relationship. But I feel like this is the kind of thing where she finds out it'll just come up a lot at parties. I'll be mocked mercilessly for it. And also, I don't know how much I like it.

Like, I'm kind of I've watched maybe really or I've watched four episodes so far. That's not where I saw this going. I thought you were going to tell me that it's so, so good.

I think there are moments in it that I think I get one really good laugh out of it per show. And then there's a bunch of stuff in between where I'm like, I don't know. is Genevieve does Genevieve know I'm watching this um and then and then it'll make me laugh again and again it's fun to hear oh Ron Funches plays a character that I just met so there's it's fun to like Rachel Dratch is part of it oh I didn't notice her so anyway that's one of the embarrassing things that I've been doing lately is watching a cartoon and the other is you know how I used to um and by the way I invite people to write in because I'm sure like this is hardcore nerd culture something that I always and I think that's part of it by the way I wish I were more into it i love yes universes and creating universes and people who get really into them and i just never really did but it seems like something that but you can i say something

that i hope you you and you interpret in the spirit in which it's intended you seem like you would be into that stuff but you're not and i think that's an interesting tension in your life because you do tend to be i think when you get into something you want to know a lot about it i think of you as being sort of a completist you're not you don't strike me as a dilettante um and also you like to i just feel like if i didn't know you and i and i sort of lined up the things that somebody told me about you i would be like that could be a person who would really be into you know anime or these worlds these universes that get created that people get

really into and yet you don't have that in you at all in my experience of knowing you yeah and

it's one of those things where like i'll follow somebody on instagram and they will you know mention something and you don't quite get it so you google it and then you realize oh they're all into this thing and then it makes me want to get into that thing and then i'm like well this just isn't my thing you know like it doesn't stick to me at the but the interesting tension in all that

Is that our listeners are people Who are into stuff This is that for our listeners This show So this is a show created By a couple of fellas Listened to by people who tend to Get very into things And really want to like Be totally up to speed on Each episode Each day of the week that we put it out And also our people who really know a lot about A lot of stuff that we would consider To be geek culture maybe And yet you and I are not really in that world When you want to unplug, you watch Monk And I watch Dateline NBC Yeah, right So much less I mean, Monk actually is much more defensible than Dateline NBC But it's like, you know, it'd be much better if we were sort of fully understanding the universe of I don't know, fill in the blank Whatever cult show people get really into that you and I are not getting into Right, exactly

In fact, I mean, I don't know if this is the place to have this conversation or not, but my relationship – I would say the closest thing that I have to a, let's say, hardcore TBTL listener's relationship to TBTL, mine would be for the Dan Lebitard show, right? Which I realize my Lebitard-iversary must have just happened because I'm kind of – they're talking about leading up to Super Bowl week this year, and I remember I started listening right before Super Bowl week last year. I can't believe. I mean, again, I mean, this is covid times, but like I just cannot believe that was only a year ago. But I kind of started listening to that show. You and the stew bot and other people had been recommending it for years and it took a long time for me to get into it. But then once I got into it about a year ago and I got into my routine with it, I became very much a completist. Right. And and and somewhat even obsessive about listening to every episode. And now they're going through this huge change as far as like, you know, their employment, their independent show right now, shopping themselves around and still kind of doing their podcast and they're no longer affiliated with ESPN. And you would think that all of this would make the show even more interesting because it's all this like behind the scenes, you know, gabbing and the chains are off as far as what they can talk about and what maybe I should say the guardrails are off as far as what they can talk about and what they can't talk about. But somehow this period of the show, while there are some moments and yesterday was pretty good, like parts of it have been really hard for me to listen to. It's just like Dan is just so obsessed with where they are as a show that that's all he talks about, like literally all he talks about. And my examining my own relationship to that show now and my own habits with that show is I feel like it's an insight into and potentially could give us insight into how we treat TBTL and how far we go into our own navels at time until it becomes too much. Or if we if we ever do start to veer in that direction, maybe like get a sense of it and also listening habits. If you get out of a habit of listening to a show, a huge part of me listening to every moment of Levitard was the glut of Levitard. And that now they're taking a few days off here and there. And when I run out of Levitards, I move on to other things. And then it's harder for me to get back to care about the Levitard world again. Like, oh, do I want to crawl back into that? It's weird how offering less content has made it a little bit harder for me to get back into it, if that makes any sense.

Well, yeah. I mean, as far as that relates to our show, first of all, it's a very dangerous thought to start having is what is and isn't interesting to the listeners. I, for one, don't support that. It's not so hard. I start now 3,345 episodes in. also i have i don't know if this is really related to what you're saying but the thing that i've always said about tbtl is you know what we lack in in in quality we make up for in quantity i mean this is the this is the claim jumper of podcasting we make so much of it there's just a lot of it and somehow that i mean i don't know that seems to sort of work for people a small group of people who have just bought in on this, you know what I mean? Have just said, okay, we're doing this. And they are like all in with whatever this thing is. But yeah, like it's weird how listening habits work. And I always, when we were working in radio and when I was working in, you know, tip like regular.

even commercial radio and i'd be talking to somebody else who was a host or a producer and they somehow thought that they were what they were making was vital to people's lives i was like watch someone's commute change by 10 minutes yeah right and see how much they listen to your show or my show i mean this is a thing now maybe podcasting is a little different because it's more on demand but but even so like people can be totally obsessed with with with a radio show or a podcast or a radio product and one thing changes in their schedule in their life and they have to do something else because their commute uh you know has changed or their child care situation has changed or whatever and it's just a distant memory i used to be so obsessed with the show love line um that i would this is actually very feels very andrewian to me i would schedule or i would wait to do any kind of puttering anything i needed to do that was a little tedious or maybe i wasn't totally looking forward to doing around the house, I would wait until 11 o'clock at night to do it because Loveline was on from 11 to 1, I believe. Maybe it was 10 to midnight, but I would wait until those two hours of Loveline. And I was obsessed with, I wanted to do something that would make it so that I was notable enough that I would be invited onto Loveline as a guest. And I really felt like if there's ever a time where I can't listen to two hours of Loveline Five days a week I'll be lost And then at some point I don't know what happened I moved to LA Things changed Corolla was off the show And then it was just kind of like Never occurred Like never even occurred to me again That it was a thing

Yes yeah And again that gets into the Into the habits And now I'm Going to talk more about TBTL and behind the scenes stuff In a way that might be off Putting in the same way Dan obsessing over where they are And him describing his pirate ship over and over and over again. I still love the show, by the way. It's just going through some growing pains. And I know that I would be hurtful if people talked about – TBTL has gone through a lot of transitions as well. And believe it or not, not every single one of our 3,340 episodes have been – or 44 episodes have been just stellar content. Chef's kiss. Yeah, there are one or two in there that are probably even clunkers. But so so I'm not trying to throw stones from my glass house at the Levitard show, but it's just as a listener, I've developed this personal relationship where and in some ways it's an entitled relationship, right? Like I'm like, oh, come on, stop talking about this. Move on. Talk about the Browns or anything, you know, and it's like, oh, I'm just listening to this thing for free. Like they can talk about whatever they want and I can move on if they don't. But when I do get out of the habit of listening to them and then moving on to something else, it reminds me of like I know – like you and I stopped doing reruns for the holidays several years ago now because it didn't make a lot of sense to be doing reruns of podcasts when all of the archives exist. And so you and I, of course, we've talked about this a lot. We've started doing our summer games and our winter games when we take a week or two off from doing brand new shows. But we pre-record tons of content and we try to have, you know, guiding principles around it. And you and I have a lot of fun recording those. Like I actually think of them as some of some of our most fun shows because I love games and quizzes and stuff. But I have heard from people, not in a cruel way, but I've heard from people who are just kind of like, yeah, when when you guys coming back, I want to start listening again. And I'm like, but it's not old content. We're not rehashing. This is still new stuff you can listen to. But I think there is something about the immediate. Believe it or not. Here we are talking about, like, a Harley Quinn cartoon and the Dan Lebitard show, but it's happening now.

Don't forget coffee filters that tell you how much coffee grounds you put in.

But there's something about the fact that we are having this conversation on Tuesday, and people will listen to it. A lot of people will listen to it on Tuesday or sometime this week because it is sort of like the metronome to people's daily lives and what's going on right now, you know, in the world around them. And so even though we're providing new content, when you and I step away from the mics for two weeks, that content immediately does feel stale to people. And then they might move elsewhere and then they might not ever come back to TBTL or it might take them six months to come back to TBTL because I have that relationship with shows. And then that's where I start spinning out of control. And I think, well, if we just chain ourselves to our desks and never stop talking and never stop releasing new stuff, then we'll be fine forever. Right, Daddy?

Yes, absolutely. That's the recipe for success. No, we have to do – everything you're saying totally squares with my theories on this, which is I think it's much better that we don't do reruns. I still think that for a lot of folks, they would rather hear us – even if the show is not great, even if the show doesn't have a particular focus on a random Tuesday, they'd still rather hear our unfocused thoughts on that random Tuesday. because there is, I think metronome is a good way to describe it. There's a... there's some kind of forward momentum to this show because we just get up and we start talking to each other every morning five days a week so that there's something there's something that about that that's like propulsive um that being said we have to do the winter and the summer games because by the time we get to the winter break and the summer break i'm ready to quit well also i think a lot of people do enjoy it as well i'm ready to work my tail off to make this the best damn show out there until we get close to the summer games at which point I'm ready to quit. You should quit your other shit though. Don't quit TBTL. I'm not quitting but I'm waiting to be let go. I'm pushing

Are you going to fire yourself Luke?

I'm pushing the I wish the listeners every once in a while That was a good joke. The listeners don't know. That was a solid joke Andrew. I Like the listeners of this show will be shocked to know that there are, in fact, two or three things that you and I do actually manage to hold back from talking about on the program. And when one of us sort of obliquely references one of those things, it's just the best. It's part of what motivates me to do the show is when you make an inside joke to me only like that one. All right. Okay. Well, let's take a break because we've been doing this for like 30 minutes and we come back. I want to really – you're talking about the lebitard stuff getting a little navel-gazy. I'm about to do something that will turn off at least 50% of our listeners, and that is try to explain what shorting a stock looks like. Oh, my God.

And then I'm going to give a TED Talk on Bitcoin, so stick around for that.

Dude, my Bitcoin is getting killed right now. Oh, no, really? You remember I had like $200? Yeah. Now it's down to, I'm going to give you the, you want to talk about the rhythms of daily life, Andrew? It's at $119. I lost $80. I lost on Jeopardy.

A listener reminded us exactly why you did that, by the way. You did, because you said recently. I thought that I just left like five bucks in there. Someone's saying I left more than that in there? So, no, that's about right. And maybe you did say this, but I felt like you and I were kind of floundering around a little bit trying to remember why there was a little bit of cash kicking around in your Bitcoin thing that has now blossomed. And what you did was you divested of your initial investment and just left in whatever had been accrued over the top of that. And that's what's grown. So I guess you knew that.

I did, but I didn't think it was something that could have been in the neighborhood of what was almost $200. like it had grown to that I guess I assumed usually even if it was 50 bucks some part of my brain would have been like hey don't you have 50 bucks in that coinbase the fact that I completely forgot it existed made me think it must have just been like 5 or 10 bucks but yeah now it's getting it's getting just pummeled so I'm glad that I didn't I'm glad that I didn't do a very Luke thing which was oh wow this whole Bitcoin thing is really going gangbusters and then like go grab some money out of my checking account and put it in there or something and then have it start getting it's the same thing with with sports betting which i'm actually going to be doing a tv story about i think i might have i think i mentioned this on the show but uh me and our uh our friend from the fun loving criminals john who's a sunday morning producer we're going to do a story on the expansion of sports betting and i guess we're going to interview brent musberger which i'm kind of excited about that's an espn personality who's that he is where he is the um And for many years, he was one of the kind of main sports announcers on, you know, he's called Super Bowls and things like that. And then he sort of gave it up to go do this gambling show on a network that he and I believe his maybe his son-in-law started. And he does this show called Your Guys in the Desert. And he does it from a glass box inside a casino.

I think you've told me about this guy before.

And it's become pretty successful. It's like a TV channel and also a radio thing. And he's also now randomly the radio play-by-play guy for the Las Vegas Raiders. And he's good, too. I mean, he's not young, but he's still got some vim. So anyway, we're going to be doing that story. My point is I don't dare even mess with sports betting because I'm already emotionally invested enough in sports games. If I threw financial ruin atop that, I would be way too much. You know, I live on the 21st floor of a building and not to be glib, but I just don't need I don't need to see the Seahawks lose. And also for me to lose a bunch of money, that would be a very bad combo. one of the things i follow on tiktok are bad beats and it's just people with their phone

phone videotaping the TV as something improbable happens that costs them money on their sports bet and every time I watch one of those I am deeply thankful that I'm not a sports better

can you identify a voice for me this is a project I've been meaning to go on this is a very famous voice I'm embarrassed I don't know this I've been meaning to look it up I think this is my favorite voice to hear if I click on the radio and somebody's calling a national NFL game it's Often this guy, I think he's a Westwood One slash CBS guy, but I don't know his name. Do you have his voice recorded? Yeah, this tape, because this is tape we use sometimes. It's funny because a streaker ran onto the field during a game, and this guy announced it. But all joking aside from this tape, which I do enjoy, I really don't. I'm not setting you up here. I really do want to know this guy's name.

Hey, somebody has run out on the field. Some goofball in a hat and a red shirt. Now he takes off the shirt. He's running down the middle by the 50. He's at the 30. He's bare-chested and banging his chest. Now he runs the opposite way. He runs at the 50. He runs at the 40. The guy is drunk, but there he goes. The 20. They're chasing him. They're not going to get him. Waving his arms. Bare-chested. Somebody stop that man. Here comes the blue goat. Oh, they got him. They're coming from the left. Oh, and they tackle him at the 40-yard line.

I haven't heard the long version of that in some time. That's amazing.

I don't know My guess would be Kevin Harlan Because Kevin Harlan is a guy Who has a very very Professional very competent sounding Broadcaster voice but also it's Kind of nondescript Let me take a look here What I really want to talk about Gosh we were so close to going to a break But what I love about that Is that's not a bit That's a real thing that happened

Yeah I believe so I can't remember how it was brought to my attention But I've had it for years and I'm pretty sure it was relatively new when I started using it.

What I love about that is that they didn't do the thing that all the national TV broadcasts have decided to do years ago, which is they never show anyone running on the field and they never they try to never reference it. maybe the announcer joe buck will say and some idiots gotten on the field and the idea is that if they show people on tv streaking or running on the field or give it any attention it will it will create more of that behavior to which i'd say yes let's create more of that behavior there are many sporting events where the only interesting thing that happens is a guy gets on the field and starts running around i love it i'm into it let's make it part of the game let's build it into the whole thing i'm watching like and peace and love but i'm watching the jets play the jaguars to a 13 to 6 just absolute nail biter i would love to see a guy running around in met life stadium eventually getting tackled by gardner minshu the third like yeah we remember the best

part of that game i remember when tony romo was somewhat new at calling games um i think it was in his first, I feel like, half a season of calling games, a cat got out onto the field during a Thursday night game, and he was already openly making fun of the game. I don't know if it was just like, it was just like low scoring and sloppy, not like low scoring and a good defensive game. It was just like, he was literally making fun of this Thursday night game, and then a cat got onto the field. I don't know if you have that tape or not.

Yeah, well, I just have him saying this. This is the greatest thing I've ever seen.

Wait, is that? I think I have more. Okay. Here, let me see this.

There's a cat on the field, Jim.

They say it's Halloween season. So cute. Oh, and he did say it's Halloween season, which would mean, yeah, that would be kind of near the beginning of the football season, right? Like September is when it would be. Incomplete. Hold on. That's what I want to see. You see the cat running on the sideline.

So we're allowed to talk about if it's a cat. We don't think that's going to lead to more cats?

Look at this, Jim. This is like how you ran in high school. Look at that.

Perfect form, extension.

I mean, it doesn't even get phased if there's people around. Just look at the change of direction. Does he get both feet in right here at the end, Jim? He turns it up.

So there's Tony Romo talking about the cat. And I think you're right. I found a video called Kevin Harlan, amazing call on man running out of the field. Yep, there you go. That's my man, Kevin Harlan. You were absolutely right about that.

But again, I just would like these leagues to be a little more fun about it. I love that Kevin Harlan just fully went for that call. Maybe they have decided that radio, the lesser form of sports broadcasting now, and I say that in quotes. because I still love hearing sports on the radio, but maybe they've decided that there's not a danger of Kevin Harlan narrating it so that it will cause more people to do it.

People are like, oh, man, I'm going to streak on the field so I can get mentioned on the Westwood One radio broadcast.

All right, let's take a quick break, and then we will come back, and again, I will disappoint the listeners with my knowledge of the stock market. Since we tried to go to a break, I'm going to check my Bitcoin again See if it's Let's see Oh It has now Ah it just went up 14 cents In front of you Things are really looking up Yeah Yeah it was It was Yep it was Now it's gone up Well it's just sitting still for a minute But anyway I mean this is the kind of Moment by moment Oh yeah Rooted in this day In January 26th By the way I noticed on the show sheets Andrew I have yet to update it to being 2021 Oh really? Oh, no wonder I've been off. God damn it. And I was able to just, like, my brain was able to look at the show sheet today and realize, nope, it's not 2020, it's 2021. I did that on the fly because I'm a professional. Look it up in the book. All right. Quick break, and then we'll be back with more TBTL in just a moment. Let's thank some donors of the day. Folks whose generosity is what allows us to do this, to be the metronome of the lives of tens of people out there five days a week. It's happening because of folks like Neil Hodges of Seattle, Washington. Thanks, Neil. Rachel and Greg Smith there in Oakland, California. William Richard in Mount Lake Terrace, Washington. Misty and David Grieger I'd say Grieger of Seattle Scott Hartley of Oxford, Ohio not to be confused with Bart Jarvis Hartley one of the worst baby contestants I've ever seen on I Think You Should Leave I thought you were going to say Hartley Quinn

Nope You know Bart Jarvis Hartley That's ringing a bell I think you keep on explaining this to me and I keep forgetting it He's the baby There's that I think you should leave sketch

That's like a baby pageant Oh right right right But for whatever reason one of them is considered to be a real bad boy Right right This is like a six month old baby that has like a do-rag on Named Bart Jarvis Hartley And the bit is that everyone's like booing this baby They're very mad at him our friends will occasionally throw out a good random Bart Jarvis Hartley or whatever his name is reference. Anyway, this is Scott Hartley. He's in Oxford, Ohio and we appreciate the donation. Same with Kristen Cullen, who's in Redmond, Washington. Thank you so much for supporting the show. Our dear donors of the day. We're only here able to do this because of all of you. So thank you very much. We really do appreciate it.

Thank you, baby, oh, thank you, baby, thank you, baby.

Hello, and welcome to Top Story.

All right, this is a story of the sort we don't usually try to delve into, Andrew, but it's kind of interesting. Alex Kirshner wrote this piece in Slate. What the hell is going on with GameStop's stock? So the gist of it is GameStop has been having some problems because, well, people don't really need to go to a physical location to buy video games anymore. Most of that stuff is just downloaded. Would you say most of the video games that you play, Andrew, are just downloadable? I mean, have you been to a GameStop or some such in a long time?

No, and it's so weird because I didn't have a video game system for a very, very, very long time. And then I got an Xbox. I think Genevieve got it for me for Christmas when I was in L.A. So that's like, you know, let's just say five years ago now. And I remember when I got it, I did feel like a kid at Christmas again. Well, it was Christmas time. The only thing was I wasn't a kid. But I liked the idea of going to a store and, like, picking out my video game. And, like, it gave me that feeling of, like, going to Blockbuster as a kid and being able to rent one Nintendo game. But then I quickly realized, oh, you just buy them online. And, you know, it's actually a little bit of a dangerous game, Dano, as the Stugats might say. Because, you know, you have a few beers. Next thing you know, you're downloading a $40 racing game. And then, like, real that. still seem uh appealing to you tomorrow i found myself doing that this is not a video game thing but with television shows i wanted to watch veep and they get you because they'll you know there'll be an episode or two that has that is free and then all of a sudden you're kind of hooked back in and then it's like hey do you want the rest of this season um and it's just one click i mean there's something very fun the analog for me with this would be like blockbuster or a video store it was so much fun as a kid to go rent actual videos and just that process of browsing and the smell even of a video store and i know game stops they have their own smell too video game stores but anyway things were not great for game stop before the pandemic they had reported uh something like a 340 million dollar uh excuse me they had reported a 470 million dollar loss um which Which, by comparison, eight years ago, they were running a $340 million profit. Wow. So they went from a quarter billion dollars in profits a year to about a half a billion dollars in losses. And when the pandemic came along, that was extra bad. And so they announced they were going to close 300 locations permanently. And their stock really kind of cratered. Then this guy comes along. His name is Ryan Cohen. He is the founder of the online pet food giant Chewy. Okay. Have we done ads for Chewy? Do I need to be careful about what you're saying?

I don't think we've done Chewy ads yet. I will say that I'm a customer of Chewy, though. Now that Theo has to take medication, we get some supplies for him through Chewy.

So this guy who founded the pet food place, Chewy, he buys a 13% stake in GameStop, when GameStop is really just not looking like a very appealing business or whatever entity. And he starts blasting the company's board, saying that they're not keeping up with the transition from physical hardware to digital streaming. And so GameStop says, you know what? You make some good points, guy from the pet food place. We're going to expand our board of directors, and we're going to put you on it. So now this brash pet food guy is now part of, I guess, the solution to fixing GameStop's issues. I guess he probably wants GameStops to try to do kind of what Netflix did, although Netflix was never a brick and mortar. But, you know, I remember when Netflix was no longer going to send DVDs out, just thinking, are you crazy? The way Netflix works is I watch four episodes of The Sopranos and then I wait a week to get my next refill of watching The Sopranos. I mean, that's just how God intended it.

Did I tell you my dad just stopped his DVD service like in the past year? I'm not joking. I remember you mentioning it.

i was shocked to know that that was a thing that was still going on me too but i look i would you know some years ago i remember thinking like this is craziness i'm not gonna like download movies from the internet like i'm gonna get them in that weird plastic sleeve or whatever that whatever that material was that tyvek sleeve is gonna have my dvds in it and i'm gonna watch them and then i'm gonna have to mail them back that's just how it works but anyway i think this guy you know obviously uh this ryan cohen guy wanted to try to get game stop to get hip i don't understand at this point it would seem like the the the sort of cow was already had already escaped from the barn i imagine there's a bunch of other places that are already doing the digital game thing

well yeah that's effectively that's what's interesting to me because he'd really have to think he'd really have to think outside the bun for this because like right now we're describing my xbox well the xbox is a microsoft thing it's like the apple store right like it just takes me directly to the microsoft store um or for the like more online games or like kind of um pc based games uh like there's something called steam and like for example genevieve wanted to download the digital version of that birds game that birds board game we play wingspan or birds actually and like the way i was able to buy that was through the steam platform so and and i think there's a couple of other big players out there so it does seem interesting to me it's not that the model isn't there and i think i think he's actually right to try to preserve the name game stop and that intellectual property but i don't know how you break in at this point it seems so

established right and i guess it seems like what what this guy and anyone who's still betting on game stop is really saying is the game stop brand is so strong that if we can figure out how to get the stuff out there digitally there's still some value here like because this is a this is maybe This is a very established name in this, as they say, space. So anyway, the narrative around GameStop becomes, and again, everything I know about this is from this article that Alex Kirshner wrote in Slate Magazine. But the narrative around GameStop... apparently sort of becomes hey they got this guy from the pet food place and he's on the board and they're gonna like turn it around and suddenly gamestop becomes this kind of like low-key a little bit sexy stock to buy because it had so cratered the people are like i'm getting this for cheap and we like that this guy uh is is is now involved in the in the you know sort of reclamation of of this business model or whatever so these so people start buying it and it's kind of popular and then all of a sudden a lot of established like wall street heads like people that aren't gamers people that are just looking at this purely from a business standpoint start shorting game stop now the story becomes game stop is not a plucky stock that can but in fact is just a shitty business model that people should not be investing in and um are you familiar with

taking a short position on this is you know i know i've seen movies about it like i i know i just i could not explain it though if somebody just said explain what that is i don't i know that

it's yeah you go ahead you go my understanding of it and i have spent many hours trying to understand this concept and am only barely barely informed on it the very very simple version is i think is that you basically you buy a stock you sell it high and you have the right or you have the obligation to buy it back at a more cheap rate so what you think is so if i'm buying stock in walsh walsh and doormat for some reason a publicly traded law firm i don't know why this is the example classic and i think that the future is not bright for walsh walsh and doormat And I think, and your stock is trading at $10 a share, but I think it's ultimately going to be at about $2 a share. And what I do when I short your stock is I basically borrow the stock at $10 a share, I sell it, and then I buy it back at $1 a share. And somehow in that process, that $9 is profit to me. So I'm betting against the success of your business. I'm assuming that this is something that I will be able to buy for much cheaper later, having sold it at what is a relative height. Now, people don't like – a lot of times they don't like people who short stocks because it's sort of like when you're playing craps and you're betting the don't pass line. You're betting basically the bad number. You're betting that the number seven is going to come up, which is just a kind of – maybe it's a realistic bet, but it's not fun. You're not betting for the success of the table. You're betting for the bad outcome for most of the people that are sitting there. So anyway, there's this subreddit called – actually, I don't even know if it's a subreddit. It's a Reddit.

It's r slash wallstreetbets. That's a subreddit. Anything that starts with r is a subreddit. It's like a community on Reddit.

Okay. So r slash wallstreetbets starts looking at this. And they basically become furious at the companies and the hedge funds and the whomevers, the boomers. By the way, this is very much described in terms of the kind of young people hanging out on this Reddit, subreddit, and their perception that the boomers are coming in and shorting GameStop and are basically player-hating on GameStop. and so they decide that they are going to start driving the price of the game stock game stop stock up by buying it because what basically happens is if you take a short position and the stock instead of going down goes up you still have to buy that stock you just have to buy it at the you have to buy the number of shares of that stock that you had agreed to buy but instead of them selling for one dollar instead of me getting to buy back my walsh walsh and doormat stock at one dollar what if i have to buy back my walsh walsh and doormat stock at a hundred dollars

see i didn't realize i did not have any idea that that was part of the short sell was that you are obligated to then do something you're entering into an agreement and locking yourself

in yes and that's the downside of shorting a stock is that at some point if instead of going down it starts going up you're losing money rapidly and this is something that actually happens i don't know if it happens frequently but it's not unprecedented i think in this article they call it like pinching a short stock and so what's basically happened is these people on this this this red this subreddit have been doing effectively what like the k-pop stands did trying to sabotage trump's tickets for that tulsa event they've just been driving the price up of this stock so that all of these big companies are having to jump out of this these these companies It's a short position.

are having to jump out because they're just hemorrhaging money as the price goes up. Now, if they were able to ride it out—now, this is where I'm hitting the edge of my knowledge of how this works. I don't know how much time they have to hang on to the stock if they've taken a short position. In other words, maybe they could hold on to the stock for a long, long, long, long time, and if it goes back down, they can ultimately get their money back, like if the stock goes back to almost nothing. But in the meantime, they're just losing money left, at least losing value left and right and owing money because the stock prices is now going up. But as this guy writing the piece, Alex Kirshner, points out, there's no indication that GameStop is a better business than it was six months ago. Like, there's nothing about the fundamentals of this company that have gotten better. It's just that some people on Reddit Got mad that some Wall Street boomers Were trying to play or hate On their And to be honest with you I bet you half of the people I bet you 80% of the people in this Reddit This subreddit went to GameStop When they were kids It'd be like somebody shorting Toys R Us Godfather's Pizza Toys R Us It'd be like somebody shorting Taco Time Andrew Something that's very associated with childhood But you're right. Toys R Us is a better example, because when you're a kid and you're in a Toys R Us, it's just the best. Or when you're a kid and you're in a Chuck E. Cheese, it's the best. So somebody shorting GameStop, I really get the feeling that a bunch of these people in this subreddit were just like, oh, hell no. And so they are pushing back.

It's interesting that they're defining this as like a boomer thing, because my guess is, and I could be wrong and I should look this up. Actually, I will look this up when I'm done talking. But my guess is GameStop, if – well, I don't know if these people online – it just seems to me that that is probably – it seems more like a legacy business. It seems like it was a business that boomed because it was – well, boomed because it was probably started by people who were boomers at the time that these people were kids, right? That's the generation that was running the businesses that these kids were going to when they were kids.

Right. Yeah. I don't even know if it makes sense generationally. It's just, I think, a feeling that like big Wall Street is coming. And also it's like these hedge fund managers are not investing their own money. They're investing the money of their clients. Right. And so that was another thing that comes up in this article is it's like to the degree that these Redditors are like costing these companies money. They don't feel I mean, they're not like going after some ma and paw investor. They're going after these giant, huge funds that are just they see them as being sort of, you know, very ruthless and using other people's money anyway. This is one thing that I felt. I mean, to be honest, this is where my brain was going as I was reading this article this morning. Andrew, I was like, how do I learn about stonks? Because there's some money to be made. Apparently, there is one of these Redditors who has now $14 million worth of GameStop stock as of, like, yesterday where the stock was trading. This is supposedly what this person did. They spent $250 to buy 800 options at 31 cents per share. so basically what they did was they wanted the option to buy the GameStop stock at a certain price that price was twelve dollars so they they paid two hundred fifty dollars to have the right to buy a bunch of GameStop stock at twelve dollars right now the value of that two hundred and fifty dollar investment is five point two million dollars those options are worth five point two million dollars if this if this article is to be believed uh which is crazy to me i do not see

this is where i don't understand things like okay we're doing this because it's an internet thing but now if i made this small investment and now it'll reap this amount wouldn't everybody just sell it off now like hey we had our fun let's i would yeah if it were me i'd be like we had our

fun let me let me let me peace with this money and uh i'll let the wall street fat cats go ahead and feast on the carcass of GameStop you're right you know like yeah I would definitely I don't think I don't think that that's typical I think there's a reason this person's being singled out because they somehow really got in at the right moment but and again the math on that is confusing to me I don't understand how $250 could actually however much the stock has gone up I don't understand how that could actually how 800 options so eight like what 800 shares i can't see how that could be worth 5.2 million that's what the article is let's just say there are some people who have managed to really put themselves in at least a theoretical here uh that's uh that's pretty incredible off of basically this subreddit just deciding to push back on this thing um i will say and again i'm clearly not somebody who knows stocks and i'm also not somebody who knows games i don't think gamestop is a good bet as a business

not to go all well yeah booyahs on it but of course now that you just said that it's the kiss of life because you said the same thing about twitter and hey can the kiss of life By the way, GameStop traces its history back to 1984 when it was founded in Dallas as a place called Babbage's, named after Charles Babbage, the mathematician who was kind of a computing mind. And then, by the way, it ended up merging with software, et cetera, which was a what? A Dina-based, a Dina, Minnesota, or is it a Dina? We always have this conversation. E-Dina. E-Dina-based company.

The E is now small.

So it's lowercase e, capital D. Oh, I see what you're doing. I-N-A, E-Dina. E-Dina, right. Well, that's where I wanted to create an E-Dina, and that's where you go in and you eat virtual corned beef sandwiches.

I remember Babbage's I don't think I ever went in it But I know that was a thing that I was aware existed In the world And I wasn't at that age Going very far outside of the Seattle area So there must have been at least a Babbage's or two That made its way to the Northwest

Yeah, I guess so And then they grew from there So either way it is kind of funny Because it definitely is I mean, if it was founded by these two fellas back in 1984 I mean, them's the boomers

um i saw an article on uh well it came to me by way of pocket it was written by matt soniak how did the duck hunt gun work for many children of the 80s a good portion of your childhood probably revolved around sitting too close to the tv clutching a plastic safety cone colored handgun and blasting waterfowl out of a pixelated sky in duck hunt um and uh the he goes on to write about this thing was actually, Nintendo called it the Zapper. Nintendo never called it a gun, which kind of makes sense, actually, if you're a big company. It's not a gun. It is not a gun, Andrew.

At least don't call it a gun. That's two things we can't talk about.

Two inside jokes, just for you and me today. The Nintendo Zapper, if you will, its ancestry actually goes back to the mid-1930s when the first so-called light gun appears after the development of light-sensing vacuum tubes. In the first light gun game, Ray-O-Light, which was developed in 1936 by a company that made parts for jukeboxes, players shot at small moving targets mounted with light sensors using a gun that emitted a beam of light. When the beam struck a sensor, the targets, which were ducks coincidentally, not David Duchovny's, but actual ducks, registered the hit and a point was scored. this reminds me of remember being a kid and going to the like you know amusement park and they would have that like hogan's alley type of deal where you'd get the rifle and you'd shoot at things yeah the play the guy would start playing the player piano and everything yep amen we did that at

cedar point a lot in the old west town yeah uh so um there was a game that the this really took

me back andrew because we had one of these when i was a kid the magnavox odyssey there was a game called shooting gallery which used the light gun technology from the 1930s in the as part of the magnavox odyssey which was developed in 1972 how now andrew i wasn't born until 1976 how did i have a magnavox odyssey garage sale my good man by the time it was like the 1980s the magnavox odyssey was so outdated that even Burbanks, now even Burbanks can afford Magnavox Odysseys that are purchased at a garage sale. And man, me and my little sisters, we friggin' loved that thing. I can't even remember the games that we played, but I just remember being geeked on that thing. And it was like, it made Pong look...

Ooh, the form factor on this thing is awesome.

It made Pong look like an immersive world, the Magnavox Odyssey. Have you, do you remember what it looked like?

i'm gonna google it right now holy macaroons this thing looks so cool it looks like something out of like halton catch fire it's like a you know that very 80s um but very clean lines 80s

style uh with just we always had the electronics that were just like kind of one off so we had like a magnavox odyssey my dad then finally bought a computer but you know apple computers were all the rage. The Apple IIe was a whole thing, but But we had an Apple IIe clone. I believe it was called a laser. We were always kind of dealing with the, you know, not the absolute sort of finest of the technology. But, man, yeah. Oh, look at that thing. Yeah. It looks like a – why does it have a keyboard on it, I wonder?

Oh, I think we're looking at different pictures. This one I have just looks like maybe like the top of a robot. Are you looking at one that is white and kind of almost flat, almost like the roof of a Pizza Hut if it were white? Maybe it doesn't matter.

Anyway, yeah, so we had one of those, and apparently we – oh, yeah, I see the one that you're talking about. I don't even know if we had that one. I think we had a later – I think we had a later one that was actually less cool-looking. You know what I mean? Because you're right. What's listed as the 1972 design, I could absolutely see that being a new video game console. Yeah, right? Because it's very sleek. It almost looks like pre-Apple. You know what I mean? Whatever the sort of design aesthetic of Apple is, it looks like that. It's actually very, very good design, the 1972 version. I think we had a newer one that was actually less well sort of designed or thought out. Anyway, apparently the Magnavox Odyssey version never really took off because you could only use it with a Magnavox television. So you had to have the TV and the player To do the light gun thing The Nintendo Zapper Came along in 1985 When it was released in a bundle with the NES The early versions Of the Zapper, don't call it a gun Were dark grey, but then the color Changed, they turned it into the Sci-Fi Ray Gun When a federal regulation required that Toy and imitation firearms be blaze orange

Oh right, I remember that Remember that rule? Yeah, I do, I do

That was probably smart To try to cut down on the confusion Between real guns and fake guns Another thing to do would just be to Not live in a society Full of guns But yeah, so But actually it's kind of interesting because that's one of those things Where it's so much Cooler, the orange ray gun Thing that they did, like that's so much better than Just something that looks grey and like some kind of Real gun, right?

Which one, well, which did oh did you end up ever having a nintendo we had the gray and like off white gun i think

oh really yeah did you like it i mean when you saw the orange i always thought the orange one

was very cool i kind of forgot that there was an orange one um yeah no i don't think i knew anybody who had an orange one i guess i had the original uh nes but speaking of by the way and i realize this does not really let the listener in on this but maybe i could use one of these why start now um for the show pick today although i wonder if my family would be okay with it but my mom sent me a box of old photographs a while back because I was talking about quite a bit on the show and some of the photos were clearly from the Christmas where we first got our very first NES that was before the Xbox the only other game system I had was the original NES and I just sent you some photos you can see that like my cousins and uncle and like my family was over and everybody is gathered around watching me and my cousin Frankie play Frank who's like you know 10 years older than me so he's like a teenager I'm like this very awkward tween but everybody is standing around and you know that we're playing Mario Brothers because that's all I got I got the Mario Brothers duck hunt but everybody's staring sitting around staring at this and I was thinking the other day as I was playing the latest version of Madden what you know if if I could transport that Andrew Walsh that Andy Walsh at the time who was playing Tecmo Bowl that was probably the game I played the most as a kid the the the just leaps from the Tecmo Bowl game to the game I play now Madden where it's like the players are coming out of the screen and sitting down with you on the couch and giving you advice on how to use the controller they've really come a long way but my family was definitely mesmerized by the original

NES back in 1986 or whenever that this is these are such awesome photos I mean what I just I mean Literally, what a snapshot In time Is this the house that you Grew up in, the one that was in the country?

Yeah, yeah, exactly It looks like this was right after we had renovated The kitchen area

Yeah, I actually like what they did with the refrigerator It's kind of cool, it has a wood paneling on it It kind of blends in

I hated it growing up because I couldn't hang magnets on it Other kids had magnets There is a sign on there

There's a laminated thing, I can't zoom in enough But it looks like it may be some kind of who knows um i love this idea though of um uh it's does it say you said this doesn't really let the listeners in and now i'm just trying to read a laminated piece of paper on i remember

obsessing over that too when i first found this photo of your ohio childhood home but just this

the way that like i mean I'll see you next time.

Let me just make a huge leap here that I know you won't go along with, but it's like I feel like on some level we just – we didn't have – I think we might have been happier people in – what is this? Circa 1986 maybe? i think we might have been happier people in 1986 and the reason was because we just didn't have as much entertaining shit going on so that someone playing mario brothers was pretty cool the whole family was like hey let's all watch this now it's like i'm watching american greed on my enormous television and i'm also looking that there are these 30 second ads that i can't fast forward through because i'm just like watching the free version of it or whatever and when that's happening I'm muting and watching TikTok now a lot of this is my own Bullshit don't get me wrong But like I like that this was a big Event in your family and I know like We didn't have a Nintendo but when my friend Peter Williams went to India for A month with his parents because his dad Was and is an adherent To a guy named Meher Baba We got To borrow his Nintendo

Oh I thought you were going to house it but no you brought It over to your place no the Nintendo

Was at our house and it was amazing me and my that's when my sister sarah became i think like one of the world's greatest tetris players we would just say i would play mike tyson's punch out we would play mario brothers we would do duck hunt we would do all of it and um by the way some the duck hunt thing was kind of a cool breakthrough because what it actually did was somehow and i don't know how it could work with just any tv but it did it would actually shoot light out of the tv and the barrel of the gun would receive the light so that if you were pointed at the right place that's how you'd get

the ducks the tv is connecting to the gun not the gun connecting to the tv is that what you're right

which probably had to do with what how you were able to then play it on any tv you didn't need like a special nintendo tv because the tv was emitting something that the gun was and if you

line up the gun correctly and pull that trigger at the right place well then it opens itself up and you're capturing the signal from the TV.

Isn't that interesting?

That is interesting, yeah. I always assumed it was just mirrors.

The other thing, the freaking mirrors, how do they work? The other thing, though, that we borrowed from Peter Williams while he was in India was his Honda scooter, which then, I was supposed to give my sister a ride somewhere because I had a car at that point. I was 16. I was supposed to give my sister a ride to my Aunt Mary Lou and Uncle Mike's house, which was probably like three miles from where we lived, and I didn't want to do it Because I was probably playing basketball somewhere And so I told my sister And I don't know how I would have done this I didn't have a cell phone But somehow I told my sister Just drive Peter's scooter She's like This is my sister Liz She's like probably 13 at the time So she drives the scooter And then she gets hit by a car on the scooter I vaguely

I thought you guys owned the scooter No it was Peter's The scooter and the Nintendo Were being loaned while he was in India Did you end up later owning your own Honda Elite Or is this the Elite Okay, so this is a different story I was a coastal Honda elite Okay, gotcha But this was a borrowed one And then didn't Yeah, didn't Like when she got home Did you guys like perform Some sort of home remedies on her? Did she not end up going to the hospital?

Of course she didn't go to the hospital My parents were out of town But the scene that I found When I arrived at my Uncle Mike And Aunt Mary Lou's house Was my poor sister Liz On the couch One leg All swole up Because she had I mean, I don't think It wasn't like, you know She was doing 60 It was like she was coming around a four-way – like one of those kind of traffic circles on like a pretty small side street. And I believe that the guy that hit her was in a junker and was probably drunk actually or the guy she made contact with. But because she was a kid and didn't know the protocols and also didn't have a license, somehow she just got out of there but was hurt and the scooter was trashed. Maybe we even had to go get the scooter. But I just remember her apologizing so profusely, like feeling so bad. And it was like, it was my fault because I was supposed to give her a ride. Like I was derelict of my duties as a big brother. And of course, she didn't go to the hospital or the doctor. That was not, that's not the Burbank way. But what we did do was I went and found an exact exactly the same scooter that was actually like had fewer miles on it that had been crashed. And I was able to buy it for like a couple hundred dollars because it was totally destroyed. And then my dad did some crazy thing where he basically rebuilt between the two scooters. We basically had like one functioning scooter that had like a like nose cone plastic, whatever, somehow rebuilt the whole thing. And so when Peter came home, I was like, good news, bad news. The bad news is you don't have your old scooter because Liz crashed it because I didn't give her a ride. Good news is you have a different scooter that's better. Yeah, right. And so that was his scooter. And then we somehow figured out how to like – How do you react?

i think he took it better than i would have i tend to find myself in friendships andrew with people who are long suffering i don't know if you've noticed a pattern and so i think he sort of rolled with it literally and figure was it the same color do you know i'm sorry i'm asking a lot

of yes it was cherry yes it's always just the same color and it's like well the experience is basically the same and yes it just got worked on and if your dad it sounds like your dad's you know he knows what he's doing like that might yeah that i could see that being an upgrade maybe

assuming it was enough that he wasn't furious you know what i mean it was like and my dad of course paint like i think one of the pieces wasn't the same color my dad uh who's very crafty like painted it you know the same color like went and got the right paint color so i think it was pretty seamless but then what i had was this other scooter that was jacked up like that basically was fine because those those honda scooters i mean you had one too right did you guys have an

elite yeah that's what we had of course ours got stolen and smashed up too but that was i think a 2008 elite so well did it have the kind of headlight that flipped up no it didn't not that it didn't have that so did you have that um hood on like or the nose piece that was almost like um a like slatted like three or four slats oh yes and when you would turn it on the the the headlight would flip up which was kind of a cool effect yeah um that matches your magnavox toy pretty

well totally i would drive around with the magnavox odyssey strapped to the back just living the the perfect 1980s dream no but like the problem with those scooters not the problem maybe this was the design but the the whole body all the fairing and everything it was all built out of plastic so if you crashed it just evaporated and so that was the real issue and i don't know how so so then we had the scooter that was basically functional while my sister had crashed but it just somehow my dad took the plastic rebuilt it it was all different colors and this one he was like listen bro I'm not painting this for you like in some parts of it the pieces didn't fit back together because they were broken or from different models so my dad just kind of would like do this thing where he would take a piece of like very industrial plastic and kind of rivet it into both sides of the things that needed to connect so he basically Frankenstein this scooter back together and then that was my scooter so I had this weird Frankenstein scooter that I would drive to Nathan Hale High School

um so well i see i'm glad that that wasn't the um i'm glad that that wasn't the one that you gave your friend no that would have been unacceptable yeah that would have been pretty unacceptable

yeah yeah i have to tell you something though i'm the person who borrowed your and genevieve scooter i just yeah right needed to get somewhere quickly in seattle my plan was to use it bring it back you'd never notice and then some stuff happened and i just want to apologize to you here and now

You must have started smoking because there was a – I'll never forget there was a brand new pack of cigarettes in, like, the – in, like, I guess the trunk or whatever you call the storage area under the seat. There was, like, a bottle of whiskey, bullet whiskey, without much left in it and – because I think what happened was –

We're 100% sure the mummy didn't take it.

Yeah, right. No, we're not. It was, you know, clearly somebody who was living a certain kind of lifestyle. You know, there were a bunch of – Yeah, but bullet's not the lowest. No, it's not. But I assume it was stolen, though, because it just, you know, somebody stole this bike. It had a bunch of, like, stolen tools in it. Or it's like, I can't explain it, that type of stuff. You see piles of this. It's kind of sad. Even outside the grocery store the other day, we saw a pile of stuff that was so clearly. It was a bunch of personal photographs and CDs and other shit that was so clearly in somebody's car. And the car got smashed and grabbed. And somebody grabbed all the shit and then left the rest of it on the sidewalk. And in this, in the boot, I'm not trying to be British. I don't know what to call the storage space of a scooter, but in the storage area, like, there was just, like, tools that you could tell were probably stolen, like a – I actually – that was one thing that made me feel better. I have a little mini drill that you can charge up using your phone charger. That thing's kind of cool. But I'll never forget there was a full pack of cigarettes that had not been opened, and anybody who smokes or has smoked in their life knows that you're really running. If you're living that kind of lifestyle, but you're leaving a full, unopened pack, a cellophane-sealed pack of cigarettes behind, you're not sticking around the scene after you wrecked my scooter. To me, that was always the indicator that this person fled.

Were you tempted to start smoking again just because I bet a pack of cigarettes is like 20 bucks now?

I don't know what a pack of cigarettes is. I think it was like 10 with all the taxes when I quit a few years ago. No, I don't know. I was in a weird place right there but I will say that I don't know if I ever told you this there you know when I was quitting smoking and again it was around fall I want to say three years ago I probably just had my three-year anniversary and um I you know quit pretty much cold turkey vaped for a while and then I had uh I put on a winter coat let's say it was about six months after I quit smoking or maybe

that's right I put on my probably my lighter jacket or something and I went to the grocery store I was living in Wallingford at the time not that it matters and I went to the grocery store went to the deli I remember I ordered my lunch meat as I was waiting for them to bring me my turkey I put my hands in my coat pocket and in that coat pocket was an almost full pack of cigarettes like maybe one missing and I hadn't touched a pack of cigarettes in like six months And I wasn't tempted. It didn't trigger me to want to go outside and, like, light up or smoke a cigarette. But I remember just thinking, well, I guess I just throw this pack of cigarettes away in this garbage can that I'm standing next to while I'm waiting for my turkey. And that seemed sinful or just seemed so unnatural just to toss an almost full pack of cigarettes in the garbage can. And it wasn't even about, like, I need this nicotine right now. You just don't do that.

Right. It felt wasteful in some weird way. I assume you just tossed them. You just kind of went.

I just tossed them. And you know how grocery stores always like it's hard to find a good garbage can in a grocery store. They're always kind of weird.

I've been talking about the war on garbage for years. I'm very angry about. What is that? It's that you can't find a flipping garbage can anymore.

That's right. You do say that.

And when you can find one. I mean, I know this isn't the grocery store, but even outside now, when if you can find a garbage can, It's always got some sort of filtration system built on it that's like metal and kind of keeping you from putting too much stuff in, which, I mean, I guess they are doing that because they have to. But like sometimes if I were to have like a bag of, you know, that had had fast food in it or something, and then maybe I put the cup in the bag and then I roll it up. But it'll be like a there'll be this lid on the garbage can that lets you put stuff in, but not too much stuff because I don't want people just putting their like home garbage in there. and anyway I I'm not surprised to hear that you had a hard time did you were you tempted to give the cigarettes to someone maybe even somebody who's asking for money but then thought well

why am I gonna add to their lung problem as I tell the story you know I think I it was a weirdly shocking feeling I can't explain it like because I hadn't smoked in a while like it was a weird feeling almost like if somebody if well this is just a weird thing to say but if like somebody like just if you pulled out pornography in the deli section of a grocery store right like it's just it's just a weird thing to say but like it just felt weird and unnatural to me in the moment I threw it away I don't know if I had that thought at the time weirdly Luke I have that thought a lot like I've I've never done this and I and I won't do this but um sometimes if I'm if I'm you know outside somewhere or I'm sitting in a window of teddies when I was allowed to do that or a coffee shop and you see somebody go by and they're they start rooting through the cigarettes that are in the ashtray outside or off the ground or or digging in the garbage and pulling out a little cigarettes like i have been tempted and i would not do this but i have been tempted to think like let me just buy this person a pack of cigarettes that must just feel so good like they're like if they're smoking these little ends and butts and things that are just like nasty off the ground that who knows who was smoking it like having a fresh pack of cigarettes of 20 cigarette cellophane sealed must be a must feel really really good and it's sometimes i have been tempted to be like what

if i just get that guy a pack of cigarettes that is such an interesting moral dilemma because obviously cigarettes are bad for people but also drinking is bad for people and also you know being unhoused is bad for people and eating you know there's like a lot of bad things that many of us are doing to our bodies and also bad things that might be unhealthy things might be happening for somebody who's let's say maybe living on the streets or something and it's like if the cigarette brings them happiness in a life that's otherwise short on on on good feelings i mean i don't know man i think it's debatable like like if if it were if this were uh you know michael phelps and he's about to like you know swim the anchor leg of the olympics or something like i don't know if it's somebody whose body is a complete temple and inhaling the cigarette smoke would just absolutely destroy them and put them on some other ironically michael phelps is a known marijuana enthusiast so yeah that's a terrible example because he uh smokes a weed or at least used to but you know what I mean like that is really debatable like I don't think it's I don't think it's a given that if you were to give a pack of cigarettes to somebody who was you know rummaging for cigarettes and look like they were sort of down and out I don't necessarily think

that's the worst thing you can do you know when I was a smoker I would do that but you know right you'd go outside of you're drinking with friends whatever you go outside you you

You're smoking and then somebody almost inevitably would come up to you, especially if you're in downtown or whatever, and say, hey, can I can I get a cigarette? I would always give them a cigarette. Often I'd give them a couple of cigarettes, you know, like because, yeah, but like the idea of and again, I wouldn't do this. And I know my instincts aren't right about it, but I just sort of think about like the pleasure that somebody must feel if they're just picking up these shitty little butts on the ground. But then suddenly they're in possession of 20 fresh cigarettes and they get to open it themselves. They can pack it or tap it or do whatever they want. That seems like that would be a pretty nice feeling for somebody who smokes.

When I was in Austin during the Christmas break, I walked from the hotel over to the Barton Springs pool, which was kind of interesting. It's this big natural spring. It's one of the sort of real gems of Austin. They wouldn't actually let me in because I wasn't there to swim, which I thought was kind of funny. Like I was in just regular clothes and the person said, hey, are you, you know, the kind of entry point said, are you here to swim? And I said, no, I just want to see it. And they said, yeah, because of the pandemic, we are only allowing people to swim in it. And I thought, OK. I mean, I'm glad that they were setting up rules because there were a lot of places in Texas that seemed quite unsupervised.

But anyway, do you think can I ask you a quick question here? Do you think it had anything to do with the fact that you were a single male who was there to. And I'm not even saying that to be funny

I had my magazines with me I'd just been kicked out of the deli

Right, right You just got kicked out of porno deli

I don't think so, here's why Because I saw people Exactly like me, except they were In, you know, shorts or whatever Like it wasn't, like there were other There was other guys of my age Who were by themselves, who were being let in to The woman who asked me I think it was literally because basically they i my guess is that this barton springs is seen as a local treasure and it is outdoors and they wanted you know austin residents or people from the surrounding area to still be able to sort of make use of it but they didn't want a bunch of people unnecessarily just hanging and loitering and looking at it they didn't want to be a touristy thing it was like if you want to go and you want to jump in and you want to get out and you want to go home we want to make that possible but if you're doing anything that's not that keep on moving um which i thought was kind of a slightly odd policy but again i was just glad austin was a place where they were taking it seriously just generally which i enjoyed that being said before i was denied entrance to barton springs this guy you know person who seemed like i said sort of down and out walked up to me looked at me and then just turned and then another guy had just rolled up on a mountain bike in fact a guy who was there to swim who was admitted to barton springs and he goes to the guy who's just getting off the mountain bike and he goes hey do you have a cigarette man and the guy was like no sorry and then the guy just kept going he never asked me for a cigarette and i thought what non-smoking vibe am i emanating that hard right that hard that the dude looked at me And he was like yeah nah And then turn around to a guy Who was on a mountain bike

Maybe it's just selfish maybe he just thought Well this guy probably smokes but he's selfish He'll never give me a cigarette

Right exactly what kind of miserly Cigarette smoking vibe Am I giving off Because a guy's on a mountain bike That seems like a less likely person To have a cigarette habit And that guy was Michael Phelps he was there at barton springs to trade that's right 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

hey no i actually i glanced at the emails today which is rare for me and i'm hoping that the email that you want to read is the email that i want to read

i have a voicemail here that i wanted to play but before i play it i wanted to ask you um No joke, because we've gone over this a million times. What is the name of the town that I referenced in Minnesota before? Is it actually Edina? I believe it's Edina. Edina, yeah, and we talked about that, and I believe it was our boy, the Stewbot, who set us straight on the pronunciation, although I obviously did not remember it. But the Stewbot is back. We had mentioned Savage, Minnesota on yesterday's show. Sounds like a very exciting but dangerous place. Stewbot wants to set us right on that.

Hey, pals. It's Stew from the Internet. just checking in on the city of Savage, Minnesota, which you mentioned on Monday's program. Given its name, you might think it's home to epic burns, dank memes, complete and total pwnage, and other pieces of Internet culture. But that's where you'd be wrong, Andrew. Let me pull up the wiki here. It is named due to Minneapolis businessmen Thank you.

marion willis savage who kept his record-breaking racehorse dan patch in the small town of hamilton minnesota about 15 to 20 minutes south of minneapolis and st paul now dan patch became super famous and he got like you know the whole seabiscuit secretariat thing but like in 1905 or whatever and they renamed hamilton after um savage himself and you can also i'm assuming you know this already um you can walk on dan patch avenue at the state fairgrounds to go see a butter sculpture if you guys ever come back to the state fair which is pretty cool another modern like city of savage it's just like a quiet little suburb it's like in washington terms of like a sammamish or boffle but you know damn pack wow look at stew from down flex washington terms um anyway uh Smell you later. Go Vikings.

Go Vikings, indeed. Obviously, that's also the town that Megan Thee Stallion writes about in her song, Savage. I'm a savage. Oh, right. Classic, bougie, ratchet. Stallion. Sassy, moody, nasty. Acting, stupid, what's happening?

What's happening? It all comes back to horses. Dan Patch. Yes, it does. Stallion. Dan Patch was a harness horse, by the way. A champion harness horse of the world. Not to be confused with Dan Patchman, host of The Sporkful. Right, exactly. I kept on asking this horse, is a burrito a sandwich? And it would not answer me. You got to eat them upside down.

Maximize the flavor to tongue ratio. The email that I was hoping you would read, if you don't mind, I'll just read it here because it's from listener Teresa. And I really like it. The subject was potpourri. I like that. This is just a grab bag of responses and thoughts that listener Teresa has had to various episodes. An assortment of informational goodies Luke and Andrew The pronunciation for Goomba Friend in Italian slang is Goomba You're both going with the Goomba pronunciation Goomba You know I'm not disagreeing with Teresa But it's one of those things where I think if I said Goomba Do we have I mean Not that the Sopranos is the You know like definitive Italian pronunciation sort of, I don't know, source. But doesn't Goomba sound weird to you?

Well, I can now, you know, now that Teresa says it, I can sort of hear it both ways. But here's the thing for me.

Like Goomar, that's like your like side piece, Goomar.

The thing for me is I don't, it's like with words like that that are slang and associated very specifically with a culture, like I almost don't want to get it exactly right because then there's an assumption that either I am trying to like kind of take on that culture or pretend like I'm more familiar with it than I am. So in a certain way, like sometimes with these rhetorical things, if it's off by a tiny bit, it's also a way, not that I did that on purpose, I'm not trying to change history here, but I don't know that I would try to go for a more accurate pronunciation of that because that's just not my world, and I don't want to project that.

It'd be like saying, Nihiro Agua.

Right. Coming from me when I say everything else the way I say things.

Right. I feel you on that. But anyway, I'm sure you're right, Teresa. I'm not disagreeing with you, but I'm going to probably keep saying Goomba. Andrew, I was listening to TBTL on Pocket Casts, but starting in mid-December, the episodes would play for 20 minutes and then just stop. No other pod has done that. I switched to Spotify for TBTL, and that works fine. Just a heads up. Did you know that, Andrew? We're having problems on podcast.

Guys, can we just not tell Luke everything? This has been an ongoing thing. A lot of people have been getting at me with this. I've been working with the engineers a lot at APM over the past couple of weeks. It's all part of this experiment where we've been releasing podcasts as a different format. It's exciting for a bunch of reasons, and when we iron out the details, it should work. But I do know that a lot of people have been having some issues down. In fact, those people might not hear this part of the show because I know that people have been having issues listening to the back half of shows and whatnot. We are working on it, and starting today, we'll be going back to the old format until we can get this fixed. Oh, okay. It's been a whole thing, Luke.

Well, thank you for all the time that you've been putting it on, and I'm not being sarcastic with that. Thanks, man. So you mean some of the listeners didn't get to hear me quote the Megan Thee Stallion lyrics savage? That's true. If you notice, go back, Luke. I can open tomorrow's show with that.

Do a little mental inventory or go back and listen to the shows online. And you'll hear that all of my controversial stuff I've been saving for about after the 32-minute mark.

That explains so much. Teresa continues, Luke, you mentioned Starks, the vacuum place in Portland. I'm looking at it right now, by the way. Literally staring at it.

I thought Teresa was saying that.

Right, but I'm just saying that this is... I have mentioned it.

fact i i'm i'm looking at i believe it's on the corner of grand and cooch which could have gone with a different pronunciation portland looks like couch is pronounced cooch what are you gonna do anyway uh luke you mentioned stark's the vacuum place in portland they make one of the best masks i own right now i'm not sure how they got in the mask biz but they are superb

because vacuum bags because genevieve when she was making her first round of masks she was putting you know their cloth masks but she was putting i'm pretty sure they were vacuum bags that she ordered online because they were recommended as an extra layer filtration inside the mask

um well it's got me uh wanting to wander down there and to safely check out what the starks mask situation is so i may do that also a theresa continues andrew c attached while reading a biography about tiny tim i learned that donovan was trying to get attention from tiny's teenage

wife and she thought he was cute so tiny tim had a teenage wife this sounds like a i didn't even realize that that sentence was going to sound like some sort of a nursery rhyme some sort of a body nursery rhyme but tiny tim had a teenage wife so that's problematic right there but then donovan is trying to steal this this um this young lady i thought that tiny tim's

wife was named like Miss Debbie or something. He always referred to her very formally which seems like a kind of an older like a name you wouldn't call like a 17 year old person. But anyway, I'm trying to open the attachment which is now crashing my computer. So thanks a lot Teresa. Oh my God. It's your lucky day. God, I just found an email from Teresa in the parking lot. I was trying to let's see I've got to log back in now because there was like two more things in this potpourri email that I've fallen into the unfortunate position Andrew where I now have different passwords for so many things I was trying to avoid that I think something's

going on with GoDaddy by the way because I can't get into GoDaddy right now and also we had mentioned before the show that there was a big headline that like there's a huge internet outage that is hitting some like it's supposedly hitting gmail and some other big um services and and whatnot i wonder if gmail is being hit by that because i can't get in there at all um yeah i can't get in either well there

was one more thing i think i'm gonna do this from memory now andrew this is why i get paid the big bucks because i can remember things like the fact that the other thing teresa had was a photograph that was just an image that she'd pasted into the email of some kind of a plastic thing to save lettuce in for a long time. Oh, yeah. And she said, this is the thing that I use to save lettuce for a long time. Because I think I was probably talking about how those salad bags tend to go bad.

Yeah, is it called a crisper? Because we had a Tupperware one growing up. It was nice because there should be some dampness to the lettuce after you wash it. And also, I think it keeps it fresh, but you don't want it then sitting in its own moisture. And I remember we had some sort of a Tupperware thing that had little spikes on the bottom of it so that you could put the head of lettuce in there, but it was still raised above the surface a little bit, if you can picture that.

I always knew the crisper to just be the drawer in the refrigerator where you're supposed to put lettuce. I think when I was a kid, we must have had some brand of refrigerator that literally had crisper written on that drawer. Yeah, I think you're right. Maybe it had a kind of little bit of like a corrugated bottom to it or something that was supposed to be doing that same thing.

I, by the way, oh, I think I found this thing, vintage Tupperware lettuce. They do seem to be calling it a crisper bowl. You know, I don't think I can this. I don't I hate to be a bummer here, but I'm looking at like I don't think I can use this picture of my whole extended family watching me play video games because there's just like a lot of whatever. Or if one family member sees it on Facebook, then it'll kind of become a thing. So I'm not going to be able to use that.

Can you just, like, could you crop it?

Well, what I could, yeah, maybe I could try cropping it so that I'm the only person in there. Or I could use the one of just my fat, concentrating face as I'm playing Mario World or whatever it is. Or I could use a photo of a vintage 1980s Tupperware lettuce crisper bowl.

Totally your call. I only want you to put, if it's a photo of you or your family, only one that you feel like putting up. I don't want you to put anything up that's going to live in your head afterwards. So that's not much help other than to say, I support you in whatever choice you make.

Thank you for that. I appreciate that. Let me just play one more thing, unless you had more things from Teresa. I've had this voicemail that I downloaded a while back. It's called Shame Eating. if i've previewed this i don't even remember it or maybe i just thought oh we like shame eating stories so hope this is good guys this is hannah in ohio i have a shame eating story

so my boyfriend is at work and normally uh i would be expecting dinner for said boyfriend and i but on days he works i get lazy and i don't want to cook right so i'm like yes i don't want to cook um i also haven't eaten anything all day i just got off of work i decided to stop at mcdonald's on the intention of getting like a five-piece nugget to hold me over till i got something to eat at home because i was starting to get sick right and uh i see on the menu they have a big mac packed like two fries two big macs like a 20 piece right of nuggets and so i was like oh that's yeah i guess i didn't preview this so i just powered down two things of fries two big macs back to back about five of the nuggets and washed it all down with a large sweet tea and i am filled with shame but i am very very full now so there's that power up i'm glad

I'm glad you can come to us with these stories. That sounds good.

I would be down with everything in that except the sweet tea. I would go D.C. I would go Diet Coke because McDonald's famously has really good. Well, there's some debate. Is the Diet Coke better or just because they have a wide straw, which oxygenates?

Do they still have that wide straw, though? I've been very disappointed because I went to McDonald's for the first time in a very long time a few months ago, and I really had my mind set on a very specific meal that I used to get all the time. 20-piece chicken nugget with orange drink, and I was expecting the orange drink. I expected the big fat straw and the high C non-carbonated orange drink, and I got in the car, got my nuggets. I took my first big gulp of orange drink, and number one, the straw was not that old-fashioned really wide straw, and number two, it's not high C anymore. It's totally carbonated. It was a real turnoff.

i'm just trying to think if i've ever had high c from a mcdonald's i don't know if it's actually

high c but their orange whatever that orange yeah their orange drink was not carbonated and when you go to take a big gulp of something that you don't think is going to be carbonated and then it is it's again like i like orange soda but it's a very different thing

the thing for me the reason why i wouldn't go with sweet tea or even just an orange drink The reason I would go for the Diet Coke is because I, if I'm eating something, if I'm eating pizza, if I'm eating, you know, fast food burgers or whatever version of that I eat these days, I know that I'm going to want to eat too much of that. And I know that I need a carbonated drink to Tetris down the food in my stomach. Like I need, because I'm going to hit that point where I'm like, okay, that was too much. And then I'm going to burp because I've been drinking carbonated something. And then I'm going to feel much better. Like it's, it's actually part of the process for me.

So, but you're, but you're, I'm wondering if I just got, if I, maybe I went to a McDonald's on a bad straw day. Do you think that they, do you think they're still using those wide straws?

Well, to be honest with you, I have not been to a McDonald's in kind of a long time because they don't have a lot for me. So I don't remember, but I would be shocked if they had gotten rid of that. I feel like that was one of their difference makers. Everybody loves that straw. So I don't know. Maybe one of the listeners knows. Maybe listener Hannah in Ohio can tell us if they had one of the big straws when she was using her sweet tea to wash down her two Big Macs, which, by the way, tip of the cap, back-to-back Big Macs, that's not for the faint of heart.

No. And, again, I'm not trying to add shame. I like that you did this.

No, game-recognized game. shame recognize shame yes although man i'm not gonna now i'm not gonna get a red x today because i've got my mind on i mean there's a you know i'll tell you this about portland that i love there are a lot of burger places here that will make you a fake meat burger like it's a big thing in fact there's there are whole places that are basically like plant-based fast food joints there's a place called veggie grill there's also one of those in university village by the way and uh they make they it's it's just like you're going to some sort of burger joint except all the stuff is plant-based and i have to say it's pretty convincing i went and i got a uh we must

have said oh one of our listeners or during the emails or something somebody mentioned a diner on yesterday's show right in a pastrami sandwich i believe and so i um i left here and i went to dingfelder's i've mentioned that place to you before right it's like oh yeah that's on capitol hill right on capitol hill even before pandemic they were only like a takeout window i think they had plans to open up their dining room eventually but of course that has changed but they're still operating as a takeout window um and uh yeah i just got this giant pastrami and corned beef sandwich and sat in my car and ate it it was so good luke are you

even sad that places are closed like because i feel like you're having a real love affair with sitting in your car eating food maybe because it's something you never did before the pandemic

no i mean i'm doing it because i don't feel like because i'm just spending all of my time here at home i could have it's also just too hungry to sit in the car for another 15 minutes with this food getting colder as i drove home but also like i'm eating no i are you kidding me and i mean i

i'm doing it sitting in the restaurant with your book or with your phone oh god yeah that's still

the ideal for you it's going in reading uh in a diner and maybe like sipping the the coffee or the coke that keeps coming yeah no that i am i want that's you're missing i'm so sick of eating in the car it's gross um well my friend i mean i don't think it's gross but i mean for me i

always feel like well that's why i was wondering if you had if you'd had an awakening because you grew up in a family that didn't eat in the car and you generally try to not do that in your adulthood and now it's like well that's your only option i wondered if maybe you were because i do i personally i mean i enjoy a good sitting in my car eating like taco time food whilst listening to you know whatever midday public radio programming is on or yeah midday sports programming like that's a good that's a that's that's fun for me but yeah i mean i'm sure there will be a time when

i look back on this and i think oh yeah and maybe i will even do it more like you know my thing is i was listening to the lebitard show yesterday and um they were talking about getting liposuction while i'm like sucking in while i'm lipo sucking this sandwich well of all people it was mike it was producer Mike Ryan who was who first mentioned it and but then but thank God for Chris who's like actually fat and his body is actually more shaped like mine and he's saying like this is like the most skinny guy thing in the world to do to say I think I need liposuction and then to lift up your shirt and show everybody like look how fat I am if you're really fat like people like me and Chris this this is Chris's point you are you don't often lift up your shirt I mean I'm not saying that's true with everybody but like right it's just very much of like for For those of us, and, you know, I shouldn't use generalizations like that, but for those of us who have true body shame, which I do, which is not a good thing, like, it is somewhat annoying when the really good-looking skinny guy is like, oh, look, I gained a tiny bit of weight. I'm thinking about getting liposuction.

Yeah, that's something people need to be aware of. I think I definitely dabbled in that. Luckily, my body has caught up to my insecurity. So when I pull my shirt up now It's not like It's not a guy Whose BMI is really really really low Trying to just like Sort of like fish for a compliment Like it's now definitely like Not a thing that anyone needs to see But I know what you mean Like I feel bad Because I think there's probably days Maybe in the early days of this show Or even before TBTL started Where I was like 175 pounds And if I got up to, like, 179, I was like, I'm getting so fat. And it'd be like, calm down, dude. Again, I mean, now I'm pre-diabetic. So good news, everyone. It's no longer an act. It's a lived experience. But, yeah, I know what you mean. And, yeah, from Mike Ryan, come on. I know. That guy's definitely not having any – his weight is very, very, very – he appears to be very svelte. Yes. Good-looking man. All right. Good-looking man. Okay, let's call it on today's episode. Did you have any thoughts about songs to go out with?

I could go out with this song. I mean, I don't feel strongly about this, but there's a song called Automobile that I like by Nation of Language. I've probably played it on the show before, but if we're talking about cars, I could play it now. Okay, let's do that. And let's say thank you to everyone. Hold on, who's got a song called Sitting in My... Oh, we can't play Sitting in My Car. That'll be too dirty, right? I don't know that song. Slick Rick has a song called Sitting in My Car.

Oh, I don't know that Slick Rick song, but I guess it is.

It's probably not. Sorry to cut you off on that for a second. I was like, oh, that's perfect, Sitting in My Car. And I'm like, no, it's Slick Rick. We won't be able to get through the title of the song before he'll say something offensive.

Uncle Ricky, would you tell us a story, please? Oh, please. All right. Well, that's going to do it for our show today. Thank you, everyone, for listening. Thanks for being part of this thing. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio for you. So we will see all of you then. Until then, enjoy your Tuesday. Stay safe. Take care of yourselves. Take care of each other. And please remember to mount too tall. And good luck to all. I'm concerned, I never deserve, I never deserve, in the night I'm bleeding and she's hurt, I never deserve, I never deserve. We'll be right back. Power out.