Muse

A little BG on me. I do HR, means Human Resources. Here at TAC, my name is Eric Rossdale. Some people call me Cool Eric. They called me that once. Some young people, too. Some one young person did that. I love people, to say that another way. I love people. And that one's got a little more fun to it, doesn't it? TBTL! thought i was shame eating in private what is shame eating i don't think we have enough time for that tonight as i tried to explain before you cannot get honey from a hornet's nest i just don't

think there's any science to support that buddy there's some very basic science out there supporting

that trust me pal what a fun terrifying joke that's science these are facts in science we

call that a hypothesis you find something to back it up and we can talk now if you excuse me i was

watching mama's family this will be blown way out of proportion you have my word on

all righty hello good morning and welcome everyone to a monday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live social engineering what is it exactly and how does it work my name is luke burbank i am your host you're still doing a podcast coming to you from the nest broadcast center high in the sky above portland oregon where we are expecting another scorcher jalapeno uh here in the pacific northwest we are now under i guess what is called the heat dome uh which sounds like something out of a an hp lovecraft work like there's something kind of sci-fi about a heat dome descending on your on your region but anyway we'll be we'll be dealing with that today and you all will be dealing with this let the fun begin episode 3449 in a collector series i am back home back in the broadcast center after being up in seattle this weekend and i thought i was being real clever by jumping on an airplane uh and uh flying there and back instead of driving but i wish i hadn't done that a real um cut real intense moment on an airplane actually not involving anything that felt unsafe for the airplane i wasn't afraid of what the airplane was going to do i was afraid of what i was going to do uh so we'll talk about that oh and and speaking of uh mess ups i've made a huge mistake an intern at hbo apparently uh sent an email out accidentally to like most of the subscribers to hbo and it was just kind of a nonsense email that was obviously just meant for internal purposes it wasn't like it was you know had something um graphic in it but anyway it just made no sense and then hbo got on twitter and said yes this was our intern who did this and then everyone else decided to start sharing their big mess-ups when they were interns and turned into kind of a heartwarming life affirming moment so we'll look at some of those and also there is apparently a chicken wing shortage in America and so wing places in particular wing stop is trying to get people Americans that is to eat more chicken thigh and they are doing some digital version of their

store called thigh stop these are the best cajun chicken niblets i've ever had um we'll get into

the uh details on uh on on why there is not enough there are not enough chicken wings which at one time were totally undervalued nobody cared about them until the anchor bar in buffalo new york started serving them and now we don't have enough of them so we'll do that plus emails and v-mails including a quite amazing video sent in by a listener in Pittsburgh that I saw just before the show. So I guess now we have to call it emails and V-mails and videos from listener Tan Ying in Pittsburgh. Okay, that's all coming up as soon as we welcome this fellow to the show. He is the longest-running co-bro of the program, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. Hot Walsh summer is here, y'all Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard He's Andrew Walsh And he's joining me right now From the Roosevelt neighborhood of Seattle, Washington Good morning, my friend Good morning, Luke The Milkshake does I'm laughing because I decided during the intro To try to edit that tape Without actually listening to it And that's why you get that real funky upcut This is the full grandeur of that tape Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard and, hey, Dirty, baby, I got your money. Hey, that's not it. I knew as I was saying it. Wait, that's not the line. But I decided.

I decided that it would be more funny and punchier to just focus on the milkshake part, but because the show was already starting, I just tried to eyeball it. I just tried to look at the WAV file and figure out where you would have said, where you would have wrapped up saying, my milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.

I heard the upcut. I almost made a comment on it, and I wasn't sure if it was from the sender who sent it in to you, and I didn't want to be insulting him.

The unpaid audio production associate, Lynn, would never know. He's very, very conscientious about those things. Only LB would be responsible.

Milkshake brings all the boys to the yard.

Actually, that was better at that time.

That was good. You're just editing it out.

All I need to do is take five minutes of the show to diagnose it, and I can usually get this thing dialed in.

Well, I'm not going to be much help here because you said something moments before you played that drop that I wanted to react to. then the drop took all of our attention and now i cannot remember what i can you um can you redo your entire intro but start from the back i was talking sure absolutely well i was talking about

the the chicken wing shortage that was all it took okay yeah you know what it was it was about

the um the video uh we won't talk about what's in the video right now but you mentioned we we say we have emails and v-mails like you know everybody knows email that's an electronic mail i guess And voicemail is what we call, you know, V-mails, voicemails. So now if we include video calls like that or whatever you want to call it, what if we called them D-mails, like don't you know it's a video?

Uh-huh. No, other than making me laugh, how do you see the D working to help people?

Don't you know it's a video?

Now is that a show title? Six minutes and 42 seconds in, don't you know it's a video?

It's not going to be funny to anybody, but let me explain it. There is a radio host here in the Seattle area of a show that Luke and I do not love too much. And he calls his email segment D-Mails. And it just always sounds wrong. It just always sounds wrong.

It's just funny because, I mean, it's such a self-own in my mind. It really is. Because it's like this is a guy who's obviously, you know, our political worldviews do not align. He's also the guy who, maybe rightfully so, got very mad at us one day in TBTL's radio days when we were frying up mackerel in the studio the night before because we were trying to recreate food that you can make in prison. And the next day, he made quite a thing about it on the air, which I, by the way, would have done the exact same thing in his shoes because that's good shtick. Yeah, right. It's like he's a very competent broadcaster, but he's also got this populism thing going and whatever. Point is, the idea that he didn't realize what a self-owned calling his emails D-mails. He thought he was branding them and making them more special. He just really made himself sound silly, in my opinion.

Which is why my joke, let's call them D-mails, don't you know it's a video. That's why that is so hilarious. It made me laugh.

It literally made me lol here at 9.30 in the morning on a Monday when I think you and I both, Andrew, are moving a little slow. You described I believe you described your energy as hot And grimy this morning

I think I even said slimy I'm kind of coming in hot and slimy But not like hot like I'm coming in hot I mean like no I'm literally hot I'm baking

That kind of hot where you're sweating Your hair is kind of turning into limp lettuce That kind of unpleasant version of hot Where you feel less productive As opposed to Shep Smith yelling this Jalapeno On Fox News

That's that's hot. That's hot. Good energy. Yeah. You're feeling hot. Slime energy. Hot slime energy. Yeah. That's also a show title. Somebody should write definitely the new Tyler, the creator album. I I'm going to get real personal here. OK, what's going on is I I went to bed too late last night. And then, of course, like you said, we're living in a heat dome now. So, and I'm not complaining about it. It's been fine. I slept fine last night, but woke up feeling a little, you know, just woke up to a hot bedroom. Usually 99.9% of the time I would have taken a shower right away in the morning, but I was getting kind of a slow start. And I thought, okay, I know I got a project I got to do this afternoon, but I think there's going to be, I'm slurring my words here. That's that hot slime energy. I know that there's going to be a donut hole in my day, which is the perfect amount of time to go to the gym, which I've only done once since I promised to go back to the gym to four months ago. So I thought I'm going to go to the gym. So why shower in the morning? I will get through this show, not get through this show. What a terrible way of talking about my job and you and the listeners. I will drag my ass through this show, this TBTL, and then I will go to the gym and then I will shower. So as I sit here right now, I'm I'm unshowered. I feel like I still have sleep on me, if that makes any sense. I feel.

little sweaty and slimy and gross and uh that's the energy i'm bringing i have no real good reason to feel tired this morning because i went to bed pretty early last night um i slept i slept okay but yeah i mean i i was you know kept it mellow yesterday largely had a really fun day uh hanging out with my kid on father's day we we roamed around capitol hill and she made this like amazing breakfast for us that was super delicious right out of the new york times she's living in the new york times recipe section like that's her life like if you go in her little kitchen she has all the appropriate um you know kinds of like she was telling me about something called uh texas wear which is this very kind of i guess popular among the real heads popular kind of like um serving bowl that she had bought on ebay that she was very excited about she made this great salad and she She literally almost made us toss salad and scrambled eggs, which felt maybe one. It was just a little too on the nose for being that we were in Seattle. But anyway, we had a really nice day and just went to this place on Capitol Hill called Blotto. First of all, I can't see the word Blotto without thinking, my name is Otto, and I love to get Blotto. But it's this new pizza place that is also a wine shop and a little grocery. and it's just run by some really cool people and my friend Kyle Johnson, Kyle Johnson who took my wedding photos and so I blame him for some of that and also who took some promotional pictures of us anyway he is associated with those folks point being we just had an absolutely lovely day then it was time for me to come home Andrew and I was like really proud of myself because I was like I you know I'm avoiding the slog the slog being basically from fife washington down to fort the the front gates of the fort lewis army base that stretch of interstate five particularly going south is just a living nightmare and so i get to the airport and i in fact i even moved my flight up andrew i had there was a flight at 820 that i was on but then there was a flight at 755 and i got there with enough um you know extra time to to move up to the earlier flight and it was a bigger plane and i was like yes this is everything's coming up millhouse and then by the way i was on an airline that uh we know and love but i will they will remain nameless for the purposes of this conversation because it was not it was not my it was not their best day um but uh but i still do love them anyway uh we get on the plane everything's pretty much normal and we taxi out onto the runway and we were like at that critical moment where you are like the pilot's about to floor it and we're sitting there for like too long you know i sense there's something is not right about this like now we've been sitting on

that runway for like five minutes and he hasn't punched it chewy what's going on and he comes on the speaker and he's like you can just hear that he's he's like frustrated at the information that's just been relayed to him via the radio i mean being a pilot an airline pilot it seems like a really fun job at times it all seems like it could be kind of a tedious job um but it also comes with i think the unfun part of having to tell the people on the airplane when some people that you have absolutely no authority over have maybe messed something up and it's gonna ruin it and let me just tell you this the last moment that you want to be delivering the news to a plane full of people that you have to go back to the gate because there is some problem with how the luggage is distributed underneath the airplane the last moment you want to be doing that andrew 8 p.m. on a Sunday night everybody wants to be home you you could probably get away with that on a Saturday at 1 p.m. some of those weirdos that are taking the Saturday flight because it's like cheaper or something or I don't mean you're a weirdo if you want to get a good deal but just like you're flying at kind of a non-peak moment probably it's like hey you get home uh you know you get back to Denver at two or you get back to Denver at three but man Sunday night everyone is already just counting how soon can they be in their bed at least i certainly was so the the frustrated the the sound of of of what is what do they say in the princess pride that like when when wesley is i mean when wesley is being tortured and somebody says oh that's the sound of a man who's lost his true love or whatever that is a man who is having ultimate suffering whatever that was everybody on the airplane when they said we're going back to the gate so we go back to the gate and now we're just sitting there but we're not they haven't they're not letting us off the plane which is actually good you want to try to generally not get off the plane if it's going to be an under two hour experience but the problem was we're just sitting there and it's taking forever and also we are in this weird kind of limit space where my cell phone has no reception but there's we're not close enough to the thing to pick up the wi-fi from c-tac and i didn't have a book i didn't have a magazine i had a magazine in my backpack that was like far away from me and not gettable so i was like i was forced andrew to sit there with my own thoughts and it was killing me the guy next to me i was jealous he brought a book about afini shakur he was reading that the um the the woman uh in the in the aisle row of our of our row in the aisle she had a ipad with all kinds of movies loaded on it i had nothing i just had andrew 40 seconds of a tiktok video that was 50 seconds long and i couldn't see the reveal i kept watching it i kept watching it it was basically a video where a lady is playing with a raccoon and then the raccoon turns on her but i couldn't get to the end of the video and it was

honestly making me so frustrated and we're just sitting there and we're sitting there and the pilot just keeps coming on and again it's not the pilot's fault but it's like this was supposed to take five minutes then you can hear them throwing the luggage around under the plane i'm thinking who put the luggage in the wrong place in the first place i assume there's a app for that right like there should somebody is there's got to be some system for telling the the luggage handler And by the way, that's a thankless job. But, like, how did that even happen? How do you put the luggage in the wrong part of the belly of the plane? And so then the moving of it, we basically sat there for another 90 minutes, Andrew, waiting for it all to be done. And then when it was finally done, maybe it was, like, another hour of waiting for them to move the luggage around. And then now the luggage is done. And the pilot's like, the cargo door is closed. We're ready to take off. We're ready to push back. then of course we're out of we're not in line for the people that tow you back out of the gate because we've missed our window now so all of those folks are doing other things they're towing other planes that are on time out of their little you know shoot so now we sit for about 30 more minutes knowing that the cargo is ready to go and that we're just waiting for someone to come tow us back like 12 feet and that was the longest 30 minutes of my life Andrew and I really started to understand emotionally how it is that people lose their shit on flights like when you see those videos of someone who's got like four air marshals on top of them and they're trying to zip tie them and for some reason they're wearing an arrow through the head yeah and i don't know why but it just completes the look it's a promotional gift at the um you know las vegas airport yeah they uh or something they got it they got it at the at the romano's macaroni grill at phoenix sky harbor and um they've been wearing it the whole flight like as they would make these announcements i i had a stronger and stronger visceral desire to yell aloud back to the announcement almost like to the yell to the front of the plane to like express my annoyance and displeasure at the by the way the people who have zero to do with this the flight attendants they do not load the luggage the pilots they do not load the luggage these are not the droids you're looking for luke but oh my god i was just i was there was something about the impotence of my position sitting there not able to look at my phone not able to get off the plane the plane is not taking off i just was in i was so filled with boiling rage and every time the flight attendants would walk down the aisle they were doing their best they were trying to kind of strike that middle ground of like not being overly glum but not seeming overly happy they were trying to kind of just be i guess like grimly pleasant might be which by the way is grimly the battle trolls yes third cousin we'll get into it next

year on that tape yeah grimly the pleasant but anyway the pleasant right um but uh so Maybe that's a show title.

I'm actually very interested in this character now.

Yeah, you're right, because it really flies in the face of, like, the whole troll vibe, right?

I don't know if David does any kind of role-playing game or something, but I would appreciate if he could kind of build this character out for me. I'll ask him. I don't know if he does that pro bono or what.

Yeah, Grimly the Pleasant. Just like... Yeah, I'm totally with you. That's a great character that we need to learn more about.

Wow, wow.

anyway i just was i realized essentially how bad i am at dealing with even mild disappointment and not having some digital device to distract me that was why it was really rough for me also just being kind of tired and we'd been out in the sun all day so i was you know just kind of had that like i am just ready to be done with today oh bt dubs then i land and uh i didn't have my car so I'm going to I'm going to call a lift how much do you think a lift they were initially going to try to charge me for a lift we don't do ads for lift anymore do we uh a lift from the uh portland airport to my

place which is i think it's like maybe eight miles eight miles i'm gonna say that was was it coming in at 55 dollars 162 dollars i meant uh 55 tip now now that is now now now that would be for the

fancier car but that's because andrew they were out of all of the other cars so it was like it Basically, like, well, we can pick you up in a stretch Hummer with a hot tub for $3,000.

Driven by Grimley the Pleasant.

Yes, yes. He knows where all the strip clubs are. It just felt like, and also, like, so I actually managed to get an Uber because that was running a little, and it wasn't $162. It was more like $50, and that was, they were, I got really lucky. somehow i just like because people were just standing around with that once i get out once i we got to portland once i got off the plane once i got out to the kind of waiting area there was thousands of people out there andrew the line to pick people up from the airports right so i get or maybe drop them off i don't know just the line of people in cars trying to get to the airport to do some business there again either dropping someone off or picking someone up it went all the way it went a mile it was just stopped parked traffic for one solid mile between the portland airport and the and the freeway where you get off to go i mean i'll tell you what nature is healing and it's not great like we are getting back to the problem is we have all i said this about the restaurant thing the other day we now have all of this new demand and we do not have

enough supply of any of it whatever it is yeah i'm interested why there isn't as much supply for the drivers though I understand that you know if we were still in a more fuzzy reopening stage I understand why a lot of people kind of maybe stopped driving it wasn't worth their their gas and their time to go out there and pick up a ride here and there during the pandemic but it seems like things are pretty you know kind of buzzing right now it seems like there's plenty of demand I wonder why there isn't as much supply as far as drivers coming back to the roads I don't know

enough about the economics of the stimulus and i don't want to just like lay it at the feet of that i'm guessing that there is some kind of psychological shift that's happened for a lot of people and it is i think a lot of people who were doing work that maybe they would have rather not been doing and they basically this time off which was you know something that was for many people survivable because of the stimulus money i don't i'm not you know some republican saying that like we're just giving people too much money now they don't even need to work but i do think that something happened in people's some people's brains where they were like life is too short for me to go to a job that i and i don't know if this applies to ride share drivers or not but i just think a lot of people in this country decided yeah you know what i'm not going to do that for a while whatever that was like i went to a dairy queen i was visiting my parents who were down in camas washington i went to a dairy queen i think i mentioned this on the show they had a handmade sign on the drive-thru that said we are short staff please be patient with us like that's just i think it's going on everywhere and i think it's that people have realized that maybe there's a different way to live their life i don't know if people move back in with their families or if they um or what what we're all doing but there seems to be a shortage of of people to do a lot of the jobs and a lot of those are the jobs that i think you know we're we're towards the the lower end of the of the you know the food chain on job stuff um i i said this on wait wait they probably cut it out but like there's a simple fix for this if i can pay people more money like less money to jeff bezos and more money to the people who don't want to do certain jobs for 16 an hour like there's a lot of hand wringing like well what's going to happen if no one wants to go work at mcdonald's you know it'll work itself out once you're making 25 an hour to work at mcdonald's like yeah and

And that's also one of the reasons why ride shares are more expensive, too. It is the scarcity. But also I know here in Washington state and I think in Oregon, too, right, there have been laws that have been passed for that apply minimum wage or some sort of minimum wages to the ride share drivers. And so you do see a direct impact when you're ordering a car. And you're like, oh, yeah, things are a little bit more expensive now. But I don't feel terrible about it because I felt a little bit worse about it when things were so cheap it didn't seem economical. You know, that was problematic.

I saw a headline that was the end, I think it was something in the effect of the millennial subsidy is over. And what they meant by that was there are all these services, whether it's ride shares, whether it's those scooters that we rent, whether it's our beloved DoorDash, our sponsor, all of these companies have been basically. operating at a loss to base to demonstrate the value of the service to us and to get us to use the service and all of these companies are now deciding it's time for them to actually turn a profit and it kind of means that this the the fact that they have because you'd be like how can i they're bringing me my food and it's two more dollars what's the you know how is that even a thing um and and so i think a lot of this stuff is the we're gonna see what feels like a huge inflation on a lot of these things and i think it's because they were we were all getting it

for free for a long time basically yeah yeah yeah exactly um sitting on the plane like that one thought that i have is like listen nobody wants to be sitting on that tarmac whether it's a a tarmac if you're on a flight that's about to take off or i think it's even sometimes worse if you've already landed and then there's a huge delay on the tarmac i haven't been yes i don't think i've been a huge victim of that maybe 45 minutes tops but you know so you remember some of those horror stories of people landing at their destination but then being stuck on the tarmac for

hours in some case like that sounds awful my parents were on a plane in st louis they were on the airplane for five hours i can't even imagine like not at the gate i know time stands

still i can't even imagine that but i will say that i also think there's something about this style of trip that you did that makes any extra minutes on the airplane even worse because if let's say you're going to Hawaii for a week well then the percentage of time that is added to your entire trip when you have to stay on the tarmac for an extra 45 minutes to 90 minutes or whatever it was um it was closer did you say how long how long did this add like 90 minutes

oh we took off we were supposed to take off at 755 and we took off at almost 955 so it was about

two hours so um yeah and so that's not great under any circumstances but if you especially if you're at the beginning of your vacation and you know you had a whole week of kicking it in the sand or whatever i don't know what people do on vacation i assume they kick sand sand kicking you're going to the sand kicking festival in hawaii famously that's in that nervous than a

one-legged man in a sand kicking contest whoa i've never heard that before yeah that's like some old in fact maybe it's even ableist now i don't know but they used to say something about like you know he's he's got he's got more trouble than a one-legged man in a butt kicking contest it's one of those one of those real well yeah those and dem duke boys got boss hog nervous than a long-tailed cat in a room full of rocking chairs kind of energy we could say that though

we could say long-tailed cat no i think so yeah um anyway i was trying to think because my dad had some really good ones that i know i've shared on the show before and now i'm forgetting i know that my my uncle uh would say if it was raining really hard he would say it's uh it's it's raining like a cow pissing on a flat rock that's a pretty yeah i like that one it's very evocative yeah oh now

you know what they say now on tiktok is is some there's a meme going around sorry to be vulgar but uh it's it's like some audio of some woman saying like like i guess her boyfriend or whatever is is like you know is using the bathroom he's micturating and she says something like damn it sounds like you're frying chicken in there i'm with it or whatever like that's cool or whatever it's like it's basically like his his the man is dealing with a powerful stream situation and she described it as sounding like frying chicken which i thought was kind of hilarious it is it is funny

but that also makes me not want chicken which i guess well good later on there's a chicken shortage have you heard that's what i hear um but anyway so just to complete my thought which is obvious at this point yeah i mean you were just going on a very short trip like you're in and out and so adding two hours to that where your margins were already oh and by the way i mean we never really talked about this you came up to seattle we did go to the mariners game yes friday it was like one of the best i mean one of the best nights i think a lot of us have had in a long time amazing game went out afterwards the gang was back together so much fun but your flight was delayed and you're the one who arranged like to get all the tickets for us and everything which i really appreciate and you kind of got everybody on the same page and then what you showed up at the i don't know fourth inning fifth maybe even yeah that well and the other thing too and then

we can move on from this because listeners are like more than bored with this i bet but like yeah the problem is it is a real it's a coin toss driving from portland to seattle and flying from portland to seattle is a bit of a coin toss as far as what is more efficient if everything goes correctly with the flight and if you get there you know right before the flight leaves and the flight takes off on time and everything goes super smoothly you do gain a couple of hours and you don't have to sit in traffic and sit in the car and all that stuff but if anything at all goes wrong like it took me much more time to get home yesterday than it would have if I just drove you know and listen to a bunch of episodes of the Anthropocene reviewed or whatever like and that was also part of my anger was well first of all the flight that I had moved myself off of had long taken off by the time we took off so that was kind of right

that made me a little frustrated the guy next to me it was funny uh he was like i was explaining this to him and he said oh yeah he goes you're so smart you outsmarted yourself that's what my dad used to say to me and i was like this is a true point he was mad like he he was sort of like talking slightly like above normal speaking voice i think so that like if the flight attendants could overhear that he was frustrated and then he would say something kind of on a little bit on the louder side not too bad and then he would pick up his phone and text presumably his wife what he had just said out loud because it's like he needed like he needed someone to give him a response to like his frustration he was feeling you'd feel seen as they say exactly so anyway yeah that added to the like once i realized oh i have completely i've i've uh you know i picked the wrong the wrong door door number three it takes you six hours to get home uh was the wrong door when i thought i was actually you know sort of get and then i get to the airport you know in portland and then it's like 162 for a lift and i'm just like you gotta be kidding me you gotta be kidding me but you know what honestly and i was texting with carrie on the waiting on the plane i was like i was just hitting up anyone in my phone you're it's amazing you didn't hear from me andrew um because i could i told you i couldn't really like i couldn't surf surf the web but i could get a couple texts out i I guess that like uses the least amount of connectivity. So I was like texting with Addie. I was texting with Carrie and I was but I was saying to Carrie that like because she was like, oh, that sucks. I'm sorry that you're, you know, dealing with that. And I was like for the day that I got to have with my kid, you know, and happened and it was Father's Day. And also the fun I had with you guys at the baseball game and and afterwards just being out and about like it was such a great weekend for me that this one little hiccup on the way home is it pales in comparison to the overall huge net benefit to my life. So it was a good weekend. It just got it just was a little frustrating getting home. Yeah. All right. Let's take a quick break. And then when we come back, we'll get into these top stories. And, of course, the D-mails. Don't go anywhere. It's TBT. Hello and welcome to Top Story. All right. Our top story today, an intern at HBO Max apparently sent out an email by mistake that said, integration test email number one, which was clearly just intended to be some kind of internal test. but instead went out to, like, a huge number of the people who have HBO Max and I guess who allow HBO Max to email them directly. Did you get it?

Did you get the email? I got the email.

I did not, but it's because I'm always trying to opt out. I have HBO Max, but, well, or I guess Carrie has HBO Max, but I've just been grifting off of that account or something. Somehow it's shared between Bellingham and here. But anyway, I do have it. I did not get the email. and i also am like you know anytime i'm given the option to uncheck a box that says no i would like to not have updates please yeah i saw somebody wrote on twitter the other day like they were basically like describing the inside of your brain when you're like i could take i could take 40 seconds and unsubscribe from this email list or i could take two seconds and delete this for the rest of my life yeah you know which is really the it's the math it's like i just like to take two seconds every day to delete this thing from uh you know this mask company that i evolution mask whatever that i bought some of those like you know pandemic masks from and i somehow never unsubscribed and so every day i get and they're getting increasingly desperate because they feel

like their salad days are over you know yeah yeah you've had it you've had a good for too long big

mask anyway um this uh test email went out and uh i guess people were probably confused by it so hbo max the hbo max help twitter feed got ahead of it and they said we mistakenly sent out they they sent a tweet themselves we mistakenly sent out an empty test email to a portion of our hbo max mailing list this evening we apologized for the inconvenience and as the jokes pile in yes it was the intern no really and we're helping them through it heart so that was uh the the tweet from hbo max and people really loved this i guess they loved the fact that hbo max was owning it and also that they were being nice to the intern um oh i'll mention that uh listener tiara in baltimore who is is she now going by like taste sizzle she's trying to start that as

a nickname i think that might be an internet nom de plume whenever i get emails from her it's under

that okay yeah name okay so this is uh we were this was sent in by listener tay sizzle um anyway the internet response

with a bunch of people just replying to that original tweet starting with dear intern and just like basically trying to make the intern feel better by talking about their mess ups. So somebody named Suzanne Lovett said, dear intern, as a young lawyer, I proofread a legal brief and I filed it with the court. I caught a typo and I blindly used the global find and replace function pro tip don't do that my brief argued for the rights of the panties not the parties all 50 pages of it that's pretty bad um uh somebody named ray pickett's a dear intern i once said it sent a 1 900 sex hotline as a conference call number for the women's national Democratic Club. The average age of membership was about 78. Monica Lewinsky got in on it. Dear intern, it gets better. Also, P.S. Don't wear a beret for a while, okay? I think a lot has been made of the obvious horrible mistreatment of Monica Lewinsky just in the public space and the kind of redemption of her image if you will or the like the the reassessment of monica lewinsky in in the culture a lot's been said about that but i do really like this idea that she seems to be somebody who's really been thriving and and is as i'm glad that we as a culture realize that it was not an okay way to

treat somebody yeah do you know what her i'm sorry to ask you a question i think we have an agreement that we shouldn't ask questions like this since it's unlikely to know the answer but do we know what her career path ended up being and because of course we all know her from the scandal and you know she's like the world's most famous intern um but i do wonder and i heard that um that season of slow burn that really looked at you know these these specific clinton years and these specific clinton scandals but she's not in politics right and but i assume that if you were an intern in that position you were you know headed into a life of politics so i also just wonder how much that ruined what she wanted to be or maybe not at all i don't know i don't i'm not sure that part

of it like what monica lewinsky's aspirations were when she was interning at the white house if it was to become president someday or to work in politics or just to be near exciting things happening i know that at this point i believe that her her career is is as a um kind of public speaker and i know that she i think she hosts a podcast or is one of the hosts of a podcast uh she's given a ted talk she contributes at vanity fair i'm just reading by the way her bio off of twitter so uh that's i think that she is i'm not saying this to be um dismissive i think she's sort of like a professional recovered one-time pilloried public figure yeah um which is, you know, which is a useful job to have since we now live in a society where, you know, a lot of people are being mean to other people by way of the Internet. And so the fact that she can speak to this from personal experience, I think, is a really useful voice in our in our culture. Let's see. Somebody named. Oh, I know actually this. I don't know this person, but I follow them on Twitter. It looks like Cassie, but with a kind of unusual spelling. She said, dear intern, I was using my desktop calendar to make a monthly note of when I started my menstrual period but after several months i realized i was making that note on a calendar i shared with all of my colleagues company-wide i was 37 years old i um that's

the only one of these that i had read because i didn't know that it was a trend somebody had retweeted that one i think she also maybe has a follow-up tweet that says i found this out when a male colleague of mine said right before a meeting why does it always say period on the calendar on every fourth Monday or something along the lines of that.

Talk about a D-mail. Wow. Don't you know it's a video. Yeah, this person, Cassie, must be a TV writer, former Letterman, Rosie, writer with P.F. Tompkins. Yeah, because I think I must see her being retweeted often by Paul F. Tompkins, who I follow on Twitter. Somebody named Aaron said, Dear intern, when I was 25, I made a PDF assigning each employee to the muppet they reminded me of the most i meant to send it to my work friend but i actually sent it to the entire company no my supervisor beaker wanted to fire me but the owners bert and ernie intervened that's that's really good i mean that would really that would really really really stress me out if i if i had made a list that could be seen as kind of roasting some of the people like my bosses and then i'm trying to think I have definitely sent a few regrettable emails to the wrong person, although I think, luckily, my mind has kind of blacked out most of the details. It's probably too painful to remember. Nothing on the order of, like, an all-staff that is, you know, meant for one person, but definitely I've had a few. I mean, one of the bigger mess-ups that I did, I've talked about on the show so many times, but it was just when they finally let me on sports radio for one news update, And I basically meant said that somebody had died when they had been injured. It was a Seahawk named Mike Fryer. And I talked about this car crash that had, in fact, paralyzed him. But I said the car crash that killed Mike Fryer.

And was it a recent event that you were reporting on or you misspoke about a life event that had happened like five years earlier?

It was in the last it had happened like a week or two before the big news. It was like these Seahawks were driving around, probably one of them drunk, not the guy who got injured the most terrifically. He was in the back seat and they hit a like utility pole. And speaking last week, I was talking about, you know, those like speakers that we would all have, like wedge speakers and stuff that people put in the back of their car. I think a like very heavy speaker that was just kind of resting in the back of the car flew forward and hit this guy in the back of his head. He was an active Seahawk at the time, and it unfortunately left him paralyzed. He has since passed away, but he had not passed away at the time that I reported him as having died. And that was a pretty – also considering it was my debut on the radio.

Yeah, your margin of error. We were talking about this when we were talking about the moments where you accidentally sleep in, you know, sleep in through your alarm clock and you show up to work late. If that happens in your first week of employment at a place, that's way worse than if it happens in your fifth year at a place and here it is your first day to finish that thought before I move on to say, you know, I'm trying to – I live my life very carefully, as you know, Luke, so I don't have a lot of like really embarrassing work stories. But when I think about that moment, like that classic, I think universal or near universal feeling of just complete and utter panic when you realize you hit send on something to a bunch of people that were not supposed to see it, the details are a little bit vague here. But I know that I was already, I believe, done working for WKSU. This is, of course, where I am on the, what is it, the radio Hall of Fame, I believe. But no, when I worked at WKSU, I was a student employee. I was going to college at Kent State, but I felt like so lucky, and I still feel very lucky, that at the radio station, I earned a lot of trust of the adults that I worked with. And so they treated me like an adult and like a colleague. It was a very special, important time in my professional development. And then I had recently graduated, and I was probably about to start my first job. I don't know what it—maybe I was already in New Hampshire working my first post-college job and one of my former bosses Vince emailed me I think like kind of asking if I one of those emails that you send out we were like hey do you know of anybody who might want to apply for this job you know and you're supposed to you know pass it around but it's also a way sometimes of asking somebody if they're interested in maybe applying for a job you know what I'm talking about yeah and so he sent me something and yeah I guess I have to gloss over the details because I don't remember exactly what it was. He sent me something and then I responded and I was going to respond to a whole bunch of people. So I responded to him and then maybe a bunch of other of my former kind of colleagues, the adults in the room were copied on this email. Then I started to fashion this email more directly to Vince himself because I wanted to get in some of the money stuff. And I said, well, at this, you know, at this rate, blah, blah, blah. So and so might or might not be interested I don't remember the details of it but I kind of got into some personal stuff about money and what the job was offering and then I hit reply all accidentally and it was one of those moments where oh my god I realized it like um but so you weren't writing this about yourself you

were diligently sorry about the ambulance factory that I live above you were diligently trying to actually help connect the right person with the gig but you were also trying to give the useful information of what they would how much they would do it for it was something I don't I really

don't know how revealing it was I know that it was basically very gauche and I still felt like you know as a very young adult at this time and I still felt very indebted to probably everybody who was on this on this email chain and I just wrote something that was more personal I don't know if it was about my own finances but kind of getting into getting into whatever this job paid and whether or not it'd be worth it to possibly a specific person or whatever either way it was one of those moments where it was like I feel like

my finger wasn't even off the send button before i remembered before i realized what i was doing because i think that's where a lot of reply all shit might happen is where you start a podcast somebody should you start um you start the message to everybody but then you change your mind you think oh i'm just going to send this to vince and then you forget to go back and take everybody out at least it seems like that has happened to people other than me before but luke and again i'm sorry that i'm not giving more detail i'm not trying to be cagey it was just you know more than 20 years ago now but um that feeling that i barely remember the baseball game we attended so

and that was two days ago so don't feel bad you can't remember 20 years who won oh wait i know that don't i know that i don't even get us started on the recent the recent

success of the baseball men's white hot mariners but um that feeling of just utter just panic where you you stand up and you're just flooded with adrenaline and you're like I just remember I I'm trying to remember I must have been in New Hampshire at the time in my very first apartment and just standing up and like probably like shaking my hands like as if as if I had to get ants off of me just like so panicky of being like why did I oh god I just sent this to everybody Betsy's on there Jim's on there everybody's on this email and I'm talking you know whatever Looking back, it probably was not as bad as I thought. I remember writing to Vince right away and saying, oh, Christ, Vince, I'm so sorry I didn't know. I don't think I said, oh, Christ, by the way. Also, family man, very big Catholic. I probably didn't leave my second email with that.

You had CC'd the Archdiocese of Ohio.

Why?

That was weird.

It was. I was panicky. But I remember writing him back. And he wrote back just – he wasn't like, hey, man, this really wasn't a big deal at all. You just need to relax. He was just like, no problem. You know, like he wasn't super comforting. Like obviously I had made a mistake, but also, you know, don't lose too much sleep over this. But, ah, God, that feeling of just like that moment, that initial like 60 seconds after you hit send on that, that is one of the worst feelings in the world. Just the worst.

What I would say, too, to anybody who is being confined—I'm not trying to, you know, blame this other person who basically low-keyed it to you. But, like, when somebody reaches out to you, when someone has really stepped in it—actually, maybe I was about to make a—this is more of a question than a comment, Andrew, to invert that. It started out as a comment. It started out as a statement, and now it's turned into a question because I actually don't know how I feel about this. I was going to say that what that guy should have done for you is fallen all over himself making you think it was no big deal because what you really want in that moment when you mess up and then you reach out to someone to apologize for it or to tell them oh my gosh I screwed up you want them to just be like oh my gosh it is so not a big deal you're like you want them to overdo it right I'm making you feel better but also sometimes maybe it is kind of a big deal and so maybe they're doing you a disservice by yeah by making you think it's not a big deal I don't know actually where I land

on that now yeah i mean i think i remember feeling like vince's um response was appropriate you know what i mean not trying to make it seem like it was nothing but also like you know for real just like we'll we'll get through this i am i am trying to open up my old yahoo account is there a chance this seems like the type of thing i would keep doesn't it what if i could find it if i find it it'll probably just be more boring than whatever i just said so my guess would be

that it is because i know how your brain works my guess would be that if you actually found it first of all i'd be fascinated to to hear what was really in there but my guess would be that it was not nearly as bad as your anxiety told you it was in the moment or even tells you it is now you know 20 years in the rearview mirror sorry i'm talking funny while you were talking i muted my mic and sneezed like the two loudest sneezes maybe in human history and i'm trying to fight

off a third one here uh-oh you need to blow your nose my allergies are uh are really um really raring up today um one last one wait hold on i found i found an email you found it i didn't find the original i'm literally nervous to read first of all this is in the this is during the period where i was so verbose in my emails every email was like a book tvtl breaking news here's what i wrote back to everybody i don't have the original email this is so embarrassing i am now i'm not i'm now i'm now i'm having like hot flashes of him you want to just email it to me and i'll pre-read it while i blow my nose hey everyone you blow your nose you mute your mic go find yourself i need to hear this oh you don't have any tissues in reach i know i'm not a broadcast professional like you are i just you know i just opened up a brand new box of tissues for me today because I knew my other box was running out, and I go through, I don't know, 10 tissues a show at least. All right, let me hear those. So here's the email.

that I wrote to every so I copied so I'm sending this to Vince who wrote to me the original email and then three other people in the newsroom and another former boss of mine hey guys no I wrote hey everyone just so you know I accidentally just sent an email to all of you that was originally intended for Vince it's really embarrassing because that was one of the few private emails I write that I wouldn't want to be too public. As you now know, if you read that email, NHPR is looking for a new program director. And I've been calling. Oh, I was reaching out. I've been calling people who know people who know people. And Vince has known a lot of people. So I was reaching out to Vince to see if he might be interested in, you know, sniffing around this new program director opportunity in New Hampshire. The thing is, I probably would have called you all eventually anyway to get your input, too. But I'm really embarrassed I made such a stupid and irresponsible email mistake. Of course, I think this begs the question. I would learn later that it doesn't really beg the question. How could he have made a mistake like that?

That's really embarrassing about this email.

Well, see, I'm just going on and on here. Now I'm just embarrassed about how long my emails were back in the day. Well, to be honest, I was originally going to send a mass email to the five of you with a link to the photos of my new house. But then I changed my mind because I thought a mass email would be rude. I figured I'd write to you all individually, but I forgot to change the address box. So, again, my apologies. While I know it's certainly no secret that NHPR is looking for a program director and nothing I said was anything I wouldn't tell you all individually, I feel awful that I sent it to a bunch of people unintentionally. So, anyway.

Now, so what do you think the chances are that any of those people got to the end of the email?

Oh, very little. I think one of them probably still has it flagged right now. This is from 2005, by the way. So I'm like four years out of, out of, uh, Kent at this point.

I will say that it's, you're a good writer. Like it's, it's a, it, I would, I would work with that person. I mean, I have worked with that person now for like a decade, but like, I don't know what it, like, cause you were probably like early twenties, early, mid twenties, 24 or something. Yeah.

Yeah. Probably somewhere around there.

I don't think I, I think an email that I wrote at 24, I don't know if it would have actually been that poised. I mean, yeah, maybe one paragraph longer than it needed to be, but but well written.

Thank you. Yeah, no, it's way longer. And as a matter of fact, I mean, when I was in when this is something I think about a lot, but I'm worried that I'm not going to be able to articulate. I literally don't think I said able to articulate. I think I missed a word there. I don't know if I will be able to articulate aptly enough. the the writing mode I was in kind of in college and post-college and the the pains I feel in in reading these old emails especially old emails that I would send to friends because I think in a certain way you would be you would tell me there's nothing to be ashamed of that it's actually something to celebrate like I loved writing in high school and college and I did a lot of writing And I also keep in mind, kids, I grew up like when I was in high school, there wasn't really email or at least we weren't using it. And a bunch of my friends were a year older than me. So they all went to college before I did. And so we became like I became like, you know, lengthy pen pal friends with that's not the right way to put that. Coming in with some real hot slime energy today, Luke. But I became, you know, pen pals with my good friends and we would write long letters to each other. I mean long pages and pages and sometimes we'd get creative and write them in weird formats like we were just nerds and we missed each other and we would write long letters to each other which then of course became emails as time went on and I will still look at I will look at emails that I sent I think because I loved writing stories and I fancied myself more of a writer. I think I identified more as a writer, even though I didn't really have anything to show for it other than a bunch of embarrassing notepads filled with scribbles. But I think I enjoyed writing so much that I really, you know, when I would check in with friends who I hadn't seen for a while, they were very long, epic emails that were supposed to be clever and funny and all these things that I read back to myself now when I stumble upon them. And they are so cringy. They seem so much more about me than the person I'm writing to because I'm trying so goddamn hard to be so clever and just long-winded, man. I mean, I know you can imagine that. I mean, long-winded. And so there's this period of emails, which, I mean, in a certain way, like I say, I shouldn't feel ashamed. I had healthy pen pal relationships with my friends who also liked to write and I think appreciated my writing.

Well, I mean, look, I bet you that those friends loved those letters from you. And, I mean, like, who wants to get a – if you get a letter in the mail, who wants a letter that's, like, one sentence? It's a different experience. Like, when we're work emailing, it's like everyone just wants to kind of cut to the chase. But when it's like your friend sends you a letter. I bet you those people really enjoyed those I bet you some of those people even have those saved still

Well yes well there's that I'm kind of conflating things here so that was like kind of the setup that's how I wrote letters when I was writing them by hand but I think what I'm more embarrassed about is as I got older that same kind of vibe followed me to the digital sphere and so I have a bunch of emails from like you know going back to you know not you know 2004 or whatever where I'm an adult but I'm still like I'm emailing people as if they're my um as if I'm still in high school writing these long you know these just way too intricate and again the just you can tell how much I enjoy the sound of my own my own words so much in them that is kind of embarrassing to me but the flip side of that is those are also that was the mode I was in when Genevieve and I were courting from um you know half a country away and we have you know I don't have a way of accessing them but I have literal floppy disks with you know long emails to uh you know a woman i was courting

and genevieve very much it obviously worked as me right exactly and veeves is no dummy right so like that's the thing if you would have been insufferable if you're if you're like long you know long-winded love letters etc if they would have just been kind of like eye-rolly i'm sure veeves would have swerved yeah on the whole situation so like you should take it as a high compliment that somebody of vive's intellect was like yeah i want to i want to rock with this i do

every goddamn day um but um for real but um i uh but also i think you nailed it by the way and i know you're not i know you're not saying that but the insufferable is the exact word that i would use to describe how how i feel when i go back and i read these emails from myself way back in the day

i have no history of that like i can't by that i mean like like maintaining correspondences with my friends like i i kind of wish that i was the kind of person who did that like you know uh we would just i don't know maybe call each other on occasionally but in fact i mostly just lost touch with everybody like it was basically like high school and then i had to go to a new high school because the christian one closed down so i kind of sever didn't intentionally but end up severing ties with a bunch of those people and then i got to college and then i kind of lost touch with the people that i knew from still knew from high school unless they went to the college i went to and then it was just kind of like i just moved on with my life which probably indicates some kind of uh you know pathology there or or like sociopath behavior that i was just like well and on to the next thing you know this is very unrelated to that other than being slightly archival yesterday addie went digging around in her closet at her apartment and found this old newspaper interview that the seattle times did with me about when i'd never seen like what era it was when i was filling in on wait wait don't tell me okay so i was like at npr but i guess maybe i had just become the host of the bryant park project i don't even know if that's in the article but i had never seen it because i lived in la when the interview happened and so i just knew that somebody from the seattle times wanted to talk to me and i i answered some questions i I think it was a phone interview so it was like a Q&A with me but there's like a huge picture of me which is which is weird because it's from a long time ago I was like boy have I ever I can't believe I thought I was homely then I would kill to look the way that I looked 20 years ago is it one of

the photos that I would have seen a lot because you had like a bunch of publicity photos taken at one point or is this one that kind of that I think it was a little under the radar it was an

NPR public basically what happened was I think they had brought NPR had hired somebody to come do publicity photos of the real hosts so it would have been at that time like madeline brand and alex chadwick and stuff and then i think because i was there at the time and because sometimes they would let me on the radio they were like well we already got the light set up in the studio let's let burbs sit in there for five minutes so like i was getting the the the special treatment of getting a photo taken of me but i wasn't really at that time the photo was taken i wasn't really like a full-fledged like radio host or anything i was basically the booker who would sometimes get to weasel my way onto the radio but um it was really interesting because i just i had i don't even have a memory of doing the interview and again i never knew if it was even printed i don't know if i ever read it because i was in la but it was she had been carrying it around she's been it's moved with her upteen times i know it was very sweet actually it's very touching i also thought i made a decent spoof in there yeah so the question was uh that this guy uh i think his His name is Mark Rahner. Oh, yeah. I posted shows with him, yeah. So he was doing the interview, and he asked me something about, like, because I'm filling in for Peter Segal, and he said, By the way, this tells you either my jokes were really dated, or this was a long time ago when a joke about the war in Iraq still felt like.

like timely he said something like what are you going to do to establish you know with the staff and everyone that you know you're a host to be believed in or trusted or whatever and i said well the first thing i did when i got here was i tied a bunch of ropes around a statue of peter segal and i pulled it down and then i said but similarly i'm doing this from memory i i the problem is i also don't have an exit strategy so i don't really know how this ends anyway i had to explain to addy what the what the under what the what the undertones of that joke were all but i I don't know. I just was it was it was a bizarre little moment of of of seeing in print something that I had no memory of having done and also a photo of me from years ago. And then also realizing that my daughter has been schlepping this local section of the Seattle Times around with her from moving out of, you know, moving to college, moving to 20 different places in college, you know, moving to D.C. to work on Tiny Desk, moving back to Seattle. It was very touching.

She would have been probably a teenager at the time, right, when this article came out.

no not quite a teenager maybe a little bit younger because okay if i were living in los angeles i moved back to seattle when she was a freshman in high school oh okay okay so yeah the time i'm not sure but anyway i was it was it was very sweet and it went and honestly it really mostly goes to the point that i was talking about last week which was for somebody who deals with as much kind of just like low self-esteem and and discomfort about my physical appearance in the world and how every picture that's taken of me uh i look at it and i just really wish that that had not happened uh i'm sure that when i these pictures came out of me 20 years ago i was probably like oh god so mortified and now i look at it and i think it's like what was that guy insecure about now i have a reason to be insecure andrew circa 2021 yeah exactly circa 2003 i had nothing to be insecure about and yet i was very much so you want to talk about this uh thigh stop thing really quickly yes Before we get to the D-mails.

I don't like those words together, by the way. Thigh stop.

Let me throw one last quick thing from the intern we messed up file that I just wanted to tell you before we're all done with this. Somebody from the Chicago Bulls, I think, TV broadcast said, Dear intern, for the first two months of us being the admin on Twitter, we thought this was a rose emoji, and it's just clearly an emoji of a tulip. So every Derrick Rose post had a tulip instead So this is, you know, because we're all extremely online The Chicago Bulls TV broadcast, I'm sure, was like tweeting out fire tweets about Derrick Rose The one-time Chicago Bull doing well But they were always doing it with the emoji of a tulip

I wonder if that would appear as a rose on my Android anyway

to be honest with you it looks vaguely it looks like something that could also be used for sort of sexual entendre it's got a let's just say some strong georgia o'keefe vibe yeah i was gonna say coming through yeah anyway uh i guess there is a chicken wing shortage uh in america because when the pandemic started everybody started ordering wings which is shocking to me i don't think of wings as being a food that holds up under the uh ravages of home delivery but you i know you and vives have ordered wings during the pandemic are they actually edible when they get to your

house yeah i mean depending i mean there's it depends on where well yes they're edible obviously but uh it depends on where you get them um but i it's been a it's been a pretty standard tradition for me for a long time now especially um where i get my pizza now is this place called pudge brothers and they have decent wings and so I almost always get an order of 10 wings anytime we order a pizza that's been going going on for quite some time now it's how I keep this healthy frame Luke and yes exactly I was talking to my dad on the phone yesterday and he told me about the he's like I'm sure you heard about the wing shortage I was like I had not heard about this wing shortage at all and then here it is in the in the rundown today I was curious as to why there was a wing shortage and my father didn't know I was wondering if it was just like a supply chain issue I didn't realize it was that supply I'm sorry demand was so high during the pandemic like I'm yes I get wings delivered and again like I've gotten wings from um the the wing dome here in Seattle a few times I don't know how they do that by the way there I know the wing dome is about a I don't know with regular traffic it's at least 15 minutes away from me just like kind of getting door to door and winding your way through greenwood yet somehow i think they have outposts or something because i ordered wing dome and it got to my house in like 10 minutes like is there a chance that they have like they have centers set up around the city to deliver that'd be pretty

clever actually my guess would be yeah i mean if you set up a commissary something. If you set up some little like satellite locations that were just there to, you know, during games and stuff to just like pump out the deliveries, that's just like, yeah, partner with another restaurant, maybe, you know, like, oh, well, let's partner with our friends, you know, the Westie over in the Roosevelt neighborhood or something.

Let's partner. Well, then the problem there would be, I guess if they were making the wings, if you have a little bit, you'd probably want to try to control the quality and the consistency of your product. But it's just funny to me because, you know, in my meat eating days, I, you know, would have chicken wings sometimes and Kamara Kev loves them. So we'd go to Buffalo Wild Wings or whatever. And I enjoyed them just fine, like if I'm watching a game or something. But it's just it seems to me like kind of the last food I would order for home delivery. But apparently there's just been a huge surge in demand. And and so and also like so this is just directly out of the CNN article. During the pandemic, when restaurants closed their dining rooms, chicken wing sales soared. At Wingstop, sales at U.S. stores grew about 21% during the pandemic. Casual dining chains like Applebee's and Chili's launched online-only brands selling wings to get in on the trend demand for the product. Plus, high feed cost and supply chain constraints have driven wing prices up. The wholesale price of wings a year ago was as low as 98 cents per pound. Today it's $3.22 per pound. So for whatever reason, the price in wings has really skyrocketed, leading to some degree to this shortage. Well, Wingstop is trying to get Americans to start eating the thigh because apparently nobody wants the thigh. Now, that's not true. real food heads know that the chicken thigh is i think the chicken thigh is the most in style part of the chicken right now if you go to any cool restaurant or before the pandemic if you went to any kind of high-end restaurant and they served chicken it was almost always chicken thigh in my

experience um i definitely know that that is the the part of the chicken that i prepare the most here in the home you know whether it's like uh during the pandemic i started uh wrote just doing a very simple roast of um chicken thighs and yeah it is amazing you just put a little butter on there and it'll kind of turn into a kind of a nice kind of crackling skin on the outside anyway i know you don't eat meat so maybe i'll stop describing what it's like chicken thighs but i'm familiar with the experience right exactly so yeah i definitely think that yeah that's a good it's a good cut of meat but the thing about the thing about wings though is it's like it's the experience of it you know like it's the whether you like it or not it's a very different experience eating a bunch of little wings than it is tucking into a thigh or even two thighs you know whatever the equivalent would be of however much poundage of wings you'd usually eat like it just is part of the experience

I agree with you like that's the fun that's why I was surprised that there's so much home delivery although I guess if you're watching the game at home and the wings show up and they're still you know hot enough or crispy enough or whatever it is you're looking for then that could be a fun experience but like yeah to me it's like the experience part of the chicken wing is that's the whole fun of it and a chicken thigh is obviously a little bit different i guess there's lots of chicken thigh about because broadly speaking americans don't eat as much don't consume as much chicken thigh so wing stop is is sort of betting big the ceo said something like This is very CEO talk, something about, oh, we believe we can make the chicken thigh a center of the plate item. Yes. Is that the most, like, corporate food statement? Like, right now it's a more side of the plate, but we see in Q4 migrating it to a center of the plate item. So they're trying to see if they can get Americans, which is, I guess, kind of befitting this particular food product, considering back in the day nobody wanted chicken wings because they were seen as not having enough meat on them, yada yada yada and then you get this one bar i would say the anchor bar in buffalo new york has had arguably the biggest impact on american food culture of any i don't know restaurant in however many years in decades is there any other like food trend that has gone from non-existent to a national obsession more than chicken wings no not i i can't think of it i'm and i'm actually

trying like i know that there was a a moment where you know the cronut was kind of trendy and it blew up i never had that i think that came out of one restaurant but it didn't have the staying power and like wings are just a huge part of our culture this is a um by the way that point about like the wings just being almost discarded in the early days that's what my dad was saying he's like yeah like i don't even think i think my parents when they were preparing a chicken would just like discard the wings like they they took this thing that people overlooked and made it well they made the center of the plate. deal, Luke. Yeah, they moved it really to the center. One thing that this is so silly and I knew this anyway, but there was one line in the CNN article that like for some reason got in my cranky craw today. Stay out of my cranky craw. This is a quote from I think one of the Wingstop execs. If we can all buy. Oh, they said that they want to introduce thighs before this even happened they wanted to introduce thighs because it's better economically for them to be able to buy an entire chicken and then cut it up and all the different parts uh this quote from the exec says if we can buy all parts of the chicken not just the breast meat for boneless wings and the wings themselves we can start to control a little bit more of the supply chain i know that this is just a small um petty point but like this is proof they call them boneless wings i don't know why we call them boneless wings you just said right here it's breast meat you're making chicken tendies i know that everything is coming back to tendies lately but like they call them boneless wings but there's nothing wingy about a boneless wing it's just a chicken tender made out of

breast meat oh right yeah so get your terminology right dude you're never going to move to the

center of the plate i mean i know that's just a silly thing but like it is just about food marketing right like they just created something totally different but they know people like wings

So we all just call right. Of course, yes. They're hoping that they can, like, trick people into buying it like it's a wing and then the people will like it and then they'll, you know, be able to like they want to try. Yeah, they want to try to sort of warm the water up on a bunch of chicken wing eaters to where eventually they're eating chicken thighs and they kind of don't even realize it happened. I thought this was kind of interesting from the article about why Americans might prefer white meat. All the export of chicken from America is dark meat, probably because people in a lot of other places are hip to the fact that the dark meat is probably better. But Americans prefer white meat, including breasts and wings, because of restaurant trends. Restaurants began to serve white meat because it was easy to work with. And that turned into a longstanding American preference. chicken nuggets chicken strips breaded chicken sandwiches uh they lend themselves to the breast meat which is easy to pull off the bone um and so basically there's just been generations of americans who are used to eating white meat uh when it comes to their chicken even though i think all people that really know from food will tell you that the darker meat is better flavor and you know is probably a superior product but believe you me when i was eating meat i was going straight for the the basic b white meat you were that's chicken sandwich that surprises me i

mean you know when it's prepared by a restaurant in various ways and if you want to get a breaded chicken sandwich like they're probably going to use a breast like that's fine but like i never liked white meat like growing up i always liked the the darker meat because i really white meat was very dry in fact like if we were going to do like a fried chicken night i think that what was always left over were the breasts um because they just weren't opposite for me wow that's

interesting but i think it's also because uh for a long time when even when i was a kid i got kind of weirded out by eating things off of the bone okay yeah like because it was reminding me maybe this was the very very beginning echoes of me feeding not feeding fed horses or feeding birds with multiple scones or whatever like i think there was something about it's also why ribs kind of wigged me out because it was like if it was on the bone I was like oh okay this was in something's body this was part of something's body like a chicken breast was just decontextualized enough

for me I think or whatever and you know I love dark meat but it has a bit of a well I keep using this word today but it you know it it can be a you know a slimier experience I guess you know like if you're having any kind of any kind of um notions of oh wow I'm eating an animal here like a drier a drier cut is probably gonna wig you out less totally like when i and even like at

thanksgiving um you know when i would have turkey which i almost had turkey last thanksgiving and i don't know maybe this thanksgiving if the mood strikes me i may have a bite of turkey deal with it america but um and you know even as a kid i was always like going for the the the white meat of the turkey the breast all that stuff so i like this new shot this new like deal with it america

i'm gonna eat turkey on thanksgiving like that can be your whole new brand as you like you come up with america do you mind you come up with like a really confrontational i'm sorry i'm gonna do it my way but i'm gonna put ice cream next to this apple pie i had an ice cream cone yesterday andrew

I haven't had an ice cream cone in probably 10 years like just I don't know why because I just am not generally like if I'm making food decisions I can live without an ice cream cone but like I can't live without my french fries so I just usually swerve on that stuff but Addy and I were wandering around Capitol Hill

And we ended up at the Molly Moon's and I was like, hell, yeah, I'm going to have an ice cream cone on a sunny Sunday with my daughter on Father's Day. And we just sat in Cal Anderson Park and ate a Molly Moon's ice cream cone.

And I was just like, this is living like when's the last time you had an ice cream cone, a regular full size ice cream cone that is prepared for me. It's been a minute, as my friend Sam would say. Sam doesn't know who I am. So I am giving all the caveats because Genevieve has been buying these pre-made little mini ice cream cones. I think they're a Trader Joe's thing. I don't know where she gets them, but she likes it because having a sweet at the end of the day is important to her at the end of the evening. But, you know, these are a quantity that she can just have one cone. It'll satisfy her. It's like a little like we used to do that brand drumsticks where like a full ice cream cone. they're like that only they're like they're i don't know maybe a quarter of it you can eat it in two bites one bite if you're if you're strong like me um and so i have been you know you have a sturdy frame exactly so i've been popping a few of those into my into my gullet the past uh few weeks but i haven't had like a proper ice cream cone where like you go in and pick out the flavors in a long time what flavor did you go with by the way it's molly moon was it something like

cucumber and rosemary or something no but i was honestly i was really stressed out about that I had ordering anxiety because it's been a long time, not a minute, longer than a minute. It's a weird name for a show. It's been one minute since you just did the show? I mean, the show's longer than a minute, Sam. Thank you. Come on, man. It's Been a Minute, by the way, is I think the fastest growing public radio show currently going. I know because in a lot of places it goes up against liveware and or replaced it. I'm deeply aware of the just rocket ship that is. It's been a minute with Sam Sanders. And I got to tell you what, it's such a good show. It really is. I love that show. It is really good. I ended up with, so I started off by ordering strawberry. And then I switched it to salted caramel. And then I switched it to basically chocolate chip mint, their version of. This all happened. So it'd be like, oh, I'll have a single scoop of strawberry on a sugar cone. And then the person says, OK. And then they reach for the cone, like the actual sugar cone itself. And actually, could I do the salted caramel? They were like, no problem. And they move over like one bucket. And I was like, oh, what's that one that looks like has cookies and cream? And they were like, this is our whatever their version of like chocolate mint flake is. And then I went with that. So that's where I ended up. And I was probably the most annoying customer they had of the day.

And that's when they said, sir, you know, there's a labor shortage in the service industry, right? Like how many times are you just trying to torture me here? I hope you didn't tip either. If you were if you had your druthers, like, let's say, well, first of all, let's let's take it from here. If you could have any ice cream cone and there's no social pressure, you're not in like a nicer place or maybe you want to be in a nicer place like Molly Moon's. Like, what is your what would be your ideal ice cream cone situation if nobody's judging you?

Well, it depends on my mood. I love strawberry ice cream, love strawberry ice cream. and i also now i also used to work at dick's drive-in so i did for a while i was having a cone a day to keep the doctor away oh nice um when i worked there and so i was able to sample all the flavors of the rainbow and i got i kind of got into chocolate mint flake there

i didn't realize i didn't realize they have so many options for flavors i think of them as a

hamburger place they have i don't know if it's so many options but definitely like you know i would say five or six different ice cream cone flavors and i think some of that's the same ice cream they make the shakes out of so you got your strawberry you got your vanilla you got your chocolate um but i really love strawberry ice cream and i like chocolate mint flake and i like cookies and cream and a lot of it is dependent on the brand though i love that i started out by saying i don't really eat ice cream and i'm just going to give you chapter and verse good well if i'm in an american dream cone type of mood with a ben and jerry's product uh i'll go with that no it sort of just depends I guess on where I'm at I will tell you this the people in that Molly Moons the workers they were very pleasant despite my annoying ordering tendencies and I was thinking I had this moment standing in there with Addie Andrew I was like I would be so miserable if I worked in this place because you know I used to work at a frozen yogurt joint and what made me miserable was when there was a beautiful Sunday and everybody was out enjoying their time with their friends and family and then I was there to make sure that they had their yogurt when the mood struck them and I was like I want to be the person who has the mood strike them that it's time for some yogurt and I saunter into this place without a care in the world and it really became a thing for me like I was like I want to figure out how to have jobs where on the weekends I'm the person walking around with my daughter casually getting a cone not in this not very well AC place getting carpal tunnel syndrome because I'm just like scooping 10,000 ice cream cones a day uh you know and trying to not break the sugar cone when I smash the ice cream down on it etc etc like the difference between eating an ice cream cone being the person who's eating an ice cream cone and being the person who's preparing the ice cream cone i don't think there's a bigger there's a larger difference

in experience on any food situation right right because the ice cream cone is symbolic it's not like you're putting the mustard on the burger off the grill which i mean there's a you know there obviously you still want to be on the receiving end of that as well right but it is

like the most fun food that is the least fun to get to be also it is sticky as shit oh that sounds awful the end of the day that scooper is just picking up you know melted sugar milk all day long your hands i again i know this from having worked in the yogurt industry but it's like just the stickiness factor of doing that always really made me very unhappy you know what always makes me

um unsettled to look at is the water thing that the scoop is stored in when it's not scooping ice cream i always think about that liquid and it always makes me feel well yeah because it's too

much water and dairy combined it is it's just like remnants of ice how much to drink that steel ramekin like if i gave you a thousand dollars which could you shotgun it at the end of a day

so it's like the it's like the end of a shift at baskin robbins yep you have to drink it and how much like a full glass of it the whole thing which is the full thing whatever it is i assume that

that thing comes out and that it's like your standard probably quart of like it's a quart

size round steel kind of container probably i don't think i do it for a grand luke and i could i could that would get me out of a few jams but i don't think i could do it for a grand i we got

to be talking significantly more than that are you running that are you running that pull tab

tab at fat alberts at bad alberts again are you are you behind the eight ball again there that's the one thing about well that's not the one thing they don't have tabs there um there are some other things too um but anyway um no i i mean maybe i mean i guess five grand i got to start thinking about it but i also know that like what you're asking me to do is wretch publicly because i

just don't well that's the thing as i imagine it yeah i i have a pretty iron um clad stomach at least in the throwing up department you know things don't go north a lot sometimes they go a little south but i could imagine shotgunning that and wretch and literally just involuntarily

throwing it back up yeah i mean i can't imagine not doing that let me write to vince and betsy and joe gunderman and see if they have any thoughts on this how much money hey new hampshire

public radio is looking for somebody to drink a quart of ice cream scooper water and i was wondering if vince would be interested but this is how much they're paying for it

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

All right, the much, much anticipated D-mail segment is finally here.

Don't you know we have a video, Luke? Why don't you set this up? You're very excited about this. This is an email that came in from Tan Ying in Pittsburgh. I don't know for sure that I'm pronouncing Tanying's name correctly, but I saw this the other day. I got very excited about it. It looks like you discovered it this morning, and you are also very excited about this.

Well, you know how – let me start with the least interesting part of this. You had emailed me last week very thoughtfully and conscientiously saying, hey, by the way, our TBTL email is migrating. Oh, yeah. and uh i saw that message and then i also got an email from from the email provider go daddy uh which said your email has been successfully migrated you just nothing changes for you but we're just letting you know well that was not true because now it's in microsoft outlook and before it was in some other system which the other system wasn't great shakes but i just i was used to it so i have been checking my tbtl email for since wednesday and i i looked this morning i thought i can't believe i have received zero emails since wednesday i'm not saying this show is exactly uh you know burning up the itunes charts but it would be weird for me to have gotten zero emails and that's when i realized they were they're all all the emails are living in a new place now so i had to go over there which i don't like by the way andrew because It's different. It's probably a better system, but I just don't like it because it's not what I'm doing.

i'm used to looking at but that was when i found tan ying's email that had been there for a few days that i hadn't even known existed because i was on the wrong platform okay i want to talk

about her email but can i also just say this and by the way this is going to get this is this is me complaining about microsoft products and why this move to outlook is especially bad for me luke and i'm afraid this might be boring but you know what it's chapping my ass and i need to get it off my chest or maybe my ass. I've lost the thread. So you have an email provider, let's say like Gmail. I think a lot of people are familiar with that, right? You can have a couple of different accounts on that Gmail. For example, I have a personal Gmail account, not to brag. We also use Gmail for TBTL emails. We also use it for my other two podcasts. And this is a way of getting emails and voicemails and the thing is they can all work together like when i turn on when i open up gmail it's usually my private account but i can very easily switch to one of the others microsoft outlook for the web does not allow you to do that if you want to switch between different um you know different email addresses you have to buy their office 365 suite which is like, I think $79 a year or something. But if you want to use the free product, which is Outlook on the web, you have to log out and log back in every time you want to check a different Outlook account. And I actually am trying to be a professional for once in my GD life and keep an eye on my work email, you know, my APM email, and that uses Outlook. And so, and it's on my private, it's on my personal computer too, where I do most of my work. So I'm sure that, I mean, I know that I have the paid outlook version on my on the laptop that they issued me but that doesn't really help me much so I have this whole rigmarole now if I want to check a tbtl email but then if I want to check an 8 p.m email I got to log out and do all I have to bend over backwards and and it's Microsoft so nothing is easy like trying to log out of the one and then log back in it'll still take you to the wrong account it is it is like I just don't understand how they create products that are so un-user friendly like it seems like a challenge it seems like every year Microsoft must have some internal competition for somebody to create the least user friendly product and then just troll the populace by pushing it out there I guess this is a slightly different issue but

what I woke up to this morning was an email from the executive producer of Livewire saying oh hey here's some info on this interview that we're going to do later today and it's in a google doc and about once out of every four times it just decides that i no longer have permission to read google docs and so then i have to request permission and then if the person who created the thing isn't like right on top of their email i'm just sitting there locked out um and i guess that's slightly to the side of the microsoft thing we're talking about different companies But yeah, there's got to be a better way on all this Also, I promise you I'm going to continue to go to the wrong link for our email Which still works It still opens the email And I'm just going to keep going back there out of habit for a good six months And thinking, wow, slow day on the emails And then realizing, nope, I've got to go to this other thing now That I also need to set up a bookmark for and figure out Anyway, that's why I got to Tan Ying's email a little bit late. But anyway, I did get to it. And do you actually have it there, Andrew? Are you able to play it?

Yeah, yeah. So the email itself says, my only thought of this video I made this morning is, what have TBTL wrought? So this is a video of Tan Ying's kids, right? And they're hanging out in the kitchen. And one of them has the TBTL sound machine. the tbtl sound effect machine and is playing the don't miss the sausage fest sound effect and we'll tell you what happens as it goes on this is only 22 seconds now as as he's playing the don't miss the sausage fest sound the camera pans and we see his brother who is just casually in another part of the kitchen eating a sausage directly off a fork andrew walsh style let me yeah let me paint the picture because

uh tanying i don't think was even trying to point that out she was like moving the camera because her one son who's got the little sound machine is wandering around the kitchen now he is a light has gone off in his head that sausage could also mean part of the male analogy.

anatomy and uh and so she's just following him and just uncommented on in tanying's email and in the video is the fact that another one of her kids is standing there not just eating a sausage but like doing something like out of a cartoon about when people eat sausages it is a per it's a yet to be consumed perfectly kind of like almost you slightly u-shaped sausage being held on top of a fork i mean being you know with the prongs in the sausage like and again this is just apparently

a normal morning in pittsburgh in this household i like it i approve of it so here let's uh let's listen so we've just seen we've just seen the other boy he's eating the sausage wait that sounds like penis festival because sometimes sausage means penis don't miss the I was not prepared for that power out when I watched this 22-second video for the first time. I didn't know that that's where this was going. I thought it was just like, hey, look, it's fun. It's a fun toy to have, and the fives are loving it. But no, we're seeing connections being made. We're seeing synapses being structured in this kid's brain.

We absolutely are, and I'm proud of it, by the way. TVTL Breaking News. I've successfully hacked back into the mainframe Called our new TBTL email account Nice And I got a response from Tanying About this whole situation Because I responded and I said I think I said something to the effect of Did you set that up with the other kid with the sausage Just standing there in the background of this video And Tanying said I have three boys and they're all obsessed with penises But even still I did not think That one was going to decrypt the innuendo I think just having the drops at their fingertips will make them all future tbtl listeners and no that was not a setup in advance it was just a total coincidence you know the funny thing is i don't know that i

maybe i'm just i'm just so innocent and naive luke but like when you play that drop are you always thinking of the innuendo because i have disconnected the innuendo in my head i just think of that drop as its own thing now and of course i love sausage so much that yeah but that's probably not right when you first started playing that you heard that in a radio commercial probably right is

that uh frank there was literally a sausage festival somewhere in the suburbs of seattle and it was one of those just like probably as part of the like fcc public service responsibilities of Chi Radio or maybe this was like a very cheap ad the Sausage Fest bought but like it was just running during our show because that was definitely where the the most inventory was available for the cheapest price and it was Frank Shire's and it just cracked us up because at that time really Sausage Fest we thought of it as a party where you as a guy go hoping there will be some gals and it's just a bunch of guys and that would be called a Sausage Fest which is of course entendre and um that was just why we thought it was funny but i think i'm with you that now at this point if i play that drop on the show it's almost always related to actual sausage because of you because of your right component of this show right exactly because of the love of sausage

but um anyway well that was a great d-mail that really was what i do we have any emails that you

you'd like to um get into before we we get out of here today sure i think this is kind of

interesting this is from listener abony i had mentioned actually i think um i think abony will explain this setup enough i don't have to set this up i'm way behind on episodes but i just finished the one where you mentioned that one of your mail carriers whistles loudly while delivering mail and you and genevieve thought it might be because he's trying to disarm folks who might make assumptions about him because of his race so yeah this is a delivery driver we have who um often is dropping stuff off on our on our back porch and all often sometimes I think he has he must work late because sometimes it's you know he's coming he's dropping stuff off in the early evening and I know and he's a black man and he he's always whistling and I always wondered like I wonder if he's doing that because he's going into people's personal spaces the world is a racist place people make assumptions when they see black men and I wondered if he was whistling to disarm people and Ebony says I just wanted to tell you that you both are probably correct this is a well-known tactic used by black people in white neighborhoods to avoid profiling and interactions with the police in addition to always wearing a uniform clearly visible name tag or dressing in business clothing in fact a stanford university psychologist wrote an entire book about it called whistling vivaldi how stereotypes affect us and what we can do issues of our time it's a great book i highly recommend you and Genevieve check it out if you are interested um which really is just such a reminder of what the hell we're talking about when we talk about white privilege man like is there anything that puts more

a goddamn point on it than this yeah that's that's that's an interesting update and also just something that just leaves you feeling like gut punched like right damn there's a whole system

yeah we're trying to not get killed yep when you're trying to do your job just for existing yep yeah but anyway but it's interesting that it's been something that's actually been studied from a psychological perspective and written about and reported on so thanks for

email i really wanted to get more credit for my whistling that music from kill bill thing that i did when this subject initially came up i thought that was a pretty from you didn't get the validation you needed from me or from the listeners nobody's emailed me or demailed me about it oh okay well

have you checked your dmails because i think i don't they also my dmail account changed yeah i can't get into that one check your dogaddy account for your dmail i don't even know what i'm talking about anymore um let's see here should we go out with the letter by um the box tops i

don't know sure is that that my baby wrote me a letter yeah exactly all right let's do it um oh we've gone about 99 minutes which is roughly the amount of time it takes to move the cargo around in the belly of an airplane at sea tech not that i'm bitter uh okay that's gonna do it for today's show thank you so much for listening everybody oh we will be back here tomorrow with a more imaginary radio for you please do join us for that till then stay safe take care of yourselves take care of each other uh stay hydrated if you're in one if you're in the heat dome and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

To my baby, yeah, lonely days are gone, I'm going home, my baby used to hook me a letter, when she wrote me a letter, said she couldn't live without me no more, listen mister, can't you see, I got to get back to my baby once more, anyway, yeah, get me a ticket for an aeroplane, Ain't got time to take a fast train Lonely days are gone, I'm a-going home My baby used to hook me a letter When she wrote me a letter Said she couldn't live without me no more Listen, mister, can't you see I got to get back to my baby once more Anyway, yeah, could you take it for an aeroplane Ain't got time to take a fast train

Lonely days are gone I'm a-goin' on

Power out