Muse

what i'm saying is you got to go for it you know you have to take a risk yeah no you're right you have to it's like when i decided to go back to cleveland i wasn't totally sure they was gonna welcome me back man but they did they welcomed me back with open arms and an open heart yeah they

did again i feel like that applies more to you um like i don't even live in cleveland but again i

appreciate the thought cleveland ohio you just want the home of the rock and roll hall of fame

or maybe go down the canton to the pro football hall of fame you know superman was created in Cleveland yeah no I know Superman was created in Cleveland you've told me that a number of times you ever seen Cuyahoga Sunset no do you know Cleveland's great for the whole family yes yes yes I do you tell me that all the time you randomly just text me that what's wrong with that weird it's weird I got free texting TBTL we'll walk that fine line between cutting edge

irreverence and trouble with the federal communications commission okay so I smoke

a little as a stress release i never told you because i knew you'd lecture me it is not a

lecture to simply point out to someone that the episode of different strokes about dudley's dad has proven incontrovertibly that smoking destroys your health and leads to ridicule from willis

you have to be it so we don't see it you have to live it or we won't forgive it you have to inhabit it or leave it in the cabinet oh let's i can't believe this is actually happening

All right, hello, good morning and welcome everyone to a Tuesday edition of TBTL The show that just might be too beautiful to live Oh, and the adventure begins again My name is Luke Burbank, I'm your host

Oh yeah!

Coming to you from the Hollywood studios here in Portland, Oregon Where I had this audio drop all ready to go So usually indicating that it's been kind of rainy because it was a bit rainy on my morning jog today. But now the sun is coming out and it's threatening to be sort of a beautiful Tuesday morning here in the 503. As we arrive at episode 3550 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

A new study out of 15,000, I guess you would say, office employees, but these would be people that are primarily now working from home, finds that people who have office jobs are now seeing the number of meetings that they have to be a part of.

This is so boring and forever taking.

The number of meetings that a lot of us are in have doubled during the pandemic. People spending an average of 50% of their work week in meetings. We will take a look at the data and try to figure out how we reverse this incredibly troubling trend. I don't know if I've been clear on the show how I feel about meetings. I take a sort of a dim view. Anyway, we will talk about that. also a guy in california an office worker you might say coincidentally would leave his office at lunch and then on his way home stop for dinner at a place where he said was so affordable to eat that he actually paid off all of his student loans that cash could really get me out of a couple of jams paying just 150 a year to basically eat all of his food at six flags i don't know what that means but it sounds disgusting uh so we will um report on that as well plus we've got emails and we've got the emails and we've got this guy the longest running co-bro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships he's been he's been co-broing this thing for like i don't know seven eight years now and he's gotten pretty pretty pretty good at his job 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. It was one of those unusual mornings where I learned some bad news in the show sheet, one of the topics that's coming up later today. And I was just wondering, can we change our process for this? If you think there's some news out there that I didn't already know about, like an obit of a beloved actor.

Well, let's just get into it because now we're talking about it.

Yeah, but as I say, could you kind of maybe before you send the show sheet, I was just trying to think, maybe you give me a call on the phone and it's like, Hey, Andrew, I'm going to make you some cocoa, give you some sad news in the show. Do you prepare me a little bit? Is there anything you're willing to do? Can you meet me halfway here?

Yes, I'm willing to get a commitment from you that you will look at any kind of news source between bedtime and when we do the show because it's all over all of the newspapers. People are tweeting it at us. It's the lead story in most entertainment-based publications.

And so I made the mistake of assuming you would know about it Alright, that was just teasing

I'll look at the news

I am sorry though that you're learning it this way Because I know you're a big fan of the show And I really, and truly, Andrew I would not intentionally spring The passing of Dean Stockwell on you By way of a cold callous show sheet I am really sorry if that's how you found out That sucks, man

Teasing But that was shocking news to me We were just talking about him on Friday's show And he is a beloved actor. I didn't realize. I mean, I guess it's I mean, it says that he passed away of natural causes. And I didn't realize, I guess what I was going to say was that he passed away, that he was already at such an advanced age. I guess I didn't I guess I didn't put him in his 80s, although it makes sense. I mean, he's been acting for as long as I can possibly remember.

Yeah, he had a really pretty interesting life and career that a lot of it I didn't know about until I was looking at some obits of him today. Although, again, bizarrely, I did know about his love of dice-based art, which we talked about on the show the other day, which was, again, just a coincidence that we've been talking a lot of Stockwell lately, and then he's passed on. But, yeah, he was 85 years old. He started out, he was born in the greater Los Angeles area, and he was a child actor, I guess. And then was in Anchors Away with Gene Kelly, and he was in a variety of different movie projects. But then, I thought this was kind of interesting, he was about to give up acting. I think he'd hit sort of a point in his life where he wanted to start a family, he wasn't getting very good roles anymore, And he was looking to get his real estate license. And Harry Dean Stanton, the actor, reached out to him and said, there is a movie being made by Vim Vendors called Paris, Texas. Nineteen something. Do you know this film?

I know of it. I don't you know, I like Vim Vendors and that name rings a bell. Although I if I've seen that movie, it was in college during my brief, shallow Vim Vendors phase.

I don't think I even have ever seen a Wim Wenders film I just have always noted him because of the fact that his name looks like Wim Wenders to me But you're supposed to say Wim Wenders And I think he made a movie called Wings of Desire that was getting a lot of heat When I was like in college I never saw it but then I knew that they made like a more Americanized version with Nick Cage I believe

Yeah and you know Peter Falk is in Wings of Desire I didn't know that Yeah it's actually a really cool movie

so um anyway vim vendors also made a movie called paris texas and essentially dean stockwell as i've been reading this morning was like just he was getting his real estate license he was like yeah i'm done acting it's not working out for me i need to get onto a new career and harry dean stanton calls him up and says i know this dude vim vendors he's making this movie paris texas do you want to come be in it and and dean stockwell's like okay fine and then i guess he again having not seen the film the reports are that he was quite memorable in it and then after that he gets dune he gets blue velvet married to the mob and and you know his his career is totally revived he's nominated for an academy award but what's also interesting is then he ends up in quantum leap which is what everybody knows him for which i think is an interesting and i'm not saying it's right or wrong but it's an interesting um kind of way that like uh the entertainment the entertainment industrial complex works or at least our brains work related to why we think of people as being famous like you could argue that blue velvet is a much more artistic thing right than quantum leap

in a way oh yeah and i'm sure paris uh texas too right like and and he was nominated for an academy

award i mean the assumption is he was a pretty serious and pretty good actor in a lot of different things but what he's known for because it was on national television is jiggling a thing called Ziggy and being stressed out about where it was teleporting Scott Bakula to yeah exactly and you

know and maybe it's because of that of course that's how I first think of him and like I loved quantum leap growing up and I've mentioned on the show many times that if I could go back in time and save one possession, it would be the video, the VHS tape that we as a family recorded the very first episode, I believe the pilot episode of Quantum Leap on. And we would watch it every time we were on vacation. And I would love to have that actual cassette so I could see all

the commercials, which I assume were on there. Quality local Ohio programming.

Certainly hope so. But so, yeah, he's the type of guy that whenever he shows up on the screen, you're just like you're filled with joy now for me it's probably because of that initial connection i had as a kid to him as Sam or I'm sorry, not as Sam, but as Al. But like these and I were just watching Dune, the original Dune the other night. So we had seen the new one. And so that kind of put us in the mood to go back and watch the original as chopped up and and weird as it is. And I had totally forgotten that he was in it. And as soon as he comes on the screen, he's like he just I don't know if I don't know if it's fair to say he lights up the screen or the room you're in lights up when you realize he's in the movie you're watching. But I'm being completely sincere about it Like when he shows up on the screen You're like oh Dean Stockwell Like I just yeah I love that man So sorry to see him go

This there's a really This is unsurprising But there's a really really good Informative obituary Daniel Victor wrote in the New York Times About kind of Dean Stockwell's Whole approach to acting And thoughts on it Apparently he told Turner Classic Movies When he was being interviewed in 1995 that he did not like acting when he was a kid he was he was withdrawn as a child and took little pleasure in acting seeing it as an obligation foisted upon him by others quote if i if it had been up to me i would have been out of it by the time i was 10 he said so then he graduates from high school and um because he was a child actor he didn't get any legit schooling like imagine the 1950s in Hollywood, I highly doubt that they had monitors making sure that these child actors were actually getting a decent education. I mean, most of that industry was focused on giving Judy Garland enough uppers and then enough downers to get her through the next production. I don't say that to be mean to Judy Garland. I just don't think it was a very safe place for young people. but um so he graduates uh and then he doesn't really have any skill outside of acting because he hasn't gotten any decent schooling so he's just floating around from one odd job to the next uh and so finally he uh he returns to acting at 20 because he doesn't know what else to do then he tries to get out of it again and get into real estate and as i've already mentioned uh he ends up in paris texas the movie and and the rest is dean stockwell history the last thing i'll say it too which is just kind of repeating what i mentioned the other day but that article that i read in whatever new mexico newspaper like profiled him the dude sounded like he was just kind of living his best life out there like just had this beautiful view of the desert and he liked to work on his art and he like just lifelong cigar enthusiast so i guess the key to living to 85 is a lifelong love of cigars yeah exactly that's what we can take away from this from a medical standpoint oh god you devil i immediately thought of george burns right when i was saying that too um but you know it's it's it sounds like he you know he had a pretty good life and he was kind of i was thinking of gene hackman the other day because you know and you know knock wood i don't want to get in the business of somehow jinxing the the later years of these various actors and actresses but um gene hackman is still alive and he did an interview recently like a print interview and he sounds like he's very lucid and he sounds like he's doing great he just was like i've been in enough movies and so i hadn't even thought about it but like i don't think gene hackman

has been in a movie for like 20 years oh really oh that's surprising to me i had no i could be

wrong maybe i don't know while i'm while i'm droning on could you maybe imdb yeah this or something uh to see if there's a it's what i remember when i was reading this interview with him was some kind of a number that was given in the article about how long it's been since he's been in a movie and I was shocked because I think of Gene Hackman as like didn't he just make Hoosiers like two years ago yeah I think so that's that's how my brain uh kind of categorizes things and

whatever it was maybe it's been five years or no no no it's close to 20 and the last one was um uh a 2004 movie called welcome to moose port which i haven't seen yet i think that's a is is

wait am i confusing welcome to moose port with is that a is that mammoth um oh let me see here what's the go you what's the go you what's the go you mighty huskies one that that you guys quote

a lot that's mammoth that i always oh state in maine that's state in maine and welcome to moose

port like live adjacent to each other in my brain right right no this is i don't know the um the

director but anyways ray romano and him it looks like kind of just a goofy comedy before that he was in a runaway jury which sort of rings a bell anyway that's 2004 and 2003 respectively and then the last one that would be kind of an hour radar was the royal tenant bombs that was his third to last movie i had no idea that's a that's a powerful powerful role yeah it is i mean maybe that was

part of why he was like all right uh you know i think this is might be the high water mark at my age and that was the kind of what he was talking about in this interview like he was like yeah you know i had a really good time and i would just had i had sort of done a lot of stuff and i was ready to just relax

And I'm out here chillaxing and it's been 18 years and I'm loving life. And I was just like, wow, man, that's how you do it. Yeah. I don't understand people who are that good at something and then able to just kind of say, I mean, it's, this is why I can never walk away from podcasting because I consider myself the Gene Hackman of podcasting. And I just, I need to somehow summon the, I don't know, awareness to know when it's time to walk away. Many listeners have said that time was three to four years ago.

Let me know if you want any notes on that. I like the one of the final lines of this deadline Obit I was reading it said those close to stock will describe him as a rebel Who love to act play golf smoke cigars and play golf I guess he didn't love to act that much I'm trying to get out of it no But I just kind of I just that kind of stuck in my head a little bit it just Sounds like yeah you know I mean people this is how people Hope and wish to remember him as well but I just hope that that's how people i don't know it just sounds like a nice ending you know what i mean like how did he go out he just it sounds like he went out laughing you know like he was just yeah he he just kind of uh soft landed his career at least that part of his career and went on loving life that's

nice i wonder if boy am i i'm getting into a lot of kind of speculation on dean stockwell someone who i never met but i wonder if not really liking acting at least for periods of his life sort of helped him have a healthier relationship with it because it's like if you can kind of take it or leave it then maybe you're not as obsessed with it maybe you're not as crushed if it doesn't work out you know like whereas if you grow up you know somewhere in like the midwest and you just like your dream is to make it on the silver screen and then you you come out to holly woo you know and then maybe you have some success but not the success you were looking for Like, it could be more fraught than if you're just kind of like, I'm only doing this because I don't have any other skills. Like, there's a practical, there's a sort of practicality to that that could maybe be sort of liberating a little bit.

Oh, I believe it. Yeah. Chasing fame sounds exhausting and ugly and just awful to me, frankly.

Yeah. I've been saying versions of this for the last couple months, I think, because, well, you know what I was saying? actually i was saying this at dinner in back in brooklyn uh with pesca and robert smith uh i was saying how it's interesting for me to think that my life i always somewhere in the back of my mind because i think because i'm delusional i kind of thought well i'll probably be famous i mean i also thought i would be a professional basketball player which is i mean honestly like if i would have told that to a to a mental health expert they would have said you may be suffering a break with reality mr burbank um but i also just thought somewhere i was like i don't know i'll probably be famous that was kind of what i thought anyway now what i've realized is this is definitely the high point of whatever it is my work life looks like this is it like the plane took off the plane's flying level again i think we just talked about this on tbtl as well and then at some point the plane will begin its initial descent but for me to realize that this is as famous as it gets for me which by the way is fine like that's the other thing that's evolved over the course of the last 20 years for me i think when i was 20 i would have thought god wouldn't it be cool to be famous and now i i don't think that would be cool but it is weird for me to have the realization that this is this is the apex of my my i guess my career in as much as i have one And I'm okay with that too Which is nice I'm not like I'm not bummed about that It's just kind of It has sunk in And it's totally fine I think I'm having a pretty good life I just got to work on my dice sculpture skills Get out to Santa Fe Start golfing And I can kind of Spend the last 20 years in Stockwell mode

I was having dinner with some other With a couple of other couples A while back now This is going back probably At least three years I'm going to say And some of the people at the table were also podcasters A couple of which have some pretty popular podcasts And one of them This is somebody who I don't know that well But that I'd met before They're talking about podcasting And like what he wants And he just said I want to be famous And that has stuck with me Have I told you about that? I think maybe off air

But no but refreshed I remember being shocked to hear someone say that

Yeah, you know, and that's all I was, I'm not going to get into details about who this person was on the off chance that people would know, but I, you know, it's like, it's one of those, it's one of those sentences that echoes in my head like Marge Simpson's voice because it just clangs around in there and it can't find purchase anywhere because like, first of all, it's like the complete opposite of me. Like, I just I can't imagine going into anything thinking I want to do this for the just end goal of being famous, not because I want to be good at this thing or I want to succeed at this particular.

particular project or piece of art or whatever it is you're working it's like no no the end game is that people will know my name and like that is i just i can't wrap my head around that but also i guess i also have a begrudging respect that this person really knows who they are and what they want which i mean i gotta i gotta give it to him for that but it also it seemed like such

an ugly sentence to me now they must have gotten somewhat famous because you're concerned that somebody would know who we're talking about so you know got to give them a point on yeah no this

person already had a probably a much more successful podcast during this conversation than then or maybe similar similar career track as ours i'm not sure but like yeah this wasn't somebody who was like just starting a podcast saying i'm starting this so i can be famous as somebody who already achieved quite a bit of uh of of acclaim for their work so that's interesting

to me because i feel like if you actually get to the point where you are a let's say quasi public figure or micro celebrity as i think we are which micro celebrity to me means about once every three weeks you'll be doing something and you'll be interacting with someone and they'll say oh are you the person from that thing and maybe it's more like once a month that feels like micro celebrity to me but once you even have a microscopic amount of of notoriety usually you can see very quickly how not great it would be to have a macro a macro amount of celebrity like just in the you know I got into I was a very very inebriated in Portland at one point and I got into a Lyft and the very nice Lyft driver mentioned that they were an 11 and i was so mortified that this was the state that this very nice rideshare operator was seeing i i don't think things went badly but i was immediately racked with embarrassment and it's not that person's fault they didn't get me drunk and put me in a rideshare but it was just like i was thinking of all the times for me to cross paths with someone who has a vague awareness of my existence this is an embarrassing moment for that to be happening and uh you know i i guess my point is it's surprising to me that this the person that you're referring to who had had at least probably some taste of being recognized a few times would want that to go like way bigger because if you get a little bit of that my experience is you realize how bad a lot of it

could be yeah you know it's funny we talk on the show about drinking quite a bit or at least it's come up i think it's come up once or twice over the course of the past 12 years um and so people clearly know listeners clearly know that we like to have our fun times yet in the moment you don't you know what i mean you'd rather you'd rather come on the show the next day and talk about all the stupid shit you did possibly while drunk the night before as opposed to being a little bit drunk and not really doing anything embarrassing but being around a person in the moment and having them um having them experience you in that state um did you make it home okay yeah i did everything

was fine uh and again i don't think i did anything super embarrassing but it's that feeling of like knowing that i wasn't in total control of myself and that there was someone who was going to report back to uh somebody else oh hey i ran into that person from that thing you listened to he was wearing a lampshade on his head oddly enough i was yeah uh it's just and again what i need to do is probably make better decisions for myself is really what the kind of moral of that story is but again i like i said i have uh as much celebrity as i can eat at this point which is not very much celebrity but it's still plenty uh for me so anyway uh by which i mean r.i.p dean stockwell I think that's the most fitting tribute to him That's also how the New York Times Is me talking about being The reporter for the New York Times wrote about a time They were drunk in a Lyft And how it was embarrassing because the person said I subscribe to the New York Times So anyway Alright, let's take a quick break And then we'll come back and tell you how you too Can pay off your student loans Through the Six Flags dining program And we'll also do some emails and V-mails Coming up in a moment here on TBTL all right let's thank some donors of the day these are the people stoking the fires of our micro celebrity by pouring the gasoline on it known as monthly donations which they send in to APM and then APM uses that to fund the show and here we are

I should clarify when that person said I just wanted be famous i did say to them i just want to be rich and i flicked their earlobe with my middle finger

and see it's worked out for everyone yes exactly so thank you we're both fabulously wealthy from this program right there was a time when i thought oh maybe we're getting overpaid but i we may have i think we've moved into the we finally moved into the world of being underpaid you've never

in your life thought maybe i'm being overpaid i i think when i realized we could do this job for

our living i think i was very i was completely happy with what the setup was situation was and and and and i still am but i think what's happened in the podcasting industry with people just making ridiculous sums of money and granted because mostly because they have shows that are more popular than ours like i understand how this works but i think there was a period of time where it's like hey you know we're making an okay living doing a podcast that's amazing and then you turn around and like 80 percent of the people not the people in podcasting because lots of people are doing podcasts as a you know avocation versus vocation but there are certainly some high flyers that are really skewing what the podcasters of the world are making and we're not part of that

crew is what i'm saying yeah it is true it does seem very like you're either doing it i mean i think we're in a weird place to have this we're in a unique position we are like i think that we're very very lucky we have a we have a stable job that we've had since 2015 i like working for and with american public media it's really cool on the one hand you know we are people who are doing a podcast it's not a hobby it's our job which is amazing and thanks to the donors on the other hand you will talk to somebody who says yes i just sold my podcast and right and then when they say how much they sold it for your eyeballs turn into money symbols dollar signs people are selling

podcasts and getting like multi-generational wealth out of it now granted those are podcasts that have more listeners than ours and that's and i again i'm good with this i really am but it is it's a it's a very odd time in the world of podcasting you have the people who are doing it Totally as a hobby. You have the people who will never have to work again. And then somewhere closer to hobby than never working again is TBTL. But aren't we lucky to be here? And aren't we lucky to have Bridget Schaub in Chicago, Illinois, supporting the program? Thank you, Bridget.

I was saying this to you during the break. I think Bridget has, I think she belongs to the club of people who have a TBTL tattoo. Really? I could be wrong. I know that she was on stage during our Chicago live show, Lo, those many years ago, and I feel like she had just gotten a TBTL tattoo, although I could be conflating things that happened at that show.

How do you think I did with Bridget's last name? Would you go Shabes or Shabes?

When I see it, I always think Shabes, but I don't like Shabes and Haw, which is one of my favorite Fast and Furious movies. But I always, in my brain, it looks like Shabes, but I don't know. I'm probably wrong.

I think it's Shabes. Because it needs a U, I think, to be a Schaub. Yeah, maybe. Like Matt Schaub, the quarterback of NFL fame. Tyler Setter is in Wichita, Kansas. I'm digging this geographic layout, by the way. Thanks, Tyler. Appreciate you checking in from Shocker Territory. Wichita State Shockers. Tina Taylor is in LFP, Washington. We found out by way of an email, Andrew, that I think you're now beloved. Diner? Mm-hmm. What's it called? Nora Mays or something?

Oh, Flo-Anne's, I believe.

Flo-Anne's. That's actually technically Lake Forest Park.

Oh, really?

It's just barely... Like, when you cross 145th there, I guess you've technically entered Lake Forest Park.

I have gotten three different answers on that. The map will alternately say Lake City or Shoreline. I got an email from somebody who said that's not Shoreline. That's definitely Lake City. and I don't think I realized this Lake Forest Park situation.

Yeah, Shoreline, you've got to go, I think, and I'm bad with this stuff, but my sense of Shoreline is you've kind of got to go west of there. Like, other side of I-5, that's definitely Shoreline. I don't know. You know what? I'm the wrong person to ask. I only lived in Seattle for 30 years of my life.

Its address is technically Shoreline, so that's interesting. It's on Bothell Way in Shoreline, Washington.

Well, then whoever said Lake Forest Park, I don't think it was Tina Taylor. But, you know, you might need to check MapQuest on that. Is MapQuest, does that exist anymore?

I think so. When we took our road trip in January, went to MapQuest, mapped it out, then printed it out, and then highlighted the printouts and took it with us.

Didn't you go into Netscape and then you searched for MapQuest? I did.

I am on MapQuest right now. I'm wondering. It says I'm the first person to be on MapQuest since...

2002, it says. That's good. People who are much smarter than us have studied this, no doubt. But there's an interesting phenomenon of being one of the first companies to do something, particularly in the world of software, internet stuff, to be one of the first companies to be doing a thing. But then somehow you just, you fumble your sweaters and you're then, like someone else comes along and just does the same thing but a little better and then you become a footnote. it's sort of like Yahoo as a search product. You know what I mean? Like they were a Yahoo. Like we're not really Yahooing anything anymore. You know, there's just a lot of that. There's a lot of examples. I mean, MapQuest was the thing for this. How did MapQuest end up losing the battle to, you know, Google Maps and Waze and other such type of things?

There's no chance that Best Western owns MapQuest now, is there? It's probably just heavily sponsored by Best Western. But when you go to MapQuest, it's kind of like a – I mean, it feels like a jankier Google Maps. Maybe I say jankier because I'm less used to it. But it seems more simplified, kind of not all of the functionality of Google Maps. But in the bottom right-hand corner where I'm used to dragging a little animated character down to the street so I can see street view, instead there's a little button that says click here and it will show all the Best Western hotels and resorts on the map. I'm like, wow, that's some integration right there or ownership.

Yeah, I was going to, I mean, I think Best Western actually is, I assume, doing fine as a business. But I was going to say like that if they aren't, that could almost be like kind of the two crabs left in the bucket just clawing each other. Like, okay, we're going to dump all of our money into MapQuest. And MapQuest is like, we will take all of your money. Now this is just a way for people to find Best Westerns. Hey, Carrie Maloney is over in Seattle, Washington. Thank you, Carrie, so much for supporting the program. Ken Ney in Ypsilanti, Michigan. Ken, one of our very favorite people. Anytime there is a troubling loss for the Detroit Lions, I think of our friend Ken. I know, and then he emails in. He says, I'm good. I'm used to it. It's fine. I've focused my energy on other Michigan athletics. I'm good. uh i still i have to say ken i want you to know i think of you every time something or something good happens to the detroit lines i also think of ken so thank you so much ken for being such an awesome uh long-standing long-suffering tbtl 10 and then claudia curio is in pacoima california trejo town baby that's uh that's where danny trejo lives and uh i was walking down the street with him there and you know you want to talk about the the mayor of a town and i don't mean he actually is the mayor but boy oh boy do they love danny trejo in pacoima i believe it pacoima also sounds like a place bugs bunny would say it does probably because he did i think it was actually in fact we may have even talked about this on the show i think the the the you know the writers if you will of looney tunes and of bugs bunny liked having him say pacoima for some reason like it was a town that

seemed funny to them a town name and wasn't there a um i remember talking about bugs bunny when i was when we were in albuquerque right yes and was was there also okay they gave him words that they just wanted to hear him say but also was there a connection or was were you just speculating that there was some california town outside of la that you speculated that a bunch of writers uh what would be the production company for bugs bunny is that i guess uh warner brothers I think what we're actually doing here

Is we're reenacting the conversation We had a long time ago There's I think an interesting back story To why Pacoima would come up I'm not googling this right now I'm netscaping it And MapQuest tells me I can find out the answer At a Best Western just outside of Pacoima But no at some point First when we were in Albuquerque I think I was obsessed with that Bugs Bunny tape Should have taken a left at Sorry that's a I don't even want to Do that to the listeners When he says I should have taken a left At Albuquerque And then I think Maybe either that time Or some other time We sort of went down A bit of a If you will Andrew Rabbit hole About why Some of those words Made their way Into Bugs Bunny's lexicon And I think Pacoima Was one of them And I do think It had to do with Either where some of the writers Were living Or just Stuff going on In kind of the Greater Los Angeles area

There is a, I would say, a non-official website on something called ilxor.com. I don't even want to know. Nobody looked that up. But it's just, it's funny places, names in the loony. Looney Tunes slash Krusty the Clown tradition. Like this, we were talking about early internet the other day. This looks like early internet to me. This is just like where people are just posting funny place names that have shown up in Looney Tunes or Krusty the Clown cartoons. And it just listed from users here, Albuquerque, Cucamonga, Walla Walla, Sheboygan, Kalamazoo. I can never say this one Schenectady I think I nailed it Oh nice Nailed the landing Good job Take the W Tillamook Puyallup Anyway It goes on and on Bemidji

Schenectady The problem is I think I had sort of figured out Schenectady And then Synectady became a whole thing

Because of the movie

Because of the movie I mean it was always out there I think as like a Philosophical term Which I still Do not understand but then when they when when uh charlie kaufman made synecdoche new york which is a movie about a guy who's building a movie set for him or like i don't know it's like so my small brain can't wrap itself around all of that stuff but then i got synecdoche and schenectady mixed up and it'll never it'll never be right again i think the point is r.i.p dean stockwell hey thanks to our donors of the day we really wouldn't be here without you thank you for making this thing possible

hello and welcome to top story uh let's talk about the story of a guy named dylan

i saw this in mel magazine andrew welcome back mel magazine no longer owned by dollar shave club i

don't believe right no i think it's a i believe they are in fact i heard or wait not independent I think that they teamed up with kind of a money organization, right? What do you call it? A venture capital. Like a venture capital kind of situation or something? Something like that. A bank.

Yeah, they were acquired. They were acquired by some sort of VC outfit, I believe. But I heard somebody who was credited as being a writer for Mel Magazine on Weekend Edition Saturday this week Talking about the black cowboy tradition And the kind of The sort of overlooked history of black cowboys It was a fascinating conversation It made me really want to dig into that history And the person was credited as being a writer For Mel Magazine, so I was like, okay I guess we're back, baby Anyway, this is also From Mel Magazine, Quinn Myers Writing, meet the guy who spent Just $150 a year to eat all his meals At Six Flags So this guy, Dylan is a 33 year old electrical engineer in santa clarita california he uh was he had just gotten a job um a few years ago and at this job in santa clarita and he actually was an internship it was back in 2014 and he was sitting at his desk and he was looking out the window and he noticed the roller coasters of magic mountain and he was kind of into roller coasters so he took note of it and uh he you know so he said he went on the website for magic mountain to try to figure out like how much would a pass be if i wanted to go ride all those roller coasters at my leisure like he was pretty psyched at how close he was to six flags um or magic mountain however you like to describe it and he um so he went on the website and it turned out that there was a um there was a pass uh that he could pay for for 150 dollars for the food it was like a food pass i don't think this was actually to get into the park I think this was just food related it was $150 and it meant he could eat two meals a day at Six Flags every day for an entire year and he quickly did the math and he realized well I'm five minutes from the park I could go there on my lunch break I could stop there on the way home and have dinner and for $150 a year I can basically eat all of my meals and he did and what's really I mean shocking to me Andrew well first of all he still does this to this day now he's married so he says he doesn't do dinner as much because you know he goes home and he eats dinner with his with his partner but he still has lunch there every day and what I find amazing is that he for years was doing lunch and dinner there I say shocking because when i actually started to read into what was available it's very limited in the initial uh times uh when he started out all they had were like um i think it was like a uh a hamburger type of thing maybe a hot dog and um some uh i think i don't even think they had pizza at the time. There was like two menu ideas.

they have photos of this in this mel magazine piece these things look as bad as you would imagine for being you know amusement park food and there was something else called chicken balls that sometimes he had to eat because he was busy at work and the the slightly better food was on the other side of the park but he you know basically from his office to where he would park to where he'd get into the park like park his car the closest thing was this something called chicken balls which is basically like kind of like chicken strips covered in nacho fixins he said he had he's eaten that hundreds and hundreds there was periods of months where all you could get he only had the time for chicken balls he didn't have time to go across the park and get the slightly better food and but he did this and he's he he saved so much money doing it that he said he was able to pay off all of his student loans so this isn't just a gimmick this was a lifestyle that he actually embraced and it did and continues to do and it's actually paid off for him financially which to me is kind of the most surprising part of the story and this

is probably the least interesting part of the story but um or question about the story but i wonder about the parking implications whenever i've been to an amusement park it just seems like the parking is such a big part of the of the experience and the process and not necessarily a good one but you know you have to like parkinson maybe i'm basing this all on cedar point which maybe is a is a bigger situation than than the Six Flags I've never been to a Six Flags but I just picture a sea we drove past it by the way in the Delica oh oh yeah I vaguely remember seeing that I think you pointed it out yeah I was like I was kind of psyched for some reason I'm not even like a roller coaster guy but yeah we did drive right past it does give you a feeling when you see those those arches of a roller coaster in the distance but yeah I mean it just seems so inconvenient from that perspective but I guess I don't know what they got going on there

I think what happens is you start to figure out all the angles if you're doing this on a daily basis so what he tells the guy from Mel Magazine is like okay during the off season it's a breeze like you know during the times when no one else is really using Magic Mountain he said he could just kind of like have his run of the place sometimes he'd even just go on a roller coaster at lunch like he'd go he'd eat his chicken balls or in those days he could actually go and get one of his like he I guess that in the for the first couple of years he said the only items that were actually on the list for his hundred fifty dollars were pizza and breadsticks which seems redundant like I'll take some bread with some cheese on it and then some bread without some cheese on it but pizza and breadsticks burger and fries and a refillable soda cup those were the options for him for a shockingly long amount of time and then they brought online a like a kind of a steak sandwich thing uh actually a black bean uh like a basically non-meat burger like over the years the cuisine has evolved a little bit so now it's you know he's got like five or six options but on the days uh when the park wasn't very uh full he could just kind of go do his thing i think on the other days he served that was those were the days when he had to have chicken balls because he just had to like go to his one parking spot go to whatever was closest in the park get around all of the people um he estimates or he guesstimates maybe that he's had over 2 000 meals during this you know while he's been you know doing this meal plan which means he's it's cost him about 50 cents per meal he's averaging 50 cents a meal over the lifetime of doing this particular uh approach to his dining he also points out that it has not been healthy

for him i was gonna say yeah where's he getting his greens you gotta have like on weekends he must just like go to the farmer's market and just like rabbit out i mean he does have to get 5 000

steps to get to where the chipotle chicken salad is now so he says like you know i mean if you think about it if you if you start out at one end of the park you go all the way across you come back i mean it's you know it's a little bit of uh you're getting some exercise in that way the other thing that he said has been dangerous for him is that over the years they've also expanded this meal pass into dessert so we can get dip and dots sundaes churros pretzels he says that's when i started adding weight so he like again the early days it was there was no dessert on it and now they've made it so that he there's a there's almost too many options now for him uh as far as eating and some of them are not super healthy for him um i think you have to be a certain you have to have a certain kind of relationship with food to do this almost like those people you hear about in silicon valley and i don't know if this was a real thing or if it was like a new york times trend piece where three people did it but did you ever hear about this thing soylent yeah yeah and i don't mean like from the charlton heston yeah yeah that was a startup i think that

i think that was in the headlines a lot probably when you and i were working at cairo because i just feel like it was one of those head

Thank you.

lines that would pop up a lot and of course the Soylent Green comes from the sci-fi actually that's the name of the movie right Soylent Green or am I can right

yeah yeah where it's like oh Soylent Green is people

yeah exactly I didn't say I wasn't going to see it Lemon but I say to each other whatever there's a spoiler anyway but yeah then there was some startup that like basically got attention by calling itself Soylent it had nothing to do with eating human flesh of course but it was just like a way of saying like you can just this has all the it was some substance that had all the nutrients that you would your body needs but without any of the the pleasure of eating basically without any of the time-consuming

chewing yeah right uh yeah and then the reason that it be you're right the name naming it soylent was sort of genius but then it also played into this idea of like silicon valley programmers writing code all day with no time to chew food just like mainlining this like brown goo that gives them i mean probably three people had soylent i'm guessing it's not even in business anymore it's probably gone the way of map quest but anyway like if there was a person who was consuming soylent i feel like they're kind of the same kind of person as our guy from this article in that he could just go there and eat the same thing day after day after day after day after day after day just like lunch chicken balls dinner pizza and breadsticks get up next day lunch chicken balls dinner uh burger and fries you know like the repetition of that i don't think i'd make it one week but this guy's been doing it basically now for like seven years that's you just have to it's almost like you just have to kind of not see food as a pleasure you see it as a necessary thing that you just take in your body so you can keep doing your life that is not how i experience food i think about food sort of all day like i get up in the morning and i start getting excited about the things i'm going to possibly eat that day like i would not be able to do this

trying to think of the um phenomenon we i mean it's a common phenomenon i just can't think of the or it's a commonly used uh comparison i just can't think of the word right now um the syndrome where when you're a captive of somebody, you start to feel feelings. Oh, Stockholm. Stockholm syndrome, yeah. I wonder if there's almost something Stockholm-y about this at this point, though, because it doesn't sound like he still needs to keep doing this.

Right, and again, he got married, and you would think that—I think it's his wife. I didn't note closely, but anyway, you'd think that at some point you'd just kind of settle into a different version of life where it was like i don't know just you're not eating at six flags

every day yeah like what does his spouse think about this like that's i would love to do that

interview like what's going on there right and as i've already mentioned and they'd say in the article he's not doing it for dinner anymore because uh you know i'm sure his spouse was like yo let's let's have dinner together why don't we and uh no i don't need you to bring home extra chicken balls uh we'll just kind of like we'll do a normal a normal family food thing but i i mean i guess it's kind of his business in the daytime it's his lunch break he's close to six flags yeah it's i mean if he's paying 50 cents a meal that's a pretty sweet deal i mean the thing like dave ramsey will tell you as would bruce williams back in the talk net days um like you know people would call into this financial advice show that i loved um called talk net we actually play a little bit of bruce williams let's see this is some bruce williams we talk about you in your life your hopes your ambitions your dreams all the things that make you a very very special person that you are uh bruce williams's advice to people when they were like running low on funds was always brown bag it like stop stop eating out for lunch at work stop going down the street to the sandwich shop and bring your own lunch and you will save a lot of money over the course of a year this guy mentions that somebody he works with says they spend fifteen hundred dollars a month on food which by the way sounds low i don't know i think food might be one of my biggest expenses um but i also don't do a particularly good job of efficiently you know carefully buying groceries and then making a meal for the whole week i should be better about that but anyway like the advice from a lot of financial people is don't waste money on stuff that you could just be bringing from home and this guy is kind of you know he's figured out his own version of that so

i guess he's saving money and you know good for him the one problem is though whenever he sweats It smells like a biodiesel car. That's what I love. Did you see this tweet that was going around the other day? And I don't have any context for it, so my apologies for that. But I think, was it Mina Kimes or somebody retweeted this? There's a subreddit called... I think it's called hold up like in the whole point of it. I discovered it recently. The whole point of it is you'll be reading a statement that somebody posts there or watching a little video or something. And you think, you know, you think, you know, where this is going. But then something happens at the end. And you're like, hold up. What? It's actually a great subreddit. And I thought this would be a good submission to it. This isn't where I saw it. Somebody tweeted it. But this is somebody not with a blue checkmark. His name is Kyle Davis. And I don't know what their background is, but he says, highly recommend packing a lunch every day, save so much time and eat so much healthier. The simple process of telling your helper what to prepare makes you think about each food you consume. Did you see that? I just thought I heard a knowing chuckle in your voice there.

No, I'm just laughing.

Right. Like you're like, wait, hold up. What? And I'm still not clear. Like some people like obviously this is one of those things that was, you know, like kind of trending and ratioed. But a lot of people then in the comments start saying, hey, listen, you don't know what the cultural background here is. Other cultures like having a quote unquote helper is a common thing.

Oh, so the thought was that this was not he was not being sarcastic.

No, I don't think that this is a this isn't a parody account. This was like somebody who's just an old friend tweet. No, I don't think this is weird Twitter. I think this is literally somebody who's, like, kind of a life coach-y kind of person on Twitter. But it's not like Gwyneth Paltrow. You know what I mean? Like, it's just some guy. Anyway, I don't know why I felt that. But you're just talking about how we should all pack our lunch more. And you're starting to read this. You're like, yeah, that makes sense. You're a helper. What the hell?

And I was in the car with Becca the other day. And she said, Joe Rogan is to some dudes as Gwyneth Paltrow is to some ladies. Yeah. And I was like, oh, that's probably pretty accurate, actually. Yeah. if you think about it um uh all right uh this other story i wanted to get to real quick before we get to emails and v-mails is just about the fact that our our number of meetings seem to have gone up with the pandemic and they attribute it to before the pandemic uh that they they surveyed 15 000 people who have like i said office jobs although these are people that are working at home primarily now uh and those people said that they before the pandemic they would be in about 14 hours of meetings a week and now the during the pandemic they're spending about 21 hours so maybe it's not quite double but it's a pretty big increase for these folks and part of it is because in a way it's so easy to have a meeting now like it's gotten easier to have a meeting because we just you know boot up zoom or teams or whatever it is you use but of course that means that now more meetings are getting scheduled and there's also this feeling of like when we used to work in offices together and i guess it's been kind of a long time andrew since you and i really had these kind of jobs but you can remember back to when you had an office job or worked in an office and if you wanted to have a meeting with someone you would just kind of walk down potentially if it was something casual you'd walk down the hall exactly and you just kind of poke your head in their office and or or post up at their cubicle and then you would just chat about something and i mean it could take under two minutes to just check in on the thing cool and then you're on your way you go get your coffee whatever but now this process is so much different because it involves a calendar invite there's the leading up to it where you're like okay am i gonna like turn on this ring light how do i look um there's the there's much more of these kind of like pleasantries that sort of have to happen now like how are you doing you know how are you doing well this that and the other you know it's like this is standard go-to kind of conversations we have around pandemic life it's just a really different energy in these meetings and they're much more taxing and there's more of them it would it would appear yeah i think you're absolutely right that

it's this idea of things that used to not be meetings have to be scheduled now because you're not just passing somebody in the hallway and being like hey did you think that email from luke was weird you know like and that's an i'm just throwing you in there because you send a lot of weird emails yeah um but uh that's a huge thing and again you and i have been dealing with this for a while probably me a little bit more than you because i don't you much more yeah but like i I have – there are various business-related – I don't know if business, but there are various production and business-related aspects of TBTL that I got to be in touch with people about. And there is that sort of – I'll just say soft diplomacy here, which is not really the right term at all. But there is just the sort of like soft nature of just having casual conversations that don't have to rise to a certain level. And here's how – this sounds like it's going to be kind of a negative thing, but it doesn't necessarily have to be. I'm not just talking about complaining to your coworkers here, but that is, I think I have realized the value of having a casual complaint session. Now, that can create a toxic workplace, and I've been in places where it becomes people, they spiral around some toxicity too much.

just make it worse you know what i mean and too much gossiping or whatever can definitely a bad can be a bad thing but there have been a couple of times over the past couple of years where i never really took time to stop and think about my interactions with maybe a specific person at the company and i'm actually thinking about two people right now neither of whom are actually with apm anymore we've actually been there going on seven years now i think um but that i would just have interactions with and just in the back of my head thing like that's not right like what the hell is going on but also just being like whatever just keep your head low and keep keep marching on and then like after they're gone everybody's like whoa geez what about that guy right like how did you end up how did you even work with him it's like what do you mean you mean this was a conversation that was going on that like this person was a problem like it is actually helpful to kind of have that context and you don't want to be like hey um i can't believe you're calling stew out like yeah i know well he's gone i told you he's gone now but like okay let's say when stew was our colleague like i didn't want to be like hey stew can we dial up a zoom meeting or do you have time for a 10 minute conversation i can't tell you what it's about right now but i need to talk to you about something hey isn't so and so weird you know what i mean like that just that does that it doesn't rise at that level and also it's it would be embarrassing to do that and also you end up putting more importance on it by doing so yet having the occasional pressure release of that or just like kind of the context of oh okay i now know that this person is kind of creating trouble in other departments as well or other people are having this this natural reaction to their work style like that's actually really helpful right you know if you're

losing your mind or not yeah or if this is a shared experience for me and and and yes as it relates to tbtl you are in so many more meetings than i am and you just kind of like handle so many things that i do not have to deal with and i really appreciate that about you and about our working relationship um i've also noticed though that because i have like a few different jobs going each one of those jobs has a certain number of meetings that are just that even i can't get out of and it'll be like on a day when i have three meetings or on a week when i have what feel like a lot of meetings i can't figure i couldn't figure out until i read this article why it feels so draining because again it's just like i'm just chatting with people so i'm not working you know i'm not digging a ditch i'm not in a coal mine i mean there are much harder jobs but i do think it's all of that stuff kind of around the edges of of how formal these meetings are versus how informal they could be in pre-pandemic and i wonder if this is enough to actually make the argument for people going back to working in offices or if it's just the new way that we're going to you know do our jobs and it'll just be the kind of thing where everyone is both able to work from home from in their sweats but also feels kind of burned out because they had 15 meetings in a week 15 zoom hellos you know 15 of all of the 15 of like trying to smile in a non-weird way as you hit leave meeting you know i mean it's like all of this stuff that our brains are really not quite caught up to because it's not a natural i mean one of the other things that's been pointed out a lot is you know a lot of these systems you're looking at yourself uh there's probably ways to turn that off but it just ends up happening that you can also see yourself which is very tiring if you're vain like i am yeah because when i'm

there is a way to turn that off by the way last time we talked about this a lot of people were like dude that's a really easy thing to turn off if that is an issue because i think that but then

what if i look bad yeah right exactly i mean seriously that's the problem i'm totally i'm completely attributing this to my vanity i know that i was doing this this shoot on friday for microsoft and um it was a it was a very professional operation it was at they have an incredibly state of the art broadcast and like um you know whatever film studio on the campus and this was in all of the different things i've done with i guess like tv stuff now this was the most professional and kind of intense scenario there were I think maybe seven cameras like cameras that each had a person operating them you know like and as I'm doing this I'm reading off the teleprompter it's saying I'm seeing like camera seven and I got to look over at this camera seven that's on a jib arm that's coming down at a certain angle and then it's and then I see in the script camera three and I got to go find camera three and I have you know it was a very very professional operation But all of these cameras had monitors on them that I could see, and I could see myself. And I was kind of joking in between takes. I was like, boy, this ain't great for my ego, seeing what I actually look like. And they said, oh, we can turn all the monitors around. I said, no, no, no, leave them. Because I also, I hate seeing myself. thing i hate more than seeing myself is not seeing myself and thinking i look even more dumb and i

can't fix it you know in that case and i can't really relate to that at all but trying to um i would think that with that many people on set in this big of a production then i wouldn't want to see myself because you just trust that these people want you to look as good as you possibly Can just as much if not more than you do

I know you're Absolutely right like There's a team of people there was a makeup Person Stacy who It was like to take It to take it back to cartoons I remember seeing A cartoon when I was a kid About Some kind of Hollywood production And whoever was being Filmed in between every Take somebody would run out and this might have Literally been Looney Tunes I don't know we're talking so much looney tunes today but it was something where somebody would run out with a giant like i don't even know how to describe it like a poof of something and they would like hit the person in the face yeah yeah who was on camera and then they would run a puff sort of a giant powder puff and i didn't even at the time i i knew this was funny but i would had no con you know i had no idea why it's funny i just know someone's doing something silly i realized on this shoot on friday oh that's what that joke is about because they would go like okay and we're cutting and then the makeup people would come out and they would like do all this stuff on me and try to fix my you know my receding hairline and the shine that exists at the very crown of my forehead and then they would head back behind the cameras and then we would do another take and then they would call cut and then the makeup person would come out and she would do it again it was like in between every single take but so there's a lot of people there were a lot of people there trying to make me look as as as not bad as possible and yet there's still some part of me that was like i just want to be able to still kind of if i'm making a weird face i want to be able to correct it or whatever so anyway that's my problem with all of these virtual meetings we have or these zoom meetings we have is i could turn myself off but then i would be racked with this feeling that i'm looking silly and don't realize it so i leave it on which again is totally my own that's

my own ego and my own hang-ups you know coming into play i'll say um this is going very specific here and i assume that she won't hear this i'm not trying to um uh butter anybody up here but i will say that we we have a relatively new boss a kind of a direct supervisor uh named beth who she i don't know we've been working with her for maybe a month now maybe a couple of months now and i really like her style of communication she hit me up the other day she i had tweeted something out on Friday like hey everybody we're gonna be doing the show a little bit later than usual today you know just keep an eye on this space so she must have seen that tweet and just like got at me on slack and said hey I see you're starting the show a little bit um later you got a second just to hop on zoom or a phone call and let's just catch up on a couple of things and I was like yeah perfect and we did and I didn't have anything really to catch up on I thought but she just asked me about a couple of things that were going on just like you know just like boring boss meeting stuff but nothing intense but just like hey do you have a second to catch up And then in talking to her, I had a bunch of things like, oh, oh, yeah, what about this, too? Oh, yeah. And then I remember that I had some other things to talk to her about that I hadn't really thought, oh, I need to talk to her about this. But it was just like it probably maybe even the most since we've been working remotely. I mean, you and I working remotely, you know, for the past six, seven years, it was the most casual kind of like stick your nose over the partition of the cubicle and say, hey, you got a minute moment. You know, which is really what I prefer, because I know that I've done that with other people before when we had Christina working on TBTL still. That was very much my vibe. I'd be like, hey, this is not an emergency. No worries if you don't have time. But if you do, can we just hop on the phone quickly? I don't feel like composing an email like I don't like composing emails because I think that I'm too well, I'm too verbose, just writ large. But in emails, especially, I always feel like, OK, I have seven different things I need to get across here. I'm going to try to bullet point them and make them make them easy to read. But also there's a lot of information in here. So I know that people aren't even getting to bullet point number four or whatever. You know what I mean? Like, I am much more like, hey, do you have two minutes to hop on the phone with me? And we'll probably turn it into 10. But like, that's my vibe.

Yeah, I love the phone now. Like we have a production meeting for Livewire every week. And we just always do it on the phone because like that to me just feels like, yeah, I can be sitting on my couch or i can be walking around my kitchen and talking but not like sitting staring into a a lens possibly with a ring light on etc like that i wonder if the next maybe this is what slack is supposed to do but i wonder if the next if we all continue to work from home and i mean you and i probably will for a good while but if like people with more normal office jobs continue to work from home i wonder if somebody will develop a an app that basically deals with this it's called like pop in or something or walk by where it somehow allows you to have a conversation with someone that doesn't have the formality of an outlook invite and a zoom meeting etc you know what i mean i mean i guess that's just called emailing

them and calling them but i think slack you're actually right i think by mentioning slack i guess that is kind of a similar thing something that like you and i didn't i still don't think you you really use slack at all with the possible exception of with with the listener sometimes but But, like, for work, I think I was a really slow adapter to that, too. It just seemed, I don't know what this was being. Without naming names, and I think you know this joke. This is not a place that we worked together. But I worked on a talk show, a radio talk show, for a while where, like, the host. I'm just laughing because anybody who knows knows. But I guess we don't have a lot of listeners who are inside these editorial meetings. But there was a host who I used to work with who, like, was always wanting to use sort of, like, the second latest technology from Microsoft to help, like, coordinate everything. And it just, like, it was just, like, it became this whole language. It's like, all right, have you put that on Delicious yet? Like, okay, first we put all of our ideas on Delicious. Then we have our morning meeting. But then when we're done with Delicious, there was something called Yammer. And then you had to Yammer something in order to get it to the right producer who would then use a third one.

I actually don't think I know what you're talking about.

which is great you know this person you've worked with this person i'll tell you later but i think it was like we worked at different times and so um it was just like it would just be like hey did you yammer that yet there's a third thing there was delicious there was yammer and yammer is like kind of an internal almost like an internal twitter kind of a way of just passing notes back and forth quickly but not not as organized as a slack and so slack has picked up the slack there i would say but it was just it was like all the by using all of these tools that was supposed to make our jobs easier and make communication easier it just made everything so byzantine it was so ridiculous right and probably by the time you actually had learned

one of these pieces of software it was time for a new one yeah right because there was a new something that would supposedly integrate more of it or whatever um i mean i guess you have to have some systems in place obviously but like there's a certain kind of a person who they think that if you can just get the systems dialed in then the content will take care of itself I tend to be more like I don't know we'll just like I've been sending you I'm not saying this is the right way to handle it but I've been sending I compose the show sheet every day in a draft email like I have a draft email that I have been maintaining for the last 10 years where I go every day and I just you know and the listeners have noted the many times when I mess up the actual show number we're on so i'm not saying it's a great system but it's my system and i go in and i update this draft email every day that's what the shit that is not the ideal way to do this like there is some piece there is some app that could do this so much better than the way i'm doing it but it's just the way i've been doing it and it sort of works and i think you sort of know what i'm talking about when i send it to you so there you have it but then there are other people in our in our industry who are very very into making sure that all the systems are in place and that they're using yammer or whatever yes i i saw a um a thing i'm gonna look up later with more uh intention in the new york times it was like a list of all these vegetarian things you can make at thanksgiving that are really yummy i promise you yammer is one of them i don't know what it is but it's in there

well and the irony is if i saw that there was a time when i would have added that to delicious i'm not even joking delicious has nothing to do with food it's just one of those sort of like kind of uh tech boom era kind of startup names delish.us or something um that doesn't quite spell out correctly but you dig what i'm saying but anyway it was just a book it was like called a social bookmarking site it would be a way of being like okay i'm going to tag this so that i can read it later or refer back to it later or just basically find it later and the only thing that i used it for uh was recipes and i think i might have been the last man in the world using delicious and i was still just actually though it's not that different than the the pocket app that i use now that i love like and that's more for like kind of long reads but it can be for anything it can be for a tweet you want to remember like i have it on my app and i have it on my desktop and when there's an article that i want to read but i don't have time for it right now i just hit add to my pocket and then when i'm in a waiting room or something i open up my pocket app and there it is waiting for me actually i've really kind of gotten into that it's weird though

how sometimes it's just if you're saying that pocket and delicious are not that different but you really like pocket works for you it's either that there's just one little tiny upgrade or a button that makes it simpler you know what i mean yeah then that's the one you use because it's like the probably they're probably very similar at least they can do similar things but one of them just has one little i can't give you a good example of this but there are so many you

apps that i use over a different app that does the same thing just because of i know where this one thing is i know how i make this one i use this thing called um pick stitch which is a a thing that allows you to make like photo composites not overlay photos but like take you know a picture and uh kind of next panorama right it kind of creates a panorama effect um well what it does is if i want to take two pictures and put them next to each other oh if i'm doing a tweet so it could either be a grid where it's like four of them and they're in you know like a square and there's like one upper upper left upper right lower left lower right or pictures that are side by side or on top of each other just a way of combining pictures i almost always use it for some bad twitter joke that i'm trying to do i don't know how pick stitch got into my life and i bet you there's a thousand better apps at this point but damn it i know how to use pick stitch i will i'm pick stitch till i die because it's just it's what i use now and there's like so

many things that are sort of like that for me yeah i will say yeah my i guess my well this is just taking your point way too literally yeah i mean the thing about pocket is you literally hit one button you sign up and you hit one button and like with delicious it was more like and you would think this would appeal to me in a certain way it's kind of like okay what is this write your own little description for it okay and what what categories you want to put this in andrew recipes and you know home and health or whatever you know what i mean like it was just more of a like okay you can really categorize this pocket's like you don't have time for that just like just

put it in your pocket 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 email or v-mail before we get on out of here

yeah i have some voicemails i want to play here let me see what they are how about this voicemail from kristin hopping on our topic of feeling nostalgic over school lunches

Hey, it's Kristen, and I was just listening to school cafeteria talk, and, man, I could destroy one of those rectangle pieces of pizza right now with the little square cubes of pepperoni on it. Those are friggin' delicious. And I wondered, it made me wonder, if you also had the milk that came in little plastic bags, Not little cartons, but little bags of milk that were these rectangular pouches, plastic pouches of milk. They had like a little leprechaun in the middle, and you got a little straw that was pointed on one end, kind of like a Capri Sun or something, but smaller, like a coffee stirrer practically, but that was pointed on one end. And, you know, half the school year was teaching the kids or learning from the teacher how to put your thumb over the top of the straw so that when you stabbed it into the milk bag, it wouldn't squirt all over the place. But then, of course, you also had almost every day somebody who stabbed their milk pouch all the way through so that it would leak everywhere. So you always had to have a bucket in the classroom that, like, you put the milk in that had been punctured or something to put around it so that you could drink the milk after you'd punctured it. And you'd always try to, like, stab it right through the leprechaun. So anyway, that's my little milk memory that Cafetorium Tops brought up. And I kind of miss those milk pouches. Those were the days. Power out.

Well, I have a complicated relationship with milk products anyway, but I heard you give a shuddering sound, which I would echo.

Oh, my God. I know. That sounds absolutely terrible.

To me, it looks like a level coming to me.

I wonder what the advantage of that is. Is it a shipping advantage? Is it a storage advantage? Because I don't. It just sounds awful.

I'm looking at a picture. I was totally unfamiliar with this as an idea. Like they did not have this at Daniel Bagley, where I did most of my cafetorium stuff as a kid. I Googled it, and I'm now looking at exactly what the listener or the caller, I should say, was describing a bag of chocolate milk as part of a cafeteria lunch meal. And it's exactly as as she described it. And it's it just seems like when I did the story about Flamin' Hot Cheetos many years ago, I believe I described one school district that had banned Flamin' Hot Cheetos as describing them as a janitorial nightmare. Right behind it would have to be a bag of milk that needs to be pierced by a small child. Like, I don't think I could actually do this without spilling.

like remember with Capri Sun the move if you were a cool cat was to actually go through the bottom

of the Capri Sun no I don't think you ever see that no I don't think so you know I've had some Capri Suns like very recently like this summer as in a couple of months ago I we had some Capri I think we I think we got them because we knew maybe some younger people were going to be over here some kids or something but then they didn't drink them or we bought too many I don't know why All I know is Veeves and I had like a six-pack of Capri Suns in the fridge. It was great. But I will also say I probably drank three of those things, and at least two of them, the straw went all the way through. Right, exactly.

You have that little foil circle that's telling you this is where the sharp straw goes through. But if you aren't doing it just right, you pierce the entire thing. So the move that some kids would do would be to actually turn the entire Capri Sun over. the bottom of it was actually kind of fairly wide the base and you could just go right through the bottom and then there was no danger of you just had more like real estate to work with that was sort of like the other move that i learned in middle school that was very cool which is if you have a banana and it's kind of getting brown like it's that kind of thing where like sometimes you know opening a banana like you know pop in the top of a banana if the banana itself is is a little bit you know get going brown that the whole top can kind of almost just like crush in on the banana is this making any sense the way i'm describing i know you're talking about i don't

eat bananas but i know what you're talking about yeah so like if the banana is if the banana is a

little squishy basically trying to like crack the top of it can also just mess up half of the banana but if you just hold the banana just by the stem i guess we're going to call it right and now the banana is pointing at you so imagine you're holding it by the stem between your thumb And your forefinger The banana is pointing at you And then you flick the banana away from you It will open up perfectly That stem will just like snap the top open And you will not do any damage to the banana So that was my other My other cool bit of flair That I would like to roll out You don't eat bananas, not too squishy?

Yeah, I mean I think I ate them as a very little kid So I sort of remember that Or I have that sense memory Of breaking the top off But yeah, at a certain point I was like No more bananas I remember there was a time I was fine having bananas in my cereal, and now the idea of having bananas in my cereal is just so – which is – I feel like that's the opposite. I feel like most foods in my life, I thought they were icky when I was younger, and the older I get, the more I'm like, yeah, yeah, whatever. I'll eat it, but not bananas, and I don't see myself going backwards on that.

You know, I grew up eating bananas in cereal too, and I think it's gross. like I remember at the time you know you would see it sometimes depending on which cereal you know you'd see the box of cereal that would then have a photograph on this box of the cereal in a bowl and depending on what the cereal was sometimes there'd be banana in there and I remember as a kid thinking I'm supposed to like this because it's on the box of cereal but I don't actually like the it's the texture of it is the banana meeting the crunch of the cereal was not ever like blueberries could be kind of yummy There's other things you can throw into cereal that I think are good. But I never liked banana. But I was always – I was just doing it because it was in the commercials.

What do you think is the best fruit to put into a cereal? And I'll start this by saying, like, you have to have the proper cereal for fruit. Like, you don't want to put fruit in some Cocoa Krispies. At least I certainly don't. But for me, I love – you know, I'm a very basic fellow when it comes to cereals. I like my Cheerios, right? So if I have a bowl of Cheerios, cold milk. Just regular Cheerios. Just regular Cheerios. Now, these days, I try to keep almond milk in the house because I kind of prefer that. But I'll have it with regular milk, too, if Genevieve has some, 1%. But I love a bowl of Cheerios with some fruit thrown into it. I have some opinions on this, but I'll give you the floor first. Do you have any strong feelings?

I really don't because I'm thinking, like, I don't eat cereal much anymore. Occasionally, like about once a year I'll have grape nuts But that's a whole situation where I like to put Honey on them, and you have to kind of I don't ever put fruit in grape nuts when I have them I'm trying to think the last time I ate a bowl of cereal and also Applied fruit to it, and I don't know, it would have probably been Maybe Blueberries thrown into some like Special, no, you know what? Special K with some strawberries cut up

Yeah, sliced strawberries, right?

I could mess with that, I could mess with that

That would be yummy. I think I'm going to go strawberry as well, although blueberries are a close second. And also sometimes I'll like go to the grocery store and buy one of those little containers. This is such laziness, too, because I think it's way more expensive. But they'll have like kind of like kind of a prepared little jug of fruit that'll have like, you know, mostly berries. It'll have some sliced up strawberries. some blackberries, but also raspberries. Yeah, raspberries and blackberries as well as blueberries. I'll put the whole mixture in there. You know what I mean? Like some blackberries. I love a raspberry. I like to take a blueberry, put it in the raspberry, and then pop it in my mouth.

A real fruit turducken.

Exactly.

The question is, should we go out with a neutral milk hotel today? Oh, yeah, we should. Since we're talking about milk bags. Wait, that sounded dirty. Almond Milk Hotel Alright That would be a great That would be a great name for a band At this point I mean I have to be honest with you I really pretty much only know What is it King of Carrot Flowers That is yeah That's one of the songs off of Airplane Over the Sea I only kind of know their most famous album And like really their most famous song Off their most famous album

But let's do it though because some of that album Yeah, it's hard to remember which song is which for me sometimes. I think Holland 1945 is also an acceptable one to close out the show. But because they do get kind of weird, let's just go with what we know.

All right. Hey, thanks for listening, everyone. We're going to be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you. I'll be down in Pleasanton, California, just outside of SF, tasting the rainbow of ranch dressing, Andrew, which I'm sure I'll have a full report on. Living Andrew's stress dream Alright, we'll see you then Until then, have a great Tuesday Take care of yourselves and each other And please remember, no mountain too tall

And good luck to all

Each other's bodies were formed This is the room one afternoon I want to love you And from above you I sank into your soul

Into that secret place Where no one dares to know And your mom won't drink until she was no longer speaking And dad would dream of all the different ways to die It's more than ever more than we could dare to try There's only one thing I hate more than lying, skim milk, which is water that's lying about being milk. Power out.