Muse

Hi Luke and Andrew, my name is Julian and I'm 10 years old and I listen to your podcast and I just wanted to tell you a joke. Why? I mean, what do you call a potato that sits very still? A meditator. Thanks, power out.

TVTL

the faces may not look familiar but the voices this zany radio team have developed a unique

style of frolicking on the airwaves it's kind of meta and that anything meta sign this guy up

because i am i am totally down for that that's a donny brook that's a total donny brook a donny

brook you know what a donny brook is it's a donny brook and what's the deal with popcorn It doesn't taste like pop, and it sure doesn't look like corn.

Can I just say, and I think this is really important, so I need everyone to shut up. I love your hair. Oh, thank you. It's genetic and unattainable.

We're the number one show in hospitals and on sinking riverboat casinos. It's party time, chumps.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Monday edition of TBTL, The show that just might be too beautiful to live. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host.

I don't do this for the clouts. I don't do this for the fame.

Coming to you once again from Midtown Manhattan in beautiful New York City.

New York City!

Where, of all of the hotels in New York to be staying in, I ran into a 10 and her friend over the weekend in the elevator bank here at this hotel. Our friend Alicia was here for the weekend having fun. And I was walking out on my way to go to my jog, I think, arguably looking as bad as is possible for me. And let me tell you, it's possible for me to look pretty bad. And I ran into Alicia and her friend. They were lovely. We took a picture. It's probably on the Facebook page somewhere, but it's yeah, it's been a it's been a nice weekend here in New York and it's becoming a nice Monday. The weather is just absolutely beautiful. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. I just got back from an interview up in Harlem with Dougie Fresh.

I'm the president of rap music and I need to work with you right away.

Known as the original human beatbox. Interesting to talk to somebody who has multiple stories that are like this, and they're not even told for effect. It's just in passing. It's like, well, Bunkmaster Flex was playing Harlem Fest, but then his equipment died, and they were like, get Dougie, because he's the human beatbox. And so they get me over there, and there's like 13,000 people in the street, and then I'm nervous, but I get up there, and I beatbox, and everybody goes wild. Like, guy was at the, kind of the genesis of pretty much everything we think about in terms of hip-hop and rap music. So anyway, that's been my morning so far. Very excited, though, to be starting this part of the day with episode 3814 in a collector's series with all of you. Let the fun begin. The Raisin Cane Chicken Finger Company is suing a real estate company in Indiana. for leasing them a space to put their Raisin Cane Chicken Finger Company, although they didn't tell them that...

These are the best Cajun chicken niblets I've ever had.

Somebody else had some rights to sell chicken, meaning the Raisin Cane's Chicken Finger Place is not allowed to sell chicken fingers at this location based on some contracts. So we will delve into that story. Speaking of food stories, I have been capping off a number of my evenings here in New York by going down to 7th Avenue and walking up to this one street cart that I really like and ordering late night street cart food to bring back up to the hotel room to eat. I wish I hadn't done that. Well, I've got to make some different and better decisions in my life, which we can talk about, too, along with emails and emails. And this guy, the longest running Cobra of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. When people ask him to describe how he thinks of our relationship, this is usually how he answers.

I'm his confidant, his best friend, his silly rabbit. His what? His silly rabbit. His silly rabbit? Yes. Is that what he calls you? No.

He is Andrew Walsh and he is joining me right now Good morning my friend I'm your serious rabbit I'm your serious rabbit Luke You're the silly rabbit

Why so serious, Rabbit? Why so serious, Rabbit? You know what I like? Speaking of silliness, that joke that young listener Julian left at the beginning of the show, that's a year old, by the way. I think I played that about a year ago, and I saw it in the archive today. I'm like, oh, let's celebrate the one-year anniversary of this wonderful joke. You think it's going to be couch potato, don't you? What do you call a potato that sits very still? Were you thinking couch potato, Luke? You can be honest. You can be vulnerable.

You know, I would have accepted couch potato.

But Meditator is so much better

Oh it's I mean Infinitely better Now you said we've played that before I don't have any memory Like that joke caught me by surprise How does a joke that I heard one year ago How do I forget the punchline And then find it surprising when I hear it a year later Is that really what's going on with my brain these days

By the way I need to get one more thing Off of the plate here I am drinking some cranberry juice That has ice cubes in it Actually, round ice balls. I want people to know that I am not drinking alcohol. It sounds like a cocktail. It does. Yeah, but I'm not drinking a cocktail. You know that's going to know that.

Generally, you know, we don't drink during the show. We don't drink alcohol during the show. I don't. And also, we often talk about foods, and then we end up going out and buying or eating those foods later in the day. Now, will me hearing you tinkling that ice in that glass, will it cause me to go out and get a cocktail at like 1.30 p.m. here before I record LiveWire? I hope not for everybody's sake, but just the power of suggestion is very strong.

Wow. I hope. Actually, I got somebody sending me an all-cap text saying, like, don't ever pour your coffee into the microphone again. It triggers me. I don't know if the clinking of ice cubes does as well. I mean, to me, the sound of the clinking of ice cream.

What this person was triggered, are they on the hard, I don't want to hear people eating, I don't want to hear sounds? Are they, I guess you would call them the anti-ASMR crew?

Yeah, and what is the, it goes to, back to the sound of people, like, kind of masticating, too. People really, some people don't like the sound of that, and it's called, not synesthesia, that's when you match colors with objects and days and numbers. But what is the word for We used to talk about it all the time But like people who are really

Yeah just an extreme sensitivity to it I guess does ASMR Does that indicate That you like the sound Or does ASMR just mean You hear the sound you note it It's like there's a lot of people on TikTok now That will just be running kind of calm music They're like live streaming And it'll just be calm music in the background And then they'll just be like scratching their like acrylic nails on the microphone itself um like or just like tapping them and there's people that will just watch this channel for hours now does asmr mean does it mean a positive does it does it or does it just mean you can hear the sound i think asmr is the product in the same way a song

is a song and some people may like that song and some people may like that kind of music and some people don't asmr i believe is just the genre of or or the art of doing the whispering and you're right like the soft touches and all of those things i think i see those things pop up quite a bit um i'm looking for this original text message misophonia misophonia yeah that's exactly it yeah so i don't know if tinkling i'm sure i will find out if the tinkling of um ice cubes uh sets people off as well to me it's such a it's such a nice feeling i mean not even its association with cocktails but just generally even as a kid just the sound of or the sound luke oh the sound of somebody stirring their tea with a spoon and then tap tap tapping the spoon on the end at the edge

of it like oh so great see i'm the problem andrew is that the listeners or a listener doesn't want you to pour your coffee near the microphone but a cobro as in this cobro loves that sound i love i i don't have any problem with the sound of of any of that stuff so i'm i obviously do not have

misophonia well the i guess the question is do you donate to the show because that's that's the crowd that i need to play to i donate my time in exchange for money andrew so the answer is yes i do donate to the show the crowd i gotta that's the crowd i gotta play to race right back here

from interviewing dougie fresh today to do this andrew you think that's a big time donation for me yeah that went well it was really fun actually now i'll say you know uh the song that he's probably if you ever like watch those documentaries about the origins of hip hop or things like that or you're talking about the kind of like early folks that are seen as being extremely um important to the founding of like kind of what now has become hip hop his name always comes up but i also couldn't name you know a bunch of his songs that la-di-da-di song that is slick rick rapping la-di-da-di we likes to party uh which then snoop dog covered later which this is an interesting Thank you. footnote do you know that that's like the first time in history that there's been a hip-hop song that was just a full-on cover of another hip-hop song no i didn't know i knew it was a full-on

cover and i remember snoop's version of it i didn't know that was the first time you're right because usually it'd be a sample it would be an homage it wouldn't just be a word for word um

yeah right and it's weird because they don't do that in hip-hop nobody you don't release your version of a drake song or your version of a whatever you know you don't put your spin on it it's it's usually a quick reference it's either a you know it sounds like it for a minute the kind of way that you're rhyming things maybe or maybe you literally borrow a couple of lines or maybe you just actually reference it um but it's not like nobody just does like a word for word cover but this is one of the few songs that in hip-hop that that's happened with but anyway that song which is slick rick rapping is you know um dougie fresh is doing all of the beatbox uh himself he's he's the backing track there's no instruments on it there's no recordings it's just him and so he actually owns that song even though people might think of it as being slick rick because he's the one rapping it's the other guy the beatbox guy that actually it was his song and he owns the masters and it's the most sampled song in hip-hop history so uh this would explain why we were interviewing at his music studio in one of his many brownstones that he owns in harlem

yeah nice yeah i remember that i think i mentioned that to you the other day you said you were interviewing him i'm like oh yeah he did lotty dotty and i always thought it was interesting that he's not um you know everybody thinks that's a slick rick song it's not it's it's it's featuring

slick rick it's not his song yeah but then i just was also just fun to hear somebody i mentioned i gave an example at the top of the show about him you know beatboxing on stage for harlem fest but like just so many of these stories would just in passing just have like some reference to some kind of legend of hip-hop who they were just all growing up you know around each other or they were going to you know the reason that this dougie fresh guy kind of invented beatboxing or at least was the kind of first person to record themselves doing it and to really perform it widely was because he was in um he was playing trumpet in his like school band and then they canceled the music program for nice um funding reasons and so he had been doing all these said he got pretty good at trumpet and he would always practice these like kind of mouth exercises and ways of you know passing blowing air and circular breathing all this stuff from trumpet but he didn't have a trumpet anymore so he would walk home from school and he would just be doing making all these sounds with his mouth that were sort of trumpet related but now we're becoming something else and there would be like a record store in his neighborhood they like sold vinyl where they would be just spinning a record and he would come down and he would start making his own little sounds to go along with the music and then one time he was just messing around with his friends and his friends are like slick rick and like you know guys like that that are like they're at someone's house like and they're in the guy's bedroom and they're like playing music and trying to like whatever and he starts beatboxing and the kid's mom comes in and goes i like that last beat you were playing and they're like no that's dougie that's not even a recording and he was like it was the first that he thought of it as being something that could have its own musical life not just like a weird thing he was doing so to actually kind of you know again as somebody who didn't have a huge awareness of like his catalog of of music just that he was present at so many points important to the hip-hop movement um was really kind of it was most of what we talked about wasn't even for

use in the piece i was just curious now i'm no dougie fresh i want to make that very clear here that i'm not claiming i'm not stepping to dougie fresh okay everybody would we would we could we

say you're andy toast it it'll be fine like not stale but like you know what you want to just

throw that in the toaster it'll be all right they call me yesterday's andy's is what they call me they call me one day old andy um or day old andy day old andy is my is my name but when i was a kid and i'm not going to try to do it now i think you did this on the show the other day but when i was young i'm not joking i considered one of my top skills to be able it was my ability to imitate a trumpet with my mouth now i don't know if i was necessarily good at this or if it was that i wasn't good at anything else and so therefore this was something to be proud of but i just remember feeling like oh day old andy day old andy yeah i i felt like that and i'm kind of just remembering this now i mean i kind of remembered it when you you made a trumpet sound on the show the other day i'm like oh yeah but i haven't i can't pull it out now because i haven't practiced

in years but i just be very proud of that well you know i have talked a lot on the show about how i wanted to be able to play the trumpet because i wanted to learn how to play the theme song from transformers but i also was enamored with um bill cosby now remember this was a different time as far as what we knew about america's dad but bill cosby did a lot of like Like his – like a lot of his kind of –

and his faces he would do were basically him playing trumpet it was because he had played trumpet as a kid and so i being like obsessed with the cosby show and bill cosby when i learned that like oh he learned how to do that from playing trumpet i thought well this is how i will become a successful comedian and star of stage and screen as i will first learn trumpet then i will make funny faces that are like based on playing the trumpet because you have to do your lips in a very specific i mean you know this because you played trombone right i played

trombone and later i played trumpet as well with a little uh stop in baritone town in between

my goodness who knew you were like i mean you're like half of uh half of the horn section like

half of the barquets yeah no i mean that is yeah i think that's why they call me brassy andy wait

they call me brassy one day old andy um speaking of trombone you know i went and um played some trombone champion on friday here in new york i went to an arcade now if you are not familiar if you didn't catch that episode where we talked about it it's a game like guitar hero like guitar hero that is but you're trying to play songs on trombone it sounds something like this that's like a um a reviewer for pc gamer trying this game out trombone champ now i know a lot more about it because we're doing a tv story on it's just a guy named dan invented this like he just wrote the code and worked on it for years um you know on nights and on weekends and when he wasn't doing his day job and released it and it has been an incredibly popular video game there was a day where it was like the most popular game on steam which is a platform that people sell games on and stuff like uh and it's so much fun to play andrew and i was so bad at it and it was

so hilarious they actually had it set up as an arcade game or just seemed like a fun backdrop

for the tv story to meet up at an arcade well um they set it up there for for us so it was like basically on we were we're actually in this very interesting arcade that i think it's called wonderville or wonderland i have now the problem is there's something like that in portland that i think is called wonderland i think this might be called wonderville it's in um like bushwick and it's an arcade but it's not like you know we've all been to a barcade at this point where they've got frogger and all kinds of video games which is cool and fine but this one only has independent video games meaning just some people made a game some people that were into programming like made a game and it's a lot of them are in like an arcade um box or whatever you'd call it so it kind of is like what you know you'd as a kid play at chuck e cheese but they have all different it's almost like part art installation part video game and there you don't you don't use quarters for any of the games they're all free play but i think you pay a cover at the door or something but it was amazing to see the creativity and i'm not much of a gamer but to see what people created was really something like it was amazing like just all the there was one game that was just had like a kind of a joystick type controller and it was this series of like LED lights like a bunch of them hundreds of them that went in a circle around part of the arcade and when you would hit this these little points you would have to wiggle it back and forth so that you get past them and if you didn't there would be some explosion of light but it was like just the most interesting like again it was part light art part video game there was another one that was using a very old monitor like you know the kind of monitor that we would have had in like 19 or like 2007 and it would have seemed super high tech when you got it but now it's like comically big and it's a game that you that is intended to be tedious like it's an intentionally unfun game using like spreadsheets and just office stuff and like the only way you win it is by like not messing up for like over the course of six or seven hours no one's ever won the game because the place isn't open long enough for someone to actually complete the game and if you mess up it like it like locks you out i mean it's one of these things like a torture device of a game but people love it for some reason anyway i was very taken with the actual space um but then they they the they set up a trombone champion with a big screen and a way that i could play it and we could film it and i could do badly and then we could all laugh

you know something just jumped in my mind while you were talking about little independent games i think this is kind of different but i suddenly remembered you know how sometimes during the show although i haven't done this as much in the past year or so but remember that um that game i used to play i kind of doodle around with it called uh hex empire and it's like a very basic version like the shorthand of it it would be like a very very very be- basic flash-based version of like Risk basically it's like this little world domination game that takes maybe five or ten minutes to play and it's very simple it just you know I could just turn off part of my brain and just stare at it and uh and just move little pieces around the the board or whatever there was another game that I'm just thinking of now and as I'm talking I found it it was something just called a falling sand game and I'm just bringing this up here because I wonder i don't think i've ever talked about this on the show this predates my time of um being on tbtl i think it must be 20 years old or something and luke just try typing falling sand game into your browser i don't know if this will make for great podcasting but i am interested to know if any listeners know about this basically it just starts with a black square and there are four falling kind of substances coming down one is sand one is water one is salt and one is oil but they I mean, I'm talking about the most basic graphics you can imagine. And your cursor starts off just by being a little, you can just draw little walls around. So if you draw a little gray line underneath the sand that's falling, suddenly the sand will sort of accumulate there until it overflows. And then you can sort of just do with this whatever you want. It is nothing but meditative. You can draw a little, like you could put a whole floor on the bottom of this thing. And then all of these substances could accumulate together into one big pot. or you could turn off the water if you want.

I'm watching it right now, and it is tremendously relaxing.

Have you drawn any little lines on there, like underneath any of the falling substances? Like, just use your mouse to, like...

No, I'm just watching...

You're just watching the four straight lines?

I just did a line. I just did a line. I actually regret that. I want to undo that. I liked it when... I just did a line, too, right before the show. Hey, I bet you did. You sounded a little extra energetic, but the question is, are you going to be able to keep that going throughout the whole show? Okay, so now I'm doing the thing you're talking about. I'm drawing a sideways line that now the sand is starting to pile up on. Oh, my gosh.

And then it overflows, right? And then, like, if you scroll down. I can totally see the appeal of this game. You can sort of see. You can then see how you can choose your cursor to be fire. So you could set fire to the oil all the way to the right if you wanted to. So you can kind of go bananas with this. You can set up big pots of oil and set them on fire. And then I think the salt puts out the oil. But the way I'm describing it almost makes it sound too complicated. It's so simple, you can do anything with it, if that makes any sense. And then over time, the oil will kind of cut through, or I think the fire will cut through the little walls that you build. It is so meditative. You could just turn everything off and just watch the sand fall during the show.

I really just want to watch this. I want to lie quietly on my bed in this hotel room and just stare at this. Isn't it fun? I love that. It is really fun. I don't know. Am I becoming a gamer? Something happening?

I don't think so. But I would love to play this. Like, can you imagine this independent arcade you're talking about walking in and like kind of posting up at an arcade style game, but you're just making sand fall from the sky?

I bet you they would have that if it were designed by somebody, you know, who like so not a giant, you know, company or something, but like a person they probably would. By the way, it's called Wonderville, Wonderville Indie Arcade Bar. But it was, again, it was just so cool because there was this one game called something like This Will Not End Well. And the game was, I want to just give a trigger warning because I'm going to refer to some violence here. But it was like graphically as rudimentary as like Pong. Remember Pong? But what happens is you just have there are these two stick figures. And then, so you're one of the stick figures. The person you're playing is the other. a knife i'm sorry a gun and a bullet and it's super all of this is incredibly rudimentary a gun and a bullet fall in the middle of the screen and then you are running to get this weapon and try to use it on the other person before they get it and use it on you and it is like so simplistic but it is so actually upsetting when you get shot i don't know why and the the owner of the of of wonderville said this was deemed i guess they were taking there was a display of independent made video games in the smithsonian and this game was deemed too violent to be in the smithsonian even though it has nothing going for it graphically like it's not a realistic depiction of violence but when i played it i immediately knew what they were talking about it was pretty upsetting in an in an interesting sort of way yeah that's what i used to try to

describe to you for minecraft which i know is like very childish you know it's funny because i've been playing minecraft again this fall it might have been something about the changing of the weather and there's something cozy about that but uh last week i stayed up late a couple of nights and played minecraft again got into some old world that i had created like a year ago and um you know the whole thing of mine one thing that i did have the thought of is like there were children who used to listen to the show and then write in advice about minecraft and in fact our buddy gus who's i believe been on the show certainly by way of voicemails um who used to like come over sometimes and like show me tricks on minecraft everything i was thinking about him he's probably outgrown minecraft unfortunately i the adult have not outgrown minecraft while probably most of the kids who listen to the show who used to be interested in minecraft content are now i'm assuming done with minecraft i don't know if that's accurate or not but that that is what i'm talking about it's a very blocky the the graphics although they've kind of gotten a little bit more sophisticated like it's not a realistic video game at all you look like a you look like a lego walking around right but it doesn't mean that you didn't feel fear in the depths of your bones when the enderman finds you like it was just like my reaction to that game i couldn't but unlike any other game i ever played i was i like felt that game in my bones that's really interesting i mean there's

obviously some sort of psychological principle there at work or whatever that if we have our once we're invested in something on whatever level that is mentally emotionally etc the realism of it is not as important as the other kind of things that it's activating for whatever reason because i was like i did not want the owner of this barcade stephanie to shoot me again with the man gun because it made me feel very weird for reasons that were kind of no um i couldn't quite explain now i do have a question which is have you ever been like you and it's you and veves and it's it's nighttime and and veves is gonna has a plan of something she's gonna do maybe in the house or a show she wants to watch and you don't care and she says why don't you just go play your video game and you go don't minecraft if i do happens every day it's the reason she's considering

breaking up with me in fact she doesn't like that i just feel like if you could tee that up that'd be a pretty awesome little piece of piece of wordplay the problem is genevieve never says don't like genevieve's never trying to get rid of me because unfortunately i'm so absentee at nights with my damn video games or like clamping my headphones on and puttering around and listening to to podcasts or whatever that like i think genevieve often you know she'll go in the other room and she'll like kind of put on some of her shows whatever they might be and you know she like some things that i actually most things i'm happy just to have on in the background but like for some reason i apologize for this to our star trek fans there's something about a lot of star trek properties there's something about the lighting and tone of that show that i don't even like it as background sound or ambience it's kind of bad ambience for me i'm not a not a fan of those things even though some of my closest friends have uh you know make their money being fans of that stuff but for the most part Genevieve will look for things I want to watch and be like oh do you want to watch something like you know and I always say well don't put on anything I think this drives her crazy too I'm like don't put on anything for my benefit because I don't want to commit to anything like people talk about commitment issues my commitment issues are to sitting down and watching television for any extended period of time in fact I watch television better when Genevieve's not around because I must have some sort of undiagnosed ADHD kind of situation because if Genevieve's not around, I'm more likely to turn on a TV show because I know that I will pause it, walk to the kitchen for five or ten minutes, come back. Like, I'm so bad at just sitting for a full 45 minutes or an hour without, like, kind of taking a break or doing something that I think I'm annoying to watch TV with. And if Veeves wants to watch TV, I always say, like, don't put on anything for my benefit because I can't guarantee you

that my ass will be in the seat five minutes from now hey but there is something wherein i know your ass was in the seat because you've expressed that you were quite compelled by it which is severance now can we take a moment and talk about severance um the uh i would say great great series from apple tv uh you're done now what did you think um as a comedy goes it's terrible actually that's

not even true i was trying to say something funny but like it does have it's a droll comedy it is a

dark comedy in some way the work the workplace aspects of it play as sort of comedic you know whether it's the whatever those parties are those reward parties that are like i i haven't watched it in a long time now so i forget the specifics but what is the food that they're getting there's

a melon one so kind of it's melon one it's like a you know it's a um what's the word i'm looking for not apocalyptic but um it's a you know a future it's a future it takes place in the future kind of a bleak future and and we've talked about the basic premise of the show on this on this podcast already so i won't go into all the details and probably a lot of people have already seen it but like yeah so in this very very stark way it sort of sends up what a office like kind of birthday party the types of things that you and i have complained on the show about for years even though we don't really have to take part in them since we started working from home but like i I remember like literally hiding at KCRW you if it was somebody's birthday because I knew that somebody was going to come marching in with a cake and there were no walls in the newsroom and everybody would have to take part in this like what I would consider to be very awkward like 15 minutes of celebrating somebody's birthday that I just had no I wanted no nothing to do with whether it was mine or somebody else's yet in this TV show it's not a birthday party and it's not a cake there's like somebody gets excited because somebody He brings a melon cart in. I believe there's an egg party, Luke. Do you remember that?

Oh, that was, I think, one of them, yeah.

An egg party. And then, of course, the one thing that this one guy is really excited for is the waffle party, which ends up being pretty surreal. I don't understand that. I mean, I don't want to spoil this, but it's also been out for a while. I don't understand what happened with that waffle party. Everything else sort of like, you know, it ends on a cliffhanger, and I'm dying for the next season to come out. but i still don't understand what the hell that waffle party was all about other than i think they wanted to make something really weird and strange for the show what happens during the

because again it's been a while for me is it is there music associated with it yeah there's sort

of like party different yeah i mean okay so if you haven't watched it and you want to watch it you don't want to be spoiled i guess just like kind of consider this your spoiler alert but like for those who have seen it and for you luke remember like i think the guy's name is dylan And the guy who gets really excited about the office parties and puts all of his steak and getting like the little prizes they hand out for, you know, a job well done or what have you. He's so excited. He's working for a waffle party. And you think it's going to be all the staff gets together and eats waffles together. But it's not. It's a solo experience where he goes into a chamber and eats a waffle by himself. And then he lays down on a bed and wears a mask. And these and these like people like three people who are of various genders dress up in very sexual.

Oh, right. It's in the house with masks and they do dances like traditional home of the founder or something, too.

Yeah. And it doesn't really play into the rest of the plot. I don't feel or if so, I don't understand it yet.

I would argue that that's one of the few times where the show kind of for me for just a few minutes got a little bit. i don't know kind of like lost whatever it's it's a it's internal logic was um but that was rare for me uh as a viewer of the show which as we've established on this program i'm very literal with my tv watching like i don't like a lot of that's why i love that david lynch exists i'm very pro david lynch in the world but for me i don't like watch his projects with a lot of they don't work for me because i i just can't let it go when something seemingly completely random starts happening so i was worried with severance that that might start happening a lot but i felt like they did a pretty good job of always kind of reeling it back in right when i was maybe in danger of finding it to be kind of unrealistic or or a little bit silly or something they would they just every episode ended and i really wanted to know what happened the next episode

yeah the one thing that i wanted to tell you about and i think i might have alluded to the to this in um in off-air conversation we had last week but like so it's a pretty short season which helps and the episodes i think were only 45 minutes long or something so i i kind of burned through it very quickly and i've been having severance had been on my two watch list for quite some time i wanted to get through a couple of other shows i was already committed to first um but i burned through it i watched some of them by myself and some of most of them i think i watched with genevieve who'd already seen it so genevieve loves that like she'd been she'd been hounding me to watch severance since it came out because she binged it right away and she just needed to talk to somebody about it right and i guess you know that number this is a very um this

is anecdotal and also um probably incorrect but i really don't i find re-watching a show very boring or at least it's not my favorite way to consume reconsume the information i have never been in a relationship with a person i.e. i've never been with a woman who was not more than happy to re-watch anything they'd already watched with me or with me like i wonder i mean this just could be the three people i'm thinking of you know what i mean but i wonder if that's if that's if that is somehow can tend to be a difference between being a man and a woman i i love re-watching things in fact

like i uh so you're with them i just don't think it helps to break it down by gender you mentioned the other day something about oh i think you can leave you said it seems like it's like men who like it and women who aren't into it i heard from three different women who wrote in like nope you got it backwards in my relationship here's what i said and we want to rewind the tape i'm not mad

at you by the way yeah i said there are probably literally a million women who like the show so if somebody needed to email in and clarify that there are there one of the million i'm i i very much believe that i just said that i have and i've again this is all anecdotal but i have Also, not only have I tried to get some people in my life who are women to get into the show, I have friends who have just mentioned apropos of nothing. Oh, yeah, I.

tried to play that for my wife and she was less enthused about it than I expected so I don't think that that's a broad I don't think that's a scientific statement it just has been my experience yeah I know

I mean nobody was angry they were just saying hey totally opposite in my family like I love that show and my boyfriend or husband just finds it super super cringy as far as the re-watching thing again I don't know if there's any service done in trying to break it down by gender but I will say I love re-watching shows because like i first of all i don't want to leave the the world you know like we're i mentioned this on the show last week but severance ends and you mentioned this when you were obsessed with it when it came out like it ends on such a um on such a cliffhanger in fact i was oh this is what i was building up to before the second to last episode you know near the end they start ending on on bigger and bigger cliffhangers sort of and i remember the second to last episode i can't even remember exactly what the cliffhanger is oh i do i do kind of know it's not worth getting into but i was at home watching it by myself genevieve i believe was at a halloween party or something so i had the house to myself i could watch tv however i wanted i didn't feel any need to like kind of like you know stay in my seat or whatever i remember the second to last episode ended and i said i i exclaimed something out loud like i think i yelled to the best of my memory i think i yelled you gotta be kidding me and then i stood up and i remember i walked around you can sort of picture our house like we kind of have a circle area around our kitchen sort of so you could you could literally pace in a circle by going through a couple of doors just around and around through the kitchen i believe i paced through the kitchen twice and eventually found myself and i literally found myself luke standing in the dining room and i didn't really know how long i'd been standing in the dining room because I was just like thinking about the show and like I had another episode to watch with a cliffhanger like that you'd think that I would just want to barrel right into it but like that show and I can't remember any other show kind of doing that to me where I only had one more episode to watch I knew I was going to watch it right away I was excited to watch it I couldn't but I needed to let it soak in like I just I felt like I can't just hit play on this one yet maybe it was because I wanted to you know when you're down to two Reese's pieces in the bag to bring back that and you maybe want to savor them more i don't know what it was but i remember i just was like i need to i need to absorb this a little bit before i watch the final one and i was just like standing in the dining room i was like okay okay like paul rudd in celery man i think i'm okay let's go back and finish this baby off like and and so back to your point like i kind of want to re-watch it not because i want to pick up on anything i think i i think i followed it you know there are times where you're confused about something but then it for the most part it pays off but it's like i just want to be in that world as dark as that world is i it's hard for me to say goodbye to characters you know patriot was the same way now there is going to be another season

i think they're actually filming it as we speak so that's i mean i think that was a pretty big hit as well so um there will be more but as i told you back at the uh point uh when i was watching it And I think I was a fairly early adopter, at least I think I was watching it pretty close to when it was released. I didn't realize it was multiple seasons. I thought it was like, I don't know why. I just figured it was a, you know, it was a one season arc. And I was watching it just like thinking, how are they going to wrap this up? Wait, there's 10 minutes left. They can't. And then it was only at the end of the biggest cliffhanger I can think of in a long time that I realized, oh, no, I just have to now walk around not knowing what happens to this world for like two years. Right. Yes. That was the most devastating part for me was realizing in that moment, oh, no, this is not over. This is not over this season. This is going on for a long time.

And well, you know, while we're talking about TV, I started I think I only watched the first episode of White Lotus. You were very into White Lotus, too. Right. I think you I assume you went to that before I was. I'm always a little bit late to these things, but they're now dropping the White Lotus episodes. But usually when a show is, you know, kind of one of those prestige television types of shows, I usually am so late to the game that the entire season drops. And then I can just kind of binge it on, you know, sit down and watch two or three in an evening if I want to. Yes. With some pauses for pacing and standing in the dining room from time to time. Pacing pauses. Yeah, exactly. But they've only dropped two episodes, maybe three after last night. I'm not sure of White Lotus, but I couldn't contain myself, though. I had to watch the first episode of White Lotus the other day. Have you you've been on the road? I assume. No, I'm waiting. No, I'm trying to wait till there's more of them out because the same thing like when I watched them the first time or the first season, it was, you know, all of the episodes were available. And I think I told you I was watching it.

literally on a flight to hawaii so it was like and maybe even on the way home from that flight like it was the most ideal programming for me and so yeah and that's actually happening with some podcasts that i'm listening to right now i'm really enjoying this uh show called cover story well the the the show is called cover story this is season two of it's put out by vox and new york magazine um and this season is called seed money and it's about this billionaire who moves to whitefish montana this is all this is non-fiction and starts um basically potentially creating a harem there um maybe doing something more devious it's unclear so far but they're releasing those week by week and uh i am caught up and i'm just like i'm doing that like refresh refresh and you know what's funny is uh my a friend of mine is a producer on that show and i was chatting with her and it was hard for me to not want to like try to extract information like i've never had that experience like i didn't know anyone who was working on severance where i could be like hey so uh what's going on with the waffle party um but uh so that one i'm really enjoying um seed money from cover story although again they're they're releasing it week by week and then the other one is the um rachel maddow presents ultra that one is also amazing and it's being released week by week so i'm finding myself um having to live like it's the 1990s all over again where i can't just watch or listen to the totality of something just because i'm into it having only

watched one episode of the white lotus i want to give a quick only because it's very rare that i'm in position to do this i want to give a very quick little review of this which is to say if you watch the first white lotus and you i think most people kind of know that the the premise of the second white lotus is that it takes place in a different place at a different white lotus hotel that's a brand name of luxury hotels it takes place in in a different one not in hawaii this time and none of the characters are the same except for jennifer coolidge she had her character appears in both seasons and i think we all knew that even going into this season um so none of that is a spoiler um but i have found one episode in that it does exactly what you want if you liked the first season of white lotus like there are a lot of similarities kind of in the way that the plot is being set up as far as the tensions are concerned but like it's got it is not a letdown as far as like sometimes like when you what i loved so much about the white lotus was the the tone of it in some ways the way it did string you along the music just like all of that music was wild yes and this has like kind of echoes of the original music but it's got a little bit of a different local flavor to it um but like it doesn't feel it doesn't to me and i could be totally wrong i'd be interested in your thoughts when you know you watch it but to me it doesn't feel like a cheap retread but it's totally fan servicing me and i wanted to be back in this you know kind of with this type of people again it's that juxtaposition of just seeing the most beautiful places on earth And the most luxurious, kind of rich, literally wealthy experiences that you're supposed to both loathe and admire at like the same time. Like that's what the White Lotus, the first one, did for me. And basically the second season seems to totally nail everything. One episode in, I should say again.

Well, I mean, one thing, it's created by Mike White, who I'm just a huge fan of his work. I think he just almost always comes up with something inventive that I really like. also it's a genius idea it's a genius um conceit for a multi-season show right because it's the backdrop right so you just set it at any and i'm sure they can just i mean in this world there could be a white lotus anywhere beautiful right i mean we've established that so next season could be somewhere else different crew of people show up and have misadventures like it seems like it's very it's reproducible in that way whereas some shows if you're trying to keep going if you're trying to do another season but with different people it's like plot wise it doesn't work or whatever but this is a this is well constructed to be reproducible for multiple

seasons yeah fargo did a pretty good job of it very different type of oh you didn't get into the fargo yes did you watch the fargo shows i couldn't remember i watched the first i think

two or three seasons and i really enjoyed it but yeah they fargo because of course everything about that movie was avant-garde i think that was written weren't wasn't that fargo stuff written by the guy who also did true detective is that that rings a bell and i can't remember the name now but like the Fargo thing was interesting because they these were totally unrelated universes right like it would just be if I have that right right like they would just decide on a plot and on a group of people and then kind of go with it I think there were

tangential connections like one person okay I believe like there was like one person who was the main character in season one was actually the son

I don't think they went But it was like the son of somebody in season two And so I think they kind of jumped around In time and stuff and there would be some connection So they weren't different universes But they were completely different storylines And different characters and different Mostly different casts and everything

This is A hard pivot off of TV talk But I just want to tell you Andrew If at some point if I text you later tonight And I say stop me from Doing this I want you to say Luke You're not allowed to eat any more street food from this one cart by your hotel, please. Because every time you do, you spend the next however many hours in a certain amount of intestinal discomfort. What do you what is the type of food? What is the type of food? It's just rice with this amazing sauce on it and then some hot sauce and then what they call salad. Salad is just like a pile of green, green olives, some celery, like a tomato, a little bit of lettuce. So basically, it's your standard New York City. There are all these carts, and a lot of them have lamb over rice or chicken over rice. I don't really eat a lot of meat, so this is just—I'm like, hold the chicken, but I just get the rice. The rice is so good. And then they put all the stuff on it that they would normally, and it is—honestly, eating that with this stupid plastic fork that they give you while I'm watching Scott Van Pelt is so unbelievably— First of all, the exact taste of this kind of New York City street cart rice dish, I have missed it ever since I stopped living here. Like, it is a weirdly specific flavor, and it's not, you know, food carts are everywhere, and you've got a million great food carts in Portland. And maybe I would need to explore more. Maybe I could find one that does this. But, like, there is just a certain New York City street cart flavor profile that I really love. And, I don't know, a few nights ago, I was coming back to the hotel, and I was just like, ah that wouldn't it's like and i was gonna order some food but i didn't want to deal with that whole situation and stuff and so i just was like and every corner in man you know in this part of manhattan midtown literally every corner has like four of these so i just went to the one that was on the corner and i got this rice and i said like put everything on it and then it was so delicious it was exactly what i remember it tasting like and it was awesome and i ate a lot of it maybe too much of it maybe all of it and then about three in the morning woke up uh-huh that's um that's calling the bathroom is calling my name and so then i thought okay well that was yummy that was a nice little reminder but i need to not do that again and then last night i was feeling hungry at about 8 30 it's also weird andrew because the sports are on such a delay out here like the you know sunday night football starts at like eight like 8 30 at night here so of course i'm up late watching football or whatever and then i'm like oh you know it would be so good right now some of that rice and i was like maybe i'll just have them put less of the hot sauce on it but then i was like no i gotta go i gotta if it's worth doing it's worth overdoing and so what did i do i got the rice they threw all the stuff on there it was delicious a guy tried to sell me cocaine i said no thank you i have to work tomorrow i have to interview dougie fresh and i don't think that would go over well and um got the rice and ate it and it was so good

and is the truck right immediately heading is the truck right by your hotel sorry to interrupt i it's kind of true so it's like you can just go right downstairs and grab i mean that's like

literally it's like i know it's like a five it's like a five steps from the hotel yeah see that's

the thing even if you sought this out in portland like there's something about just the convenience of it and the fact that it's right there and it's just like fitting the lifestyle right now

perfectly it's so yeah and again really it was one of my when i lived in new york it was really one of my kind of go-to things you know is and i know they call it the city that never sleeps and And that is kind of like a, I don't know what you want to call it, like, it's an obvious point. But you really, when you come back to this place, you realize, oh, yeah, it really doesn't sleep. These carts are going like two, four, seven. Like, you could, I didn't test this, but I bet you at four in the morning, I could, there would be at least 20 places within a one block radius where I could get food. Like, it's crazy how active everything is. When in a lot of other parts of life, and I've actually seen data on this, a lot of, you know, restaurants like in Portland that used to be open until 11, now they close at 9 and they're not going back to it, you know. A lot of late night stuff is kind of shut down. It's why a lot of people are ending up at my father's place where our friend, listener Chad, works. And the people I was talking to last time I was there were like, yeah, this is one of the last places you can get late night food anymore. So there's a lot of changing in the hours that places are open and stuff. And sometimes when I'm in a small town And I'm hungry and it's late at night I'm like what are my options That is not the problem in New York There is an embarrassment of riches When it comes to food options And again I also feel like While I'm only here every once in a while I should just enjoy myself And I should treat myself to this thing that I miss eating But then when I'm sitting on the toilet at 4 in the morning And I have to interview Dougie Fresh three hours i think that was a bad decision now was that part of your memory of this um of this type of food when you used to live there or is this something more with age i think i have a sensitive portland tummy now i mean we're getting older like i don't remember food affecting me the way it affects me now i mean whether you're talking about stomach distress or just anything like even salt like you know like if i have a meal that's super salty i like feel that like there are times where i kind of feel a little i can't even describe it like it's probably some sort of hypertension like i feel a little jittery or something i'll be like oh my god it was that goddamn breakfast i had with all the salt in it and that's why i'm feeling this way i never noticed

that before i was in my 40s you start to understand who they're appealing to in those truly disgusting commercials where like a chicken wing is beating a guy up yeah right i forgot about that yes i when your food fights back and i was like who is the demo for this and then i'm like me yeah it's me i'm the person who needs to sleep with my head slightly elevated so i don't get

heartburn and such well i'll tell you what you said that if you call me later or i should just randomly text you and say you know i gotta say luke as your lawyer and your dietician yeah now you're only there a few more days like there are so many foods that maybe not so many but there are a handful of foods from various places i've lived that i can't get and i mean just like a turkey sandwich that i used to get at the specific place in in concord new hampshire i haven't had it in 20 years um now i don't think that it would have the same effect on me as this spicy rice but like just live it up because then you know i mean i know that you make it back there every now and then but like who knows when you'll have it again i know i'm probably gonna get it for dinner tonight

andrew that's the messed up part probably i've got a lot of a lot of work to do after this and then a lot of writing to do before tomorrow some filming that we're doing and like i'll just be here in the hotel with monday night football cranking away and i'll probably go downstairs

and get some of this rice um i'm still looks like you know i have one more player to play in my fantasy football league but my opponent is still winning for the week and i am i won this week again i believe i will still be top of the pops luke it is it is either going to yes because i've never been in i mean i might have touched first place in one of these leagues maybe once accidentally because my opponent forgot to play a player who was on a bye week or something but like i i've never ridden the top of a league for this many weeks in a row and either i'm gonna find out what it's like to even if i don't get first place like i'm gonna find out what it's like to be a you know top three winner in a fantasy league or we are setting me up for one of the biggest falls of my sports career this is my sport i'm excited for you and plus you know

You're in one of those leagues where if you lose, don't you have to get a tattoo of, like, Steve-O from Jackass on your forehead or something in a Waffle House?

It's very close. Steve-O has to give me a tattoo on my forehead of me. It's a tattoo of me.

Oh, got it. Yeah. I mean, that's a really good reason for you to try to stay in first place if you can to avoid that. I'm working on it. He's my opponent next week, too. Okay, let's do this. Let's take a quick break here well into the program, and then we come back. We'll knock a top story or two out, and then some emails and emails here on a Monday, TBTL. Don't go anywhere. Hey, let's thank some of our daily donors for keeping TBTL going with their donations. Folks like Kenneth Walls of Stillwater, Minnesota. Might have thought I was going to say Oklahoma. I'm not. I'm saying Minnesota this time. Thank you, Kenneth. Also, Patricia Anderson is in Freeland, Washington. Freeland, Washington. I feel like I was. Oh, I know where that is. That's over by Port Townsend, actually, I believe. It's over. It's me.

Not like one of those places that was set up like, this is the land of free people. We don't acknowledge the U.S. government. That's not like Freeland Washington.

No, but Patricia is a sovereign citizen. Okay. Good to know. Good to know. Thank you for donating. She is the same accountant as Wesley Snipes. And we appreciate that Patricia does decide to use some of her hard-earned money as a sovereign citizen to support TBTL. Thank you so much.

Unfortunately, they're free bucks, I believe. I don't think they're U.S. dollars. They're free bucks, but they're M dollars.

There's just a picture of Emily on them. You can only spend them in an oil rig off of Scotland, which has also declared itself to be a sovereign nation. No, but for real. Thank you, Patricia. And also thanks to Emily Atkinson of Brevard, North Carolina.

Now, I bet you this came up last time that we read this from Emily. Now, if we were down in Florida, that would be Brevard County. So I don't know if it's Brevard, North Carolina or Brevard, North Carolina.

We could call a bagel shop there, find out. Call a Waffle House.

Maybe we will. Thank you, Emily. Thanks to Lisa Belonger of Neenah, Wisconsin. Stillwater, Minnesota, Neenah, Wisconsin. Some solid Midwest places. Congratulations on your Packers winning, Lisa. I saw somebody write on Twitter that Now you know Mike McCarthy used to be the coach of the Packers And now he's the coach of the Dallas Cowboys And I guess he made a questionable call in overtime Which caused the Cowboys to lose And the Packers to win And somebody said That's the first coaching decision that Mike McCarthy's made To help the Packers win in his career

Wow I didn't know that he was I didn't know that he was disliked I always thought he was kind of beloved there

That might just be one you know one person having one opinion at one time i don't know enough about his history there i know our listener uh friend lisa would know she's a big packers fan as are many of our listeners um so thank you uh i don't know where where lisa belonger falls on the spectrum but we do appreciate your support also we appreciate the support of jamal abdi who's in arlington virginia arlington virginia where i briefly lived andrew and where i told i've told the story many times i was almost shot with a pellet gun that shattered a window at the chinese restaurant i was walking past i don't think i know that story yeah i was walking down the street this was nighttime um i was walking it was the um i was on garfield street if case jamal is scoring at home and i was walking towards this little kind of mother-in-law apartment that i was like renting actually npr was renting for me because i was living out there during my like internship thing and i'm just walking by this like door and it just shatters and i just thought that something had flexed you know that like something weird happened with the door and then the window broke next to me it was one of those real these guys this man hates can kind of moments like things were happening i couldn't logically put my mind to what it was other than these windows hate not being shattered they're just spontaneously shattering and then i looked over and these These young ruffians were in a car shooting at me with a pellet gun.

And it was definitely a pellet gun, because I've got to say, I've owned pellet guns in my life. I can't imagine them shattering a window.

I couldn't either. I mean, believe me, had it been not a pellet gun, it would have been attempted murder. Yeah. And they did. By the way, the cops caught them. They were just on a mayhem run. I think they stole the car and they hit a bunch of cars. The police basically called me and said, could you come back? I didn't. At this point, I lived in L.A. again. And this is months later. And they were like, would you consider coming back to Virginia to testify against these people? And I was like, if it's the only way you're going to make your case, yes. If it's not, could I would rather not fly back to Virginia for this? And they never they didn't make me go out there. So I don't know what happened. But I know it wasn't a gun. I know it was a pellet gun. Yeah, that had been a gun gun. I mean, first of all, just what if the stakes would have been way higher, way, way higher.

but um and you do hear about that i guess i do kind of i mean i guess maybe you know i had some pellet guns when i was a kid or like a teen or whatever but um i guess i didn't try shooting windows with it and you're right like you often will hear about that like a couple of you know some teenagers going on some sort of spree in some sort of neighborhood blasting out windows so yeah i guess i just can i ask you another question do you think that if you if if you had been compelled to go back to virginia from the west coast just for the trial would they have paid your way

probably not i'm guessing they would have to okay because think about i mean i can't imagine a universe in which somebody testifying in a criminal case it comes down to can their personal finances yeah support that sort of thing that just seems like that would be a really really bad way to try to you know run a case so i'm guessing they would have probably flown me out on southwest and put me up at the finest holiday in in the northern virginia area like i bet it would have been pretty low frills yeah but um it's kind of funny because this hotel that i'm staying in i get the sense that it's uh well there's some conventions there's also of course tbtl listeners there's me and there's a ton of airline staff ton of airline staff and i was getting a coffee down at the starbucks and the incredibly kind gregarious guy working there was like which airline like as in What airline do you work for? And I was like, oh, I don't. But I was very flattered that he thought I could possibly, like, be a pilot or something. I was like, wow, is that a vibe I'm giving off? I'm into it. I can see you being a pilot. I can't. And nor should anyone else. I think it would be bad. I used to, like. Like, I was for a while interested in the idea of taking flight lessons, and Carrie was always like, hmm, I've seen you drive, I would say.

I meant your look. I meant your demeanor, not, like, the physical ability to fly a plane, obviously.

I think I'm too outgoing. Listen, we have great – we have pilots in our listening audience who are wonderful, gregarious people. I'm not trying to say they're not, but don't you feel like pilot energy is a little more, like – it's a little cooler, it's a little more reserved than I have going for me? I feel like I'm out there just being a big goofball. And most of the pilots have got the aviators on. Sometimes they're ex-military. They just seem like they're a pretty calm bunch.

Well, I think I made it pretty clear the other day that the only thing I know about airline pilots, I learned from the TV show Empty Nest. So maybe I'm not the right person to answer that question.

Well, thank you, Jamal, for supporting us from all the way out there in Arlington, Virginia. Thanks also to Nikki, a.k.a. Veronique Crotia in Seattle, Washington. Now, wait. Okay. I always forget, but we've met Veronique and Veronique's partner, and he also has a— D'Artagnan. Isn't his name D'Artagnan? D'Artagnan, yes.

I never had known that name before I met him at a ball game.

Other than Waiting for Guffman and the Musketeers, I don't think I've ever heard that name outside of uh being part of uh veronique's life waiting for guffman yeah he says one time the christopher guest character is talking about challenging someone to a fight he says you know it's like that time when you take off your glove and you slap them like how dare you do that to me d'artagnan

i remember that scene but i didn't know that it ended with d'artagnan um oh wow okay good But I'm with you. Those are the only two.

Yeah, it doesn't come up a lot, but it does every year when Nicky supports our program. So thank you very much, Veronique. Thanks to all of our daily donors for keeping TBTL going all these years later. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. All right. Let's talk about this story out of Indiana. out of indiana but it's basically like a suburb of chicago right which is where this um raisin canes chicken finger uh what do you call it a chicken finger place is scheduled to open a store pretty soon this is in hobart indiana um this was sent to us by the way by listener michael who's our one of our official unpaid producers but who has a great eye for stories that are of interest to us now i don't know if you had a chance to actually read this piece or not andrew i did i

ended up sending it to you too because i wasn't sure if you saw it i thought it was a great piece

it's very interesting who knew the complicated world of like and no offense but completely and totally unremarkable and soulless food options at what i think of as fairly unremarkable and soulless kind of large mall type complexes or whatever you want to call it um this raisin canes they basically there's a place called the crossings of Hobart off of US 30 there in Hobart Indiana now every time I read the crossings of Hobart in this article what do you think I thought of I don't

it does sound like a short story or something but I don't know what do you oh are the three three billboards outside

no Ebbing Missouri no it's the shops I think it's the shops at the creek which is where the Dan Flashes is I think you should leave i think it's called the shops at the creek i didn't remember that and then they later have an ad for the shops at the creek pop up independent of the dan flashes anyway every time i read crossings of hobart i was like that's like the shops at the creek anyway uh yeah this uh this raisin canes they bought this uh or at least they they signed the the the lease to build this 3,000 square foot restaurant at the site of a former TGI Fridays, Andrew, and this was a multi-year lease, and it involved a lot of demolition and building and adding things to this space, et cetera, and it was only after they'd already put, they say, over a million dollars into this project that they learned that they don't have the rights to sell chicken and this location and i would like to mention raising canes in entire existence is about selling chicken i know this because they just interviewed the founder of raising canes on guy ross's show how i built this where he interviews you know business people that show is so interesting to me because i don't think of myself as a person who's particularly interested in business stories per se like i'm not entrepreneurial myself i just don't really I always find it fascinating like it'll be like this person who founded something

that maybe i've heard of maybe i haven't i don't start off being like i can't i need to know about raisin canes but then he's talking to the guy and it's like this is really interesting like he wanted to i think the first one was in louisiana and he really wanted to have this this this store this restaurant that the students would want to come to after games and whatever that would be like affordable and simple so they don't sell cheeseburgers they don't sell hot dogs They literally just sell chicken fingers. I've never been to a Raisin Cane, so I'm basing all of this off of how I built this. But I think it has a very, very simple menu. It's like the chicken fingers and probably a bunch of sauces, the French fries. I think they're crinkle cut fries and like sweet tea or something like I mean, it's a very, very simple thing. So when you find out that you can't sell boneless chicken, which, by the way, is mentioned in the piece, I guess the contract extends to the whether there's bones in the chicken or not. The rights to sell boneless chicken for the next 20 years in this location actually belongs to McDonald's because there's a McDonald's not in this exact area, but it's close enough that I guess they have the rights for the neighborhood to be the only people who are allowed to sell boneless chicken, meaning Raisin Cane's, which almost all they do is sell boneless chicken, can't sell their boneless chicken at this location.

You might, because I haven't read this in a few days now, so tell me if I'm wrong. I have a feeling you read this more recently than I did. But, like, you can't have that as, like, a neighborhood rule, like it's a law or something. So it's some sort of development deal, like it's in the same development or the developers own both properties, because that's the only way that could be written into there, right? And for me. Yes, absolutely. It also raises the question, it raises the cane question, when children went to DJI Fridays with their parents and ordered a very classic children's menu item, such as chicken fingers, were they rejected? Not that only children eat it, I just think when I was a kid, like, I would go to DJI Fridays or Applebee's and I would get the chicken finger basket.

Yeah, that's a good question. it sounds almost like this was one of those things that nobody was enforcing for a while like so one of the weird things is like i said i've actually andrew this is bizarre but i went to the website for hobart crossing and i looked at what the actual layout of all the stuff is and it's it's not like just a mall like northgate mall in seattle or something like it's when they say mall it sounds like you're saying a big square building with a bunch of stores in it this is more that kind of like strip mall thing where it's you can pull it and there's like um it's how do i explain it i don't know i guess they're called malls but i don't think of them as a mall like if you go to the place where there's like a harbor freight there's a tuesday morning there might be a

best buy okay like so not not like it like not like the grove in la which would be an upscale outdoor mall but just like kind of box stores and just like big development and a bunch of

giant ass parking lot yeah and then other smaller like ancillary parts of it because i mean it takes up it's indiana there's a lot of room and so it kind of goes on and on but one of the things that's confusing is there's not a mcdonald's right in this area like there's not a mcdonald's as part of this complex and then they list this mcdonald's that i was trying to look up on google maps to figure out how close it is if it's like a mile or whatever but somehow yeah that mcdonald i think i I don't know if it's the McDonald's Corporation or if it's specifically that McDonald's reserves the right to do this, but you're right. It's because it's all owned by the same company that they can do this. Meanwhile, what basically happened was the people that sold or leased this spot to the Raisin Cane's chicken people, like the people for the property management company or the people that own the property, they reached out to the McDonald's to negotiate some kind of deal with them on something for a Chipotle. so this is what they say in the piece the exclusivity issue came up earlier this year when the crossings of Hobart asked McDonald's for a waiver to let a Chipotle Mexican grill move in McDonald's declined and then also noted in its correspondence that a Raisin Cane's would also violate the terms of its lease demanding that no one else be allowed to sell chicken to go at the shopping center so I don't know if McDonald's was just being hella sinister and letting them just build this raising canes so they would burn off a million dollars and then at some point go like hey you know you can't sell chicken there or if they were no one was really like monitoring the situation it didn't come up until someone till they asked on behalf of chipotle and then they were like huh what is the rule on that and then they went back in and then they this 100 by the way supports my never ask for permission i was going to say that when you said that they went to because well it wasn't raisin cane that went to ask permission from mcdonald's right it was the but i it was the the creeks the shops at the creek but i did think of it i was going to make that exact comment this is why luke burbank does not ask for permission for things it just raises too

many other things because it also again i can't i couldn't quite get enough info from this piece about the nature of the mcdonald's thing if it's like if it's the specific mcdonald's restaurant that's down the street if they have that or if it's that mcdonald's has just somehow they just bought the rights in case they want to put a mcdonald's in later like and if it's mcdonald's corporate or if it's a franchisee like they're i'm a little confused as to what how involved mcdonald's is in this but it could have been a situation where they weren't even monitoring it Mm hmm. It's a random strip mall in, you know, Indiana where there is a McDonald's a mile away. But I mean, where is there not a McDonald's a mile away ever in American life? So it seems like you could have probably just thrown up a raisin canes and they wouldn't have really said anything. But then you wouldn't ask them for permission on this other thing. And then they were like, oh, and by the way, cease and desist with with the chicken finger situation as well. And it looks like they're not budging on it. and so now i mean i don't know why here's what i would do if i was mcdonald's and i know more about running a fast food restaurant than they do obviously i've done it successfully for years but like do you i mean i guess they must really see the raisin canes as an actual threat because i would think you know what tell them that just set a really really high bar like you should say yeah well you can buy us out of this contract it's going to cost you a hundred thousand dollars a year or something i don't know come up with a number and then make somebody pay it what's What's happening, though, is that they were McDonald's refuses to release the boneless chicken rights to anyone else, meaning now Raisin Cane is suing the the shops at the creek for lying to them about the idea that they could sell chicken at their place.

Which, I mean, I think that's a – if that information was literally withheld from them and it wasn't in any of the paperwork or any of the contracts that they saw, well, then I think they would have a – I mean, not that I'm a lawyer. I mean, but, like, it sort of seems like, yeah, it would be like if you and I, like, went into some – I mean, I don't even need an analogy. The analogy is the case example here. Like, you just – their one thing is selling these – I mean, specifically, it's not just breaded chicken. I think I used to think it was just raisin canes was all kinds of like breaded chicken and fried chicken. But no, it is specifically boneless breaded chicken. I've never been to one either, but people are kind of passionate about them. Am I wrong about that? Is this kind of a culty kind of chicken finger? A culty kind of chicken finger.

I think people get very excited about it, particularly if they've lived in a place that has them. And they really like it's kind of like anything like that. Like if you have it and you enjoy it and then you move somewhere and then they finally open one. It's like a sort of like an in and out opening somewhere or whatever. People are pretty jazzed. Yeah, I think Raisin Cane gets that. It sort of gets that sort of attention.

It's such a it's I wouldn't I mean, I shouldn't say I would never because, again, I don't understand this business of development of of these fast food deals. But like it seems like such a screw to say, OK, McDonald's gets the rights to sell this type of food without any kind of competition. and yeah and if that information was withheld from a from a company that sells nothing but that kind of food like that seems like a legitimate complaint to me it also just infuriating from like

kind of a consumer standpoint well i'm sure that mcdonald's just paid extra to have the rights or that's how it was pitched to them i mean this world of like commercial real estate is i'm sure super duper complicated and also like they've figured out every way to sort of maximize their Profits so one of them is probably like hey You want to build this mcdonald's here Or you want to have you want to someday build a mcdonald's here And for x number of Thousands more we'll also make sure that Nobody else competes with you on the chicken space Now the thing that's weird about that to me is I don't think of maybe because I just Even in my more meat eating days I didn't eat a lot Of mcnuggets but like I don't think of boneless Chicken as being mcdonald's main Thing yeah like if I was mcdonald's And they were like do you want us to do you want to have exclusivity on hamburgers or french fries i'd be like absolutely that's what we do uh the boneless chicken thing seems kind of like a sidelight for them but i guess you know i mean certainly they thought it was worth paying the extra money for to have that right and now they're i mean are they that afraid do they think that someone will be driving the raisin canes one actually kind of makes sense but the chipotle one makes less sense to me because i feel like if i am going if i'm in the mood to get mcdonald's on a given day were that a thing that i did more i'm not in the same mood as I am to go to a Chipotle. Those seem like totally different experiences.

experiences where so if i could go to the chipotle and get some chicken on my fajita and then i'm like and now i don't have to go get those mcnuggets i was gonna get that doesn't seem like how that would work the raisin canes may be more because you're driving around you're hungry they have french fries and uh soda pop and you get a you know big greasy paper bag of some kind of highly caloric deliciousness um but the chipotle one is weird to me because i don't think those like

seem like they're in competition for my taste buds no i agree but it just eliminates i guess by having this in the contract it just eliminates all kinds of competition and so it's just going to put i'm with you on both of those like the chicken like i'll get chicken nuggets at or what chicken mcnuggets at uh mcdonald's um from time to time that used to be my go-to order actually i think in college i'd get myself like a big 20 piecer of those but like i think they're actually somewhat better now but they're not particularly good you're just sometimes not in the mood for for a hamburger or what have you like i just don't think of them as like i don't know competing in that same space at all other than the fact that if you can just eliminate all competition by having these things written into the contract then you can eliminate it let me ask you one more question here that i don't know if you know the answer to this but do you what i don't know about franchising could fill a mcdonald's bathroom um actually could fill the whole mcdonald's but like do you think it's this particular like franchisee who's fighting this or could this be mcdonald's

corporate who cuts these that's the part i don't know and it's not really specified in the piece that i could find yeah because that's another thing does mcdonald's like have this going on in a lot of places this is the first i've ever even heard that this was something that they would do and you're right it can't be legally binding it can't be like hobart indiana or whatever i don't know if that cobart's a city but like i guess it is it's the sort of byline or the slug for the piece that no city could say that like no one has the right to sell something in a certain area so it would have to just be a business deal between the people who own the real estate and the people who potentially rent the real estate but yeah is this common practice is this like if i see a mcdonald's next to a kfc did mcdonald's lose that war like what's going on right yeah

in this town only mcdonald's sells boneless breaded chicken and there's no dancing

if i roll in the town i see john lichow standing in the corner i'll know that it's going to be one of those mcdonald's only breaded chicken stitches

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 rightily an email or female before can i just mention something just it will seem apropos of almost nothing but it just it flashed across my cell phone and reminded me something flashed across my cell phone which reminded me of this thing that was kind of interesting which is remember how we were talking on the friday show about larry david's ad that was kind of questioning uh ftx the crypto trading thing and then like i think by the time we were done the ftx had already like gone bankrupt and like the guy who founded it was like in the Bahamas hiding out like do you see any of that stuff over the week I didn't see that he was

hiding I know that he had sent out a message saying something like I won't be reachable for a while but yeah I mean that's just a mess and it's funny because well it's interesting because

it's like when you know when everything's working everything you do seems like just this like fascinating quirk to your purse so for instance the guy's named Sam Bankman Freed and he was Famous for never wearing anything Other than shorts and a t-shirt So they're like all these photos of him at these like big conferences He's being interviewed on stage by Bill Clinton And he's just in like the Rattiest shorts and a t-shirt And it's like when they think you're a wunderkind When they think you're the next big thing It's just like yeah man he doesn't need to wear Some suit to make money Like now it just looks like really You thought this kid was uh not Possibly not totally on the ball But this is the thing that I was thinking of I um i read the other day so you know the great writer michael lewis yeah lewis money ball money ball the blind side um lots and lots of things um he apparently has been writing a book about sam bankman freed for the last i don't know eight nine months he's been basically living with this dude and following this guy everywhere and like just right there as and i don't think now maybe he knew something we didn't i don't my guess would be that he didn't get into this because he thought this thing was going to collapse in a spectacular way but my god am i excited that this is happening like not that people are losing their money but that michael lewis has been there inside documenting it all it's going that's going to be a hell of a read and movie starring um jonah hill i'm sure and what is the um where is the ft

ftx feel what is the i'm looking this up now ftx arena oh that's the miami heat arena so ftx what's

going to happen to that it looks like they're looking i believe they're already taking it off i saw a picture on like twitter or tiktok so i don't know i could have been doctored but this person was saying that they were already taking the ftx off the roof this person lived in a condo that looked out over the top of the roof now it could maybe i'm maybe i'm getting taken by a hoax on the internet but it looked like they were dismantling the ftx like as of this weekend

how can i say what i want to say here if we have listeners who lost a lot of money in bitcoin or cryptocurrency or whatever if this is affects you like honestly like i i don't want people to be miserable or whatever but there's part of me that like maybe there's part of me that was always too lazy and dumb to truly understand what the hell cryptocurrency is and why you know why it's better to have something that is unregulated and all this stuff and i've just sort of always hated it and i've hated the talk around it and so the kind of implosion of it kind of does bring me a bit of pleasure maybe it's kind of like oh my god like i never studied for the quiz but then they didn't give us the quiz at school anyway or something like if the future really was apt analogy the future really was like if our future economy really was based on this thing that just seems like so such bullshit to me and also so complicated that I don't understand it it's just like it's a relief to know that it was bullshit and that I don't have

to understand it I am I feel exactly the same way and it is also because of my inability to understand it or make money off of it that adds to that like massive relief because I mean I would think about this kind of stuff not a lot not intrusively I'm not like the guy who you know basically traded uh you know 200 million dollars of bitcoin for a pizza or whatever but just the idea that there was this thing out there and that a bunch of people became ludicrously wealthy on it for what could have been an achievable sum of money as an initial investment for me in other words it wasn't like if you'd put a million dollars into exxon in the 1990s you'd have 20 million now it's like yeah well i didn't have a million dollars in the 1990s this would be more Like, if you'd put $10,000 into Ethereum or whatever, like, you would have $800 million. It's like, what? How is this possible? So I also am on some level relieved to feel less like I missed out on something. But that's really largely just because I'm – to this day, I can't really understand it. And I have read about it fairly extensively, and I just don't – I don't really get it.

And also, like, I just want to look at who the ambassadors were, too. Like, how was, you know, OK, like when Paris Hilton is going on Jimmy Fallon and they're sharing their their funky monkeys, you're like, well, this cannot be the future of our economy.

Like, it just can't be right. Well, that's the thing. I would say this is also sounds real Monday morning quarterback of me because now we've, you know, things have been going not great over there. And so it's easy to sort of say, well, yeah, it always seemed a little bit unreliable. But it seemed, yeah, it seemed like the, what am I trying to say here? Just, yeah, certainly the fact that you've got Paris Hilton and Jimmy Fallon and whoever else as the like ambassadors of these things didn't give it a lot of kind of like, I don't know, believability for me. The fact that it was so I could never quite understand it or why it was The future of everything but all these people Much smarter than me were saying it's the future Of everything so I just sort of believe them And they were all getting rich too So I was like this has to be something I'm not Understanding but now it feels like Oh maybe you guys just all diluted yourself Into you know A bubble of sorts That has sort of burst although you know It's burst before and it came back so I don't know I mean there's a lot of people that have a lot of their money tied up in this now, so I don't certainly think it's going away, but it makes me feel less bad about my inability to crack the code on how it all works.

Yeah, me too. Hey, by the way, you mentioning Ethereum did remind me that I did profit once off of the cryptocurrency craze, and it was with our show title Ethicum, Ethigo, which remains one of my favorites. I wanted to mention something that is much more valuable in our community, which is the tbtl holiday card exchange can you believe it is time to start swapping holiday cards once again and of course it's our friend meli who arranges this every year thank you meli for doing it and meli sent us this note it says the tbtl card senders season is upon us i will keep this short one if you participated in this last year just check your email for instructions on what to do this year. First-time participants, send your address, your mailing address, where you'd like to get a... card to tbtlcards at gmail.com and put new in the subject line. So again, that's tbtlcards at gmail.com, put new in the subject line, and you will start to participate in the holiday card exchange. And if you want any more details and parameters, Melly talking parameters, that's a big word uh of the program please go to melizond.com slash tbtl cards that's m-e-l-a-z-o-n-d dot com slash tbtl cards use the password tbtl to get in all right that's a lot of information if anybody needs to see it again you can probably check it out on the slack channel or the facebook page or you can email uh tbtl cards at gmail.com for more information and this is a really fun

thing if you're sort of new to the show or if you just haven't done it before this the um the sort of elevation and happiness reported by the people who take part in the card program and the pen pal stuff and anything like this is extremely extremely high so if you're looking to get a warm fuzzy feeling uh and create a warm fuzzy feeling for someone else this is the way to do it yeah i mean

the type of thing that i always think about when i think about how special tbtl is and i'm not trying to get go into some sort of a pitch right now but um it's just like this is something special that meli has been organizing for i mean years and years now and it's it's uh just a way for the people who listen to the show just to connect with each other around the holidays and also some people like to kind of flex their crafting muscles a little bit and have a lot of fun with it other people uh just the any card that you would just want to send to brighten somebody's day and maybe to get some cards in the mail to brighten your day uh it's honestly the the type of tbtl thing that just makes me feel absolutely the best about what we do or more importantly what the listeners are doing so thanks again for setting this up meli yeah thanks mel i'm

mel's not far from here she's down in staten oh that's right yeah it almost i i was in brooklyn heights um the other night and i didn't realize this i lived here but i'm terrible with geography and I was just walking down this street and I realized, oh, wow, I'm standing on the East River and I'm looking at the Statue of Liberty and I'm looking out at Southern Manhattan. I was like, this is amazing. This is very beautiful. Did you say Liberty, Biberty? I did. I said, line.

I love that commercial.

I do too. All right. Anything else that you had for today or can we...

Let's wrap it up there and we'll share some more. I actually have a very fun email that I will share with you tomorrow about, well, it's about a secret bathroom key. Just leave it at that. Oh, I like it. Yeah.

Okay. We'll talk about that tomorrow. Also, we'll talk about the guy who got an earbud stuck in his ear for five years and just had it pulled out. And I'm just telling you, it's such a satisfying story. I almost want to get an earbud stuck in my ear. I almost do. So we'll get into that tomorrow as well. plus whatever else occurs between now and tomorrow's broadcast. In the meantime have a great Monday. Take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

You're a chicken. Cuckoo-ca-cha! Cuckoo-ca-cha! What are you doing? That's what I was just telling him

Has anyone in this family ever even seen a chicken?

Power out