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And T-Dog's playing with the yo-yo-yo.

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seem like a real real down-to-earth dude. Implicitly you could absolutely implicitly trust me. I'm gonna bring 110 percent to the table on a daily basis so one thing I would do

is like this. Okay that's great. I love you oh my god with your cheekbones and your guitar played and it's all very very attractive and very very talented. Sweetie have a good show what you do is

so important well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a tuesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live my name is luke burbank i am your host i'm an activist and house party enthusiast coming to you this morning from the future home of tbtl at the still very much under construction river house studio perched above the mighty Columbia River. I am in a just absolutely what's the word for it? Disaster of a construction project where if I just stare out this one window I'm looking at the Columbia River and it's very beautiful and soothing but if I stare in any other direction I just become sad because I see all of the work that needs to be done here at the Riverhouse studio. It was literally a major disaster. But that is not going to have a negative impact, I promise you. On episode 3865 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Where we've arrived as a group. We've also arrived at the point in history where the M&M's, the characters that were revamped recently and were decried by some as being too woke.

It is political correctness run amok.

Now, those M&M's are being sidelined for Maya Rudolph to be the new spokesperson for the candy. Have they canceled the woke M&Ms, or is it just a publicity ploy from the Mars Corporation? We'll look into that. And even as we record this, there are hearings going on on Capitol Hill, people talking about Live Nation slash Ticketmaster.

Because I've got a golden ticket.

And what are alleged to be the monopolistic practices of that ticket company. This has really brought together people of all shapes, stripes, and appreciations, whether you love Bruce Springsteen or Taylor Swift. Actually, it's not a hugely wide range now that I think about it. Basically, fans of very popular musical acts who could not get tickets to their shows or had to pay $5,000 for a ticket are banding together to say no more Live Nation slash Ticketmaster. So we'll try to talk about that, time permitting. Also, we'll say hello to this young man, the longest-running co-bro of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. This shiny guy always worries. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Hey, Luke, you just said something that reminded me I had a thought this weekend. I had one thought this weekend, and I almost let it go. But thank goodness I remembered. What I'm about to say is not about anybody except for me. This isn't me trying to diss anybody's musical taste or their artistic talent. This is about me being out of step with pop culture, I believe. But I had a realization today, or maybe this weekend, maybe more of a kind of a clarification of something that I've always known. And this happened during a conversation with Genevieve as we were flipping through the radio in a Bruce Springsteen. song came on i realized i've never invited bruce springsteen music into my life i have no need for bruce springsteen music i guess you would say i don't like it you make it sound like ringstein

bruce springsteen's music is like renfield you have to invite bruce springsteen's music across the threshold of your door otherwise it cannot enter your house slash life you know what i'm

saying though like i don't harbor any bad feelings about him i don't think his you know he sounds like he's a really good man people really enjoy his music i mean but just for a guy who's cranked out so many just super huge pop songs over the years you'd think there'd be one bruce springsteen song that i would say oh i like this song but there are zero like if it comes on the radio i don't stop i certainly don't turn it up i keep going i don't have i don't have and then again And I don't want to say I don't like him because it sounds like I actively don't like him, but I just don't like him. I just don't like the music. There's nothing in it for me. Not one Bruce Springsteen song comes to mind that I would like want to put on a mixtape.

You're saying you don't dislike him. Yeah, I don't have bad feelings. Not liking and disliking are two different things.

Yeah, exactly. Like, and this isn't like, I don't know. We were talking about Nickelback. Was that yesterday? It feels like 100 years ago. But, like, you know, there are people who went a little overboard with the dislike of it, and, you know, sometimes if you don't like something, you can tie it into broader cultural trends, or Kanye West is somebody who is complicated because some people like his music, but he's a toxic person, and blah, blah, blah. None of that, other than, like, I do think it's, and maybe it's not surprising, maybe this is a terrible way to start the show, but, like, there's just never, and I had a friend, like, somebody who was about a generation older than me, somebody I worked with in my 20s, And he, you know, would make mixtapes and he'd put these long, dramatic songs by Bruce Springsteen on them, which, you know, were maybe things that I was hearing for the first time. They weren't the radio hits. And even then I was like, I can sort of see why you appreciate this. But it's kind of like Frank Zappa, too. Like Zappa, totally revered, not in a pop sense, not in a pop star sense, but totally revered. Like, I just don't have I just don't think I like that music. And I guess that's OK.

I think well it's not okay First of all I think I have a theory On how and why this happened to you Because Andrew it almost happened to me This is a real Ben Affleck Sliding doors type situation

I was going to say I didn't like Bruce Springsteen And all my neighbors laughed

I like you Did not Grow up Well there's a difference between me liking you And me disliking you, Andrew

I was really wishing this sentence just ended there Damn it

I'm about to explain the nuance No, similar to you I did not grow up in like Asbury Park, New Jersey Or the greater tri-state area Which I have identified to be the hot zip For an obsessive love of Bruce Springsteen That goes beyond fandom in my experience Like it is the folks I know That really love Bruce Springsteen who are from that area really love Bruce Springsteen. Now you and I were growing up in the 80s as like born in the USA was like this anthemic thing but you're in Ohio I'm out in Washington it's just kind of like oh yeah there's that song born in the USA the guy Bruce Springsteen sings. It wasn't like an obsession for people like you and I I think at that time like that is to say the career of Bruce Springsteen also the Bruce Springsteen songs that have gotten big like have had national radio play are in my uh argument probably not even his best songs but i had no strong feelings about bruce springsteen one way or the other much like you except a when i got to college and i took what was pretty much the only college class that meant anything to me which was history of american pop music music 162 and uh we talked pretty extensively about um uh which let me hold on let me remember this oh born to run the bruce springsteen song born to run and why that was kind of culturally culturally significant at the time and what the what it was doing that was interesting etc and then later i started listening to a lot of a singer named mary lou lord and mary lou lord just does a lot of covers and mary lou lord does a cover of the bruce springsteen song Thunder Road the word road has to be in or run or that those are obligated to be in every Bruce Springsteen song so she does a cover of the song Thunder Road which is I just think an absolutely beautiful song I love the Mary Lou Lord version and then I started listening to the Bruce Springsteen version and then I started listening to more

Thank you.

Bruce Springsteen stuff that was again not obscure at all but that was just a little bit to the side of born in the USA things that were a little more stripped down I quoted I think literally yesterday when I was talking about the White Lotus 2 I quoted the song tougher than the rest by Bruce Springsteen which is also I just think lyrically an amazingly beautiful song and so had I not like gotten into that Mary Lou Lord cover of Thunder Road and then started kind of investigating more Bruce Springsteen I think I would feel exactly the way you do Andrew

there are I'm trying to think there are some covers didn't I think he did like because the night or I don't know the name of that song but you know because and I think Chrissy not Chrissy Hine Patti Smith I think did that and then 10,000 Maniacs did that I think I actually got there i got to that song via 10 000 maniacs by the way as did i i might i was gonna say i might be that one person um but i also don't like that song particularly i like this song i like the song in natalie merchant's hands i like the patty smith version i also just think that like the more i think about it too like and i'm not i'm not i wasn't trying to fit this into a pattern of my listening but like i don't i guess with tom waits being the exception i'm not a big fan of the gravelly voice you know like the um what was i mean it's funny because i couldn't be more the

opposite yeah specific to the question of tom waits and bruce springsteen oh right yeah sure

like i like i do like i like tom waits um but and he did some weird jazzy stuff i like the most but um like i always use this as an example the song that was from um the three musketeers i want to say where you had brian adams rod stewart and the other one of um robin hood

prince of scenes starring one kevin costner and what is the song too it's like the three gravel

voice guys i'm just kind of like yeah that's not my sound was it now wait was it the everything i

do i do it yes exactly it was that all of them was that a trio or are they just all on that soundtrack or have they all done a version of that song wait am i right that it's um no wait

No, no, no, that's Brian Adams. That's Brian Adams.

Yes, Brian Adams definitely does everything I do. Yeah, no, I'm thinking of a different song. I do it for you. And then he also says, what the hell was that on Friar Tuck's head? He does say that, and he was talking about a colander.

He was wearing a very normal, seemingly normal hat. I think it's driving me crazy what All for Love is the song that is very similar. It's called All for Love, and Sting rounds that out. Sting is another person. I've never heard a Sting song that I've actively enjoyed.

There's, let's see, I kind of have a bit of a soft spot for the Sting song Fields of Gold, which is, you know, I think if I were listening to it in an uncharitable moment, I could say, this is a little, I don't know, maybe a little hokey for me or something. Somehow when it came out I don't know what emotional state I was in I was like yeah I kind of like dig this song There's another There's like a couple of Sting songs that I really like But mostly I would say It's not music that particularly Energizes me

Yeah and I do wonder now that I think about this I wonder if it's a gravelly voice thing But yeah anyway that was

All This Time By Sting All This Time that song slapped

That's another one that you like That one I don't think I know Is that one that got radio play Or is that one that you just sort of know from

It got radio play Was the way that I heard about it That song all this time reminds me of Another song that I really like Called In a Big Country By the band Big Country I want to say off the album Big Country

Yeah yeah yeah we've mentioned that before You like that song right Didn't you and Jen bond over that

I don't know I know that I think Carrie is a big fan Of that song But that was an era where we had a few bands that were going with, they were really owning the branding on there. That was also a little after the song Living in a Box was released by the band Living in a Box off of the album Living in a Box.

And for me, my first encounter with that was in high school with the first Black Sabbath song off the first Black Sabbath record. It's called Black Sabbath, and that sort of blew my mind too.

I had a thought about Black Sabbath the other day as I was driving down the road, and Andrew, I cannot tell you why this entered my head, But I just thought, what an asshole move to bite the head off of a bat.

Do you think he really did that? I thought that was apocryphal. Was it? I hope it was. I always thought it was. I thought that was just like one of those stories that kids of my generation told each other, like in the lunchroom.

You know, I certainly didn't see it for myself. So maybe it was just a rumor. I mean, I wasn't at like a.

black sabbath show at the kingdom in 1984 or something but if that really happened i am i'm i'm disappointed in ozzy osbourne i sure hope it was a fate because they're just what did that i

mean why do you gotta do that to a bat dude i could be wrong about this and this might not turn you around i i want to make it very clear here i am not ozzy osbourne's pr person if so i would have a much nicer studio um i am not in the business of reclaiming his reputation however I think I saw a story and I don't I still don't know. And I'm trying to Google on the fly here and it's not going to make for good radio. So I'll just let it go. But I'll tell you what my memory is. I feel like a couple of years ago, maybe just before the pandemic or something, I thought that Ozzy Osbourne, who is now more of an animal rights activist, actually did something. And again, I don't know if he was addressing the rumor or the actuality of doing it, but out of some sort of either guilty conscious or what have you, he decided to do something very good for bats, like donated a great amount of money to a bat sanctuary or something along the lines of that. So I don't know if that mitigates it for you, that as we age, our maybe attitudes do change.

That's fair. And that does mitigate it a little bit. By the way, I'm on rollingstone.com, and it says Ozzy Osbourne bit the head of a live bat off 40 years ago today. He'll never live down the infamous moment, even though the whole thing was a complete accident. He accidentally bit the head off of a bat.

Oh, it wasn't a toy. He says he thought it was a toy. I think it's coming back to me now. Is that what it says?

I'm sort of scrolling the article. During the time, let's see here. Osborne had been on the road for well over a year When he arrived in Des Moines For the infamous show During that time he developed a ritual Where he'd pummel the audience with raw meat And they'd chuck back Whatever insane things They could sneak into the venue I always liked Excuse me Always liked old movies That used to have those custard pie fights That's my Bill Clinton impression You've just been sitting on that? Osborne explained in the documentary The Nine Lives of Ozzy Osborne. He gave me this idea. Sharon! He gave me this idea to throw instead of pie bits of meat and animal parts into the audience. I'll stop with that now. I thought it was hilarious. I think it's pretty good. They would throw back sheep testicles, live snakes, dead rats, all kinds of things. Someone once threw a live frog onto the stage. It was the biggest frog I'd ever seen, and it landed on its back. That night in Des Moines, someone threw a live bat. I thought it was a rubber bat. I picked it up, put it in my mouth, and crunched down and bit into it, being the clown that I am. As blood filled his mouth, sorry, this is a little graphic for people. As blood filled his mouth and people in the crowd looked on with horror, he realized he'd made a horrible mistake. Bats are the biggest carriers of rabies in the world, he said, and I had to go to the hospital afterwards, and they started giving me rabies shots. I had one in each rear and I had to have that every night, but they had to shoot rabies medicine into both of his butt cheeks every night for the rest of his life for the rest to stay alive. Ozzy Osbourne needs a rabies shot. You can do that, Andrew, when you're in your bombed out husk of a home, you can just yell yeah scream nobody none of your neighbors are gonna get mad um but uh that so that's the story there i believe that this happened i really do but i do wonder a little bit um how if you throw

a live bat doesn't it just fly that's a good point i don't know like the more we talk about this the more i am sort of feeling sad about about everything but i mean yeah maybe it was in some sort of stunned you know stunned capacity which is like that is a bummer yeah yeah i mean i again

i don't think he's lying or the story is made up because i i think a bunch of people saw it happened and also yeah he seems to vividly remember having to get rabies shots so uh i get the question to me also raised is like i guess he was just in a flow state but biting the head off a rubber bat wouldn't be that funny to me like i don't understand what the bit was supposed

Ozzy, what was the bit supposed to be? So-called bit. Let's workshop this. Let's see if we can punch it up a little bit. That's all I'm saying. Yeah, no, that is, now that you retell that story from RollingStone.com, which I just learned you must have a subscription to because I couldn't get into that article I was trying to follow along.

I haven't reached my monthly limit at RollingStone.com. How did I?

How in the world did I?

Because you're always on there trying to find out about the new Audio Slave album.

Cutting out pictures of Kurt Cobain. That was my biggest relationship with Rolling Stone as a young person. would be like...

buy the magazine, then cut out all the pictures of your favorite bands and put them on your wall. I don't know if you did that move. It was pretty unique as a teenager.

I would not have been allowed to do that move unless the bands were, like the singers were like Michael W. Smith or Second Chapter of Acts. Yeah, that's what I got.

Or Amy Grant before she did Baby Baby. No, the real, yes, exactly. Not the fresh Amy Grant, for goodness sake.

Gosh, no, Baby, are you kidding me? I'm taken with the notion to love you with the sweetest of devotion. I love that song so much.

I crushed so hard on Amy Grant and that song and that video.

Oddly enough, now that I've, I think we've talked about this video in the last eight months, and I went back and watched it, and I will tell you, Amy Grant is extremely fetching in that video. But because I knew Amy Grant growing up in a very Christian household from her time doing such songs as El Shaddai, El Shaddai, Adana, something I own, age to age, you're still the same by the power of the name. I just knew her to be doing really religious music. And it somehow sort of it made it so that I didn't have a crush on her. So when the baby baby thing rolled out What I'm trying to say is I did not see Amy Grant as a sexual figure in my life Sure, like seeing your priest in a thong Well, exactly

We knew we were going to get there today

Uh-huh Sorry if I'm a little distracted There is a There was somebody grading the road outside of the house Like a big I don't know what you'd call it Like sort of had a big scoop on the front of it You know, like you could plow Like a snow plow kind of thing And I wasn't sure exactly what they were doing And I was nervous because There is The guy who lived here before The guy who owned this house before me I think was like a Some kind of commercial mariner And by that I don't mean Played for our beloved baseball team But like worked out on the river or something And so he has this He had this big giant anchor Like I think it was at some point Like a real actual anchor Like in the 1900s that you would throw off of some kind of huge you know commercial vessel but now he just has it i say he like he's still here but the guy had it like installed in the ground outside of the dry or you know as you're driving down the driveway to the house and i honestly when i got this place i thought i'm gonna get rid of that that's kind of dumb but it's been here so long that i'm it's kind of growing on me yeah and it's got that and you kind of have a connection you know like you're enthralled by some aspects of the river house studios right yeah it's grown on me i thought it was kitschy at first but now i'm kind of i'm into it the problem is it's right so this place that i'm in is at the very very very dead end of a street and uh when the garbage truck comes down or the folks from amazon or anybody else who's out here they often will sort of pull into this kind of area that is my driveway and then turn around and apparently the garbage i got a call a few months ago from a number i didn't identify and it said actually you know what it was it was my neighbor tanya who said i'm standing next to one of the garbage truck guys they hit your anchor

and they need to talk to you oh no did they hurt the anchor i assume that an anchor takes no damage

uh from a garbage truck it could i mean this thing isn't like you know it's pretty burly but it's You know, it it could still be knocked over by a garbage truck. And I guess what had happened was they had accidentally backed into it. They had knocked it kind of over or off center or whatever. And they didn't know how to get a hold of me. So they asked my neighbor, who also didn't know how to get a hold of me. But she called Becca's sister-in-law, who did have my number, because Becca's sister-in-law had been and brother had been staying here for a while when they were buying a new house and met the neighbor and they knew the neighbor. And so, anyway, through this elaborate game of telephone, I found out that my beloved anchor had been knocked over. Now, they were very professional about it. And then, like, a different guy called me later and was like, I'm the supervisor on this. And I had the sense that he deals with some version of this a lot. Like, our garbage truck hit your fill-in-the-blank. Sure. How would you like us to make this right? I wanted a year of free garbage service. He said, how about we come out and we just, you know, fix the anchor? And I was like, that's actually fine. that's cool and so they sort of did but now i've noticed that it's it's a little bit it's poured like the basically there's a there's like a concrete you know a big square of concrete that's buried in the ground that the anchor is attached to now because it's heavy it needs some stability and i think they just kind of sort of put it back in but they didn't really fix it and now it's a little it feels a little precarious and i was worried that that whatever that vehicle was was going to bash into it. That's what you were watching just now.

That's what I was being distracted by. And I thought they were leaving. And I kept hearing the backing up noise. And I was just like, please don't hit my anchor. We just got that thing working again.

Yeah, you're like, now suddenly you're just like, that's my favorite anchor. Totally.

It went from being like, well, that's going to like, if anything happens to this anchor, I will literally die.

I would die for that anchor. You know, you hit on something there that is another kind of buried thought that I often have. And I mean, with the success of my Bruce Springsteen talk earlier, I'm excited to see how this one plays out. But I find myself from time to time turning around in a driveway. And I think people turn around in this driveway all the time. And I'll bet you the homeowners hate it. It's always a driveway that is in some sort of a weird traffic pattern. Right. Like maybe. And I'm just making up an example here. But I think there's one kind of near my old place where it's like you can't take a left for a while because the road is artificially divided with some sort of curb because they're trying to actually, you know, make a traffic pattern and they don't want people turning in a certain place. So then you always take a left on a certain street and then turn around in a driveway and like get around it in that manner. I don't know if that made sense, but people just know there are certain driveways where if you're located at a certain place where the traffic flow doesn't quite work out for most people, people are probably turning around in your driveway all the time. And I assume it annoys the homeowners, but maybe that's just because I'm a petty little creep.

I had that exact thought the other day. And again, I can't remember the exact circumstances, but it's like you said, what it usually is, is one of the first houses after a turn that if you miss it means you're basically screwed. Right, exactly. So you're driving and you're just like, oh, wait, I can't I don't want to go three more miles in this direction. So then you start looking for a place where you can turn in and kind of turn around. and i did that the other day somewhere and i had the exact thought andrew is like this must happen constantly to these folks and so in that case what i try to do is just like get in and get out as quickly as i can because i know that i'm just i'm just another annoying person who is you know pulling into their driveway so that i can avoid going four miles out of my way and i apologize but i don't feel bad enough to not do this no yeah and you know important thing you know where there's a great example of that thunder road oh my gosh you ain't a beauty but hey you're all right

did i is that how i assume that that is that is how that's on the entirety of the song

you're driving down thunder road see that's the thing we don't need to belabor this but that's the thing that's so interesting to me is that you enjoy the gravelly tones of tom waits but not the somewhat gravelly tones of Bruce Springsteen because again this sounds like I'm trying to be rude about Tom Waits and I don't mean to be but this has actually happened to me recently a couple times because as I've been out here working on this house sometimes I just put on some kind of music I put on some sort of Pandora type of thing or whatever make a radio station on Spotify out of a particular song and let's say it's like a Bob Dylan song from a certain era or It's just something that's from an era Where it will deliver me a Tom Waits song Unexpectedly And I have had this experience a couple of times Where I'm just listening, listening, I'm working And then I'm listening to something and I'm like What the hell is this? And two times it's been Tom Waits So there's something sonically Other than the song Beautiful When You Sleep And also Downtown Train Other than that I think the Tom Waits stuff hits my ear Much the way the Bruce Springsteen stuff hits your ear Even though they kind of have some similarity

musically also tom waits went through a lot of um various sort of stages and so i sort of and maybe springsteen did as well but um i think that the the stuff that got me with tom waits was that early stuff that was much it was much more like kind of like again almost like poetry and jazz and i'm not saying that people should like it but it was it was different and you know another part of the the bruce springsteen experience is that like kind of big rock and roll band sound with like with the brassy section right Clarence Carter on the sax and that and I've never liked I mean I might and I might not be able to stand by this statement with all examples but like generally speaking I remember just being like if I'm listening to rock music for lack of a better term like the mix the mixing of like saxophone and rock and roll has never like hit my ear in a good way it's almost like the gravelly voice of of instruments sort of and then usually mixing like kind of brass and big guitar and any kind of really big sound like that and i don't mean like loud sound like nirvana was loud right but they were like a three-piece for most of their for most of their life a weird comparison there but you know like just like really big bomb

bastic rock and roll with brass sound also that that music isn't really my fate that's not what i go for it either whereas some of that early tom wait stuff again as ridiculous as it is when you when you put it on a jukebox in los angeles and you think you're gonna be a jukebox hero but instead you're a jukebox zero which happened to me i'm not saying it's for everybody but it appeals to me more it's more interesting it was more it was weird the first time i heard it was like unlike anything i had ever heard before you know right well that's what i'm saying i'm with you on

that like the the songs like born in the usa and rosalita or whatever the big numbers where there's like a eleventy thousand east street band members running around and patty skialpha is like singing with her back to bruce springsteen's back and it's like he's got a sweat band on his forehead that whole vibe is like that's my least favorite expression of his music but if that's mostly what you associate with him i actually totally understand not so much vibing with that because I don't that's not musically super interesting to me I'll bet you I'll bet

you like if he did like a classic MTV unplugged which I don't think he ever did but like you know so it's just like the MTV unplugs while I like the format even that started to get kind of bigger and bigger kind of by the end I feel like but when the unplugged was really really stripped down and it really was just like an acoustic guitar and maybe a drum with some brushes or something like that like I read that you really we're kind of taught where we literally talked about this yesterday or the day before when we were like producing for public radio shows which of course you're still doing and hosting but like hearing some band stripped down their music to just a guitar for your program like dead did the band dead did for you on live wire this week like that is such a cool sound like i'll bet you that's how you get that's how you get the bruce springsteen into my

veins well you know the the uh he did an interview on the howard stern show recently which has been actually do you have hbo like i don't know if this is how you necessarily want to spend an evening of your life but it's uh it was a really good interview and he plays he's got some guitars and a piano and he's just kind of talking about his music and then he'll like jump on the piano and as he's describing something he was trying to achieve with a song he'll just start playing it it's howard stern and him on hbo well it was recorded for the howard stern show but then it was like rebroadcast or licensed to hbo and um and and so it played uh there and it's been getting a fair amount well see i i listen to the stern show every day so in that universe it was a huge deal that they got springsteen and that he was there for like two hours and and of course because every pretty much everybody that works on that show is from the tri-state area originally not everyone but like it's very much that that's a hot zip for people who love bruce springsteen right like a bunch of white guys of a certain age um so they were they were geeking out on it but then also it was a really compelling interview and it kind of did have that like storytellers sort of vibe like where he's talking about a song and and what his motivation or inspiration was and then he'll just start playing it and it's very stripped down and and um i don't know if you're some night if you're like playing darts and you're super bored throw hbo on that fancy smart tv of years and uh and maybe give that a whirl and see if that in any again not that you have so many things that you could be doing with your life i'm not saying you becoming a bruce springsteen fan needs to be at the top of that list yeah but i did think it was a good interview yeah it's probably

not by the way the interview was um was somewhat recently and and it was turned around for hbo pretty recently this isn't like from the the back catalogs of stern no this was very recent and it

It was, again, it was news in the Howard Stern world because Howard actually went into the studio in New York City for the first time since the pandemic started. Oh, interesting. He's never been back to the studio. He's just worked from one of his, you know, beautiful homes somewhere. God, I feel like he and I are really having a different experience in terms of broadcasting from home.

What do you mean? You have multiple homes. He has multiple homes. Like, that seems all right.

There are multiple piles of rubble at this home that need to be moved around.

I know that you've said this a million times before. I think you've – maybe not a million times. I think you've mentioned this before. But, I mean, that drop of Howard Stern saying you want to do a radio show from a basement somewhere, it doesn't work like that or whatever. I petered out at the end. There's no money in that. There's no money in that. It just gets more ironic with every passing day as that man has not been into a studio. I mean, let's face it. Like, if he's got – if Howard Stern has a home studio, it's not like mine. Like, you know what I mean? And I know it's a real, real studio in his home, but it is it is somewhat ironic.

Yeah, he literally like he. So as far as I know, he's got at. Well, he's got many beautiful homes, but he's got, of course, a big place in New York City. But then he's got this like insane mansion out on Long Island where he was pretty much been for most of the pandemic. And he's been broadcasting from a basement there again, a fully tricked out. Yeah. you know like a nicer radio studio than you and i have probably ever worked in maybe and then uh he's also got a palatial estate in florida where i think he is right now it's so weird i have such a parasocial relationship with him the way that some of our listeners have with us where uh he was complaining about the air conditioning being too cold in this in his studio uh the other day like he was saying it's freezing in here and then robin quivers uh his of course longtime collaborator I think they call her the longest running co-cis of the show She said You left the cold Only now to be in the cold And I read that to mean oh he's in Florida now Like this is how I track his movements

You can track him right

They're like a very casual statement I'm like well that wouldn't make sense on Long Island Because it's still bitterly cold Okay they're probably in Florida And who cares it makes no difference But that's the level of like I said Sort of And I've mentioned this recently on the program but it's like I really enjoy that show he's also wildly under-informed on what podcasting is or who's doing it and not doing it and who's making a living at it like he doesn't understand what it is because he's just come up through the like morning radio system and so it's much like when I'm you know talking about a band that doesn't really do it for me but our listeners like love that band or a tv show or what have you i'm always just like i'm so like oh man i really like this guy i really like this show i wish he understood podcast more about podcasting because he's he's really off yeah with all of it but you know it is what it is all right let's uh take a quick break here about halfway into the program that's not the worst for no not at all could be could have been sooner but still uh we will take a break and then we will be back with more tbtl hello and welcome to top story our top story today the uh rebranded m&m mascots i guess that's what we settled on for what we were calling those like animated m&ms yeah uh they uh spokes candy spokes candy also could be used m&ms has announced or the mars corporation has announced that they are going to sideline the revamped spokescandies in favor of going with an ad campaign that will debut at the Super Bowl starring Maya Rudolph. They say that Maya Rudolph is basically a spokesperson that everyone can agree is great, which I don't know. You know, Ben Shapiro is probably like, hold my beer. I could probably find a way to disagree with Maya Rudolph. like this is the statement from uh the mars corporation america this was a tweet i believe in other social media places america let's talk in the last year we've made some changes to our beloved spokes candies we weren't sure if anyone would even notice and we definitely didn't think it would break the internet i'd like to mention that if the internet was broken we would know it I think, you know, break the internet. I'm good with us retiring that term.

So cringy, and especially coming out of, I mean, I just have so much distaste for everything involved here.

Well, this statement, I mean, can you imagine how parsed by how many overpaid people this statement was? i mean this must have gone through so many levels of of of writing and revision and addition and subtraction and you know they wanted to throw in break the internet because they're trying to basically say look we uh people were mad about this candy about this candy wearing more comfortable shoes but also we didn't break the internet so it was kind of good what we did like it's weird They're trying to do a bunch with this statement, but we didn't expect it would break the Internet. But now we get it. Even a candy's shoes can be polarizing, which was the last thing Eminem's wanted since we're all about bringing people together. Therefore, we've decided to take an indefinite pause from the spokes candies in their place. We are proud to introduce a spokesperson America can agree on the beloved Maya Rudolph. We are confident Ms. Rudolph will champion the power of fun to create a world where everyone feels they belong. What if Maya Rudolph was like, no, I refuse to champion a world where everyone can get along.

Thank you for this money, but I have some negative things to say about this candy.

So this is kind of making the rounds today because the right, the Tucker Carlson's of the world decided before they were worried about Joe.

joe brandon coming for your um gas stove uh and before they were worried or somewhere in between trans bathrooms and joe brandon coming for your stove one of their obsessions was woke m&m spokes candies so the question is is this the mars corporation bowing to the tucker carlsons of the world or is this just like a way to get sort of some free attention leading up to their super

Oh, it's it's definitely the latter. If you'll recall, like for everything that makes me angry about this story, going back to when the so-called kerfuffle happened. I don't know if anybody's actually calling it a kerfuffle, but the quote unquote kerfuffle, meaning that, like, I don't even think this was real in any way. back when Tucker Carlson was complaining about the change in footwear and the female M&Ms being less sexy or whatever, like, I said on the show I read this today and I almost wanted to go back in the archives and pull the tape but then I realized that I'm lazy, but and also that just wouldn't be good programming, but I remember saying to you, Luke, that like you don't need to issue a press release about changing a cartoon's footwear like if anything if you wanted to like kind of casually like if you're really looking at your kind of branding strategy and you're like you know what we have sort of oversexed the the female characters in our little cartoons i'm going to keep calling them cartoons um you know it would be nice you know we could probably let's try something else you know like you could just run a commercial where instead of wearing high heels the green m&m is wearing sneakers you could even find an excuse i don't think you need to do this but you could set uh you could set one of the commercials in a basketball court or something and then suddenly like nobody even notices that the shoes have changed then you just stick with the new shoes m&ms never cared about this they never cared about inclusion what they wanted to do was release a press release saying hey you know we're making this because we really care about progressive values and then knowing that the right would run with it and then everybody would be talking about M&M's and now and my guess is they knew they were going to get to this point if everything worked well maybe that sounds conspiratorial but like this is all it's such corporate bullshit I really encourage everybody if if all of this talk including our talk of M&M's makes you want to go buy some M&M's please buy some Reese's Pieces I heard the Hershey company has never done anything wrong I was in line at the post office yesterday for a very long time and two old acquaintances ran into each other one of them was very passive aggressive towards the other about not hearing back after sending a christmas note by the way on facebook

there were two like kind of older gentlemen start here sorry i'm in the middle of a rant here

this is delicious but then and then the other guy in the the one guy says um oh yeah hey i you know i sent you and your wife a note on facebook around the holidays i never heard anything back and the guy's like well yeah uh i'll ask ginny about that i think her name was ginny i can't remember and and then and then the other guy's like well how are you and then the guy who didn't respond to the facebook note is like well i'm clear of cancer now i'm like you're giving this guy grief about not responding and it was clear that he knew he had cancer because he's like well how are you doing he said it in this way that he wanted an update and this all comes back to the Hershey company because the guy behind me who was now apparently cancer free but says there's still a 15% chance that it could rear its head again said that some medication he was on was made by the Hershey company and in a great Seattle line of all times he said it was tough because we've been boycotting the Hershey company and I really wanted to interject and say what is it about Hershey that you're boycotting I what are we mad about let me know but like it was just like In a very, very short conversation between these two gentlemen, I felt like I gleaned a hell of a lot of information. Anyway, I don't know what Hershey did wrong, but they make Reese's Pieces or Reese's Pieces, as I prefer to call them. And I would recommend you guys just eating those for now because this M&M's bullshit is bullshit.

You think and I don't think I disagree, but you think that M&M's or I should say the Mars Corporation actively wanted to be part of the culture war?

Yes, absolutely. By releasing that press release the first time around and calling all this attention to, look, we've made this change in footwear. And then also they introduced like a purple M&M that was supposed to represent inclusion in some way that I don't fully understand. And I think that they were fishing for controversy because, again, you could make the you don't have to issue a press release with every small change in a long running commercial campaign. I mean, literally a TV commercial campaign. Right. Like you can make little changes around the edges. I know that earned media is a big deal, too. So you want.

that you want if if you're unveiling it even if you're like i don't know some i think john ham used to do commercials for some sort of tax software right i can't remember what it was but i understand if you're a company tax slayer yeah if you remember those ads no i don't i thought

you were making that up no there was i i want to say it might have even been a super bowl ad well i think there was like the tax slayer.com bowl for a while in college football and then they were spending a bunch of money on ads and i think they had really bizarre ads anyway that's not

anyway i'll wrap it up because i realize my rants aren't aren't super interesting but yeah i think john ham was doing commercials for h&r block a while back and so like i understand if you are unveiling a new campaign like you want to release press releases around it like it's not just like hey here's a new commercial and you want as much people talking about it as possible but i do believe that what m&ms was doing a year or two ago was very much fishing for controversy trying to get everybody to like talk about this and like especially probably i don't know just talk radio and any other kind of kind of quasi-conservative circles i think they hit the gold mine with tucker carlson being an asshole and uh and i just think that like now it's perfect and i also would say i think i wrote it down when you were talking before they said an indefinite pause on these characters like these characters are coming back like they're in fact I'll I'm not sure there's one chance that there's like in the Super Bowl this year like you'll see Maya like addressing it in some way or showing them to the door or something like that and then they'll be back and by the way all of this is to say I hate these characters I hope they never come back like I this should be good news to me I think this is one of the most irritating campaigns of all time And I love Maya Rudolph, and I want her on my TV more, and I want her to get paid. So in practical matters, I'm glad of all this stuff. I just think the Mars company is trolling us like crazy here.

I'm not saying that you are wrong, but let me float a sort of counter theory, which is that back when Mars was saying publicly that they were going to try to, you know, desexualize or, you know, sort of change up some of the things that they were going to do. the uh gender tropes around particularly the i guess female m&ms i don't know yeah because you're

talking about you're talking about cartoon food right it's weird right that's what i mean that's

when it gets complicated yeah but like here's my thought i do think that m and i do think mars wanted a lot of earned media and i i'm wondering if there's a universe in which they thought they were going to get the earned media for being inclusive maybe like they thought they thought like oh we're going to get some brownie points because we're we're being more inclusive and they didn't realize that the right was going to get as mad about it as it was because the one downside of the tucker carlson type folks mobilizing their people is fewer conservatives eating m&ms which would be sort of a bad deal for them like i'm wondering if if they didn't like and i'm with you also they want to get as much extra attention as they can whether they meant to get in the culture war or not they're monetizing as much of it as they can because you're absolutely right they don't need to announce no one literally no one cares what's going on with these cartoon candies if you would have just thrown maya rudolph into a super bowl commercial for m&ms everyone would be like we love maya rudolph cool like if those progressive ads that we like with um what's his name dr bob or something dr rick yeah dr rick if at some point progressive will decide that those ads have run their course and that they're no longer effective and they will shift to a different campaign and they will not release a press release saying we're retiring dr rick that's not because the progressive company is somehow um better morally than mars but it's just most of the time unless they think they can get some free publicity on a podcast like this being done from a basement somewhere i tell you there's no money in that unless the company thinks they can get some free attention they never release press releases about we're gonna start you know we're gonna start doing these new commercials and we're gonna kind of sunset this other thing we were doing so you're absolutely right like these announcements that that mars is making are completely designed to get us to do exactly what we're doing right now so yeah and

mate us and as the article mentions you know it's kind of like super bowl commercial season the most annoying time of the year i feel like like every commercial has a million press releases and an entire kind of campaign like you know this isn't um completely unlike a few years back where um the the peanut i guess mr peanut is that the brand of peanuts we're gonna kill their mr peanut character but then and there there was supposed to be this whole like there's this lead up to it where we saw them drive off. a cliff then there was going to be this big one minute long funeral for mr peanut but then in real life kobe bryant died and suddenly having a long funeral during the super bowl seemed weird so they sort of half-assed it and cut the commercial in half in a way that it makes absolutely no sense it was one of the weirdest commercials um and it's just kind of like i don't know what the status of mr peanut is but i assume that he's still on the labels and also i hadn't

I've seen a lot of Mr. Peanut stuff. He's still on the jar.

It is dapper as fuck. Like, I'm sorry for the language. I love that mascot. But, like, they didn't really kill him. And also, like, oh, you don't see Mr. Peanut as much in commercials anymore? When's the last time you saw Mr. Peanut in a commercial before that Super Bowl ad? They're just amplifying and making up. I mean, again, that is their job. They are marketers. And this is, you know, three-dimensional chess or whatever. Like, that is what they're paid to do. They should do it. But let's, like, not get all – let's not give them any seriousness that they don't deserve.

The question about the Mr. Peanut stuff to me, and really all of this, all of this is, is it – I mean, it's an assumption that if people are hearing about your product or talking about your product, it somehow drives sales. That's the only reason any of these places do this. is it the thing that we're going to kill mr peanut so now there's more conversation around mr peanut i would love to see the data on how many more jars of mr peanut that moved yet i would too

because i gotta say i'm really susceptible to that like right now i'm not in the mood for eating peanuts but even on this show like we were talking about pizza boxes the other day right and how like domino's domino's is not the top of the line pizza company but even us just talking about pizza and pizza boxes made me want to go out and eat a pizza right away um and there are some foods where it's kind of like okay you're talking about the mascots but it's planting that idea like i'm sure if there was something going on with dave thomas right now like i think of dave thomas i immediately have a sort of pavlovian response to biting into a wendy's burger something i haven't done in a really long time and so i don't know maybe i'm especially susceptible to that but i i do think just having it in the conversation constantly does it drives some cravings I believe I just saw something that

popped up in my either Instagram or TikTok feed but it was an ad for not an ad it was like a it was like a maybe a news story about something called a super bar at Wendy's do you have any I don't I don't think this made its way to Washington State and I'm guessing that this is not going to pay off but um could you just permit me to click on this yeah it's also by the way it's something it it's something that very much would benefit from the visuals like because it's so squarely set in 1988 but the idea was uh that wendy's was deciding to roll out a bunch of like basically all you can eat tacos and things like that because they thought that was a market

that they could kind of um we all know wendy's for its hamburgers soon wendy's will have answers to more than just where's the beef. In the mood for fettuccine Alfredo or rotini with meat sauce? Maybe some Spanish rice, refried beans and tortillas. Fact is, Wendy's The Hamburger Place has begun an expansion to woo lovers of Italian and Mexican foods. They're calling it Wendy's Super Bar. The Dade County prototype began serving several weeks ago in West Kendall on Kendall Drive and 138th Avenue. It's all you can eat. It's available seven days a week and is priced at an incredibly low $3.69. For kids 12 and under, it's only $2.99, and that includes a drink and a prize. The Superbar in West Kendall may be Dade County's first, but the idea is going statewide. In fact, Wendy's predicts the expansion will be complete within seven months and will substantially increase its business.

Now, a couple things. One, please do watch this, because the video is just amazing. We've been talking about this a lot lately, where there's something that just feels like normal life, like the way people dress the way they do their hair the way they talk i bet you the person doing that voiceover is 33 years old they sound like they're you know from another they sound like they're 130 to me but i bet you they were 33 that was how you talked on news stories then there's all these little things fonts that are used for the super bar etc that you don't notice how vintage they are until you look at them 10 years later you go oh my god wow that was a thing We were all doing and it's so it's Visually very satisfying from a nostalgia Standpoint but

You mean there's the sort of 80s style Chirons where it's kind of like the lettering With the kind of the black shadow behind it Is that what you're talking about or what they're writing

On the screen I mean what the actual Signs in the Wendy's are Oh I see I got your bar just oh sure The decor really what it is is The decor of this Wendy's In Dade County Florida Circa 1988 1888.

just gives me a massive huff of nostalgia.

Yes, which is, that's a good reminder that I have not been to that Arby's. You're always, you're defending Edmonds, right? Because I said it was an, technically, is it an Edmonds that Arby's? It's technically Edmonds. You are correct, sir. You are correct, sir. But like, that should not be my touch point for Edmonds. Oh yeah, you mean the home of the last Arby's? But that Arby's up there, I always mention this, I can't remember if you said you've been any time recently, but it feels like the 90s came and stayed like it's purple. It's like purple booths or booths. How do you say booths? Do I say booths funny? Booths. Booths. Booths. If I say booths, is that right or is that like me saying electricians? I think you said it just fine.

I wonder, I wonder if like if for a place like the last Arby's, I'm trying to make some kind of last man on earth versus combined with last man standing combined with last Arby's. It just didn't come together for me there. I apologize. I wonder if the financial model is such that there's no upside for Arby's remodeling a physical Arby's in the greater Seattle area because like, is that going to move more roast beef? like because of the reason i ask is because we live in a doordash world now and so much stuff is is just ordered to have it delivered to your house or i don't know i just feel like the business the business of so many different things now the business model doesn't work exactly the way it used to work like it used to be that you want to keep your arby's nice because you got people that are coming in on their lunch break to have some arby's but everyone works from home now i know not everyone but i just feel like so many elements of life that were a given are no longer a given and it's like i wonder if the arby's corporate math is why would we fix this place up why would we try to modernize it that's not going to move enough additional people through

this arby's to recoup the cost yeah i mean if it's clean and functional and it's if the kitchen can stay up to date on whatever the latest offerings from the fast food restaurant is I guess there isn't a huge upside in it unless you're doing something like you know and obviously there's a huge gap between McDonald's money and Arby's money oh man if you can make that McDonald's money but um you know like McDonald's went through the whole McCafe revolution I remember there was one what's the I always ask you this what's the airport in Burbank California that's

not bob is that bob hope or john way that's bob hope and the one in orange county is john way okay

i need to just remember that but anyway so on the occasion that i'd be picking up genevieve or somebody from bob hope airport there's not really it's a very small regional airport and so there's not a good place to stay but i think that was maybe the first mick cafe i went into that was like a whole rebranded mcdonald's you know that was supposed to be it was probably them trying to compete a little bit with the starbucks vibe i don't know if you remember those and that was like the default waiting room for picking up people from the airport was the mick cafe i don't know why i'm on this jag but you know i can see a company like kind of going through a big rebranding like that actually to go back to this wendy's thing i think i sort of remember that well i don't know if i remember the super bar exactly but i remember wendy's carving out around this time like really carving out a name for them amongst the other fast food restaurants as being the place that had the really bomb salad bar and that the salad bar also contained things salad bar contains things that are not salad you know i don't know if they were actually tacos and pizza at that point but i remember like that worked in the circles my family traveled in because like wendy's would be the place to go so that people could take advantage of that huge

salad bar that you did not have at mcdonald's i will tell you this too that super bar the food coming out of it in this news story looked absolutely disgusting and i would honestly just fight someone to go to that super bar and eat that food right again the power of suggestion right like you know looking at it you know exactly how bad it's gonna be but you want it but my god there's a lot of it it's the weirdest exactly like well uh i was at a sizzler in colorado some months ago it just so happened that i was on a tv shoot and then i had like two hours to kill before my flight but i had left the where we were filming and i was just like looking for somewhere to eat and i ended up at a sizzler which has an amazingly robust salad bar of this exact kind it's every kind of salad fix and you could want but then it's got like a taco situation and uh uh you know sort of quote-unquote asian food situation got everything you could imagine that can exist under a heat lamp and then everything that can be put in a giant bed of ice because all of the salad bar fixings are in these containers that are in an ice thing and all of the hot stuff is under a hot lamp and it was so good they just kept bringing me texas toast i was which is just i think in this case anyway garlic bread effectively but i was in hog heaven i was like i'm glad i don't live close to a sizzler

because i could really do some damage here well we've done it i am hungry i know i'm not going to a sizzler even talking about arby's in this case didn't work for me i don't think i'm in the mood for an arby's but my god i'm in the mood for something you know it was tbtl where we talked about that really great piece this is i think well it's definitely pre-pandemic because the pandemic really affected any kind of buffet situation but remember that article that really broke down like the healthiness or the lack of healthiness around buffets and i'm talking about them like like i remember like they were talking about even the cantaloupe you don't eat the cantaloupe in a buffet because it's like the rind on the outside was probably sitting in dirt at some point and could potentially be giving E. coli to something else. I feel like some show I worked on, we went deep on these things, and there was an article, not unlike the article in The New Yorker that talked about the potential for an earthquake in this part of the country. Oh, yeah, the Katherine Schultz piece. And how it really changed everybody's sort of outlook on the future. Like, I'm not worried about that, but I am worried about buffets after reading this piece that went into such detail about like keeping the food at certain temperatures and just like basically it this was not written by somebody who hates them it was written by somebody who loves buffets but then had to start digging on this and then get pretty

grossed out by it i am not surprised to hear that or to have heard it and forgotten it and to be rehearing it because it's i mean let's be honest remember when you and i were in missouri and i think we ended up at like springfield missouri's leading seafood buffet or something oh we walked

in and out though right we didn't did we eat there i don't know if we ate there didn't we

eat somewhere else down the street that was also another buffet but not like people in missouri love those those kind of buffet situations and no we ate in um we ended up going to a steakhouse

that was some sort of a there might have even been an all-you-can-eat component of it but there we walked into a buffet that was right by the hotel and we just like we totally grandpa simpson that we walked in and walked out and then we got in the car like well let's just drive somewhere remember and then we drove anyway i just remember these weird specifics about where we went it was like a weirdly formal place actually yes do you remember this now i do remember it yes i do

remember it now it was yeah the because again it's i think it was the pandemic right no had The pandemic started? I don't think so, no. I don't think people are letting us in their cars. Yeah, yeah. Although, I don't know. In Missouri, I think people take a fairly laissez-faire approach to the whole situation. Yeah. Yeah, like just to walk into a Golden Corral or an old country buffet and you look around and you just think, yeah, I'm going to just check. I'm going to check my skepticism at the door for this whole situation because if I go in and I'm really analyzing the food quality as in just like is this the juiciest crab leg i could have gotten or um how long have these scalloped potatoes been sitting out at room temperature like that way lies madness you have to just go like i am i'm you know what i'm i'm skydiving without a parachute here i'm just going into this and i'm just going to fully immerse myself in this experience

and i'm going to ask no follow-up questions the real last sort of chain buffet experience that i had I feel like was especially sad I was not living up here in the Northgate area at the time but you know this is where the mall used to be and that's still kind of a big you know kind of chain commercial hub sort of um here in North Seattle and I was living in Seattle and I just and maybe you and I had just had a conversation about buffets I don't know what it was but I was just really in this nostalgic mood for like what you just said like a kind of an old country buffet type of thing and I was looking at my phone I couldn't find anything and the only thing that came close was a buffet up in Northgate that is not here anymore but it was something like Blue Ocean or something along those lines and they had some well I guess they had surf and turf Luke but it was like definitely more seafood oriented and even sushi oriented and I remember being like well I'll just eat like the chicken wings and because I'm not huge on i i love sushi i love the occasional sushi night out um oh my god in fact genevieve and i had some amazing sushi in hawaii at some place that was like in a in like almost a warehouse district it was astounding mitch's i recommend it if you're in the honolulu area anyway um but anyway i like fish especially if it's fresh but i'm not drawn to it and i'm also really I'll see you next week.

quick to like swerve on it like if i think there's anything icky about the fish i'm just like no like i'll eat a i'll eat an old piece of salami before i'll eat a a piece of fish that maybe has been out a second too long and so i walked into this buffet and it was lunchtime i'm by myself on a weekday i get a huge booth because you're not supposed to go to these places by yourself and it's like it was just me sitting there with like five imaginary friends who should have been surrounding me And I remember just kind of going through the buffet and picking some things out and just being like, this is not bringing me whatever nostalgic happiness I thought it would. This was probably like six or seven years ago. And I have not been to a buffet since.

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

All right. We didn't really talk about the Live Nation Ticketmaster thing. But I guess what all I really wanted to say on it, Andrew, was this is actually risen to the level of something that they're at least addressing in hearings at Congress. Because remember when this was all happening, we were both saying, yeah, this is annoying. But of all the things, of all the challenges facing this country is overpriced Taylor Swift tickets. Is that is that actually the most sort of the biggest threat to our way of life? And I guess, you know, at least for Amy Klobuchar of Minnesota, who's kind of, I think, one of the people running this, it is So they are having hearings about it

Yeah, no, I'm glad of that, too And honestly, like, it kind of took the Taylor Swift nation getting screwed over to sort of I don't think without Taylor, I know that Bruce Springsteen played a big role in this as well And the only thing I'll add here is I was telling you off air that I had a really bad experience right before the holidays Trying to get postal service tickets It's Postal Service and Death Cab were kind of touring together, Ben Gibbard's two projects. And it's like, you know, for my generation of people who like the music that I like, this was a huge thing. And I had it on my calendar. I'm like, oh, OK, the tickets go on sale at this time. You logged in. It was broken. Couldn't handle everybody trying to log in. And then two hours later, it's like all that's left is resale tickets still on our site. But now it's five times what it was before. And it was going to cost like I want to get Genevieve these tickets for for the holidays for Christmas. And it was like going to cost us close to five hundred dollars for two people to go see these bands that we like. And it's like you can't have a system where you're selling it to yourself so that you can resell it for more money on the same platform. Like it is just so ridiculously broken. So, I mean, I hope something comes of this. I mean, Ticketmaster, people have tried to hold them accountable before. We'll see what happens.

Yeah. Sick the Department of Justice on them. yeah um because they can put them under a consent decree i mean they can do a lot of stuff that actually would they can they can hold them more accountable than they've they've been held i mean it it does on the one hand it seems like whatever it's a concert who cares but on the other hand it's like you know it's a big deal to the people who it's a big deal to and it's just a monopoly that shouldn't be allowed to continue monopolizing the market because as we've uh mentioned when this has come up previously part of the issue is ticketmaster slash live nation will actively i mean that the potential is there for them to withhold like um so if you're a venue and you want to have someone come through and they're not selling their tickets through live nation by the way do you think this is selling more live nation tickets as we're talking

about i'm so hungry for some live nation tickets right there but like you know basically like if

you're if you're a venue and you want to not use live nation for the tickets when someone's coming through on tour who's not using them live nation then can punish you by not letting you have whoever the big hot artists that they're promoting they just they have so much control over the industry that they can basically set the terms they want and then there are these fees where it's like something like 25 or 30 percent of the ticket cost is fees which have no discernible explanation like it's computerized why is there an extra i'm paying four hundred dollars for this ticket and a hundred of it is fees but what are the fees and they don't have to tell you it's a

bad situation absolutely i want to um let's let's talk about food a little bit more here um going back to our old conversation while the email music is playing um i've gotten several notes from several people uh letting me know that it is happening and it is a bad thing it is the fact that my favorite sandwich place here in the lake city area is officially moving to bothell i I think we knew this. I'm talking about Tubbs. For a day or for a lifetime? Unfortunately, for a lifetime. Tubbs Gourmet Subs. Again, it's just in this unremarkable little strip mall in Lake City. Has these big sandwiches that I love and I've talked about on the show quite a bit. And I know that there are hardcore.

Tubbs fans aside from myself well call them tub thumpers tub thumpers we had heard that they were opening a place in Bothell and then a listener told me actually they're not just opening a new place in Bothell they're moving to Bothell and I was like no that can't be right this is going back a ways and then I asked one of the young people who work there and they said yeah but we don't know exactly when we're gonna move but yeah we're moving and now this has been going around on the internet and people have been emailing it to me the tubs in lake city has uh put a sign on their door that says uh this tubs gourmet subs is uh moving to bothell we want to thank everybody for years of patronage um here's our new address blah blah hope to see you there it's unclear to me whether this was posted i think three days ago to their window so it's unclear whether it's they've totally locked the doors or if it's a matter of days or what and here's what i want to say about this and i'm not proud of this but i am resentful like i won't go to their new location and i'm not by the way i'm i'm being a total asshole here it doesn't make sense but i was just exploring my feelings about this as it comes in and i gotta say my knee-jerk reaction as well good luck in bothell like i'm just like i won't i won't i'm not going you know i could i can get to bothell i have ways luke i have ways of getting to bothell but like no i'm not gonna support that i liked you better when you were in seattle and it's such a shitty thing like they're a company that has a product that i love and that's probably run by you know i don't know if it's a family but you know it's not some some gross national corporate chain or whatever i'm sure they're good people but i'm just kind of like no i'm not following you to boffle sorry shouldn't have left

me i feel spurred they're doing the equivalent of making you take your shoes off when you come over to their house yeah exactly you're like really you're gonna make this hard on me okay fine i'll go somewhere i'm not doing it now are there any are there any um sort of uh uh you know other candidates for your for your heart when it comes to your your lunchtime sandwich eating

that's interesting that you should mention my heart because that is exactly where most of the tub sandwiches lodge themselves um i uh you know it's funny you know i'm not a huge i tell me if you think i'm wrong about this in all of our years of having mundane conversations But, like, I'm not somebody who's huge into sandwich culture, really. There was just something about these Tubbs sandwiches that I really like. And, you know, for me, like, I'll grab a quick Subway sandwich or something, and I have my weird little make-your-own sandwich that I always get. But I don't, like, I don't usually talk about it and, like, kind of really say, well, I love this sandwich place and that. Like, Tubbs just came into my life, you know? And so I don't think I'm seeking a replacement right now. I think maybe I'm just in the morning phase, too. Sure. Well, I'll be here for you as you work through the different stages of sandwich grief. I appreciate it. Also heard from a couple of people. This is just a short little note that makes a lot of sense that I wish I'd thought of when you were mentioning this. You had said that recently you accidentally Venmoed the wrong person. You were trying to Venmo somebody who was like renting an Airbnb space to you. And you accidentally sent it to somebody with the same exact name. And I was kind of surprised that there wasn't more of a sort of a guardrail against that. But you said that in order to get your money back, you did not try to approach the person you sent it to. You just, you know, went to Venmo, the company itself, told them about your mistake. And it sounds like did you already get your money back? I'm sure that that was a pretty quick process. I assume so. I should.

Yeah, I think I did.

You should double check that. You know, and I said, oh, yeah, I'm glad. I think I said I'm glad you went to the company. That's what I would do. But maybe I was a little surprised that you didn't reach out to the person directly. But heard from a couple of people, including our friend Kayla in Stockton, who said, yeah, don't ever do that, because that's like that's how a lot of scams work. You know, people are like, hey, I accidentally sent you this money. And even if it's a real thing, like you should probably never deal with a complete stranger on the other end of ones and zeros who says I accidentally sent you money. Like if you ever get money or need money back, like that is why Venmo is there. They will take care of it for you.

i saw a news clip the other day where um somebody had venmoed somebody from their contacts but who they had met like one time you know how you know you'd think your contacts well these are people i've entered into my contacts i probably know them but at this point in all of our lives we've got you know tens or twenties of contacts that are a person we randomly bumped into one time or some work thing and a lot of times these systems now whether it's instagram or tiktok or venmo are constantly trying to like integrate our contacts with whatever they're doing because again i think that they probably have research that shows that leads to more overall hashtag engagement with the app and so this woman had i by the way i never let anything use my contacts i'm like i I will contact you if I want you to use my contacts like. Don't don't be up in my contact business, you know, like whatever shoe like place I bought some shoes from on Instagram, clear weather specifically in this case. So anyway, this woman had allowed that with Venmo had gone into her contacts. And so she had accidentally Venmo'd a rent check like she literally was trying to send it to her landlord. And because, you know, it auto filled the wrong name from her contacts, it just went to the wrong person. And now that person who was she knew enough that they were in her contacts, but not enough that they were actually regularly in contact, was totally not sending the money back. And Venmo was saying, well, we can't help you because we're not technically responsible if you send the money to the wrong person. What? And the bank was saying it's, you know, because it draws on your bank account. The bank was saying we are not responsible for Venmo transactions. This poor woman was caught like with totally no help.

I am really surprised about that because like I understand like a banker or somebody saying like, hey, I just had two hundred dollars that I walked out of this bank with. But then I handed it to the wrong person on the street or whatever. I can understand any kind of financial institution not taking full responsibility with what you do with your money, but you would think that Venmo would be in a situation where it's so important to them to know that there are safeguards against people sending the wrong – because it could happen very easily, especially as I get older and I realize that the technology gets a little bit – technology moves fast and as we get older, maybe we're not as accustomed to it or what have you. it's easy to send money to the wrong people potentially you would think that venmo would want to do everything be like oh yep i'm going to take care of this for you um so that you just have trust in that organization because they're handling your money well they did in my case but

we were talking about all of 100 and i got to them i my i'm wondering if this and this is why i did this by the way i wanted to start the process of clawing my money back asap and also before the person who got the money realized they'd gotten it because like I don't think I have push notifications from Venmo so if I if two thousand dollars dumped into my Venmo out of the blue I wouldn't really know it until I went to my Venmo and I was thinking so my strategy was let me get the money before this the wrong Jocelyn Choi is any the wiser and not that the wrong Jocelyn Choi would have any nefarious intentions I wonder if this if this woman would have reached out to Venmo immediately because I think what she tried to do was get the person who was her contact yeah hey i sent you this money on accident by the way what a just unbelievable a-hole move is it that you're accidentally in someone's phone well not accidentally but you're like distantly in someone's phone and they accidentally venmo you some money and you are just like can't help you

yes i'm trying to think like because you said they didn't know each other that well it's just a contact in the phone like after everything i just said about being careful about sending money back i mean i i feel like if i was in the position of this person who erroneously received the money i still might want venmo in there to mitigate it just to make sure that i'm not being had in some way but i would certainly obviously i wouldn't just be like oh free payday it's terrible i guess

you're right i hadn't thought about it from that perspective i guess there's a small small chance that the well no there's not i was gonna say there's a small small chance that the person who accidentally got the money was thinking well this is a scam but after this woman has then reached out to venmo after she's gone to the local news and then i'm seeing it on my like instagram page or something at that point you'd think that the the person who received the money accidentally would have been alerted through various channels that it is not a scam you know

can you remind me what the amount was or the ballpark it was it was this woman's rent and i

want to say it was in the like couple of thousands of dollars yeah so i mean that made me feel fortunate about my little uh my snafu and that it was resolved as uh as simply as it was nice all right we should probably wrap things up because andrew it's very cold here and i turned the heat off because i didn't want it to be too loud and this is the one room that has heat and uh i have had it turned off for the whole show and now my feet are going pretty numb yeah let's let's get

you some are you you're not heading yeah you're gonna head right out of there right and head back

to portland where you have heat i am i in fact my plan was to do the show from portland this morning but my um i was meeting my friend toby out here who was very kindly made me this amazing like live wood dining room table top because he has all this lumber on his property and he had it milled you know you ever see those like real cool kind of slightly unfinished but still very cool uh big Tables that are made out of a big slab of wood I think I can picture it So he had one of these

and he brought it by, but then we got to talking and walking around the project and me sobbing quietly in the fetal position. And by the time that was all done, it was time for you and I to dial up, so I just stayed here. But I will be returning to the heat and indoor plumbing of Portland, Oregon, right after this, which is where I will be joining you from tomorrow. So we will see everyone then. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all.

The most rewarding part was when he gave me my money. Power out.