Muse

I'm watching Seinfeld and I'm like, he does great of those. How can I do those if I'm going to be a comedian or a writer? I don't even know how to write. Or a storyteller. I don't even know how to do stories that funny. Only the Snow White one. Seinfeld, he does really good jokes and I can't do that much jokes because nobody laughs at me. And I need someone to tweet me. We need to copy him. So you need to print it off so I can do each word at a time. And I need to memorize that so I can do each word at a time. He does great of those. How can I do those if I'm going to be a comedian or a writer? I don't even know how to write.

TBTL.

I love these guys. They make funny with their mouths. Well, I'll tell you one thing, I'm not eating the Taco John's. That's spicy stuff.

I think the awkward silence are the best bits. And especially those kind of related to the obvious sexual tension between Luke and Andrew. And I think that's a really important thing that you need to keep in the show.

If there's a better use for the internet, I haven't found it.

Well, all right. Hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Thursday edition of TBTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live.

That's a tuna, bro!

My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Oh, la, la! Coming to you from the Hollywood Broadcast Center right here in Portland, Oregon, where it's an absolutely beautiful Thursday. Oh, ma, pa, it's just beautiful. Well, it's very warm in some parts of the country. Hope you're doing all right. It's pretty warm here in Portland. And I am definitely overdressed because Andrew and I just got off of a Zoom meeting with all of our colleagues, soon to be former colleagues from American public media. And I wanted to, you know, fool them into thinking that my life is going OK enough that I like wear a collared shirt at 9 a.m. on a Thursday morning. Like that's just a normal thing for me. But now I still have it on, and it's a little toasty in here, but I think we're going to be okay. We're going to be able to bring you episode 3977 in a collector's series.

Let the fun begin.

The other day on the show, Andrew received a mysterious text from somebody showing him a bottle of, like, very expensive-looking wine. Sweetberry wine! And it was obviously a wrong number text, and we were wondering what's going on with that. So he reached back out to the person who had accidentally texted him. And we've got some updates on what's going on with that. Also, Bed Bath & Beyond. That's why I think they call those places Bed Bath & Beyond. The IP and the branding of Bed Bath & Beyond have been purchased for $21.5 million. Somebody thinks there's $21.5 million of value in the Bed Bath & Beyond brand. I know that's a lot of B's, dude. We'll talk about that. Also, other sort of, I guess, business news. National Geographic has laid off its remaining previous staff writers. You're fired. There are no staff writers anymore at National Geographic magazine. They say that it's not going to impact at all them publishing their magazine. So we'll look at what's going on with that. Oh, and it's a Thursday, a.k.a. Blur's Day. we'll do the blurs day messages it's been the it's been quiet in blurs day town but not this week there's apparently a ton of blurs days to celebrate with all of you uh we'll do all that with the help of this young man he's a handsome young stranger a soulful rocker from new hampshire he's back at it again with the white vans he's baby stepping he's doing the work he's the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships i'm like seriously

excited i'm kind of shy but mostly excited he's andrew welsh and he's joining me right now good

morning my friend how does one navigate a text conversation that you're having with an with an old friend who's just kind of randomly touching base with you catching up saying hey how are you and then just as they're telling you that they were recently in a car accident that messed up their neck pretty badly luke starts to introduce you on the show and you need to tell them oh my gosh i hope you're okay but also i'm recording a podcast right now so i'm not going to respond to anything else you say about your condition or health i would do that i would just say it

exactly that way yeah that's what i did also did they send you a picture of a bottle of wine

they did not may not be the old friend you think in fact no way that is the old friend checking in And I've made fast friends with the person. Let me set this back up for you. I mean, you did a bang-up job of doing it, Luke. Thank you. But I just want to get my own oars in the water, if you will, as my old boss used to say, even though he denies he ever used to say that, and it drives me bananas. But I was on the show with you just, I think, two days ago when I got a text message from A random number that just had a photo of a bottle of wine, like a large, very expensive bottle of wine, being held in what appeared to be a woman's hand. I was not able to include the bracelet that was also on the hand in the show pic, and so some people were confused why they thought it was a man's tiny hand. I don't know why I'm focusing on that, but I'm pretty sure this was a woman's hand holding this expensive bottle of wine. and it just randomly came into my personal text message machine. And I had gotten something like this once before on the show, if you'll recall. Somebody had texted me, not a photo, but just sort of a kind of a random thing from like the east side Seattle area code or the east side of Seattle area code. And I said, hey, I think you have the wrong number. And they wrote back, oops, sorry, and that was it. Well, when this person sent the photo of a bottle of wine, I realized, like, I guess this could be some sort of a phishing scam, some Internet person trying to lure me into a conversation. Like, they'll say, oops, wrong number, but you seem like a really cool person. Can you send me some money, something like that? I was like, it could be a scam, but I trust myself enough that if I respond to this person.

You trusted yourself, as you said, for a second response. Yeah. A follow-up response. You knew you were playing with fire, but you were going to put that fire out before it turned into an inferno.

Yeah, so if this person comes back with another message and they try to engage me anymore, oh, now I'm getting photos of the car that was wrecked in this other text thing. It was a rough accident, and here I am not being there for my friend because I'm talking to you.

Or being here for the show, so it's good. Neither party wins.

I think I'm here for the show. I'm not taking any of that this week. um i uh but anyway so i got this so i got this text message of an expensive bottle of wine being held by somebody off camera and i uh wanted to respond somewhat cheekily so i'm looking for the actual message here but i think i wrote back i think you have the wrong i think you have the wrong number but dang it i sure hope not i was trying to say something kind of like you know like hey it looks like you're having fun but i also didn't want to be like you know creeping on anybody or say anything that's i like kind of gross we'll we'll learn more about what's the

likely nature of this messages uh coming up in a moment but i like that let's just say it is somebody who's looking to scam you you still don't want to be a creep no i don't like i like the idea that like somebody is is trying to some bot somebody somewhere some bad actor sent this thing out with maybe the ultimate intention of of somehow separating you from your money but in the meantime you don't want to seem like a creeper even to them well you're speaking now with the

knowledge that i believe this was a scam but in the moment we kind of assumed it probably wasn't a scam my calculation at the time was this is probably a legitimately wrong number there is a chance it's a scam but it's probably a legitimately wrong number and i also was just curious what would happen scammer or not if i responded how quickly would they respond and what would that be like and so i have what i wrote back here is i think you have the wrong number comma but dang comma i hope not um and uh it still seems sort of weird actually the more i think about it but i think i

sent it while i was talking i think if you would have said damn it would sound like you're hitting on them but by saying dang it sounds like you're like i'll trade you some moonshine for that for that expensive champagne what if i'd run down in the holler dang i'm down in the holler what if i've written dang girl well see that's the thing if you wrote damn girl that's one thing but if

you're a dang girl yeah that's a different thing yeah anyway um i was surprised that they did not respond scammer or no i got no response during that show and i think we talked for like another hour after i responded um but then after the show i i was grabbing the photo so i could use it as a show pic which you can see on the new tbtl.net page um and i was like i should just google wine text wrong number scam and wouldn't you know it i'm afraid how much i need wine i did end up on party hardison's website um i uh and sure as hell i got a bunch of results mostly like people kind of talking in in various forums online like a a wine forum that i found and also a just like a reddit forum um and people were like i just got and it wasn't i could not find the exact same picture that i have but other people were sharing pictures of a hand holding a bottle of wine in some sort of either a wine store or whatever and apparently this is some sort of a scam to try to get people to engage and people are like

I got that and I found TikTok videos, too. I should actually look this up again while we're talking, although none of the content was especially interesting to play here, maybe. But it was just people saying, I don't know. I just got this random text message with a bottle of wine. And so I responded. And some people say that they didn't respond. They just blocked the numbers. Some people said they responded and never heard back. Some people said that they responded and the scammers were kind of like, you sound like an interesting person. Sorry for the wrong number. Tell me more about you. You know, that was the next step that I was like, I think I can suss that out. I think I can I think I can kind of avoid future engagement if I get a weird vibe. Wow. My computer just fully shut down in front of me. I'm not even touching it. And now it's dead. That'll be on that wine video. Oh, my God. It is happening. It was just a photo. But anyway, here's here's what I find interesting. Not that this was the beginning of some sort of a scam. Social engineering. What is it exactly? man how does it work not one response i mean i guess the one thing they know is they got a live wire with me now right like they know that they have somebody with a working phone who is going to respond to stuff and maybe they know i'm an idiot so now anymore they're like oh man this is perfect they're licking their their their fishy jaws as they think about getting their hooks into

me wait what a fish are they the fish or are they the fisher i just heard it i heard it are they the

angler or the fish um but anyway yeah so i think it is a scam but either i'm not worth their time or they're taking 48 hours to figure out the perfect way to to separate me from my money

i think that probably what it is is some sort of program has been written that sends this out like i don't think a person typed in your phone number i think there's some kind of a blunt force attack that goes on and then someone somewhere is supposed to probably get a readout or a listing of because out of a thousand phone numbers probably they only hear back from three of them and then someone's supposed to get a readout or some indication of like hey we got a response from these ones and then they're supposed to follow up and someone is falling down on the job in that cyber cafe in lagos or wherever they might be well you can't let the interns do the

important work exactly you need to stay on top of well i have now you know over the course of the past 24 48 hours i have responded several times like why are you guys not responding to me i know

that you're scammers i'm just gonna forward my bank account information just to be safe in case

someone's monitoring this exactly i i've sent them routing numbers i sent them pins i sent them your pin that's i mean yeah um and so uh yeah no i have not heard back so i gotta say here's my take away from this whole thing like first of all i thought the listeners were going to destroy me the listeners do not like it when we are idiots about this kind of stuff especially since we spend so much time complaining about the cyber security trainings that we had to take at american public media um and usually when i say or do something like this the some listeners are like this is a classic scam like i just saw this like i saw this being written up even in some mainstream news sites as well and kind of a roundup of the kind of wrong number style scams and i was surprised that no tens jumped down my throat about this but maybe they've just given up on me i think maybe they're just like screw this guy like maybe he's just got to learn the hard way um but uh my other

takeaway is just not that widespread of a scam it's not so as because i had never heard of it and it's i i want to i want to give you some credit here or some cover at least it's really what i want to do i guess is tip of the cap to the scammers not that they did a great they did not do a great job on the follow-up but it's such an odd picture that it's kind of genius first of all it's not language specific i don't know how many photos are but it's like you know you could see that you could speak any language and see that and think oh my friend's at the store my friends somewhere and they're like hey do you like this wine or whatever it's like it's sort of perfectly open-ended and and also it's not saying like i get a lot of not a lot but you know once every week or something i'll get someone following me on requesting to follow me on instagram and they are someone i mean typically it'll be like a young woman who has like hasn't done zero posts and the subject line is something about like you know looking for a true man to whatever and it's like okay this is definitely a scam it's very easy for me just to delete that request but but what you're talking about there with the wine thing it's so open-ended it just it's such a such a random thing to have as the conversation starter that it's kind of smart it is kind of smart if

you're going to fall for it and depending on like what what comes down the line you know kind of After that, I will say that so here here are my my last two takeaways. I guess I had three takeaways. I was surprised I didn't get in trouble with the tens, but also somewhat relieved. I also when calls come into my phone now.

I mean, I obviously never touch the ones that say scam likely, but I have gotten a couple of calls, I think, in the past couple of days that are just unknown numbers. And when I see that and it doesn't say scam likely, but it's an unknown number, I'm kind of like, oh, I wonder if that is somebody who now knows this is a live number and it's not being marked as spam likely or whatever, because I've interacted with this number before.

maybe i don't know maybe what maybe what you've loosed the hounds of hell that you've loosed it's not somebody who's gonna like follow up even on that text chain it's that you've now been identified as a working phone number yeah that's that now is getting bombarded through

these this sort of other means now i don't feel like i've gotten bombarded more than usual i mean i think most people get like kind of a a a random scam likely or spam likely call i mean do you get at least one a day, Luke, do you think? I feel like I do.

Probably. It kind of comes in waves, which I've said before on the show, that is what I don't understand. Like, how is it that sometimes I can just wait out a certain spam call that's calling me? Because if it's computerized and if there's no cost to the scammer, why wouldn't they just leave that on, call Luke five times a day for the rest of time until further notice? Like, I don't know what the cost to them is, but somehow it'll go on for a long time and then it'll just stop happening.

Yeah, I see today that I did get a, I did get a call from an unknown number, or at least, I mean, I see what the number is, but it was an unknown, you know, it's not saved in my contacts, but it wasn't marked as likely spam that came in at 7 o'clock. It's a different number that texted me than the one that texted me. But anyway, yeah, I sort of feel like they at least now know that they have a potential fish on the line. But again, are they the fishers? I get so confused about that. Are they fish that are also fishing?

Because that's just real.

That seems wrong, but also.

That's real Benedict Arthur behavior.

I feel like I've seen Charlie Tuna, not the rapper, but the actual cartoon character. OK, here's my other final takeaway from this is I am being a little bit more careful when that's a tuna when calls come in. Just not that I would ever pick those up anyway, but I'm kind of like, let me just like not if another text comes in, that's weird. I'm not going to respond. Let me put it that way. Like, I'm not going to play around with that stuff anymore. But this was interesting. We did get a call or an email, I should say, from listener Mariah, who says, hey, I was listening to the show while running through. vineyards in the bordeaux region and i was loving the wine content the bottle is indeed expensive it's a bottle of oh i'm gonna mess this up romanay saint vivant maybe sure uh that is the vineyard the grapes come from and the producer that makes the wine is i'm not even gonna try that one um but it's a widely considered to be the best producer of burgundy in the world by the way i am a burgundy guy uh through and through so um that that appeals to me maybe they knew that they're like hey this guy likes burgundy um the grapes in burgundy are always pinot noir and traditionally pinot is bottled in that shape of bottle it's a pretty large bottle of wine with a pretty heavy bottom um current sale prices have been about thirty four hundred dollars if this person gets back to you feel free to send her my way and i can sell her some more wine i don't think i'm going to put Mariah in the crosshairs of this fish who's fishing, but it was nice to know that that is a good bottle of wine. I would like, I mean, if anybody wants to give me a bottle of wine like that, I would take it. It's also got some weird saran wrap on it. I'm guessing, somebody asked about that in the comment section on tbtl.net

Oh, now available at tbtl, the new improved

tbtl.net. A lot of people taking advantage of the comment section on the show pages. I'm loving it, Jerry. But my guess, I said this to somebody, is when you have a bottle of wine that is that expensive, you probably save the bottle after it's empty anyway and that probably protects the label if you put it almost looks like you got a fresh tattoo and you put some saran wrap around the tattoo only it's around the label of the bottle and i'm guessing that might protect it from maybe an accidental fingerprint or a tiny drip of wine after a pour or something that makes total sense yeah look i'm over here on

tbtl.net and i'm looking at the comments that people are leaving uh at the episode this is so fun this little i mean you know the my guess would be a lot of these folks uh know each other uh from the the stens page and stuff but but it's fun that people are excited we're coming to paul's bow people have we're not going to wine people people want to hang out with us in paul's

bow i know you make one joke about paul's bow and now we have now we have an apartment in paul's bow but um you know can i just say one other thing last last night i i was back to my archiving project as we get ready to release all 4,000 plus episodes in the RSS stream in a couple of weeks, there are still some outstanding episodes, well, we've produced many outstanding episodes, but there are still some MP3s that sort of got lost in the shuffle, and I'm trying to sort that all out and get them into, like, find these old files and get them into the feed before we open it all up. All of that is to say, I spent a great deal of time behind my computer again last night, Luke with a pint of

beer in one hand and my mouse uh in my carpal tunnel hand just like kind of moving things around but in doing so every now and then like taking a moment to read the descriptions of the shows like to me we've been at 8 p.m like that's still a very new era of tvtl but of course it's been eight years now and also like when i think of even like trump getting elected i'm sorry to take it there but like in 2016 that seems like yesterdoodle but like as i'm going through all this stuff i'm just like wow that like 2016 was a long time ago and as i scroll through all of these shows or not scroll through but actually kind of randomly see okay this show is missing i gotta find it what do we do on this day and it's like you and i like either marking the time around us and what's going on in society by talking about it also the things going on in our own life as they are displayed in the in the show descriptions and like we've been a lot has happened in eight years and i started to like i think i've been so overwhelmed with the all the work and challenges that are going into this new launch that we're doing on monday um that i haven't settled down into like kind of sentimentality or nostalgia um and i think that started to creep in a little bit yesterday and it's like wow i started to get some real feels about kind of what we've been lucky enough to do and how we have this podcast that really does sort of mark the passage of time through our particular lens and that we've brought these listeners along with us for so long i think i'm starting to feel kind of sentimental about the whole thing it's been quite a journey i don't know if you're feeling any of that as we make this big change too or maybe it'll hit you later or maybe you just have a hard cold piece of coal in your heart but uh i don't know it's been i'm not articulating but i'm on the transplant list okay newer less for a softer piece of coal no i'm kind of putting you on the spot because i didn't really articulate what i'm feeling i was

just feeling something. Yeah, I know exactly what you're talking about because I think that the doing of this show five days a week is, you know, most of the time it's like, okay, it's time to do the show again. It's time to turn on the microphone. It's time to talk. It's not, you're not getting, you're, you're, I'm only thinking about that day's episode and, you know, did it feel like it went well? Did it feel like it didn't go so well? I don't think of the overall, it's like grass growing. If you just stare at the grass for an hour, it doesn't seem like anything's happening. but if you come back after a week you can tell that it's grown and that's kind of the undulations of the show and the way the show reflects like you said what's going on in the wider world what's going on in our lives and it's easy for i think you and i to lose track of that because mostly we're dealing with this in like 80 minute increments and i also just feel like i need to start getting some i need to either get married or divorced again or i mean we need like i'm running out of personal experiences that are of any interest and as that happens it's just the petty stuff it's just me being irked because of a look someone gave me in in line to get on the airplane or something so that's kind of the the feeling i have of like i don't know you know if this show really means anything or if it's like you know if we're saying anything important about the larger culture or whatever but then like you said you look at a hundred episodes a thousand episodes and you think about all the stuff that happened in those thousand episodes and the way that however imperfectly we were reflecting back our thoughts on that are living in the world of that the pandemic yeah that's what i mean like it just that's a big thing that we were all living through and you and i were living through it on this show however boringly but still we were living through it can you imagine going back and listening to a podcast about the spanish flu right somebody just being like god this is i wonder how long this is gonna last like that would be a pretty interesting thing actually to kind of you know have that day-to-day almost diary experience of of people going through major world and life events and I mean that's what this show is even though um you know I I'm with you I lose track of that sometimes yeah and also in personal things too

like I read a description I'm trying to click through now to kind of recreate what I was seeing last night I maybe should have jotted them down but um I just remember one that I was I was searching for this mp3 file and I couldn't quite find it and I realized oh this was a show that I clearly this is a very behind the scenes thing but like 90 of the shows that you and I do just contain one mp3 because we sit behind our computers i hit record on a on a little recording device and an mp3 is spit out at the end which i edit but when you and i are up to something there's going to be a bunch of mp3s involved if we're like on a road trip together or if you're there were times when i was living in la and i would go drive to like sunset boulevard and do the show from my car while you were out on a boat somewhere right just to try to like and and so like when i would see these folders with a bunch of files in there i'd be like oh what was going on in this day and then so i'd click over to the to the description and it would be like oh luke and andrew arrive in chicago you know bleary eyed but ready to do the show or like whatever you know and it's kind of like man even just personally and again this is just pure navel gazing here and just sort of feeling sentimental about like wow we've we've gotten up to a lot of shit it's it's it's it is i don't know it just is something that made me feel kind of nostalgic for the past but also kind of exciting that we're doing this and we're still doing this and you joke about the fact that like hey we're running out of like new content like i'm also kind of excited this is a new chapter like the the we've talked about this a little bit on the show but tbtl has really been marked by different chapters in its life and apm and surprisingly ended up being one of the biggest or longest chapters i should say but i do think that we're gonna start there's gonna be kind of a new energy around the show now too as we try this new thing and try some new fun tools around it and as i freak out about

missing mp3s or whatever new energy but same mistakes i said benedict arthur a minute ago oh i didn't even i meant benedict arnold benedict arthur is not a traitor it was apparently a doctor

from michigan benedict arnold yeah i didn't even hear you traitor my brain for whatever that's worth um just converted it to arnold in my head hopefully the listener did the same quick

conversion all right let's uh take a quick break when we come back we've got these uh top stories oh and also um i know that you want to talk about an event that's going to be coming up a zoom event that's going to be coming up as part of the tbtl a thought yeah let everybody know about so we will get into that right after this short break hello and welcome to top story i'm realizing andrew that that's the what okay so we just came back from a break which of course we have no control over if there ends up being an ad or not uh at least uh under apm we don't have any control of that but that would be our we only have three more breaks now as apm employees yeah which is something i

need to actually talk to you about off air although we can have the conversation on air but let me just do it on air here for a second because this is a decision that we need to make like as of right now we are we we're out of the apm loop as far as these podcasts being delivered to people so the era of random ads should be officially over as a matter of fact we're still taking these breaks sort of out of habit, but habit, but also because there could be a time in the future where we want to use these breaks for something. Now, Luke, I need to talk to you about the technological side of that and some real decisions we need to make financially about if we want to pay for that functionality. But you and I need to decide maybe with the listeners going forward, if we keep this format where we say we're taking a break and we just pause for a moment and then go to top stories knowing that six months a year and six months six years from now maybe something will be there or is that just annoying and we just and we just stopped doing

breaks for a while i don't know because could we create something could we could make filler we could make promos we could i mean we could create our own thing that's not an ad that we wanted to

put in there potentially that's what we need to talk about off air it's not as simple there's some There's, there's some, I think some, not with the system we have now, but we could potentially pay for something. We'd have some more meetings with some folks at the, at the RSS store, Luke, about that.

Yeah. Oh, okay. All right. Well, we'll figure that out. Yeah. We will have to figure all this out because this is the process of going independent. And a big part of that, of course, is going to be figuring out after next week, if we can do this for our job, because we're having a TBTelathon. We're hoping that the many people who have been so amazing to support us over the years who have now had their donations turned off will go to the new place and turn on their new donations. That would mean a lot to us. And part of that is going to be a Zoom get-together with the listeners on Wednesday, right? What's the scoop on this?

Yeah, so this is next Wednesday. We've done the Zoom get-togethers the past couple of TB telethons. In the past, we've come up with a concept. I think, what did we do last year? we played charades right last year and the year before that surprisingly well yeah and then i mean i think a couple years before that we did a show and tell but we divided the zoom groups up because we didn't want them to be super huge and also we wanted to find a time zone that worked for everybody so i think we used to do four of them across the course of a week trying to like serve various uh you know time zones and groups of listeners this year we are doing the tbtlathon during a holiday week things are going to be smart you know very smart uh i think people's schedules are going to be kind of up in the air i don't know how many people will be able to join us but we are just going to do one big ass zoom party i have to say the a word i did have to say the a word i needed to get it across so this is next wednesday the fifth

in the middle of the THON, starting at 5 p.m. Pacific time, which is 8 p.m. East Coast, and you can do the math on all the other ones. And as I post this podcast today, I will also post a link on the tbtail.net website right at the top that will take you to a place where you can sign up and get your invite if you want to join us for this big Zoom party on the 5th. Now, Luke, I believe you came up with the concept for this. No, I think you did. Did I? I think I said something and you refined it. Ah, I see. Well, I'll take the bar if you want, or take the ball if you want. Ooh, this music's perfect because we're calling it Tenteeks Roadshow. This is where you will, kind of like show and tell, you will bring an, if you want to participate in this way, you can bring an object that has maybe been in your family for a long time, or something that you've just had since you were a child, and it's something of some personal value to you. But it's not just something you bought off of Amazon, like a Japanese record player the other day or something like that, but something that has been around, has been kicking around for quite some time. And you can present it to us, and we will, I guess, assign a monetary value to it, right?

Oh, you guess. No, with absolutely no formal training or expertise, we will absolutely tell you the monetary value or what we assess it at, what we would appraise it at. And yeah, I mean, this could be something that's really an antique or this could just be something kind of, you know, quirky from your from your home, from your family history. Bring it in, show it to us and we will appraise it. The Tentiques Roadshow.

The Tentiques Roadshow. Now, I don't know if people get the reference of Antiques Roadshow. So if you're somebody who's more familiar with the old television show Personal FX on FX circa 1994, think of it like it's like that basically. Same deal.

For somebody who found a VHS tape at a rummage sale and has been trying to manage your stress by loading it carefully into YouTube, you may think of this as more of an FX, personal FX show. Is that on that tape? What all was on that tape?

Oh, just so many tapes. I have a box of tapes that all came from one family, and somebody in this family loved the show, Personal FX. And again, I need to stress to people, the FX network in its earliest days was nothing like what it is now. it was more like mtv for talk programming sort of it was like kind of it was like a bunch of it was a bunch of cool young people hanging out in a big studio that was actually a house um and they would do different shows from different rooms and this tent i'm actually

gonna look i almost called i send you we were talking about this off air i think the clip of like when elliot smith was on that oh yeah yes that is one of and i've done some

pretty cringy interviews he was on that he was on he was on that network but that was their breakfast time show that they were on yes but it was still on fx yeah yeah it was just like again

i've done in fact the interview i did with sigur rose has been used to be regularly uh like sort of listed as one of the top five cringiest interviews ever so i know from cringy interviews but this is like elliot smith on this kind of glib fox hangout morning show or fx hangout morning show in like a cool apartment presumably in new york or something and like the person doing the interviewing just has no sense of being able to read what elliot smith's vibe is elliot smith is not able to really go there for this show it was quite something i want to play for you a 30 second

clip of a video um i posted to instagram a couple of weeks ago um you just need to picture a bunch of people who are kind of hosting this show there's like a couple of hosts and then an appraiser and they're sitting in uh they're sitting on like kind of a sofa joking around and then a woman walks onto the set and she's carrying a little objet of some sort it's a little porcelain thing it looks like kind of two ladies talking to each other listen to this 30 second clip of conversation

the woman who's the guest is very quiet at first hey alice is here with something

alice is here with something she wants to have a face hi alice what is this i don't know

we came to find out oh well you've come to the right place okay so i want to tell you it says

Alice bought a nodding head figure at a garage sale. Now listen to what this appraiser says. I love this so much.

Well, Alice, this is probably a little bud planter. I love this piece. I'm a sucker for German bisque figures. This is from Germany, and I'm a sucker for nodders. These are wonderful. It's called Scandal, and it's basically two old women sitting over tea, probably talking about the town gossip, and they're just agreeing with each other. See? Yep, yep.

Luke, I have been saying I'm a sucker for notters for the past couple of weeks. It's just that phrase is now just living in my head.

Also, does this mean that the FX network, which I think of as, although, I mean, because of your obsession, it's come up on the show a lot and maybe it's worth rethinking, but I reexamining the legacy of the FX network, but I don't think of it as particularly highbrow. Is it possible they invented the form and then PBS ripped it off? No, I think quite the, I think it's, I, no, I, I feel like to me, Antiques Roadshow, I could just Wikipedia this, but I feel like it's a phenomenon of the last 15, 20 years. Like I didn't grow up, you know, watching, seeing Antiques Roadshow on PBS and we watched a lot of PBS because we didn't have cable. And so it feels, but, but, but I'm, maybe it probably still does pre-see.

I'm looking at it up now. It might've come over to the States. I'm pretty sure it was already in the States Before the FX thing I think it's a direct kind of borrowing But it says the show itself started In 1979 Oh okay But that was on BBC Yeah exactly And then it came over here But I'm pretty sure that FX was chasing PBS on this So remember Wednesday

5 o'clock West Coast Yeah next Wednesday The Tentiques Roadshow We would love to have you zoom in Hang out with us These things always are as participatory as you'd like or as hang out in the background as you'd like. You don't have to have your camera on. You don't have to say anything. You can just be there to enjoy the energy of the whole thing. Or you can pipe up and show us something that is an interesting object from your life, something you've acquired at some point. And we will figure out what the monetary value is.

That's right. And then maybe even we'll have the opportunity to buy it off of you. Is that part of it? Because that is something they did on the FX show that I don't think they did on the original, like on Antiques Roadshow, on the FX show. No, they didn't ever. I think that they would then say, OK, at the end of the show, maybe they'd have all of the guests on and kind of say, OK, now you've had time to think about it. Are you willing to sell it to us for what we've appraised it for? And then people have to decide. That's a great idea. It is a good little ad, isn't it?

How about this? I'll play a hand of poker against anyone for their object. I don't know what they get from. If they win, they get to keep their object. If I win, I get to have their object.

If you win, you get to live with them for up to a month if need be.

Exactly. Depending on how the thon goes, I may be looking for somewhere to crash.

Couch surfing, yes.

The website overstock.com has purchased for $21 million, $21.5 million at auction. They have purchased the rights to Bed Bath & Beyond. all of their intellectual property. This does not include the stores, the physical stores, or the merchandise that's still in some of the physical stores. But I guess Overstock.com thinks that there's $21.5 million of value in just being able to call something, call your website Bed Bath & Beyond. And they're going to relaunch a new, improved Bed Bath & Beyond domain in Canada, and then they're going to relaunch in the next few weeks and then they're going to relaunch it in the US on a mobile app with a loyalty program. I was surprised to see that this went for this much money because I feel like the fun of a Bed Bath & Beyond for me always was the journey. It was going into that weird ass store with all that random stuff, wandering around seeing all the so-called end cap stuff, right? Which would be the like just a display of some kind of salad spinner that I never thought I needed but boy and that looks snazzy like to me bed bath and beyond as a website it does does not seem very appealing uh the wandering around of the weird the weird thing that was a stocked bed bath and

beyond that was the fun for me this reminds me of an irritating conversation i had this weekend this is going to be an aside here luke but this is just the story is just triggering me a little bit this is not answering your sort of query about that i think there's value in the brand of bed bath and beyond but i was at a function recently and i know some of the people at this function will probably hear me talking to you about this i don't think the person in question will hear me talking to you about this but i will try to protect uh all names and protect the innocent but um i was at this at this get together and there was somebody there who i've met a couple of times but after meeting them the first time i've tried to give them a wide berth because my first couple of meetings I found that the person is just super kind of negative and ball busty immediately and this time I realized okay we're in it like we're at this thing together now like I'm just going to roll with this and try to get into their rhythm and I'm trying to give them the benefit of the doubt but it's the type of person who I guess only communicates by negging you somehow and by the way you came up later I didn't know that everybody noticed this about this guy genevieve said to me later she's like i was really worried that you were going to kind of lash out i was like i thought i was on my best behavior i did she's like no no you didn't do anything wrong but i just know that you are irritated by this kind of communication and i was starting to worry that you were going to lash out which actually made me feel really bad i don't think of myself as a liability in social situations just like a i mean maybe awkward but not like a

grumpy jerk who's going to create something but um this but but that should say to you how much this person like never once did this person just say oh that's interesting tell me more about that like anything i would say if i was trying to talk about um there i was talking about the basketball draft with a friend and he would just like jump in and be like oh boy you kind of don't know anything about a lot of things huh or like i'm telling you man like everything was like this Like everything I would say was, even to other people, he would just interject something that was like somehow ball busty. And I realized that I think some people just do that. They don't realize how they're coming off. I don't think this person has any bad intentions. I think he's just like, that's his language, right? But I find it incredibly tough to work with. But I really tried. I really tried on this particular day. But while we were there, somebody asked if a certain store still exists. and I can't remember what it was my apologies but I said oh in its current state or in its original I think I said in its original state I'm not sure and this person in media is like yeah in its original state like what other state would it be and I'm just like oof and I was like and I tried to I do this thing where I would try to defend myself and then I rose why am I wasting any words on this person but like right um I think we found my new backup host next time I'm out you ended up come you ended up coming up later on I got in the car and I was like that guy and they're like yeah we got we're all worried that somebody luke's gonna meet this guy and it's not gonna be good i'm serious that legitimately somebody i love it somebody said like yeah no it's gonna be kind of bad if luke ever runs into this guy and he's going to one of these days and i'm like oh my god i hadn't thought about that but you're right that's gonna be like that's gonna be like when that guy took the french fry off my plate and you wanted to knock his block off 10 years ago or whatever

that that's when you know you're that's when you know you're a wild card is when some people who you don't see all that often but who are you know your dear friends um i'm presuming that i knew some of these well yeah yeah obviously yeah people who are your friends who you don't see all that much are worried that someday you might meet a person you've never met yes who's like tangential to the friend that just tells you that just tells you how how uh you know how out of control i can

get some time but the reason i bring it up first of all that was very much an aside to the story But I also think probably more interesting than anything I have to say about branding. Well, certainly when you said you came up later, I was all ears. I had a dream. Don't tell me about it. You were in it. OK. But anyway, all of that is to say this is this is exactly what I was talking about when I said, does that store still exist? It's like, well, does it exist as we know it? Because we've seen this happen with legacy brands or whatever you want to call them. I think Radio Shack is the perfect example of this. Like, yes, you. Oh, you know what it was? it was uh we were talking about a fast food restaurant like um i think it was red lobster that's what it was and somebody said does it still exist i'm like oh i don't know if it exists in its original state and then this person was sort of all over me and i was like no it's like radio shack still sort of exists but it's like in the corner of like a t-mobile store they might have a rack of things and they have the the radio shack brand now and i said it would be sort of funny if you walked into a t-mobile and there's a little red lobster in the back i realized i realized it's not totally transferable but anyway this is exactly what we're talking about here with bed bath and beyond right like technically it will still exist as something but it's not the bed bath and beyond that we think of but there is probably still some value in having that tag in the same way that i'll still go to the hbo tab on the new max platform i mean i think probably

what and again the the people from overstock.com have spent i'm sure they you know they're more savvy about business than i am so they've done their due diligence and they've decided that yeah just the awareness the fact that you go up to like the majority of people in the u.s and you go do you know what bed bath and beyond is and they'd be like yeah i have some sense of that that alone is worth 21 million dollars to to not have to start from scratch and i have to start from being like uh we're gonna do a store called you know bedworks and then we're gonna spend 21 million dollars just trying to promote it and just trying to get people to know about it this is a thing where people already know this is a thing they had some very devoted fans and so just being able to call ourselves that is worth some money i guess to them yeah and if somebody is is shopping online

and they don't they don't follow the news of the demise of bed bath and beyond the way that you and i have been obsessing over this like somebody might just want some towels and just instinctively type in bed bath and beyond or type in you know bath towels and maybe one of the first search results is going to be a sponsored link to bed, bath and beyond. And again, they haven't been following the blow by blows of this brand switching hands. They just are going to instinctively click on bed, bath and beyond and buy themselves some fluffy towels.

I'm going to the bed, bath and beyond. Oh, wow. Website dark. Thank you to all of our loyal customers. We have made the difficult decision to begin. winding down our operations. Bed Bath & Beyond, and, oh, by the way, this is the other thing I learned from this article, was that not included in the sale was the intellectual property to the baby store that Bed Bath & Beyond had called Bye Bye Baby. B-U-I, B-U-I, Baby. That's kind of a clever name, Bye Bye Baby.

Is that, I think so. My mind went to something sort of dark there, like. Oh, like we're saying the baby's not around anymore. Why are we saying goodbye to babies? But maybe is Bye Bye Baby a phrase or a song that I'm not familiar?

Well, it's a song from – there's a song called Bye Bye Baby in the musical – oh, my goodness gracious. How can I forget – wait. No, it's Bye Bye Birdie. It's not Bye Bye Baby. I think the musical is called Bye Bye Birdie, and I think the song is called Bye Bye Birdie. And I think – is it like Anne Margaret sings it? Bye Bye Birdie, the army's got you now. And basically, if I remember loosely the plot of Bye Bye Birdie, it's this this character who's based loosely on Elvis is going off into the service and all of the women of America are swooning over the fact that they are they're all lining up to try to like marry him or something before he goes off to serve his country and maybe dies.

Really? And I didn't know it was loosely based on Elvis. I see the first production came out in 1960. So he would have been still like, he would have been Elvis at the time, but he's already a phenomenon because he's made, he was Elvis, capital E Elvis in the 50s, right?

So yeah, this is just according to the internet, is Bye Bye Birdie based off of Elvis. The story was inspired by Elvis Presley being drafted into the US Army in 1957. Jesse Pearson plays the role of teen idol Conrad Birdie Whose character name is a wordplay on the country singer Conway Twitty Who was at the time also a teen idol pop star

Oh interesting, see I've always heard I know nothing about kind of musical culture So this stuff is always very much lost on me

I've said this before but so much of my sort of musical Like I mean literally musicals And like pop culture stuff that I got was from my mom who got all of her stuff from her gay older brother. So a lot of like Anne Margaret vamping about in a musical romp. I was watching a lot of that stuff as a kid. If there's, I've said this before, but like if anyone's worried that you can turn someone gay, I would like to point out that it is not possible. Because if it were, I would be because of steady stream of things I grew up on that were very much associated with the tastes of a lot of particularly gay men in this country.

Let me go back to something you said when you clicked on the Bed Bath & Beyond website. You're like, oh, wow, this is dark. And I'm on there now, too. And it just has that message that you just read. You know, it's just like, no more shopping. The shopping's over. Thank you. Goodbye. I have been seeing now, I'm assuming that the store in Northgate is totally closed now. But for a few weeks earlier this summer, after the news of Bed Bath & Beyond was closing, had broken, I saw something that made me really sad several times around my neighborhood and around the Northgate area, which is there were these cars, not like falling apart, terrible eyesore cars, but just like very, how can I say this without saying it's sort of classist? Not that I ever, like, drive super nice cars, but just, like, kind of run-down cars driving around with a super janky three-sided sign strapped to the roof with, like, bungee cords saying that, you know, Bed Bath & Beyond is closing, you know, the fire sale is going on now, like, get your great deals, everything up to 50% off or something like that. And there was something. And again, like, I'm sure that these are people, the people who are taking this gig wherever they saw it are people who need this gig. So I'm not trying to like dunk on people who are just like trying to make a little bit of cash. But there was something about the closing of Bed Bath & Beyond, a place that sort of used to at some point in my life bring me sort of comfort in the sort of richness of the of the smells and soft linens and towels that you could go in there and touch. And instead sort of seeing junky cars driving around with a really janky sign half strapped to the roof just saying, like, go buy whatever – like, go in there and scrape whatever you can off the floor and give us a few pennies for it.

That is kind of – that is a sad – I was looking – trying to look up what you were saying that if – I was trying to clarify for myself if Bed, Bath & Beyond was a franchise situation, which it wasn't. Because what I was wondering is, like, who reached out to the people with the cars to put the little sandwich board on top of the car or the whatever, the repurposed pizza delivery light? Yeah. And, like, because I was thinking, well, maybe it's a franchisee. Maybe the person that owns the store near Northgate, you know, they figure, hey, the more of it.

this merch that i can move that the less my losses will be but that's not how it works it's a it's a owned and operated company it was anyway like i so that would have been some local manager was like i guess we're just going to freelance this we're trying to get rid of this stuff we got all this merch that we're still trying to move and i'm going to just like hire some people to strap something on their car not particularly nice looking cars yeah well my cousin's got a 2003

Toyota Tercel that's not really doing much like let's let's let's strap a sign to that baby yeah and it also just sort of harkened to the the slow decline of Bed Bath & Beyond I think that's what it harkens to is just like because you and I I mean speaking of like going back and and watching us pass time and mark time with this podcast this has been a long time coming I mean I feel like it was over a year ago that we were doing a top story on this show about how certain branch managers of Bed Bath & Beyond were cutting the air conditioning in their stores because the financial situation was so dire. Do you remember that little nugget? I forgot that part. What I remembered about the

branch managers was that for a period of time, the success of Bed Bath & Beyond was credited to giving the local management a lot of control of what would go in their store. So if you ran the Bed Bath & Beyond in Alderwood and you just had a hunch on something, you were like, folks that live out here really want this kind of cutting board or something you could just like you were you know authorized to make important decisions and that was somehow like part of the special

sauce of bb and b i did i don't think i remember that part of it but yeah so i guess you know

r.i.p bed bath and they're not yet again but they're still not even gone they're still like

or yeah ones that are open yeah like seriously i think that they're just like you know they're

trying to get they're trying to wind down the footprint but there's still a few of them that hanging on oh that's funny maybe hanging on spatula national national geographic actually you know what becca was making some delicious halibut the other night for the hell i was thinking just for the halibut and i was like and and she didn't have i feel like this was a week of the show me obsessing over this particular fish spatula that i was trying to locate yeah that somebody had had given me and it was like not only my favorite spatula for cooking fish because it's very thin. It's red and plastic and very, very thin at the edge. You can get it under anything. But it just became like my favorite spatula for, like I said, because you could get it under any kind of egg you're cooking. It was like very effective. Anyway, I was saying to Becca, I was like, we've got to get you a fish spatula. And then my first thought was, I could probably grab that at Bed Bath & Beyond. And then I realized, probably not. Speaking of hanging on, National Geographic magazine has announced that they are laying off the remaining 19 editorial staffers who were the last of their full-time editorial staff and that they are now going to just do the magazine with only freelancers. And I felt very bummed about this because I loved National Geographic as a kid and then I realized I also have not read National Geographic in a long time. I think David might have gotten me a subscription at one point as a Christmas present. Because that was a callback to, like, our granddad used to get our family a subscription. I started mysteriously getting National Geographic, I don't know, five years ago or something. And I did read it when I was getting it, and then that stopped. So, I don't know. I mean, I guess I don't qualify for National Geographic presence anymore. But I was sad about it, but then I realized, I don't, I mean, I'm not helping. I'm not subscribing to the magazine. I'm not breathlessly waiting for it each month. um and uh and and i thought it was also interesting that they're not like i feel bad for the folks that lost their jobs obviously but i but i wonder if there isn't kind of a i don't know i wouldn't i don't want to say maybe it's a grim logic but like there is some logic to saying we just need more flexibility we're going to keep being a magazine because they still have like 1.8 million readers a month although that's down from their high of 12 million subscribers in the late 1980s There was a real heady time for National Geographic. This would have been about when we were getting it in our household, too. So shout out to Farnham Burbank for making our family one of the 12 million subscribers in the late 80s. But at one point, there was 12 million people reading it. Now it's down to 1.8. That still makes it one of the most widely read magazines in America.

Huh, that's interesting.

Because of how bad the magazine business is.

I wonder how well they've translated their work to the web. Because I also think of National Geographic now as a brand, again, going just back to brands, like it's a I wonder if most of their energy is producing content for their for their television network.

Right. Yeah. They get into that in this article that it's Paul Farhi writing in The Washington Post, by the way. I love Paul Farhi stuff, I think, because he writes about public radio and the media a lot. Half the time when I see an article in The Washington Post that I'm intrigued by, I look down and it was written by Paul Farhi anyway. yeah

Yeah, they basically, most of the resources now for National Geographic are tied up in the National Geographic Channel and Nat Geo Wild. The magazine was eventually surpassed for profits and attention by the society's video operations, including National Geographic Cable Channel and Nat Geo Wild, a channel focused on animals. While they produce documentaries equally in quality to the magazine's rigorous reporting, the channels, managed by Rupert Murdoch's 21st Century Fox, sentences rarely get better after you hear those words, also aired pseudoscientific entertainment programming about UFOs and reality series like Sharks vs. Tunas, at odds with the society's original high-minded vision. Because the way that it used to work was if you were a member of the National Geographic Society back in the 1920s or something, then they would give you the magazine for free. It was an enticement to join their society. It was formed, let's see, by 33 academics, scientists, and would-be adventurers, including Alexander Graham Bell, were all the founders of the National Geographic Society magazine. so yeah so now it's just basically all the money is in sharks versus tunas yeah yeah um and i was

starting to say too i wonder how well they kind of moved over to like online journalism as well because they have been because their reputation at least what i think of first and by the way i should just say that like i don't have a lot on this because i just was never we were not a national geographic family i was never super into national geographic i think i have a real like embarrassing disinterest in the natural world like it's really weird there are things and this is going to break um our uh our listener summer's heart um but like i just like when we talk like the cosmos doesn't interest me the natural world doesn't interest me all that much maybe i'm just too much of a humanist maybe that's just a snotty way of saying that i'm disinterested and boring but like i uh i don't know so i i wasn't super into it but uh you the first thing i think of though is just astounding photography right and i could sort of see them doing what the new york times i mean i can't think of a publication that uh harkens from the old days of print media that has adapted so well to modern journalism than the new york times now i don't know i haven't looked at their books you won't be surprised to hear so i don't know how the new york times is doing i thought that they were doing pretty well even during the pandemic as people were like you know buying subscriptions to keep up with the the global news but like they do such a good job of experimenting with what it means to be the New York Times and what it means to be a photographer in this day and age and creating these interactive articles and interactive experiences. And also just to like throw in there like, hey, the New York Times crossword puzzle has been an icon for generations. But now like there are still a lot of us out here wordling and like wordle and like them just finding ways to stay relevant.

Yeah, totally. And you know, I have to say it's, I think it's it's impressive from the New York Times because the New York Times was not some plucky upstart. I mean, there's a reason they call it the old gray lady. And usually when you are the sort of dominant, you know, form of something for a long time, you also then suffer on the innovation side because you sort of don't have to innovate up until you do up until you're no longer relevant. And the New York Times is very smartly, like you said, they've integrated all this multimedia. I feel like for National Geographic, and I'm sure that they tried this, there's a real missed opportunity around podcasting. And I think it's probably because it's really hard and expensive to make good podcasts. But I also think that, like, the topics that National Geographic has covered over the years are ideal for making really good prestige, high-quality podcasts. You know, they write articles and have photographs from all over the world about all different kinds of cultures and rituals and things that have gone on, interesting development projects like those would all be good topics for a podcast but they're hard to do and also maybe there's still no money in them yeah maybe that's the other takeaway is like prestige podcasting you every once in a while you hit one out of the park and it's it's a it's very profitable but i think as we've been learning with the kind of like more or less the end of gimlet and things like that that prestige podcasting is very expensive to make and you got to get really lucky to actually have it kind of you know pencil out yeah boy this is we already

kind of talked a lot about podcasting I think it was late last week or earlier this week and and about um about Spotify's kind of blunders and and the collapse of the Prince Harry it wasn't I keep saying Prince Harry but it was really um Meghan Markle's podcast and everything did you happen to see I was behind on this this is not breaking news but I didn't realize that Bill Simmons so So his podcast is on Spotify.

And also he's like an exec at Spotify in charge of like podcast monetization or something. And he was like straight up talking shit on his podcast about Markle. I didn't. I totally had missed that.

He called them grifters, I believe.

He called them grifters and said, one of these days I'm going to get drunk and tell you all about the time I had my first Zoom call with these grifters or something like that. Yeah. What is the book on Bill Simmons? I think, first of all, I confuse him with somebody else whose name is Simmons.

You confuse him with Dave Portnoy probably from Barstool Sports.

No, no, no, no. know i don't do that there's but simmons is the guy who he we he was a or is a well-respected guy who came from the world of sports media am i right about that bill simmons back andrew

literally 25 years ago maybe bill simmons was writing something for espn's website called page two and it was a revelation to people like me because it was the first place that i'd ever seen I mean, first of all, this is still like the fact that ESPN had a website was kind of novel, but it was like it was the first place that I saw that brought together sports and pop culture. Nobody was doing that. You had your sports reporting that was, you know, like this is what the batting average is. This is what happened in the bottom of the ninth or whatever. And then you had your culture writing and you I mean, there were some maybe there's some overlaps and maybe George Plimpton, you could argue, was in a way doing that sort of with Paper Lion and stuff like that. But generally speaking, those two worlds didn't really mix, at least not for my generation. And then suddenly you have a guy who's like comparing each Boston Celtic to what Arcade Fire song they would be, you know. And I just was there for it because I was just like, this guy has just like so – he knows sports so deeply, but he also knows all the pop culture references that I know. And he has this way of blending them together. So I was a just obsessed, dedicated reader to his blog basically on the page two of ESPN. and then um he eventually um he started podcasting he started this thing i think called uh the ringer um he might have also started grant land yeah i think he did because didn't he like

he famously left espn right kind of in protest but he was standing up for the right things though right that's what i wanted to know like i felt like his background has always been like he's our type of person right and is he still i think he's a little more bro-y than you and i but he's

not like bad take bro and now i don't know every take he has i haven't followed him as much i think he's he's not like that guy portnoy is terrible the guy that founded barstool he's just like a misogynist and just like a bad person that's not the rap on bill simmons at all uh and i mean i think bill simmons is is is well regarded um oh he used to be called the boston sports guy i think back in the day which was um you know how i remember him early on by the way if i sound distracted it's because i'm trying to keep the cat from unplugging the computer talking to each

other on but anyway yeah i do think i think that spotify bought like the entire i think he left espn started his own thing the ringer and then i think spotify just bought the entire ringer properties and then like established him as both a podcaster and a and an exec over there and

truthfully my guess would be hold on give me one second and also by the way this is really

embarrassing but i think the reason i sometimes get confused about bill simmons is because of russell simmons and it's like i only know a tiny bit about both of these guys and i just often conflate them into the same person russell simmons the founder of def jam is that who he is i know he's like some brand no i'm thinking of russell simmons yeah he's like i just know him as i think of the yeah as an entrepreneur i know that they're in very different spaces but i just like because i don't know enough about them i always hear him in passing i conflate the two

and then i get confused um uh what was i there was one more thing i wanted to say about bill now you got me sorry bill simmons i'm likely to talk till the sun up oh the thing i was just going to say is my guess would be that the bill simmons stuff the stuff that bill simmons is doing on spotify still does pretty well because he is not unlike howard stern over on sirius he is a popular entertainer and people are into what he's doing and he's got a fan base and you know there still i think is you know success to be had for people like that what i think doesn't work is astroturfing something like they tried to do with i mean we don't have to have this whole conversation again But with like Megan and Harry, more primarily Megan, of being like, this person is famous. So if we just plug them into some idea of a podcast, it'll be great because they're already famous. It's like I think – and the prestige journalism, which I love listening to. I just noted today there's some new – I don't know if it's a full season of Serial or just if Serial Productions is dropping a new episode. But I saw on the New York Times webpage it's something having to do with a fertility clinic. Like when there's a new season of Serial, I'm like the first person in line to listen to it. I really enjoy consuming this kind of stuff. I just think, I'm just starting to really wonder if there's actually a living to be made for a large number of people in extremely produced prestige podcasting. I just really wonder. And it's not that I want that to be the case. I'm not like rooting against that. stuff i guess maybe maybe somewhere i am because we don't do that we we do something so different that i guess i feel maybe five percent validated and vindicated if if we learn that like this a podcast that has a staff of 30 people who you know spend months researching if if that's not a viable model i'm like well at least ours is or something but like i do i'm just really the the end of gimlet or at least you know firing 200 people over at spotify many of whom were gimlet folks It just makes me really wonder how that kind of journalism or storytelling, whatever you want to call it, how that's going to keep happening year over year. I mean, because the National Geographic thing, again, what's great about National Geographic is the reporting involves months of research. It involves sending one or more photographers to spend a good amount of time getting incredible photographs. It's a labor-intensive thing, and it's hard to get people to pay the amount of money that you need them to pay to financially pencil out those kinds of labor-intensive things. And then you got us over here just crapping out a show five days a week.

Let's polish that up a little bit. Listen, I'm sure we'll get into the models of podcasting more next week during our TV Tail-a-thon because it tends to be where the conversation goes. and I don't want to bore people with this stuff but in all earnestness it's hard for me not to be thinking about this a lot lately because of number one our big transition here to going back to being an independent podcast and also because of all of this news about the industry sort of imploding right now especially on the Spotify end of things and it is it's almost like crystallized to me more so now than even when you and I first started sort of like daydreaming about the idea of taking the podcast independent again is it's really crystallized to me that we are truly doing the right thing because the industry is whack and like they might figure it out and they might not but it's like you and i well you had this podcast before there was really a podcast industry and then the podcast industry sort of grew up around us sort of and then and because of that and because we worked for a network we kind of went with the flow and first they introduced um dynamic advertising but it was always our voice right or and and we were thoughtful about it and then eventually kind of changed and now we had some country music person introducing our pod the last day that we had ads on the podcast we had an especially obnoxious one and i was just sort of thinking like for some podcasts this will make the most sense if you're starting a new podcast you want to get into this dynamic ad thing and maybe you want to like land some huge guests right away and try to blow up on on all the platforms on your first week and just get ridiculous numbers but Like we've been sort of chugging along here for quite some time. We know who we are and we know what we do and what we do well. And we know what our financial model is. The industry as a whole is still trying to figure that stuff out. And I was just texting with our former colleague Kiki Lolo earlier today. And I think she specifically asked not to say where she went when she left APM, but she was working for another very well-known podcast platform. Right. And she's not there anymore. But we're just talking about it. I'm just like, it's so clear to me that we are in a position right now because we have listeners and we have a background in public radio style fundraising, even if we're not affiliated with a public radio station anymore, that like we don't have to be chasing these trends or trying to make these trends fit us. And like the the addition of kind of randomized ads being inserted into our show and annoying our listeners doesn't work in our favor. Whatever we would make from that doesn't work in our favor. What works in our favor is saying, hey, we we know that the people who find the show valuable are willing to support it. And so we can just do that. And there's just something so refreshing and sort of there's something so refreshing about feeling clear eyed about that.

Well, I feel like I had a bunch of notions for a while. I feel like I'm more clear eyed about that than ever before, because when people say, well, how are you handling ads or where are you putting ads? And I have to say, we're not going to do ads. You know, we're kind of I feel like in some ways we're turning back the clock in a way that just is like a way of saying we don't have to do what everybody else is doing to sort of scratch out pennies around a Carvana ad or whatever.

all due respect well what's so funny about it is it's like you know having been here at the beginning of this as just a podcast and being like in my house maybe with jen there maybe literally by myself going well i'm running out of money next week if you would like to have this be a thing here's a paypal link or whatever and feeling like then this whole industry grew up and i missed the boat like i started building this little canoe or whatever somehow it always comes back to some nautical theme a little rowboat and then all of a sudden people started building all these podcasting mega yachts and i was looking around like how did we miss we were here first and and we're i think reasonably entertaining it was like how did we how are we still in this rowboat and everyone else is like i got a jeff bezos mega yacht and these big beautiful buildings i remember like being down in la and seeing wondery like the

headquarters on sunset boulevard is big glass building on sunset and thinking like i was doing

Thank you.

a podcast for like eight years before anyone at wonder had heard the word podcast and then they came over from the film industry and now they you know and i'm just kind of looking around thinking like how did i miss the boat and it's like then everyone's boat started sinking and we're still in this row but we're like can we row this around yeah can we get where we need to go yeah does this work as a vessel for us it sure does so it's just kind of weird to feel like i missed we missed out on something but then actually you know it was sort of fine all along you know and we're kind of where we've always been which is actually a better place than some of these big mega yachts yeah

exactly i'm feeling and again we'll be asking people to support the show next week i have faith that we will i mean it's been so great to hear from so many people who've been actively reaching out to us to say hey listen my uh 8 p.m donation just you know was shut off because you guys are leaving how can i start donating to you right away you know and we'll have actually tomorrow's going to be a big day for us we're going to tell you exactly how you can start to do that if you want to if you want to kick off the tb telethon a little bit early with us tomorrow before uh before the holiday weekend um we will start uh telling you how you can engage with us but it just shows that the the power of our listeners who are like actively reaching out to us saying hey i have money it has your name on it can you tell us how to give it to you i mean it is it is astounding and i'm eternally grateful and i truly think we meaning you me and the tons of listeners are

doing the right thing here yes absolutely that's a that's a nice and rare it's a rare bit of

confidence yeah watch out whenever i'm confident i'm like whenever i correct you on something with

confidence i end up eating it there's a right way to rock and a wrong way to roll you can't just listen to your soul just remember that life is number one you can't be having so much fun Is it better or worse when I make that noise, Luke?

Is it better or does it ick you out a little bit? I can see that being an icky sound coming from my face. Let's do some Blur's Days here, Luke. We got a lot of Blur's Days. Boy, last week you said, hey, the Blur's Day cupboards are almost bare. Boy, that prompted some Blur's Days. I think people are making up Blur's Days.

That prompted some people to build a time machine and go back many years and nine months ago and make babies. I mean, let's be honest, Luke.

Not to be negative here in the Blur's Day segment. Do you think any of these people really are celebrating birthdays? They just want their moment to shine. I'm not asking for birth certificates here. Any of these could be made up, right? Huh. Stolen Blur's Days? Like stolen valor? I hate to see it. Yeah, you really do. Okay, I'll tell you what. I believe Rob. When Rob says, good day, my 10, Stacey, has her B-Day this week. Just want to wish her a wonderful 39th year, and I'm so glad I get to share it with her. Sweet.

Happy Blur's Day, Stacey. Cheryl, I think I know what Cheryl this is, says, a very happy belated Blur's Day to Julian. We've met Julian. Hi, Julian. We sure have. This would be Julian from Corvallis. That's right. As it's often known. You can't believe you're already turning 12 this year. You're smart, creative, funny, and have an amazing, kind heart. Dad and I are so proud of you and all the hard work you did this year in sixth grade. We hope your birthday was amazing, and we love you always. Sweet.

And listen, Julian, I know you got the signs off our van. It's fine. I'm not even mad about it anymore. I just hope you hung them up somewhere really special.

Honestly, the statute of limitations has expired, so you can just come clean now. I'm not even upset about it. I'm glad you got it. It's all about restorative justice, Andrew.

Denise says, I'd like to wish a happy Blur's Day to my five Michael on his 25th birthday. All of our hours in the car on road trips listening to the show have pretty much made him at least an honorary 10. All right. We'll take it. Where's my bell? Welcome to the club. Yeah. I'm also an honorary 10. He's the real best company. Did I read that right? He's the best company. I don't know why I put the word real in there. He's the best company. I wouldn't be the same without him riding shotgun. Mike, you're awesome, and I love you so very much. That's really sweet. Happy Lur's Day, Michael.

I think I wonder if Michael has listened to more episodes of TBTL than me. I've hosted more episodes than he has listened to, but I don't think I've listened to more. I've probably listened. I think I've probably listened to less than 100 episodes of TBTL in my life, like all the way from front to back.

Late last night. I think I listened back to, you know, I was telling you earlier, I was feeling all the feels looking back at old episodes. And then I kind of, again, I'm not saying this like it was hard work, but I was just kind of. of in my little uh myopic zone last night like hunting down these mp3s and i think i put down my stylus around like uh actually you have a stylus i put down my mouse around 12 30 or something and wanted to clear my head a little bit and i'm throwing some darts and i'm like you know what let's listen to today's show because someday today's show will be an old episode of tbtl like i can't explain it but i wanted to listen to the most recent episode of tbtl with like ears of context. Would you like some ears of context? I don't know what I'm talking about anymore. Good lord.

Why'd you let me on this show? That one super negative guy from the party was unavailable. Yeah. I believe this is me on behalf of Lou in Virginia who says, please wish my five. Annie Bird a wonderful 11th birthday. Hey, Annie Bird. Lou says, Annie is currently performing as Town Fish No. 1 in SpongeBob the Musical and getting ready to go off to 4-H camp. We will celebrate her big day with smoothies and squishmallows.

Squishmallow?

How many squishmallows do you have, Andrew?

A squishmallow is like kind of a modern plush doll, right? That's really squishy. It's a stuffed animal, stuffy. Yeah, okay.

But I actually saw a headline the other day that I was surprised by, which is that what's driving the Squishmallow sales is adults. I believe that. Much more adults buying Squishmallows than kids. I'm sure there are lots of kids that love them and have them, but it's also very popular amongst adults, Squishmallows.

That's interesting. I don't have any. I thought of you the other day because I told you that I like to sometimes, when I'm served an ad on Instagram that is kind of interesting, even if I don't want it, I never buy anything off of Instagram, I'll sort of engage with that ad in order to get more weird stuff. And the other day, and I get like, I think I was telling you on the show, I know I was telling a lot of friends that I was really engaging with these weird light fixtures that were being advertised to me. Like, yeah, we talked about that on the show, right? And so then it was just amazing how they were just like, this guy's into weird lighting things. And I mean weird, like little statues of children blowing bubbles, but the bubble is a light bulb and stuff and little pieces of toast popping out of toasters that are lit up. It's very strange stuff that I don't need, but it makes me laugh. So then I clicked on a little toy frog the other day, like a little frog that you would set on your desk or something. I'm like, ooh, yeah, give me more weird shit like this. And I clicked on it, and then I realized the frog is flipping the middle finger. And I was like, ah, shit. I know that everybody flips the finger at the camera these days. That's fine if you're into it. But to me, it's just like that's the least interesting thing you can do with your hand.

i'm not a fan either and i told you about the time that i was in rossi's like i don't know now a few months ago uh with becca and i was taking introducing her to ramonski and to desiree and some my favorite people in chicago and they're like take a picture behind the bar and then everyone was throwing up the bird because that's like a thing there and i was like and then i just did it because i didn't want to be weird but then i regretted it so much oh you did do it i you know

I do tend to I find myself still just sort of naturally flashing kind of a two finger peace symbol at people like not even like not. I don't hold it over my head or anything, but like even if a car is like pauses for me as I cross the street or something, I think I instinctively just sort of like kind of give a kind of half wave half like kind of lazy peace symbol. I would maybe, you know, if I was if I was in the exact situation that you just described and I had the ability to think in the moment, I might just give the peace symbol instead or if I could do it over again, I would do something like that.

I did and I got and that's also I think very much like the way that I respond to peer pressure differently than you like I think I'm more what's the word I'm looking for susceptible to it I wanted to be cool and be in the moment with them so I did this thing that was really betraying my natural instincts against flipping the bird

I guess is Johnny Cash the coolest person to famously flip the bird

there's that picture there's that famous picture but I feel like Johnny Cash was doing it

like i don't think everybody was doing it back when john cash did exactly and i already know your favorite picture of johnny cash where you're sucking his tummy in i love it so much i feel so

seen by it because it's like you're johnny cash and you are doing exactly what i do if anyone were to take a picture of me shirtless which is trying to change the shape and appearance of my torso and like to see johnny cash doing it again i was like well that that that means you know we're

all humans well all of that is to say happy blursday johnny cash exactly michelle says july 3rd is the most important day of the year yes my mom joyce will become a nonagenarian whoa that's the nines maybe i meant to look that up before i read that i'm pretty sure that's the Can you look that up? She has patiently listened to the show and even attended the live show in St. Paul. Oh, my goodness.

Oh, yeah. 90 to 99 years old. Nanagenarian. Congratulations.

That's why they call grandmas nana sometimes. That's exactly right. That's the origin of that word. Nanagenarian. But Michelle says that her mom has even attended the live show in St. Paul, episode number 2140, colon, This American Legion. That was a pretty good show title. That was a good name. It really was. The Co-Bros will be busy that week, so please send my love to the best mom ever and to Disposable Media. Here we go. Happy Blur's Day, McShell's mom. Joyce. Joyce. I do have the name here. I'm sorry.

Happy Blur's Day, Joyce. Sheila in Ithaca says, happy birthday to Cindy. I hope you had a wonderful day. I miss you dearly and hope we can get together on the Wagner deck this summer, please.

Unless that's the Wagner deck and it's marching towards.

Yes, it's the – is that a reference to the Wagner group or the music of Wagner?

That was a reference to the Wagner group, but I was butchering it because they're no longer marching towards Moscow. That has ended –

Now they're in Belarus. They are in Belarus, yes. Exiled. Yes. I think it might be a different deck personally, but I don't know. I haven't been out to Ithaca lately. Yeah, I hear it's gorgeous. Lunch on the commons, drinks at Simeon's something, anything. Happy birthday, dear friend-o. This feels to me like our show, sorry, the cat's stepping on the computer if you hear some audio, is now becoming how Sheila is trying to get Cindy to call her back.

Yeah, I know. I like that. Please, can we do something? Hey, Cindy, please, return Sheila's calls. Happy Blur's Day, Cindy. Hope you both have a great time.

Yes.

Brent says, Could you please mention my wonderful wife's birthday, which is on Friday? Beth has been a dedicated 10 for a long time and would love to hear her birthday called out on her favorite podcast. She's a great mom and my best friend. Well, absolutely. Happy Blur's Day, Beth, from Brent and us.

Also, Ashley says happy ninth birthday to our five page. She's on her way to Idaho, filling her birthday with adventures and camping and water parks. Oh, I wonder which water park in Idaho. was there one that was associated with what was there was a place called like Silver Something that when we used to sometimes be in Spokane we'd be staying out at this lake house that my parents friends had we would also go Silverton Silver Something I wonder if there was a water park associated with that I loved it back in the day I wonder if Paige is going to the same place Ashley says Paige you're amazing so smart talented and you're my actual favorite person in the whole world come on i mean that's adorable uh don't get too car sick just nap or focus on the road ahead at the moment you're sleeping in the next room as i write this and i miss you already love you my goodness that is that is absolutely adorable also i'm reminded uh when i think about page being out there in idaho of the time when um this was during tbtl times i rented a little place kind of on the lake on loon lake out there um and uh sammy and david and addy were all out there in fact we had the whole family out there for various periods of time and we went to costco and bought a pizza like one of those ones that's made but you got to cook it yourself it was all wrapped in saran wrap we're driving my audi space car and for some reason the back there was so much food that the back hatch had not closed correctly and the pizza flew out and landed in the middle of the highway and we grabbed it it was the only thing that flew out of the car took a picture put it back in the car drove home cooked it and ate it and we called it road pizza that sounds like something out of a movie it was totally like something out of a vague a national lampoon's vacation movie this or like don't tell mom the babysitter's dead type of it so hermetically sealed that it was okay but i i gotta find that picture in the cloud of a young addy sam and dave all standing around this pizza that's sitting in the middle of the road in idaho

um speaking of water parks by the way the music naturally ended there we still have more blurs days to do but since the music ended and this gives me an opportunity to play some audio here um i grew up in ohio as you know my park of choice was cedar point which was an amusement park that did have a little like a water park area built into it but we never really messed with that But there was also a amusement park that I had never been to before called Geauga Lake. In fact, you were in Ohio in Geauga County. I was in Geauga County. Yeah, exactly. And Geauga Lake had, I think it was like, you know, roller coasters and stuff like that. But then they also introduced a water park feature and it was called Turtle Beach. And I'm going to play this audio. I do not know how bad this audio is, if this is going to work at all, if the link is dead. I don't know.

But I remember these commercials from my youth of this cartoon turtle who's interacting with real-life children, but a cartoon turtle that is just the epitome of, like, 90s cartoon cool character. Like, it's a little turtle with sunglasses, and he's given, like, the hang-a-loo symbol, and he always says, Turtle Beach, dude.

So not to be confused with the turtle that was crapping its absolute brains out in Australia.

This is not Spooch the Turtle, although I do assume that there's some relation there. Let's see if I can get this to play.

All the kids are beach found Turtle beach beach found Tasty waves Turtle beach

Tasty waves

It comes from everywhere Everybody's having fun Soaking in the sun Totally liquid Flip flash Go soak Slip fly Totally soaked Gnarly

Gnarly

You tell me if I can't That's Yaga Lake, dude

At Yaga Lake, dudes.

I don't know if it was just me, but that was very, very, very quiet. I don't know if you want to go back and boost it or just how it was coming to me.

Yeah, no, I'm going to have to boost it and post a little bit.

But I was able to pick up that they had some, did they say Tasty Waves?

Tasty Waves.

Because don't you, there's a drop that you play that has someone else saying Tasty Waves, I feel. Oh, is that? Sometimes in the course of an intro package.

Is that true? I know we have the surfers who are like, it's pitted, totally pitted.

Oh, that guy. Who could forget?

Oh, you know, Tasty Waves is from Fast Times at Ridgemont High. It's Spicoli, right? That would make sense. So I'm going to look here. Did I isolate that and use that? I kind of didn't realize that. Let me do this. I mean, this is good. I mean, I think that I'm successfully.

This is how we're celebrating Kristen in Kansas City's birthday this weekend.

Yeah, you want to read that?

I'm going to look for Tasty Waves. Kristen in Kansas City says, I want to wish myself a happy 40th Blur's Day. My Blur's Day wish is that my fellow tens donate whatever their finances allow. Oh, God, Kristen. I didn't think we could like you anymore. I think Kristen was part of the crew that picked us up. Absolutely, yes. We took the bus. Yep. Unless we've got multiple Christens in Kansas City. Yep. Kristen says, my Blur's Day wish is that the fellow 10s would donate whatever their finances allow to the upcoming TBTL-a-thon so that we can all enjoy it for many more blurs to come. And also world peace, which is going to happen sooner. TBTL-a-thon will raise record amounts of money or world peace.

I don't know. Well, I mean, the Wagner group has turned around. Sure. Yes. We have some peace there, I guess.

All I need are some tasty waves, cool buzz, and I'm fine.

So that's Sean Penn, right? Yes. It's the weirdest. We don't really have time for this. We should all be getting on with, and I mean this mostly for the listeners, we should be getting on with our lives. But I would argue that as far as breakout roles go that are more wildly divergent from what the person's overall oeuvre turned out to be, I'd put Spicoli up there. Like, Sean Penn mostly stars in hella serious movies where he's being super serious, and yet he broke in as Spicoli. That's always really funny to me.

yeah I'm trying to I guess yeah more so than I was gonna I was gonna throw this out here but now I'm already regretting my words I'm pretty regretting my words what about Woody Harrelson I mean that's kind of that was just on my mind because I watched some some old cheers the other day and you're just like looking at you're looking at Woody Harrelson as like this not not tertiary certainly secondary character who's just like playing this sort of like dumb dumb young guy

Indiana Hoosier.

Yeah, right. And then and of course, like he's not that Ted Danson doesn't have a great career himself and that he isn't celebrated enough these days. But like he still eclipses like Ted Danson, the star of that show, as a as a as a A-list movie star, you know?

Yes, but I would absolutely. But what I'm saying is the character, like the next few characters that and I'm sure I'm leaving out a bunch of Sean Penn stuff that people will email in and correct me on. but I guess what I mean is Spicoli is such a sort of vapid kind of silly thing to be and then you have a person who's most of their career has been being super duper serious whereas Woody Harrelson in like white men can't jump and other movies is still playing kind of a light character and then it was only later I feel when he got into his real like true detective mode or something but I don't know I just I always forget that Sean Penn was also Spicoli because I guess I just hold those characters in such different categories in my brain of like you know some movie where he's like in a war-torn country trying to help you know refugees get out alive versus tasty waves

yeah right right aloha mr hand anyway i'm gonna stop doing my spicoli imitation you know i am too you were talking about that and i'm wondering should i just go buy like a pizza from papa

murphy's and i'm not kidding when i thought about that pizza lying on the road my first thought was I could really go for some pizza. Me too. I'm going to a port. portland pickles game tonight andrew god damn that's awesome that's great get some get yourself a hat i've got a um i've got a baseball bat of beer i i bought last season i don't know if it transfers season to season my guess would be they get a new bat each season yeah probably i forgot

that you actually did that because i saw somebody drinking out of a baseball bat of beer on instagram the other day and i was really hoping to buy one at the rainiers game but the rainiers game is a little bit I think that's even still too much of a mature league to have baseball bats full of beer I think you got to go to like what double a or high a to get those yeah whatever level the

pickles play at but I'm not even really a beer drinker but there's something about filling up a baseball bat yeah it's a plastic cup that's shaped like a baseball bat and then what I did last year and I plan on doing it again this year is filled it up with beer and then pretended to be using it to hit and then took a picture not unlike my little baseball card from when I played

for domino's pizza but was there so you were holding it very carefully there was beer in the bat was it all the way to the top it was a slosh all the way to the tippy top so i had to really have good form nice nice congratulations all right well that's great i'm i'm kind of i'm a little jealous that sounds like a lot of fun um yeah you know uh honestly i've been i've been

jealous that uh you know you guys have been all able to go to more mariners games than me although So based on recent performance, I'm feeling less jealous and more OK about going to the Portland Pickles with my bat, O'Beer.

Yeah, you know, it's funny. It's such a busy time for me that I'm worried that, like, I'm not in the space to enjoy it as much as I want to. But I'll get there. But, like, don't forget the week after the Thon, I'll be going to the All-Star Game and the Home Run Derby on Monday and Tuesday of that week. So I'm hoping that, first of all, I can get out of here early so I can get to the ballpark. But also, hopefully I'll have some stories for you. I mean, it's very exciting to think of that. I mean, this is...

I'll be at Dragathon raising money for the Trevor Project while you'll just be off getting drunk at some baseball game watching Overpriced Millionaires.

That Dragathon is not happening during a weekend? It's happening...

It's just about life choices. No, it's... At least my shift is like July 10th. Oh, okay. That's a... Is that when... Is that when... That's when the beginnings of the... That's like the Home Run Derby or something, right?

Yeah, that's Monday. So, okay. So the Dragathon starts on a Monday. That's interesting. Or at least it takes place across a Monday. That's interesting. Yeah.

It's like going straight. You know what I mean? I think it starts, like, Monday night and then goes until, like, Wednesday night and never stops. Yeah, nice. Anyway, all right. We're going to be back here tomorrow. Hey, by the way, we have a big announcement tomorrow. Yes, we do. Yes, so we are going to— We have an exciting development for the program.

Yes, and about the future of this show and this business that we've started.

Oh, and also—do I have this right? Tomorrow's episode, we're going to also announce what the, like, thank you gifts are for the Thon and everything. We're going to tell you everything you need to know about the Thon, correct?

Exactly. So, and we, yeah, exactly. We're going to make an announcement tomorrow about the future of TVTL, and it's a good announcement, and we are going, just don't be worried about that, and also.

We've signed Carvana.

It's related to the TVTL-a-thon, I should say that, in a certain way, and also we will be telling you what our plans are for the thon, how you can donate, we're going to open up our donation page and send you links to that, and also tell you what we're going to be trying to thank you with for your generous donation, so it's all happening.

I'll probably say this a lot tomorrow as well, but, like, if you're going out on vacation for the 4th of July week and you want to just, like, check this off your list, you can just, I mean, starting tomorrow, the donation site will be live, and you can donate and then not have to think about it again. You don't even have to listen to the THON if you don't want to, because you'll have done the important work.

You should. That's going to be fun.

Actually, it will be a fun. I think it's going to be very fun. I just realized we're literally going to my parents' basement. Yeah. Like, Sunday, you and I are going to be in my—I don't know, like, what's down there. I don't know what the setup is. I haven't given—I mean, they know we're coming. There's three pallets of TBTL swag outside their house.

I know what's going to be down there is going to be a lot of TBTL lunchboxes that I plan on sitting on. Can we pile up a bunch of lunchboxes that I sit atop while I do the show?

It sounds very uncomfortable. Yep, but worth it. And also precarious. I'm a performer, baby. Yes, I know you are by nature, and you like heights. So we're going to do that. Yeah, it's a tower. All right. Thanks, everybody. We'll be back here tomorrow with that big announcement as we roll into the TBTL-a-thon week and end our time as employees of American public media. I still can't believe that's happening tomorrow. All right. Thanks for listening. We'll see you then. In the meantime, please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all.

for the double cheese and sausage am i hallucinating here just what in the hell do you think you're doing learning about cuba having some food power out