Muse

What's TBTL on your phone?

What's your favorite show?

TBTL. Can we please do TBTL?

Yep, we can do TBTL. TBTL!

For the next little while, it's going to be you and me together alone. I want you to lock the door and turn the phone off and really concentrate on what we're going to do.

Be honest, what is it about me that no one respects? respect that my hair yeah i'm thinking about getting a new haircut changing stuff up maybe getting like an arnie schwarzenegger jingle all the way type of haircut isn't that for techno geeks with red cheeks we hang out like friends like the friends from that program friends

what's that noise uh hey that's the radio dear 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 you're

about to see some serious voices my name is luke burbank i am your host hello everyone as i was

getting all of the audio drops ready to go for today's program and trudging between my little cottage and the madrona hill studio uh i uh it was it was gross outside it was raining it was not dry it was didn't know you like to get wet though and so i had dialed up our favorite piece of audio related to that kind of weather but now weirdly in the like eight minutes of doing the sound check sun has come out stopped raining i'm looking across the mighty columbia and there are these forest hillsides that are just covered in snow and I have to say in the words of

Okay, alright, sorry

I don't think I've played the entirety of that clip in a while I was playing it on yesterday's show but mercifully for everyone, I was truncating it I apologize I'm going to try to get the nose up here on the rest of episode 4107 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Interesting piece in the Washington Post that Andrew sent me about myths when it comes to your hotel stay. And what they did was they interviewed folks, the hardworking folks that do housekeeping. Housekeeping! Just to find out if, you know, like the bedspreads are actually as kind of gross as we worry they might be, et cetera. So we're going to basically tell you some truths and some falses about your next big hotel stay. Also, it's a Thursday, a.k.a. Blur's Day, so do some Blur's Day messages. My guess is we'll have kind of a long list here after the Winter Games. Oh, and we're going to talk to this guy, the longest-running co-bro of the show.

Oh, I guess I just have my first taste of the filthy side of this business.

He may be best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He is Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend.

Good morning, Luke. I had a radio fantasy this morning, and I've had a lot of radio fantasies, as I'm sure you'd expect from a guy like me. This is the first time I've had this particular fantasy, though, because in this fantasy...

Do you mean a dream or a fantasy?

No, I was daydreaming. I was in the shower, and I was thinking about our own program and a segment that's coming up later today. and I just my brain wandered and I thought you know if I were the producer or program director of a station that had like kind of a I don't know I don't know if these shows really sound like what I remember them sounding like in the 80s and 90s but if I had like a morning zoo style show that I was like a producer of I had an idea for a segment which by the way I want to say like um you know Trigger warning to our listeners, this is antithetical to what we do on TBTL. This is, I mean, quite the opposite. We are about creating bonds and friendship here on TBTL. But I was thinking if I had like one of those really crass sort of, you know, hard-edged morning zoo shows in the 90s, you could do the opposite of Blur's Days where you have a listener line where people call to break up with people. And I was like, wouldn't that be a very popular? Is that something that exists, by the way? Yes. Do you think I'm just ripping this off?

Well, there's a version of that. I was listening to it the other day, actually. Really? Oh. Yeah. I was listening to Jubal in the Morning. So the thing that happens if I happen to get up on the pretty early side is by 8 a.m. I've already heard all of Morning Edition. And that sounds like a brag. What a sad brag that would be. I just mean sometimes it'll be like 8 a.m. and I'm

I'm like, I can't handle re-hearing this piece again, whatever it might be. So I'm looking for something else. The other day I was coming back from my jog, and so what did I find but Jubal in the Morning, which is, I think, a show that's on a handful of stations kind of out here in the Northwest. But they're one of many, many morning shows that use these paid actors to, some places call it phone taps, some call it War of the Roses. So War of the Roses is you send somebody roses, and then the idea is that you send them like anonymously, and then you call them up, and then they think it's from the wrong person, therefore exposing themselves as having multiple people on the hook or whatever, or these crazy dating stories or crazy stories of infidelity, and it's riveting radio. the problem is it's all made up there is a service there are multiple services that do this and when i tell this to people i always feel like i'm stealing a little part of their happiness because um usually it feels like it's news to the people i'm telling that those that's all made up

well the blurs days are made up too oh wouldn't that be a plot twist we pay and i don't make them up myself we pay a service to write in i mean that's what i love about it they're not even you don't i have actors write blurs days and send them that are too long that you then have to edit during the program they're like but i'm an actor i'm like yeah act like a writer

start writing i love that that's such a like the the level of subterfuge there so we've hired a team of people to write the blursday messages but then we pretend or at least you do you pretend to kind of occasionally find it tedious and comment uh both on and off air that sometimes the the uh the messages could be a little more concise but all of this is just to throw everyone off the

scent that this is all a fabrication that we're paying ten thousand dollars a year for a service to send it in fake blurs days but wait a second what you described isn't that doesn't sound like people calling in to like break up like hey this is this is jimmy that's why i said there's a

version of it because people do break up i see a person will be like my no good cheating boyfriend i caught him doing x y and z and now i'm breaking up with him but but it's maybe not what you described which is the entire raison d'etre of the thing is that people are breaking up instead

of celebrating birthday just leaving a voicemail but honestly though as i was just saying that to you like i i'll bet you a million bucks i've heard that segment before and that just probably years and years ago i was driving somewhere and i heard that you know in high school or something and i'm thinking it's a new idea now there's no way somebody didn't have a breakup line at some point in the 90s on their morning zoo show right i mean it must have already existed i went down a

bit of a commercial radio morning show rabbit hole yesterday i was reading a piece in the i'm gonna always get this wrong i guess it's sf gate right i always used to call it the chronicle it's not the chronicle anymore it's just sf gate and they were talking about something andrew that's well relevant to our interests or our previous interest which is there is this big behemoth of a kind of radio and content company called audacity um and they filed for bankruptcy um because they're in a lot of debt and they're trying to restructure that debt now the reason it's interesting to us is because one of the companies that i believe they also own is the company that if you enjoyed all of those carvana ads that were airing on tbtl by the way those i always you know i'd sort of use that as shorthand for annoying ads you are so lucky my friends and listeners and fellow country people because when i listen to a lot of podcasts and boy just the fact that we never did a new genics ad oh just the fact that we never got into the the supplement side of like advertising like yeah those carvana ads were kind of inane but they were we weren't actively telling people to put something in their body of questionable

origin well and we and by design though i mean right yeah we were turned down most things that were like and i you know i don't know to what degree they were shady i'm not accusing anybody of coming to us with shady things but i basically said nothing that claims health benefits or that

we put in our bodies to claim nothing that claims to improve our junk well certainly yeah honestly how do you improve on perfection right of course but so you know and and basically the deal is are the company that we used to work for now going on what eight months ago long long ago they kind of like sold uh all of the advertising slots all of the available time across all of the the shows to this company. and I you know I feel comfortable saying this I don't think this violates any of the contracts that I signed or maybe didn't sign but like I don't think we thought it was the the best approach it seemed to me like a kind of a defensive crouch I think it was Crouch cream being kind of like easy we can't we're not great at selling our advertising time so we're gonna go I mean that's not true I I didn't think it was the greatest thing for all of the shows. Anyway, I will be honest, there was a certain amount of schadenfreude, a certain amount of satisfaction, I think, that I won't speak for you, Andrew, but that I felt when after we had moved away from that model, after we had struck out on our own, we found out that that company was not even paying their bills. Like, we had handed over all this airtime to them, the various shows had, And that company was not solvent. And it confirmed, I think, our suspicions about how it wasn't a great business model. And there were a lot of things about that weren't ideal. So yesterday, there was the announcement that this company, Audacity, is filing for bankruptcy. And they just happened to mention, because this was SFGate, the different stations in the San Francisco Bay Area market that were owned by Audacity. and one of them they just said including uh alice i think it's like alice 97 3 is that what yeah alice 97 3 featuring the popular sarah and vinnie morning show and i was just like oh man i want to see what the sarah and vinnie morning show is like because that's just just the name of it in the fact that it's on a station called al there's a there's a few i think there are a few alice stations around the country it's a certain kind of format generally and it did not disappoint the the the the tile if you will the like promotional photo for that show and i'm not i'm not i'm not uh crap talking here i'm not blowhardened but it's exactly kind of what you think a morning show on commercial radio in 2024 is going to be it's two people holding guitars rocking out like it's the most morning show photo i've probably ever seen and i there was something

about it that i found deeply comforting i'm looking at i'm looking at it now in case you couldn't tell what yeah because i was on the alice website i was like oh yeah it just looks like kind of a cut and paste kind of janky um commercial radio website but then i went to the show and yeah it's just kind of like they're not holding oversized pencils but no which was my move once

NPR yeah and they're not playing the guitars I mean what it clearly happened for the photo and I've been in photos like this this is this is you know why I why I'm speaking from experience here is they had there were props uh it was photos they wanted I'm sure it's a really fun show to listen to I'm sure that the fans of the show love love hearing it and love all of the enthusiasm and the energy and so the photos are supposed to reflect that but somebody handed them a couple of guitars and kind of said it does look like vinny is forming a chord i'm gonna say it looks like maybe vinny's playing a g but uh sarah's definitely not uh i don't think i think she

i'm looking closely here maybe she's way up the pretty high up the fret for that i mean maybe she's just high wiring like she's doing something with her fingers that doesn't just seem like she's

not just clamping her hand that's fair and i hope that wasn't overly gendered yeah um if i assumed that sarah wasn't playing because of her being a woman i don't think i was consciously doing that i just think it's because how she's holding guitar but basically they're doing like we're rocking out on guitar the way that i interpreted the photo was these people don't play guitar during the show they might by the way i don't know anything about them but really what this is is a way of kind of conveying to the casual person scrolling through the internet this is a show that rocks and a show that doesn't take itself too seriously um and i i'm not kidding i like found it deeply comforting because in in my younger days my dream in life would have been to be part of a morning show on a rock station I mean I could never get close to the closest I got to that was like traffic reporter where when I'd be on kick in country I would do the news sometimes and I would wouldn't do any news I would just do basically like a two-minute kind of joke monologue loosely tied to the news and the program director once called me at my desk because you're not in the building where the radio station is when you're a traffic reporter slash news person you you're on a bunch of stations and the guy just said i picked up the phone and he said just do the effing news and hung up so like that was i was i was not welcomed into this world of like cool fun morning rock radio and so i i've always kind of you know like i said it. It's it just really seemed like the most fun radio job you could have other than the hours and with all of the tumult in the industry, I was I found it very kind of heartwarming and I was like stoked to look at something that seemed very much familiar to me as far as morning radio goes.

Yeah, I'm looking at some of their topics now and I would listen to this. I mean, just based. First of all, one of the topics is that says Aaron Rodgers has been bounced from Pat McAfee. Was there an update? Yeah. Oh, I didn't know.

Yeah, it was literally when we got done with the show. Oh, really? I, like, walked into the house. I looked at my phone, because it had been over 40 seconds since I was staring at a digital thing, and it said Aaron Rodgers is booted for the season.

Oh, wait, wait, wait. You know what, though? I think that's a bit of a misnomer, unless, like, maybe I'm wrong about this, because, again, I haven't read deeply into it. But I feel like there was a lot going around yesterday where people were like, oh, he's not going to be on the show anymore. And it's like, yeah, he was never on the show except during regular NFL seasons. Like, it always would have ended there anyway. And that people were sort of changing the headline. It won't be until – it's my understanding that it won't be until next season when we'll find out whether or not he's – like, he would have always stopped doing it except during the regular season anyway. So, anyway.

I would be surprised – I'm surprised to hear that they don't have him for the playoffs. Like, before all of the, you know, Jimmy Kimmel stuff. Like, it seems to me that if you think, like, having Aaron Rodgers on the program is adding, you know, and I'll give him this much, it certainly generated some attention. Like, if you think it's good to have him on, why would you not have him on for the playoffs? I don't really get that.

I don't know, but I did see that, I don't know, I saw a lot of people kind of saying this is a kind of a, I don't know if misnomer is the wrong word there, but almost kind of a fake headline because that was always the plan, which seems reasonable to me, but I don't know. But anyway, I'm looking at this. I also really want to avoid talk. I've really enjoyed the past several shows where it gets to be like the one hour mark and you and I just go deep on whatever sports thing pops into our head. But I am making a concerted effort not to do too much of that. I always get irritated when listeners kind of complain about us doing it because I don't feel like we do it that much. But I will admit like the past few days, it has been a lot. So I'm going to try to respect that.

moderate to severe sports talk if you're if you've been suffering from moderate to severe sports talk on tbtl talk to your doctor about it yeah we're trying to kind of uh keep that you know to a to

a minimum but um sarah is not trying sarah is trying not to be the anti-hype man i'm interested in knowing what is also a third season of children ruin everything is that a tv show or is this a segments that sarah and um vinnie are doing themselves i cannot confirm or deny that i would

be interested in these things yeah i mean it's i i wonder this is what i was thinking when i turned on jubel in the morning the other day was i wonder well i was about to say i wonder who the demo is but i guess i know who the demo is it's people that are driving to work or driving their kids to school and they want to listen to something and they're not like that they're either they've already listened to all of morning edition or they just that's not really their vibe and i guess there's still that's still a significant number of people significant enough to support morning radio shows i mean i think a handful of them right like that's the thing because with the way commutes have changed and the nature of work and things like that uh you know you wonder how many morning radio shows are going to are going to be around in in five years it seems like it's kind of an old-school model of broadcasting but I don't know I mean this is the thing that I have always said about this is I still feel like it's one button versus like three buttons and somehow we cannot get the podcasting thing down to one button like if you get in the car yeah you and I you know I'm I listen to a lot of podcasts I listen to a lot of serious radio I bounce around a lot so I'm used to it but like if you're a normal person and you get in the car and you can either hit a button and be listening to your radio or like see if the daily has downloaded yet and then hit that and then you know like hit the aux on your like i just to and i know i seem like an old person because there are people that like their phone bluetooth to their stereo and it maybe is kind of like one button that just still feels to me like and maybe this is going to change pretty soon but it feels like even in 2024 there's a teeny bit more that goes into trying to get your favorite podcast when you're driving your car than just turning on the

radio yeah no absolutely that's that's a i've said it a million times so i won't do the whole spiel again but it's the same when i like don't have just streaming cable anymore you know when i say streaming cable i mean i can't just turn on the tv and there's just something on and i don't have to think about it like i have to think about which one of these apps i'm going to open and then which one of the top tiles I'm going to click on right it's just like I it's easier if I can just turn something on and it's like okay I don't I don't really care about what I'm watching right now I just can't be alone with my thoughts so I should just be able to push this one button speaking of radio I heard on the local all things considered broadcast yesterday our friend Danny O'Neill being interviewed about the Pete Carroll the coach of the Seahawks who lost his coaching job yesterday we talked about that quite a bit but anyway I thought it was interesting I could be wrong about this but I I don't care. I'm going to bust his chops anyway. I swear Danny was doing a public radio voice. Like, I've listened to a lot. I love it. I've listened to a lot of Danny, and Danny used to host a show, like my favorite show, on the 710 Sports AM station.

Was it not the voice he used when he almost fought an Alabama fan from the luxury box that we were all in there in Atlanta?

That would be amazing. Like, if somebody could, like, redub that chaos with him doing his public radio voice, it would be fantastic.

As he's dressed effectively like Grimace. Because he had a head-to-toe sweatsuit that was purple and, I believe, a bucket hat.

Like a Run DMC style, like in a tracksuit, right?

Yes, with the hat, and it was purple because, of course, we were there supporting the Huskies. But I said yesterday at the end of the program that I would give you all an update on what my mom had to say about Pete Carroll because I feel like my mom low-key has a sort of a crush on Pete Carroll because he's actually older than her, but I feel like he's her Tom Selleck. He's a nice-looking person for his age. He's got energy. He's got a cool job. So I'm always curious about my mom's thought on Pete Carroll. And it was a little underwhelming. She jumped into the Hawk Squad at about 3 o'clock, And she just said, I left my phone at home all day while I was at a sub job. So that was what I suspected. She was subbing for the school district. But I'm just getting the news now. I figured as much.

That's what your dad said. You were dubious.

My dad said, yeah, I figured this was going to happen sometime soon. Raising the question, should my mom and dad be hosting some kind of like sports talk, you know, first take. No, what if it's called. Good morning football type show.

What if it's called After the Fact? where after anything happens they claim yeah we saw that coming that's their show i love it i love the show i am really in commercial radio program director mode this is so yeah like i'm seeing children ruin everything is like a cbc show and it looks like this commercial radio show just wants to talk about season three but like i also could see a call-in segment where people can you know it's like i love my kids but you know like i love the idea of people i'm a big fan of the live call in if you can tell most of my ideas swirl and i use the word swirl on purpose most of my most of my ideas flush around the idea of people calling in and complaining about something do i mean that's

another thing i feel like that has i guess sports radio still does it uh the over the air sports broadcast but that's kind of one of the last places like i feel like talk radio i can't remember the last time i listened to like uh cairo style of radio but i don't get a sense that they take calls

anymore on those kinds of stations i don't think so i don't think so which i mean i don't know

again it was probably just the time where has that gone have we lost interest in that is tiktok we talked a lot about tiktok yesterday so i don't need to get into that again but like what happened to the what did you talk about the masculine urge the other day masculine urge to dig what happened what has happened to the masculine urge to call a radio station and say first time long time yeah Like, that was a big part of, you know, my teenage years when I started listening to sports talk and then talk radio in general. And last night I was listening to, sometimes I will listen to my Dreamland radio, which is just old episodes of Coast to Coast with Art Bell when Art Bell was on. And my God, the calls that they take are just spectacular. But like, did we just as a culture stop caring, like stop wanting to call in and tell and really get something off our chest to a radio host, be it Larry King coast to coast or, you know, Bruce Williams on TalkNet or whatever? Like that just seems like it's kind of gone away outside of sports talk radio. It's kind of gone away.

And, you know, I have some theories on that. I think it started to fade into the background around the time of social media, because I feel like stations found like, oh, there are other more curated ways that we can engage with our audience without just having. Because the thing about the thing that I love that I think you love potentially about call and radio is that there's a good possibility that call is going to be a total disaster. And I love I love that. But I could understand program directors being like, well, why would we run the risk of it just being like both bad radio and somebody.

saying something that could get us in trouble like there are better I just feel like there was less of an appetite for it because people thought it was kind of bad radio but like for me that was like you know I've talked a lot of shit about uh John Clayton rest in peace uh who used to be on 710 and of course ESPN as a sports analyst and broadcaster and like my favorite thing that he did or maybe you would even say kind of the only thing I liked that he did on the radio was his weird ass Saturday show like he ended up having a weekday show that I didn't really care for that much he didn't fit that sort of you know trying to be a more kind of polished midday radio host just didn't work but on Saturdays nobody was minding the store and Clayton would just go on the radio in the morning and it was all these guys with terrible phone lines but he knew all of them it was just like you know oh okay we're gonna go to Fat Jack in Bellevue or whatever and then like Fat Jack is still drunk from the night before. You can hear it. And he doesn't even have to give any context for what he's jumping into. And he might even just start by having a personal conversation with John. Like, it was a disaster. It was so good, though. I loved it. And, like, I didn't have to know who Fat Jack was the first time I heard it. Like, everything was right. All the context was right there for me.

But do you feel like the Fat Jacks of the world now kind of more broadly speaking have just gone on to their, like, Twitter feed? their own yeah like where's they gone yeah so we're the the people that used to be calling into talk radio are now just putting those same thoughts out on social media maybe so they don't have that unexpressed need to and also again i don't think that that's what's driving i think

it's the radio side that's not opening up the phone lines anymore or are you so that's pushing

people to their social media if they could call in uh they they would well i guess i confuse things

When I said social media, I just sort of remember back in, like, the early 2000s, and this is public radio for me, it sort of seemed like we were moving away even in public radio from having call-in segments of our show because there were other ways that we could get listeners to interact with us. And we were so excited about it. You know, whatever, Facebook or pre-Facebook or email. And it was just a way of, like, kind of controlling the radio waves a little bit more.

Right, we thought we could take them and make them into better content contributors By sort of like putting it in an email or pre-recording them, call the voicemail line Like all these things, because let's be honest, most people, I could put myself on this list Most people who are radio professionals are not great at talking to total strangers and making it interesting Repeatedly, and so there was like, well, why would we just take a random call and we could like curate this make it just like the most sizzling 45 seconds of all time which i don't know i mean i guess there's some logic to that but you know who is great with calls is howard stern and what's great about it is he has no patience yeah you tell me that but he takes them at the weirdest times like he's in the middle of talking to somebody be they could be famous or it could just be like his wife or something and then uh what's the funny here's what's here's what's actually kind of great about the the phase of life that howard stern is in right now he is so down on podcasting but he's doing a podcast yeah he just doesn't know it he's at his house because when covet hit he didn't want to go into the studio anymore so he's got this like well-appointed studio at his house on long island he's got another one at his house in florida and half the show now is him texting his wife to come down to the studio to talk about an argument they just had it's a fucking podcast and it's good but it's but anyway he'll take calls and and like it's wild to me how quickly he gets annoyed at the callers and i gotta get out of this i gotta get out of this like it's like well why'd you take the call but then other times a call will be terrible but he'll just leave them on the line they're just you can hear them breathing they don't even say anything for six minutes of like they'll start out saying something and then the conversation will migrate and then they're just still there six minutes later it's like it's spectacular radio i really it's really like one

of my favorite things about that show it's so messy we can take calls by the way on i know why we can do it we could we could somebody tell fat jack our phone number 206-414-tbtl sober up fat jack and give us a call or have another one i have a bit of a new podcast obsession i'd like to tell you about. It's called The Distraction from our friends over at Defector. It's hosted by Drew McGarry and David Roth. Now, you've heard Luke and I obsess over David and Drew's writing over the years. And I just started listening to the podcast, I don't know, a month or two ago. And I knew I was already addicted when after listening to one episode, I quoted it like a thousand times the next weekend. They were interviewing one of the showrunners from The Simpsons. And I didn't even realize until

like more than halfway through the show that it was also ostensibly a sports podcast well it's about sports it's also about movies and art and sandwiches and getting irritated by people who are talking on their cell phone in public with a speakerphone that's something that's very close to my heart as well each week these guys tackle all kinds of subjects serious and impossibly stupid their words not mine but i'll back it up if you like the kind of show we're doing here at tbtl i I think you're going to like this podcast as well, especially if you, like me, have at least a casual interest in sports. So dial it up on your podcast app or surf on over to Defector dot com for more.

Hey, let's thank some donors who are making TBTL possible with their financial support. We don't have all that big audacity money anymore That they weren't actually sending So we're leaning on people like Becky Day In Aberdeen, Washington

Oh, did you do a lilt there?

I was, because Aberdeen's in Scotland I've really got Scotland on the brain From all this Shetland, Andrew

Oh, the Shetland you've been watching, yeah

I was really, Becky, just to go with me on this I have to say, I really never know what my dad's reaction to things is going to be. He does not respond to things in the way that I'm expecting or that maybe typical people would. So we, every night when we're working on the house, our big tradition is we watch this BBC show called Shetland, which is just like a crime show based in the Shetland Islands. It's based on an island called Lerwick And wouldn't you know When I'm flying from Seattle over to Germany I'm looking at that screen on the plane When you're doing international flight Which shows you where you are And I'm flying over Lerwick I'm like what are the chances I take a picture and I send it to him And then when I'm flying home like two days later I fly over Lerwick again I take a picture and I send it to him I'm like look what I'm flying over This is all we do at night is watch Shetland Finally, he cuts. So then, you know, he comes back down. We're working on the house. And I go, I flew over to Larwick. Isn't that crazy? Like, this is a weird random thing in the Atlantic or North Sea or wherever it is. And he goes, I don't think that came through. And I go, you didn't get this photo? And then I showed him the photo. He goes, oh, yeah, I got that one. He said, I had a feeling you'd send that photo. Exactly. And your mother did as well. And I go, I just, I got a little, our relationship, my dad and mine's relationship is evolving a little bit in probably a good way which is it's like they used to say on the real world this is what happens when people when they stop being nice and they start getting real like we don't stand on ceremony anymore me and walt like i just said to him when's the last time you were in lerwick and he was i've never been there i go exactly that's why it was notable that i was flying over it he goes all right good point these are the conversations that we have now by the way

By the way, really quickly before we thank more donors, you know, I think some listeners were wondering how the flight actually ended up being. I assume it was fine, but you had read some email from a listener of horror stories flying on that airline.

I was on Condor Air. It was totally fine. I got the new plane both ways. I think what happened to our listener was there was a mishap. Are we calling it a mishap? Was it a mid-air mishap?

It was an onboard oopsie.

There was a problem with the plane and the listener basically had to They sent a different airplane, an older one that was smaller So a bunch of people got kicked off the flight and it didn't have Wi-Fi Well, I'll tell you what, this one didn't have Wi-Fi either But it had like 8 million movies And I also was reading Jeff Tweedy's latest book Which Becca got me for Christmas and it's great It's like 100 songs that changed my life or something he's just writing about songs that you know he have meant something to him but of course because he's Jeff Tweedy it's like the writing is just so funny and relatable and it's not even really about music it's just kind of about his life and weird uncles he had and not weird uncles in that way just you know like the cousin who you know taught him smoke on the water or whatever it's just a wonderful book so anyway I was fine on that the flight turned out to be relatively easy peasy for being you know eight hours each direction and it worked you got your you get your

point my precious precious status i mean was there a question i mean could you have done all of this

and then come no i double checked and triple checked but what the thing because it's a different airline um even though it's like a partner airline the person i talked to at alaska said don't sit near the door no they said um uh they said uh really hang on to your paperwork because if that doesn't transfer over in the system you're gonna have to verify this so like you've never i've never clutched a paper ticket closer to my heart because i was like if i get back from this whole thing and they can't verify that i did this and this was for not i am going to be really bummed out so yeah but i

I mean, that'd be an outlay of some cash.

Cash, time, energy, all of that. But it was totally fine. I didn't have to verify it. It whisked right over into the proper account. I also got a bunch of miles from that flight, like some kind of cuckoo bonus situation. So it all worked out just fine, which brings me to Jake Bowman in Tacoma, Washington. Hey, it's our friend Jake. We love Jake. Jake is a big, big Husky fan. Jake and I often text about Husky Nation down there in Tacoma, which is interesting, Andrew, because another name on this list, and I don't know if I can confirm this or not. We also need to thank Jen Cohen in Cherry Hill, New Jersey. Do you think that's the athletic director for the Huskies, Jen Cohen? And has she been commuting from Cherry Hill, New Jersey?

Also, wait, she's the former athletic director now, right? Or is this the new athletic director? Is she gone? Yeah, I'm pretty sure she.

Well, that makes it possible this is the same. Did Jen Cohen move to Cherry Hill, New Jersey?

I'm looking up the press release here. You know what Veeves and I got on a tangent on the other day?

Possibly written by your partner?

Yeah. Oh, Jen Cohen went to USC. USC, right, right, right. I knew it was somebody in the conference. I just couldn't quite remember it. No, Genevieve doesn't write press releases anymore, And the reason I know that is because she and I got in this whole conversation the other day, and I think you'll appreciate this, about whether or not press releases still have the four hash marks at the bottom of them to indicate you can stop reading now. Is that what the purpose of that is? I mean, I don't know what. I mean, I'm assuming that that is some holdover from, I don't know, the faxing. Yeah, like faxing. Like this is the end of the message.

Because it probably was like all day long. Don't you remember? Yeah. The fact of me just spitting out press release after press release was probably to say, this is where we're done talking and where the next press release picks up. Yeah, it might even predate that, Luke.

I'm wondering if it might even be like some sort of a newswire thing. I worked in a newsroom. Shipped to shore. I assume you did too. Did you ever work in a newsroom that just had a machine that every now and then would come to life? Not a fax machine, but like almost like a ticker tape, only it wasn't ticker tape?

Yeah, I mean, we had the AP. Yeah, I think maybe that's what I'm thinking of. And you would, I don't think, if I remember right, at least in the early days, God, we're old. In the early days, I don't think it was the kind of thing where everyone had the AP on their computer. Yeah. I think you would go to the AP computer, which would just be centrally located in the newsroom, and you would print stuff out.

Oh, this wasn't that. This was literally a machine. It was not a fax machine, and it sat in the archive room of the newsroom. But it was kind of loud And it would just spring to life sometime And I think it was maybe AP stories But also Ohio The Ohio News Bureau or whatever The Capitol News Bureau And stories And I feel like press releases too Would just And it was one long roll of paper And it would just spit these things out And that's where Rip and Read came from You would literally just rip it off this machine And read it only you know like there was some vetting in the newsroom that i worked in but yeah boy i mean so that was like we weren't even like getting that stuff via computer at all it was just coming in via this machine that was just like you know somebody would send it we didn't ask for it it just came into this it physically came into the newsroom i miss old media we were so connected

yeah right it's funny because i sit around most of the time waxing kind of nostalgic about how things used to be and i do feel that way in a lot of sort of ways that i do think there was something kind of good about having a handful of reasonably trusted news sources and then you know giving everyone 24 hours to figure out the next phase of the story as opposed to this a constant content hole that exists that we have to fill um that being said boy were we in the dark about a lot of stuff circa 1999 versus now like if you're sitting in imagine sitting in the newsroom at k-u-o-w now versus sitting in the newsroom in 1999 as i was when all of a sudden the ap computer or printer just starts with yeah you know like pops to life i mean that that was that was how you found things out and then you were like like you said probably handing it to ken vincent yeah running onto the running onto the air anyway uh jen cohen of cherry hill new jersey thank you very much, even if you're not the Jen Coen I was thinking. of you are the jen cohen that's keeping tbtl going which is more important and mary gerlach in aurora colorado is the mary gerlach who's helping tbtl thank you stay in existence today thanks mary connie evans checking in from stone mountain georgia god what a place i've been there

you have i have we always talk about the laser show at stone mountain that is sure right i forget Theorically problematic.

I always forget the fact that Vives is a Georgian. She seems so, I don't know what I think a person from Georgia is, but I forget that Genevieve is from Georgia. And that's not a statement about anybody from Georgia. She just doesn't have a Southern vibe to me anyway.

No, she doesn't. And, of course, we met in the Northeast, and I think her family, I think her mom didn't grow up in the South, for example. So I think Genevieve, she did grow up there. She legit spent her entire childhood and teen years there until she went off to college. But no, as we say on the show, I don't think Genevieve is culturally Georgia.

No, she's more culturally Edmunds. Now I'm hungry for Arby's. She's culturally Honolulu, Hawaii, which is where Matthew Scott is. Oh, Matthew. Thank you. Matthew. It's the time of year when I'm pretty jealous. Pretty jealous about you over there in good old Honolulu. So thank you.

I was in Honolulu almost exactly a year ago, and I didn't realize it, except I was scrolling through Instagram, and I saw a photo from listeners and friends who we ran into in Honolulu. And then kind of like did karaoke with and stuff, right? Exactly. And her caption was, it's listener Julie, and her caption was, I can't believe it's been exactly one year. And I was like, well, then that means it's been one year since I was there, too. In a certain way, it feels like a lifetime ago. I was going to ask you this earlier. Sorry, I'm really all over the place today.

But no, this is the kind of broadcasting that Matthew Scott pays for.

Matthew Scott in Honolulu, Hawaii. Yeah. I was going to say you mentioned when you were talking about something about our old days at American Public Media. And you said all those all that long time ago, like eight months or whatever it's been. I wasn't sure if you were being sarcastic. Like, does it feel like a lot longer than it's actually been? Like sometimes when I realize it's been less than one year since we went independent. independent and frankly just a little bit more than half a year it feels like we've lived lifetimes since we were part of american public media to me how does it feel to you i think because

of the immense good fortune i have to not be involved in the technical side of the show as far as posting and all of those hoops and let's be honest i rarely went to the all staff meetings i think i i am the same amount of connected to american public media now as i was a year ago if that makes any sense so from my experience which again i am extremely lucky that there's so little of the show falls on me it's like i get up in the morning i put a show sheet together i dial up my friend andrew walsh we talk we get a paycheck every two weeks we thank the donors it feels pretty similar to me and so i guess it's when i said that low those eight months ago i do think i was saying gosh that was a while ago i wasn't saying that like sarcastically like it hasn't been very much time in the moment i was saying that i was thinking oh yeah it has been a

while since we worked there and for me it's like it's like wow it hasn't been that long it feels so much longer and for me it's like thinking back to like i don't know the transition period of like just me being so worried about that rss feed transfer which is which is a legit worry by the way you knocked it out of the park well yeah i mean i all i had to do was worry everybody else the work but like it was just it just feels like it just that that just feels like ages ago i just can't believe that it's been it's been less than a year since that and also we should mention as we're wrapping up our thank yous for today that um we are still independent and we will be having

another tbtl-a-thon and yes the coming months and just having a meeting yesterday uh with tbtl employee numero uno john sklaroff and we were starting to float some ideas for this year's TBTL-a-thon yeah and we were also this is what always happens when we get together and we we talk business because we've been having other meetings too you know just kind of like putting we're still setting certain things up on the business side and meeting with people and we had a moment we were talking to somebody who's kind of like on the financial business building side and and I could actually at the end of the call I kind of noticed that this person I think there was a certain amount of kind of like wow you're really doing this like this is a real thing you're doing here you know you have a business and there's an income stream from these amazing donors and there's you know like this is a real thing and not a lot of people can say that um and then of course I did my thing which was like well manager he was like I gotta listen to your podcast and I was like well manage your expectations then I immediately regretted saying that because I don't know I mean I it's like my default setting is always to kind of over be overly deprecating about the about the show but what i feel a tremendous amount of pride in is that this is a real thing and you know we really work here and this is only uh possible because of these amazing donors but uh you know every once in a while i get reminded of that one other thing i'll mention is you know you don't have to wait to the tbt tbtlathon if you are are listening and you've always meant to support tbt I believe you can go to the website, right, tbtl.net, and there's probably a button somewhere.

There should be a button there, yeah, definitely.

I had that thought yesterday as we were discussing folks who signed up when we did the last one from my parents' basement and maybe a certain amount of attrition and also a certain amount of addition. So, yeah, if you're hearing this and you're like, God, I love that show, it's like the podcast answer to Sarah and Vinny in the morning. If you like it, you can always go to tbtl.net and help support the program. So thank you to all of our donors today for making TBTL happen. Hello, and welcome to Top Story. You sent me this article, Andrew, and of course it's way up my alley because I, mostly for my CBS job, end up staying in like a lot of hotels, and I have all my systems now and various thoughts about things. So this was a piece by Natalie Compton From the Washington Post Are bedspreads actually filthy Hotel employees debunk Ten old myths So They go through I guess we already kind of know the answer Which is everything I'm going to read you It turns out to not be true if they're already being called myths It's not sort of like True or false and some of them are true

No it is The myth is X now is the myth true or is the myth false you're right like they're maybe the word myth is a little yeah you're right maybe they should use the word myth but like things that you've heard about hotels that's a little bit wordier that way but things you've heard about hotels true or false

some of these are true and some are false yeah okay so thing you've heard about hotel number one

i have a way of just like again this is why i should be a no no i'm not i'm not trying to i'm

trying to subtweet you there like i'm the one that was confused about the very structure of this thing because again myth to me you've already said it's mythical it's not real yeah so that's but i don't listen i don't want to split hairs with natalie compton at the washington post i think this was a very good idea for a piece yes myth number one housekeepers skip cleaning daily because it's less work i'll be honest with you i don't i i don't know if i would have thought that or even heard that like i guess my assumption is if the room has been stayed in then it has to get cleaned and if no one stayed in it then obviously it doesn't i just kind of i i don't i don't know exactly what's being proposed here mythologically like is it that can i jump in because we actually

have talked about this on the show before to the degree that somebody then wrote in a hey dummies about this very topic that i answered um because this has to do with like you know let's say that You know, one person or family is staying in a room for several days and like kind of in the post-COVID era, we've seen hotels make the decision that housekeeping isn't going to come every day during your stay. It'll be clean when you arrive and they'll clean it maybe after you leave. And so one of the things that like kind of labor rights people were saying is this isn't not only by having housekeeping coming less often is that just kind of bad policy for those workers. and potentially takes, you know, work off the table, it also makes the work more difficult for them. Because, for example, like, do you have to clean up an overflowing trash can and a bunch of a week's worth of towels from this family? It's overflowing. And we had a listener who was like, that doesn't sound right to me. I think that, like, cleaning once after a two-day stay is probably just as easy as cleaning once after a one-day stay or cleaning it every day. I'm actually very much on the side of the housekeeping here, not only because I love it as a guest, but like I do think that like if I had to go in and clean a room and you were staying in a hotel, Luke, and I had to go in and clean up after you, I would rather do it every day and do a little bit of tidying and replace the mugs or whatever than do it after a three or four day stay when nobody's been in there to tidy up.

Well, that seems to be the response from somebody named Giancarlo Guetta, who directs two Hilton properties in Tulum, Mexico. And it said basically that they consider it protecting an asset. From the hotel's perspective, we don't look at this as cleaning your room. We see it as protecting our asset. So getting, you know, keeping the room clean and keeping it, you know, from getting totally out of hand is easier for the folks doing the housekeeping and also takes better care of the room itself you know it doesn't get as grungy i guess yeah myth number two and this is now where we're getting into this is the real uh you know social lubricant of life and also the thing that i have a lot of thoughts about myth you can sweet talk your way into an upgrade and then the reality they say is it might be true actually um they talked to uh somebody named judson corey who's the assistant director of guest experience at the waldorf astoria in chicago uh and judson says we've got a lot of parameters to honor upgrades um uh hotels particularly big name brands must factor in loyalty program membership uh i of course am a bonvoy member i mean actually in all of them but i don't have a lot of status with like the hilton folks it's like it's it's all it's all bonvoy for me all the the time that's marriott and so much like an airplane like i think probably in the 1980s maybe if you were trying to board the airplane and and you were you know you found a particularly sympathetic uh gate agent they might be able to slip you up into first class or something if you were having a bad day or going on bereavement or something like now you can't do that because i'm at the top of the list and i'm constantly refreshing the app you know you they there's no putting somebody in like first class because everyone who's in line for that because of their airline status knows exactly where they are on the line yeah everybody's playing the game all the everyone's playing the game now the i think that the hotel is a little more opaque like i don't know when i go to a bonvoy hotel if sometimes i get lucky and they go oh yeah we put you in a nicer room and uh and then some you know sometimes they don't and i don't know if if they put some other non bonvoy platinum elite person in uh in a room that they should have quote unquote put me and i'm also not as hung up on the hood particularly when i'm traveling for work if it's like if it's a decent hotel like if it's a residence inn or if it's any kind of normal hotel pretty much any room is fine for me i would like it if it's not staring at a giant air conditioning hood on the roof of the parking structure but short of that i'm not nearly as obsessed with my hotel roomage as i am with my airline seat kind of deal funny that you say that because i mean

immediately when i was first scanning this before i even sent it to you i i immediately was picturing very like i remember you told a story about how you were staying in like just sort of a mid-level hotel somewhere on one of your travels and like you spent a long time like i don't know kind of like negotiating with the person at the front desk because you didn't want to be looking out at a parking lot i thought that you were going to like really um connect with this one because i feel like there's a lot of stories of you like changing rooms and trying to get a

better view and whatnot well like i said it really depends like you know um if i'm going like becca and i went to hawaii and i will tell you that i wear like the weston or something and i was like we probably went through five rooms before you know i got the one i liked now if i'm traveling for cbs and it's just somewhere for a day to film and this is just a place i'm gonna sleep i'm probably less amped about trying to get to get the the super sweet room or the best view of yonkers or whatever that being said in this um in the answer to this question they they do say that uh we are very human in the fact that we pay attention to honeymoons and anniversaries according to uh judson cory so this is actually one of those ones where if the person at the front desk takes a shine to you for whatever reason or you're having you know maybe a celebration of some kind uh they might be able to kind of like put you in a slightly better room you know where this manifests for me andrew is i don't know the last time you um like checked into a hotel or were like signed up for a hotel but maybe this is just because i'm all in this bonvoy world but they start texting me and emailing me trying to get me to basically like sign into the hotel sometimes like oh yeah six in the morning of the day of like download your digital key or whatever and i think all of this is a way of trying to just have less human interaction because that's expensive like ideally for them i'd walk right into the hotel and then i would just take my phone which is now my key to the room and i'd go up to my room and i would let myself in and there would be no housekeeping and i would like be the lowest impact on that hotel possible from a staffing standpoint but i don't trust that because i like my chances of kind of being likable enough with the person at the front desk i don't know if this ever even happened but something inside of me something deep inside of me says my ch if there is a chance that i'm going to get like a nicer room it's because i'm going to be so friendly to the person who is putting me in the room and i don't trust the robot

to do that yeah when i am talking to somebody and when i'm checking into a hotel i like to be very forward and I mean

sexually i like to come on very strong i ordered the heart-shaped bed i'm still making those yeah that's that's i'm sure i'm sure they're i'm sure they are somewhere at niagara falls boy that feels like a cbs story for you like you go to the place where they make heart-shaped beds wow how about those beds that vibrate that you put 25 cents in those might not

who were the sex wizards i mean that's like that was the kind of i've stayed in a hotel i'm sorry i i will i'll give the uh i'll give you back the balance of my time here in a moment oh no i i had nothing to say i just wanted to say sexually oh good um well no it led us to an interesting place which is first of all i do remember i think is it like super i don't know which superman it is but it's the superman where lois and clark get married and they go to niagara falls for their honeymoon yeah and I have a pretty strong memory of either like a heart-shaped bed or a round bed or a heart-shaped hot tub just kind of one of those things that as a kid you're like boy that's where sex happens and and I wonder if people are still doing that but then the other thing that that I'm reminded of is and this was a this was it seemed to show up a lot in pop culture in movies and stuff which was the kind of slightly lark more down-market motel that would have a bed and the feature was there was a like a little coin place on the side of the bed that you could put like a quarter in and then the bed would just vibrate which I only know from pop

culture and the pop culture depictions of those is they're always janky and the whole thing like just kind of rattles and clanks around whereas I don't know what a good working condition brand new out of the box 1971 version of that was supposed to do you know right i assume it's

supposed to be sexual but or just relaxing no well you know i again i this is the pop culture part of it which is i feel like it's in the connection i made in my childhood brain was that's like the kind of motel you rent by the hour yes and they've got the beds that vibrate and the cable TV, maybe the Playboy Channel. It all seemed to be tied together with sexual activity. But I don't know if that's the case. I don't know if that's why it was invented. I'm really curious about who thought that was a good idea. Has anyone ever been lying in bed and thought, I would like it if this bed was slowly migrating across the room at the Pony Express Inn in Lewiston, Idaho. Because that, Andrew, is my memory is that's where we had one of those beds. But it could have been somewhere else. When we would go on these family road trips, We would occasionally actually get to stay in a motel. And I do mean a motor tell. You pulled right up to the door of the room. And one of them, I can't remember which one it was, had one of those beds. And we put a dime in it, and it was wild.

It worked. Really? So you've had you. Best sex of my life. But what? So when you say it works, was it as like clanky and janky and like rattling across the floor as is depicted? or is it just like because it does seem I mean you've been in a massage chair before we've talked about on the show like I mean I could see like just like a a low level casual vibration being

soothing if it wasn't all janky yeah I think like now at my advanced age of 47 if I could lie on a a comfortable clean bed that also would kind of vibrate a little bit it might help with circulation or something it's just i wonder who the inventor was and what their kind of what what their uh you know sort of what's the use case was for for that bed where they think of it as a sex thing where they think of it as a massage thing were they thinking of it as a circulatory thing like who came up with that bed and are there any of them still operate it's in america it seems like

the one that we are talking about is called the magic fingers vibrating bed and it's exactly if If you don't mind me, I mean, I know that you have a CBS allegiance here, but I'm going to read from ABC News here from back in 2000. Is that?

Well, I'm going to have to turn my headphones off.

Okay, sounds good. Just mark it in Chrome River. This is from back in 2009. We're on Concur now. It says 2009. Was it ever even Chrome River? It was. Oh, it was.

It's a very good memory. And Chrome River also definitely sounds like a well-made movie that was Oscar bait, Starring like a young Jennifer Lawrence She was in a movie I think called Wind River That's why I think of it But Chrome River sounds like a Like a Kenneth Wandergan Very like prestige kind of movie With Mark Ruffalo in it

Well back in 2009 The inventor of the magic fingers vibrating bed Died at age 92 Rest in peace I'm looking for the name here John Joseph Jingleheimer Hodling Oh no here it is Oh they have a pronouncer in here Boy, I don't know if CBS would have provided that, but it's.

Hufftailing Let's see here it says the coin operated Device was mounted into beds and putting A quarter in the slop brought 15 minutes of Quote tingling relaxation and Ease according to its label Quote put in a quarter turn out the Light magic fingers makes You feel all right Jimmy Oh Jimmy Buffett sang in his Song of the hotel room

I just I'll tell you what Can't you said this was 1992 He passed 2009 he passed away oh 2009 okay so that would have been more recent i was gonna say if he would have passed in the 90s can you imagine the monologue jokes oh right on like carson or leno or whoever's doing at that point yeah he was uh did you see this the uh the guy who invented the magic fingers bed he uh passed away he was buried in a vibrating coffin i was wondering what your dismount was

gonna be there because i was enjoying the i was feeling panicky my really really solid jay leno I liked your Jay Leno, but I was worried just on your behalf, maybe based on my own failings. As a friend and colleague. I was like, okay, we've done the setup, but how are you going to dismount? Actually, where's your bell? I'm impressed with that. Coffin vibrated for 10 whole minutes. Okay, stop while you're ahead. Oh, right. Jeez. Okay. Myth number three. Nope. Now you have to do them all in Jay Leno's voice.

uh bed spreads and glassware are never cleaned yeah this i thought of you as well now i don't know if i if i knew about the glassware thing because i have a little bit of an i don't want to say unfair advantage but because i do spend a lot of time wandering the rooms i should say wandering the halls of hotels not even hotels i'm staying in just just just trying to find leftover french fries on a room service plate they call them the cleveland creeper but um no i i feel like i do see typically part of the housekeeping cart that's being pushed uh you know down the hall is oftentimes we'll have you know coffee mugs with that little kind of paper lid on them to keep the dust out i feel like i see that a lot so i have i'm not particularly worried about the glassware but i am deeply worried about the bedspreads those because just think about from a and I haven't read down into the answer of this but like the just from a practical standpoint from a logistic standpoint it's not possible to wash every bedspread in every room every time a new you know a person checks into the room it's just it's not realistic and also if you're thinking about people getting down to it probably on the bedspread if it's you know just imagine some sort of assignation some sort of like maybe forbidden meetup between some colleagues thinking to the like scene in election when Matthew Broderick is at the whatever that like world's saddest kind of off of the highway motel waiting for his lady friend to come and like it seems like the bedspread is also going to maybe be a surface where people are doing things that would make you really wish that the bedspread were getting washed more that's kind of my theory

on the case my memory from reading this a couple of days ago is they say that nicer hotels or newer hotels have often switched to a um to like a duvet cover situation so that you can clean the the duvet cover without having to clean the entire bed spread but i do think that the expert they talked to on this one basically said yeah you might want to just play it safe and don't mess around with bed spreads or like decorative throw pillows like yeah the regular pillows like you change the the pillowcase or whatever but like those things that you're like should I the

answer is probably no which is a bummer you're exactly right they're talking this is actually the same guy that's doing the hotels in Tulum he's saying it depends on the hotel brand oh that's somebody else I've lost track of who this expert is but some expert they're talking to says it depends on the hotel brand I know for a fact that some hotels are more thorough than others always avoid fluffy bed throw or cushions you never know that's all i'm saying um and yeah that's when i walk into a hotel room uh well at least when it when i'm about to go to sleep or whatever first thing i do is get any kind of decorative pillow right off that bed like i don't want any i don't want any part of that large tube with tassels coming off each end or whatever else they've dressed the bed up with out of here with that and uh and then i throw the bed the bedding open so that the bedspread is folded on itself and i'm now just looking at sheets and pillows where the pillowcases i presume have been washed and sheets that have been washed i want to try to be only in contact with the stuff that i know got washed what i do is go in and i take those

pillows and stuff. First

I figure out whether or not they're clean by burying my face in it. Pillow fight! Exactly. Just taking a big, burying my face, big, big inhale. Deep inhale. Deep inhale.

Then you jump on the bed. If Veeves is there, you whack her with whatever pillow is handy and then just have a good old-fashioned pillow fight.

You really want to push this into a sexy pillow fight, I realize now. This is some fantasy.

I'm just describing a pillow fight.

If the listeners find it sexy, that's on them. This is our fantasy. I'm a morning zoo radio producer, and I'm having a sexy pillow fight with my lady.

Myth number, I don't know, we're on four. Everyone's doing weird stuff with the coffee maker. Now, listen, I start off by saying this is a good article, and it is, and I want to salute Natalie Compton for the writing of it. I will say, is this a myth that's going around? I think what this really is, and again, I want to say thank you to the writer of this piece because it allows me to discuss this dude with you, Andrew, who I see on TikTok.

Is this the guy who is making like some sort of fillets of beef in the hotel? I watched it because it's embedded in this article and it is disgusting.

It's so disgusting that I've actually started like I haven't seen the guy in a while, but I've started nexting those videos. I've actually stopped watching them. So this is a guy and I haven't even seen the link. I printed this out, but it has to be the same guy. He's got kind of like long hair and glasses, somebody's wearing a backwards hat, and his whole thing is there's always music playing, he doesn't say anything, but his deal is he cooks these elaborate meals, I mean not elaborate like fancy, but just kind of like involved, like a pizza that's covered in like cheeseburgers and then rolls it up. but he cooks it all in the bathroom of his like very very kind of like mid-level motel or hotel kind of room and he will like at first I thought well this is I first I found it kind of entertaining because it's like well how's he going to figure this out and I also assumed that he would like carefully and painstakingly clean the entire room first like that what we weren't seeing was that he was going to go in and like sanitize everything and like wash the sink out top to bottom um so that it's like as clean as any plate you'd get from a restaurant and then and then he just makes the food on the like counter in the bathroom and like you know sous vide something in the sink but it's like it looks kind of gross but it's because he's actually done all the work to make sure it's a sterile environment now i don't think he does that no i think it's just gross he looks

gross I mean well I mean am I allowed to say that yes you are not under APM but uh under TBTB I mean he's not somebody who looks and again listen I I know that I'm not somebody who puts a lot of effort into my personal appearance either but I'm also not making cooking videos I mean he you know like he is in the video I'm watching and re-watching right now which is so gross he's making these beefy fillets where he's like putting them in a pillow preparing them and then putting them in a pillowcase and then putting a hairdryer blowing into the pillowcase for a few hours while he takes a nap and I mean he looks like he has BO I don't know I mean I was I would that's what I would say to you off air and then I was gonna try to soften it up here and I was like no you know what the guy I'm not saying he has BO I don't know for sure but you know he's got long kind of straggly hair and an unkempt beard and a backwards hat and a sleeveless t-shirt and shorts and he just looks unkempt and dirty and he's making this gross ass looking food in a in a hotel bathroom and my question be why why would anybody do that i'd just like to ask why now the thing is

i think i've seen some other videos where he's maybe like at his house his house is totally normal okay so i want to just i'm trying to get ahead of a pushback from a listener which might be well is this a person who's economically marginalized or whatever and no this is a stunt And it's getting him a lot of views I think he's, you know, a person who probably travels For whatever his job is Has a normal, you know Has a home that he lives in with a kitchen Where sometimes he cooks stuff But it's not as interesting as when he's sous-viding in the toilet Tank I haven't seen him go into the bowl yet But he definitely does stuff in the garbage can At the hotel And again, it was the weirdest thing Because I watched this guy With great interest for months until it dawned on me that this was very unsanitary it's so unsanitary that i assumed there must be something i'm not seeing that's making it more sanitary and when it dawned on me like no he just doesn't care i was like oh now i can't watch this anymore but now so this

is a little confusing the way we've led this conversation based

Based on the way the Washington Post has set it up for us, because the myth, quote unquote myth, is everyone's doing weird stuff with the coffee maker. And then they say that that's actually and I don't know if you have your buzzer ready, but I do false. Oh, OK. Let me just activate that. Yet they embed this video that is like the extreme opposite of false because they're showing him like, you know, marinating this meat in a in an ice bucket and whatever. But it sounds like they're saying with the exception of extremes like this that people do for social media clout that, no, you can't expect that everybody is like, what were the rumors? Like washing underwear in the coffee pot and like doing Dave Ross. No, not in the coffee pot. No, in the sink. But we have talked about this on the show before, this idea that people are making all kinds of stuff, trying to sear things in the coffee pot and you don't want to use it.

They're saying that that just does not happen, though.

They're saying that that is exaggerated. That is not true. I will say this, though, whether or not the previous, you know, users of the hotel room or visitors of the hotel room were purposely doing anything weird with the coffee pot. I still avoid the coffee pot because like even my coffee pot at home, like after we get done with our coffee for the day, I leave the kind of lid open on it for a few hours to really let it dry out. because we know what happens when you leave just like beads of water in a in a closed space all kinds of molds and stuff start to grow in there and there's no way that these hotels are doing deep cleans and uh what do you call it uh when you run the sort of self-cleaning mode of a coffee maker you know you're supposed to de oh de scale it i think de scale it or whatever like they're not doing that and so i do think that these and the article doesn't say this i do think that the coffee making situation in most hotel rooms is probably pretty gross anyway i would still go to

a coffee shop and you know most hotels have some kind of coffee situation down on the lobby or so in the lobby too so you usually should be in sort of okay shape uh here's another one that i thought was kind of interesting uh myth are hotels a bedbugs favorite reality false uh michelle That was a great Jay Leno. Thank you. That's my Carson. Weird, wild stuff. My impression of Carson is actually Dana Carvey doing a character called Carcinio, which was actually kind of a genius character. That is kind of funny. So it was like Johnny Carson, but he had a fade like Arsenio and big, long fingers like Arsenio has. And it was like if Carson hosted Arsenio, and it was kind of genius. Of these, this is my dog, my dog pound. I call him my dog pound. Woo, woo, woo. That's my impression of, I believe Dana Carvey doing an impression of Carcinio. This is what I find so interesting about this. This question. They talked to somebody named Michelle Zwirik, who's director of sales and marketing at the Omni La Costa in Carlsbad, California, gateway to Legoland, and says it's a common myth that hotels are the most susceptible place for bedbugs. While bedbugs do love to travel, they're not partial to hotels over other destinations what did you think michelle zwierich was gonna say director of sales and marketing it's a free-for-all in our hotel it's you open the door they scatter oh i thought that bed i thought the bed sped was brown it was just bed bugs of course you call someone at the hotel and go is your hotel bed bug's very favorite place what are they gonna say of course this person said no no but they did they also call a bed bug though to get a counterpoint well that's the thing but the that's both side as a manager and i don't think that we need to do that anymore i mean i do think i do think that the i think the opinion is probably or the the whatever you want to call it the feedback is is probably accurate just saying like yeah uh bed bugs could live in a hotel just as much as they could live in your home I guess the thought people have is, well, I keep my home really clean. It's just me or my family. The hotel room is God knows who is coming through here. But I don't think that there's a lot of evidence that, in fact, what was it, six months ago or something, when they were having this whole freakout in Paris about bedbugs?

Oh, yeah.

And they were like, are we going to have to cancel the Olympics or something? Because the Olympics are going to be in Paris and stuff. And I, you know, it's probably NPR or the New York Times But somebody was like, yeah, bedbugs It's not even up It's not even like, there's not even a measure There's a panic, there's like a social contagion But there wasn't any hard evidence that there was like More bedbug activity than before It just kind of got into the media feed

I remember talking about that on the show Yeah, it was like a pure, it was like a It was mass panic

The problem with stories Thank you. like that if we can for a moment andrew and everyone was hoping if we can take it back to epstein where we were yesterday like the problem with stories like that and and and with the existence of jeffrey epstein and the terrible things that that he did is that it just it's just enough to cloud the waters or to muddy the waters so like when someone's like yeah the media they just make a mountain out of a molehill and they'll just tell you anything just to sell papers and it's like well and they kind of didn't do that with the bed bugs or like there's a ring of sex predators who are feasting on the blood of children it's like well that's not probably really a thing well what about epstein okay well that was bad that was super bad what happened you know it's like uh there was uh i was watching a very well uh put together segment on chris hayes show talking to i want to say it was brandy zadroski who's uh kind of watches this stuff all the time when the epstein the latest trove came out which was pretty much stuff people already knew about and what she was saying was it makes she's a she covers conspiracy theories basically and it makes her job very very hard because you do actually have an example here of a very very terrible evil person who did have a lot of wealth and power and so it just but where was this is relevant to the erin rogers stuff from yesterday it's this sort of like skeleton key that fits in any lock you want it to if you have a conspiracy because it satisfies all these different things and and and as they were pointing out on chris's show there's this one narrative that's like nobody wants you to know about this but it's also like how did you find out about it the miami herald like what is it is the media trying to cover this up or is the media literally the place that exposed this but it's just it's this moving target that's you know not uh it's a terrible Terrible thing that that happened But it also just like gives It's just a little fuel on the fire Of people that have a generally like completely Unhinged views of the world Alright Speaking of people with unhinged views of the world The final myth that we will Contemplate today Do rock stars trash their hotel Rooms the reality Andrew Is it depends

What's the sound for it depends

Let's see here Oh you know what it's What do we got here

That's rock star

Brian Jordan Alvarez Let's see here This is really lame Can you tell I haven't pre-read this

I was going to jump in here I was reading ahead a little bit Basically I love this guy

Are you kidding me Whoever Crimmins is You love Crimmins? He's a fun-loving criminal? He's a fun-loving Crimmins and all. I love Crimmins. I've totally lost track of who the experts are in this piece, but this is another person who's from the industry who says, you see a tour bus roll up, you just get out the license. I don't think that's true for a second. That is a good quote. But as a hungry journalist just trying to put food on the table for his family, if I show up with a CBS crew we're doing a story about rock stars trashing hotels and a guy goes when that tour bus rolls up you get out the Lysol I know I've got me a story baby

but the thing the reason I said it's lame is because then he doesn't give any like I name some goddamn names Crimmins he says you know in his experience like the lower level a rock star is the more chances of them being disgusting in the room like he said some band passed its prime left a bunch of like tobacco spit on the floor and shit whereas when fancy a-list celebs come through and rock stars come through they treat everything like you know nicely as you'd expect which i mean i i could see a world in which there's like some sort of a band that like thinks hey man they're like so out of touch that they think it's rock and roll to be a shit heel in this hotel room i can sort of see that i don't think like bono is i mean it's an age thing too i'm sure like but like in 2024 i think the world is a much different place than it was in like 1982 when there's this expectation of like some hair john bonham is going to throw right yeah a

refrigerator into the swimming pool right exactly yeah i don't think that i don't my guess would be that doesn't go on very much and also here's the thing i think probably most of the well i don't know what goes on with a taylor swift type but i get the sense that a lot of these bands when they get to a certain level they have a fleet of very nice buses and they sleep on the bus as they're driving to the next place and that actually ends up being maybe more now again if you're jay-z or something maybe you you're staying at the saint regis um you fly to the town and you stay in the state regis but if you're a you know pretty high level band that's going and doing you know different shows in different cities i'm wondering if if they don't actually end up staying on these tour buses

which are very luxury themselves i wonder if that isn't more how bands get around now

where do you think taylor swift stayed when she was in seattle the silver cloud in at the stadium that's where i stay is that where you say what i don't think i know the silver cloud in is that

it's next to uh it's at the corner of edgar and edgar and dave no it's um it's across the street from uh from t-mobile park oh that place okay jays or something okay yeah yeah i thought i

wasn't sure if you were making a joke about it being a real trashy hotel no no it's it's it's

it's totally serviceable okay but i don't think it's where taylor swift was staying i don't i mean that's a really good question i mean you feel like that would have gotten out too right i mean she's at that level of celebrity i wonder if it isn't the case that at her level somebody doesn't rent you a mansion for you and your team yeah and uh you know like the the nicest house in in bellevue or something yeah the nicest house yeah on lake washington or whatever uh something that's you know 30 000 a night or whatever it is and you rent it for the whole weekend and that just becomes the hq like the idea of taylor swift she's at such a level of celebrity now the idea of her getting a key card and trying to scan into her room and then it not working and then having to go back downstairs it's just it's like it just seems beneath her like it just seems like normal and that same goes for beyonce i mean you know like there's a level of celebrity that i can't imagine them staying in a hotel room anymore i but i i

think that i'm looking this up now so i'm sort of speculating while talking at the same while reading at the same time but i was sort of picturing like a super luxury hotel that um you rent like the entire top floor of it or something and these are hotels that are like known for high-end service and security and privacy and all of that i am on an article now uh where does taylor swift stay on tour these are her favorite luxury hotels worldwide uh blackberry farm in tennessee um let's see here it's closed but i mean again this looks like a greenwich hotel are you on the same article yeah yeah i mean this looks like a whole cabin actually it doesn't even look like a hotel at all so yeah these are like very i mean incredibly upscale places but when you're just like when you're not in uh you know when you're in a seattle like i maybe there are super fancy places in seattle that i just don't know about they don't tell us about it i love that there's a whole reddit page about this oh yeah where do you think taylor stays when she's touring

in a city she doesn't own a residence in and then i love that this person who goes by bleaker babe says literally just asking out of curiosity i love that she's like i'm not gonna go there like I just like everyone calm down I'm not I'm not gonna show up I'm just curious and then she said I was at the Tampa show and I was thinking about it and wondering if she would risk staying in a hotel knowing there could be fans who might be present etc etc and then somebody jumps in and says the highest price hotel that's in a reasonable distance of the stadium she would rent out an entire floor or two plus her security would be easy to contain and then it says in tampa she might be staying at scott's as he lives there i have no idea who scott is but apparently a friend of taylor's yeah and then bleaker babe goes oh is that her dad i had no idea her dad lived there omg ha ha ha so i think we found out that she's staying at her dad's house in tampa but we call her dad scott for some reason it i am on a website that i don't trust

at all um new york times exactly uh but according to this like it's like a um it looks like an ai written sort of thing uh you know it's one of those things where you're looking for an answer and it starts with a brief overview taylor swift is one of the most popular and successful musicians in the world like so don't believe any of this but it does say that uh years stayed 25 i'm sorry 2015 to 2016 the edgewater hotel in seattle which is actually interesting that she stays at the

edgewater because that uh is kind of the place that uh rock bands would go in seattle the beatles like fished out of the window there famously and then also there was like some crazy story with

led zeppelin that i would recommend nobody google all right well i was not familiar with that there's also the weston hotel where she apparently stayed in 2017 and 2018 that's where we stayed at the west at the west end i've not not you say we not you and i right i know i've stayed at the west

you don't remember that night god that hurts those for the night you can't remember the night

i can't forget those forget me nots it really worked um or no what does he call him an arrest development forget me nows yeah um did were we traveling for something that we know i just i

guess i i guess i would just mean like one uh well i stayed that's the hotel that i typically stay at I'm in Seattle and and we've stayed there to do live wire in Seattle and I've been there a lot in my life It's weird for me to think that I've ever been allowed in the same hotel

Where they allowed Taylor Swift. Right, where they allowed Taylor Swift. I think I stayed in the West and maybe my very first trip to Seattle when Genevieve and I came out here to kind of stake out, you know, her employer, the company that was hiring her or maybe wooing her at the time, I can't remember, you know, flew us out here and we spent a weekend in Seattle and I think we stayed at the West. And then it says she stayed at the Four Seasons Hotel, 2019 to present. But, again, I would take all of that with a grain of salt, although I dedicated 20 minutes of this show to this three-item list.

So there you go. Another hotel myth debunked on TBTL.

It's a great carcinio.

You can be having so much fun. Just remember that life is much fun. You can be nothing but fun.

Just occurred to me that I need to check my junk mail folder here. Sometimes, believe it or not, sometimes Blur's days, the most precious of messages, end up going to the spam folder, which is not fair. But nope, looks like we're good here. Just two Blur's days today. Whoa, what?

Yeah, just two. That's really. Don't go there.

James says, happy 12th Blur's day to my wonderful five, Jackson. I'm so very proud of you and the person you are. Kind, empathetic, and very smart. Sounds like me. Can't wait to see the man you will become. If anyone wants an autograph from the future Seahawks wide receiver, let me know. Power out. All right. Happy Blur's Day, Jackson.

Yeah, happy Blur's Day. I'm surprised that it's such a short list today after we were winter gaming it.

Well, I did do Blur's Day the last two Fridays. We called them Flur's Day.

Oh, I should really tune into the program.

Not a huge flood of them, though. They've been kind of trickling in lately.

Okay.

However, the emails I get from people wanting to break up with people on the air, it's just like I can't even. You're fired. There's so many of those. That was a good drop. It was appropriate. Finally, Schaefer says, happy Blur's Day to Mike. You got one.

Got it long last.

Schaefer says this, happy Blur's Day to Mike. He's my daddy. Aw. I don't know if I'm supposed to say it like that. Both because he introduced me to TBTL.

Miami Meat Tech.

He introduced me to TBTL and because he sometimes buys me dinner. Much love, Schaefer. So I think that's daddy in the... Whoa, what was that? Chewbacca. Oh, that was Chewbacca. I was ready for a Hey Hermano there. I've got this one. Believe it or not, I'm a complete catch. Can you do some sort of Carcinio version of Chewbacca? No, but I am going to find you a picture of Carcinio. Hey Hermano.

Somebody will make that for us, please.

I wish I knew how to spell the Wookiee sound, because that would be the show title. Hermano. Hey, guess what I just ruined? The Blur's Days. Happy Blur's Day, everybody. Happy Blur's Day to Mike and Jackson. What am I doing? Jeez, Louise. I've got to get out of here.

I'm sending you a picture of Carcinio.

I'm going to play some Carcinio here. I have it dialed up on YouTube. I'm going to play it at the end of the show here as we feed the music.

You know what was great, too, was I forgot that part of the bit, if I remember right, was the, oh, gosh, Ed McMahon character is played by Phil Hartman. And if I remember right, there's some weird thing where the Phil Hartman character is just saying the most unhinged things. It just, like, adds to the humor of the whole thing. I have this vague memory of him calling someone a lantern-jawed freak. I think he's referring to Leno. That's great.

It's just really wonderful stuff. But wait, I saw something on social media yesterday. Wait, you've been looking at social media? It might have even been on TikTok. I told you I'm going to try to get into TikTok.

You're finally upping your TikTok time.

And I don't know if somebody sent this to me or if the algorithm, I think the algorithm just knows me. I don't know why I'm whispering, but this was very exciting. I almost texted you and Chris about this on our I think you should leave text chain. But there's a clip from the Seth Meyers show Yeah, I just saw that yesterday You saw that too And of course, Chris is buddies with Seth as well Of Chris Robinson playing a sidekick Tim Robinson I'm sorry, what did I say? Chris Robinson Chris Robinson Is that the Black Crows guy? That is I was talking about the Black Crows guy I don't know what you

saw but i'm talking about a different video no uh with tim robinson playing like what like the most stereotypical sidekick on a talk show while and they're doing a segment called like this week next week it's so oh yeah he's giving predictions like seth meyers is doing his bit where he gives predictions of kind of like karnak yeah exactly and it was so funny i want to see the whole thing because i only saw like 30 or 40 seconds of it it's it is interesting too because

now of the reverence that we all have at least folks like you and me and our friend chris for tim robinson to go back and see him in things because i mean you know he now it's kind of well known that he didn't really hit with snl like he kind of he did do that one pretty funny sketch with sudaikis where he's um basically dave tesh he's john tesh's brother and he's made lyrics for the nba on nbc song and the lyrics are just yeah basketball but like that was a pretty good one but like just he just kind of didn't find his place with SNL so when you see him kind of pop up in things where he's just kind of like guy number three you just think no one has any idea how much you will absolutely revolutionize this

form yeah in years to come did you see the you follow Sam Richardson Instagram or anything I love their friendship and how it comes out on Instagram and Sam Richardson won an Emmy I think from his role in Ted Lasso which I didn't know i didn't know he had a part on ted lasso but uh he was like i won an emmy and so did my best friend and it's like photos of them holding their emmys and it just melts around i love them well

that was like this year when the seahawks played the lions yeah and you know somehow managed to beat the lions in detroit they just kept cutting to tim robinson and sam richardson on the sideline just decked out in their lions gear being so happy that the lions are finally good and it was I mean I was still happy the Seahawks won But it kind of took a little bit Of the fun out of it for me That's how much I love those guys

I didn't know that I didn't see that on the sidelines But I'd seen again some social media postings of them Kind of walking on the field And what not I think probably prior To the game but yeah I love those guys Man just so lovable

Happy birthday to Sam Richardson

And congratulations On your Emmy Jackson

Yep alright That's going to do it. You know, Andrew, I have to, I mean, first of all, we've been doing this long enough, but it's so cold in this room that I'm in. I'm having a problem with my DeLonghi space heater. It's giving me an error message I don't understand. And it is not warm in the broadcast studio. I need to get that figured out.

Oh, by the way, my dehumidifier is a Frigidaire. Oh. Is that what you guessed the other day and I told you you were wrong?

No, I think I said Maytag.

Yeah, Frigidaire. and it's a small little guy but it does hold four gallons I think that whatever you got I'm going to send you a picture of mine

alright thanks for listening everyone we are going to be right back here tomorrow with more hotel housekeeping myths bunked we're actually going to find some things that are true we're going to re-bunk them today we were debunking tomorrow we're going to re-bunk so tune in for that in the meantime have a great Thursday take care of yourselves and please remember no mountain too tall and good luck to all

From NBC Studios in Burbank, California, it's time for the Corsenio Show, starring Corsenio. And now let's bang a gog and shake that groove thang for your party maestro. because he's Casenio!

We are going to take it. We are going to take it.

Yes.

Yes. All right. All right.

That's all right.

That's all right, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is, uh, this is, this is fun. This is wild stuff. You see this, Ed? You just, you just do this. You go whoop, whoop, whoop. And they, uh, they go crazy. It's just wild, weird stuff. Yes! Just, just whoop, whoop, whoop, and that's it. All right, all right. My name is Corsenio, and this is going to be a party. You are correct, sir. Yes. Now, let me ask you folks something. Have you ever known... Have you ever noticed how white guys hold themselves down there?

What is that about?

I mean, what are they holding down there? Anyway, you ever notice the way white people dance? Is that wild? Is that wild?

Yes!

They simply have got no rhythm. Okay, okay, okay, everybody, everybody chill.

Power out.