Muse

They said, you know what, we need to have a third interview with you because the notes from the social worker is that you seem anxious, high-strung, and eccentric. Yeah, that's what I do. That's the cornerstone. It's the business plan. TBTL! That was really good pizza.

Oh, this is the best pizza in a cup ever. This guy's unbelievable. He ran the old cup of pizza guy out of business. People come from all over to get this.

Well, I just wanted to say a friendly hello in an unfriendly way. Hello.

It's the story of a man with a brothel of a home and a pool filled with human excrement.

Would you say that to Tom Petty? You wouldn't say that to Tom Petty, would you?

When you get there, this is what you will see on the screen. And there's a little arrow over there. You press it, and congratulations, you're listening to a podcast.

All right, hello, good morning, and welcome, everyone, to a Wednesday edition of TVTL, the show that just might be too beautiful to live. Notice me, senpai, notice me. My name is Luke Burbank. I am your host. Are you sure? That's what they said on Ask Chiefs. coming to you from the Madrona Hill studio perched high above the mighty Columbia where the fog is lifting and it's actually maybe sort of a nice day here it's not such a nice day in the landscaping department I mean for like about a thousand reasons I would even begun to attempt to deal with the kind of chaos that is the yard at this house slash broadcast studio, but I'm also noticing that there are so many molehills.

Wanted to add a few comments regarding your mole situation.

Which would explain why in the basement of my house, which already has pretty strong kind of silence of the lambs vibes, it's like dark and kind of old and concrete, there was a lot of stuff that was left behind by the previous guy that owned this house, and there was a box, a cardboard box, that just had mole stuff handwritten on the cardboard box.

Wanted to add a few comments regarding your mole situation.

And in the box are just the most draconian, terrible traps. Like, think old-school metal, you know, nightmare situation. like you know when we didn't at all think about even slightly the uh experience of animals wild or domesticated and i looked at those things and i thought what a barbarian lived here i mean also the guy was still gets nra mail so i've got a lot of thoughts about this dude but i saw the box of mole stuff and i thought what kind of a kind of a terrible person would employ this and now i'm looking at all these mole heels thinking we may have to bring out those traps i'm not sure so Let the fun begin. I will not break out the traps, I promise, but I do have to figure something out. I also assumed the moles were a summertime. I don't know, like they hibernate or something. I figured they were like a summertime deal, but they apparently are year-round out here, perched high above the mighty Columbia. We have made it, my friends, to episode 4126 in a collector's series. We wanted to talk about this yesterday, and we ran out of time. You know, the web blog Pitchfork, which does like music reviews and stuff, has always been like the place to have your taste made. If you're a certain kind of person, like the coolest person I've ever met. And they're now shutting that down. It's the way in which most of those people were told they were no longer going to be working at Pitchfork.com that I thought was interesting. We'll get into that. And then time permitting, speaking of the music experience, big piece in the Washington Post arguing vociferously that, you know, these blue, everything's Bluetooth now, right?

All of our headphones and everything is just isn't that for techno geeks with spreadsheets that may be wired headphones really are the best.

I did an experiment this morning with that, and we can talk about that with this guy. He is a handsome young stranger from the state of New Hampshire. He is the longest-running co-bro of the show as well, and he's probably best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's Andrew Walsh, and he's joining me right now. Good morning, my friend. Good morning. Thank you for both drops today. Let's get that up to three tomorrow. Yeah, you know, I just felt like, yeah, it's trying to get ahead on the week. I might play no drops for you by Friday, but it'll average out to one drop a day.

All right, well, that's fair. I mean, I guess you're not shorting me at all, so that's good. But I thought we were going to be kind of a chasing the dragon sort of situation. Or we could trace the dragon. Oh, my God. I'm done.

i'm done there was just a tiny hint of steve brule in there i just i can't you ever traced a dragon today oh my god i can't i wish i could remember my dingus password but i've been tracing

the i've been tracing the dragon anyway hi luke i'm doing fine i'm doing great yeah it's gonna be a good show i have um a um an interesting thing happening on i think it's maybe tomorrow or it might be friday i am um so i'm going to las vegas this evening uh to do a cbs story the super bowl is going to be in vegas this year and i'm doing a story that's sort of like a check-in on like basically what is going on in the city of las vegas and also how wild is it that they're having the super bowl there i mean like 10 years ago that would have been unthinkable and now las Vegas is, you know, not only has an NFL team, they've they will they've got an NHL team and they are building a stadium for the Oakland A's. They'll have a baseball team, love a basketball team before you probably before Seattle. This has been a huge about face for a long time. They wouldn't they wouldn't put a pro sports team in Vegas because there was this idea that maybe it would like someone would throw the game because they were playing near a sports book, which didn't really make sense logically. But it was just kind of morally how we felt about this.

They just wanted some distance between the idea of gambling and their and their sports and their sports franchises and their sports league. Right. Just even the appearance of impropriety or embracing. I mean, can you imagine what it would be like, Luke, if the NFL embraced gambling or if the major sports media operations in this country embraced gambling? All would go to seed. Well, exactly.

And so that's why it's kind of a story that this is all happening in Vegas. but um the part that's interesting they have built this huge uh like ferris wheel there this isn't a lot of cities that have tourism um where it's a huge ferris wheel but you're not sitting in like a seat you're in a pod they've got one in down you know down on the waterfront in seattle and stuff i think that there's one in london that's pretty famous now so you sort of you and your friends or maybe strangers i don't know if you just go buy a ticket will get in this kind of enclosed pod and you'll do a lap and you'll get to see the sights of wherever you're at you're familiar with these kinds of contraptions right no i don't i don't know if i was well you know the one that's in on the waterfront in seattle right it's like huge and has white kind of like pods i

think oh oh the great wheel yeah the great wheel yeah yeah i'm sorry yes yes yes the pod that's

what i'm trying to describe okay yes sorry i'm doing a bad job but anyway i on um one of these days i'm going to i'm allowed to do exactly one loop andrew and this is what's been decided i'm doing one loop in the great wheel interviewing wayne newton mr las vegas oh wow yeah which i i i actually like literally was going to suggest this because wayne newton has been in this place for you know 60 years performing he really is kind of the institutional memory of the place and on the one hand it's very cliche to like feature wayne newton in anything related to las vegas but on the other hand i thought if i can break through the the the sort of facade and the performer that is the idea of wayne newton and get him to actually just kind of talk about like yeah man it's really different here than when i started out or like this is what i've noticed or these are what these are what the crowds are like or how the people are dressing when they come to see my show Or, you know, it's blowing my mind that there's a pro football team here. If I can try to break through the facade, then it could be kind of interesting. Just as a person who's been in Las Vegas for as long as he had. But I don't know if I'll be able to do that. It may or may not work. But it's an interesting kind of challenge. I have one rotation of the big wheel to try to break through Wayne Newton's persona.

Yeah, I don't want to undercut you at all. But, like, it's funny. It's like you're going to be the guy who is just, like, trained to be the most plastic representation of Vegas. But you're like, I'm the guy who's going to crack through in my 15 minutes, tops 15 minutes, one spin around the wheel. That's one of the things.

I need to figure out how long this rotation of this wheel is.

You need to get a bunch of friends to fill up the other pods so that you're up there a long time while they empty out everybody below.

I need someone to have a medical event.

Yeah, right? Yeah, that could be my role.

but like it's just yeah can i can i get him to to sort of get a little off of his talking points um in the time that it takes to do one revolution that's really the word that i'm looking for one revolution of the big big wheel in las vegas nevada you know what somebody posted on instagram

recently um this is a huge tangent sorry but um boy it really it almost well it ruined my childhood No, that's not true I think that was the zillow search of tony's house that was yesterday yeah no that made me appreciate my

childhood but um uh somebody posted a photo of the big wheel that you spin on the wheel of fortune like the big you know like i can't remember what you call when you get but like the final boss right of wheel of fortune when you spin that big wheel it oh i mean it always looks yeah it always

looks so heavy like people will reach up and pull it down well no that's price is right i'm sorry

What did I say? Wheel of Fortune? Oh, yeah, I'm sorry. Yeah, yeah, of course. That's very, very key here. Okay, everybody was picturing Wheel of Fortune. There is a wheel in there. I understand why this was confusing for me and everybody listening to me. I really should have quit the show like 10 minutes ago. I'm really regretting my decision not just to walk out of this room. I would like you to please at least finish this episode. Okay, I thought you were going to say finish this story, and then you can go. Go eat some soup and rest your little head. um i uh no the the wheel of fortune um i'm sorry no the price is right the big final boss the wheel that you spin there was something always so like appealing about that to me watching that as a kid um and and sort of tantalizing almost like kind of picturing what it would feel like to spin that big wheel which seemed like it had a heft to it and somebody posted a picture of what it looks

like from behind oh i'm gonna find this i don't know no no don't why don't put your evil inside

me it's just like it's like you just see the exposed plywood back there with like some spray painting on it it's just like you know it's just something for the for the set it's stagecraft and

it was just like well of course it is but i never thought of it i mean i assumed that it was calibrated by like price waterhouse cooper or something yeah exactly and the wizard of oz should be back there right and it has you know it's like perfectly balanced like some kind of you know like artisanally crafted like a katana blade that you can balance it on the tip of your finger yeah you know there's a midpoint there's a fulcrum that like it's just like the the craftsmanship of that wheel is just impossible to even overstate because by the way people really i feel i hope i yes i did use it right there overstate people really i think need to work on their understanding of overstating and understating things i was listening to um probably the daily the other day i was in some podcast that's might have been chris it wasn't chris's show why is this happening he would never allow this but somebody said and it wasn't today explained because amina

would never no no no i'm kidding me it must have been barbaro and the boys it probably would have been such a great name for that show they're not all boys but it's just barbaro and

boys um but what struck me was it was somebody who was a um oh you know what the story was it was the daily and what it was was a very i actually texted you about this an interesting it was the sunday read okay so what they what they do is they'll take like a a longest piece from the sunday paper and then they'll turn it into a kind of a audio book if you will and it It was about this, a woman who quite sadly lost her sister. Her sister was killed when this woman was very young and it has really haunted this woman and she has been hope, it's an unsolved murder. And so she, like a lot of people, eventually sort of reached out to this true crime community to see if maybe that would put some pressure on the police. I mean, this killing was in the 1970s or something. And the story is like, if you're somebody who's actually a family member or someone who's close to a victim of one of these crimes, and then the story becomes part of the quote-unquote true crime community, you sort of lose control of the narrative pretty quickly. And this was a story about how this woman had been approached by these two folks who do a true crime podcast. And I believe one of them is a, she's a professor at something called the US War College, war college which is like not not the it's a for-profit college like it's like a devry of colleges so maybe not the war college that might be associated with you know west point or something point is she unfortunately ends up in the situation where she's in a pretty big fight with these two people that are doing this podcast about the case related to her sister and these people it would appear kind of weaponized the listeners of the show and the facebook fans against the woman and now she's seen as someone who doesn't actually care if they solve the the the murder of her sister because she's supposedly just out for herself which does not seem to be the case okay that's a very very long setup for this one little thing the uh person who's a professor at the college uh who specializes in i don't know true crime ology or something wrote and he would not do an interview with the new york times but would write an email response and said the impact of put i'm paraphrasing here obviously the impact of having a bunch of people online start looking into a case the effect that can have on law enforcement should not be understated no cannot be understated oh no and i was like it can be understated you could yeah it can't be overstated yeah you you can't say too much about it you could say not enough about it you could say it doesn't work at all that would be understating it yeah there's a bunch of these floating around and i was like you're a professor at a for-profit college have you learned nothing just it's like the could care less thing i guess it bugs me especially because like could care less yeah it really does mean the opposite of what you're trying to say yeah i was going to raise

that one too which i know has been something that has been like kind of litigated on the show since probably the radio days that's one of those pet peeves of yours and i think jen's and certainly of mine as well like and i understand i mean i i'm trying to understand or or to a degree i understand the argument that listen language evolves and you know if you understand what I'm trying to say then language succeeds and that you know the tough one for me was watching the word literally become the opposite of what it means right like people say it figuratively like it literally hit me well you can't say like a ton of bricks I'm messing up that example there but like you know people will say something is literal and obviously it's not it's something that is totally figurative but people say listen you understand that that word has just changed now i was literally dying i was literally dying when they misused that word you know and i can i cannot understate how frustrating it is when people do that i cannot i cannot overstate how i was literally dying when they misused that word but um yeah so it's just like it's when it's the actual opposite that drives you bananas and and me too like the what was the other example that we just brought up the i can't um i couldn't care less yeah couldn't care less versus could care less i feel like as a kid that bothered me like yeah like i remember telling people like

you had two ears and they were tuned to the listening station yeah right you could hear you could clearly hear that what the person was saying was the opposite of what they were trying

to say yes like i could care less well then do it care right there is i'll say what i've said now

for 4125 previous episodes if you say i could care less you mean that means there is an amount of caring that is less than this right and what you're trying to say is there's no way that i could care less about this this is something i care about so little there's no amount of less caring for me related to the like the listeners hearing this there's no they could not care less about this particular topic about me having this conversation with you right now um maybe one or two could care less and that's who we're trying to reach we're trying to get them down to the level of having no caring left that could be less than how they're feeling right there's some opposite

growth potential there certainly um you know we hit it i wanted to tell you this or i almost told you this via text message then i was like well what what does he reply to this like maybe this is just interesting to me in this very moment but we as a podcast hit a benchmark earlier this week luke it might have even just been monday's show i think so obviously we i'm going to say obvious and then i'm not going to actually know what what are we on episode 4126 today i mean yes but if you

were to go back if you were to comb through the fossil record on this i'm sure we're off by a good 10 to 20 shows probably that's probably generous we're probably off by 30 or 40 shows but today is 4126 right yes that's the number that we've agreed is the number for today but forgetting about just

like the occasional throughout the past 15 years the occasional typo or what have you you and i have recorded all kinds of extra episodes about game of thrones about the seahawks and the browns you know with our all of our all of our special little uh extra podcasts that we would throw out their bonus bonus episodes etc on um monday i believe when i was uploading the show that was literally our five thousandth piece of audio uploaded i guess i can't say five thousandth episode but essentially and that also includes like you know in the radio days you were uploading three podcasts a night one for each hour of the program so that just like everything included we

hit exactly 5 000 on monday i believe oh my gosh again i know that there's a lot like there are a lot of little bits of audio related to that so each one is not um a beautiful episode with the beginning middle and end which is typically what we do we turn in a masterpiece five days a week i know not all those things are that but still the idea that there would be an extra almost 900 things that we're not even tracking yeah right yeah which again we were doing three you know for for a year and a half we were doing three episodes uh we're putting it out as three episodes so that's kind of messing with the numbers but just the sheer the volume the sheer volume of what we have done and and so little of it being good

the volume inside of this bus is astronomical just the idea that there would be 900 things

we forgot about yeah right there are very few podcasts that have 900 episodes yeah and that that's a rounding error for us is yeah truly shocking yeah maybe i should have texted you

i just wasn't sure if it was interesting sometimes it's like hey look it's a round number react you know what do you expect from your friends i i can always give you a thumbs up

yeah that's true i can always throw my guy a thumbs up is that the that's probably the low

i mean aside from not responding which is what i usually do as you discovered the other day you sent me something the other day and i thought it was just like a possible intro tape and sometimes i don't click on those because i don't want to um you know like i don't want to mark it unread in my text messages because then i'll never go back to find it later and if it's actually something useful for the show i don't don't want to lose it but what that means is i am now just ignoring a lot of your texts that come through you sent me something the other day that i you're like well you saw that thing i sent you i'm like no i just i totally ignored that thing i didn't i didn't want to ruin its its pristine unread status i was a little bit that was on me as well

because if i would have said to you hey i really need you to read this or oh you really should check this out you probably would have if i would have made it clear what i sent was like an emoji where the emoji guy's kind of being like, hmm, I don't know about this. That was a really vague thing. That's a Tim Robinson you just said. So, yeah. Hmm, hmm, aw, aw. Like, I just sent you an emoji kind of being like, kind of side eye, and then a link that was very nonspecific. Yeah. So that's really kind of on me. I feel confident that if I sent you a link to something and I said, hey, can you take a look at this? You totally would. So I don't feel ignored by you on anything that's actually important.

But to raise the original question, aside from not responding at all, which the internet now calls pulling an Andrew, is the thumbs up like response, not even like sending an emoji of a thumbs up, but just like tagging the text with a thumbs up. Is that the lowest common denominator response one could possibly get?

Yes, what it tells me when it happens from other people is it's literally the worst thing that they could do to me no what it tells me is and this is okay because it's hard to it's sort of hard to say this without it seeming slightly mean what it tells me is that this particular chat is over and that's okay yeah like the person has other things to do and sometimes i'm sort of i'm indicating that to the other person in other words because it's like you could keep going back and forth with text back and forth with text and And then it's hard to know when it's okay socially to kind of move on with what you're doing. As you go from the, like, a long response, a long response, a shorter response, and then just like a thumbs up, thumbs up, a heart. If I get more than one just kind of like, so-and-so liked your text, you know, so-and-so hearted your text, then I'm like, okay, we're winding this down. That's really what I take away. I'm not offended by it. It's just a subtle cue that we're kind of done talking about this.

Yep, exactly. And I use the eggplants in the same way.

And as soon as we get an HR department at Too Beautiful to Biz, that's going to be one of the very first things that we look at.

I love vegetables. Thank you, baby.

All right, let's thank some of our donors today Who are supporting the program With a little financial contribution And it's a big thing here It's a big part of how we're able to do the show And by big part I mean the only way

It is the biggest part I literally cannot understate How important this is

Let me put it this way to you Andrew I could care less if we get donors

I could definitely care less if we got doters.

The amount that I care that we get doters is stratospherically high.

Yes, it's literally stratospheric, yes.

And that's why I want to thank, hey, it's Mary Holden of Phoenix, Arizona.

I mean, let's just take a moment to appreciate this journey. A woman who just started getting the TBTL newsletter in her mailbox for a reason she did not know assumes it has something to do with her adult children who are going to school in the greater Seattle area just starts getting this newsletter doesn't know about the podcast starts reading it, has questions reaches out and is now a supporting donor of tbtl.net can you believe it?

I still never heard the show.

We did a show with her. She appeared in Arizona.

She gave me a ride home from Nora's house. Like a ride back to our hotel. That was truly chaotic.

Looking back, that was a very surreal TV telephone that we did. I mean, pandemic era still.

Plandemic, but yes. Sure. Thank you, Mary. but but like the van breaking down in the desert uh the potential that maybe there were folks that were trying to make their way into the country we were i don't want to say interviewed by ice yeah yeah briefly briefly interacted with ice as our van was was breaking down getting a toad i don't know or you know 200 miles maybe 200 is an exaggeration 100 miles into phoenix with that tow truck guy who was like actually really a sweetheart but also you know somebody who probably has a very different worldview than us then going to Nora's house Nora is leaving with her brood of children to go up back to Minnesota for a well-deserved summer break and so kindly says yeah yeah come over do the show at my house it's fine whatever and then it's so hot that our cameras are melting and like we're trying to do the show outside on her you know in her backyard and it's just like technically almost not feasible because of the sheer temperature there I mean there's just so much go I had to stay and babysit the van oh that's right or four more days after you and Christina flew back to your respective location you know what I'd forgotten about all of

this is you know I remember going to Nora's and it being a scramble but I couldn't remember until this very moment when I was trying to remember it um what was our original plan and our original plan was to do the final show from Mary's house right that was the plan but Mary lived a little bit further out and with the complications of the van I think it was something having to do with a

condo association right no van and then we're like can we do it in a picnic shelter and then somehow yeah we we had to kind of call an audible and we ended up that's why we ended up at Nora's

and then Mary came over to Norris. Anyway, thank you, Mary.

Thank you, Mary. Boy, I'm glad I didn't have to sing more of that song because I started that way too high.

You started it high, you did. Really high.

And I am high. Yeah. So there's a lot going on. Which would explain why you did that. Which would explain why Jeremiah Zimmerman is wondering about supporting this episode of the show and really the show in general. Hey, Jeremiah's in Nashville.

Yeah, I was going to say, you know, he really goes by Jerry Dillon.

Mm-hmm. He doesn't like to, you know, kind of, he doesn't like to get the attention for the fact that, you know, his mom was Bob Dylan's sister. Right. He tries to low-key that.

Exactly. And Bob Dylan does, that is, I was going to make that Dylan joke anyway, and then, of course, I didn't even notice the Nashville thing. Bob Dylan, famous album. Nashville Skyline, right? Nashville Skyline, yeah.

I think I might be going to the Nashville Skyline this, in August, which is when you want to go to Nashville, Andrew.

Yeah, sounds like it.

I think I might be, I'm a bad business quiet person, but a listener to the show, I think, reached out and said, my company is having a get-together in Nashville, and would you come out and, like, you know, emcee it for us? Oh, really? And that may be, I don't know, it may be happening. Jeremiah, I may be in your town in August.

So a listener of TBTL has booked you for an event? This is a new phase in TBTL.

I don't think they booked me, I think they passed me off to the people that may be booking me. Interesting But it's still TBD That's why I said I'm a bad business Secret haver keeper Because I Like it's It's not even agreed upon That I'm going to do it It's just kind of It's in It's in Some balls are rolling And it involves Nashville And that's how my brain works Andrew I saw Nashville And I remembered emailing someone yesterday About something in Nashville And then I just started talking about it

I'm available for events too If anybody's interested

They make a mole trap for your tongue

Yeah I think I, yeah, I was testing him this morning. Maybe you were able to tell. If you need, if anybody needs anybody to like, kind of like be awkward and kind of sit in a corner and glare and then every now and then try to make attempts at socializing and then just ruining conversations, get at my agent.

You are not, you are not an accurate judge of how you come off in the world. In fact, you were very delightful yesterday, Andrew, when we were recording with the Big Flop.

Oh, yeah, that's right. We teased that at the end of yesterday's show. So I don't think we said the name of the show. But if anybody out there is a listener of or wants to become a listener of the Big Flop, I guess. So we recorded yesterday as guests on that show.

And hosted by Misha Brown, who's a very big Internet person who has a like his social is like, don't cross a gay man. Don't cross a gay man. Yeah, take a minute.

You might have seen him. And I was very much considering it right up until probably a couple weeks ago. Well, I just, I was walking around going like, is this the day I cross a gay man? And then we got the email inviting us on the show. And I was like, well, that's definitely not something I'm going to do now.

Exactly. It was a fun time, though. Yeah, so that'll be coming out, I think, about a month, they said, right?

Yeah, so it's a show about.

They're like, usually it comes out the next day, but we need to edit the shit out of this one.

They actually did. This is the boring technical side of it. but like uh you know they were like it's pretty much live to tape it just doesn't need a lot of record a lot of editing and then today i woke up and there was like three emails going hey can you send us your file burbs i.e we're gonna need to get in and kind of monkey around with this one a bit

i didn't tell you the secret on my end i ended up messing up my i don't even want to i don't want to get into this they had they kept on emailing us beforehand saying hey we just want to make sure that you have all of your you know exactly what kind of microphones you're using how it's connected to your and we're just like listen you can listen to our i was literally about to not

even do the recording i was so proud of us and myself i was like we do not need a sound check we do not need advice about microphones we are broadcast professionals and then and but the

funny thing is and i'm going to turn this on them a little bit here i don't know why i'm getting so negative so quickly but for as much detail that they paid to making sure that we had setups And we're like, yeah, we have setups. We do this every day. We record remotely, listen to any episode of the podcast. You'll hear exact. Because they were like, can you record a sample of yourself? And we're like, we have about 5,000 samples.

In fact, we just did it this weekend.

But never in all of these detail-oriented emails they sent did they say, also, we're going to ask you to record an isolated track of yourself at your place.

I think they did in one of them.

Did they really? And the ones, I was looking really closely at those. Well, that's fair.

I was looking not closely, so I could be wrong about that.

Okay, if they did, well, then that's on me, but then for me, because I have a slightly more complicated system in here, I can do that, but I needed a little heads up, and then I'm like, okay, well, I think I can record on this machine. It won't be perfect, but this way it'll just be me. If they need to edit something, they don't want a track with you and Misha on it as well. We're supposed to record isolated tracks. I messed that up. I forgot to mute a channel, so my quote-unquote isolated track was actually the full mix, which they already had. And I had to write back sheepishly like, hey, guy here who said we're professionals at this. I don't actually have an ISO track for you. Is that going to be a problem?

But you, when we're doing this show, it was because we were trying to use, and this, by the way, is why Kristen Onsen in Thunder Bay. Is this our second Thunder Bay Ontario person? Kristen has to know our other Thunder Bay person. They must be associated and just be doubling up on their generosity.

I like this scenario. What if the two Thunder Bay listeners have passed each other on the street and didn't even know it? Didn't even know it.

Whoa, whoa, please take my hand. We're riding off together to case the promised land. Thunder Bay, Thunder Bay. That's my Bruce Springsteen impression. It took me a while to figure out what you were doing.

I don't know him that well, honestly. I don't know his catalog.

I love that song so much. I'm not a Springsteen head either, but, I mean, I can't claim to be. Although I once did Kazaa, the entire catalog of everything Bruce Springsteen has ever done. Well, that's why. That's why you never got to.

Exactly. It was too much. You couldn't get into it because there was a glut.

And it was all like, oh, Rosalita live at the Palladium. You know, it's just like, it was an overwhelming amount of Bruce Springsteen. Instead, I should have just gotten like Nebraska and listened to it.

Rosalita might be the only song that I kind of recognize and like by, aside from, you know, the radio hits. But, like, I remember somebody playing Rosalita for me one time, like, when I was a younger person. And them saying, listen, you think, you know, Bruce Springsteen, born in the USA, whatever. Listen to this song. And I haven't heard that in a long time. But that's, is that one of, that's not his bigger hit, but is that one of his more appreciated songs? Isn't it, like, seven minutes long or something? Maybe.

It's just, I think somebody used to do it at karaoke at the Mandarin Gate. There was a guy that used to bring his own microphone. Oh, wow. I wish that, I think he might have even been a, I don't know if he was a TBTL listener. Maybe he was. He was an interesting character, but he used to, he would sort of sometimes, I think, bring his own CDs or maybe Laserdiscs or something. Like, he'd have his own soundtrack, and I believe he used to like to do Rosalita, and he would bring his own microphone.

Wow. I'm trying to figure out what the runtime on that is. It's 7.04. You're coming with your own microphone to karaoke and doing a seven-minute song. Like, that is inappropriate, right? Like, that is somebody who is so high on their own supply.

He was good at it, though. Seven minutes, though? I don't mind it, though, because if you're having a drink with your friends, you're hanging out, someone's doing a much better job of singing.

the boss performing the boss than i just did when i tried to make thunder bay ontario into the song thunder road i also didn't want to get into the lyrics of that song are so heartbreaking you ain't a beauty but hey you're all right like you know it's it's it's a it's a sort of a beautifully written heartbreaking song i didn't want to start applying the themes of the song thunder road to donor kristen arntzen in thunder bay so that's also why i was struggling there because i was I was trying to pick lyrics that were just general.

Well, let me say to Kristen one more time. Thank you very much. And to answer the question, you started to form but didn't finish, and we don't even have to let the listeners in on this. Yes, I was using a different computer to connect with them yesterday, which is why I didn't have a natural ISO.

Because of using Riverside.

Because of using Riverside and because you and I during – we will talk about it – because you and I about once a show, sometimes twice a show and sometimes no time's a show, like my new drop policy at the beginning of each episode, apparently, I will lose my connection with you. And I think sometimes that is an internet thing on your end, but I think often it is a computer issue on my end. So I didn't want to use that computer, the one that drops out on you. And also there was a camera involved. And so anyway, I was using a different computer I usually use. It's all fine, but I was not prepared. My setup was not prepared to also record an ISO track on my end.

So when we're doing this, you do have an ISO track.

I am recording one right now on a different computer.

So I can just say any kind of gobbledygook I want.

Yeah, but I don't use the ISO tracks. They're like tertiary backups.

Right, but we have them as an option. And by the way, I did intentionally say gobbledygook wrong because I think Rachel Maddow said it wrong last night. Well, not wrong. I think she said it the way I say it last night on MSNBC's coverage of the New Hampshire primary. Gobbledygook, she's saying gobbledygook, huh? What I heard was gobbledygook, not gobbledygook. Now, I agree gobbledygook is the correct. Look, I started this show railing on people that are not using, you know, overstated and understated correctly. So far be it for me to go rogue on gobbledygook. But I believe Rachel Maddow said gobbledygook last night.

Well, maybe I came off a little bit hard on this the other day. I wasn't 100% convinced that one is right and the other is wrong. I was kind of blown away.

I think gobbledygook is right. It's the only one that really exists on the Internet.

i am looking it up again now i thought maybe i was only getting the results of that because i had you know sort of googled in a way that would that would geofenced what does that mean you're

in an area isn't well geofencing is kind of like when you only i'm actually probably misusing geofencing there but it's like the idea that like where you are is an as a hot it's a hot area for people that call it gobbledygook but you're not getting the results of people outside of that

area that geofencing oh oh geofunch yeah yeah sorry you were pronouncing that wrong i was confused

sorry if i ever have another kid i'm considering naming them geofunch you're gonna have a kid with elon musk interesting oh it feels good to laugh uh and thanks to julie tesnati in salem oregon hey thank you julie for for for funding the operation and giving us this opportunity to laugh julie i may see you in two weeks at the theater down in salem oregon that is showing no it's next next thursday i'll be down there seeing uh brighton beach brighton beach memories what's the neil simon play brighton i don't know memories i'm going to be seeing that in salem i'm going to be seeing a play in salem oregon where julie is i'm unfamiliar with this work i'm

I'm not somebody who follows the stage, although you say it's Neil Simon, so I don't know that I have much of an excuse there. Okay, and this is something that you were invited to?

I was invited to. Somebody bought me a ticket. That's where Becca's from. She's from Salem, and I think we're going with the whole family because their friend is directing the play, and what I would say, Julie, is if you do make it down to that play, Please come up And recognize me but make it seem Very cool in front of Becca's family Be like oh my god Luke you are Probably The most influential media Personality of our time or something Or something bigger than that too I don't know Please try to make me look really good In front of the family

This is a personal question but are you and Becca Going to be doing sort of a Lauren Boebert kind of situation Because if so

people might not want to approach you honestly you mean going bankrupt on our restaurant where everyone's wearing firearms because the answer is yes we are going to be going bankrupt with that concept uh we're not going to pull a beetle juice yeah that's right yeah the musical oh my goodness gracious well let's see how the night goes yeah good luck let's see how close let's see if

seats are all together. If it's me and her and the rest of the fam, that will impact how Bo-Berty things

get. Okay, Julie, I'm sending your money back right now. Sorry about all of this.

But we're not refunding Mindy Lum's money because Mindy is in Minneapolis, Minnesota. Nice. Very far away from where any kind of weird behavior might be going down at Brighton Beach Memoirs. Exactly. Mindy, thank you so much. Really appreciate you and all of our donors today. Thanks for making TBTL happen. Thank you, baby. Hello and welcome to Top Story. Reading from an article in Variety magazine, the staffers at Pitchfork, the music news and criticism site that was launched in 1996 were told by Anna Wintour who is the I don't actually know what her job is at Condé Nast but I guess Is she the publisher now? Maybe the publisher of everything under the umbrella of Condé Nast I always think of Anna Wintour as being very much a fashion person and very much associated with that side of the Condé Nast publishing empire. I didn't know that they also deployed her to tell the people at Pitchfork that most of them aren't going to have jobs anymore.

Yeah, I see. So she's still editor in chief at Vogue, but she's also global chief content officer for Condonest. So that's different. But yeah. So they acquired Pitchfork back in like

2015. And the announcement was that Pitchfork, I think, I don't actually have the exact number employees but some small number of pitchfork folks will be absorbed into gq so the gq music which is what we all turn to gq for gentlemen's quarterly it gentlemen's quadrophenia uh where we all go to get our music reviews a gq uh will be taking on the uh the the role of doing the music reviews and whatever the stuff that pitchfork was doing uh basically what it is is pitchfork is over with there may be a little sub you know masthead somewhere that says like pitchfork as part of gq but it's not going to be what it was at one point which was really for like again andrew a certain kind of person and and i would say probably particularly a person of a certain age a very very um big influence on if something was considered cool or not or like the things that were maybe not mainstream but then would would kind of blow up A lot of times in my memory, it seemed like it would be because Pitchfork magazine had given it, given whatever this was, this band or this album. It's sort of like, you know, imprimatur.

Yeah. And I feel like we I mean, I'll speak for myself. What I'm going to say here is a bunch of stuff that might not be accurate or factually true, but seem right. I'm pulling a real Hassan Minaj here. Everything I'm about to say may not be that guy. i mean fuck what's the latest now well the defense a few weeks ago is that what you're talking about

the well his no but he's got a his tour now is like off with his head is the name of the tour and like he does these videos like okay i heard you we're adding 24 new shows and like when i was seeing lauren michaels walk into 30 rock across the street is um is radio city music hall and it's just like hassan hassan minaj you know coming to radio city music hall and it's just kind of Like he's now completely reframed this as like, it's such a Trumpian move in my opinion. He's reframed it as instead of like, I just lied a fundamentally about like, if my kid had anthrax on their shoulder to their, the, the, the, the, the lamestream media is coming for me, but you, my fan base, you know what I'm really about. And like, they can't off with my head, I'll laugh at them.

It's like the victim of the tour. I mean, I know that they're so fundamentally different the stuff that they address and also what their uh let's just say offenses are but it's the same with louis ck and it's like right now i will tour as the victim of the mob and you're like really and chapelle too right like it's it's really a bummer it's a super bummer and it's it's it bums

i mean i don't think that like hassan minaj is like a terrible human at his core like in the

way that louis ck was for what he did and yeah or even chapelle for that reason as well yeah and

you know it's like he doesn't even have bad takes per se it's just like this idea that you can totally up and then turn it into a feature not a bug yeah it's just so it's just the idea that it's like off with his head like that just is such a that's just such a master stroke of crisis PR yeah yeah to just

just I just it bothers me as you might imagine but anyway there's me but so anyway I guess I want to talk about Pitchfork sort of from from like things that I sort of remember as truths but at least I'm giving that caveat you're gonna get to the emotional truth of Pitchfork magazine exactly my emotional truth of it which is you know I'm not a I'm not a super big music nerd I don't claim to be and if you do claim to be you're really just putting a target on your back anyway so maybe that's why I try to distance myself from claiming to know anything about you know culture or music but for me Pitchfork the height of Pitchfork was when I was in like my mid-20s you know I was like that kind of the perfect I think kind of consumer of that like I was going to the Pitchfork music festivals it was during a time when like I was constantly like on a daily basis scanning music blogs and we called them mp3 blogs back then and downloading mp3s from various corners of the internet and pitchfork was like both the first stop on that journey every day and also sort of like just sort of feel like um influenced that that whole era like pitchfork was i i want to be clear here this isn't something that i am you know wailing and gnashing my teeth over um or i'm not even luke you're gonna be surprised here i'm not even rendering my garments over this oh man i know garment rending oh is it rending not rendering right rendering is what you do it's friend it's friendering you're rendering you nice subtle correction on me there i appreciate it it's rending the garments i'm not doing that i'm not wailing i'm not gnashing it is what it is and i don't want people to lose their jobs and i want there to be good music journalism like i want there to be all good journalism but i also don't want to make it sound like the end of pitchfork is a total disaster for our society we have plenty of those um but um it it you know it did give me a moment to reflect on an era that sort of i didn't realize it didn't have a specific beginning for me but clearly has sort of a specific end i guess that's not even true because pitchfork just became part of my life at some point and that era of my life was very very much influenced by finding music and and and even fine it was almost like bootlegging in the digital age like digging through crates in the digital age like yeah but did you hear this version of this um of did you hear the real real version of ring ring you know like you and i talk about sleigh bells by sleigh bells thanks and um and so anyway and then at some point that stopped being a big part of my life and probably the streaming age had something to do with that like i wasn't collecting mp3s and loading them up into my itunes on my pc anymore right we once everything was just on spotify and the other streaming platforms like that that kind of hunting and gathering aspect of it went away and my relationship with music changed once again as it continues to do throughout my life so it's sort of a you know it made me reflect a little bit

um i the idea of pitchfork being absorbed into gq i mean is it sort of like maybe the athletic being absorbed into the New York Times it you could you could still have some good journalism there but it sort of feels like a lot of people are losing their jobs and that's not good

right I think my relationship with Pitchfork was like my personal relationship was complicated because I it was always a little like in its heyday it was always a little too cool for me like the kind of big this is just from their Wikipedia page the sort of top line bands that that were championed by pitchfork early on that i got really into were bands like clap your hands say yes sufion stevens arcade fire the go team like broken social scene um these were all bands that that i like but then if you actually went to pitchfork on a regular day it would just be a lot of much more kind of esoteric stuff and reviews of like jazz records and things that like i didn't really understand like honestly like if i were to go through a pitchfork and read all the recommendations or listen to snippets of the recommendations half the stuff if not more i wouldn't even get or like and it kind of created a feeling in me like i think what happened with pitchfork at some point too was like anything that's a tastemaker it became like oh i wonder what pitchfork has to say about it like it almost became this like like it went from being like oh this is such a cool place where they're telling you about stuff that you would know about to being like these who just think that they get to you know set the you know tone for everything and like dictate to me if something's good or not like it almost became like a kind of shorthand joke of a certain kind about like what's the pitchfork rating on that yeah and and you know it is music

snobbery I mean there's a I mean you know if you're going to critically review music there's always probably going to be there's always judgment involved in that and then you had this sort of like you know internet age young upstart judging um you know new releases and sort of again like kind of, in some cases,

of making bands and discovering bands but of course you're gonna have all of the all of the baggage of being the hipster that says oh you're wearing that shirt name three songs you know like those things are sort of inseparable i think it didn't i think maybe by the time it became shorthand for um music asshole i was maybe a little bit less in that world or i really don't in all seriousness like i don't think this is like that i was one of those music assholes i just because i was never like a hipster in that way i had i like yeah you know i liked i liked what i liked and they you know again it was a fun era and again i loved going to the pitchfork music festivals i used to i think i got a media pass one year i got a photo pass somehow i didn't do a lot of this i could have probably leveraged my media connections more and i always felt like a a boy scout who didn't want to misrepresent myself but when we were starting a show called word of mouth I believe rest in peace at New Hampshire Public Radio but we're you know the internet internet culture was kind of new at that point and so we were like we're starting a radio show but a blog and it's not just a radio show it lives in various uh in various forms online and off or whatever so I was able to like sort of like apply for a photo pass to go to Pitchfork and I was like we didn't use any of the photos I took on the on the blog for my public radio show in New Hampshire when I traveled to the pitchfork media festival in chicago right like what is the what but either way i did get that media pass and i rented some lenses and they're some of my favorite photos i've ever taken that has nothing to do with this story i'm just reminiscing now some of the favorite photos were they of a particular band or can i um can i look i mean we are talking 20 years ago now so i'm gonna log on to my flicker.com here but i know there's one um i know there's one there's a whole bunch that I liked I think that I have some of the hold steady I think but you are also um I think it was you who were fans of the French sounding band with the crazy red-headed guy with the beard oh Les Savvy Fab Les Savvy Fab I have some good photos they were on uh tbtl when we did

the show oh really well the guy the the dude Tim Tim Tim Timerson no uh the the lead singer of Les Savvy Fab was nice enough to come be on the show I will I'm scrolling through years and years of

old photos here sorry but it was just like because you could get it was a fun experience I don't know if you've ever had that experience before what they do is they let the photographers into the little photography cage that is right at the foot of the stage but they only let you in there for the first three songs right then it's just like you're in there and you know everybody's being pretty polite but everybody's also trying to grab the best photo so you're you got to kind of fight stand up for your position a little bit as you're trying to move around and all of your photos do end up coming from that sort of um the angle from below the stage sort of so you kind of got to be creative there but there there are good ways to be able to like kind of frame the people with kind of clean backgrounds from down there and it was just kind of a rush and i mean hey it just felt like hey i have a special pass that gets me close uh it was just a good feeling

as long as sound opinions doesn't go anywhere as long as i can still turn to Greg Cott and Jim DeRogatis to get my music.

Wait, hold on a second, though. Are they? Wait, does that exist in some form at all? It does. It does.

It's produced by Columbia College.

Oh, okay, good. And so is it mostly a podcast now?

I feel like I hear it on the radio still. Oh, good. I'm glad to hear it.

I used to love that show.

I believe Pip, my former nemesis, is a student at Columbia College, And I always think of them because I walk by Columbia College in Chicago when I'm going to do Wait, Wait, Don't Tell Me. It's literally like down the street from where we are. And I believe that Sound Opinions is still produced somehow by way of or an association with Columbia College. At least it was last time I checked.

I'm glad to hear that. That's another one. I love that show. That was appointment listening for me. I'm trying to think, did I end up listening to them on podcasts? I don't know. Could you do that show on a podcast? because of music rights i can't remember how much music they actually played on that but my god did i love that show uh listen to it on new hampshire public radio back in the day um the other story

uh around this layoff was that anna wintour supposedly never took her sunglasses off during yeah while delivering the news uh that the most of the people were losing their jobs and Allison Hussey a former Pitchfork staff writer wrote on Twitter the indecency we've seen from upper management this week is appalling Quote one absolutely bizarro detail from this week is that Anna Wintower seated indoors at a conference table did not remove her sunglasses while she was telling us that we were about to get canned What's funny about that is I'm just still reading from this Variety article In a 2009 interview With 60 minutes winter offered an explanation for the omnipresent sunglasses They are seriously useful I can sit in a show and if I am bored out of my mind nobody will notice at this point They have become really armor so I Some people may email in and say well, there's possible it's possible that Anna and a winter has some sort of eye sensitivity or there's you know

sort of true and up to

Optimological I don't know if that's really a word kind of aspect to this But I haven't heard that to be the case And here she is by her own admission Sounds like just saying I like it because I'm more inscrutable I mean isn't that what she's saying?

I guess so I can sit in a show

And if I am bored out of my mind And nobody will notice That just sounds like But what was funny was You go into the comments of this variety piece And Somebody says Somebody Is responding to someone who's being critical of anna winter this is somebody i think that they're just under uh i can't exactly tell what their name is maybe it's ro uh anna winter most likely was very sad to have to tell the staff they would be let go i feel her sunglasses were to hide her feelings she is a very direct strong woman but is also a human and uh then somebody says well it's still deplorable and then this person jumps back in what's deplorable across the world every day executives have to tell staffs they are being let go. The only reason this article was written and published is because it was done by the one and only Anna Wintour. And all of you are not her and never will be. You can only be yourself. Anna Wintour just happens to be famous and very good at what she does, thus the article. I personally happen to find her an interesting, mysterious woman who holds a lot of power and sway. As mentioned in another comment, she does not own the company and its parent company is owned by a billionaire family where are their names i don't know her i'm just surmising like every other comment on here once again anna wintower is a famous well-known woman thus this story is that written by ai that last that summary scene kind of this story yeah anna wintower once again comma anna wintower is a famous well-known woman that's that seems like something that might have been generated by a large language model let me ask you this i heard

you slipping back into a tower is that that's is that how you pronounce her name and i don't know

that or is it the way it's spelled i think it's just i don't know right winter yeah i'm just

probably i'm not trying to like uh be a dick honestly uh i am embarrassed i sent you i found a link that said pitchfork photos i sent it to you and it's just a bunch of photos of my friends and shit you can ignore that first one that was from the year i didn't have a pass just so you know i'm not hey look at these photos of my friend sophia and paulie getting drunk that is not what i meant to send you but i do have some jarvis cocker might be my favorite photo from here i got some really beautiful shots of uh jarvis cocker but scrolling through i mean now i'm just talking about how i like my own photos from forever ago but um yeah uh boy i used to be um i used to be motivated to do creative things this is real it's really interesting my friend tell me tell me about it i gotta go into i gotta get myself a photo pass and go to see some some some young musicians that scare me now because you don't you don't understand what's

the noise what's the noise they're making i was uh actually almost well you know what i'll save this for the music for your weekend segment on friday i almost wanted to go to a show andrew how about that wow how's that for a young youthful take and then i looked at it uh and uh and it was sold out and then i was like okay then i'll just stay home and and watch uh you know uh television in my living room yeah but i want to play some music i want to play some music from this person that i have been getting very into recently who i almost went and saw play live in portland oh i i

was bummed because i keep on talking about that band rat boys out of chicago yes they just announced a tour and i'm like hey i'll i'll be on top of this i'll buy some tickets um but they're not coming out west they're like not coming out any further they're doing like tours and they're doing a bunch of shows in japan then they come to the states but it's all like east coast to about i don't know i guess like kind of center of the country i don't think they're going even past chicago or something or maybe a little bit further west than that but it's a little bummed i was like you guys recorded your record out here i sent him a note i was like hey you guys recorded your record out here well actually well actually i don't know if you know this um but you recorded your record

here you know that i actually heard a song i don't know how to scroll andrew i'm getting younger by the moment i have trouble scrolling through the photos on my phone for some reason but i heard a song the other day and i was like this is incredible and it was you know it was part of a um a playlist of some kind or you know a algorithm yeah and uh and then i went and i uh i took a picture i took a screen cap of my phone to make sure i could find the music there it was Rap Boys. Oh, yeah. you go yeah no they have that i really like their whole record but each song has a little bit of a

different vibe yeah what is it uh let me see here not oh you're trying to figure that song i am just trying to scroll through and and close the loop on this because well you know what i'm never going

to get there so uh i i should have quit the show 10 minutes ago if i 10 if i said it would you remember it because the two i played for you was it's alive was the first one i think and the next one was me uh no way was it either one of those no and now i'm mad at myself because like uh let's see maybe i didn't oh i also wonder you know i only know their latest record but they've been around for like a decade so i mean there's also a chance i whatever i i only know the record called

the window all i can find on this are photos of my jacked up toes from my private collection burn that phone uh let's see no i took a picture of a shaky grave song that i liked i took a picture of I took a lot of music pictures Go Outside by Rap Boys

Go Outside I don't know if I know that one I don't see that on this record It's way good I heard that their early stuff Might have had a little bit less of a rockin' edge I don't know if that's true or not Was that a little bit more Americana-ish?

I don't know I was putting together some furniture I was dealing with two broken toes Travis Kelsey was scoring touchdowns And doing a heart emoji hand signal To Taylor Swift There was a lot happening on Sunday Yeah, Jason had his shirt off Jason had his shirt I actually really do like Jason Kelsey And I, you know Andrew, let me put it this way If you were playing in the playoffs And you caught a touchdown I would strip my shirt off And shotgun a beer And scream loudly You don't have to do that for me, Lou

You can leave your shirt on for me

It's very bro-ish, but I actually find Travis Kelsey I don't have a problem with. I think he's sort of, you know, generally like a – we've heard from listeners that he generally has pretty good takes and, you know, kind of seems like an okay dude. I really like Jason Kelsey a lot, actually. Like I've been – I don't actually listen to their podcast, but I see clips of it, and they just seem like kind of likable, you know what I mean? Like for these guys that have both had really huge achievements in the NFL, They both seem pretty likable to me.

Do you know that I had a couple of realizations about them? And again, like they're the biggest cultural phenomenon of the past year with, you know, I mean, that's not true. Taylor Swift is obviously, but Taylor Swift has a connection to the story as well. But like certainly as far as anything that is sort of in the sports world and in the pop culture world. But how did I not realize until like I think two weeks ago I was watching one of the games and and they said Travis Kelsey is from Cleveland Heights. I was like, I did not know that their show is called New Heights, and it must be a reference to that. Our friend Sarah texted me the other day and just said, hey, do you like the New Heights podcast? I'm like, I've never heard of it. And she's like, it's the Travis Brothers podcast. I'm like, oh, God, I would have just called it the Travis Brothers podcast. It didn't occur to me that it had a name. And it's such a name that doesn't seem to really evoke what I think of when I think of that podcast. So New Heights is a reference to them growing up in Cleveland Heights. Is that a fact?

Yeah, they played college football at Cincinnati. I've been listening to the Such Great Heights podcast.

Oh, yeah, it's sad.

Jim D. Rogatis' song-by-song review of Give Up. 8.1. Yeah, like I said, I don't listen to the show, but as I'm scrolling TikTok endlessly, I'll see like a two-minute clip. And also, because you're right, they have moved into such a sort of central point in the zeitgeist right now, I've now been seeing a lot of content around them like just pictures of them in college And what's amazing is neither one of them look like they're headed to the NFL Like I think they were both. I don't know if they were walk-ons, but they were both very unheralded Coming you know to Cincinnati University of Cincinnati And like Jason Kelsey does not look I mean to this day He doesn't look like whatever we think of a high-level athlete looking like but then he doesn't even look big He doesn't look particularly tall. He doesn't look, you know, Travis is a little bit taller But they just look like a couple of jabronis and the idea that they sort of like You know manifested this NFL thing and then like Jason Kelsey Tells the story of like the night that he met his wife, which was I believe he met her on a dating app And I don't know if I think he might have been a Philadelphia Eagle already but the story was and you know you could take this one of two ways you could either be like This sounds like somebody with a problem with alcohol or you could be like it's kind of charming But I guess he had like, you know, he was supposed to meet up with his now wife It was like essentially their first date, but he had been out with a bunch of friends and he had just become so drunk that he was just passed out like on a table in a bar and that she showed up and she was like this is a terrible look for you and then his friend had carried him out and then somehow he had managed to you know I don't know in subsequent hangouts or something undo the damage of this first impression first of all I want to know who carried Jason Kelsey out of a bar that person needs to be studied by science but like there there was something in the way he told the story. And I believe his wife was maybe on the show too. There was a, like a level of ball busting from her and a level of just like normalcy of kind of like, it just, it didn't strike me as a person who had a high opinion of themself, Jason Kelsey. That is like, it didn't seem like he was kind of like I'm the goat or whatever. It was more like, I'm a moron and I can't believe, I think he said something about his wife. Like when she walked in, I was like, through my stupor, she was the most beautiful person I'd ever seen in my life. And I knew that was the case, and I knew that was the person I was going to be with. There was just something I found very likable and kind of relatable. Now, Travis is unfortunately moving out of, to the degree that he was ever relatable as an NFL star, he's moving out of it because of the Taylor Swift stuff. He's moving into this other category of kind of unattainable life, you know. Again, it was already unattainable when he was in the NFL, but Jason just seems like this kind of kooky troll of a guy, and I don't mean that in the internet parlance. I mean, he looks like a guy who might be guarding a bridge.

yeah right yeah he's got this like kooky beard and this like gray ass hair that's like sticking straight up and he he just seems like a kind of a a guy who would definitely help you pull a transmission out of your car if you were having trouble in the 90s and like meanwhile jason kelsey is like becoming a fashion icon and dating taylor swift and he's he's moving to this other category jason kelsey just seems like a guy who would just be helpful like would help you move or something

Now, I am so, you know, out of date with this and out of step in general, but I'm trying to remember if I actually heard this yesterday or if I just heard the local radio hosts describing this tape that I found here. This must have went wildly viral last year and I was totally unaware of it, which is kind of my brand. But did you hear this? I'm going to play the tape for you. Hopefully it'll work. Of Jason Kelsey with his two daughters talking about how Uncle Travi winned the Super Bowl.

Oh, I, yes. But play, do you have it there?

Yeah, Dad, Dad, you didn't win.

Dad, I said we would be happy for him tomorrow. You can win. What's that? You can win. I didn't?

No.

Oh, man. Uncle Travi win. Uncle Travi did win. Did you want that to happen? Marty, I didn't want Uncle Travi to win. It's all right. Bye-bye. Uncle Travi got it. Can we wait later? Oh. She knows that one. We can be happy for Uncle Travi. Oh, come on.

I mean, that's what I'm talking about. That's the, you know, I'm a fan. I'm putting me down as being pro the Kelsey brothers.

Finally, somebody stands up for the Kelsey brothers' likability.

hey by the way i'm looking at these photos they're really good i hope you're clicking on the second link not the ones i've just yeah all i'm seeing all i'm seeing are um are things related to musicians and i'm like again it's just like it's a rundown younger man when i took it's just such a rundown of like so much stuff that i'm like oh yeah of course jarvis cocker i remember being very obsessed with him and then like hey there's the lesavi fab guy by the way it's tim harrington ah harrington yeah yeah yeah and uh and then a uh jay mascus dinosaur jr sure and i think there's

a is there a um stephen malcolm is in there too i've closed the tab i think i remember seeing stephen malcolm is i can't remember which show that was i think i went to three two or maybe even three different pitchforks so i can't remember uh which was which but i saw um stephen Malkmus do a solo set, just him kind of rambling with an acoustic guitar, but then his drummer from Pavement went out to accompany him on a very small drum kit for like the second half of the show. It was very messy and fun in that Malkmus way.

It looks like the whole thing was very muddy, too. There's a lot of photos of people. There's some positive... Is this a picture of somebody from Chick Chick Chick?

Yeah! Yes! How did you recognize it? I'm trying to... I forgot about

Well, you had just only because you had like, you know, the photo was subtitled with the three exclamation points. That was right. That's a band name I have not considered in 25 years. Okay, yeah.

That is like distilled pure pitchfork culture, right? This was an era when somebody named their band three exclamation points and we were all supposed to know that it was Chick Chick Chick.

Here I go once again. the email every week i hope that it's from a female no man it's not from a female all right email or v-mail did you see uh did you look at your tbch email today

i did um actually for once but i don't remember something that would make me chuckle the way you

just chuckled you could never chuckle the way i just chuckled don't flatter yourself um no it was It's one of those things. It's all good, but it's like I forget that people can listen to the show and then tell people we were talking about their business, which, I mean, we were mostly.

In this case, you don't mean it like stay out of my business. You mean literally a business in Tacoma, south of Tacoma, Washington.

And, I mean, I think this person was glad to hear what they heard us say. But I remember the conversation began with you saying there's some meatball operation, some meatball restaurant along this that you can see from the highway as you're driving south out of Seattle. And you said it's around the Tacoma area, right? Yeah, a bit south. It's more like Lakewood, Fort Lewis, I guess.

Lewis kind of area.

But anyway, and I remember you being a little bit like kind of dubious about this place. But the more I looked at their website, it looked more and more delicious. And the place is called Manic Meatballs. meatballs and we really talked about manic meatballs a place that you and i never set foot in we ended up dedicating a pretty long chunk of a show to talking about this meatball operation and we got an email from the owner of manic meatballs carrie wrote to us and said some one of our one of our listeners forwarded the uh episode to her uh she said one of our manic

maniacs one of our manic maniacs so they've got their fan base they're called manic maniacs which I love it would explain by the way how this place is thriving because I think that was the jump-off point for me was I will be totally honest, and I'm also assuming that Carrie will hear this I Wouldn't have known that that was going to be a successful restaurant approach so many I mean the profit margins on restaurants are so sort of thin and so many restaurants that are started don't succeed I was really surprised to find that this manic meatballs place was not only surviving but thriving And so that was kind of the jumping off point. And then but it would explain their success would be explained by the fact that they have manic maniacs. Like, I think I really do mean this. I get the sense that the people that love this place really friggin love it.

Yeah, it must have been such a strange experience to hear two guys who are are on a mission of discovery on the fly, like listening into a phone conversation that we're posting publicly online saying like, oh, I've only passed this place. then me exploring their menu then me and i was ribbing a little bit about the way it was like very well plated in some photos but then some of the takeout stuff that people posted to yelp looked a little less flattering and so carrie here is including um photos of this is what our i want to say by the way this food looks it looks amazing delicious oh god yeah and i love meatballs and i i will i am i'm gonna go down to manic meatballs i'm gonna order a bunch of you owe them a you owe them a visit i absolutely will and and i know carrie wanted to reach out there's You know, Carrie is nothing but very sweet in this and seems excited that we're talking about Manic Meatballs. But I am a little bit chagrined just thinking about, like, if anybody were to, well, honestly, it would be like if two people stumbled on TBTL while they were recording a podcast and then trying to review it live. And then we're somehow listening to the show and describing it in real time. Yes, exactly. And being like, well, this guy doesn't know how words are pronounced. He can't remember names. I'm horrified to think about what it would be like for somebody to be podcasting live as they discover the product. i put out there so anyway thanks for being cool carrie i thought yeah carrie gets the show even

if carrie is not carrie's probably busy running a successful restaurant but the very fact that in the subject line uh carrie says i'm the owner of manic or just has manic meatballs and then it has the emoji with the hearts around it yeah that was immediately letting us know that like carrie's not in in the email going like what the hell dudes yeah we good carrie's being like oh i'm stoked My business was mentioned on your show, and by the way, let me clarify, this food looks amazing in photographs when we take the pictures as opposed to maybe, you know, some rando on their phone or whatever. So everybody go to Manic Meatballs south of Tacoma. And tell them we sent you.

Use promo code TBTL. You'll get no money off.

We'd like to welcome new sponsor, Manic Meatballs.

You'll get no money off.

Shout out to all of our Manic Maniacs. Also, I believe that I believe there's I have another association with this place because our executive producer at Livewire, Laura, is from Tacoma and knows people that are that are associated with this fine restaurant. So now all I would say to Carrie is get get get yourself a plant based option and I'll be there.

She does. She says we have impossible meatballs and possible meatball sandwiches. I should really.

read these emails. It says, I can send a gift card or deliver the dishes myself, but no need, Kerry. We will pay. We'll pay. Looking forward to

supporting you. You know what? Next time I'm driving up to Seattle, I'm swinging through. And I will give it a... I will pay some of my own hard-earned... I heard what it sounded like when I said hard-earned money, then I remembered what my job is.

You had to swallow a fly there for a second.

Seriously, like last night I was talking to Becca on the phone and I was like, Gosh, I'm really, you know, I was like, I'm, I'm feeling pretty run down and tired. I was like, I had a long day. And she's like, well, what did you do? And I was like, well, I did TBTL. And then Andrew and I went on a different podcast. I just like heard myself saying out loud what my jobs are. And then I was like, okay.

You know, I did a third podcast last night, too. Not that it's a competition. Well, it was my own podcast with Genevieve. It was actually a fun one. It would have driven you bananas because Genevieve had this idea of let's do a theme of commercials that try to sell you something a mass-produced product on the idea that you're a rebel for buying something that is mass oh it's a great topic it's a great topic but it's also

infuriating and the the most what was the most infuriating as a little as a little um you know kind of a promotion for the show for after these messages and a little um appetizer what was it

well the appetizer is meatballs for manic meatballs of course i want to make that very clear but the one that i think blew my mind chris is leaving the room i'm gonna blow your mind right now um it was this one called rock the product is called rock and roll denim and i need you to let's just do this okay this is a little teaser for what uh veves and i talked about on yesterday's show um i'm sending you this uh via email rock and roll denim is the product and um you know I'm not even going to tell you why this blew my mind. I just want you to watch this and play the audio down the line if you can so the listeners can hear it. And then tell me what strikes you, if anything, about this commercial for rock and roll denim. Do you have it there? Oh, you want me to play it? If you don't mind, play it, watch it, let us hear the sound, and then you tell us what strikes you.

I was looking at the meatballs and getting really hungry.

He was still in the news.

Rock and roll denim.

Oh, I did email it to you if you wanted to click on over to your email. You really were. Boy, you really were down to meatball. I seriously didn't hear one thing I said in the past two minutes.

I'm sorry, Andrew. I try not to do that, but I got seriously.

I am so hungry. You're against my will in a meatball.

Okay, here we go. I've got it now. Rock and roll denim.

So play it and give me your reaction.

Okay. This one is for the rebellious.

for the ones that always stand out in the crowd.

And play cornhole.

For all the risk-takers, rule-breakers, and music-makers. Oh, my God. For the ones who live life to the fullest.

First of all, they were able to hire Billy Bob Thornton to do the VO.

Who did I attribute it to? It sounded like, at the end, he sounds like Hank Hill when he delivers the final line. It's like, do I look like I know what a dang JPEG is? Well, for me, well, I don't want to spoil it, but okay, go ahead and tell me your gut reaction.

I'll narrate to the TBTL listeners who will get a better narration of this, probably from Vives on after these messages. But it's some folks that are out kind of in the cornfield or, you know, like a little pasture area. And they're playing cornhole and they're playing acoustic guitar and they're sitting around in these in these jeans. What I would say is they're doing exactly what somebody who would like these jeans would be doing. It feels it does not feel unpredictable or rebellious to me at all. But I'll keep playing.

For all the risk-takers, rule-breakers, and music-makers. For the ones who live life to the fullest. Dang it, Bobby! This one is for those who take a walk on the wild side. Rock and roll denim. Live boldly. Live boldly.

Use propane. They ripped off the FanDuel logo. That's the side of the point. That's got to be the owner, right? Doing the VO Maybe I mean there's no way There was casting And they were like This is the guy Because as much as This is not a vibe That I go in for In terms of the Like you said Being rebellious Through your consumerism I just do consumerism To fill the hole in my heart Right But I don't think of myself As a rebel As much as I don't Dig the whole concept I would If I was going to lean into it If I was going to really Go for it with this It'd be a guy with Way more energy Doing the read

Yeah for the voiceover yes now yes but here's okay here was our main takeaway which is just i mean it still blows my mind but the fact that you didn't mention this maybe it's less of a deal than i thought but um i don't think the people who made rock and roll denim know what rock and roll

means now that music definitely sounds like something that is rock and roll inspired but none and i mean zero i mean zilch imagery in this commercial nods towards people who like rock and roll music right they're all country music fans they are sitting on bales of hay they are all wearing cowboy hats one of them has an acoustic guitar and is strumming the acoustic guitar while While you hear that music playing, while you hear that, like, crunchy electric guitar playing. And none of these people are doing any, and again, I'm not saying what they're doing is wrong. They're having a wonderful day in the field.

Yeah.

But it's not, rock and roll would be a leather or a denim vest. Like, they're country music fans. Why is it called rock and roll denim?

Yeah, that is the strangest. That's why I'm convinced this commercial was shot by the nephew of the owner of the company and that the voiceover is the owner of the company.

Yeah, I mean, it's definitely a low-budget deal.

You know who we're getting an email from tomorrow? I'm Kurt, owner of Rock and Roll Denim. I'd be glad to send you some jeans.

I stand by that. Maybe the jeans are great, but I will say to Kurt's face, well, with varying levels of eye contact.

I think we would both come in with peace and love and say, this might be a totally fine product, but we've really, really missed the rock and roll element of it. Like you said, there's nothing about what's happening in the commercial that indicates rock and roll. It indicates a wonderful afternoon. Somebody is playing some Garth Brooks.

It's Garth Brooks. This should be Garth Brooks denim.

I was about to try to make a Like a Bobby Brooks reference Because that's a line from the song Jack and Diane Something about Dribble off those Bobby Brooks And do what I please That's like where he's talking about I think getting frisky with a lady That I believe was one of the That and the debutante In the backseat of the car Were both things that we had to edit out Of the Jesus Creek Junior Senior video That we made Because it was too scandalous

So you recreated that song But then adapted it

We did not recreate it, we just did a terrible edit I see So the junior-senior banquet I mean this was real Very powerful footloose vibrations at this school We did not have school dances But we would have a banquet Where everybody would get dressed up And you'd go sit in a hotel ballroom somewhere And the tradition was For the junior-senior banquet The juniors would create some sort of video or whatever that would be like you kind of In honor of the juniors and seniors, but primarily the seniors and so we made such a video And this was when it was that was such a lift You know what I mean? Like we had to go to some guy's place who was like a friend of a friend He was like had video editing equipment and it was just hours and hours and hours of like sitting in this guy's basement as he would be like Okay, and then frame by frame, you know like this was like on VHS or something We're editing this stuff and then putting music in and then taking still shots and and making making something that you could make on your phone in under five minutes now but When we finally played it for the adults One of them I forget who it was was like wait What are they saying about the backseat because you know, we used try to use the song Jack and Diane and there was Basically some objectionable content in there lyrically and so we'd already Made the video like it was all like in the frame, you know everything audio and video were kind of synced we'd locked on picture Andrew and So the only thing to do was to just like make this Horrendous edit which to this day. It sounded like a CD skipping. Yeah Because we didn't have there like you and I now if you assigned us this we could figure out a way to take that out And then loop something and then like you could make it really seamless We didn't have that technology in those days and I remember sitting in the ballroom of wherever the hell we were for this thing watching this production that I had like personally spent 25 hours of my life on you know just sitting around with the edit and like just dreading the moment where the song Jack and Diane was going to skip and I will never ever forgive those adults for that

how do they feel about the part where they talk about laying down on the tall grass and letting them do their stuff that will forget

yesterday what was it second hand news

off the table. I couldn't remember exactly what song that Fleetwood Mac sang. I think that is Lay Me Down on the Tallgrass

and Let Me Do My Stuff. I don't like that line, by the way. No, me neither. No, no.

I'm not trying to be a prude. Let me do my stuff. That doesn't sound very like yes, yes, yes or whatever. Yeah, definitely. That's

chick, chick, chick. When we need yes, yes, yes.

Yeah, let me just, you just sit there. I don't care what you do. Just lay down and let me do my stuff. That is not giving. Yeah, no, thank you. No.

No, not at all. Do you

ba-da-ba-da-ba-ba Do I know the McDonald's song? Yes. I do. You just sang it. I have a, well, I'll save it for next week. Today's our last day to play voicemails, and I have a voicemail I've been sitting on, but it's evergreen. I'll play it for you. Yeah, let's play it on Monday. I've got to re-record all of the Big Flop show today. Oh, nice. Yeah, good job. Solo. Are you going to be funny this time?

What?

Burn. That was a good, that was a solid burn. Burn. All right, everyone. Thank you so much for tuning into the program today. We are going to be back here tomorrow with more Imaginary Radio. I will be in Las Vegas. Oh, yeah. So probably have some sort of update from the... You will not have talked to Wayne Newton by that point. I will not have yet spoken to Wayne Newton. I'll still be in the anticipatory phase. So, yeah, we'll see you tomorrow. Until then, have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves. And please remember, no mountain too tall. And good luck to all. Just another Manic Meatball. Power out.