Muse

Hello and welcome to the amazing world of cat massage. My name is Mary Jean Ballner and this is my wonderful cat Champion. In this videotape you'll learn that your cat doesn't want petting anymore. Your cat wants a massage and we'll be able to show you how based on my book Cat Massage. So continue watching and you'll learn to bring on power purring and mega meow moments. When to cat massage whenever computer keyboards on the couch cat massage makes TV commercials bearable and of course on the bed our best massage techniques were developed here cat massage is the easiest way to produce a cat smile and is a reliable source for cat giggles listen closely for cat giggles sometimes Sometimes, Cat will approach you for massage. You know what that's like. He's rubbing up against you. Or he'll simply give you a look that says, Massage time.

TBTL. Hey, you know, if we knocked down that wall, it would really open the place up. You know, clean up the blood, maybe add some French doors, maybe a ping pong table right there. You know, I'm just ripping.

I don't know if it's video games or what, But it's so unfair to, after something like this, to blame people in the backseat or say they deserved it.

Beads.

Beads?

Beads.

Beads?

Mmm. Ah, this gazpacho soup just burned my lips. The gazpacho? Yeah, it's been sitting out. It warmed up. It warmed up so much that it burned your lip. Let me explain something to you. If you're expecting something ice cold and you bring it up to your lips and it's room temp, it's going to feel like your mouth's on fire. It's going to feel like your body's on fire.

Oh, I see. dirty monkey not okay but dirty monkey dance let's get to the jokes

well all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a tuesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live this song goes out to all the coffee lovers of the world my name is luke burbank i am your host i just want you to be normal and clearly you're not Coming to you once again from the DMV, the District of Columbia, our nation's capital, where, let's see here, yeah, a lot of police presence, a lot of security, a lot of roads being blocked off this morning. Went on my little jog, and I wanted to go over to the White House and see what's become of the East Ballroom. And, well...

It was a waste of time to do that.

I mean, in the most literal sense, it's a police state right now. It doesn't help that I think the Saudi prince is, like, a half a block from where I am right now, being lauded by our current president. So, it's a security situation. That's all right, though. Episode 4,600 in a collector's series... Let the fun begin. ...of TBTL will be unaffected by whatever is going on outside here in D.C. and we've got a great show for you, actually. Target and Starbucks are both apparently kind of facing some economic headwinds and the Target folks are trying to fix it by telling their employees to smile more. Can you hear my smile? Which I have kind of mixed feelings about, honestly. So we can delve into that. Also, speaking of retailers, Costco is in trouble for putting stuff in their tequila that is not tequila. You scare me.

You're an alcoholic.

and it's against the law what they are doing according to the the class action lawsuit that is being brought against them uh so we'll talk about that too time permitting we will always permit time for this guy though he is the longest running cobro of the show maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships he's been dealing with something this week but he's been handling it very bravely honestly he's about at his limit i happen to know a guy who's at his limit his name happens to be andrew walsh and he joins me right now good morning my friend good morning luke and

shout out to listener mike who resurrected the cat massage tape that we heard massage at the beginning of the show so listener matt sent me that video which by the way we only played a minute of it's three minutes of pure gold there's nothing that you would want to cut out of that it killed me to end it where we had to end that but uh you were obsessed with this tape way way way back in the radio days of tbtl long before i was part of this ship and uh and i think mike just stumbled on it recently and said yep i guess i'm a new listener at only five plus years because i didn't realize the history behind that but uh yeah that's some classic i hadn't heard that in so long

yeah it's like an instructional video for how to massage your cat right yeah well she wrote a book

it's a promo video for her book cat massage i believe yeah and uh and so maybe we can play some more.

of it later but cat massage would bingo tolerate a lot to vary well i'll be honest with you i've

watched the video i don't see a lot of difference between cat massage and cat petting you're already doing she tries to like sort of differentiate there which i understand it's a cat eat cat world out there in publishing so you got to do what you got to do to get your book on the shelf but like i it seems like cat petting to me although while we're here there is something i wanted to get off my chest regarding my relationship with bingo which generally is very positive as you well know and it maintains its positivity. Love that guy. Genevieve's been gone lately. Yesterday he was just obsessed with me. Well, I also think he's obsessed with my chair. When I was out of town, I think he spent basically the entire time sleeping in my chair and here at my desk. You could say, oh, because he missed you. But no, I think what it is is when I'm in the chair and he's acting lovey towards me, he really just wants me out of the chair. He likes the chair, not me. But that's not even what's irritating me. What's irritating me is something that's been going on since he was a kitten and he's started to do it again which is once a night usually very early in the morning once i've been asleep for a while and i no longer have control over what my limbs are doing in bed when one of my feet is exposed he just walks into the room and knows he doesn't do this on any other part of my body he doesn't tap my face or my arm he just comes in the room when i'm dead asleep and just tickles my foot just one stroke down the middle of one of my feet the fact that he brings a feather honestly he's using tools it's weird we need to tell the researchers it is it really is clearly learned behavior though because if he were to tap me somewhere else he would just wake me up but what he does is because i'm ticklish he taps the bottom of my foot and i jump out of my god dang skin and so he knows it he's like oh it's it's 6 a.m or 5 a.m or whatever it is it's time to get the big you know reaction out of andrew and so he just like put it he's not hungry he's not like he's not like begging for food or anything in the morning i think he just he's like oh let's push

the button and watch the big guy freak out i was hoping you were gonna say that like you then it integrates into your dream no then you're like i'm not dreaming anymore i'm wide awake you're having a dream of being tickled and it's just like a funny you know a fine little moment for you know it actually wakes you up and then but he's not doing it because he's trying to get anything from you it's just he's bored and it's funny yes when the when the big guy has a strong

reaction yeah i think i jump like probably an inch off the bed like i just i jump out of my sleep so yeah it's uh and again i just know that he he he has learned reactions right like he's he's not doing anything else except for the thing that is going to get me to jump so anyway not a huge fan of that he did do that uh last night or this morning i don't know what time bubbles is would

not tolerate very much cat massage although i do think she's getting a little bit more like when you know i'm visiting or when i'm getting my supervised visits with her at becca's place i have noticed that it used to be so i always i'll pick her up i'm always very excited to see her and everything but i'd pick her up and then i would like be patting her tummy or something and i'd get about five seconds of that max before she started to squirm and i kind of intentionally i play into it a little bit like i kind of throw her over my shoulder like or i kind of i hold her in a way like i know she's going to be annoyed no matter what so i don't even try to not annoy her it's almost like a a big brother kind of razzing his little brother or something so i'll pick her up i'll kind of pat her on the tummy she'll kind of go meow or maybe sometimes she sounds like this and then so that used to i used to get about five seconds before she freaked out now i'm getting about 30 seconds so she is a little bit older and maybe was she like maybe four years old now or something um and she so i don't know if she's just she's certainly not mellowing out because as i commented to becca the other day she is a highly anxious individual that cat like it's you know she's lived with becca for a long time now and she's lived in that apartment for a long time and you'd think she would be kind of used to the rhythms and the just the goings-ons there but like i was doing the show from there the other day because i'd been in portland doing that little tv appearance and i forget what happened some like not particularly loud sound happened and that cat went sprinting across the room like you know like as if you know it was it's her life was flashing in front of her very eyes or something so it's like she's never had a relaxed moment in her life that I can and I was like I mean I guess they make gummies for animals right isn't that a

thing now it seems like that would be really hard to chew you know what I mean like I don't they

make like anti-anxiety I'm not gonna look I'm not gonna put her on meds honestly I don't think I have the parental rights to put her on meds anymore I think that'd be more Becca's called than mine, but like, I just had this realization with her. her that she is on edge at all times I mean unless she's sleeping but she's just never like that's one of the things I'm I'm envious of your relationship with Bingo and also I'm envious on behalf of Bubbles for how Bingo's brain is because Bingo seems to be pretty happy most of

the time and pretty not anxious yeah I mean we've had now three cats Genevieve and I as a couple and Bingo has that personality and the other two had very different personalities you know professor bananas was incredibly anxious i don't know if she'd go running at a loud noise well for most of her life if there was a knock at the front door she'd go running and hide somewhere and and then theodore who was a big guy he uh he had his own anxieties as well he was like super sweet with us and super cuddly in fact i think i've said this to you on the show like i'm not somebody who goes through my life i have regrets over things i've said or embarrassing moments whatever but i don't like kind of regret broad swaths of my behavior or what have you although i do look back at all of the times theo would want to sit on my lap and i was like no i'm playing whatever that card game was i used to play on my boop boop you know like i'm always like hearthstone i'm like i'm playing hearthstone i did just how many times a day did i kick that cat oh not kick him with my feet but you know like kick him off my lap because i had something more important to do and now i would kill to have that cat you know begging for some for some snuggles now so anyway i try to remember with my parents yeah right actually yeah i mean with all relationships true story yeah true story

i really like i love them but uh but you know sometimes i'm like there's gonna be a time when i'm gonna really really really want to have these days with them so let's have one right now yeah

yeah exactly so anyway so you know bingo we've lucked out with his personal he's really chill but i would also say this like you're talking about your relationship with with bubbles i mean And it sounds like you just have the reverse of what Bingo and I have. I mean, in each situation, you've got one chill dude and one uptight dude. In this case, Bingo's the chill dude, and I'm the one who goes running around the house and hiding when somebody knocks on the door. Like, that's not even—if I hear a knock on the door, I'm probably hiding, you know? So I understand it.

I've seen you play with a foil ball, a crinkled-up thing of foil, for hours.

Yeah, it's fun.

Hours. You never tire of it when I skitter it across the kitchen floor. Thank you for that again, by the way. I appreciated that, yeah. Hey, by the way, a couple things. One, I was out this morning in D.C. kind of doing a little exploring and going to see what it looked like over there at the White House with half of it torn down now. And I just had the realization, first of all, I actually really love D.C. as a city. I think it's a very interesting place. And there's this sense that, like, you know, important stuff is happening here, you know, whether it's happening the way that I want it to or not. I think it just, there's an energy here that I really like. I think also because I live in like the middle of nowhere now and there are like zero good restaurants that I can walk to the fact that like last night I just, I didn't even know where I was going. I just walked out of the hotel to find something to eat and it was a Monday night and there were 30 options within a three block radius of the hotel. I just like being in an area that has stuff, which would raise the question, why did you buy a house in the middle of nowhere? But so I really like the city of D.C., but I also realized today that it is also almost like uniquely designed to make me angry because everywhere you go, there are police, there are Secret Service, there are National Guard people. And I was going up to Pennsylvania Avenue to see what was doing with the White House, and it's just all blocked off for no reason that they can tell you about. The Secret Service person I asked is, is this all day? She said, I don't know. I said, do you know what this is related to? No, I just got here, actually. And then it's just like a bunch of people just making, just following rules that someone else has told them. You know, my least favorite thing, which is following rules that I don't feel like have a very legit explanation. And it's just everywhere you go, particularly in the area I'm in, because I'm right by the White House and right by the National Mall and all that. Everywhere you go, there are like barriers that are set up. They're like multiple law enforcement vehicles. There are people with AK-47s or whatever those kinds of guns are. And they're all just doing something that they were told to do by somebody who was told to do it by somebody else, by somebody else, by somebody else. And no one has any idea why they're doing any of it. It feels extremely feels really like a police state.

That reminds me of a story that a friend of ours told me recently. This is a mutual friend. I'm going to leave his name out of it only because in case I get details of the story wrong, I don't want to put it on him. but he travels a lot and he was in China and he was on a jog in China and I don't remember what city but he's like yeah you know there was one time I was just jogging and it was completely empty street but there was a soldier with a gun and the soldier said you're not jogging here just turn around he said yes sir and he just like yeah turn around he's like I'm not picking a fight with that guy and it's just like you want to talk about completely random because I don't think he was near any kind of government building or anything I think it was just sort of like you want to talk about a police. state and he was like yeah okay i don't run here i run somewhere and yet and yet andrew that same person i was you figured on instagram you figured out who i was leaving enough breadcrumbs there

yeah yep that's right uh and yet that person the photographs from being in china that that person was putting on instagram were again i don't want to elide what are the real like human rights violations of the chinese government i don't want to sort of sound like i'm joking about that or whistling past that graveyard. But I was like, why does I had texted our friend and I said, why does every photograph from China make it look like the most amazing place I've ever seen? He goes, it is. I was like, are we moving there? Like, it's weird because we think of and I am, as you can tell, by no means a China scholar. And I am not trying to minimize the the real issues. But I guess because I've never been to China and because I think of it as this kind of I still think of it as like Tiananmen Square or something. And it's just kind of like this incredibly oppressive place, this oppressive communist place or something. It somehow blows my mind when I see, oh, no, wait, no, they have malls and they have restaurants and they have, you know, they have like all kinds of stuff going on. People are living their lives right now. You know, again, it's obviously a lot going on. Wouldn't be good to be a Uyghur if you're in China. Wouldn't be good to be somebody who is in any way expressing political dissent. Wouldn't be good to be our friend jogging down that street That one day with the guy with the gun But I was shocked at how Actually cool China looked Maybe it's like the worst America gets The more I think well What are other options

Well what I like is Dave Chappelle can say whatever he wants there He has more freedom of speech in China Than he does here in the United States I understand

Dude it was crazy this morning Because they do have everything closed down around the White House I think because I think it's MSM right or what's this you know the the saudi prince is here again it's very it's a very strange thing to have that happening about a half a block from where i am from where i was trying to jog because i finished my jog up and then i come back to the hotel and then i stop by they have this like lounge you know that you can scan in if you are at the whatever level of bond voyage here it's so great by the way because all i really need at a hotel i need access to bottled water for free a couple of diet pepsis some coffee in the morning uh an apple like they have like they just have like a healthy amount of snacks there it's all free it saves you so much money because mostly what i am at the hotel is i'm thirsty i want some bottled water i want a couple cups of coffee in the morning uh and maybe i'll have an apple later or something like it's great but i go into that lounge room and they just have cnn i enter the room to get my coffee and i just hear someone talking and there's a lot of like business people with their laptops open on zooms and stuff in this, you know, kind of lounge area. And somebody's just talking and I'm like, that person is the most annoying. Their cadence is so annoying. I can't believe they're having this meeting and they're just blasting everyone with their annoying voice. And I realized, oh, it's CNN. It's just Trump talking. Like the TV was on at a kind of a medium volume. I didn't realize that the volume was on the TV. So what I was hearing was the current president of the united states of america lauding this you know i would say extremely evil person um and so it's weird to be like in the hotel lounge watching on tv a thing that's happening a half a block away from me indoors that i'm not even allowed to jog near and then when you went down on constitution avenue some guy had a huge he had like a box truck but somehow the sides of it were like a digital signage and he just had and this was what i realized was this guy was parked where he was because it was as close as he could get to the white house legally and he just had this digital sign said mr bones saw is in town oh wow and then i know it's dark but but yeah no i mean dark but

verified wasn't i mean trump was basically defending the prince saying ah he didn't know anything about it his only is the only through line is he aligns himself with evil like it doesn't even you know anybody he pardons it doesn't even matter about their actual like political leanings

it's just like oh are you evil then you're on my side yeah hey is gargamel from the smurfs that's he's still doing time because i'd like to see what i can do for him how has the onion not

done that yet trump lauds gargamel says hell of a job but i think i cut you off though you were

going with something i think with that well just i don't know just it's it's strange it's a strange experience for me i guess considering my normal life and where i normally live i'm so out of the loop to be by happenstance i'm not here doing any stories about the politics of this place but just to be like right where that meeting is happening and then also where the people are trying to protest that meeting but they can't get close to the building by the way which is half torn down because of why um so this guy's just out on constitution avenue with this big digital truck just parked there Thank you.

as long for as long as he can until the secret service shows up and gets him out of there you know it's like i don't know it's somewhere it's certainly not china and i don't want to say it's china but it certainly isn't the america that i remember from 20 years ago regardless of who was actually in the white house democrat or republican it feels speech feels very repressed here right now to me compared to compared to certainly my time living in dc um and also compared to just, again, my knowing of what the vibe is here. It feels, again, we're not quite at China yet, but it's closer to that than I'd like it to be.

Yeah, I have something that I want to say, but I don't know if I can articulate it, and that's why I'm saying this to ramp up to it. I was having some thoughts yesterday about my fair city here in Seattle, and, of course, Katie Wilson was elected mayor, And it was an election night when you're first counting the first round of ballots. It didn't look like she was going to win. She was way down in the count. And Bruce Harrell, the incumbent, had just poured so much money into the campaign. It seemed a bit like a fait accompli. But with more and more ballots being counted throughout the days, including mine, by the way, I'm one of those people. People were complaining about my type of voting, like literally dropping, walking to one of the ballot boxes and dropping it in the ballot box on the day of as opposed to mailing it weeks in advance, which I have the option of doing. But you never know. Honestly, you never know what's going to change in the last few weeks of an election. I like having the extra time. But anyway, so she's elected and I'm I'm very proud of that and I'm incredibly happy about that. And I was bummed when it looked like maybe she wasn't going to win. But she is somebody who has not held public office before. I think she's going to do a great job. And I truly believe that. We don't have to get into her politics of it. But it was such a quiet race here when you had everything going on with Mamdani out in New York. And the nation's attention was on that. And people saying, you know, and him, you know, proudly saying that he's a socialist. And here Katie Wilson has been sort of painted with that brush. And she didn't back away from it. But she also says, I don't go around calling myself a socialist. You can call me whatever you want. I'm, you know, I'm for the working class and all of those things. She didn't shy away from it, but she's also not a grandstander. You know what I mean? I'm not trying to say Mamdani was, but there was just no grandstanding at all.

She has no prior history doing rap songs? Not that I know of. Oh, man.

Well, whatever.

They're not bad, by the way. I have to say, the Mamdani song that I've heard, it's not the worst song.

There's a guy named, I'm forgetting his first name, but he used to write a blog, a music blog called Passion of the Weiss. And I was following that like 20 years ago. I think he was even on one of my radio shows at one point. And he's in LA. And I think we've had a couple of interactions. But anyway, it was a pretty well read, hip hop focused, you know, MP3 blog or whatever. And he still sort of maintained that brand. And I must follow him on Blue Sky now or something, because he on the day after the election, he went back and found an email from 2011 that an unknown Mamdani had sent him saying, hey, any chance you would give this a spin on your blog or however? Oh, my God, that's it was really it was really cute and really cool. But all of that is to say, so I'm really glad that the election turned out the way it is. But now suddenly not only the nation's attention, but the president's attention is is on her. and he's calling her a communist and he's trying to get the world cup there's six games in the world cup and so and it's it literally feels like i was like oh good you know that's cool katie wilson she's a very down-to-earth person i know people who know her you know like it just sort of had this like small i didn't think about this way before yesterday but it just sort of felt like yeah we're seattle we elected who we want to run our little city you know and then it was like the eye of soron turned on us and then yesterday i'm just like oh she doesn't just have to figure out transportation and homelessness and all of the issues that are really important to us easy stuff easy yeah right like yeah the things that are just like but also is now thrust into this national conversation where she's you know illogically and inaccurately being described as an evil communist by the president of the united states which means and i'm sorry this is always a trigger for me but that means all of my family all my lovely family that i was just visiting probably think now that I am I am under the service of an evil communist mayor here because everybody just believes whatever is on Fox News and you're just like man it's a real it's a real bummer that we can't just run our city and anyway that's that's the I didn't really want to get into all of that I don't know if it's related to what you were just talking about that's but that's where

my brain went well this morning when I was down at the um kind of the the national reflecting pool you know the thing that's in front of the lincoln memorial and then i went

around this little loop and i came by i guess it's it's like it's one of the i don't know if it's the vietnam memorial or if it's the um it was a it looked like it was a sort of a memorial for you know for veterans and people who died at war or whatever and there's no one around it's pretty early in the morning and there's just three national guard guys just standing there doing that thing that like i don't know if football players invented this move or not but it's the I have nowhere to put my hands so I'm holding on to the interior of my shoulder pads move oh yeah yeah yeah you ever see a quarterback doing that on the sideline it's like they don't give you pockets and your football uniform I wish I had known to do that because I used to hang on

to my face mask because I didn't know what to do with my hands and my mom said oh yeah I can see you on the sidelines I said how do you know which one is me they give me a different number every game and she says because you're always playing with your face mask like anyway now the move I

feel like is hold on to the the the sort of you know collar part the collar plate of your of your shoulder pads and these guys were all doing that with whatever you know battle wrap they're wearing their tactical vests yeah you know it's like but they didn't seem like bad dudes how would i know i was huffing and puffing as i went past actually it was kind of funny i was in the elevator and this i get in the elevator it's one of these elevators at that um you don't get to you tell it when you're in the lobby what floor you want to go to and then after that it's just some real like charlie and the chocolate factory shit like it's just gonna do what it's gonna do have you been in

those elevators before yeah it's been a while but it was um this is a long time ago luke but the last one that i remember or maybe it was the first one i encountered was when you and i were at some sort of a public radio conference that i was excited to be at but i had just had tongue surgery. Do you remember that? Were we in Chicago maybe? And I remember we were in kind of a fancy hotel because I was finally at, maybe it was a PRPD thing, but also I had just had that tongue surgery, which they told me was not going to be a big deal. And I just remember being in our hotel room or one of our hotel rooms and trying to do the podcast and not being able to barely talk. Anyway, that hotel had one of those things and I thought it was very exciting and confusing.

They're exciting, but for some reason they stress me out. It feels like the self-driving cars of elevators and like i don't know there's something about not having any like it's just you you get you get into the elevator and just a blank it's just too yeah it's like a ken doll there's just two blank walls with nothing happening on them and you just have to trust that it remembers where it's supposed to be taking you which of course it does but i get in the elevator to go down and i'm in my like kind of running clothes and the guy next to me he looks over and he goes um are you going running and i go yeah he goes now you're a real man and i was like okay that's a really interesting statement in this elevator like that is really interesting what

was our kind of can you describe this person without getting into staircase yeah he looked exactly like anthony fauci he might have been anthony fauci i don't know okay that's now that's a real man i mean in a certain way haven't you been sort of waiting your whole life to hear that

i have and then i finally heard it and it was kind of disorienting honestly if you went to

push you went to push the elevator button to get out and there was nothing you're just

but i was like oh and i didn't i thought he just meant because like i'm going on a run or something and i said um i said yeah i got a little time to kill because my company is this is how i describe what we do andrew my company is based on the west coast oh okay i like that yeah i didn't know what to say i was just trying to say yeah i got a little time to kill before basically you and i dial up so i'm gonna go out there or something and he goes like well have you checked the temperature and i was like oh our nar i was like no uh and he goes yeah it's like 32 degrees oh that's what this is all about that's what you're talking about but then i had to like kind of dig in my heels and act like i knew what was going act like i'm a responsible person who actually checks the weather before they go out on their jog because i was in a t-shirt and shorts and i said to him uh this is a this is an old aphorism from running i said well you got to dress for the second mile by this time by the way there's more people in the elevator we're getting hop-ons so now there's overhearing me confidently saying because you dress for the second mile is like you're going to be sweaty by the time you're in mile two so like if you overdress so that you're feeling good in mile one you're going to be wearing too much clothing in mile two and three or whatever so i said well yeah you gotta dress for mile two and i was like mr cool guy and then i got outside and i was like ah damn it is way too cold for this outfit did you just continue on though i did but it was like i thought my hands were gonna fall off by the end by the so all that is to say i'm just like running past these national guard guys and mostly just focusing on trying to keep some blood circulation going to my hands and like they're just sitting around shooting the shit.

I mean they didn't seem again they're just they probably you know who knows what they do in wherever they're from I mean these are probably you know probably welders in North Carolina or something I don't know like you know and they're just now they're just here and they're protecting the city from crime and Antifa but they're just standing three of them at by the way at what cost in front of this war memorial where there's nobody else except me at this hour of the morning and I I guess my thought was, I wonder what these guys' politics was coming into this, and I wonder if this has in any way impacted how they think about some of this stuff. You were talking about people that you know who hear that Katie Wilson is a communist, and so then that just becomes what their truth is.

That's an assumption, by the way. To make that clear, I haven't had any conversations about this.

But just the way that people tend to look for, to have their priors confirmed, just generally i'm not talking about people you know just in the world we tend to look for our priors being confirmed and if we you know if there's a new source that we tend to go to and it tells us something we tend to believe it and i'm just you know i mean i don't know these guys's exact life but i being in the national guard i would say probably sort of increases the chances that they may have a more conservative political persuasion than i do not everyone in the national Guard, but certainly I think if you took a thousand National Guard members and a thousand former public radio journalists, you'd find a certain kind of politics in one group versus the other. But like, so I wonder what these guys thought they were getting into. I wonder to what degree they thought that DC was a lawless hellscape that they were being deployed in to protect. And I wonder how they feel about it now and what they're telling their families. Like, what are they saying to their wives at night from the hotel room about how their day was and will this in some way if they have the experience of hearing one story about dc and then coming up and experiencing that story to be clearly untrue i wonder if that is some kind of a small crack in the the levy that is their faith in the in the voices that they listen to that we're telling them

dc is a is a hellhole yeah you hope so you hope so i i told you well i don't want to get too much into it but like i i've always held out a certain amount of hope that people would sort of see what's going on around us and be like oh wow like this is this is beyond anything that is normal but that doesn't seem to be reaching people that i was hoping that it would reach for sure but that's

because they're not being yeah they're not being commanded to go to where the hell is and then they have to look at that's what we should do make everyone that believes all the things that are pretty hard to really prove if we could just instead of giving everyone two thousand dollar stimmy checks off of the tariffs which by the way is not going to happen oh that's such a fascinating like sorry i'm not trying to get so political today on the show but there's something about staring at the white house from your hotel room that kind of puts you in the state of mind like um it would send instead of those stimmy checks of two thousand dollars which will never happen anyway probably send send everyone a free travel voucher to the place that they think send everyone to the ice facility in portland south water who thinks that portland is a lawless overrun place that needs a national guard and i bet you that experience would actually change

some hearts and minds now this is changing the topic drastically but i just saw something that came across my transom via blue sky that is literally the perfect luke burbank article now I'm going to send this to you if you don't see it already. And I think that we should maybe reserve that. I don't know what our plans are for recording a Thanksgiving show, but maybe this is a good Thanksgiving topic for us. Listen to this from the New York Times. The author Joan Didion embraced Thanksgiving, and she staged it the same way she conjured her essays, novels, screenplays, and memoirs with almost military mustering of planning and ambition. The headline, How Joan Didion Did Thanksgiving. Luke Burbank, is there a more—I mean, can we throw a Fran Leibovitz in there to make it more into your style?

Andrew, I saw the link this morning, and I said, I'm going to savor this.

Well, I'm a West Coast operation, so I'm just seeing it now.

I'm going to savor this article because I'm so—and I sent it to Becca. She's, by the way, the photo, she's standing at a stove. There's a big Le Creuset pot.

Yes, and those canisters in the background. I'm drooling over these canisters.

And I'm just like, I want to crawl inside this photo, and I want to be at Joan Didion and Gregory Dunn's home for Thanksgiving. Was it something like, I think it said, like, pages and pages of notes or something?

I only read to you what I'm seeing in front of me now, but now I'm seeing the—I was going to describe—I didn't know you had seen this. I was going to describe the photo to you as well. This must be, I'm guessing, from the 70s Or maybe late 60s, maybe But yeah, that lot

but then also all of these like perfect canisters with oh my god that has all of her like you know flour and and seasoning and everything in it all across her countertop which by the way it's pretty humble little countertop too but still has that like um sort of era appropriate pink tile with red highlights i love this kind of kitchen and bathroom too i know um i love it let's absolutely

roll that out for the thanksgiving show um and but we do have some other top stories today that i do want to get to so let's do this let's thank some donors and then let's talk let's talk smiles at target all right let's do that donor thanks this is a list of folks who are donating their money to tbtl every month and that is how we get paychecks you and me and john sklaroff that's how this thing can happen five days a week i'm in this slightly unique position in this hotel room andrew because along with all the other dc stuff that i've mentioned that i can kind of see i can also just see right into an office building i think it might be the kaiser family foundation and so what i'm looking at is kind of like that classic sort of cross-section of multiple floors of an office building it's actually a very beautiful newly built office building but all of the offices have these big huge floor-to-ceiling windows and i'm just looking at all of these work lives unfolding in all of these different offices kind of separately i love that it's a fun thing to look at and again it seems like honestly a pretty nice place to work like very tasteful furniture everybody seems um happy to be there and yet i'm very glad that this can be our job i'm very glad that i am not going through a spreadsheet uh in an office right now as is the job of many people because well thanks to folks like nate valderis who's in shoreline washington now did you have

you called nate bruce i'm not sure i do want to point out that i am literally looking at a spreadsheet right now ironically i am too you know what andrew i'm looking at a spreadsheet we keep all of these donors in a spreadsheet and that is literally what i'm looking at right now um so no shame to spreadsheets uh so yeah at all so nate's pronouncer so in the system he's officially listed as a nathan but then in the pronouncer in parentheses it says nate but andrew calls me bruce i don't know why maybe i might have confused him with batman one time and i thought he is Bruce Wayne. I'm not exactly sure what that's in reference to, but Bruce, thank you for the donation.

I appreciate it. I'll call you whatever you want. Appreciate you. Also, thanks to Wolfgang Weber in San Francisco, California. Each year when we thank Wolfgang, I wonder aloud if Wolfgang is going with the if he's going with the W sound or the V sound. Is he going Vim Vendors or Wim Wenders? One wonders if he's going Wim Wenders.

If his name is Bruce

Yes, that's right So I'm going with the more like you could say Americanized version of it and saying Thank you very much Wolfgang Thanks also to Kay Constantino Of Canfield, Ohio

Hey, thank you Kay, I'm looking up Canfield I feel like I maybe Is that nearby your old stomp? Jeez, it seems like it was It seems like a place that we would travel to For maybe some sort of special School event from time to time

Oh, I thought maybe like the barbecue shows when you'd bring out the Andy man.

Oh, no, that doesn't seem like Canfield to me.

Somebody is flying a drone pretty close to the White House. That thing is going to get shot down, man. Whoa. Yeah, I'm watching a drone. This like, you know, kind of a, it's not like, you know, it's not weaponized or anything. It's just the kind that you could probably buy at, you know, Best Buy or something. But it's, yeah, it's hovering. I'm thinking way too close to the airspace than I want it to be

I said woe for a personal reason that we don't have to get into you saying drone trust me I'm not even going to get into it but I was just like oh yeah what was that thing I was watching about that crazy drone yesterday and then I was like oh damn that was a dream that you just uncovered that I had last night I think maybe before bingo tickled my feet but the woe from me was about me remembering that dream which was very unprofessional having said that you said this looks like sort of a cheap drone up there so there you don't think there's a chance that it is the security because i would guess that white house security uses drones as part of their security you know what

that's a good point i guess if it doesn't get shot down maybe that's the more likely explanation it's i mean i don't know how much like if it's cheap or not it looks from here like the kind that our cbs crews use and my understanding of that is that those are you know i don't know thousand bucks or something but um but yeah the fact that it's the fact that it's still up there makes me think that it's probably not, um, that it is authorized and maybe that is, yeah, maybe they're using that, the, the, that's, that's, maybe that's a secret service. I don't know. It was also weird today. Just talking to secret service people. I don't, that doesn't happen, uh, perched high above the mighty Columbia river either. Like when I was talking to the secret service person who had no idea why Pennsylvania Avenue was closed and couldn't give me any information, just said, well, I just got here. I don't know if it's all day or just a little bit or whatever and i just thought like again no no particular shade on this person but i thought i wonder if you thought this is what the secret service was going to be like you know like i wonder if this was because i think most if i was going to the secret service i'm imagining being clint eastwood in that movie where he runs on the edge of the car and then has a couple of threesomes actually wait that's the mule and he wrote it remember clint eastwood was in that movie where he's like a secret service guy and I feel like I didn't even see the movie but what I can tell you is he probably takes a bullet for the president

yeah and I'm trying to remember that's not the play the something Daisy for me right or play no play Misty for me is where he's a jazz DJ in Monterey California the fact that I said called play Daisy for me is going to drive me crazy I don't know where I got that from but yeah driving this Daisy it is not clear and present danger that's

it's clear and present Daisy it's clear

clear and present Daisy that's obviously the The Han Solo movie

Oh, Claire and Present Danger is Harrison, isn't it?

Harrison Ford, right, as I call him, Han Solo Yeah, that's part of the The Jack Ryan movie Yeah, exactly So yeah, I do know what you're talking about I feel like it was a 90s movie In the Line of Fire, maybe? In the Line of Fire, I'm quite sure that's it Am I right that it's 90s, or was it before that?

It feels 90s to me, or late 90s I mean, but I just feel like I haven't seen the movie, but if you ask me to describe it It's, the entire movie is a slow motion scene of Clint Eastwood running on the corner of the, whatever they call the Air Force One car. I don't think they call it Air Force One car, by the way.

I think they call it, don't they technically call it the Beast?

Oh, I don't know. I've never heard that. I think that the name for the car that the president travels in is called the Beast. Really? I don't like that. I don't either. And I think that might, believe it or not, I think it predates this president. Because it sounds like something that this president would want to name his car. But I feel like yeah that that uh clear or whatever in the line of fire i didn't see it but i i promise you there's a critical scene where clint eastwood as a you know even at that time what 74 year old secret service agent has to take a bullet for the president in the line of daisy in the line of daisy i believe is in the line of daisy that's right with morgan freeman and april bingham of seattle washington who are also thanking today thank you april thanks april and then we're returning to the Buckeye State, Andrew. We are. To Oxford, Ohio. You know that's... For Scott Hartley.

Yeah, Scott Hartley. Thank you very much. You know, you mentioned Buckeyes. Do you ever... I think I've asked you this before. I can't remember the answer. I'm going to a little kind of holiday party in, I think, early December, and I've been thinking about things I want to make for it. And I was thinking... Somebody said, hey, you can bring some appetizers. But I was also thinking maybe a dessert. And I was thinking about making Buckeyes. Do you remember those desserts that are mostly... They look like the little nuts that are buckeyes or horse chestnuts or whatever but they're mostly peanut butter with chocolate on the outside with like a little peanut butter eye so that it sort of looks first of all that

sounds delicious yeah I didn't grow up with those but I think I kind of know what you're talking

about and I would say definitely yeah those are good but anyway but Scott thank you I didn't mean

to steal your spotlight Scott Jarvis Hartley of Oxford Ohio and then I saw this clip on TikTok the other day and it was um a woman in her 20s I think I want to say but she had used some kind of crazy filter that just kind of like moved with her face and head and it made her like look like she was really bald and kind of her features were sort of distorted and the like writing on the screen was like if you're at any single man in his 30s house and she's just pretending to be a guy in his 30s trying to tell her about i think you should leave and i felt very that felt that felt like personally hurtful because it's exactly what i do to anyone who comes over to my house let me explain something to you yeah exactly if you like your your body's on fire uh thanks to linda mills in anacortis washington hey thank you linda you're

a big yeah you're a big fan of anacortis i don't know if i've had the pleasure yeah i would

absolutely live in anacortis if i could uh figure out a way to work it with my schedule and stuff because it's a little bit out there but man oh man is anacortis ever a lovely little spot maybe too close to the casino for me that might be dangerous territory out there they've got a They've got a wonderful casino right as you pull into town. But then there's a lot else to love about Anacortes as well, like the fact that Linda Mills is there. So thank you, Linda. And thank you to all of our donors for making TBTL possible. We absolutely could not do this without you. hello and welcome to top story i was reading this article in cnn the other day that was sort of the headline uh said target and starbucks are both looking for a turnaround they're teaming up on an exclusive new drink so i was like i don't really know if this is there's going to be enough here for us to talk about on the show which by the way would is probably quite stunning for the listeners to hear that i think there are things that there is not enough there for us to talk about on the show considering the stuff that i'll spend 20 to 30 minutes on talking about with you but i mean the ostensibly the story is that target's having trouble because there's been a lot of protest around them eliminating their dei programs and things and also the fact that a lot of the stuff that's for sale at target is is kind of um you know it's what do you call it elective purchasing it's that cute soap dish that would be nice to have in your bathroom but also you have a soap dish in your bathroom and when people are feeling more financially strapped those are the things they stop buying that's the theory behind what's going wrong at target uh for them financially and then starbucks is just i guess i don't know they're well they're having you know they're just i guess they're having trouble with some strikes and things that are happening there as far as their labor force looking to unionize by the way i'm not saying that the unionizers are wrong there i'm just saying that's seen as a financial challenge for starbucks right now but they have like every target pretty much has a starbucks in it which i didn't even i just thought it was all the targets i've been to it didn't occur to me that like oh of course this is a this is a nationwide thing this is something that they've got so and they found that when starbucks launches like an exclusive drink people go crazy for it which i want to be careful because we recently got we had a list didn't somebody leave us a list of like worst starbucks things or something

experiences yeah but it was somebody who enjoys starbucks but the five worst experiences you can potentially have in a starbucks including like which is why i want to be careful i don't want

to like i go to starbucks when i'm traveling and if you know i don't want to roll the dice on whatever the coffee scene is where I'm at I will absolutely hit up a Starbucks so I'm not I ain't too good for Starbucks but it does seem like um you know they've I'm surprised I will put it this way I am surprised at the level of enthusiasm when Starbucks rolls out a a thing that's like you know their version of the um McRib the limited time offer and people are lining up for it I'm always a little surprised by that but apparently it works so now they're to try to raise the fortunes of both companies they've announced this frozen peppermint hot chocolate drink but you can only get at a starbucks that's in a target you can only get it at the combination taco bell pizza hut

it's funny you should use that as an example because i was trying i was just racking my brain right now i'm like i don't usually go in i'm very much like you i'm not like oh i gotta get in line to get this special seasonal what have you right like that's kind of not only do i not do that i'm sort of anti that i just like i don't like waiting in lines and all the other things that i have with my early onset grumpiness which i don't even think it's early onset anymore i think now i've earned it at this point it used to be early onset but i have another shredded wheat grumpy my whole life oh that's right i i really i shocked you with that yesterday who phyllis said that you let out like an oh no as if i told you i'd been diagnosed yeah like you didn't have long to live what i told you i've been moved i moved off of grape nuts into shredded wheat and now they're just trying to keep me comfortable but um what i was going to say was i was thinking i i'm not really into that except for and i don't i still don't think i've tried it but there was something that i was thinking about recently and i think it's the special kind of mountain dew that they only have at taco bell and i never go to yeah is that taco bell or kfc i think it's oh you know what taco bell has baja blast kfc had one for a while that was like a uh it's like golden dew or something like that which you gotta be careful about it's not called golden dew but it was but each of those sort of sounded tempting to me i'm like oh but i never go to to taco bell i feel like there was another one that maybe rang my bell at least uh intellectually but i still haven't checked have you ever had a have you ever had a baja blast could it get me through the door

of a taco bell no but i really should actually give it a try because you know why not live moss it's funny because my tiktok feed for a maybe not a week but a few days just converted into this woman whose whole thing is explaining how to basically order fast food but the vegan version it's just like it's like all of these hacks for like here's what you do you go to you go to taco bell and you order the this but then you get it fresco style which i guess means no none

of the like dairy or something which by the way that would appeal to you potentially you know the sour cream and stuff and honestly by the end and it's like it's it's a total five easy pieces kind of a thing right where it's like you go to taco bell you order the this thing you hold all of this stuff you add the all of this other stuff and then pretty soon you've got this like burrito that's totally vegan and really good and it's like four dollars um and i was like well it's actually this is kind of compelling content for me but um would you be really surprised to hear that in the target press release on this they said that the frappuccino based drink is positioned to be the perfect companion for holiday shopping runs i am shocked you said did they did they is that peer

reviewed like how did they how did they arrive at that conclude that scientific conclusion that it's the perfect yeah it was just in jamma yeah that's another drink they're also selling the

santa jamma i believe i the thing though that really forget the specialty drink the thing that i did not know about this i got the sense in talking to you about this off air the other day that maybe this was a bigger story than i realized but they just mentioned in passing in this cnn article by the way uh credit to uh jordan valinsky writing uh at cnn.com um that of the many things that target has been trying to do to boost business uh they've apparently told um their employees to smile more at the shoppers um so as to create a better shopping experience and you know right when I saw that line I was like oh you've got to be kidding me like how dare you and then I thought about it longer and I thought well I don't know I mean on the other hand it is a workplace and it is nice when people when you're at a store and people are generally friendly like this immediately calls to mind for me this sort of like really gross thing of men traditionally telling women to smile more which i'm not a supporter of but on the other hand it's like if employees are being told hey can you be friendlier to the customers does that fall within in your mind within the acceptable thing for bosses to say to the people that do work there

to get their pay well i'm trying to think if i were running let's say that i started my own business Let's say it was a podcasting business. Like a West Coast operation? Let's say it was a West Coast podcasting business.

But what if you're at your limit?

I am at my limit. So I want to be specific here and say if I was starting my own company that had sort of my employees were outward facing, is that the right word? Like actually interacting with the public? So let's just say that I started a little coffee shop and pastry shop. And also I turned into a pizza shop at night. Specializing in Buckeyes. Right now I'm just trying to steal Barry's, all of Barry's entrepreneurial spirit. But for real, let's just say it's like a coffee shop or something like that. And I have maybe two or three baristas who work. And if one of my employees was outwardly what I considered rude in some way, even if it was standoffish or just barely looking up from their phone, But, you know, provided a coffee, the very bare minimum of what the job requires, yes, makes a coffee, yes, sets it down in front of the customer, but is essentially like rude. I would definitely have some policies in place. I don't know what, you know, if there are legal barriers to what you can and cannot sort of say or put into place. I would definitely, though, try to put into place some sort of policy. And I would certainly talk to that employee and just say, hey, what we're doing here, it's kind of it's not just about coffee. You know, it is about the customer experience. And we need to make sure that the customer experience is good in here. And if people are good at that, then they're going to go further in the company. I don't think there's anything wrong with that. I do think that the corporateness of this is what's so gross. And, yeah, while this was just a quick throwaway line in the article that you read, I noticed it linked to other articles, which I couldn't get to because they were behind paywalls. But I did a little – I just did a very simple – is that what it was, I guess? Bloomberg's behind a paywall. I didn't realize that. I thought it was Wall Street Journal or something. But anyway, but there are articles written just about this policy as a headline in and of itself. In fact, that's what got me on that Fox News video yesterday where he turned to his panel of experts, which was four baseball hat bros and one guy wearing sunglasses inside to talk about their opinions about this. But anyway, it turns out the policy is something called the 10-4 policy that Target is rolling out. And there's something so corporate about it. Like as in 10-4, good buddy? As in 10-4, good buddy, here it is. The new policy requires employees who are within 10 feet of customers to smile, make eye contact, wave, and use friendly, approachable, and welcoming body language. then if staff members are within four feet of customers They must personally greet the guests, smile, and initiate a warm, helpful interaction, Target said. And there's just something about that that is just like, oh, what are you doing? And you also like, you know.

Employees will be outfitted with tape measures.

Right, yeah. I mean, it's just so weird and corporate and so disconnected from the reality of things. And again, like, I think that if I'm a manager of a Target, like, I would kind of hope that my employees and I would try to encourage my employees to be as, you know, I mean, listen, I'm an old man. I complain about customer service. Remember when I was going to the best of them with the best of them? I can shout at clouds like I I had that Home Depot near my house and I think that things have changed there. And it actually has changed my desire to go into that store. I used to literally pass up the Home Depot that is slightly closer to me and I would go to the Lowe's. That was maybe what a quarter of a mile down the street on the left hand side. Slightly harder to get to because it was taking a left across three lanes of Aurora traffic. But I would do it because if I looked lost at Lowe's, somebody would be like, can I help you with something or I can find somebody to help me. And when I was in the Home Depot, I just knew that there were just like kind of a bunch of zombie looking people. And no offense to generally people who work at Home Depot or zombies. But in this particular Home Depot for a while there, they were just like they looked like they actively did not want to help you. Like they were put out if you ask them a question. And just like look just – I mean Genevieve had a story about like just like almost negative helpfulness in a couple of things that she tried to get done there. Like that's not good business. So I guess I'm saying that I do think that managers and people who run companies can have an expectation that if you're interacting with the public, you should try to do so in a way that is helpful. but also when you hear about this corporate policy of 10-4 where you're saying and you have people who are you know working for this giant company probably not making that much money also a company that drives smaller companies out of business or whatever it's just like none of it can be

none of it can be talked about in a vacuum i feel like and also i feel like if you're going to be the place that's known for having extremely friendly helpful employees that's got to be day one like i mean literally ace is the place with the helpful hardware folks yeah and when you walk into an ace they are helpful they certainly are it's part like it's obviously been from the early days of the company and granted you know target is a much larger operation than than ace hardware but still it's like there are places where their whole thing their whole shtick is we're really

helpful chick-fil-a that's got to be like a big one too right yeah but that was a really big one And of course, they have their own baggage, but Chick-fil-A to this day. And I think you want to talk about a day one policy is like their whole thing is like we are super serving our customers with a smile.

And that's where you like if that had always been Target's thing from day one, then then I think, you know, you could maintain that. But what's really hard is to have a gigantic, humongous national chain that just has people that are working there. And some of them are probably really friendly and some of them are probably a little more maybe introverted and just want to get their job done. And now all of a sudden it's like, if you're within 10 feet, do this. If you're within four feet, do this. I can tell you this, even though I do think it is technically, it strikes me that, you know, technically Target does have the right to say this to their employees. Hey, it's the new company policy, but I would be pissed if I worked there and I got that memo. I would not it would not make me feel great about the work environment that it's being directed to me down to the level of like how many feet I am from people. Also, I have to say to the Bloomberg piece that I tried to click through to that I also couldn't get to because it's behind a paywall. I could just I could only read the I guess like the first line before it kind of graded out for me. and it was basically like target is let me see let me get oh come on let me let me see the the first line baby bloomberg don't hold out on me it basically said something like target is bringing minnesota nice to the rest of the country or something i thought is that what we mean no no that's not what minnesota nice means like minnesota nice and listen that's a hot zip for us that's probably outside of seattle where we have the main number of listeners so i'm not trying to no shade to our friends in minnesota but like i don't think that minnesota nice is offered as a positive no it's not this person writing this bloomberg thing really missed the memo on what

minnesota that is that's so cringy boy yeah this bloomberg thing i also did they adjust something so you can't even see the first line anymore because i swear i saw something like that too

i've got this i could see it for a minute and now that i've gone back to the page there's some giant banner blocking that area but you know what too late i already saw it yeah you can't take it out

my brain it's in there i remember i remember being a kid one time and and trying to get ready

for a test and thinking you know what i could do

I could just memorize the answers and just because I used to always try to figure out ways to cheat like I'd you know make a little cheat code for myself or something and then one time I had the bright idea of just like no no store the information in your brain where they can't see it yeah and then when you read the question you just write in the answer that you have you've remembered from before and then at some point realized I believe that's what study I'm writing it on the backs of my eyelids with my brain pretty much yeah I was just like well where can I write this where they won't find it well i guess if it's inside my brain they really won't be able to find it and that's how i became smart yeah right um costco is in trouble for selling their kirkland brand tequila or at least they're potentially in trouble for listing it as um 100 agave even though um there are now some um customer groups some people that are saying uh it's not 100 agave in fact there's up to 40 of non-agave alcohol in the kirkland signature blanco tequila which is labeled as 100 agave um i did not realize i kind of knew there was you know this is one of those what like designated place protected you know there's like like champagne and stuff you know there's certain things that you sort of can't there are a lot of rules around what you can call champagne and what you can call tequila i guess and um there's a lot of uh rules about how much non-agave which is like a cactus right that's basically what the agave plant is i think so

i don't know much about it but that's what i always picture yeah it's a desert plant i don't

know if it's a cactus but it's a desert plant but apparently so um the suit uh brought as a Putative class action claims Costco violated the federal racketeer-influenced-and-corruption organization—they're bringing a RICO charge on this—and various state laws, including the Washington State Consumer Protection Act. The litigation follows January protests by Mexican agave farmers who claim that some distilleries were cutting their tequilas with cane and corn alcohols, according to a report on mezcalistas.com, a mezcal-focused trades organization. and then basically the the argument here the allegation is that uh is that yeah costco was saying that this tequila was 100 agave and that it's not and that even the other ones that they didn't say were 100 agave had so many other stuff so much other stuff in them that wasn't tequila that you can't even call it tequila legally i definitely think this has to be now it's you know it's a class action lawsuit so there are basically a couple of people who have signed on of this who are saying that, like, I wouldn't have bought this tequila if I had known that it wasn't 100% agave. But it feels to me like 100% the agave producers of Mexico have hired a law firm in the U.S. and then that law firm has gone out and somehow like solicited somebody who will agree to say that they bought this tequila under the impression it was 100% agave and it wasn't. I can't imagine this being something that just a random person who bought Kirkland brand tequila, brought the tequila home, tasted it, thought that ain't agave, then had it tested at a laboratory, then reached out to an attorney who agreed to take the case.

Yeah, probably. Like the the the Rico thing is over my head. I don't understand that. That seems really intense. But like from a labeling standpoint, like if there is like a specific – my problem is I can't kind of keep – I can't sort of sort in my head what is the law in Mexico regarding like labeling and how does that law apply to what's going on here in the United States. But it does sound like there's a law in the United States that says, listen, if it's not – it can't be labeled as pure tequila or pure agave tequila or whatever if it's like this percentage, if it's like less than 51 percent. And I sort of feel like that's a legit – I feel like that's a legit lawsuit on behalf of the farmers and on behalf of the people who are buying that product. I mean I guess the one sort of argument is like, well, when we're talking about the way things taste, could it be the proof is in the pudding? You know, like, well, I enjoyed this, and so it has more corn mash in it or whatever. I actually happened to read this over the weekend, and I have not reread it. So as I'm discussing it, I can feel that like, oh, yeah, I felt like I didn't have to read this one today, but maybe I should have reread it. But anyway, I sort of understand it from a perspective of just like, well, I bought this thing that the label, because of the rules of these labels, I believe to be one thing, and they sold me some cheaper version of it. I'm actually on board with that. i guess it does sort of get into the like well but did you enjoy it and then you know like what did you taste that there was more corn in there than agave and if so well i don't know you want

to talk about pudding proof one of the things i mentioned in the article is that the idea about the pure agave tequila which doesn't have

any other mixers in it is that you would not have as much of a hangover because there's less impurity. That's interesting. That is something. If I could bring a lawsuit based on some of the hangovers I've had in my life Listen we don't need a class action. My personal experience constitutes a class action. We're talking about hundreds if not thousands of events of this happening. I want to sue. I want justice.

Oh, liver v. Patron. Yeah, I believe that set a lot of precedents.

here i go once again with the email every week i hope that it's from a female

no man it's not from a female all right emails or emails yes i got this voicemail from carolyn

andrew this is carolyn and encinitas and i just finished listening to yesterday's show and i got so excited at the very beginning when you were talking about this video game that you're playing that is kind of like Dungeons and Dragons and I'm hoping it's Baldur's Gate 3. I call it Balderdash and I play it with my son and we've been playing it for well over a year and I think D&D is so incredibly boring and slow and forever taking but Balderdash is amazing. And I am so excited and I'm hoping that that's what you were talking about and that you are going to share your joy, uh, about that game with us as the listeners, because I find it incredible and I love it. And I play it couch co-op style with my son or side by side and holy shit. I love it. And he's a huge D and D fan. Um, but this game anyway, so hopefully that's what you were talking about go balderdash love you guys have a great afternoon bye uh this was a

voicemail i got a couple of weeks ago when i happened to mention that on the show it is boulders gate 3 is the game that i downloaded the other day it is the game it is and i was surprised how many emails i got about this i wouldn't usually just play a voicemail at the end of the show that is about a video game that i'm playing but you know i'm almost wondering maybe we can talk about this more on tomorrow's show because we're kind of getting near the end of the show but yeah i did download this game i just had always been curious like literally my whole life i've been curious about dungeons and dragons i never played it before i realized as an adult the actual playing of dungeons and dragons does not appeal to me because it's so performative in a certain way like i'd have to sit around with a group of friends and we would make up stories and you're carrying you know there's like kind of just this performative aspect of it that seems really cool to me for people who are into that but that i would be very shy to do and so i realized oh that's not for me but i'm like but i always wanted just to know what it's like so isn't there a video game and i was picturing like a very simple video game like that would almost be like literally you would have virtual dice that you would roll you know and that that maybe you would even type in like maybe you'd create your own stories or something but i was picturing something very like 1990s ish and um I several times I've had this thought and I would google it and then give up and then I was googling it again the other day I don't know what prompted it maybe about a month ago and I was like is there a D&D video game that like follows the rules of D&D and that could like kind of teach me about that world a little bit and I kept seeing this game Baldur's Gate 3 pop up and the thing is my friend Libby has been trying to get me to play Baldur's Gate 3 for a long time now she is obsessed with it you know Libby a mutual friend of ours and Libby is an incredibly smart person but she's also somebody who is way into gaming her whole life she's been a big gamer and is into fantasy I think stories and stuff as well as other things and so Baldur's Gate 3 is her jam but I always just dismissed it as like no no no Libby I'm not your level of gamer and nerdery and all that stuff like it's not i'm not this big fantasy guy generally speaking and i just it felt like everything she said about that game i'm like that sounds like a game that is way over my head and uh but then the internet the internet's telling me to download it libby's telling me to download it so i text her i'm like this is the game you've been talking about right like is it actually dnd she's like yes this is this is dnd it's complicated but like you should download it i'm like all right so i downloaded onto my computer i'm like this seems like a more of a computer game to me because it's going to be more strategy based as opposed to like sitting down behind my Xbox and like playing a football game or something so anyway I download it I'm like okay this thing I'll download in about you know 10 minutes or whatever and then I'll be playing my game I think it was a Friday night it took over an hour for the game to just download onto my computer and I have fiber You're off.

optic internet that's super fast like i was like a half hour and i'm like what am i downloading she's like buckle up and so it's this incredibly immersive incredibly high graphic game that does come down to the rolls of dice basically or a die uh that maybe i can tell you about more but like i yeah it was so it was so impenetrable to me at first and i played it a couple of times couldn't figure it out I'm too impatient like I don't want to read about it or watch videos I just want to play it took me an hour to download this thing I just want to play it but I had no idea what I was doing like literally no idea and then I put it down for my trip to Ohio and then I realized I'm never going to pick that up again unless I like make a point of it so on Sunday night I called Libby I didn't even like text her first I just called her and these in this day and age when you call somebody you don't text first you have to say by you have to start by saying nothing's wrong this isn't an emergency i'm not in jail yes absolutely you actually do that very

kindly to me do when we have a call out of the blue which is weird because we work together

you and i i'm kind of surprised i do that for you because i feel like you would know we do have reasons to talk throughout the day yeah yeah but i do try to do that for other people or i'll text and just say hey i'm going to give you a call in a few minutes uh but it's not an emergency you know don't pick up if you don't have time so anyway i didn't even do that i just called her i'm just like we got to talk about we got to talk about Baldur's Gate 3 and she's like yes let's talk and so she kind of like answered some questions for me and also just sort of told me like just some very basic things that I needed to like kind of figure out that then led me it's so complicated that you can't even google things about it because you didn't understand the language of the game you know what I mean it's like so it's both a video games format that I'm not used to And I have none of the vocabulary for D&D. And so coming in like just totally green on both of those was difficult. And those are the emails that I got from some people saying, were you able to get into Baldur's Gate 3? Is that what you're talking about? Because I can't figure it out. And I got to say, with a little bit of patience, a little bit, just call Libby. I'll just give out Libby's phone number, actually. And everybody should just call Libby. And she can give them a pep talk, which is mostly what she gave me. And then I spent a huge amount of time last night. I think I finally broke through last night, and I've, like, restarted the game, like, three or four times each time, kind of learning more about my journey, and now I'm kind of into it. You would hate it. You would hate it so much. You would hate every piece of this.

Hmm. You know what? Let's talk about this on tomorrow's show, because I do have questions. Yeah.

Sorry, I told you we'd talk about it tomorrow, and then I went on for 10 minutes, but I've set up tomorrow's conversation.

Yes, exactly. So that's what we should do. We should talk about it on tomorrow's episode of TBTL, which is a mere 24 hours away. So I know that it'll be here before we know it. In the meantime, that brings us to the end of today's program. Thank you, everyone, for listening. We will be back here tomorrow. That movie, Her, has got me thinking about video games. This is what I want to talk about with you tomorrow a little bit. So, yeah, we'll get into it. In the meantime, have a great Tuesday, everybody. Take care of yourselves, and please remember, no mountain too tall.

And good luck to all. Power out.