Passenger Seat Radio Episode 2019-11-15

Hello everybody, this is Shane Armin row, you’re in the passenger seat with me passenger seat radio. It is November 15 2019. It’s Friday, the short week is finally over. I don’t know what it is. But short weeks seem to take twice as long as regular length weeks. And I don’t know what that is, but it’s true. So yes, I’m on my 13 mile commute home. Welcome to the show. I wasn’t sure if I was going to do a show. But I had this sort of epiphany. And it reminded me of an interesting story from the 90s, which is not an era that I typically talk about. So I thought, hey, make a good story. kill some time on the way home. So let’s do it. Nobody in the chat. Yeah, that’s too bad. So there’s a there’s a sort of a phenomenon. It’s not a real it’s not a real significant phenomena. It says actually pretty normal. But in the theater in the movies, right? Oftentimes, they’ll bring an old song back and they’ll put it on the soundtrack. And out of nowhere, people will reconnect with the song. People will reconnect with the song and suddenly becomes popular again right now, no, normally it’s not, it’s not like OMG hit the top of the charts again, right? It’s not like the song goes to number one. But there are many cases, especially back in the 80s and 90s, when a song from the 60s or 70s gets dredged up and put in a movie. And it makes such a significant impact. That it’s suddenly it’s on the top of the charts and you’re hearing it every two seconds on the radio and the top 40 stuff you’re hearing it and it’s nuts. And my The best example, I can think For that is the song Unchained Melody from the righteous brothers right? You probably know exactly what I’m going to talk about the movie ghost with Patrick Swayze, when that came out, that song is was like 20 years old at the time. And now it did well, when it came out. Unchained Melody was a popular song when it came out. So 20 years later, right, the Revolution, the recycling every 20 years, we go through this sort of process, right? And so the song gets put into ghost and it becomes this sensation. And now it’s all over the place. The song is really super popular on the radio again, I don’t remember. I think it climbed into the top 20 Unchained Melody in the 80s which is absolutely bad shit crazy, right? For this 1960 song from a group that’s not together anymore. And I think I talked about it on the show. The righteous brothers made absolutely zero dollars from the resurgence of that song. And that is of course because You know BMG or whoever it was that that financed that song and they recorded it under. They own the exclusive rights. So back then in the 60s, you didn’t own shit right now like any net like now where there’s publishing rights and all this other stuff. When you went to the studio and you cut that Unchained Melody, the record company owned that song lock stock and barrel. The only way you made money was going on tour. Right so it didn’t help out that the poor righteous brothers right they were they were obviously no longer making music, not new music anyone. And Unchained Melody becomes the super hit. It’s selling like crazy and Universal Music or whatever the hell it was. was making a nice amount of change off of Unchained Melody they rereleased it as a single blah blah, blah, and and righteous brothers got no money. Well, the righteous brothers went back to the studio because they could rerecord the song but they didn’t have any rights to the original recording. Right. So we’ve got about this, they went back to the studio, they cut another version. They couldn’t sing the same way they could 20 years ago, it didn’t work out. But there’s an example of a song that was popular 20 years before got dropped into a movie became popular again. Right? And you could go out and buy that song, right? So if you if you didn’t have the righteous brothers Greatest Hits on vinyl, Wolf, then you could go out during the time that ghost was a big deal and go out and either I don’t remember if that song was actually on the ghost soundtrack or not. But you could go out and buy Unchained Melody, you can buy the song you heard in the movie, you can buy the song that was popular. So let’s fast forward a little bit because I find this extremely interesting and I’m going to tie this to something modern, so you just got to bear with me on this one. In 1995, Bruce Springsteen release the song Secret Garden That song did was shit. All right, it didn’t do well it was like number 63 on the pop charts i think is where it got to the top of that was as high as it ever got the song so nobody liked it. It would sit in and and it would sit in in rot for two years. The songs then made it onto the Jerry Maguire soundtrack, the Tom Cruise Renee Zellweger movie. And the song was not it didn’t it didn’t set the world on fire, you know, right. So there was a whole bunch of songs on that soundtrack. There were a whole bunch of songs that were popular in the movie that never made it on the soundtrack. That’s pretty much normal. But if your favorite song from a movie doesn’t end up on the movie soundtrack, pretty states pretty straightforward stuff. But senior garden was new was no, you know, there was no magic bullet going on there for that song when it came to Jerry Maguire. Yet suddenly, just after Jerry Maguire came out, there was a record there was a another record company, there was a there was a radio station I believe, hang on, let me pull up my notes cuz I actually took some notes on here because I thought it was important for the overall topic to talk about these. So KKRZ FM in Portland, Portland, Oregon, one of the DJ one of the DJS took the song Secret Garden and cut up audio clips from Jerry Maguire, put it into the song and then played it on the radio. People went fucking bad shit crazy for it. And then the the DJ, of course, back in the 90s DJ had a sort of a backdoor sharing system, right? So DJ had a sort of a network of sharing so the radio station started passing it around. And Bruce Springsteen’s Secret Garden, climbed the charts into the top 20 Billboard charts the top 10 Top 20 Adult Contemporary charts, secret garden with Jerry Maguire clips put in it was a big fucking hit. Song started making tons of cash. Everybody was racing out to buy it, but there was a problem. The song that you fell in love with on the radio was not the song that you got when you when purchase the album or the single Because see, The Secret Garden song that was playing on the radio was a bootleg. It was essentially a Boulay created by a DJ and passed around you Get your goddamn hands on it. So all these people who went out and bought the album bought the song didn’t get what they wanted. They wanted the Jerry Maguire mix of secret guard. Now, the reason this is so interesting, but I gotta I gotta segue here. This is interesting, because in 1996 there was no Napster. There was no there was no Spotify, there was no Google Play Music. There was no Apple Music. The way you got music was you bought it on a fucking disk. Or, if you happen to be in the know like me, you could go to an IRC channel on F net, join hashtag mp3, and there was a huge underground scene trading mp3 files. I’ve talked about this before. This is where the the that men and black song became Popular there was a whole bunch of other there’s a whole bunch of stories behind that. But if you were plugged into the mp3 scene at that time, the mp3 scene had a lot of DJ involved in it and they had access to this stuff. I was able to get my paws on the Jerry Maguire cut of Secret Garden when it simply was impossible to get. Now that song, that version, that bootleg that mix, whatever you want to call it, that arrangement never was available commercially, you could not put your hands on it. If you delve deep into the lore of the Jerry Maguire mix, you will find that it was released on a couple of sort of like weird bootleg collections. There was there was like two sources that actually got pressed onto a disc that you could get your paws on it. Very, very rare. In fact, one of the sources had a limit of 8000 copies of that disc pushed around. So you’re likely your likelihood of getting one was next to nothing. And of course, there was no piracy scene outside of IRC. And everybody there kept their fucking mouth shut because we don’t want anybody coming after us. So we had this great mp3 scene going on but But back to Secret Garden. So what people loved about the song secret garden was the Jerry Maguire mix. They didn’t like the song. It was proven that nobody liked that fucking song. The only reason they got popular The only reason they got back to the charts. The only reason that anybody gave a rat’s ass about secret garden was because of the Jerry Maguire mix and they couldn’t go out and buy it and it was frustrating as hell. So hey, listen, I actually put together some clips here, hang on. So I would like to I’m going to share this with you You may not know the song Secret Garden. So let me I’m going to play you a short clip of the original sort of into the song a little bit so you can actually hear the mixes when I get there and then I’m going to play you the version with the Jerry Maguire clips in it. It’s a far better song. Yeah, let me let me let me put this in here for here’s the here’s the original Secret Garden from Bruce Springsteen you have that place when you came in you can right let’s be honest, that saw there’s nothing good about that song whatsoever. It’s not melodic, it doesn’t. It’s just it’s shit and it’s obvious that it should So now I’m going to play you Hey SC the CEO. So now I’m going to play you the the Jerry Maguire mix version of that same clip of music, but with all the Jerry Maguire shit kicked into it. Now you understand why this was actually popular after the movie. We got married. I said that would you stay? Don’t do that. Don’t say that. Let’s go move. Well say it if you want to give getting married. There you go. So that’s the Jerry Maguire version of that song. So if you’re just tuning in, unfortunately a bunch of you decided to come in and wants Hey, Travis. Back to my point, secret garden was a shitty song that suddenly gained a massive amount of popularity on something that nobody could get their hands on. That had nothing to do with the song itself. Right. So listen, we went back we talked about ghost and Unchained Melody right? Unchained Melody was a popular song, it went dormant for 20 years. They brought it back inside of a movie soundtrack the song gain popularity again, right, but you could get that it was it was a one for one thing. Okay, so now let me explain to you where I where I came from, from all of this right and unfortunately, those of you who came in 13 minutes late, don’t really understand what the fuck I’m talking about. You’re gonna have to go back and listen to the show again. Let’s go to beat saber beat saber just got awarded like VR game of the year before Blah blah blah that listen you guys know I like beats a brand talk a lot about Ba ba ba ba ba ba Travis hates when I talk about beats saber. What makes beats saber great is not beat saber. What makes p saber great? Are the custom songs that you can put into it. Right? So it makes so all of this makes me crazy that beats saber is insanely popular and sells tons of copies. It gets all of these great reviews. Right everybody loves beats it. But would beat sabor beat anything at all wouldn’t be a thing wouldn’t be popular wouldn’t have a million plus sales. If there were no such thing as custom songs in it. I say now, you take custom songs at a beat saber. It’s just another generic useless ass rhythm game. And so that’s that whole thing. Let me back to thinking about Secret Garden. And what a shitty song It was. It is right and how This song gained popularity not because it was a great song not because of what it was, but was what somebody else made out of it. So anyway, I wanted to talk about that. I thought that was an interesting it’s an interesting story. First of all, just just the just that the urban legend piece of that Jerry Maguire mix. And you can find it now of course, right. I mean, it’s the internet, it’s 2019 You can find the Jerry Maguire mix of Secret Garden all over the place, including YouTube. But back then, when the people wanted it, the people the people loved it, because of the DJ mix that KZRR or whatever put together. That’s the song they want it out that shitty Bruce Springsteen song that he released, right they wanted the Jerry Maguire mix and they couldn’t get it. So there you have it. So a lot of you have written in including Travis wanting to Know what it was I got all freaked out about that my wife called me about in the mail. I said something came in the mail, and it freaked me out. And it pissed me off. And in fact, I had to dump off the show because I was pretty uptight about it. So let me let me go back and explain what that is. Now, you guys know, I’m on my second wife. I was married to my first wife about five years, from roughly 90 to 95 ish. And we got divorced. And I married my current wife in 1997. And we’ve been together ever since. So it’s been 22 years. This was last October that we’ve been married 23 years together. And when I separated Hey, now What’s up, Alex when I separated from my ex wife, she became Kind of a bitch was you she wasn’t really a bitch before she was it was. You guys know the story of my first marriage, it just it just fizzled out there was just nothing right about the about our our marriage and so we end up splitting apart. But my, my ex wife like to do a lot of passive aggressive things to me as we were separating and as the divorce was being finalized and occasionally she would use our daughter to get her digs in. So mainly through things like visitation, right. So if I wanted to visit my daughter on the weekends, I had to meet her somewhere we do the pass off right and I’ll standard visitation crap. So she would do she would just she would pump my daughter for information. You know, my daughter was like three or four years old and she’s busy. You know, every time she came back, she was being grilled about everything and she would basically have My daughter spy on it just a spine is just it was just, it wasn’t a good thing. Well being the being the good guy that I was in the divorce, I agree to give the mother of my child the vehicle, right? We had one car, kind of a piece of shit, but we had one car. And so I was letting her use the vehicle because I bought a vehicle for my parents and she had the car to drive you know, take my daughter to daycare to work, right? Because I didn’t I mean, I felt Listen, it was it was a little bit selfish on my part, right? If my ex soon to be ex wife didn’t have a vehicle, how could she work I’d have to pay her money and how was My daughter going and blah blah, blah, blah blah. So I thought it was in my best interest during the separation in the divorce proceedings to let my ex soon to be ex wife have control the vehicle. Well, once the divorce Scott A little bit closer to the end, it became very clear and we were fighting tooth and nail and the lawyers got a ton of cash out of it. We were, you know, we were separating the assets, we were separating the bills, who’s going to take over what payment, blah, blah, blah. So, essentially, I, I said, Listen, I’m not going to give you the car and make the car payments. If you want the car, you take over the car payments, and we’ll put it in the paperwork. Well, she didn’t want to take over the car payments. I said, Okay, well, I’ll take the car back then, you know, I’ll get my parents back their car and you know, you can figure out your own methodology of transportation. So we made arrangements for her for us to meet. So I had somebody drive me to the location so that I could drive my car, you know, the joint, marriage car back to the house. So she gets out of the car. She handed me the keys, says something snarky and gets in the car with her parents who also drove up right? And they drove away. So I told my parents, okay, I just hang out, let me make sure you know, something happened to the car, make sure the car starts and then I’ll, we I’ll just drive home. I get in the car and she has doused the entire car, front to back seat to seat, left to right, she has doused it in her perfume. So my car smelled like her for months. That’s the sort of petty bullshit that went down during my divorce. Right? So somewhere along the way, so I married my wife in 97 and 98. We moved down to Phoenix. And I was hoping that outside of the occasional you know, joint parent thing that I’m I’d have to do with Christina, that I was free of that woman, right. So, in the mail in my new house, my new mail it here in Glendale. My ex wife Karen started having mail delivered here. Not is her maiden name that she supposedly was supposed to revert back to, but continuing to use her married name which we were divorced. So she was Karen Monroe for years after we got divorced. And for fun, she started having mail sent to my house here in her name, just to make sure that her name managed to appear in my fucking mailbox from time to time. Very petty bullshit. Nothing pissed my wife off more and getting mail for my ex wife. With her mild with mine with with Our last name still on it made her crazy. And I guarantee you that’s exactly what Karen was looking for. Make my ex my new wife fucking bacha. Crazy. Right? Well, over time the mail stopped coming. In fact, we went to we went to the post office, and we said that person doesn’t live here. Do not send any more mail for Karen Monroe or her maiden name. Don’t send any of that should our house, block it, send it to the trash, right? And eventually the mail dried up, and it went quiet now yet understand. This is 20 fucking years ago, and this all went down. Right? So you would think that all was quiet. So my wife pings me this was when I had to cut the show up earlier in the week. My wife pings me and says what the fuck and she sends me a picture and I can’t really tell cuz I’m doing the show and it’s hard for me to see the picture and I have to zoom in I couldn’t I just kind of ignored it right? I kind of ignored what she’s saying over I figured I’d look at it when I get home. So I’m still doing the show and in the middle of it, she goes, What did you think of that? And I’m like, Oh, so now I’m going to have to stop the show and I have to look at it zoom up and take a look at and find out what the hell it is. So so i saw i did I zoomed up and I looked at it and I am fucking This is a personalized mail. You know how sometimes they send you like a generic flyer or they send you a generic, sort of an ad, but you can tell where they printed your name on it. Hey, and there’s a blank there, Shane Monroe. How would you like to save money on your long business but right it always looks You know, it always looks like you know, fill in the blank Madlib thing right. This was like a high end jewelry company. discussing about Wouldn’t you like to renew your love vows with Karen Monroe, shaman row? Wouldn’t you love this beautiful, a personalized pendant to show how much you love Karen Monroe. And this whole this whole brochure was labeled with Shane Monroe, Karen Monroe celebrate your love. I was fucking pissed. And listen, it’s been 20 years. I don’t I mean, listen, do I think that she somehow sent that or arrange to have that sent? I don’t know, all I know is that after 20 years, I mean, Google knows I’m married to that bitch anymore. So why would blah, blah, blah, gold and silver company. Think for some reason that we were still married. I don’t know. But it made me livid. So That is what God sent in the mail. That is what drove me back chick racing. And of course it made my wife furious. So that’s, that’s the end of that story. That’s what happened with there. And that’s that’s the that’s what pits this all off. pretty shitty. Anyhow, so let me see what else I got. I’m getting off the freeway here. So I got about 10 minutes left. Those were the only two topics I actually had to talk about today. Over the weekend, what am I doing? I’m doing nothing over the weekend. I have no plans. No commitments. I think I think I’m gonna go get a pedicure because I like to. I like to have a pedicure and get my feet all pampered. The dogs got to get groomed this weekend. So that’s 100 bucks I get to put away Hey, speaking of 100 bucks. So I’m I’m a romantic at heart. I’m I I like to show my wife how much I love her and how much I treasure her. And so I send her flowers to school periodically. And it’s in. It’s not for anything in particular. The best time to send flowers to your significant other is when there’s no reason to do so at all. And I thought about this, you know, it always it always impresses the hell out of my wife. Because when I send it to her school, so people see that she’s getting them she knows somebody. Everybody knows somebody loves her. And they always ask the same question who anniversary today? Huh? It’s like no. Oh, it must be your birthday. Now. You have a fight with your husband? No. I just because she loves to get flowers just because so i thought you know what, I think the age of chivalry is rapidly coming to a close. So I put I put down a quick you know, five minute medium article on this. Secret of giving flowers. So for those of you who are interested, I know a lot of you follow my medium already. Thank you. So if you’re interested in my insights on the secrets of successfully sending flowers, there’s a new medium article just for that. So I’ve been hanging around in I’ve been hanging out on Reddit for a while. I think I mentioned that. And I hang out on the Sabre subreddit. And I hang out on the Oculus quest subreddit because a lot of developers hang out there. A lot of announcement gets announcements get made there first, and there’s a lot of opportunity to both give and receive technical support. And a lot of times there’s insiders that also show up there that let things leak. So I keep an eye on that. And I think I follow a couple of other subs, VR game deals, I follow a couple of switch piracy ones because a lot of inside information comes in on those things as well packing and cracking type stuff. Keep an eye on those two. But this Oculus quest subreddit is pure gold. So along with the it’s great if you’ve ever been involved in some place where a lot of new people show up constantly, you know what an abortion that sort of thing can be and and the Oculus quests is like an abortion every day of the week. So you’ve got the same people yet people coming in asking the same questions over and over again. Sometimes they stay put so little effort into the post so every Sutton for those of you don’t know what Reddit is or it’s basically a public message board. So like the old BBs days, subreddit are are basically forums that are dedicated to a certain topic like quest or switch or whatever. And within there, they have moderators, you know that people that can keep you know nonsense from going on, and every cell Usually has some sort of a basic rule set. Don’t discuss piracy don’t, you know, respect each other don’t troll, don’t, you know self promote yourself. And one of the and one of the subreddit for the subreddit rules for the Oculus quest is no low effort posts. Now, nine out of 10 posts on the Oculus subreddit are low effort posts. I mean, literally some of the lowest effort possible right. In some cases there’s no spellcheck. I mean, there’s literally if you I don’t understand how, what appears to be heavily retarded people I’m talking I’m not talking retarded as in stupid people. I’m talking about literally retarded people. People who have you know, IQ at it special people special needs people. Somehow special needs people in quantity seem to have Oculus quests and I don’t know how that’s possible. Successful hundred bucks, but the messages that we get in there, they spell break br a ke instead, you know, I break I break my hand I break something I break the question. They they spell things wrong. Listen to spell checkers. I mean, literally every browser spellcheck you built in. How do you how do you? I mean, listen, I know break and break both spelled the same. I’m talking about just general shit. The most low rent post possible show up when you think this is coming out, and they post a picture of something, no links, no titles, no game titles in the subject. Nothing. It’s just, it’s literally the least amount of effort possible that these people put out. It makes me crazy. And then and then. And then what are the other great things this one just happened today? I couldn’t believe it. This is this. This is one of my favorites. So a lot of times They’ll do what they call PSA, right public service announcements. So if somebody finds out something or there’s some piece of information that might be helpful to a lot of people, you might put a topic that says PSA colon. If you can’t restart your quest, try this right something that a lot of people might end up seeing a mass type problem or a mass solution, something of mass interest, public service announcement. If you break your if you break your quest controller, you know, call Oculus and use the secret code word this Yeah, so you know, saying something like that. So we get this PSA. Never let your dog your skunk smelling dog near your quest. I swear to God, I can’t make this up. You’ve got to go see this. So this guy basically makes a post saying that when your dog gets sprayed by a skunk and you let him in the house, keep him away. From your Oculus quest, because the smell will rub off on the if the dog is close enough, the smell will rub off into your quest and the the face gasket will smell like skunk for weeks. That was the PSA. And I’m just sitting with my mouth open going, what do you how do you respond to a post like that? What do you do with that? Right? I mean, that is literally the most esoteric use case I’ve ever heard. And so I sat there for like, a half an hour trying to figure out what would I respond to that? How do you what do you do with that? So I just wrote something in the effect of Can I see the actuarial tables on that one question mark. And and then of course, there’s somebody who plays a completely straight while you are aware that there are you can purchase a replacement facemask from this source right and like Jesus, Dude, come on, man. Let’s have a Little bit of fun here. But I mean it’s listen it’s total entertainment. Yeah, I should have wrote back No shit Sherlock right. And then and then you’ve got you Oculus quest share some interesting parallels with Nintendo Switch. So a lot of people don’t believe that a game system is worth shit if it doesn’t have Call of Duty and, and first person or any sort of First Person multiplayer done game. So I’d say about once a week, couple times a week in this subreddit. People will say shit was like, you know, there’s no good games request I’m waiting for this, this and this and it’s always triple A 200 hour RPG or or or or like Call of Duty games. And it’s like, wait a minute. And then and so and what really leads me to this this topic is Just today or yesterday, somebody made this post about, I haven’t bought a single game for my quest. I’m waiting for this, this and this. And I’m not buying anything until that and it’s like every single thing that they named was a first person. It was a triple A console type game, right? Not so do when you buy a Nintendo Switch I would have never for a second believed Overwatch could be on the Nintendo Switch. I don’t believe Call of Duty will ever make it on the Nintendo Switch when you buy a product. For God’s sakes I do some kind of research. Everybody knows, everybody knows, especially if you’ve bought one. Everybody knows the Oculus quest is a glorified mobile phone with a VR VR screen attached to it. Everybody knows that. You know, xbox one extra snapping your face with no wires. Everybody knows that and yet, somehow people by the Oculus quest for 400 bucks, not 149 dollars, that’s an impulse purchase. They’re buying $400 hardware that they know flat out is impossible to run the sorts of games that they obviously want to play, but then they then they come in and they bitch or they’re surprised. You know, if they do get a game that’s similar to that, well, you know, I can only have two, you know, two on two and, and you know, blah, blah, blah. It’s like, did you think you were buying? Did you do no research? Did you really believe that, that a mobile device strapped your head was going to play? You know, 16 v 16. I don’t know. I just it just makes me crazy. It just makes me crazy. And then the end, you know, it makes me really sad is that people, people spend that kind of money and then they’re disappointed. I mean, imagine if you spent four bucks with some false assumption and then your You’re kind of stuck with it. I mean, that’s that’s kind of sad other than just being kind of stupid. It’s kind of sad nobody because any research on I’m almost in range of my Wi Fi folks, I’m gonna get the hell out of here. This is Shane or Monroe pastor see radio. Have a great weekend, everybody. We’ll see you next time. Take care, everybody.