Author: Lydia Bugg
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I have a Taco Bell conspiracy theory. I was settling in to watch the Taco Bell Presents: Live Mas event, which Taco Bell now holds every year to announce new menu items. It’s sort of like Apple’s keynote speech but for tacos that are an abomination to God. The CEO of Taco Bell opened his speech by thanking several celebrities and influencers in the audience, including football player Davante Adams, surfer Kai Lenny, and someone named Yoquierotacoballads. It was a silly name, so I looked it up, assuming that someone who got an onstage shout-out from the CEO of Taco Bell at the Oscars of Taco Bell would be pretty popular, but it turns out he has 1,767 followers on Instagram, his most popular platform. SUSPICIOUS.
To explain my conspiracy theory, I have to tell you about another one. Back in 2021, there was a band called Tramp Stamps that got a bunch of heat on TikTok for marketing themselves as an indie band when it turned out they all had deep industry ties and seemed to be a label-created concept for an elder millennial punk-pop girl band. The guitarist and lead singer both had solo publishing deals with controversial producer Dr. Luke. They both seemed to have been pursuing pop music careers before dying their hair and joining the counterculture. The consensus on TikTok was that Tramp Stamps were industry plants. They vehemently denied these allegations, then disbanded and immediately returned to solo pop careers.
So, when I put on my dope ass little detective hat and started exploring the works of Yoqueirotacoballads, I had to ask myself, is this man a fast food industry plant? Is it possible that Taco Bell is paying people to be Taco Bell influencers so they have the appearance of this rabid grassroots fanbase that they also have complete control of the narrative from? Can we trust anyone these days? Or are they all just robots being puppeted by Yum! Brands?
Let’s take a look at some of the work Yoquierotacoballas has produced. I know it’s not uncommon to put a brand in a rap song, but it’s usually in a way that the brand would never want to acknowledge. Like if Cardi B says her man is gonna Baja Blast that pussy, Taco Bell probably won’t repost that. Yoquierotacoballads produces exclusively corporate friendly Taco Bell songs. His song “Baja Blast” doesn’t contain any pussy references at all! It’s just about a man enjoying a Baja Blast from Taco Bell, which is so incredibly lame. It provides no commentary, no metaphor, no life at all, which demotes it from a song to a jingle.
The most controversial take in Yoguierotacoballads’ music is the idea that Taco Tuesday can be any day of the week. It absolutely cannot. This is a lie Taco Bell wants you to believe, but you can’t have Taco Tuesday on a Saturday; that would be absurd. Yoquierotacoballads has released five singles on Spotify, all but one of which are about Taco Bell. The fourth is about National Taco Day. He keeps separate social media accounts under his Christian name, William Bradford, where he experiments with things like conscripting his family into a Christmas album. None of the songs on his album are about Taco Bell, so it’s nice to know he can do other things. One of the songs is called “Juicy Christmas,” though.
It makes me angry that even though the account is called Yoquierotacoballads, he hasn’t produced a single ballad. He began by reading people’s Taco Bell receipts and putting them to music. The posts would always say “swipe left for receipt confirmation,” as if someone might accuse him of lying about buying two bean-and-cheese burritos and a Dr. Pepper.
This would be way more fun if he were digging through Taco Bell trash cans and doing gotcha journalism on tired millennials who claim they ordered only a single crunch wrap supreme when in fact they got two and downed one on the way home, and here’s a little song about it, that might be fun but I don’t think Taco Bell would like it. They don’t want secret crunch wrap supreme time to be exposed.
Taco Bell is always in this man’s comments. He’s basically Taco Bell’s best friend. They responded, “Amazing!” To his jingle for the Build Your Own Cravings Box. Three months later, he posted a video yelling at people to get a burrito from Taco Bell for National Burrito Day, which Taco Bell called Iconic. The video had 180 likes. They usually just respond with fire emojis or a single peppy word, but they’re omnipresent in the comments section. Almost like they’re trying to lend legitimacy to this normal Taco-loving man.
Now I do acknowledge that this could simply be the case of a man who loves Taco Bell so much that he shaved their logo into his hair. That’s exactly what Taco Bell wants you to think. I’m not pretending people like that don’t exist. I just think those people are typically less controlled maniacs. They will usually, at some point, slip and reveal it is sexual and they are fucking the chalupas. That’s not going to happen with Yoquierotacoballads. Taco Bell somehow knows that they are safe in his squeaky-clean, probably Mormon hands.
How does Taco Bell know their precious brand is safe with this man, though? Oh, maybe that’s because he works in marketing, and specifically, he has worked in marketing for Taco Bell before. Yoquierotacoballads is a freelance marketing executive named William Bradford with a chunk of his personal website dedicated to the work he’s done for Taco Bell.
SUSPICIOUS. The commissioned songs were from 2021. So if he is on Taco Bell’s payroll, he has been for nearly six years. I promise I have scoured the internet trying to find the corner where this man got popular enough to attract the attention of Taco Bell. Each social media platform I found was worse than the last. YouTube 336 subscribers, Twitter 70 followers, Facebook 56 followers, Spotify 20 monthly listeners. These are Aunt Barb Who Smokes Too Much and Mostly Posts Minions Memes numbers. Why has Taco Bell elevated this man to the front row at the Taco Bell conference status? It makes no earthly sense.
Also, he’s obviously a bad singer. It’s not like he’s Susan Boyle out here singing Taco Bell receipts with the voice of an angel. It’s more like rapping, I guess, but slowly and exclusively about tacos, and the lyrics aren’t much either. He’s not some sort of virtuoso that Taco Bell is patronizing for his great contribution to art, is what I’m saying. Although the lyrics to “Baja Blast” are a little bit horny, I’ll count that as some contribution to art.
Yoqueirotacoballads pulled up to the 2026 LiveMasLive event in a white limousine, wearing a velvet purple jumpsuit. In his post from the event, he tagged several other Taco Bell influencers, including @tacobellsommelier, @alwayslivingmas, @bajabesties, along with the head of social and PR for Taco Bell. So there is either an ecosystem of people who are Taco Bell’s preferred influencer squad or brand simps, coming when the chulupa signal lights up the sky, or they’re a false-flag marketing team curated by a corporate giant and I’m honestly not sure which is weirder.
Sure, this could simply be the case of a Mormon man who had his first bite of spicy food ever and made it his whole personality. For his loyalty, he’s been rewarded with a bit part in the Taco Pizza musical and tickets to every Taco Bell premier in perpetuity. It’s getting a lot harder to tell who’s being honest about advertising on the internet. At least I know I can trust my favorite influencer, Gordita Supremely. She’s been posting about Taco Bell non-stop for eight years for only the most genuine reasons, I just know it.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Ogi-Wan Supreme, who is just like regular Ogi-Wan, but comes with sour cream and diced tomatoes.
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Learning Day: Weetabix Gang
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Nerding Day: Planet Of The Apps
Seth Green once made a TV show so bad that it ruined the growth of an industry, and we should all thank him for that. People have called the recently surfaced trailer for White Horse Tavern “cringy” and “the most embarrassing shit I’ve ever seen,” but in reality, it’s way more cringy and embarrassing than anyone knows, except for me. I know, and now I’m going to tell you.
The story of White Horse Tavern begins where all great art does, with commerce! Specifically with Bored Ape Yacht Club #8398. For those of you unfamiliar, Bored Ape Yacht Club was basically like Beanie Babies for boys. Anyone who thought that Princess Diana Bear was going to pay for her college education can sympathize with the men who bought Bored Apes. When Seth Green purchased his in 2019, he took his bad choice a step further than most and decided to develop a TV show with Bored Ape #8398 as the main character. I’m sorry, he gave his Beanie Baby a cool name, it’s Fred Simian. Fred even has an Instagram account with 97 followers!
Fred was going to be a bartender at The White Horse Tavern, which is a real place in New York. In the show it’s made to look like a dive bar, but the actual place sells Croque Madames for $22 instead of ham and cheese sandwiches for “technically we don’t sell food here if anyone asks.” The bar would be staffed with various other NFTs and real people mingling together. However, this was sadly not meant to be due to the ape heist.
Apparently, Seth Green fell for a simple phishing scam and lost not only Fred, but two mutant apes, and one Doodle NFT, if you can even believe it. This happened right before he was set to appear at VeeCon, an event run by Gary Vee, owner of an MLM for boys. He’s a fifty-year-old CEO who posts like a midwestern aunt and got 11.2 million Instagram followers from that. His main message seems to be that you should love yourself and purchase some of his many fine products.
During Seth’s talk at VeeCon on bringing NFTs to the creative space, he revealed that there were some problems with his NFT show, mainly that he no longer owned any NFTs. You can see him struggling with this during the talk. He says the NFT space needs “not regulations but controls, safeguards, and protections.” Controls, safeguards, and protections are all synonyms for regulations, but sure. He went to the wild west and was surprised to find so many cowboys there, and then the cowboys mugged him.
Naturally, his next move was to try to emotionally appeal to the thief via Twitter. The good news is he knew exactly where the crypto criminal would be hanging out, so it was easy to get in touch with them. The advantage of NFTs is that they are extremely traceable, so he even knew the username of the person who stole the NFT from him and the name of the user they sold it to for 200K. It was a very civilized ape mugging.
That’s the nicest threat to sue someone I’ve ever seen. It makes Seth Green look like the most down to earth celebrity who will sue your ass into oblivion if you don’t give that ape back and it worked! He only had to pay 300K to recover his personal property, but that didn’t really matter. Hollywood took one look at this mess and said, “Do I want to risk having an easily kidnappable main character on my hit TV show?” Nope! And White Horse Tavern was dead, but let me reassure you all, it was a merciful death.
At VeeCon, he also debuted a trailer for White Horse Tavern, which Gary Vee described as having “scaled Roger Rabbit like vibes,” which I agree with. It looks like someone said, ” What if we made Who Framed Roger Rabbit with shitty art and then did that because they turned off the switch in their brain that tells them, this is a bad idea, something that Seth Green said he did and encouraged the audience at Veecon to do. Incredibly funny thing to say before making a mistake so big you tank an industry’s future growth. I would like to encourage him to pop that bad boy right back on because the audience at Veecon filmed the trailer, and here’s what it’s like.
We open with Fred Simian on his daily subway ride to work at the White Horse Tavern. It appears to be Valentine’s Day. There’s generic, peppy whistling music in the background that gives the whole thing the vibe of an ExxonMobil commercial, reminding us they love people and are sorry for that horrible thing they did. Fred and another bartender greet customers, including Connor Ratliff, and oh my God, is that NFT celebrity and not at all a con artist, Gary Vee!? This trailer has everyone!
Fred and a fellow snarky bartender make fun of two cute old people for dating. “I’m just saying ’til death do they part may be tonight!” is the punchline, and after it the monkey shows its teeth, which is a sign of aggression in primates, and I get scared that he’s going to attack the old people. The actress has no chemistry with the tennis ball she’s talking to, which probably adds to the creepy factor of the interaction.
A stitched together zombie girl NFT and Constance Shulman, the voice of Patti Mayonnaise, have a brief conversation that makes the viewer say, “What is Constance Shulman doing here? And why isn’t any NFT art good?” Fred announces he’s taking his break, and we get a few more clips of NFT art that I guess is supposed to make people who know NFT’s go, “Oh wow, they got the Fart Boy Energy Crew on this show! I know that NFT!” If you don’t know the NFT, it’s just sort of random nonsense, some of which might be voiced by Ron Funches.
I should point out that it’s impossible to confirm who is in this show’s blurry trailer because it’s not on IMDB. This shaky iPhone recording and Seth Green’s public confession are the only evidence that it ever existed, and I think steps have been taken to keep it that way. Maybe he did briefly turn the bad idea switch back on.
We cut to a different scene where a male waiter says, “Want me to rough him up? I’m the only gay guy in my ballet class who can make a fist?” Is that a gay men have limp wrists joke? Wow, vintage. What is the vibe of this show supposed to be? Because it seems mean and snarky, but the Imagine Dragons song from 2012 they’ve put over it, and the cutaway to various groups of people silently laughing seems upbeat and way too sincere.
In the interview before its presentation, Seth Green said the show imagines a universe where “it doesn’t matter what you look like; what only matters is your attitude.” A groundbreaking premise we’ve never seen before, but also, it seems like everyone’s attitude kind of sucks. Is that part of the joke?
It’s painfully millennial, and I say that as a millennial. It’s all the worst parts of our generation. A desperate attempt at folksy authenticity steeped in capitalism. Someone trying to sell you a community at a luxury price. NFTs are bad for the environment, and bad for art, the only people truly excited for their potential were thieves, con artists, and morons, so to base a twee millennial show around them feels like someone Weekend At Berniesing the looooong decayed corpse of Cheers.
I actually really like Seth Green’s work. Robot Chicken is funny. He was probably my favorite character on Buffy the Vampire Slayer, the only nice boyfriend. I’d like to think he got duped into being excited about NFTs, but if that’s the case, he’s sure remained duped longer than I would expect. After the stolen ape fiasco of 2022, he was involved with an NFT project called Nouns appearing in the Rose Parade. But no crimes were committed on that project as far as I can tell.
He demonstrated to Hollywood why making NFTs into a larger IP is a bad idea, and then he tried to make it happen again. He really has turned off the part of his brain that informs him when an idea is bad. I think it might be a serious medical condition. Someone help this man, or at least leave his apes alone.
This article was brought to you by our fine sponsor and Hot Dog Supreme: Alex Knollenberg, who is here to slurp apes and funge tokens, and he’s all outta apes.
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Fucking Day: Franklin And Bash
