Muse

presenting the cones of dunshire a brand new gaming experience eight to twelve players two wizards a maverick the arbiter two warriors a corporal and a ledgerman now the ledgerman just keeps score and he wears this hat oh boy now the object is to accumulate cones four cones wins but in order to get a cone you have to build a civilization then you roll three dice to see how many dice you roll with. Oh, 16, perfect, lots of choices. Okay, each turn goes roll, buy, action. But the corporal can veto. This should be green too, how did this happen? Are the cones a metaphor? Well, yes and no. Oh my God, the Maverick should be able to trade lumber for agriculture credits. How have I not thought of this before?

Um, when do you go back to work again?

Tomorrow, it's fine, I'll just throw this in the garbage. TBTL! in this brochure it says this tour is crunk what does that mean the faces may not look familiar

but the voices this zany radio team have developed a unique style of frolicking on the airway it's

like your own mini garden and well now that you think about it it's kind of fun seeing how good it grows it's kind of like you know kids like it's kind of like kids growing up the comedy

factor speaks for itself it's just painfully obvious yeah it's an unfulfilled prophecy

it just has to be played out all right hello good morning and welcome everyone to a wednesday edition of tbtl the show that just might be too beautiful to live i need you to understand

something so good check it out my name is luke burbank i'm your host hello everyone coming to

you from the hollywood broadcast center right here in portland oregon where it's a beautiful day that oh ma pa it's just beautiful uh at like 6 30 this morning there was ice and frost forming on the roofs and sidewalks Some of it might have been frozen urine I'm not totally sure I was out for my morning run today And saw some frozen liquid of an unknown origin Anyway, that was this morning Now it's sunny and nice And it's going to maybe be like 70 degrees or something today And then it might snow tomorrow So pretty normal weather patterns happening here as we arrive at episode 3,656 in a collector's series. Let the fun begin. Great story in the Washington Post that's been sort of making the rounds. It is weird. It is beautiful. It has a plot that goes in fascinating directions. About a guy who lives in the Washington, D.C. area, whose current day job is he cleans carpets for folks, But he's notable because he speaks, like, he speaks 24 languages that is fluently, like, you know, can just, like, doesn't even have to, his brain doesn't have to do any work. But more than that, there's probably, like, over 50 languages that he can basically get around in. There's something about his brain.

Come on, brain. Think of things. Come on, brain. He's smart.

That is different than a lot of our brains when it comes to being what I think they call a hyperpolyglot. Someone who can just speak a bunch of other languages. They actually did a brain. They kind of mapped this guy's brain and then mapped the reporter for The Washington Post's brain and kind of compared the two. And it's pretty fascinating. So we will talk about that. This is something that's probably less fascinating. There's a waste of time to do that. I did manage to track down the intro song to my old conservative talk radio show that I had more than 20 years ago, almost 25 years ago, I think. So we can maybe play that, too. And we can also say hello to this young man, the longest running Cobra of the show, maybe best known for his depictions of the tall ships. He's an NFT-powered, no-tropic-boosted podcaster aimed at Gen Z consumers. He is Andrew...

Ziggle-zag it. Let's get back at it.

Walsh, and he's joining me right now from the sweet cream district of Seattle, Washington. Good morning, my friend.

How did I end up with three first basemen? That doesn't seem right. I'm just coming out of a fog after my fantasy draft last night, Luke. And let's face it, I don't know exactly what I'm doing in that space. I have very little idea what I'm doing in that space but I do know that I was drinking in that space yesterday to calm my nerves and it's a very the baseball draft which you do online or which I did online is a very

It's a surprisingly adrenalized event, at least for me. You're on the clock. You have to make decisions on the fly quickly as players are getting taken around you. And you find yourself bringing the entire bottle of whiskey into your office with you because you don't have time to keep running out to the little place where you keep the whiskey on the counter. And then the next thing you know... You can't be going up and down the stairs to get the whiskey. The whiskey's down here, Luke. But the draft, it's a funny thing how after two hours of doing that, you're suddenly done, and you look around, and you say, wow, it's 9 o'clock at night, and I am. I don't know exactly what happened. I don't even know exactly who I am or where I am, but all I know is I apparently have three first basemen that can't flex into other positions. So that's where we are today. It's not easy being drunk all the time. Cool. So cool, cool, cool, cool, cool. I would do it if it were easy. You know you did a good job on the draft when you send the results to your baseball savant friend who helped you get through the draft a little bit, and he looks at your lineup and says, well, there will be some good options on waivers. That's always a good, that's a great sign of confidence.

Well, it's a dynamic environment, though. It really is. I really, like, you know, which is why I wanted no part of the research or decision-making for this baseball team, Andrew. Because the thing is, you can have... What did Mike Tyson say? Everyone has a plan for their fight until they get punched in the face? It's like everyone has a plan for what players they're going to draft until someone drafts one of those players and then suddenly everything's in disarray. And if you're a GM of a professional sports team and this is your whole job, you've just got contingency after contingency. I can only imagine how complicated the the the kind of decision trees are for folks like that but for somebody like you or me it's just kind of like well wait i was gonna try to get correa right yes and now it's like uh what do i do i mean i can how long do they give you on the clock uh more time than i thought it's like

um maybe 90 seconds or maybe it's actually 100 seconds like a minute and a minute 40 i think

that's still not a lot of time yeah yeah i mean if you're if you're already nervous If you Got a lot of whiskey in your system Although maybe that's helping Maybe in this particular case Maybe that did kind of calm your nerves a little bit

I mean it was definitely fun I do think that I was writing some things in the chat That were a little bit weird There was a conversation going on that might have been It was either involving inside jokes I didn't get Or I just didn't get these jokes Or they weren't funny I don't know, there was a conversation going on That I was pulled into Some things were being directed at me and um I was you know that was both fun and and and you know interesting except like I'm going back this morning think about what I wrote in response and I don't know that my responses were really making much sense I remember ending the night by saying you guys are like the uncles I never had so that's not even a really good joke to end the the chat with either but um anyway I was thinking there was some conversation I was unclear if they were joking about also playing trivia in the bar where the rest of the people were having their draft party or they were just teasing me i'm not sure it was a weird because a bunch of people in this fantasy baseball league

were who live in seattle were all physically yeah at a bar together with their laptops open trying to jump on the wi-fi or whatever i will tell you this my my main issue with this fantasy baseball league uh other than the fact that it's way too much work which is why i've now delegated all responsibilities to you is there's some and i'm gonna say a bad yeah i mean kind of i'm gonna say something uncouth here but there's a team that was named ass herpes yeah or i think that's what yeah i think now it's the name of the team is return of the herpes it was previously ass herpes yeah and i said not fully joking no one responded to it by the way which i know i don't have really the right to like randomly weigh in on these email chains because i'm like again as i said i went out for a pack of cigarettes last year and no one's seen me since so like i understand that i'm not really like a voting member of this league anymore but there was a number of email exchanges where i just had to keep seeing ass herpes in the subject line and i was like i mean how puerile can you be like are you four actually that's four would be too young are you 14 yeah i don't and i was i was not i mean i'm genuinely annoyed by that i'm sorry to whoever's name that is it's like don't anyway so i was like well i was looking at the you know who drafted what and all that stuff and i was like it's still there it's i guess slightly better that it's not called ass herpes but it's called Return of the Herpes or something.

Yeah, it's not. it's not my kind of humor and that is to say that I wasn't sure if it was humor like I'm just yeah I was unclear I'm looking at do you think maybe

it's a PSA about sexually transmitted diseases particularly

in the anal region I mean the more you know but we should let's stop talking about it because now we're just doing to the listeners what that email chain was doing to us and I want to stop that because every time you say it it makes me sick but yeah not my that's not that's not my speed that's not my lane certainly

I guess it's just like, what are the community standards of Fantasy Baseball League? I'm being serious. Like, can people just go rogue? Are there things people could make their team name that we as a society, a.k.a. the people in this league, would collectively say that is too far?

Yeah, I'm not sure. I'm not the one who's going to push those boundaries. Although, I was thinking a name change might be in order. I sort of wish we had maybe rethought our team name in the offseason, but we'll go with this for one more year and then maybe reinvent next year. But our logo is still, I was happy to see as I logged on, it's still Taylor Motter. It's still. So anyway, before we keep going down this line, let's six people in America who will laugh at that joke. But some people in Korea who will laugh because he played in the Korean leagues, I believe, after after his attempts in the big leagues here. Luke alright I don't want to keep going down that road I was just going to make a quick comment at the top I don't want to ostracize our listeners fantasy talk even for people who like sports fantasy talk is usually not very interesting

what about people who hate fantasy talk but love conversations about STDs in your nether regions see that we're really trying to avoid that too

I am legitimately I'm not just saying this because I want to end this conversation which I do but I'm legitimately very excited to hear this audio that you said you uncovered with the help of a listener. This is exciting. Never in this show have we raised the raised the specter of something on one day and the next day, I guess, have it fulfilled.

Sort of. Okay, so the sort of is this. The way this unfolded was yesterday, and I don't remember how, but we got on the topic of like the intro package for the weekend show that i had on a conservative talk radio station in seattle called kvi and uh listener brian clearly very up to speed on his tbtl tweeted at me yesterday hey i was just listening to some old tbtl and i think in episode one you're talking about your time at kvi and you

play the intro music oh okay i was confused by that because he said the luke burbank show and i was like wait your timeline isn't right i was thinking about the luke burbank show that came

years and years later when you're at cairo no he was astutely noting that on the very first episode of tbtl which i now know was i believe january 8th that sounds right or january 9th january 5th it was in january and it was in 2008 uh in the very first hour of the show i started by kind of giving my radio history my radio cv and that included this this music from when i had a show on kvi now the reason i said sort of is because i'm sort of talking over it i'm talking to jen i'm kind of breaking it down and i tried to cut that out this morning because what i really would like to get and this must again i must have this on a tape somewhere in a storage unit in bellingham but what i really want to get is just the the the original file that just doesn't have me talking over i'm stopping and i'm starting it okay so i spent a bunch of time this morning trying to like resect the parts where i'm talking to jen and just piece it together but it was going to be so jarring that i just had to kind of like play it you know as play it as it where it lays as they say um the other thing is andrew this was a hard listen for me the first hour of tvtl because i had to i didn't know where it happened in the first hour so i had to kind of needle drop and scrub around and man it was rough i mean we've talked a lot about the bumpy start for the show i can't i just still can't wrap my mind around how low energy or why i was so i think i was just so nervous and i had not learned yet the tactic of if you're nervous on the radio you got to kind of overdo it in the energy department i was nervous and i was underdoing it was like i was whispering it was like i was afraid someone was going to hear the radio show and i even said at one point we came back from break i'm actually not i'm mildly proud of this as a come out role on this radio.

show but we come back from one break and i say producer jen just came in here and told me i'm being way too low energy which you know to the degree that the show had any charm in the early days i guess it was the radical transparency of the whole thing but it's not good radio and you can hear jen jen is a professional jen gets it the only listenable moments of the first hour of this show's existence when it was a traditional radio product was when jen would pipe in and i found myself this morning listening to it wishing somehow retroactively she would have piped in more which like makes no sense but i was just like please let it please let have jen talk again

here some at some point yeah because eventually she became more like almost a co-host then but those i mean that's what i loved about the show like in the early days was like that i mean it was literally set up even physically like an old school radio show and and i loved it so much like you were in the big chair like surrounded by a console or whatever in your computer and you're talking into a into a radio style microphone and um and then jen is physically in a little booth like a tiny little booth i would later stand in that booth myself about the size of a phone booth or something with her own little computer and her own little microphone and she would just like kind of break into the conversation as opposed to being like kind of a constant presence as it would

eventually evolved into right right well she would be call screening although I don't know if we ever got any calls or took calls but I mean that was something you could do in that little producers booth scheduling the guests or I should say you know getting the guest on the line things like that so she was sort of like doing a lot of producing and then chiming in when she could and then I think over the whatever year and a half that we were doing it it became more the case that she would just sort of like produce the show up as much as possible beforehand and then just kind of ride shotgun with me because to anyone who turned that show on it was clear that there was there were basically two talented radio people associated with that show and it was jen andrews and sean de tori and then a weird whispery guy on the microphone so this is that audio andrew from hour one of the show me playing and breaking down the theme song for a show that i had had five or six years previous and here's a little see when you hear the classical music jan you think this is going to be a really classy show highbrow right so that's kind of but then you're not going to believe what happened

now kvi presents another hour of entertaining and stimulating talk

it's like the the record the needle has literally been pulled off the record and now you're hearing nirvana i mean this is not your father's talk this is not your father's talk radio from studio a in

seattle this is not your father's talk radio no literally it's not your father's talk it's the luke burbank show starring luke burbank as luke burbank

if you i just came in at the wrong part of the thing there apparently the piece of tape i had selected to illustrate how bad the show was also involved me coming in early on the tape from the kvi days if that makes any sense there's a this is a real

of audio now i was gonna say this is you right now in 2022 playing tape of you in 2008 and cringing over how bad you think it is and that tape is of you playing tape from five to ten years earlier cringing over how bad you thought that was this is yeah how far can we take this yeah

so it's i mean let me see if i can even kind of sort of get this timeline you're absolutely right so right now it's 2022 and i'm playing tape of me from 2008 where i was playing tape of me from

1998 right and it would be amazing if in this tape from 1998 you are giving your radio bona fides and you start talking about something that you did on the radio in college and how terrible it was. That would be amazing. I don't, unfortunately,

I was not able to incept things this far. There's this TikTok going around that's like lines from 30 Rock that should win an Oscar. There's this one point where I think Jack Doddagee says to Lemon casually, I never fall asleep on planes. I don't want to be incepted. it just made me laugh for some reason yeah so uh that that's that's what it sounded like it's pretty much as i described it i think um although i was slightly off on the the intro fancy music but one of these days i will go and find uh you know like i said when i when i finally retrieve all my stuff from that storage unit i will um i'll dig through some of that tape and i will try to find the kind of clean version of that.

then maybe we can play it or whatever i also just think it's interesting how far and really how not far we've traveled as a as a radio show as a podcast really as a family andrew because here we are on episode 3656 of this thing and yesterday on episode 3655 i did almost exactly what i did on episode one which was wanted to talk about this silly intro package that i once had on a radio show so like that was day one of the show and that was also day 3655 of the show

i have a i have a thought about this almost a maybe some of you would um categorize as a shower thought that just kind of blew my mind that i want to share with you but first i want to say the one thing that first of all you're way too hard on yourself about how you sound people loved that radio show people i loved that radio show i think you sound good and even on the first day out everything grows and evolves in these types of um situations and i think that's a pretty good show out the gate i think you see a lot of the seeds of of the kind of cult following that you guys will start to attract for good reason and and whatever i just hope that you're more proud of it than not i think that i think being on doing tbtl on the radio as much as i love doing tbtl as a podcast i think there was something very very exciting and special about that so i hope you have good feelings about it but something just occurred to me and i think this is this is somewhat universal even though people like you and me who talk on the radio for a living have a guess a different relationship with it but you know how we always talk about how a photo that is taken of you today that might make you cringe 10 years from now you'll look back on it and say like wow i was so much better looking than i had more hair and less flesh and what have you in fact i stumbled on some photos of me and genevieve when we were first dating yesterday luke i opened a box i didn't even know they were in there i'm gonna send it to you we're not a bad looking couple what happened to what happened to those cats anyway um audio is the opposite i feel like everybody cringes at old audio of themselves even even if it's just like a tape of you singing karaoke or you know like when i was six years old and singing in the bathtub and my parents surreptitiously recorded it or whatever like people love seeing old photos of themselves because they're better looking than they thought but people hate hearing old tape of themselves

that's a really interesting observation i'd never thought of that and you're totally right like in fact i listen to a lot of the howard stern show and sometimes for one reason or another they'll play old old tape and i have to be honest like i mean the that show in its early days was so much less listenable for me than it is now like it's the pace is much slower howard's voice sounds deeper um it's just it's a much more it's much more interesting to me than him uh you know at wnbc in new york throwing you know lunch meat at the rear end of an adult dancer or whatever and his his voice just sounds high and it sounds like he's talking really fast so you're absolutely right like somehow our spoken voice maybe up until a certain point and then there could be some decline as well but yeah like i'm i like how i sound on the radio much more now than i like how i sounded on the radio 15 years ago and that's the only thing where it

goes in that direction well i guess for myself and i didn't mean to turn this into uh into me just observing myself i will say that sometimes when i go back and i listen to the shows that you and i did in la well i guess it's kind of hit or miss there are some where i sound really really dead at the end of the day but for the most part i think i sound a little bit more a lie i think i i sound less stumbly i think i sound a little bit more energetic generally speaking and that probably has to do with the morning thing i'm gonna say because when i go back and i listen the tape of me even in Wallingford or you know during the especially the early time when we switched recording time to the morning time uh I just I hate the way I sound in the morning like even right now I sound more nasally kind of clogged up I stutter more and I think that that so actually I guess in my case I listen back to some tape and I think oh I sounded better on tbtl then but I will never go back and listen to anything I did on the Andrew Walsh show on Cairo radio because that just like just the thought of that the thought of that gives me the pain in my stomach that you were describing uh or i assume that you felt when you were listening back to early tbtls

yesterday it felt like when in star wars han solo has to cut open the tauntaun and like stuff luke skywalker inside it that was me cutting open episode one of tbtl was

kind of like and i thought this sounded bad on the outside that is a great show title it was it was really we actually have that drop speaking of things from the uh you know from the ancient days of tbtl this was a this was a biggie for us i thought they smelled bad on the outside but like that really was it was almost like oh i can't i can't listen to this but i have to listen to this Because I want to find this piece of audio

I am surprised that you didn't go back though That's one thing I think that you're incredibly good with tape And I love the way you've always used tape But going back to this little dissection Of your early audio that we just listened back to In today's day and age You would have done that thing Where you stop it and play it and stop it and play it But then you would go back And you would just like play it again And that's something Levitar does That I really appreciate When they have a piece of tape that they love They will play it more than once even if it's long and because it's just like it's good tape and also if they're stopping and pausing it they'll go back and be like okay now let's listen to it all the way through so as a listener right now that is the only thing that i am frustrated about is i now want you to go back

and play the whole thing from the beginning uh i don't know in what universe this would be of even moderate interest to the listeners but maybe just from a radio standpoint andrew you can appreciate this once i start playing that tape that's the first time in that first hour of tbtl that i don't hate what i'm doing and i agree with you that going back and replaying the whole thing would have been would have been a cool move but there was just something where i could feel internally something unclench when i had tape that was playing that i could pause and then interject and then let it go for as long as i saw fit and then pause it and interject like all of a sudden it felt like the weight of the world had moved off of my shoulders which is what it felt like the whole rest of the time i am convinced i've had a borderline out of body experience doing the first hour of this show like i can still remember physically what it felt like sitting in that chair like i felt totally numb i felt like i was having all these intrusive thoughts like you've never i guess i had i mean the whole premise of this is i had hosted some other show a little bit on the weekends but this was sort of different like i had this feeling of like you're a total fraud because you know cairo signed me to do that show kind of sight unseen i had been out in new york doing this thing the bryant park project for npr but that was scripted there was like very little improv in that show and i think that the people at cairo just thought well this guy's coming from new york city he must be and also jen andrews wants to do this show and we know that she's a really talented producer so okay how bad could it be they would have no idea andrew just how bad it could get um but i just remember having all of these thoughts bombarding my brain like you've never even done a show like this and you're you're 20 minutes into this and is this even interesting and jen's telling me that i'm like being coming in the commercial and trying to like hype me up being like you got to like have more energy it just i the feeling that i had harked back to the first time that i was left alone with a radio microphone to do a news update during um a college a husky basketball game and so i had gotten hired by this place metro traffic and because i was interning at kuow they thought i had some sort of news background and so they trained me for a day or two but they because of the way that place worked they just i just came in on a saturday there was literally no one else there and i had this binder that just had like instructions that were slid into those kind of like plastic you know sleeves that i'm flipping through that's supposed to tell me how to do this and it was so complicated at least it felt complicated to me because in those days you couldn't listen to i couldn't listen to the radio station directly that i was about to be on because there was a delay so you had to call this thing called the listen line so you had a phone and you would dial this

number and then it would route through this little audio situation you had to where you're hearing the station in real time and i had never been on live radio i had this was college now i had never really done a newscast like this and i couldn't get the listen line to work i could not and so they had said to me you know this game starts at whatever time and you're going to come on at around 6 20 and do this halftime update news thing and it's like now it's like 6 15 it's like 6 18 I'm thinking that the halftime of the game has already happened and I'm like not there and they're like now Luke Burbank with the news and just like nothing happens and I was so so overwhelmed with anxiety around the situation that I remember just thinking I'm just gonna leave I'll just like they can't arrest me I don't think it's illegal to quit a job it was just so overwhelming to me and of course it got worked out i called like some engineer

at coma they're like oh here's what you got to do and then like it went fine i mean i'm sure it was a terrible news report but like i got through it that was the same feeling that i had doing hour one of tbtl many years later was that same feeling of total incompetence and all like almost

disassociated with my body a little bit i know that feeling i'm still like that um in in in situations that are performative in some way that i am super super nervous oddly i have not as nervous as i've been you know doing some tbtl events i've been sort of nervous in a way that is that matches the occasion basically you know um my first events with you i was not you know when it was you me sean maybe even jen i don't know if i did any early events with jen but like i didn't really have to do that much so i was nervous up there but also there wasn't like there you weren't depending on me all that much so i could sort of ease into it and then as i became more and more part of the show and you and i started doing our own live shows yes i'm very nervous about those things but you should be you're going out to perform right um but there are other things in my life that have made me so nervous that you're right like you you well actually doing doing that reading at my friend's wedding this last fall was more nervous than i've ever been at any tbtl thing i mean my voice was shaking i was shaking my feet was shaking my legs was shaking i just

realized i was doing that um also i'm shaking my time was shaking my head was shaking my arms

was shaking my legs my feet too um also the shiny guy always worries anyway so like stuff like that Or one time I had to give an impromptu toast to a colleague who was leaving and we were at a work event. I think I told the story recently. And it's like my boss, actually, like my boss's boss leaned over and said, you should say a few words. You have like 20 minutes before we toast Shay. And I was like that. I literally had a stomach ache so bad after that that I had to go lay down in a child's bed at this farmhouse where the event was. And I had a huge I think I told you this. I had a terrible, terrible stomach ache after doing this reading at my friend's wedding this last fall.

Interesting that it happens afterwards for you. I think that the relief of it being done would mean everything would kind of just go back to its normal state.

No, it's there's something about me being so, so bunched up leading up to it. And for this reading, probably bunched up for days, you know, that when it's over, suddenly, I don't know, it's weird. It was the same exact feeling. And it was it was kind of painful. Like, it sucked. Like, I was trying to make small talk with Genevieve and meet, you know, Nick and Rosen's friends at the reception afterwards. And I'm just like, I can't concentrate on anything. It was rough.

Well, I want you to know, Andrew, whenever I have my next wedding, which I think will be fourth or fifth, I will not ask you to do a reading.

Okay, fantastic. I assume that I, well, I assume that we would be marrying each other. So that stands.

But my point still is I'm not going to make you do a reading at our wedding.

That's great. Just a couple of simple vows, which I will write myself. I wanted to tell you quickly, though, talking about disassociative, and I know I've told this story before, too, but the very, very first time that I was on a real radio station, not like the stupid college show that I did on a station nobody listened to at 4 a.m., but I was working as a college student at WKSU, which is a real radio station. It was the NPR news and classical music station for the for Northeast Ohio, like, you know, covered a big chunk of Northeast Ohio. And I was a producer there for a long time doing various things. And then I think I've told you this before. I lived very close to the radio station. And as I gained more and more kind of, I guess, trust of the people who ran the station and my bosses, they would ask, you know, they would ask me to do things that required more responsibility. And I loved it. That was my trajectory. And I was very proud of that. And one time I believe there was some issue going on. It was very late at night, I think, maybe before midnight, but getting pretty late. There was some issue with the audio signal. I can't remember what it was. Maybe there was something going on where our internal classical music automation wasn't working. but all i know is i was listening to the station i identified the problem i called some program director it might have been eric newsum probably was uh somebody that you know luke professionally um and he was running the station at the time and he said okay well then what you can do is why don't you go on and i'm sort of filling in the gaps here a little bit because i can't remember what the original issue was we were still broadcasting but there was an issue and i had to switch feeds i think maybe like take it off of our local classical music feed and switch over to a 24 hour national feed that was probably provided by American public media for whatever that's worth um thanks guys uh and so anyway he said so why don't you go over to the station I can't remember how I got in I don't think I had a key but somehow I got in said go over to the station and um just Let's make a quick announcement, open the microphone and make a quick announcement saying we're having technical times and we're going to switch over to some other programming. I'm like, OK. I mean, Luke, I'm talking 10 seconds or less of me ad-libbing something, right? And I am so nervous and I go into the studio. I mean, I cannot believe this is happening. My big break, right? I cannot believe this is happening. So I go in there, but there's not much time for me to like really mull this over either. So I go in there, I pull the microphone down, and I say in the most shaky voice you can possibly imagine, we are having technical times. We are now switching over to Classical 24. Maybe PRI distributed that. I can't remember. Anyway, I'm like, oh, my God. Okay, I did it. I did it. Was it as bad as it feels? Was it as bad as it feels? and somehow i think i got a call from my boss whoever it was at the time saying well you sounded a little off mic but you know it's fine you switched over it's not a big deal

i somehow go back and i listen to the tape and i'm so far off mic because they had returned on the wrong mic they installed a headset microphone for the afternoon classical guy who wanted to start using a headset microphone so that's like big headphones with like the microphone coming off he's about to call a game and there is a switch that you have stepping up to the plate it's schubert and so he had the switch set to these things which were hanging down under the console by my knees so i'm talking into a microphone that is not working being picked up I don't know three feet down by a headset microphone that is hanging down by my knees and somehow that was the most disappointing part well I mean I guess maybe obviously that was the most disappointing part not only did I sound nervous as hell you could barely hear me I wasn't even talking into the microphone and that's why I know I'll never have a future in radio the soup was terrible and also the portions were too small exactly exactly I still I am still disappointed about that too i would rather i would rather hear my shaking quivering voice in like high fidelity than it to barely have even gone out over the air oh gosh um i have i could i have a similar story

but i won't i won't bore everyone with it but but um something at kuw like that when i was when i was really young and it was the kind of thing where like now i just realized like yeah all of the adults didn't want to come in on a beautiful sunday in the summer to to dink around with this you know whatever and making a two-second announcement between uh you know clips of alternative radio uh with david barsamion feeding into bridge is a liberal conservative dialogue with larry josephson i'm larry josephson and i thought it was my big break but they were you know it was more just like nobody else wanted to be there and then no one was listening to like it was a very low profile event but it really stressed me out i had my friends there playing guitar in the background for somebody my friend seth bro light was there what we just we decided we wanted to record now i'm just talking about it we decided that this is when like the mummy and seth and a bunch of us would all hang out we were all like playing a lot of guitar and so we thought it would be cool to go into a studio because the place is totally abandoned it's like a sunday night at eight in the summertime so we go in a studio and record some kind of like little instrumental guitar thing which i am then going to play as the rejoin music okay yeah you can tell it's a solid plan and so we've got we go and we record some little song thing whatever it's like no singing it's just guitar music but then somehow in the process of like you know counting down the last few seconds is the last few seconds of whatever the program was again very likely alternative radio then it's my turn to talk and i get so frazzled that i like i'm pressing the wrong button i'm like not turning the mic on i'm playing the guitar music but it's like i'm playing it through audition and we're in program or i'm playing it through program we're on audition and then i start to realize midway through that like the music's not happening i mean it's like just a total debacle like not unlike probably kind of what you and it's just weird to think about it now at age 45 soon to be 46 by the way that hit me today oh yeah may right yeah like 45 you know that's definitely that's firmly in middle age if i'm lucky but 46 is very much moving towards 50 i mean this kind of happens i guess when you're at 25 and 35 and 45 when you're at the five part you can still kind of feel like you have one foot in the early your part of the decade that you're discussing or the 10 years of your life whatever like i think of myself as being in my 40s but when i turn 46 i will think of myself as being on the way to being 50. certainly yeah which is uh is something quite something for me to wrap my mind around well i

was thinking more about our conversation yesterday too and again now i'm just like maybe getting high off my own fumes but you know we had a conversation about age yesterday you want me to say backside

problems I'm trying to be diplomatic

I thought getting high off my own fumes was a nicer way of saying a gross body flatulence

situation. It is what I'm saying if you can say getting high off your own fumes I think I can say STDs on your nether region

No I'm saying that I was avoiding the body stuff by saying getting high off my own fumes I was keeping it in the

But we all know what you're talking about just like everyone knows what I'm talking about when I say STDs on your nether region. I was trying to take it

from a gross place to a nice wholesome place huffing vcr cleaner um i still don't know what vcr cleaner is but i hear tell that people were huffing it back in the 90s anyway um what was i gonna say oh i don't think i i think that we should i think we should caution ourselves to continue to i mean just for ourselves i don't mean i don't mean publicly on this show to not insult people but like I just you hear from so many people who just say that like you know things really started to click for me when I was in my 50s like you hear that a lot even 60s or even sometimes retirement as well I was just sort of thinking about that I'm like yeah like let's let's just for our own mental health and for the and for the people around us who don't like hearing people talk about getting old like let's just remember that maybe the best is still

to come absolutely I don't I mean you know like I like I say all the time you know multiple things can be true i am both i will be i think like most people are i will be grappling with the reality that i'm getting older on this planet while also looking to have a great quality of life and hoping that i can find ways to really flourish and thrive at whatever age i'm at you know what i mean i don't think they're mutually exclusive um because i you know i said the thing i read about someone talking about their kids and how they like kind of imagine that they're time traveling back to that moment in their life from when they're much older and how cool that would be like when they're you know 90 years old if you could say you can spend one day in your late 30s with your kids like whatever that day was it presumably be a pretty cool day but I'm with you like I don't I don't want to set up the dynamic that being any certain age means that your one's life has to be not something that's great I mean I am very much hoping that I am having a great rewarding life at um you know at any age that i that i'm at and you do see people okay this is like i'm gonna totally forget this guy's name only because i i don't know if i ever knew it but there's one of the actors in that everything all at once movie um let's see i'm gonna try to find it there's two things that are really his name is james hong by the way um this particular actor It's a there's something very interesting about this movie to me, which is that it stars Michelle Yeoh and then it also stars this guy named Ki Hui Kwan, who was the kid in Indiana Jones and also the kid in Goonies. oh wow and he there's a great profile of him in the new york times you know he was a kid um who had uh his family had come to the u.s i believe from vietnam maybe and they were trying to find uh somebody to play this kid in indiana jones and it was one of those classic stories where they go to his school looking for uh somebody to play this kid and then his little brother auditions and then he's at the audition coaching his little brother and they said to him hey maybe you should try it and he gets the role then he's in Goonies and he has this whole kind of career going but then he gets into young adulthood and because it's basically the racism of Hollywood in this country there just are no roles for him so he starts working behind the camera just in the filmmaking industry but not as the person who's being filmed anymore and then he sees crazy rich Asians and he's like it so inspires him to see that sort of representation that at like whatever he is 50 or something he's like i'm gonna start acting again and then the next thing that comes up is this everything everywhere all at once um yeah so i mean this kid is this kid is really iconic if you see a picture of him you're like oh yeah that guy

totally anyway can i ask you a question does he talk um did you read this whole piece yes and i plan i want to read it too does he talk much about the depiction of his characters in goonies and in indiana jones i think indiana jones especially the the fact that like the depiction of an asian kid

In that way with the broken English And kind of you know leaning into Stereotypes and what not like that Stuff for me as just like a white guy In 2022 always makes me cringe Do they talk about that in the In the piece what he talks about

More is that He found himself auditioning for a lot Of roles that were very flat And very stereotypical like in his teenage Years and in his 20s and he talks About auditioning for roles that were You know a very flat representation of someone's idea of what a quote-unquote asian person might be and then not getting the role and and so they don't they don't get into really like him sort of weighing in on how he felt about the representation that those particular characters put out in the world but i it's the way it read to me was something that i've you know uh in talking to a lot of actors and people who are particularly actors of color um there's this extremely impossible line to walk between trying to make a living and trying to you know only take roles that might not be stereotypes and for so many years there were only the most stereotypical roles available to a lot of folks you know people of color that it seems like a kind of a dangerous game for me as the white guy to get into analyzing who you know who should take what role but what I've heard from folks who've had to make that choice themselves is you got to take it case by case and sometimes you got to pay the bills and maybe paying the bills involves a role that's not the most interesting to you and maybe isn't even the best representation but I guess I and I don't think this is what you're saying but I guess I just sort of leave that decision to the people making it yeah exactly and for what it's worth

that's why I asked because like I say like as a white guy like I have certain feelings about that that make me very uncomfortable when I watch those movies. And it's a reason I actually don't watch those movies because I find it so cringe-inducing. But I've never heard from somebody who's actually, you know, the actor who is actually playing that part. So that's why I was curious about that.

Well, the reason that I thought of this whole thing is where we're talking about, you know, what life can look like when you're older than, say, 45. And in that profile of this guy, K. Huey Kwan, he mentions this dude, James Hong, who's also in the film and is 93 years old Andrew and has been working in Hollywood forever I have seen this guy in so many movies and he said that this guy said that James Hong was walking around the set like a 20 year old and he was like just totally full of life and apparently on like the last day of the shoot he brought a bunch of his own personal photos over the course of his career and he was just signing them I mean like anyone want a signed photo and people were like lining up so i was like okay that's a pretty good view of what 93 could be for somebody oh i cannot wait

to see this movie i'm seeing it all the only thing i'm concerned about now is now i need to stop hyping because i'm just seeing i'm seeing headlines like you will remember where you were when you saw this movie for the first time and like that i mean i'm glad to see it's getting good coverage and i really want to like this movie but now i need to i need to not spoil it for myself by thinking it's going to be the best movie i've ever seen but i am very excited to see this movie now and yeah i keep thinking about what is the the show you were telling me about severance i'm dying to watch that too as soon as things settle down a little bit here i'll tell

you about that after the break because i have now fully caught up and i'm nervous andrew i'm nervous and i am maybe i'll tell you why after we take this quick break here on tbtl we was hoping for

some razzle dazzle razzle dazzle that's right man razzle dazzle on your mark on your mark get set Get set. Now ready. Ready. Go. Everybody rattle, dazzle.

Let's thank some dazzling donors. These wonderful, generous folks are donating a dazzling amount of dough each month, and it's keeping everything working here in TBTL land. We've got to start by thanking our friend Remco Tannis in Zurich, Switzerland. What's good in Switzerland, Remco?

His Instagram feed is what's good in Switzerland. Remco is one of the coolest photographers that I follow on Insta, for whatever that's worth.

I'll check that out, because you're one of the coolest photographers I follow on Instagram, so Remco is cooler than you.

I like your feed, too. It's got one photo of a guy with a parrot on his shoulder.

And a picture of me and DFTB.

Two pictures. I didn't see that other one. Oh, you've been updating once every three years. There's still more for you to explore on my Instagram page. There's more to explore.

Remco says, hey, friendos, I don't know if you've seen the movie Frank, directed by lenny abramson the final scene plays in this bar named el madrid that has everything a perfect dive has in my book the band on stage serenades the bar without anyone paying attention of course with the song i love you all uh quote el madrid it's nice to see you it's really nice to be here i love your walls washrooms smell they could be cleaner stench of cigarettes

and stale urea i love you all great song i can just smell that bar and a nicely absurd movie as well would recommend that's the one with like michael fassbender right where he's got this big

paper mache head on yes in fact i um i watched that in la and then i was so into it that i i asked you to watch it with me again at your house in port townsend during the very first week of tbtl on american public media if you'll recall and um the reason i was into it is do you remember who wrote it i'll tell you john ronson we had him on my fancy public radio show and i'm in love with john ronson and we had him on the show and he's just got that i mean i don't even know how to describe his voice i mean people always say dulcet i think like dulcet tones is just like kind of a cliche thing to say it's the opposite of a dulcet isn't dulcet really is he's so he's so like um

almost lyrical in his way of talking right to my i find it mournful now let me just tell you i love john ronson i'll read anything he writes i'll listen to anything he creates but when i think of dulcet i could be wrong i think of dulcet as like soothing in some way yeah and i find john ronson's voice to be reedy and mournful like he's always sounds to me like he's about

to start crying it's interesting i i mean yeah i think i i yeah i used dulcet knowingly there for a change i i used the right word for what i was describing i guess it just has a different effect i find it so i find his way of talking so calming you're right there is a there's a bit of a um maybe an uh it's it can sound somewhat ominous i guess the way he kind of keeps you his voice is in a minor key right it gives you the bad feeling like you say and again i love i

love love love everything about john ronson's work but it's just it's it's funny to hear that it soothes you oh i love it four percent unsettles me but is well worth that four percent of being unsettled because it's so good i forgot he wrote that movie though yeah and so that's why i know

but i thought it was i maybe i'm wrong about i thought it was quasi based on uh a true story of of these of this musician who was uncomfortable taking his big mask off most of the time maybe it's totally made up i thought it was an adaptation of a story from a newspaper or something i think

you're right about that and i would also track with john ronson's kind of journalistic experience of kind of taking real life things and i mean didn't he do the original story about fainting goats that that the men that stare at goats movie wasn't that based on a ronson oh let me see i

didn't know that but i remember that movie i remember yes you're right yep that's him uh yeah

that guy is amazing and i just mentioned this the other day but this this incredible audible project called the butterfly effect yes is that what it's called i think so is there more than one season

now i know the first season was mostly about the adult industry right like all yeah i think that's

the only one that i'm aware of is that but it means it's really fascinating about the the you know kind of way that that industry has changed and things like that anyway back to remco's email all this is to get to a question that i have for you i'm going to be in la over the summer and i was wondering with the tattletale gone r.i.p uh what would be a nice little dive to wander into thanks in advance for the advice oh and thanks for the show well thank you remco for paying for the show yeah exactly it is we who should be thinking the um what i mean i feel like we're both a few years removed from our kind of you know our day in day out uh la dive barring but i would definitely say the drawing room in los felis oh yeah the drawing room so much just depends on where remco is staying if remco is out in the in the kind of northeast if you're out anywhere near you know glendale eagle rock that area i would highly recommend club tg uh if that's still there and please god let it still be there um and then yeah moving more towards los felis i would i would throw out the drawing room over on the

west side i don't actually kind of like the bar across the street from the drawing room as well but it's not quite oh yeah the rustic the rustic in um also there was a bar and i am racking my brain to remember this was a story that i told on tbtl that ended up i think riling a lot of people up like on our behalf because there was this bar in downtown la and i'm looking here it's still it's still open it's called hank's not frank and hank which is in korea town which also used to be really cool but then it was sold uh during our last months there and i'm not sure what the deal with that is anymore but um if it still has that classic vibe it used to have but hanks which is in downtown la it was like my perfect kind of style of dive bar when you walk into it it's just exactly what you want but there was a bartender there who was really problematic and i got into it with her i don't know if you remember this i was there with a group of friends but like i just went up to and i was being like really polite like honestly i was just being my usual like i

But when especially when I'm in a dive bar, like I'm very deferential and, you know, soft spoken and just like mind my own business, because I always feel like you have a lot of regulars there. There's a community often. And if you're just walking in, like, you know, take your cues from the room. I very much behave in that way. But I remember just ordering from this woman and she was like, I just said, oh, excuse me or something. And she turned around and started yelling at me. She was like a bartender in her like, I don't know, in her 20s or 30s or something. And she just was like, I'm working over here or something. and she just like just whipped her do you recall this at all i don't know if i remember this particular story so it was back in like 2014 or whatever and it was like the second or third time i'd gone to the bar but after this i was just like i was so you know i was so pissed off about it i didn't go back for a long time and then the bar closed for a while and then it reopened and i remember the reason i remember it's even called hanks is because a couple of months ago i was going i don't know why but i was going through my old yelp reviews i don't have very many but i was making sure that i don't have all negative yelp reviews i try to keep it pretty balanced and one of the very positive reviews i had was for this bar hanks which had recently reopened and i wrote this review just saying like this is everything that you want in a dive bar and i remember like the the um service was great when i went back the last few times under i believe new ownership or whatever or maybe they maybe same ownership and they just knew that this particular server was a problem and she's gone now whatever it was but this again goes back to like my 2015 2016 experience so i hope it's still as cool as it was but hanks in downtown la i highly recommend and i guess it's a little it's in a tourist area but i do got to give a shout out to the frolic

room there in hollywood yes frolic room where you classically won over the hearts of the entire bar

with some tom waits ones playing the wrong tom wait song certainly also if you're on you know

the thing that's interesting is where the tattletale used to be there in kind of culver city the tattletale was it's just like a strip like i guess you'd call it a strip mall just like a little small kind of building that has a few businesses in it and at the far right was the tattletale and then at the far left so there was like a i think it was like a aquarium store a vacuum i think it was like a vacuum cleaner store and then maybe like a tropical fish thing and then was there was a bar called the scarlet lady and what i always found kind of interesting was you had people who were tattletale people and you had people who were scarlet lady people and the twain never met even though there was maximum of 100 feet in between the doors of the businesses so i did actually i just said that no one was ever somebody went to both of them but i did on one or two occasions for whatever reason wander into the scarlet lady and i actually found it to be a very lovely place so if remco you're in culver city i mean with the tattletale gone i guess that leaves the scarlet lady in that particular area and then when you get over to the extreme west side that's a real kind of a a blind spot for me other than i would say there is a little stretch of i guess you would call it playa del rey i think the street is actually culver boulevard that just runs through this hidden pocket of really cool little restaurants and some fun dive bars and some not so divey bars um that i didn't even discover until five years ago and now it's one of my favorite little stretches of la because it's like you're just driving around in this kind of weird the place that i was saying is they're calling um silicon beach or whatever they're just you're just in this like kind of bizarro area where there's not a lot going on and then you come around a corner and there's just like this thriving little one street that has all this stuff going on so those would be my recommendations right about this wasn't

there a in in that strip mall or whatever you would call it um that the tattletale was in wasn't there i think there was also a pho restaurant because i think it was the first meal i had in la was pho in that because i was living in culver city when i first moved there i think it was in that in that parking lot but i could be wrong but also i think you're right about the aquarium store am i wrong was there also a gun store or some store that maybe sold swords you would remember better than me i mean you spent way more time there does that ring even a faint bell to you

well say here's the thing if you have that you have the immediate storefront that's got the scarlet lady the vacuum place the tropical fish and the tattletail that's one thing and then if you were to go across a little kind of driveway there's another building that had like a burger joint a barber shop i think maybe some kind of guns and ammo or swords but what's so weird about how hyper how hyper focused i was on the tat that i don't i don't ever really even look over there i don't even really know what was in that so yeah in this general area there could have been what you're saying could have been pho could have been um you know some sort of weaponry no i got it here on the map and it actually is connected you have you have The 21 Bar and Grill and Lounge Which is what the Tattletail is And then right next to it Collectors Armory Gun Shop That's right next door to it Followed by 5 Indochina Cuisine Which is I think where I got my pho And then a cleaner And then the Scarlet Lady

Well that's funny because that gun place Used to be, that was not a gun place When I used to go there Nor was the pho place a pho place So one of those was the aquarium store And one of them was the vacuum store As of like 15 years ago So that's all new

Guns and swords, I'm looking at it now There's a closed place next to it A place that is closed down directly next to what the Tattletail is On this Google map And then it says Collectors Armory Antique Guns and Swords No wonder it stood out to me so much

What you really want to do is you want to have the guns Wedged between two heavy drinking establishments You want people who are sometimes urinating on themselves At the bar of the Tattletail Also fully armed Or if they're not You want them to have The ability to become Fully armed Ideally So anyway Have fun Remco Stay safe out there Thank you for the donation Maestro

On your mark On your mark Get set Get set Now ready Ready Go Everybody rattle

Dattle

Everybody rattle Let's also thank Michelle McNelly A.K.A. McShell Of Edina, Minnesota

It's definitely Edina I thought we've been corrected on that It's not Edina It's Edina I know we do this every time It's definitely not Edina Okay, then it's Edina

But it might be like Edina It's definitely McShell We know that much

It's definitely McShell How many nicknames have we Inadvertently given to people Just by mispronouncing their names But this is what's so great

About the TVTL listeners You've got McShell Who's donating money to the show and has been for some time and whose name I completely botched because I added a Mick to her first name because that's in her last name. And then instead of being like, hey, that's not my name, McShell has now fully embraced it and is still donating and we now know her as McShell. That's right.

I hope that has applied to other parts of McShell's life as well. I'm assuming that McShell has a desk with a little nameplate on it and that that nameplate was changed

back uh at the origin of this mistake or let's see what would be the other things that she would have that would that would have her name on them her sag card her sag card her driver's license any other important documentation you know her like irs forms all of that stuff uh it's all michelle now i assume um michelle says please come back to minnesota maybe for the fair it has been a long winter well certainly yes huh boy that's got me thinking like that i mean i believe that we were talking about this during the pandemic maybe when i was i think i was down here by then or maybe maybe i went to two state fairs in a row i went to the the the state fair that was up near bellingham or at least i should say the like whatcom county fair or something i know that i went to the the Oregon State Fair in Salem last year it's weird how the pandemic made me really want to go to state fairs you know which is bizarre because it's the kind of thing that I found moderately interesting but I wasn't obsessed with and then when they were canceled and then brought back it just represented something to me very intensely like we can go and eat elephant ears together while someone tries to sell us a trampoline like this can happen um and so the The Minnesota State Fair, which is incredible no matter what, that would be really fun to go to. That'd be great. I would love to do that. If you can work it out with our bosses, Michelle, A, figure out who our boss is. Let us know. Actually, we know who it is. It's Joanne, right? Is Joanne our immediate boss now?

I think Beth.

Oh, Beth. Okay. Well, Michelle, whoever you got to talk to, whether it's Beth or Joanne, will you see if you can get them to sign off on a little trip back to the home office for the fair? because I would totally and then Andrew I'll drag you to that vegan butcher shop that you hated I didn't hate it I was just

like I was eating cold fake meat that should have been like you know like at a table with a fork and knife and I'm like eating it out of paper and it's like getting barbecue sauce all over me as we sit on a bench outside on the sidewalk it just wasn't the right you know it wasn't the right situation all right well

listen thank you so much Michelle thank you so much Remco couldn't do this here without you hello and welcome to top story it's a really cool piece in the washington post by a writer named jessica contrera the remarkable brain of a carpet cleaner who speaks 24 languages it's a profile of this guy named von smith he's 46 years old and i don't actually unless i missed it it doesn't quite say in the piece how this guy von smith ended up on the radar of this washington post reporter but it's just like such a good piece of like i guess you'd call it sort of enterprise journalism where like she clearly heard about this guy who speaks all these languages went and found him and then just kind of like followed him around for a few days on his sort of day job which is he goes out and he cleans carpets i think his brother maybe owns the business and then just kind of like digging into his incredible ability to speak many many languages he's called a hyper polyglot he can speak fluently english spanish portuguese russian czech slovak bulgarian romanian he's conversational in croatian finnish italian latvian nahuatl and serbian he's intermediate in mandarin navajo salish swedish ukrainian and welsh and he can speak american sign language catalan dutch french german hungarian icelandic irish gaelic norwegian and polish and he's sort of basic he can get around in amharic which i think is maybe ethiopia arabic estonian georgian greek hebrew indonesian japanese lakota and lithuanian And what's his native language again? His native language was English, but his mom was from, I believe, Mexico. So he grew up in a household, although his parents split. I believe he learned Spanish from his mother. So he grew up kind of with the ability to speak English and Spanish. One of the many things about this piece, and I would just recommend everyone check it out. It's just really well written, is the way that the reporter, Jessica Contrera, just kind of delves into this guy's childhood experience because he just says that he always felt like kind of an outsider. Towards the end of the piece, they get into the fact that he's very likely on the autism spectrum, which could be in a way related to his savant ability with these languages. But he never really felt like he could connect with other people. He was doing really badly in school, even though he was like crazy smart and could remember like everything. and he started to like when he was a kid he started to realize that he had a knack for languages and he tells the story of the reporter of a time where he hears a woman speaking I forget what the exact language was maybe it was Russian or something and he's a kid and he had been studying

it on the side whatever the language was and he starts talking to her in the language and he says that just the look on her face was so she was just like so touched and happy to hear someone taking an interest in her by way of this language that he said i think he called it a splash of sunshine he was like it's like a splash of sunshine for this person and so it became his whole way of navigating his world so like he ended up going to this high school that had a really diverse group of students who would like hang out with all the different kids from different who had come there from different countries and you'd like learn all of their languages that was his way of making connections with people and he never really kind of clicked with formal education like he didn't go to college he he applied for a few different trade schools which they didn't accept him for and so he's just kind of floated around professionally in his life and now he's doing this thing where he's cleaning carpets at his brother's business but his brain is just this amazing thing they end up taking they go up to i think it's like mit and they put him in a like a whatever you want to call it mri kind of tube thing and they also put the reporter in one and they study their brains as their this reporter i think only speaks english and what they found was it this is really interesting to me when when the reporter was trying to like use words and and talk and everything a huge amount of her brain was lighting up like he was taking a lot of her brain to do language related stuff and when uh when they were doing it on this guy von smith only these little tiny parts of his brain were actually lighting up like his brain has gotten here i assumed that von's language areas would be massively and highly active and mine pathetic and puny but the scans showed the opposite the parts of von's brain used to comprehend language are far smaller and quieter than mine even we were uh we are reading the same words in english i am using more of my brain and working harder than he ever has to um and this is from one of the uh people who study this vaughn needs less oxygen to be sent to those regions of his brain that process language when he is speaking it in his native language uh he uses language so much he's become really efficient at using those areas for the production of language so it's like he can just do all of this with way less effort exerted because his brain is just so good and efficient with it that is fascinating i want to dig into this piece I think that's a good one. saw it bouncing around yesterday well yeah i mean it's it's kind of cool because it's this is showing up as like the most read story in the washington post everywhere it's been republished it's like because that's let's be honest that's how i find a lot of the things we want to talk about on the show is i just go around what's most read trying to figure out what's what's being upvoted by people and this story is just popping up everywhere because it's so well written and so interesting i'll tell you though one of the things that i found the most interesting about it was the story of the guy who may have been lying about speaking the most languages in the history of the world.

So in the piece, she writes about a guy. In 1990, there was a contest to try to find Europe's most multilingual speaker. Participants had short conversations with native or advanced speakers who awarded them points based on their apparent proficiencies. The winner was a Scottish organist named Derek Herning, who showed meaningful proficiency in 22 languages. He was said to have learned at least eight more before he died in 2019. Now, here's where it gets interesting. Herning was ousted from the Guinness Book of World Records by a hyperpolyglot who claimed to speak 59 languages, but who mostly disappeared from the limelight after a TV appearance in which he failed to answer questions in a number of those languages.

um so i can't imagine having the desire to set up a lie like that which would be so demonstrably a lie you know what i mean like that just doesn't right that doesn't even sound appealing to me

what are you getting out of that although i mean this is the rest of that sentence is some believe he's a fraud others think he simply panicked under the pressure which could also kind of be a thing i'm not familiar with that thing but you know like i just i don't know what's worse for this dude who they don't mention him by name but if he because first of all the idea of like saying you know the most languages in the world but not that's totally something i would do like you would just start with like the guy probably knew some languages like he probably was good with language but then as he realizes he's getting more sort of attention for it and more um you know sort of approval then the number of languages starts to go up and up and up and you know who's really going to check him on it and then one day he's on tv trying to answer questions in finnish and he doesn't know it but that would be one bad scenario the other would be he does know all of it and he just locked up and now he's thought to be a fraud that would also be torture yes exactly either way that just

yeah that sounds terrible that again that goes against my personal i don't like as we've said before many times on the show if anything like i always try to under like over deliver and under promise you know what i mean i said that in the wrong order but like yeah i i want i want people's expectations of me to be so incredibly low that I can easily clear the bar.

It's interesting the way that this guy has gotten drawn into learning certain languages. He learned American Sign Language from a Gallaudet University student. That's the university for folks who are deaf or hard of hearing in Washington, D.C. It's a really amazing place, actually. He was going to this dance club called Trax, which had a dance floor known for it's vibrations oh interesting so i'm my guess is that that was so that people who were deaf could feel the vibrations and enjoy the music and dance and do their whole thing through this other kind of stimuli so he's like hanging out that you at that dance club and meeting people and because he loves languages he's like well maybe i can try to learn asl which he did he picked up japanese from the staff at a restaurant where he volunteered to clean the fish tank once a week he's just kind of like going through the world anywhere. He sees an opportunity to more or less embed himself in another language. He just, he does. Then this is, this was kind of like, I don't know if this is the, I guess this is sort of the fantasy in a way, although it ultimately was kind of a bummer for him, but he tells the story to the reporter of a time when he was cleaning carpets for somebody in DC and the couple spent the whole time complaining to each other in Portuguese about him. Oh, no. Oh, by the way, he speaks like perfect Portuguese. Yeah, sure. They are complaining to each other in Portuguese, saying that he looked unprofessional and predicting he wouldn't do a good job.

Now, did he do what we all fantasize about doing in that situation? Letting him just go on and on and on, and then at the end, say goodbye to them in Portuguese?

More or less. Where are you from, Vaughn's brother asked, the rude couple after they'd made the curtains spotless, because, remember, his brother owns this business. Portugal, the husband answered, Acambos de fazer uma limpeza para a embiaxada portuguesa na semana passada, Vaughn replied with a smile. We just did a cleaning for the Portuguese embassy last week. He looked.

I liked the look that that put on the man's face.

God. I love it. I love it.

See, I think that's where you and I, where our, like, weird fantasy, if you will, or what we think is the best way to kind of really, like, get someone in that scenario is different. Because I don't think I would have the self-discipline to wait and wait and wait and then say something that's not even aggressive. It's just, hey, we just, you know, in perfect Portuguese to say, yeah, we just cleaned the Portuguese embassy last week and then walk out, which is that's the best burn. Oh, yeah. It's so good that way.

I don't know if I I don't know if I have the temperament to pull something like that off. I certainly don't have the occasion to. But, yeah, I mean, it's so delicious.

I guess I would just I wouldn't be able to go through the entire curtain cleaning. Just like the second time they said this guy's going to do a bad job because he's wearing, you know, a T-shirt that we don't like. I feel like the second time he did that in like perfect Portuguese I would just I don't know I'd probably say you're effing with the wrong mother effer take this job and shove it by the way uh you have terrible taste in decor you know like I would like I would get way too mean with it and way too soon with it because I wouldn't be able to like I can't keep my powder dry on anything like that this is why I'm a mediocre poker player if I'm sitting on the nuts I have a really hard time just kind of like slow playing it in the right pace when's the last time you actually played poker poker you know it's been a long time i i kind of have i've sort of lost my love for it because it's a real if you you know you want to do it right it's a real time commitment because mostly what you're doing is folding and i have kind of just gotten less interested in that i'm more interested in the the the way higher risk and way lower reward side of like stupid like slot machines or maybe some blackjack now and then or some like three card poker

those little table games that are kind of based on the fundamentals of poker but are just like fun little games that you can play yeah and they're like the kind of thing where the odds

are worse for you than if you were to play like real poker and play it you know as a disciplined poker player but those are just these kind of like i also just don't know anyone here like i don't have a regular game here in portland and they don't really have i don't think they have like poker rooms per se like you can gamble everywhere in portland on these like silly they're just lottery machines right but they look like a slot machine you think they're a slot machine but you're you're just playing the oregon lottery basically um they have those everywhere but they don't have like a table where you sit around and play poker and get chips unless i'm forgetting somewhere i've been which you know depending on the hour of the night is also possible turns out you played poker last night turns out i'm playing poker right now i'm in a fugue state all right so anyway i would just recommend everyone go check out that article it's really good it's long but but really good and um and you know like i said in a in a time where i just feel like it's we're not we are i mean i know this for a fact it's like we're not paying journalists enough we're eliminating positions we're losing a lot of like cool enterprise journalism because there's just not the room for it or i should say the budget uh to just read a really cool old school well-written newspaper piece in the Washington Post just from like a media studies standpoint kind of made me happy all right I guess we should wrap this up here on this Wednesday oh hey if you are in Portland and you want to come hang out tomorrow night at live wire that would be a cool thing we're gonna have a really fun show Gregory Gorday is gonna be there the chef also the one of the authors of the gastro obscura book cecily wong is gonna be there and then we're gonna have music from no no boy so uh if you want to come on out please do alberta rose theater um 7 p.m is maybe when it starts you think i would know that anyway that's happening tomorrow night here in portland so maybe i'll see some of you then uh okay that's gonna do it all right from here thank you everyone for listening uh we'll be back here tomorrow with more imaginary radio for you until then have a great Wednesday. Take care of yourselves and please remember, no mountain too tall and good luck to all.

A joke for Andrew. What did you tell the hippie when he tried to stay on your... Ah, screw it up. A joke for Andrew. What did the hippie say when you tried to kick him off your couch?

Uh, namaste. Power out.

Power out.