Nate DiMeo and Pablo Torre Find Out

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This episode of Memory Palace is brought to you by LifeKid.

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Then you become a teenager and a young adult, and if you are like I was, you need all sorts of help, but you are hardly asking for or accepting any of it.

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Welcome to a special bonus episode of The Memory Palace.

I am Nate DeMayo, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

You trust us to surprise you.

You don't trust us to give you the thing you already know you want.

And you, in your anti-algorithmic sensibility, are so much more hardcore about that than us.

On the day my book came out on November 19th, 2024, While I was running around trying to tick off too many things on a too long to-do list, I kept passing through my living room where my mother-in-law, Elaine, in from New York, to come very kindly, hello, Elaine, I'm sure you're listening, to my book release event here in California.

And in the living room, she was watching me on the television, on YouTube, which is a very weird thing for me to see.

It is always weird to find out what you look like.

She was watching me in an appearance.

on one of my very favorite shows.

The podcast, YouTube show, and and I believe, but I also kind of can't believe, show on the cable television network.

Is it that?

I am not really sure.

The Draft Kings network from the DraftKings Sports Gambling Empire, which is a crazy thing to say, and that maybe should be illegal.

But I digress.

That show is Pablo Torre finds out.

And I found out recently that Pablo, a guy who I have been watching appear on various screens, typically on ESPN, but lately on cable news, thinking that he is the rarest thing in those spaces, a likable, reasonable, sharp, talking head.

I found out that this guy who, you know, I've been watching for years, thinking, you know, I like this guy, you know, in that classic parasocial way that gets weird if you think about it too much.

And lately, as he has been doing a podcast called Pablo Torre Finds Out, which I'll talk about in a second, I have been listening to it and thinking, I think this stranger and I are kind of kindred spirits in this weird way.

So I have recently come to find out that he has been listening to the memory palace thinking the same thing about me.

And so the other day I was on his show talking about the memory palace, talking about my new book, talking about what happens when we remember some sports guys, and it was extremely fun.

So today you can listen here in my feed to my appearance on Pablo Torre Finds Out on one of my favorite shows.

And so I am delighted to share this with you, not just because it is a particularly fun interview and not just because I think you'll enjoy hearing the stuff that this particular interviewer approaching the show and my whole deal from a fairly different approach angle than other people have, see what it yields.

But I am delighted to do it because you should be listening to his show.

It rules.

It is often about sports, but not always.

It is, like this show, led by its host's idiosyncratic idiosyncratic curiosity.

Often you will take a look at the title or whatever and you will think you have a handle on what the episode seems to be about.

And you might not think that you are interested in that thing.

For me, that is any episode about college football.

I do not care about college football.

But the next thing, you are completely fascinated, even when it is about college football.

And you are totally glad you clicked.

As we mentioned in our conversation, I loved an episode he recently did in which he and Wesley Morris of the New York Times, who I am convinced is America's greatest talker,

talk about the night that they both spent becoming among the handful of people to have seen a nine-hour documentary that Ezra Edelman made about Prince for Netflix, that Prince's estate is essentially forbidding Netflix from ever airing.

It is great, and that is a terrific one to go listen to after you listen to this one.

So here is me on Pablo Torrey Finds Out.

Subscribe wherever you get your podcasts, or watch it on the cable channel that you probably already have if you happen to be a self-proclaimed, degenerate sports gambler.

Welcome to Pablo Torre finds out.

I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.

I truly think he is probably the least qualified baseball player to ever suit up and participate in a major league baseball game.

Right after this ad.

You're listening to DraftKings Network.

The number one rule I have for this show is that if someone is going to be a guest and they've written a book, I must read the book.

I very much appreciate that.

In your case, also re-listen to a bunch of your podcast, re-familiarize myself

with why I'm actually passionately, genuinely into this shit.

That's exactly right.

That's the mission for everything.

And I say that to you, Nate DeMayo, because this is also something that I think we are a bit of a kindred pair of spirits about.

Yeah, I think that's entirely true.

I think that

one of the things that is key to me when I sort of look out in the world and try to find these different stories, because it's super easy to find things that you might potentially write about, you know, like.

in one's algorithm it will just feed you like fun factoids a thing that makes it a memory palace story instead of just like a sort of interesting thing that you heard once is that it has to move me in the same way that it has to move you.

To fully explain why it is that I am so moved by Nate DeMayo and his show, which is now a book, The Memory Palace, I feel obliged to let you in on what I consider to be a deeply embarrassing secret about how my own show gets made, which is that we spend a lot of time trying to figure out the optimal title and optimal description for every single episode that we make.

And I should say that we do this because the subjects we cover, the stories we tell are so deliberately not engineered for the algorithm.

We do stuff on this show that nobody else in sports media will or wants to or can.

And so for that reason, we also felt the need to create an entire Slack channel where we will argue over how to best persuade the sun god that is the algorithm to perhaps one day shine its light upon us.

And I hate that part of my job.

I hate it so much, viscerally, that I have never been more jealous of the man in studio with me today.

Because Nate Tobau has been hosting and producing the Memory Palace for 16 years now.

And just one reason it is so deeply respected in what I will call the public radio cinematic universe is that his podcast marketing strategy, when it comes to including any such identifying or searchable or discoverable or clickable bits of information of any sort, can be summarized in two words.

F

that.

I fear what you're about to say.

Tell me what you're going to say.

No, which is to say that I am trying to make a show that is not reverse engineered according to the popularity, the whims of the audience that we are trying to capture.

That's exactly right.

We're trying to make a show here on Pablo Dori finds out that I'm so delighted that you enjoy.

And you said one of the kindest things a person can say to me, which is I listened to one of your episodes twice.

Yeah, absolutely true.

It was the Prince episode, I brought it.

And I thank you for that because you trust us to surprise you.

You don't trust us to give you the thing you already know you want.

And you, in your anti-algorithmic sensibility are so much more hardcore about that than us.

And it comes down to this thing that like, that is just fundamental to my understanding, not just of the past, but the way that I just sort of like move through the world, is that the past is inherently fictional.

Like no matter the fact that we know that this stuff happened, we can dig up the bones, we can read the letters, we can read the diary entries.

The way that we can access that is an act of imagination.

If you're on the subway and you're reading a book about Gettysburg and part of you is on the sixth train and part of you, you know, is in the bloody junction or whatever the names of the places are at Gettysburg.

I don't think that's one, but it sounds like one.

Wherever you are in the world.

Somewhere where trench foot, somewhere

exactly, where people had trench mouth, trench foot, all the trench stuff.

Like it's the same thing if you're sitting there and you're reading about like Middle Earth.

Like you are transported to this imaginary space in which the past lives.

And that is true of Gettysburg and that is true of Normandy Beach, but it is also true of like the story that your buddy tells you at the bar of the thing that happened to him.

It happened to him.

It is already living in his memory.

But when he's recounting it, it creates this kind of like fictional space, you know, where you're picturing your buddy hitting on this girl.

I haven't explained exactly what she looks like, but you can kind of picture her.

You can, you know, you can conjure this thing.

And I am fascinated by the way memory works, but what I really love is that conjuring act.

Because we are relating at every possible possible juncture to the details we're imagining.

That's exactly right.

Our imagination is inevitably

a character in this story.

In fact, it is more than that.

It is the narrator of our interpretation of the story we are hearing.

You go so far as to not even include the names of the people that you're making episodes about in the descriptions of the episodes.

Yeah, I mean, and I'm sure that has cost me money.

I guarantee.

I have bad news.

It's cost you a lot of money.

I guarantee that that's true.

And believe me, this is a conversation that I have, you know, on, like ongoing in any number of venues.

And that is the truth.

Like at the beginning of an episode, there's often a cryptic title and then there is no like, hey, we're about to talk about the Korean War.

We just start talking about the Korean War.

Part of it also comes down to like, I got into this whole thing in part like through music.

You know, like when I was in my 20s, I played in bands that people don't remember and love that experience.

But what I really loved was the idea that one day this song will be on the radio, that a song that I write might come in and change someone's day out of the blue, that they're in one mood and then the song comes in and they are changed.

And I started to notice that that's the way that radio works.

And I started to fall in love with public radio in part because a story from the news could sneak into your day the same way.

Here you are, you know, wrapped up in the whir and sputter of just like, of you're trying to find a parking spot.

You're trying to remember what you're supposed to do that afternoon.

You're replaying the fight you had with your girlfriend the night before, whatever it turns out to be, and then suddenly some like sort of beautifully crafted thing like comes into your day and snaps you out of it.

This is the Memory Palace.

I'm Nate DeMayo.

The sound of the chains, the creaking door, the lumbering footsteps.

They'd recorded all that before Bobby had shown up in the studio, right on Sunset Boulevard, a stone's throw from Hollywood High.

That location alone still had some magic in it for Bobby Pickett.

Only six years since he'd graduated high school himself, on the wrong side of the tracks in Boston.

Part of, you know, not telling people what the story is about is because I want to take them on a ride, but I also don't want them to prepare.

Not long after his ill-fated stint in post-war Korea, all kitchen duty in bordellos and blown curfews and court-martials, and just months since he'd come out to California to make it, to take a chance on his henchman to the teen bully in a beach party movie Good Looks and his fourth best singer in a five-man boy band voice.

But he was starting to find his footing.

Make friends, make connections, meet that guy at the bar who knows the girl who works on the desk of some agent, who knows this producer who knows this woman who's one of the mistresses to the aging actor.

He used to play the buttoned-up dad on that sitcom.

and is trying to pull together his next project.

That whole hopscotch of having...

Like the best writing advice I ever got

from a former host of the public radio show Marketplace when we were writing the little introductions to the thing.

He said, every introduction that you hear in public radio, almost everyone tells you the whole damn story.

And what you need to do is you need to raise a question.

And I have realized that every single line ought to be either raising or answering a question because that journey, it turns every story into a mystery, no matter how straightforward.

And I do think that people have found in its weird, like hyper sincerity and kind of purity, they have like connected to the project on this sort of deeper level because they feel like they're not being cow-tatto or manipulated.

The retention editing of everything, retention editing being the term on YouTube for the way, or on TikTok or anything, for how you edit it, such that the person is not merely hooked, but is almost neurologically

entrapped.

You have me here and you have me at second number two and then three and then four.

And it's just so manipulated.

I do have some appreciation for the general mission there, right?

Which is, as you said in your sentences, raise questions.

Also, the way I put it is,

make it so that there are as few exit ramps as possible.

Sure.

Sentence by sentence.

And retention editing, Mr.

Beast, is trying to do that too.

I'm about to show you what a half a million dollar experience looks like.

I promise this is going to blow your mind.

One starts to realize, I mean, like you must contend with this all the time, as you have a new venture, as you are trying to make sure it gets in front of everyone and gets in front of different audience.

It says, like all the while knowing certainly that, oh, this show could have a bigger audience than it does.

There is freedom and release in the notion of like, well, let's let the algorithm do this.

Let me like allow it to tell you.

But at the same time, it's like, what's the version of the algorithm of the past?

It's sort of like you look back and you see these polls of the stories that you know, right?

That if you're talking about World World War II, you can rattle off the handful of facts you might know.

And you can picture Marines storming Normandy Beach.

And you can, you know, maybe picture, you know, FDR speaking at some conference or whatever.

And you can picture these different moments.

And you got Douglas MacArthur

wading through the waters of the Philippines, vowing, I shall return.

That's exactly right.

He didn't return in the way that we wanted.

So whatever, you know, matters to you, Filipino American, you know, might be different than what matters to me and what matters to the audience, et cetera.

But like you look back at these polls and you look back at the story we're told and I'm constantly sort of aware and kind of trying to unearth and ultimately like trying to like imagine and trying to find the facts that allow for better, more accurate imagining and more like sincere and more sort of ultimately like more true guessing and gap filling.

All we got to do, though, is just make sure that we do a good Mr.

Beast face into the camera so that they have the teaser image.

That's exactly right.

Yeah, Yeah, just a big.

I'm always taken by the, like, the like, I'm puzzling something out.

That's amazing.

I'm glad to participate in this.

I'm glad to participate.

Thank you, Rob, for dragging the purity of the memory palace.

I'm glad to

drag you down to the trench.

That is discoverability.

And all day long, you can see endless debate about, you know, whether Carl Anthony Towns' interior defense, what that might mean to.

They're shooting 90% on him in the exactly right.

I should make clear if it's not clear enough already by virtue of you just casually referencing Carl Anthony Township.

Sure.

So you are a guy who likes to remember some guys.

Absolutely.

Because it, in a way, because it is anti-algorithmic.

You know what I mean?

Like, yes, you can look up any guy, right?

You can look up anything.

But to just sort of sit here and just let your mind go.

Scott Roland.

Yes, exactly.

To just say like John Candelariat, right and to just throw out these names for like for every like greg gagney you know like eric gagne ericagne because they're they're paired in your head in the same way kirby pocket will suddenly enter the picture and you won't quite know why kent herbeck is there all of a sudden it just like activates this weird you know sensation like that is part of like the conjuring act that i try to participate in The name that I want to remember, the guy I want to remember, is a guy I can only remember now because I listened to your episode about it, about him.

And his name is Charlie Faust.

Ah, Charlie Faust.

So the episode, the episode title is Victory.

You can look for that, but don't expect to like have any other useful day.

If you're going to search for this in Nate's feed, you got to look up the word victory.

This, I think, is the least athletic player, arguably on the medal stand for least athletic player in the history of baseball.

I truly think he is probably the least qualified baseball player to ever suit up and participate in a major league baseball game.

And he's just one of those people where I'm like, I should have known about him long before I listened to this.

And I did it.

He fell through the cracks.

And so the story of Charlie Victory Faust begins where, Nate?

Well, for me, it begins in Germany.

You can understand who Charles Victor Faust is by thinking about his father.

leaving Germany in like 1880 something,

traveling across the world, ending up in Kansas.

Classic immigrant story.

And what is he going to do?

He's going to buy some land.

He's going to have some strong sons.

They're going to take over the farm one day.

And he has the son who simply can't.

Charlie Faust, he is neurodivergent in some way.

Like people, you know, at the time, you know, call him an idiot or a moron or simple.

Or simple or whatever their pejorative or even technical term they're trying to apply that now seems like, you know, chaotic and cruel and imprecise.

We don't know what that means to him.

We don't know whether that was a thing that pained him.

We don't know if he could understand his father's disappointment.

But what we do know is that one day he shows up in St.

Louis, Missouri in the summer of 1911.

He has traveled hundreds of miles from Kansas, which one would assume would be a very challenging thing.

The New York Giants are in town and he gets the attention of John McGraw, the pugnacious manager of the New York Giants.

By the way, John McGraw is a harsh man.

One of the greatest managers and one of the, it sounds like, according to historical record, also one of the cruelest at times.

Yes, exactly.

So here comes this man, Charlie Faust.

He essentially says, like, hey, Mr.

McGraw, I have something to tell you.

He speaks in a apparently like accent that's part sort of German accent, part kind of like hick from the country.

And he says, a month or two ago, I went to the fair in Wichita and I talked to a fortune teller.

And at this point, McGraw is like, fortune teller, do tell, because he is pugnacious, but he is also apparently like super superstitious.

He is a lucky penny picker-upper.

He is a, you know, okay, guys, let's wear the road uniforms even when we're home.

Let's break this streak.

He's a true baseball man.

He's like the

Wade Bogsian and like he's going to eat chicken the whole time.

Jason Giambi wearing the gold thong.

Oh, Jason Giambi wearing the gold thong.

So you've done it again.

You've remembered some guys.

And he says, okay, so, you know, so you, what do you have to tell me?

What did this fortune teller tell you?

And the thing about fortune tellers is that they are typically giving you the most vague thing that will resonate specifically.

So Charlie Faust tells John McGraw,

this fortune teller told me that I am going to pitch the New York Giants to the World Series.

John McGraw looks at this guy.

He's six foot two,

corn-fed.

Something's a little off of him for sure.

But he has no idea.

Like this is this is 1911.

Like the greatest baseball player ever to live might be in the next town undiscovered.

Yeah, fangrafts didn't exist yet.

Absolutely.

John McGraw,

superstitious man, says, okay, let's see what you can do.

So Charlie Faust is there like in his Sunday suit.

He walks out to the mound.

John McGraw gets behind the plate, puts on his glove.

You know, he says, okay, it's one finger for the fastball, two fingers for the curve.

If you got something else, that'll be finger number three.

And Charlie Faust gets out there and he gets into his wine app.

And then his arm starts flailing around.

You're doing the Bugs Bunny thing.

Not even.

Bugs had way more grace than that.

It sounds like it's just this sort of chaotic mess, you know.

And he fires that ball, and it very slowly glides to the plate.

You know, it is like pretty straight.

It is roughly accurate.

And it is incredibly slow.

He puts down the number two.

It is the same pitch.

It is straight.

It is slow.

It is just imminently crushable.

People are gathering around.

The other players are watching this, you know, and they are certainly laughing at this guy they think is simple or whatever.

They let him bat.

He swings 20 times.

He hits something into the field.

Everybody's kind of in on the joke.

So they are like letting him run around the bases.

They're fumbling.

They're pretending they can't tag him.

He slides into home and he gets up and he says, like, when am I starting?

Right.

So John McGraw, just to be very clear here, is now going along with this in a way that has made this itself a spectacle.

They're walking that

fine line between laughing at and laughing with.

Yes.

And they invite Charles Victor Faust to hang out on the bench with them that night.

They give him a uniform.

They intentionally give him a too small uniform.

It is comically small.

They are playing a joke on this man.

Like they are being cruel to this man.

sitting on the bench at a Major League Baseball Stadium, whose whole dream has been to do this, whose focus has been after someone has told him with a presumably straight face that you, sir, you young man, are going to pitch the New York Giants to the World Series.

Yes, what we're watching here on this field is both joke and prophecy

unfolding hand in hand.

And I just want to point out that this is insane.

It is insane.

And so this is where I do need you to know that you can actually look up what happened next in the record books yourselves.

Because while we do not know and cannot ever truly know what Charlie Victor Faust had by way of inner monologue at this time, what he really thought of himself, we can confirm that the 1911 New York Giants in St.

Louis, with Charlie Faust sitting right there in the dugout at age 30, wearing that too small uniform that John McGraw had given him, proceeded to win.

They shut out the St.

Louis Cardinals, ate nothing.

And so John McGraw brought Charlie Faust back the very next day in that uniform.

And the Giants shut out the Cardinals again.

And so John McGraw did the exact same thing.

Charlie Faust was back on the bench.

The Giants won again.

Charlie Faust and the New York Giants wound up just a half game out of first place in the National League when it was finally time.

for them to leave St.

Louis.

And they've taken him out to dinner.

They've bought him some beers.

They've like bought him a burger.

They've said like, hey, we've had a fun time with this rube or whatever other more cruel thing they've been saying about him.

And they say like, yeah, have a nice life, man.

Thanks for these victories.

You really helped us out.

And so the Giants decide to leave St.

Louis and Charlie Faust, who had been waiting to pitch this entire time

behind.

At which point, the Giants proceed to lose four in a row in Pittsburgh and then Chicago.

They thought they were in like spitting distance of being able to play for the Pennant.

Everything has kind of fallen apart in this thing.

But when the New York Giants get back home to Manhattan and they finally get back to the polo grounds, their home ballpark,

they find a very familiar face waiting for them somehow.

Charlie Victor Faust.

Who previously had crossed 300 miles or so to get from Kansas to St.

Louis?

He has now crossed half of the United States, has seen Manhattan for the first time,

has showed up at their stadium and is like, Am I going to pitch tonight?

And they say, Yeah, yeah, yeah, well, yeah, who knows what will happen?

But hey, we need some luck.

Let's, let's, the penny has suddenly rolled back in front of me.

Let's pick it up again.

They win 36 times when he is sitting sitting on the bench.

They lose twice in the rest of the regular season.

Every night, Charlie Faust is saying to John McGraw and saying to all the guys, saying to the equipment manager, saying to the peanut guy, to everyone, like, tonight's the night.

I'm going to get in the game.

I'm going to get in the game.

And he's driving people crazy, but they don't mind because they're also winning.

He eventually does get in the game.

which is when he becomes the least qualified person to ever play in a Major League Baseball game.

I just can't believe that he actually got a good game.

It's September.

They are already booked their ticket to the World Series.

They can lose any of these games.

He comes in in the ninth.

He pitches.

The other team is like in on the bit.

You know, they're swinging and missing.

Some guy really tries to take him for a ride, but he just kind of gets under it and the ball goes deep to you know to right field and someone catches it.

By the way, you can go look this up on baseballreference.com and he's there.

4.50 ERA.

Yes.

Two innings pitched.

Everyone in the papers is like they're covering Charlie Faust all the time.

For a long time, it's this great bit.

They have changed his middle name to Victory Faust.

The Giants go on to lose the World Series that year.

And the joke is that it is because the Mojo in the Philadelphia Athletics dugout, because they have their own cruel mascot, which is there is a little person in their dugout who has a hunchback.

Louis Van Zels.

Louis van Zels.

And they have been rubbing the hump in his back for luck as though it is the Buddha's belly at a Chinese restaurant for their whole season.

And apparently that mojo brings them to victory.

Just

baseball, man.

Baseball.

And the next year comes around and Charlie's like, all right, let's do it again.

Let's roll it back.

And like, hey, you know, I'm really sorry.

I must have let you guys down because I like the prophecy.

So clearly, this is our year.

I mean, the truth is he's also a person who is struggling being a person.

He's a little bit too insistent.

He gets a little bit too agitated.

You know,

it was fun for them for a while and now it's not.

And like, how do they adjust when it's fun?

And I'm sure some of the guys were total ds.

I'm sure some of the guys weren't.

And because that's just the way people are.

And they tell him to take off, you know, and they say, we'll catch up with you.

And they never do.

And in a lot of places, like, this is where the story ends, right?

You can either do like some sort of weird movie version, which thank God they would not make today, but they might have made in like 1968, where Charlie Faust, you know, is hoisted on someone's shoulders after sliding into home.

Right.

You know, hey, Charlie, it's been a good season.

Yeah.

You make it narratively convenient.

Yes.

So they can feel like, actually, this was nice all along.

You know, but the truth of the matter is like, that's not the way we tell stories anymore.

Charlie Faust, he goes back to live with a brother who lives in Seattle, who like tries to take care of him as best as he can.

But at some point, Charlie is found wandering in Portland, you know, having walked all that way, and he's looking for the New York Giants.

He's trying to connect with them in Portland, where they will never be.

He's remanded to an institution where he dies in poverty, like quite soon thereafter, this sad death.

But there is this scene where, you know, before victory, before Charlie Faust dies, he checks into a hospital.

Yeah.

And the thing that he does there

is is a marker of this is how he thought of himself.

He is supposed to, for record keeping, write down what sort of work did you do?

And he writes baseball player,

which is entirely true.

And however he came to it, the truth of the matter is this guy played baseball.

In fact,

he is a guy.

He's a guy that one can remember.

Yes.

And, you know, we've created this little memory palace here.

And now you too can remember some guys.

Storytelling is one of the most overused words across human civilization at this point.

But the reason I cling to it as this heading is because it implies something because you're writing and you're structuring, which is to say that you are strategizing and manipulating.

Yeah, sure.

And I do the same.

And I just want to know for you, what is the voice that you're, that you're listening to as you're trying to formulate your own?

When I think about trying to write the best memory palette story or trying to figure out like, what's the mode that I want to be in, it really comes back into what are my favorite ways to have heard a story?

And it is some version of like your best friend at the bar where they have just read some incredible book or they have come back from a trip to Venice.

Something has just happened to them and they have come to you and they have thought about what you, Pablo, you, nate kind of need to what's really going to get you going and they have like blown your mind it's this kind of like intimate thing where someone has thought it all through and they have a sense where like well if i tell you this first you're going to be thinking this and then i'm going to flip it over and so there's craft stuff but ultimately what underlines that and under and underlies it is meaning that the past is just like the present it is just as complicated The big picture understanding is that it is everything all at once, that it is as complicated as today feels, that the people in the past are just as human as we are.

And it's surprising how hard that idea is, you know, for even me to hold who thinks about that all the time.

I am not an expert in history, but I think about how we how we live in time all the time.

The fact that you had to close your eyes shut as you grapple

with how much you are thinking about the past.

Think about it all is very convincing.

And thinking about the present as this like historically constructed thing and the way, you know, it's, you know, it's hard to, it's hard to just like hang out in the Walgreens and hear a song on the radio and not think to yourself, boy, in 1997, they were really thinking, like the ways that they were sanding off the rough edges of grunge in this one, you know, or whatever.

It's like, it's constant, it's a constant presence.

I should confess that I didn't expect my ass to be kicked emotionally by a story about pigeons.

For our YouTube audience, we have a treat for you.

If you're just listening on audio, go to our YouTube channel.

And my God, I sound like a YouTuber when I say such things.

But I want you to enjoy this.

It's impossible to know for sure, but ornithologists tell us there were 5 billion passenger pigeons in North America at the beginning of the 1800s.

That is one out of every five birds.

And when they would fly south in the fall and north again in the spring, the birds would literally darken the sky.

The flocks would stretch out a mile wide and 300 miles long.

They would take hours, often all day, to fly overhead.

You'd wake up in the morning to the sound of approaching birds and while you ate breakfast, tended your fields all day, brought your livestock in at night or whatever, the flock would still be overhead when you went to bed.

The sound must have been incredible.

The droppings, the sh ⁇ from a couple of million birds, would rain down, defoliating whole swaths of forest, making fields fallow.

When all those birds would set down in the woods as a layover, it would take years for trees to recover.

One nesting site occupied 850 square miles of Wisconsin.

There were as many as 136 million birds there at a time.

But all of this made them incredibly easy to hunt.

It is said that if you shot a rifle into the air as they flew overhead, One shot could take down 30 birds.

They were flying so close that they collide like some sort of horrible highway pileup, and they plummet.

As the American human population spread west, the forests started to disappear.

And as industrialization and immigration swelled the eastern cities, people needed meat.

Industrial hunters stepped in.

They'd light fires and stands of trees to smoke the birds out and kill them.

They'd take a single pigeon and sew its eyes up for some reason.

Then they'd tie it to a stool so its panic flapping would cause curious flocks to land.

Then they'd be trapped and killed.

Sometimes they'd soak bird seed and alcohol to get them drunk so they'd be easier to kill.

In Petoskey, Michigan, in 1878, 50,000 birds were killed every day for five months.

They were packed into boxcars and shipped to New York or Boston or Providence or Buffalo or Newark or Baltimore.

That same year, a different Midwestern supplier shipped another 3 million passenger pigeons.

and the birds started to disappear.

The females only laid one egg a year, which is a terrible evolutionary strategy.

By 1900, the flocks were gone.

By 1909, the American Ornithological Society was offering $1,500 to anyone who found a pigeon in the wild.

The last known passenger pigeon died in the Cincinnati Zoological Park in 1914.

She was stuffed and mounted in the Birds of America exhibit at the Smithsonian.

Some years back, she was put into storage.

I mean, look, we're a show that is perhaps biased towards

remembering some guys and also

remembering some animals.

Great.

But

of course, I should have known that the passenger pigeon was so numerous as to be omnipresent.

But more than omnipresent, it literally darkened the sky.

Sometimes with these stories, like the point on some level is to be like, yeah, people are just like us, right?

You go back and you're like, you find yourself connected.

But there's also such value in just being like, yes, but the past has changed so quickly.

It is so different.

Like from 5 billion down to, you know, the one stuffed in the Smithsonian, that there was like a single bird just like sitting there is stunning.

It really is.

And every once in a while.

You are at a museum or you are like, you know, scrolling through TikTok or whatever and something comes in and knocks you out and this is one of those things that knocked me out and for a long time the memory palace was things that knocked me out 12 years ago that i could not shake and that i would roll out occasionally like at that bar you know and like you know it's a thing that will blow your mind and i've come to just sort of trust that if i noticed it there was some reason I'm inherently interested in why we remember the things we do.

And sometimes it's because it was traumatic.

Your reptilian brain has like put up some warning sign and made you remember it.

The sky can be blackened for numerous such reasons.

Yes, exactly right.

You know, but the other thing about it is like, like kind of like the inverse of trauma is like epiphany, you know, and joy, which, you know, that there are these things that happen that are novel and wonderful.

Like the thing when you're suddenly like, oh, wait, shoot, this is the way the world works, or even more importantly, this is the world, the way the world can work.

Like there are times that like this sort of wonder like is around you.

And oh my God, sometimes it goes away.

Like there's something useful about just sort of like realizing how radically things can change and how like at one point these birds darken the sky and they are no more.

Like then what is it that is occurring around me all the time that I'm taking for granted that I might engage with more deeply?

Yeah.

And how can you communicate that to somebody such that they remember it too?

Yeah.

One of the things that I learned from one of my sort of mentors, but just like a writer I looked up to, S.L.

Price, Scott Price, is just how he approached kickers and endings, which is that you want the last line of something to be a bell that is ringing in someone's head.

Yeah.

And exactly right.

Yeah.

Such that when you stop reading it or you stop listening to it in that literal sense, you're still, you're still hearing it.

Yeah.

I sometimes think about it as

like, I love going to movies in the middle of the day and you walk out and you forget that it's daytime.

And to have been just moved by something really wonderful and having your day changed by art or by, you know, a beautifully told story.

What I want to try to do is I want to move you and give you that experience.

Sometimes I like the kicker.

I think about it as like a tiny little note that I passed you so that you can open and be like, oh, that's what that thing is about.

Actually, you know, thinking about what are the through lines through any given episode, but also your whole catalog.

Yeah.

It does feel like we're all going to die is a real key aspect of it.

Sure.

I mean, it does come with the territory.

Part of it is like, you know, if I'm telling some story about this remarkable athlete who had this incredible triumph, on some level, I'm just like,

it's never that satisfying.

Because the truth of the matter is what is often so interesting to me is like, well, what else do you do?

There's a story from the podcast about this woman who swam the English channel and she became the second woman to do do it.

And for a long time, I was like, well, what's you know, that's not a story.

But ultimately, it becomes a story about keeping going, that it's actually okay to be the second to do it, that like it is in the doing that there is this pride.

After landing, Florence got into the accompanying boat and returned immediately to France.

You might think, of course, that conquering the channel would be enough swimming for a bit, but not for Miss Chadwick.

Oh no, she was soon in the sea again, and she obviously has the know-how.

She then like went around the world, like swimming like any channel that needed crossing.

This was her own comment.

Hello, folks.

I'm feeling fine after my big swim.

Like any place where people are like, boy, it seems far over there.

She'd be like, I'm going to be the first person to swim.

These lesser channels.

Yes.

But there's something really beautiful to me about the keeping going.

And there's something really beautiful to me in the right arm, breathe, left arm, breathe of these repeated movements that does sort of resonate.

But ultimately, a thing that you know ties these things all together is that, yeah, everybody dies and i find it very useful to remember that this is the time that this person had and you know here i am in 2024 and this is the life that i get to live like every couple of weeks i sit down and i put on like i start to imagine and start to conjure these spaces and think about these other people's lives and it helps ground me in that way Yeah, you know, I get the sense, you know, part of the kindred aspect that I feel with your show is that however futile in the big picture this mission is, we are trying to make stuff that lasts.

Sure.

You know?

Even while it's ephemeral.

Even while we know we are the raccoon dipping cotton candy into water, then wondering where did our beautiful treat just go.

For as ephemeral as it is, and for the fact that we have just dipped cotton candy in the water and it has disappeared and dissipated, and the water is just slightly pink, and that's the only thing that

we can hold on to.

It's those things.

It's that I will carry that with me, that that is now in my sort of personal like memory palace.

All of the stuff that we are doing, besides the fact that, you know, we will all die, you know, things will, things will crumble to dust.

It is only the Shakespeare's and the and the McCartneys and the Lennons that will, you know, persevere and for who knows how long.

Yeah, I was going to say, I don't know how much longer they got at this point.

That's exactly right.

And this book that I have written, like, truly may not sell very many things, but at the same time.

You know, like the person that finds it and the person that flips through it,

where that gets, you know, knocked on their ass by one story, That little thing will live on.

Yeah.

Nate DeMayo, thank you for leaving a little bit of sweetness in the

waters, perhaps, of these lesser channels.

It's very fun.

Very excited to be here.

I really am.

This has been Pablo Torre finds out a Meadowlark media production.

And I'll talk to you next time.

So, this episode of The Memory Palace was not an episode of The Memory Palace.

I'm delighted to have shared that episode from Pablo Torre Finds Out, truly one of my favorite shows.

My show is not funded by a sports gambling network.

It is a member of Radiotopia, independently owned podcasts who have banded together under the banner of truth and justice and of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company.

If you would like to support what we do, what The Memory Palace is, what independence means in this crazy media landscape.

And I will tell you, for as much as I love Pablo's show, and I think it is as good as anything, gosh, like I am so happy to not have to think about the algorithm all the time.

I am so happy not to have conversations about where my money is coming from, because the money is just coming from folks like you.

If you want to join the Memory Palace and help make this show possible, you can donate today at radiotopia.fm slash donate.

If you would like to also support me, a great way to do that right now is to buy my book or my audiobook.

You can get it hopefully wherever books are sold on all your various websites on bookshop.org or at your local bookstore.

I will also be doing a little bit of an East Coast swing in the first week of December.

I will be doing book readings and some other book events, some live events of different types.

You can go to thememorypalace.us slash events and find out the details about those.

But I will be in Durham, North Carolina.

I will be in Richmond, Virginia.

I will be in Washington, D.C., I will be in Boston, and I will be in my hometown of Providence, Rhode Island.

Love to see you there.

Happy Thanksgiving.

Radio Tokyo

from PRX.