June 10, 2015 • 42 mins
Tracy and Holly talk with fellow podcaster Nate DiMeo of The Memory Palace about his research and writing process. You'll also get to listen to two of Nate's episodes along the way! Read the show notes here.
Learn more about your ad-choices at https://www.iheartpodcastnetwork.com
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:01):
Welcome to you Stuff you missed in History Class from
how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trac Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We're doing
something a little different today. We have had some guests
on the podcast lately, and today not only do we
have a guest, we also have a whole additional podcast
(00:23):
as a guest. It's a podcast that actually has a
lot of parallels to ours. Both shows first came out
in two thousand and eight. They're both with history hosts
who aren't actually historians, and the both shows that tell
stories from the past, but we do this in completely
different ways. So with that, I'd like to welcome our guest,
who is Nate Demayo of The Memory Palace. Hey, thanks
(00:45):
for having me. I'm so glad you're here too. I'm
very excited. I'm a big listener of you guys, so
I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. If
you have never heard The Memory Palace the shows, the
episodes of themselves are a lot shorter than ours. The
They are little JEMs of stories accompanied by music, and somehow,
even though they're simultaneously really short, they're also really thoughtful,
(01:07):
and I think it's a lot better to just listen
to one of these episodes than to listen to us
talk about what they're like. So we're going to start
by playing one of them. It's one that's particularly short,
but it's also really particularly moving, and it follows along
nicely with our recent episodes on animals. So let's get
right to it. From the Maximum Fund Network, this is
the Memory Palace from Nath to Mayo, and this is
(01:30):
episode fifty fifty words, written about the Arctic bowhead whale
after learning that it can live up to two years.
(01:52):
There's a whale right now who may have escaped in
Nantucketer's harpoon in eighteen fifty in a Japanese whaler in
n who once heard the distant songs of fifty of
her kind, then several thousands than hundreds, But who can
(02:25):
hear twenty five thousand again singing in the warming water.
(02:54):
When we started preparing for this interview, I really listened
to a bunch of your old episodes, and one of
the things I really love about your show is that
it tells these odd, eccentric, kind of wacky stories you
had just at that point put out a remastered version
of Itty Bitty Bombs, which is about the scheme to
use bats to drop bombs on Japan during World War Two,
(03:15):
And it's another in the Wacky animal line. Where did
you come up with this story? You know, it's uh,
it has been a while, so where I found it
is sort of lost in the cracks of history. But
I suspect sort of like YouTube, um, I am sort
of constantly, constantly on the lookout for I guess in
(03:38):
some ways just sort of the the the thing that
reaches out from you know, whether it's your Internet browser
or some like larger history book or some novel or
something that fact that kind of jumps out and grabs
you and you know, either you know, makes you go
holy cow. And that one, that one about the bomb
the bat bombs, is certainly sort of a holy cow
kind of thing. But that or that just kind of
(04:00):
like makes you just you know, feel excited or sad
or somehow moved. Like I am always kind of trawling
for those things, and and like that's like an instinct
that um, you know, not only sort of I mean
I do that now professionally on some level with the podcast,
but that is something that preceded the podcast, and I
think because they've always kind of had that instinct of
(04:22):
of like looking out for those little sort of flex
of wonder in the world. UM. I think that's probably
what led to the podcast at all. I think the
flexi wonder should be your autobiography. So one of the
things that we encounter in the show really often is
that we will find different versions of the same story
or facts that are really in dispute in some way.
And a lot of times we tackle this in our
(04:42):
show by talking about the disputes and how they came
to be. That doesn't really work with your format. So
when you find that kind of thing, what do you do?
You know it is? That is the thing I startled about,
and it's also the thing that I might get the
most notes from listeners about you like it's fascinating. I recently,
(05:02):
UH Pieces from the Memory Palace started to air semi regularly,
if occasionally, and if not as frequently as I would
like UM on NPRS weekend editions, Sunday and UM. They
sort of apply this editorial process, which is the same
one that when I was a reporter UM four NPR
and in a different UH in a different public radio shows.
(05:26):
Was applied to me as a reporter. Um, where you know,
they fact check these things. They want to make sure
that everything is in there. But as you guys, well know,
you might learn something, Uh, you might learn some amazing
fact and then you'll go in and you know, first
of all, you'll find out it's not quite like that.
It's kind of like this. But very quickly you discovered
that there are three or four or five versions of
(05:48):
that thing. And um that you know, I have noticed that,
you know, while listening to your show, that you guys
have the gift of being able to say, well, you know,
this is a little bit disputed. This guy says this,
this lady says this. I think we're probably landing somewhere
in you know, in the middle. And you know, the
truth is with my format because it is those sort
(06:08):
of short stories, um, and it is a narrative. Um,
I can't quite do that same thing. Um, but I
have found um sort of small ways to do that,
and some is to simply come out and say it.
You know. Uh, you know, we don't know precisely, um
when this thing began, but we think it's around here, um,
(06:29):
you know, and sometimes like the truth is the fact
whether it's eighteen eleven or it's eighteen seven when something
might have begun, UM doesn't ultimately doesn't matter that much
because what the point is is that it's starting to say,
before the before the Civil War or something like that,
there are you know. It's essentially like what I'm looking for,
um almost, you know. And I think it's the thing
(06:49):
that that drives so much of the stories that I'm
doing is beyond just looking for fun facts and beyond
just looking for a kind of a ripping yard, like
I am really looking for meaning, you know, like I'm
looking for ways to connect the past to the present,
you know, ways to um to move the listener, you know,
to kind of like reconsider um, whether it's a historical
(07:11):
moment or um a person they may have never met before,
or a person that they've heard before, heard about before,
but have never thought about in a certain context. And
so if that's the goal, it's sort of finding meaning,
and it's and it's you know, moving people, and it's
like connecting their their current reality to the live reality
of of the past. It's not that the facts don't matter,
because I actually think it's because it is it is
(07:33):
the meaning is sort of been um embedded within those facts.
But you know, you can be very clear about like
the ambiguity in that case, because you know, life is
sort of filled with ambiguity. But what we're taking from,
you know, the story of, for instance, UM, the first elephant,
UM to continue with your animal theme, UM, which is
(07:53):
a story that that I did and is particularly dear
to me. UM. Whether it's the first elephant or not,
And that is really in dispute, and I spent a
long time trying to figure out whether it is the
first elephant. UM. What really matters is there are tons
and tons and tons and tons of people in eighteen
o five in the United States who have never seen
an elephant before, and first or second, or third or fourth,
(08:17):
UM being the first elephant for some man in Boston
or some you know, some woman in Charlotte, North Carolina. UM,
that's the you know, that's where the story lives. It's
in that encounter, it's in that novelty. And whether it
is you know, truly technically historically novel, I'm less concerned with.
(08:37):
So that actually kind of leads nicely into my next question,
which is that we talked about this a little bit
before we started recording that Sometimes when we're putting together
an episode, it ends up as a two parter because
we just find so many juicy details that are really
fun to tell, uh, and we don't want to leave
those out, and we have that leverage where we can
(08:58):
kind of spend a little more time with it. So
I'm wondering how you wrangle your research down to that
super lean format and really getting across the message and
the meaning without dropping too many details off. Yeah, well,
I think it's mostly UM. I think the process really
starts with UM, after the kind of research is done,
(09:18):
and after I feel like I really understand um, both
the story itself, UM say about the elephants, but also
the context, the historical context um, you know, of what
life was like then UM, so that I feel like
I'm grounded and sort of able to to find a
story to tell. UM. The real work comes in finding
(09:38):
what that story is about. It's it's being that the
about nous is something beyond subject right for me, It is,
you know, finding the meaning. So like, there was a
great uh story that I stumbled upon one time about
this guy who was a serial impostor and you know,
lived his life, um, you know, impersonating diplomats, impersonating businessmen, um,
(10:03):
you know. And some of it was used for, you know,
simply to get a good table to restaurant, you know.
Some of it was to pull off sort of incredible scams.
And he was a fantastic figure and UM lived this
like very you know, broad big life. And you know,
so on the one hand, I could kind of just
go in and just like reel off the facts about
(10:25):
this guy. Oh and then he pulled this scam and
this is pretty amazing. And then he pulled this scam
and this is pretty amazing. And then he was caught
and this is what like life in jail is like
for six months. Um. But instead, you know, I had
to like kind of as I do with all the stories,
you have to kind of like go in, dig in
and and find out what I want to say. And
for me with this story about the impostor, you know,
(10:47):
it was like, well, what is driving this guy to
be an impostor? Like what what might possibly be at
the roots of you know, for someone who um, of
the millions of lives that that one could have chosen, Um,
why this route? And you know, kind of like finding
this origin in a feeling of being slighted, which is
very sort of explicit and something he would talk about.
(11:08):
Um So it wasn't something that I was kind of
imposing but then really trying to get into, like what
must it be? You know, what do you what you're
actually getting out of the impostoring? What you know? What
particular thrills are you finding? And how does that connect
with me? And I, like I would find and for me,
the heart of that story is in this kind of
sense that you know that daily life can be, you know,
(11:33):
filled with toil and drudgery, and here was a guy
who found a way for himself to gain that system.
You know, he wasn't going off sort of playing fantasy baseball.
He wasn't going off collecting you know, humble figurines. He
was finding ways to, at least for a night, live
different lives. And once I kind of hone in on that,
the idea that this man is going to go live
(11:54):
different lives, um or I hone in on the elephant
story about you know this is this is not only
about the novelty of seeing this sort of wonderful creature.
It is also a creature who's alone and so much
of the story should be about exploring what it would
mean to be alone in an alien landscape, for the
for the creature, for the elephant itself. Um. Then that
(12:15):
extra stuff, like the the extra details that twists and
turns um are kind of easy to cut away because
they don't sort they sort of simply don't serve the story.
You know. It's like taking Game of Thrones um and
trying to turn it into a TV show, and then
you're suddenly like, you know what, there's those that whole
battle scene and there's that whole land over there that like,
(12:36):
if we're really focusing on who's going to rest control
of the Iron Throne or whatever it might be, then um,
if this guy is not ever gonna get the Iron Throne,
then maybe we don't need to talk about them. And
so some of it is as simple as that, Like
by finding the actual thread in the heart of the story,
you can kind of hack off a few limbs, which
I guess kind of keeps us in Game of Thrones
territory as well. Do you ever start on research for
(12:58):
an episode? And as I asked this question, and I
can tell you this happens to me all the time. Uh,
and then you'll find out that you actually want to
talk about something else, perhaps that you stumble across during
your research phase. Like do you ever let yourself switch
horses midstream? Oh? Absolutely no, I mean that happens all
the time. Um. And in fact, I actually I've kind
of discovered that the best way for me to find
stories um uh that can can really kind of have
(13:21):
like a depth of meaning and like really kind of
stand up is more than just kind of a factoid.
Is sort of looking for an idea that seems cool, like, oh,
you know, I didn't know this about, um, like the Quakers,
and then I then you read about the Quakers, um,
just kind of assume that, oh, the Quakers are interesting,
there must be something interesting there. But in doing that research,
(13:43):
you then find that, you know, the Quakers are less
interesting than this one manufacturer of Quaker furniture, you know,
like you like, It's often like I often find like, oh,
here's an area that is interesting, um, but you start
to dive in and then it turns out it is
not the area itself that is interesting, but it is
the little detail that takes you on that detour. Um.
(14:06):
But the real bane of my existence is when you
find the incredible factoid and it's so unbelievable, what a
great story, and it turns out to actually be unbelievable.
I'm I am struggling with that right now, um, with
with a story that I was sure it was going
to be like the centerpiece of my new season and
it's kind of turned out to maybe not have actually happened,
(14:27):
And that's a bummer. I have had that exact problem, yeah,
for sure, specifically with a historical marker I found once
that had an amazing story on it, and the amazing story,
it turns out, is significantly inflated on the historical marker
and elsewhere. We are going to take a brief break
for a word from a sponsor. When we come back,
we're going to talk a bit about how Nate arrived
(14:49):
at doing a history podcast, because he, like Holly and I,
is not a historian strictly speaking. So let's talk a
little more generally about the world of history. So weirdly,
right now, we have three podcast hosts talking to one another.
None of us are historians. I don't know that you
would call any of the three of us stereotypical history buffs.
(15:10):
Yet we are dedicating large parts of our lives to
working on history podcasts. So Nate, how did that happen
for you? Um? Yeah, No, I definitely pushed back on
the notion of being a history buff um and I
and it has nothing to do with identity. Actually think
that like history buffs are great, So you know, I
(15:31):
would happily sort of take that claim, you know, claim
that mantle if if I could rightly do so. Um.
You know, I uh, I think that like I'm just
sort of culturally omnivorous, you know. And the thing with
history for me is that, like you when I really
am sort of like scrolling through Twitter and you know,
(15:51):
besides the things that I know that I want to
learn about, you know, whether it is like my Los
Angeles Clippers, you know, or certain political things, certain music
things or whatever, you know, I am mostly just looking
you know for something to kind of step into my
life and you know, uh and thrill me on some level,
like you know, give me something to think about, like
(16:11):
something that will kind of change my day. And you
know there are you know, for me, I think the
thing that has brought me to history, Um, you know,
isn't sort of this sense of like you know, good Lord,
we need to look back, so we don't you know,
kind of repeat the mistakes of the past, or you
can't understand the present without understanding the past. UM. I
(16:31):
have found that, you know, in in my life, and
particularly sort of in my younger life, UM, that I
was kind of empowered by having a historical understanding. You know.
For me, I grew up um in Rhode Island, and
Rhode Island can be a very parochial place and you
know it is it is forty five minutes by fifty minutes.
It's a tiny little place, um, and it is served
(16:54):
by you know, a set of stations that are in
Providence that cover the state of Rhode Island and and
not very much else. And so it has this very
kind of like insular feeling. And you growing up there, UM,
I didn't really have the sense that, um, that sort
of exciting lives were available to me. And it wasn't
(17:14):
that like my parents weren't encouraging, And it wasn't that
I didn't see people on TV or read read people
who had written books, or read about people in magazines,
or see bands that came through town and thought like, oh,
they like, oh, look there's more that I can go
out there and do. On some fundamental level, I did
not understand that they were real people, you know that
like that that was something that there was exciting lives
(17:35):
that I too could have. And I kind of learned
that in a way by from history, like I remember
very specifically, you know, like reading you know, biographies of
different people like Calvin Tompkins biography of of the artist
Marcel Duchamp was really formative to me, and reading um
American Visions by Robert Hughes, the big survey of American art.
(17:58):
The thing that I sort of took away from that
was over and over and over again that these people
who were making history um were just as whether it
was vain or or you know, could just do such
dumb things, or or had very human and very sort
of you know, had very human appetites that would get
(18:18):
them into trouble all the same sorts of things that
were happening to me and everyone I knew on some level, um,
you know, had happened to Abraham Lincoln. And it was
a very simple and very well duh kind of uh realization,
but it was it was one that I needed to
have and I and so I would read these books,
I learned about people, but I would also learn um,
(18:40):
getting this sort of sense of history of that like
the times between things were often very short, and that
you know, for instance, the time between the Civil War
and the time between uh, you know, the turn of
the century is at this point a span of a
span of time that I have lived myself, and yet
there's such radical change. And when you start to realize that, um,
(19:03):
you realize it gives you a sense of your present
day as historical and as as filled with change and
as also um I think importantly for me, like filled
with the potential. You know, it's like if the world
changed so much between n and nineteen seventy one, then
you know, as we have seen on Madmen recently, then
(19:25):
like then you know, so too can the world of
the future. And I've always found that really sort of exciting.
And I've always found going back into the past and
in sort of relearning that lesson UM has been really valuable.
And then the other thing, like, because I think what
we do, what you guys doing, what I do, is
we're interested in these things that kind of fall through
(19:46):
the cracks, and they're the stuff that you have missed
in history class, um, you know. And for me, like
I'm aware that in in our current day, we are
constantly missing stuff as well. You know. It's that that
if you are really interested in you know, Republican politics,
or you are really interested in the Atlanta Falcons, you know,
(20:06):
or collecting baseball cards or whatever it might be, then
you're missing a whole lot of life. And in history
there are always those people and always those corners that um,
you know, not only are sort of worth unearthing, and
not only are worth kind of engaging with and and
can be sort of exciting and like you know, wonderful
in the literal sense, like you know, can fill you
(20:28):
with wonder it all. For me, it is always a
reminder that that is happening right now, you know, in
in my awaking life too, that I can sort of
engage more and look around more, um you know. And
and in a lot of ways, that's the kind of
experience I want someone to have with the memory Palace.
I want them to be like, Wow, this thing in
the past has happened, um, but you know, by connecting
(20:49):
it to our present, I kind of want them to
come out and look at our you know, their present
moment in their neighborhood and their family. Um and the
news with with sort of wide dies. So having grown
up in New England, New England is home to sort
of enormous history. It's if you want to go somewhere
in New England and not be surrounded by history, you
(21:10):
kind of have to work at it. It's big, big,
especially in the course of American history, huge, huge historical events.
But a lot of your episodes focus on things that
are really small, and this sort of ties onto your
what you just said, what is it about the small
that really appeals to you? Because I think that you know, no,
(21:32):
I mean the stories are short. I mean they're almost
like fetishistically short, right, you know, like like you know,
there are times in which the you know, the artistic
challenge becomes like, you know, how quickly can I get
from point A to point point B with um point
a being you know nothing about a subject, to point
B being like you have been moved to tears or
who have been elated by a subject and you're caring
(21:55):
about something you didn't care about before. Um, you know.
And so some of it is like a I'm looking
to kind of pack that punch. Then it's a little
bit harder to pack war in peace, you know, into
five and a half minutes UM. But moreover, like I
think that the small is is the thing that you
connect with. You know. It's like it's it's hard to
connect with, um, you know, with troop movements, and it's
(22:18):
hard to connect with supply lines in the battle, But
it's not hard to connect with a soldier who is
you know, trying to gear themselves up to charge up
a hill. You know, it's not hard to connect with
you know, another soldier who can't gear themselves up and
is running the opposite direction. And you know, I So
I think that you know that smallness UM. I think
(22:43):
it this occurs in literature, it occurs in film, like
you know, by finding these specifics, um, these specific details
and these specific stories. UM. You know that is the
way that you can kind of enter the world of
kind of like big ideas and capital H history UM,
through like the power of the kind of like lower
case H story. So is there a topic that you
(23:07):
have always wanted to delve into but you haven't quite
found the right angle on it yet that's kind of
lurking and maybe your periphery as one day I'm gonna
tackle that one. Yeah, I think so, I mean I
think I think there are tons you know, um uh
you know, and some of it, some of it comes
down to the fact that, like you look into this
story and then you realize there's less of a story
there than you thought, or that there's a bunch of
(23:28):
interesting facts but they don't cohere. And so right now
I'm sitting in um, you know, essentially like a you know,
remade garage UM where I'm talking to you guys, and
where I work a lot, and there's a board over there,
and it's got tons and tons of ideas. Um. You know,
there's there are lots and lots of different you know,
story topics up there, um and a lot of them
(23:52):
have been on that board for a really long time,
and they're just waiting for, um, the about nous to appear,
you know what I mean, Like they're they're waiting for
that thing that turns you know, a story about billboard advertising,
Like that's an interesting thing. I'm kind of interested in
what it was like to see the first billboards um
into the point you know, it's like finding like, yeah,
(24:13):
I'm sure I could. I know, I can look up
a bunch of information about billboards and say, well, when
billboards first started to hear people are really excited about it,
and then they got tired of it or whatever. The
arc of the life of the billboard might be. Um,
but until I can kind of find that thing that
um first of all interests me beyond like, oh that's interesting,
um and actually kind of like moves me or thrills
(24:36):
me or makes me sad or whatever it might be.
Um Like, until I can really connect with it, it's
going to sort of stay on the board. So yeah,
there are there are things that that I've kind of
wanted to do for years but have not been able
to crack. All of your billboard talk suddenly makes me
think of that Tom Waite's song Burma Shave, and now
it's never going to leave my head. Um. Well, that's
that's it. You could you could do worse than which, yeah,
(24:56):
it's not a complaint. I'm just I recognize that this
is my soundtrack for the day. Um. Have you ever
been pretty deep into production on an episode and ended
up tossing it entirely? Yes? Yeah, no, absolutely, I mean
that doesn't happen that you know. The truth is, and
you know I'm about to begin on June twenty one,
releasing the show in seasons UM with weekly episodes for
(25:18):
the summer, and then I'll take some some brief break
and then I'll be back with weekly episodes for another
you know, uh period as yet to be determined. But
for the most part, because I was doing a lot
of juggling, um with other uh career things, Um, the
show had just kind of come out whenever, and you know,
whenever I got around to it, whenever I finished something,
(25:39):
and so in a lot of ways, they didn't have
that luxury Like if I was kind of like working
on a story for a while, um, you know, it
might be like a month, um, you know between episodes,
and then it might be six weeks between episodes, and
it would be very hard um for me to to
shift gears. But sometimes I would kind of have to
um hopefully that would have happened when I was like, oh,
(26:01):
you know, it is even better this thing. This thing.
The reason why this this story is not you know,
coherent and is not um yet presentable is because it's
not a story, or it's because I really can't crack it.
And um, so yeah, there have been times that I've
had to kind of abandoned ship. UM. But I've also, um,
there's also been a couple of stories that I've actually
(26:22):
done that I've actually produced and put music to and
you know kind of labored over and um, they also
just kind of stunk. And UM, I think that because
I was doing stories so so infrequently, then I didn't
have the luxury of having one that's stunk, you know,
because it's like if people had waited around, like I
(26:42):
didn't want to kind of bridge, you know, betray their
faith in me and betray the fact that they waited
around for something that wasn't actually good um or um.
If something was gonna sit on my website as like
the most recent episode and someone was just gonna like
if you're if you know, if you told your spouse like,
oh you gotta check out the Memory Palace. These stories
a great and like some clunker of a story I
(27:02):
was sitting on on the front page and that was
the only one they're going to listen to then, you know,
and it was going to sit there for weeks and
weeks and weeks. Then that would be weeks in which
I was kind of like, you know, hurting my ability
to hook a listener on this odd little podcast that
I do. Uh, I know that feeling. I think we've
all been there. Um, do you have a favorite time
(27:24):
period or historical figure, Like I know you say you're
not a history buff, but you've certainly been exposed to
a lot of it as a cultural omnivore. And does
that guide your decisions on what topics to cover, Like,
for example, I am really into Queen Victoria, So I
am always a little trepidacious about covering Queen Victoria. One
because I know I'll be a fan girl, and two
because I know I can't stay objective. So do you
(27:45):
ever have any of those? Yeah, I mean I have
a few, right, And I think that I think if
you you know, if you listen to you know, if
if as all of you should do, listen to all
sixty five episodes, Um, you'll see certain sort of themes
pop up, right, And some of it is that I
am drawn to, you know, the period between like eighteen
eighty and nine. Um, you know, when essentially modernity is
(28:09):
being created. You know, there's like I find that period
really amazing, in part because there are so many things
that we are beginning to see for the first time. Um,
that we have in our daily life, whether it's the telephone,
whether it's you know, recorded music, whether it's you know, movies,
whether it's the weekend. You know, like these things are
being invented during that period. And so I'm constantly, you know,
(28:33):
interested in that moment of first encounter with new technologies,
before the kind of you know, before the shine kind
of goes away. Um. Yeah. So you know I think
that that you know, that period, you know, is is
you know, filled with like it's like it's this period
in which they're kind of like inventing modernity. Um. And
(28:54):
also like there are all these fascinating failures of like
you know that really point to like different ways in
which we could you know, have still lived if if only, uh,
you know, this fat had caught on, or if only um,
you know, this person had succeeded in what they were
trying to do, you know, both for good and for ill.
And so I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by that period in particular,
(29:17):
And and some of the people that operate in there,
like you know P. T. Barnum, who proceeds it a
bit and then kind of stretches into that period, is
just everywhere. You know, there isn't a time when we're
like it's hard to like come up with you know,
a like an interesting like crazy musical act or or
or or um, you know, person in a freak show
(29:37):
or you know that doesn't engage with Barnum at some point. Um,
And that stuff is fascinating. But because I do kind
of go to that well, um, you know pretty frequently.
I think I had some of your Queen Victoria problem
where I'd be like, oh am, I doing this too often. UM.
But I think for me, UM, I think for a
(29:58):
long time, the Memory Palace, you know, it's only essentially
now becoming kind of professionalized, and um, you know, even
though I don't sort of intend to change it. Um,
you know what, I for a while it was just
kind of like an art project. It was just this
thing that I did that that people liked. And so
in treating it like an art project, I was always
sort of like out trying to um, you know, trying
(30:19):
to create like kind of an interesting, you know, creative
experience for myself and sort of like you know, push
push each episode like a little bit further or a
little bit differently. And so I have come to realize
that it's kind of okay to keep returning to certain
wells because like if you know, if you were if
you know, if as like if you were a novelist
(30:40):
or you're a filmmaker, like at some point you're interested
in the stuff that you're interested in, you know, and
you're gonna you're gonna, you know, you've got to trust that, um,
your audience, you know, has connected with your work because
they're interested in in your on your take, and so UM,
I've kind of like, you know, I don't want to
repeat myself and I don't want to to do things
(31:02):
over and over again. But if I'm if I keep
being sort of engaged with certain ideas or certain stories
in a certain area, then on some level there's like
still more work for me to do there. Um, and
the well hasn't run dry, and hopefully it hasn't run
dry for the listener either. We're going to take another
brief moment for another word from a sponsor, and then
(31:24):
when we come back, we have a few other questions
and then we will wrap up. So, Nate, in addition
to all of your other work, one of the other
projects you have worked on is Pondy the Greatest Town
in America from Parks and Recreation, which is a show
so close to my heart. I love it so much.
I do too. I just adore it was a good show.
That's so great I wept like a child. How did
(31:49):
putting together fictional history for that book compare to the
process of working on real history for your show? Um? Yeah, so,
uh you know, I got I got so. I got
the opportunity to write that book because of the podcast.
You know, Um Mike Sure, the creator of the show,
Um and Greg Daniels, the other creator of the show.
(32:10):
We're um kicking around the idea of creating one of
those Arcadia Press books. Those are those books that have
this sort of Sepia tone, like any town, USA, like
any neighborhood in any major city has like one of
these books. Um and uh, so they thought it'd be
fun to make up a fake one for Pawny and uh,
Mike Sure was a fan of the Memory Palace and
(32:31):
he's like, oh, I know Nate and he's a funny guy. Um,
you know, he'll get what we're doing. But maybe you
can also come up with sort of a plausible backstory
and um uh you know, historical backstory and so that
it started at that, and then the more we kind
of talked and the more we kind of like riffed,
it kind of grew and grew and grew, um to
be sort of like a larger book with larger scope.
(32:51):
But um, I found it incredibly liberating to make stuff up.
You know, I mean worked as a journalist, having worked
as a journalist, and you know, and now is like
a you know, a historian like you know, in a
sort of journalistic mode in a way like that like I,
you know, kind of use where that hat when I
when I kind of like dig dig into the past,
(33:13):
like I kind of apply the same sort of standards
um in this historical work. Um, you know, to honestly
to be able to like go in and in some
ways like apply the lessons that I've learned from history,
not only in the historical stuff, but also like I
just got in this mode and doing the memory palace
of like of thinking about people in certain ways of
(33:33):
thinking about you know, um they're sort of like Craven
needs and thinking about their their their failed attempts you know,
to make you know, to sort of achieve you know,
a level of importance and you know, I think that
show in particular is engaged um with that all the time.
You know, it is this sort of like very kind
(33:53):
of like open hearted, um you know, saying, you know,
despite the kind of ridiculous and us of the people
of Pawnee, Indiana. Um you know, I I like, I
know for a fact, having spent time in that writer's room,
having having written an episode of the show, being friends
with it with its creator like I you know, and
and anyone who watches the show will know, uh you
(34:16):
know within a half an hour that um, they're both
aware of the ridiculousness of the people there, but ultimately
aren't we all ridiculous and aren't we all kind of
uh interesting and fun because of it? And you know, ultimately,
if there's a real crossover, I think, um between the
sensibility of that show um uh you know, which obviously
(34:40):
hasn't more canmedic take um than uh, you know, a
story about the brutalities of of war, for instance, that
I might you know, cover in the Memory Palace. But
it is that same sort of sense that you know
that people are inherently weak, people are inherently kind of ridiculous,
but life, you know, throws very challenging things that at
(35:04):
them and at us and that um you know, finding um,
those things that make us sort of, um, you know,
not just human, but make it sort of like worth
being human and make it kind of fun being human. Um.
Are are the aspects um that I'm sort of looking
for in the Memory Palace. UM. You know in each
(35:26):
of these stories, no matter how sort of distant in
time um or uh, you know, sort of difficult the
subject matter. I know that you like for people to
come into your episodes without a lot of explanation in advance. Uh,
but you were working on your first series of of
the Memory Palace. Can you give us a hint of
(35:48):
what we might expect from it? You know? Um A,
I do want you to kind of come into things cold. UM.
So I'm not gonna sort of blow it, but I
can tell you this that UM I was. I knew
that I wanted to do it in seasons, and you know,
I was like, well, I mean and some of that
was just practical. It was like, well, in the past,
this is how I got the work done. Now, if
I'm gonna do more episodes, how am I going to
(36:10):
get the work done? How's this going to work, and
I thought that was something I could pull off. But
the second I got excited about it, um beyond this
sort of like practical concerns and like building an audience
through um, you know, by making sure they knew that
there was gonna be something new every Monday or whatever
it might be. The thing that got me um excited
about it was a dumb, romantic notion that it seemed
(36:30):
fun that there might be someone out there who remembered
the summer of two thousand fifteen as the summer that
they listened to the Memory Palace a lot. I just
like that idea, Like I like that there'd be some
weird nerd kids somewhere, um who you know, like the
Memory Palace. These stories kind of soundtracked. Uh, they're weird
(36:52):
summer job and like the summer before they went off
to college, or the summer they were back from college
and living with their parents and things were weird and
lonely or alternative the year they met that girl and
everything was amazing and and uh and somehow the Memory
Palace would be part of the background of that. So
there was the romance that of it. But the other
thing is you start to realize that like, oh, these
(37:14):
stories are all going to be coming out in the summer,
and um, so I think you're gonna find some warm
weather stories. I think you're gonna find things. I think
you'll hear things, um that uh, I think makes sense
on the iPhone of that you know guy on the
road trip or that person at the shore, or that
(37:34):
person sort of stuck in their sort of office when
it's sunny outside. Um. And also I do know, um
because I've unless this thing falls apart because I can't
pull it off, I know that there's there's at least
one episode that is that is a very distinct twist
on a topic that you guys have covered. That was
(37:55):
one that you're like said that people have begged you
to do it. So it is a very popular topic.
And I'll leave it at that. I'm intrigued. I'm too now,
I'm all excited. I know we have at least two
episodes in the archive or we have specifically said there's
one on the Memory Palace on this subject. Go listen
to it. One of them is the New England Vampire Panic,
and the other is the Lunar Beaver Lunar Beavers, Lunar Beavers,
(38:18):
the whole Moon Hopes, which that for us grew into
two episodes. It didn't it. Yeah, it's because I can't stop.
I get really excited with the weird stuff, so weird. Yeah,
why did that one grow for you? Because there are
so many delicious weird details like the whole Oh and
then we saw these bat people worshiping at this triangular
(38:39):
thing and it's like, how could you leave that out there?
And then the characters were good, like they were really good.
They were Yeah, it's so good. There's a lot of
delicious wildness to that one. I loved that episode of
the Memory Palace also. Yes, Like as soon as as
soon as Holly handed me the outline for that, I
was I was like, there's a memory bolls on this
(39:00):
and it's so great. Oh you say it right here. Yes,
we we're big fans of the Lunar Beavers. Yeah. So
is anything else on the horizon for you that you
want to talk about or anything else that you want
to add? Well, you know it's I'll tell you that.
You know you guys have have um had the sort
of great I assume great pleasure because you have you know,
(39:23):
it seems like a pretty good give you guys have
of being able to really focus on this and like really, uh,
you know, I know that you're doing it, um every
week and know know that you're um you know have
to sort of like both have to have to look
for stories, but also that you get to look for
stories and get to like, you know, follow your curiosity
and do that stuff. And um, you know, so I'm
(39:45):
really about to do that for the first time. And UM.
So not only will people be getting sort of more episodes, UM,
one thing that I've been wanting to do for a while,
UM is to uh do live shows, which I know
you guys are getting your went in and um, so
that's been really fun for me. I had like kind
of a background and kind of being in bands, and um,
(40:07):
it's been a long time since I've had the sort
of opportunity to perform. And I've done like single stories
here and there, um in kind of like variety show
context and it's been really fun. And so it's so
I am in the midst of planning like a proper show,
like a like something that can that can hold people's
interest in and uh you know give people like kind
(40:28):
of like a cabinet of wonder experience um at a
live show and so um, so this summer I'll be
playing in Seattle and playing in Portland and then in
l a in in the early fall, and then I'm
hoping to do like a proper like tour tour in
with my you know next season, um sometime in uh
late fall. That sounds amazing. Indeed, So your season is
(40:52):
starting on June twenty one, right, yeah, runs to the
whole summer. Yeah. So people can find the Memory Palace
on iTunes. There's also the Memory Palace dot us. Really
give a listen. It's great. You can, you can plow
through the entire archive, uh and get all kinds of
just wonderful gems of stories. They're great. Thank you so much,
(41:15):
Thank you so much for being on show, Nate. Great.
I'll be listening to you guys. We will be back
to our regularly scheduled listener mail next time. We wanted
to save that time to listen to a little of
the Memory Palace this time around. But if you would
like to write to us, we're a history podcast at
how Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at
facebook dot com slash missed in History and on Twitter
at miss in History. Our Tumbler is missed in History
(41:37):
dot tumbler dot com and we're on Pinterest at petrist
dot com slash missed in History. You can come to
our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot
com and learn about many, many things. Or you can
come to our website, which is missed in History dot
com and find an archive of all of our episodes
show notes for the episodes Holly and I have done.
You will have links to the memory Palace if you
(41:58):
would like to just find something and click on it.
From there, you can do all of that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or
mtemistry dot com for more on this for thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. M
Welcome to you Stuff you missed in History Class from
how Stuff Works dot com. Hello, and welcome to the podcast.
I'm trac Vie Wilson and I'm Holly Frying. We're doing
something a little different today. We have had some guests
on the podcast lately, and today not only do we
have a guest, we also have a whole additional podcast
(00:23):
as a guest. It's a podcast that actually has a
lot of parallels to ours. Both shows first came out
in two thousand and eight. They're both with history hosts
who aren't actually historians, and the both shows that tell
stories from the past, but we do this in completely
different ways. So with that, I'd like to welcome our guest,
who is Nate Demayo of The Memory Palace. Hey, thanks
(00:45):
for having me. I'm so glad you're here too. I'm
very excited. I'm a big listener of you guys, so
I'm excited to be here. Thank you so much. If
you have never heard The Memory Palace the shows, the
episodes of themselves are a lot shorter than ours. The
They are little JEMs of stories accompanied by music, and somehow,
even though they're simultaneously really short, they're also really thoughtful,
(01:07):
and I think it's a lot better to just listen
to one of these episodes than to listen to us
talk about what they're like. So we're going to start
by playing one of them. It's one that's particularly short,
but it's also really particularly moving, and it follows along
nicely with our recent episodes on animals. So let's get
right to it. From the Maximum Fund Network, this is
the Memory Palace from Nath to Mayo, and this is
(01:30):
episode fifty fifty words, written about the Arctic bowhead whale
after learning that it can live up to two years.
(01:52):
There's a whale right now who may have escaped in
Nantucketer's harpoon in eighteen fifty in a Japanese whaler in
n who once heard the distant songs of fifty of
her kind, then several thousands than hundreds, But who can
(02:25):
hear twenty five thousand again singing in the warming water.
(02:54):
When we started preparing for this interview, I really listened
to a bunch of your old episodes, and one of
the things I really love about your show is that
it tells these odd, eccentric, kind of wacky stories you
had just at that point put out a remastered version
of Itty Bitty Bombs, which is about the scheme to
use bats to drop bombs on Japan during World War Two,
(03:15):
And it's another in the Wacky animal line. Where did
you come up with this story? You know, it's uh,
it has been a while, so where I found it
is sort of lost in the cracks of history. But
I suspect sort of like YouTube, um, I am sort
of constantly, constantly on the lookout for I guess in
(03:38):
some ways just sort of the the the thing that
reaches out from you know, whether it's your Internet browser
or some like larger history book or some novel or
something that fact that kind of jumps out and grabs
you and you know, either you know, makes you go
holy cow. And that one, that one about the bomb
the bat bombs, is certainly sort of a holy cow
kind of thing. But that or that just kind of
(04:00):
like makes you just you know, feel excited or sad
or somehow moved. Like I am always kind of trawling
for those things, and and like that's like an instinct
that um, you know, not only sort of I mean
I do that now professionally on some level with the podcast,
but that is something that preceded the podcast, and I
think because they've always kind of had that instinct of
(04:22):
of like looking out for those little sort of flex
of wonder in the world. UM. I think that's probably
what led to the podcast at all. I think the
flexi wonder should be your autobiography. So one of the
things that we encounter in the show really often is
that we will find different versions of the same story
or facts that are really in dispute in some way.
And a lot of times we tackle this in our
(04:42):
show by talking about the disputes and how they came
to be. That doesn't really work with your format. So
when you find that kind of thing, what do you do?
You know it is? That is the thing I startled about,
and it's also the thing that I might get the
most notes from listeners about you like it's fascinating. I recently,
(05:02):
UH Pieces from the Memory Palace started to air semi regularly,
if occasionally, and if not as frequently as I would
like UM on NPRS weekend editions, Sunday and UM. They
sort of apply this editorial process, which is the same
one that when I was a reporter UM four NPR
and in a different UH in a different public radio shows.
(05:26):
Was applied to me as a reporter. Um, where you know,
they fact check these things. They want to make sure
that everything is in there. But as you guys, well know,
you might learn something, Uh, you might learn some amazing
fact and then you'll go in and you know, first
of all, you'll find out it's not quite like that.
It's kind of like this. But very quickly you discovered
that there are three or four or five versions of
(05:48):
that thing. And um that you know, I have noticed that,
you know, while listening to your show, that you guys
have the gift of being able to say, well, you know,
this is a little bit disputed. This guy says this,
this lady says this. I think we're probably landing somewhere
in you know, in the middle. And you know, the
truth is with my format because it is those sort
(06:08):
of short stories, um, and it is a narrative. Um,
I can't quite do that same thing. Um, but I
have found um sort of small ways to do that,
and some is to simply come out and say it.
You know. Uh, you know, we don't know precisely, um
when this thing began, but we think it's around here, um,
(06:29):
you know, and sometimes like the truth is the fact
whether it's eighteen eleven or it's eighteen seven when something
might have begun, UM doesn't ultimately doesn't matter that much
because what the point is is that it's starting to say,
before the before the Civil War or something like that,
there are you know. It's essentially like what I'm looking for,
um almost, you know. And I think it's the thing
(06:49):
that that drives so much of the stories that I'm
doing is beyond just looking for fun facts and beyond
just looking for a kind of a ripping yard, like
I am really looking for meaning, you know, like I'm
looking for ways to connect the past to the present,
you know, ways to um to move the listener, you know,
to kind of like reconsider um, whether it's a historical
(07:11):
moment or um a person they may have never met before,
or a person that they've heard before, heard about before,
but have never thought about in a certain context. And
so if that's the goal, it's sort of finding meaning,
and it's and it's you know, moving people, and it's
like connecting their their current reality to the live reality
of of the past. It's not that the facts don't matter,
because I actually think it's because it is it is
(07:33):
the meaning is sort of been um embedded within those facts.
But you know, you can be very clear about like
the ambiguity in that case, because you know, life is
sort of filled with ambiguity. But what we're taking from,
you know, the story of, for instance, UM, the first elephant,
UM to continue with your animal theme, UM, which is
(07:53):
a story that that I did and is particularly dear
to me. UM. Whether it's the first elephant or not,
And that is really in dispute, and I spent a
long time trying to figure out whether it is the
first elephant. UM. What really matters is there are tons
and tons and tons and tons of people in eighteen
o five in the United States who have never seen
an elephant before, and first or second, or third or fourth,
(08:17):
UM being the first elephant for some man in Boston
or some you know, some woman in Charlotte, North Carolina. UM,
that's the you know, that's where the story lives. It's
in that encounter, it's in that novelty. And whether it
is you know, truly technically historically novel, I'm less concerned with.
(08:37):
So that actually kind of leads nicely into my next question,
which is that we talked about this a little bit
before we started recording that Sometimes when we're putting together
an episode, it ends up as a two parter because
we just find so many juicy details that are really
fun to tell, uh, and we don't want to leave
those out, and we have that leverage where we can
(08:58):
kind of spend a little more time with it. So
I'm wondering how you wrangle your research down to that
super lean format and really getting across the message and
the meaning without dropping too many details off. Yeah, well,
I think it's mostly UM. I think the process really
starts with UM, after the kind of research is done,
(09:18):
and after I feel like I really understand um, both
the story itself, UM say about the elephants, but also
the context, the historical context um, you know, of what
life was like then UM, so that I feel like
I'm grounded and sort of able to to find a
story to tell. UM. The real work comes in finding
(09:38):
what that story is about. It's it's being that the
about nous is something beyond subject right for me, It is,
you know, finding the meaning. So like, there was a
great uh story that I stumbled upon one time about
this guy who was a serial impostor and you know,
lived his life, um, you know, impersonating diplomats, impersonating businessmen, um,
(10:03):
you know. And some of it was used for, you know,
simply to get a good table to restaurant, you know.
Some of it was to pull off sort of incredible scams.
And he was a fantastic figure and UM lived this
like very you know, broad big life. And you know,
so on the one hand, I could kind of just
go in and just like reel off the facts about
(10:25):
this guy. Oh and then he pulled this scam and
this is pretty amazing. And then he pulled this scam
and this is pretty amazing. And then he was caught
and this is what like life in jail is like
for six months. Um. But instead, you know, I had
to like kind of as I do with all the stories,
you have to kind of like go in, dig in
and and find out what I want to say. And
for me with this story about the impostor, you know,
(10:47):
it was like, well, what is driving this guy to
be an impostor? Like what what might possibly be at
the roots of you know, for someone who um, of
the millions of lives that that one could have chosen, Um,
why this route? And you know, kind of like finding
this origin in a feeling of being slighted, which is
very sort of explicit and something he would talk about.
(11:08):
Um So it wasn't something that I was kind of
imposing but then really trying to get into, like what
must it be? You know, what do you what you're
actually getting out of the impostoring? What you know? What
particular thrills are you finding? And how does that connect
with me? And I, like I would find and for me,
the heart of that story is in this kind of
sense that you know that daily life can be, you know,
(11:33):
filled with toil and drudgery, and here was a guy
who found a way for himself to gain that system.
You know, he wasn't going off sort of playing fantasy baseball.
He wasn't going off collecting you know, humble figurines. He
was finding ways to, at least for a night, live
different lives. And once I kind of hone in on that,
the idea that this man is going to go live
(11:54):
different lives, um or I hone in on the elephant
story about you know this is this is not only
about the novelty of seeing this sort of wonderful creature.
It is also a creature who's alone and so much
of the story should be about exploring what it would
mean to be alone in an alien landscape, for the
for the creature, for the elephant itself. Um. Then that
(12:15):
extra stuff, like the the extra details that twists and
turns um are kind of easy to cut away because
they don't sort they sort of simply don't serve the story.
You know. It's like taking Game of Thrones um and
trying to turn it into a TV show, and then
you're suddenly like, you know what, there's those that whole
battle scene and there's that whole land over there that like,
(12:36):
if we're really focusing on who's going to rest control
of the Iron Throne or whatever it might be, then um,
if this guy is not ever gonna get the Iron Throne,
then maybe we don't need to talk about them. And
so some of it is as simple as that, Like
by finding the actual thread in the heart of the story,
you can kind of hack off a few limbs, which
I guess kind of keeps us in Game of Thrones
territory as well. Do you ever start on research for
(12:58):
an episode? And as I asked this question, and I
can tell you this happens to me all the time. Uh,
and then you'll find out that you actually want to
talk about something else, perhaps that you stumble across during
your research phase. Like do you ever let yourself switch
horses midstream? Oh? Absolutely no, I mean that happens all
the time. Um. And in fact, I actually I've kind
of discovered that the best way for me to find
stories um uh that can can really kind of have
(13:21):
like a depth of meaning and like really kind of
stand up is more than just kind of a factoid.
Is sort of looking for an idea that seems cool, like, oh,
you know, I didn't know this about, um, like the Quakers,
and then I then you read about the Quakers, um,
just kind of assume that, oh, the Quakers are interesting,
there must be something interesting there. But in doing that research,
(13:43):
you then find that, you know, the Quakers are less
interesting than this one manufacturer of Quaker furniture, you know,
like you like, It's often like I often find like, oh,
here's an area that is interesting, um, but you start
to dive in and then it turns out it is
not the area itself that is interesting, but it is
the little detail that takes you on that detour. Um.
(14:06):
But the real bane of my existence is when you
find the incredible factoid and it's so unbelievable, what a
great story, and it turns out to actually be unbelievable.
I'm I am struggling with that right now, um, with
with a story that I was sure it was going
to be like the centerpiece of my new season and
it's kind of turned out to maybe not have actually happened,
(14:27):
And that's a bummer. I have had that exact problem, yeah,
for sure, specifically with a historical marker I found once
that had an amazing story on it, and the amazing story,
it turns out, is significantly inflated on the historical marker
and elsewhere. We are going to take a brief break
for a word from a sponsor. When we come back,
we're going to talk a bit about how Nate arrived
(14:49):
at doing a history podcast, because he, like Holly and I,
is not a historian strictly speaking. So let's talk a
little more generally about the world of history. So weirdly,
right now, we have three podcast hosts talking to one another.
None of us are historians. I don't know that you
would call any of the three of us stereotypical history buffs.
(15:10):
Yet we are dedicating large parts of our lives to
working on history podcasts. So Nate, how did that happen
for you? Um? Yeah, No, I definitely pushed back on
the notion of being a history buff um and I
and it has nothing to do with identity. Actually think
that like history buffs are great, So you know, I
(15:31):
would happily sort of take that claim, you know, claim
that mantle if if I could rightly do so. Um.
You know, I uh, I think that like I'm just
sort of culturally omnivorous, you know. And the thing with
history for me is that, like you when I really
am sort of like scrolling through Twitter and you know,
(15:51):
besides the things that I know that I want to
learn about, you know, whether it is like my Los
Angeles Clippers, you know, or certain political things, certain music
things or whatever, you know, I am mostly just looking
you know for something to kind of step into my
life and you know, uh and thrill me on some level,
like you know, give me something to think about, like
(16:11):
something that will kind of change my day. And you
know there are you know, for me, I think the
thing that has brought me to history, Um, you know,
isn't sort of this sense of like you know, good Lord,
we need to look back, so we don't you know,
kind of repeat the mistakes of the past, or you
can't understand the present without understanding the past. UM. I
(16:31):
have found that, you know, in in my life, and
particularly sort of in my younger life, UM, that I
was kind of empowered by having a historical understanding. You know.
For me, I grew up um in Rhode Island, and
Rhode Island can be a very parochial place and you
know it is it is forty five minutes by fifty minutes.
It's a tiny little place, um, and it is served
(16:54):
by you know, a set of stations that are in
Providence that cover the state of Rhode Island and and
not very much else. And so it has this very
kind of like insular feeling. And you growing up there, UM,
I didn't really have the sense that, um, that sort
of exciting lives were available to me. And it wasn't
(17:14):
that like my parents weren't encouraging, And it wasn't that
I didn't see people on TV or read read people
who had written books, or read about people in magazines,
or see bands that came through town and thought like, oh,
they like, oh, look there's more that I can go
out there and do. On some fundamental level, I did
not understand that they were real people, you know that
like that that was something that there was exciting lives
(17:35):
that I too could have. And I kind of learned
that in a way by from history, like I remember
very specifically, you know, like reading you know, biographies of
different people like Calvin Tompkins biography of of the artist
Marcel Duchamp was really formative to me, and reading um
American Visions by Robert Hughes, the big survey of American art.
(17:58):
The thing that I sort of took away from that
was over and over and over again that these people
who were making history um were just as whether it
was vain or or you know, could just do such
dumb things, or or had very human and very sort
of you know, had very human appetites that would get
(18:18):
them into trouble all the same sorts of things that
were happening to me and everyone I knew on some level, um,
you know, had happened to Abraham Lincoln. And it was
a very simple and very well duh kind of uh realization,
but it was it was one that I needed to
have and I and so I would read these books,
I learned about people, but I would also learn um,
(18:40):
getting this sort of sense of history of that like
the times between things were often very short, and that
you know, for instance, the time between the Civil War
and the time between uh, you know, the turn of
the century is at this point a span of a
span of time that I have lived myself, and yet
there's such radical change. And when you start to realize that, um,
(19:03):
you realize it gives you a sense of your present
day as historical and as as filled with change and
as also um I think importantly for me, like filled
with the potential. You know, it's like if the world
changed so much between n and nineteen seventy one, then
you know, as we have seen on Madmen recently, then
(19:25):
like then you know, so too can the world of
the future. And I've always found that really sort of exciting.
And I've always found going back into the past and
in sort of relearning that lesson UM has been really valuable.
And then the other thing, like, because I think what
we do, what you guys doing, what I do, is
we're interested in these things that kind of fall through
(19:46):
the cracks, and they're the stuff that you have missed
in history class, um, you know. And for me, like
I'm aware that in in our current day, we are
constantly missing stuff as well. You know. It's that that
if you are really interested in you know, Republican politics,
or you are really interested in the Atlanta Falcons, you know,
(20:06):
or collecting baseball cards or whatever it might be, then
you're missing a whole lot of life. And in history
there are always those people and always those corners that um,
you know, not only are sort of worth unearthing, and
not only are worth kind of engaging with and and
can be sort of exciting and like you know, wonderful
in the literal sense, like you know, can fill you
(20:28):
with wonder it all. For me, it is always a
reminder that that is happening right now, you know, in
in my awaking life too, that I can sort of
engage more and look around more, um you know. And
and in a lot of ways, that's the kind of
experience I want someone to have with the memory Palace.
I want them to be like, Wow, this thing in
the past has happened, um, but you know, by connecting
(20:49):
it to our present, I kind of want them to
come out and look at our you know, their present
moment in their neighborhood and their family. Um and the
news with with sort of wide dies. So having grown
up in New England, New England is home to sort
of enormous history. It's if you want to go somewhere
in New England and not be surrounded by history, you
(21:10):
kind of have to work at it. It's big, big,
especially in the course of American history, huge, huge historical events.
But a lot of your episodes focus on things that
are really small, and this sort of ties onto your
what you just said, what is it about the small
that really appeals to you? Because I think that you know, no,
(21:32):
I mean the stories are short. I mean they're almost
like fetishistically short, right, you know, like like you know,
there are times in which the you know, the artistic
challenge becomes like, you know, how quickly can I get
from point A to point point B with um point
a being you know nothing about a subject, to point
B being like you have been moved to tears or
who have been elated by a subject and you're caring
(21:55):
about something you didn't care about before. Um, you know.
And so some of it is like a I'm looking
to kind of pack that punch. Then it's a little
bit harder to pack war in peace, you know, into
five and a half minutes UM. But moreover, like I
think that the small is is the thing that you
connect with. You know. It's like it's it's hard to
connect with, um, you know, with troop movements, and it's
(22:18):
hard to connect with supply lines in the battle, But
it's not hard to connect with a soldier who is
you know, trying to gear themselves up to charge up
a hill. You know, it's not hard to connect with
you know, another soldier who can't gear themselves up and
is running the opposite direction. And you know, I So
I think that you know that smallness UM. I think
(22:43):
it this occurs in literature, it occurs in film, like
you know, by finding these specifics, um, these specific details
and these specific stories. UM. You know that is the
way that you can kind of enter the world of
kind of like big ideas and capital H history UM,
through like the power of the kind of like lower
case H story. So is there a topic that you
(23:07):
have always wanted to delve into but you haven't quite
found the right angle on it yet that's kind of
lurking and maybe your periphery as one day I'm gonna
tackle that one. Yeah, I think so, I mean I
think I think there are tons you know, um uh
you know, and some of it, some of it comes
down to the fact that, like you look into this
story and then you realize there's less of a story
there than you thought, or that there's a bunch of
(23:28):
interesting facts but they don't cohere. And so right now
I'm sitting in um, you know, essentially like a you know,
remade garage UM where I'm talking to you guys, and
where I work a lot, and there's a board over there,
and it's got tons and tons of ideas. Um. You know,
there's there are lots and lots of different you know,
story topics up there, um and a lot of them
(23:52):
have been on that board for a really long time,
and they're just waiting for, um, the about nous to appear,
you know what I mean, Like they're they're waiting for
that thing that turns you know, a story about billboard advertising,
Like that's an interesting thing. I'm kind of interested in
what it was like to see the first billboards um
into the point you know, it's like finding like, yeah,
(24:13):
I'm sure I could. I know, I can look up
a bunch of information about billboards and say, well, when
billboards first started to hear people are really excited about it,
and then they got tired of it or whatever. The
arc of the life of the billboard might be. Um,
but until I can kind of find that thing that
um first of all interests me beyond like, oh that's interesting,
um and actually kind of like moves me or thrills
(24:36):
me or makes me sad or whatever it might be.
Um Like, until I can really connect with it, it's
going to sort of stay on the board. So yeah,
there are there are things that that I've kind of
wanted to do for years but have not been able
to crack. All of your billboard talk suddenly makes me
think of that Tom Waite's song Burma Shave, and now
it's never going to leave my head. Um. Well, that's
that's it. You could you could do worse than which, yeah,
(24:56):
it's not a complaint. I'm just I recognize that this
is my soundtrack for the day. Um. Have you ever
been pretty deep into production on an episode and ended
up tossing it entirely? Yes? Yeah, no, absolutely, I mean
that doesn't happen that you know. The truth is, and
you know I'm about to begin on June twenty one,
releasing the show in seasons UM with weekly episodes for
(25:18):
the summer, and then I'll take some some brief break
and then I'll be back with weekly episodes for another
you know, uh period as yet to be determined. But
for the most part, because I was doing a lot
of juggling, um with other uh career things, Um, the
show had just kind of come out whenever, and you know,
whenever I got around to it, whenever I finished something,
(25:39):
and so in a lot of ways, they didn't have
that luxury Like if I was kind of like working
on a story for a while, um, you know, it
might be like a month, um, you know between episodes,
and then it might be six weeks between episodes, and
it would be very hard um for me to to
shift gears. But sometimes I would kind of have to
um hopefully that would have happened when I was like, oh,
(26:01):
you know, it is even better this thing. This thing.
The reason why this this story is not you know,
coherent and is not um yet presentable is because it's
not a story, or it's because I really can't crack it.
And um, so yeah, there have been times that I've
had to kind of abandoned ship. UM. But I've also, um,
there's also been a couple of stories that I've actually
(26:22):
done that I've actually produced and put music to and
you know kind of labored over and um, they also
just kind of stunk. And UM, I think that because
I was doing stories so so infrequently, then I didn't
have the luxury of having one that's stunk, you know,
because it's like if people had waited around, like I
(26:42):
didn't want to kind of bridge, you know, betray their
faith in me and betray the fact that they waited
around for something that wasn't actually good um or um.
If something was gonna sit on my website as like
the most recent episode and someone was just gonna like
if you're if you know, if you told your spouse like,
oh you gotta check out the Memory Palace. These stories
a great and like some clunker of a story I
(27:02):
was sitting on on the front page and that was
the only one they're going to listen to then, you know,
and it was going to sit there for weeks and
weeks and weeks. Then that would be weeks in which
I was kind of like, you know, hurting my ability
to hook a listener on this odd little podcast that
I do. Uh, I know that feeling. I think we've
all been there. Um, do you have a favorite time
(27:24):
period or historical figure, Like I know you say you're
not a history buff, but you've certainly been exposed to
a lot of it as a cultural omnivore. And does
that guide your decisions on what topics to cover, Like,
for example, I am really into Queen Victoria, So I
am always a little trepidacious about covering Queen Victoria. One
because I know I'll be a fan girl, and two
because I know I can't stay objective. So do you
(27:45):
ever have any of those? Yeah, I mean I have
a few, right, And I think that I think if
you you know, if you listen to you know, if
if as all of you should do, listen to all
sixty five episodes, Um, you'll see certain sort of themes
pop up, right, And some of it is that I
am drawn to, you know, the period between like eighteen
eighty and nine. Um, you know, when essentially modernity is
(28:09):
being created. You know, there's like I find that period
really amazing, in part because there are so many things
that we are beginning to see for the first time. Um,
that we have in our daily life, whether it's the telephone,
whether it's you know, recorded music, whether it's you know, movies,
whether it's the weekend. You know, like these things are
being invented during that period. And so I'm constantly, you know,
(28:33):
interested in that moment of first encounter with new technologies,
before the kind of you know, before the shine kind
of goes away. Um. Yeah. So you know I think
that that you know, that period, you know, is is
you know, filled with like it's like it's this period
in which they're kind of like inventing modernity. Um. And
(28:54):
also like there are all these fascinating failures of like
you know that really point to like different ways in
which we could you know, have still lived if if only, uh,
you know, this fat had caught on, or if only um,
you know, this person had succeeded in what they were
trying to do, you know, both for good and for ill.
And so I'm fascinated. I'm fascinated by that period in particular,
(29:17):
And and some of the people that operate in there,
like you know P. T. Barnum, who proceeds it a
bit and then kind of stretches into that period, is
just everywhere. You know, there isn't a time when we're
like it's hard to like come up with you know,
a like an interesting like crazy musical act or or
or or um, you know, person in a freak show
(29:37):
or you know that doesn't engage with Barnum at some point. Um,
And that stuff is fascinating. But because I do kind
of go to that well, um, you know pretty frequently.
I think I had some of your Queen Victoria problem
where I'd be like, oh am, I doing this too often. UM.
But I think for me, UM, I think for a
(29:58):
long time, the Memory Palace, you know, it's only essentially
now becoming kind of professionalized, and um, you know, even
though I don't sort of intend to change it. Um,
you know what, I for a while it was just
kind of like an art project. It was just this
thing that I did that that people liked. And so
in treating it like an art project, I was always
sort of like out trying to um, you know, trying
(30:19):
to create like kind of an interesting, you know, creative
experience for myself and sort of like you know, push
push each episode like a little bit further or a
little bit differently. And so I have come to realize
that it's kind of okay to keep returning to certain
wells because like if you know, if you were if
you know, if as like if you were a novelist
(30:40):
or you're a filmmaker, like at some point you're interested
in the stuff that you're interested in, you know, and
you're gonna you're gonna, you know, you've got to trust that, um,
your audience, you know, has connected with your work because
they're interested in in your on your take, and so UM,
I've kind of like, you know, I don't want to
repeat myself and I don't want to to do things
(31:02):
over and over again. But if I'm if I keep
being sort of engaged with certain ideas or certain stories
in a certain area, then on some level there's like
still more work for me to do there. Um, and
the well hasn't run dry, and hopefully it hasn't run
dry for the listener either. We're going to take another
brief moment for another word from a sponsor, and then
(31:24):
when we come back, we have a few other questions
and then we will wrap up. So, Nate, in addition
to all of your other work, one of the other
projects you have worked on is Pondy the Greatest Town
in America from Parks and Recreation, which is a show
so close to my heart. I love it so much.
I do too. I just adore it was a good show.
That's so great I wept like a child. How did
(31:49):
putting together fictional history for that book compare to the
process of working on real history for your show? Um? Yeah, so,
uh you know, I got I got so. I got
the opportunity to write that book because of the podcast.
You know, Um Mike Sure, the creator of the show,
Um and Greg Daniels, the other creator of the show.
(32:10):
We're um kicking around the idea of creating one of
those Arcadia Press books. Those are those books that have
this sort of Sepia tone, like any town, USA, like
any neighborhood in any major city has like one of
these books. Um and uh, so they thought it'd be
fun to make up a fake one for Pawny and uh,
Mike Sure was a fan of the Memory Palace and
(32:31):
he's like, oh, I know Nate and he's a funny guy. Um,
you know, he'll get what we're doing. But maybe you
can also come up with sort of a plausible backstory
and um uh you know, historical backstory and so that
it started at that, and then the more we kind
of talked and the more we kind of like riffed,
it kind of grew and grew and grew, um to
be sort of like a larger book with larger scope.
(32:51):
But um, I found it incredibly liberating to make stuff up.
You know, I mean worked as a journalist, having worked
as a journalist, and you know, and now is like
a you know, a historian like you know, in a
sort of journalistic mode in a way like that like I,
you know, kind of use where that hat when I
when I kind of like dig dig into the past,
(33:13):
like I kind of apply the same sort of standards
um in this historical work. Um, you know, to honestly
to be able to like go in and in some
ways like apply the lessons that I've learned from history,
not only in the historical stuff, but also like I
just got in this mode and doing the memory palace
of like of thinking about people in certain ways of
(33:33):
thinking about you know, um they're sort of like Craven
needs and thinking about their their their failed attempts you know,
to make you know, to sort of achieve you know,
a level of importance and you know, I think that
show in particular is engaged um with that all the time.
You know, it is this sort of like very kind
(33:53):
of like open hearted, um you know, saying, you know,
despite the kind of ridiculous and us of the people
of Pawnee, Indiana. Um you know, I I like, I
know for a fact, having spent time in that writer's room,
having having written an episode of the show, being friends
with it with its creator like I you know, and
and anyone who watches the show will know, uh you
(34:16):
know within a half an hour that um, they're both
aware of the ridiculousness of the people there, but ultimately
aren't we all ridiculous and aren't we all kind of
uh interesting and fun because of it? And you know, ultimately,
if there's a real crossover, I think, um between the
sensibility of that show um uh you know, which obviously
(34:40):
hasn't more canmedic take um than uh, you know, a
story about the brutalities of of war, for instance, that
I might you know, cover in the Memory Palace. But
it is that same sort of sense that you know
that people are inherently weak, people are inherently kind of ridiculous,
but life, you know, throws very challenging things that at
(35:04):
them and at us and that um you know, finding um,
those things that make us sort of, um, you know,
not just human, but make it sort of like worth
being human and make it kind of fun being human. Um.
Are are the aspects um that I'm sort of looking
for in the Memory Palace. UM. You know in each
(35:26):
of these stories, no matter how sort of distant in
time um or uh, you know, sort of difficult the
subject matter. I know that you like for people to
come into your episodes without a lot of explanation in advance. Uh,
but you were working on your first series of of
the Memory Palace. Can you give us a hint of
(35:48):
what we might expect from it? You know? Um A,
I do want you to kind of come into things cold. UM.
So I'm not gonna sort of blow it, but I
can tell you this that UM I was. I knew
that I wanted to do it in seasons, and you know,
I was like, well, I mean and some of that
was just practical. It was like, well, in the past,
this is how I got the work done. Now, if
I'm gonna do more episodes, how am I going to
(36:10):
get the work done? How's this going to work, and
I thought that was something I could pull off. But
the second I got excited about it, um beyond this
sort of like practical concerns and like building an audience
through um, you know, by making sure they knew that
there was gonna be something new every Monday or whatever
it might be. The thing that got me um excited
about it was a dumb, romantic notion that it seemed
(36:30):
fun that there might be someone out there who remembered
the summer of two thousand fifteen as the summer that
they listened to the Memory Palace a lot. I just
like that idea, Like I like that there'd be some
weird nerd kids somewhere, um who you know, like the
Memory Palace. These stories kind of soundtracked. Uh, they're weird
(36:52):
summer job and like the summer before they went off
to college, or the summer they were back from college
and living with their parents and things were weird and
lonely or alternative the year they met that girl and
everything was amazing and and uh and somehow the Memory
Palace would be part of the background of that. So
there was the romance that of it. But the other
thing is you start to realize that like, oh, these
(37:14):
stories are all going to be coming out in the summer,
and um, so I think you're gonna find some warm
weather stories. I think you're gonna find things. I think
you'll hear things, um that uh, I think makes sense
on the iPhone of that you know guy on the
road trip or that person at the shore, or that
(37:34):
person sort of stuck in their sort of office when
it's sunny outside. Um. And also I do know, um
because I've unless this thing falls apart because I can't
pull it off, I know that there's there's at least
one episode that is that is a very distinct twist
on a topic that you guys have covered. That was
(37:55):
one that you're like said that people have begged you
to do it. So it is a very popular topic.
And I'll leave it at that. I'm intrigued. I'm too now,
I'm all excited. I know we have at least two
episodes in the archive or we have specifically said there's
one on the Memory Palace on this subject. Go listen
to it. One of them is the New England Vampire Panic,
and the other is the Lunar Beaver Lunar Beavers, Lunar Beavers,
(38:18):
the whole Moon Hopes, which that for us grew into
two episodes. It didn't it. Yeah, it's because I can't stop.
I get really excited with the weird stuff, so weird. Yeah,
why did that one grow for you? Because there are
so many delicious weird details like the whole Oh and
then we saw these bat people worshiping at this triangular
(38:39):
thing and it's like, how could you leave that out there?
And then the characters were good, like they were really good.
They were Yeah, it's so good. There's a lot of
delicious wildness to that one. I loved that episode of
the Memory Palace also. Yes, Like as soon as as
soon as Holly handed me the outline for that, I
was I was like, there's a memory bolls on this
(39:00):
and it's so great. Oh you say it right here. Yes,
we we're big fans of the Lunar Beavers. Yeah. So
is anything else on the horizon for you that you
want to talk about or anything else that you want
to add? Well, you know it's I'll tell you that.
You know you guys have have um had the sort
of great I assume great pleasure because you have you know,
(39:23):
it seems like a pretty good give you guys have
of being able to really focus on this and like really, uh,
you know, I know that you're doing it, um every
week and know know that you're um you know have
to sort of like both have to have to look
for stories, but also that you get to look for
stories and get to like, you know, follow your curiosity
and do that stuff. And um, you know, so I'm
(39:45):
really about to do that for the first time. And UM.
So not only will people be getting sort of more episodes, UM,
one thing that I've been wanting to do for a while,
UM is to uh do live shows, which I know
you guys are getting your went in and um, so
that's been really fun for me. I had like kind
of a background and kind of being in bands, and um,
(40:07):
it's been a long time since I've had the sort
of opportunity to perform. And I've done like single stories
here and there, um in kind of like variety show
context and it's been really fun. And so it's so
I am in the midst of planning like a proper show,
like a like something that can that can hold people's
interest in and uh you know give people like kind
(40:28):
of like a cabinet of wonder experience um at a
live show and so um, so this summer I'll be
playing in Seattle and playing in Portland and then in
l a in in the early fall, and then I'm
hoping to do like a proper like tour tour in
with my you know next season, um sometime in uh
late fall. That sounds amazing. Indeed, So your season is
(40:52):
starting on June twenty one, right, yeah, runs to the
whole summer. Yeah. So people can find the Memory Palace
on iTunes. There's also the Memory Palace dot us. Really
give a listen. It's great. You can, you can plow
through the entire archive, uh and get all kinds of
just wonderful gems of stories. They're great. Thank you so much,
(41:15):
Thank you so much for being on show, Nate. Great.
I'll be listening to you guys. We will be back
to our regularly scheduled listener mail next time. We wanted
to save that time to listen to a little of
the Memory Palace this time around. But if you would
like to write to us, we're a history podcast at
how Stuff Works dot com. We're also on Facebook at
facebook dot com slash missed in History and on Twitter
at miss in History. Our Tumbler is missed in History
(41:37):
dot tumbler dot com and we're on Pinterest at petrist
dot com slash missed in History. You can come to
our parent company's website, which is how stuff works dot
com and learn about many, many things. Or you can
come to our website, which is missed in History dot
com and find an archive of all of our episodes
show notes for the episodes Holly and I have done.
You will have links to the memory Palace if you
(41:58):
would like to just find something and click on it.
From there, you can do all of that and a
whole lot more at how stuff works dot com or
mtemistry dot com for more on this for thousands of
other topics, is it how stuff works dot com. M
Stuff You Missed in History Class News
Hosts And Creators
Holly Frey
Tracy Wilson
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
Las Culturistas with Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang
Ding dong! Join your culture consultants, Matt Rogers and Bowen Yang, on an unforgettable journey into the beating heart of CULTURE. Alongside sizzling special guests, they GET INTO the hottest pop-culture moments of the day and the formative cultural experiences that turned them into Culturistas. Produced by the Big Money Players Network and iHeartRadio.
Crime Junkie
Does hearing about a true crime case always leave you scouring the internet for the truth behind the story? Dive into your next mystery with Crime Junkie. Every Monday, join your host Ashley Flowers as she unravels all the details of infamous and underreported true crime cases with her best friend Brit Prawat. From cold cases to missing persons and heroes in our community who seek justice, Crime Junkie is your destination for theories and stories you won’t hear anywhere else. Whether you're a seasoned true crime enthusiast or new to the genre, you'll find yourself on the edge of your seat awaiting a new episode every Monday. If you can never get enough true crime... Congratulations, you’ve found your people. Follow to join a community of Crime Junkies! Crime Junkie is presented by audiochuck Media Company.