Selects: Chopsticks > Forks

21:29Chuck Bryant:Nothing. You don't want to be stabbed at your table. I think in Japan they're a little sharper and a little shorter, but you're still not supposed to be stabbing stuff. No. Don't stab that piece of tuna. No. No, you can just tell if you've ever done that while you're doing it that you're violating some unnatural law or something like that. It feels wrong, doesn't it? Yeah, yeah. Let me see here. In Korea, apparently they are shorter as well, and they are also blunt, but they can be metallic. Yeah, that's one thing that we'll see because we're going to talk about, as with everything in existence, there's some horrid environmental impact with chopsticks as well.

22:09Chuck Bryant:But the Japanese are like, give us cheap, disposable, wooden or bamboo chopsticks and basically nothing else. Yeah. They're just crazy for it. Whereas some of the other Asian cultures are like, no, we can use reusable ones. But the Japanese are like, no, we want nothing but disposable, cheap chopsticks, that waribashi. I assume that you and Yumi have your own chopsticks at home. Oh, yeah. And do you bring those to restaurants? Oh, no. No? No, never do. We should. No, I know the feeling. Everybody should, but... I usually think when I'm there, I'm like, oh, man, I should have brought my chopsticks.

22:47Chuck Bryant:Well, you know, I mean, like, if you go to any Asian store, they have, like, cute little... It looks almost like a pencil case, but it's, you know, chopsticks inside, and it's meant for you to carry them around with you, but no one does that. You just don't. Even though, hopefully, in 10 years when we're all like, okay, this is out of control, and this is really bad, everyone will be doing that. You just don't do it. And yeah, we have some that I could just put in my jeans pocket and walk around with if I wanted to, but I don't do it. Yeah. No one does. I take my straw now and I use it because I now keep it in my purse.

23:22Your murse? My murse, which goes everywhere with me. Yeah. So I need to throw some chopsticks in there. Sure. And it's a good feeling when you say, no straw, I've got my own. And I would love to be able to say, no, no, you keep those wooden chopsticks. Yeah. Take that straw and shove it where the sun don't shine.

23:40Chuck Bryant:Wow. I'm not that aggressive about it. It's so funny, depending on where you are in the country, though, like if they bring you a straw and you say, no straw, please, they look at you like you're just a straight-up democratic socialist hippie, you know, like you're trying to undermine the government or something like that. It's kind of hilarious. Yeah, sure. Sure, but other places now are, there's a couple of places in my neighborhood who have postings on the wall when you walk in talking about the impact of straws and that straws are upon request only. Right, and if you've got a problem with that, you can take a straw and shove it where the sun doesn't shine.

24:20Right, or you take that problem to the voting booth this fall.

24:25Chuck Bryant:Right, exactly. So are you prepared? Because I have a feeling you do a better job than me at this because you so often have great convoluted ways of describing visual things. I'm going to do a great job describing it to you because you can watch my hands. But I think for everybody listening, it's going to be very problematic. All right. How do you use chopsticks? All right. I'm going to get you back for this one, Chuck. I did it intuitively, by the way, which is what I suggest. Yeah. I never read a thing. I think reading it and having it explained makes it way harder. I agree. I think it's just one of those things you have to watch somebody do in practice.

25:04Chuck Bryant:I mean, it's just all practice. But essentially, there's a couple things to remember, is that both chopsticks are laying— Do you want to go step-by-step through it? No, I think—I want the Josh method. Okay. Well, it's the same method. Or the Josh description. Okay. So, in the valley between your thumb and your forefinger? Yeah. Okay. The webbing right there? Uh-huh. That's where the chopsticks rest. The thumbtaint. The thumbtaint. The jode. Your hand jode. Oh, my God. Hand jode. Great band name. It really is. Wow. So the two chopsticks lay right there. Okay? Okay. One of them, the bottom one, is basically meant to be immobile and stationary.

25:51Chuck Bryant:Yes. It just basically stays there. And it's the top one that you're moving. you're kind of holding with your forefinger, your index finger, and your middle finger. That's what you're using to move this top one. And so it's really the bottom one that stays basically stationary, and the top one is the one that's moving, and you're just using it to kind of pick up and tweeze food or rice or whatever with it. If you get really good, you can pick your friend up with it. Right, or catch a fly. If you're sensei level with chopsticks, for sure. But that's essentially it. and you don't want to hold it too tightly.

26:26Chuck Bryant:If you're gripping it too tightly or your muscles are too tense, you're not going to be able to kind of make that tweezer motion very easily or you're certainly not going to have much control. It's kind of paradoxical that the looser you have your hand to a certain degree, the more control you have over the chopsticks and the tension that you're directing toward the end of the chopstick. So keep your hand loose but in control and just make sure you remember that the bottom one that's kind of resting all the way along your thumb, that one's basically stationary, and the top one is the one you're directing with your index finger and middle finger.

27:04Yeah, I recommend halfway through your meal, switch those two out, because that bottom one is just along for the ride. Yeah. And it needs to do a little work, you know what I mean?

27:13Chuck Bryant:Yeah. So just switch them out and make that one the topper and give it, you know, make it do a little sweat, sweating. I think that's a pretty good chunk. Do a little sweat? I think we deserve a Peabody Award for describing how to use chopsticks. No visuals. You did talk about the environmental impact a little bit, but it is a real problem. I mean, you see these tiny little things, and you think, what's the big whoop? Like, a tree can probably make a gazillion chopsticks, so they need like maybe 10 trees in China to make all the chopsticks they need. Do you remember that? Just one thing. Do you remember that cartoon?

27:51Chuck Bryant:It might have been a Simpsons or something like that. where they chop down a tree and they show them processing one single tree into just an individual toothpick? No. That sounds like the Simpsons. I'm pretty sure it had to be the Simpsons, you know. But imagine if they're like, no, we make one chopstick out of just a single tree. I didn't think about toothpicks, man. How many toothpicks can you get out of a tree? I don't even know. Their problem, they're on the horizon. Right. But when you think about the fact that China alone produces 80 billion disposable chopsticks every year, then you get a little bit more of a sense of exactly how many of these trees.

28:29And it says here there was – I'm trying to find out what year this is. It was fairly recently. But they've had like parliamentary meetings and stuff about this in China. and they estimated that it takes about 20 million 20-year-old trees to cover their annual rate of production.

28:46Chuck Bryant:Yeah, a guy named Bai Wajin, pretty sure I said his last name correctly. He's like a representative from the Zhilin Forestry Industry Group and he really like rocked everybody at a parliamentary meeting where he basically said, hey, do you remember that old figure that everybody has been touting for years that we actually use 57 billion chopsticks a year, produce 57 billion chopsticks a year. He said, that's way off. It's actually 80 billion. And like you just said, we need 20 million 20-year-old trees to meet that a year. Yeah. And people said, wow, that's kind of a problem. And so around the world, so of that 80 billion, I think China, half of them stays in China.

29:33Chuck Bryant:Of the other half... Yeah, I wondered about that. 77 % goes to Japan. Okay. And Japan was actually the one that started all this. They came up with disposable chopsticks, waribashi, all the way back in 1878. And it's just been crazy for them ever since. Like you can go to like a pretty high-end restaurant in Japan, and they're going to have wooden chopsticks. That you pull apart. Or bamboo chopsticks. Yeah, that you would pull apart. There are also plenty of restaurants in Japan that have reusable ones, and they're much more elegant or whatever. but it's not like you wouldn't just walk in and be like, what is this?

30:07Chuck Bryant:Disposable chopsticks? Are you kidding? Because they're just such a part of Japanese culture. So they use 77 % of the other half. Korea uses 21 % and then 2 % comes to the United States. Is that all? I have to couch that that was 2011 figures, which is the latest I could find. Yeah, I'm kind of surprised that I would think China and Japan, it would just seem like they would, like everyone would have their own and it would be a very prideful thing to take care of your chopsticks and to have something cool looking. It just kind of surprises me that they're so down with the disposable. It surprises a lot of people, especially Japan is really well known for being meticulous with recycling and reducing waste and stuff like that.

30:50Chuck Bryant:It doesn't fit. Yeah, it's just this one thing. They really love their disposable chopsticks. And they just throw them away. They're not being recycled or composted or anything like that. They're just being thrown in the trash. So some, what I read is that some restaurants will offer, you know, tea for free if you bring your own chopsticks or maybe like a discount. You get that tea for free anyway. But yeah, basically. But there's not like a lot of, there's not a huge amount of movement in Japan. Where China, and this is, I think I read this in like a New York Times Green blog or something like that.

31:26Chuck Bryant:um china's made some some moves like like taxing uh disposable adding an extra tax to disposable chopsticks i think um more regulation basically overall i think which is really saying something you know i mean um there's there's like a apparently a whole sub industry to the disposable chopsticks industry that is small enough that it escapes a lot of oversight and they can be really problematic. Like there can be a lot of chemicals in these chopsticks. They're just like an all around basic nightmare. And it's just such low hanging fruit. All everybody has to do is just have their own chopsticks, but just people just won't do it.

32:08Chuck Bryant:And I'm guilty too. Like I said, I mean, we have reusable ones at home, but we don't take them out of the house ever. Yeah. Plus the paper used to encase the said chopsticks, that's a lot of paper too. Yeah, it is. And what do you do with that stuff? You just rip it open and burn it at the table. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. It's true. Should we take another break? Yeah. All right. We'll take another break and talk a little bit about etiquette right after this because we're all doing it wrong to a certain degree. Thank you.

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35:08Chuck Bryant:Josh and Chuck, some should know.

35:18Chuck Bryant:Okay, Ms. Manners, lay it on them. That's Dr. and Mrs. Manners. That's right. Ph.D. Esquire. So this is mainly Japan that we're concentrating on with the etiquette. And like you said, I think they take it a little more seriously than some other Asian countries because it turns out that chopsticks can and have had an important part in burial rites. Yeah. And funeral rites, Buddhist funeral rites. Like a lot of the taboos, I guess you'd call them, over chopsticks in Japan and in other Asian countries too are kind of based on like, well, that's kind of something we do with funeral rites. And so that reminds us of that.

36:03Chuck Bryant:Japan is not crazy about being reminded of death or mortality or pain. Same here. All that stuff is very unlucky. Like the number four is unlucky because the word for four, I think she also sounds very much like the word for death. Right. I think I remember that. So they don't have four elevator floors? Is that right? I don't. Or am I making that up? I don't remember if they do or not, but let's just go with that they don't. Okay. Because it sounds pretty great. So etiquette level one is how this is presented. There's a couple of levels here as far as like you really shouldn't do these things.

36:40But if you really want to ramp it up, you shouldn't do these things as well. I felt these were kind of willy-nilly, didn't you? Well, I mean, this is one person's opinion. Right. But the things that you really shouldn't do are the following. Do not, if you like, get up to go to the bathroom, don't stick your chopsticks sitting upright in your bowl of rice.

37:00Chuck Bryant:No. And that has to do with the household Buddhist altar, because a bowl of rice is offered to a dead person's spirit. And this apparently is from a Buddhist funeral rites as well, because there's a photograph of a bowl of rice. And to stick chopsticks in the middle of that would be verboten. I think they'll have like a photograph of the deceased and they give them a bowl of uncooked rice and they stick the chopsticks up in that. Oh, okay. I read that completely wrong. So it's reminiscent of that. Okay. So it's got that death thing going on. The death angle? Yeah. And then the other thing I saw about that too is that it also is reminiscent of like a bowl of sand with incense sticking out of it that you would also put on a Buddhist shrine to the deceased.

37:58Chuck Bryant:So they're like way too reminiscent of death for that to be okay. Okay. That makes sense now. There's another one that's very similar. Don't leave your chopsticks crossed. Right. Like resting on your bowl or on your plate. Just don't cross your chopsticks. It's impolite basically for the exact same reason as sticking them out of the bowl. Right. And I think that one is one you see like on food, Instagram food posts a lot from Whitey saying, you know, like cross the chopsticks because it looks cool or whatever. Look at how cool this looks. Yeah, not cool, apparently. We talked about spearing. The advice here is to treat them as if they are actually connected, even though they're not.

38:37It's a good way to remember it.

38:39Chuck Bryant:Like pretend connected. That's right. Yeah, and remember, this is like, I think that goes back to like Confucius, where it's like, don't have a knife at your table. Don't use your chopsticks to spear food. That's right. Apparently, it's bad luck, or not bad luck. Well, maybe bad luck to use two different chopsticks. Yeah. They should have the same mommy and daddy. This person said that it's just unsightly and that it's also reminiscent of funeral rites. That one, I couldn't figure that one out. Yeah. There's another funeral one, too. A lot of funeral rites involve chopsticks. Passing food from chopstick to chopstick.

39:19Chuck Bryant:Like if you're like, hey, you got to try a bite of this. That's just hard to do. And you hold it up. But it's a little bit showy if you can do it. Look at us. But when somebody grabs it with their chopstick, that's how they pass bones from cremations during funeral rites too, and they're like, nope, that reminds us of that as well. Yeah, and there are some of these that are just like, I can't believe people do this. Do not wash your chopsticks off in your beverage. Yeah, that's gross. Does someone do that? I don't know. Apparently somebody has. The other thing about this is, so the fact that they have restrictions on this, social restrictions, means that people have done it before.

39:56Chuck Bryant:But they also go so far as like most of these things all have like individual words. That's how like aggro the Japanese are about this kind of etiquette. They have words for that. Like washing your chopsticks off in your drink is not just called washing your chopsticks off in your drink. Yeah, there's a name for it. Let me see here. Do not treat them as toys. And we talked earlier about putting them in your mouth like they're fangs or walrus tusks or antennas or drumsticks. Just not a good look. Here's another one that is – this is sort of one that I think happens a lot is you might see women, American women maybe, do their hair and put chopsticks in them.

40:39Those – when you see that in Japan, those are not chopsticks. Right. Right. It might look like chopsticks, but they're actually called kanzashi.

40:48Chuck Bryant:Yeah, it'd be kind of like sticking a fork in your hair. Right. If you're walking around Japan looking like that, they'd be like, why do you have that fork in your hair? Yeah. It looks a little off. But yeah, they look just like those things, but they're a separate thing. That's right. What did you call them? Kanzashi. Yeah, nice. That's a beautiful word. I mean, I didn't make that up. Right, I know. Okay. I know. Another one is you'll very frequently see people do this, and I've done it too, and it's apparently acceptable under certain circumstances, but when you break your warabashi, your disposable cheap chopsticks apart at the end, if there's splinters or there's like a piece of wood sticking out, you can rub them together.

41:31Chuck Bryant:I always do that. Kind of soften the wood or get the splinters off, but you're not supposed to do that as just like a matter of course because you're basically insulting the restaurant. You're saying like, these are so cheap, these chopsticks that you're providing your guests that like I've got to rub them together. And you definitely don't want to like make eye contact with the owner while you're rubbing it together. You're like, this is what I think of your establishment. And people do that all the time. It's almost like habitual. It's habitual for me. And I started doing it when I first started using chopsticks because I saw the person I was with did it.

42:07And I was like, I guess that's what you do. You get those little splinters off. And now it's a total habit. And my whole thing there, I don't think that one's a really big one. Like, especially in America, it happens so much. I don't think anyone, a restaurant owner is like super insulted by seeing this.

42:23Chuck Bryant:Sure. Yeah, especially in America. But they are super cheap and they do splinter. Right. Well, in that case, yes. Like that proprietor has brought it on himself or herself for providing everybody with such cheap chopsticks that they're splintery. I will always remember this now. I'll tell you that. Yeah, so I agree with you. I think that this is probably not that big of an insult, especially in America. It probably falls in line with how you're not supposed to put your wasabi in the soy sauce or something like that. Well, if you want to, just do it. If you want to be remarkably polite, then you wouldn't do any of these things.

43:00Chuck Bryant:Some are way worse than others, And I think that one probably falls into the lesser category, even though it's under this advancing. This is why I was saying this seems willy-nilly. Yeah, and we also covered some of this in our sushi episode. Because if I'm not mistaken, don't you eat sushi with your fingers or am I wrong? Don't you? Don't you eat with your fingers or do you not? No, I don't. I love showing off how great I am at chopsticks. I use them every turn. You got some skills? Every time I can. Yeah. I eat millet gruel with chopsticks. That's how good I am. Yeah, or I've seen you just flip up a shrimp and catch it in the other one.

43:40What a show off. It's pretty great. Because you have chopsticks, you have four, you have two in each hand.

43:46Chuck Bryant:Yes, basically. And you do a little sideshow there. It's really impressive. Edward Scissorhands. Josh, chopstick finger. But no, you're supposed to eat sushi, specifically nigiri. Right. Right, with your hand. That's how it was originally done, if I remember correctly from our sushi episode. I think so. Yeah, but yeah, we use chopsticks these days. Here's another no-no is do not use chopstick as a rake. Like don't lift up a bowl of rice and just sort of rake rice into your mouth. So that's Japan. I saw in China that's perfectly acceptable and normal. Okay. Yeah. Yeah, it gets dicey. It's not the same everywhere, you know?

44:23Chuck Bryant:Yeah, here's the thing. I don't know if we said this before. So in Thailand, they don't use chopsticks almost as a rule. In Vietnam, Korea, Japan, China, they're totally ubiquitous, almost the only thing you're going to find that you eat with. And so that means that like even a bowl of soup, like miso soup, you're supposed to use your chopsticks for that. Like the little chunks of tofu. Yeah. It took me a second. You use your chopsticks to eat those out of the bowl, and then you slurp the rest or sip the rest, depending. But with rice, you would hold the bowl up kind of close to your face, but not like up in your face, just under your chin and out a little bit.

45:06Chuck Bryant:And then you, you know, eat the rice with your chopsticks from there, lifting the rice up to your mouth, not shoveling it into your mouth from the bowl. Right. And I saw with soups and things also is if you really want to ramp up the etiquette, you should try and drip into the bowl. oh right when you like when you are picking up the tofu you want to kind of shake the tofu off so it doesn't drip on you or on the table yes if you really want to excel etiquette you would just not eat anything you just sit there quietly with your chopsticks side by side still in their wrapper just smiling politely at everyone like didn't break any rules and i'm really hungry that's right uh there's a couple more here don't point with your chopsticks that's tough not to do Do you point?

45:53Chuck Bryant:I don't point at people, you know, or anything like that. But it'll be like, can you pass me that thing right there? Yeah, and you just sort of give a little nod like, hey, that potsticker over there. Yeah, because they're fun to hold and point with and like do stuff with. I don't know. Maybe it's still novel enough to me that I have to remind myself not to point. Or Yumi has to remind me not to point with the chopstick. Or when you're talking and you're expressing things with your hands and you're using your chopsticks. Or if you want to just do a little maestro routine. Right. You know? That's looked down upon.

46:28Chuck Bryant:Or if you're using your hands for something else, you don't stick your chopsticks in your mouth and just hold them in there while you're like moving plates around or something like that. You set them down. And here's the other thing, too. If you go to a very nice restaurant in Japan or in the States, and it just happens to be a Japanese restaurant, how about that? Really prolong this thought. They're going to give you a chopstick rest. Oh, sure. Set your chopsticks on so they're kind of lifted off of the table, the end that you put in your mouth. If you don't have that, you can take that paper wrapper and roll it up and make your own chopstick rest.

47:04That's right, because you're setting your chopsticks down on a table that could have germs. Right.

47:14Chuck Bryant:And speaking of germs also, Chuck, you never ever use the chopsticks that you're eating with to serve yourself from a communal plate or bowl. That's for sure. They should give you like a spoon or something like that to spoon it onto your plate, and then you use your chopsticks because that's just germy and diseasy. and apparently there's a like a supplement to that where if they don't give you a serving spoon, people flip their chopsticks over and use the thicker end to shovel the food onto the plate, which is not necessarily any more hygienic because that's where your hands have been rather than your mouth.

47:51Chuck Bryant:But that's the more socially acceptable thing to do than just using the business end of your chopsticks.

48:02I don't know why that's so funny to me. I got you. But the ends, though, I mean, if you're using them right, you're choked up a little bit, so they're not really being touched by your hands, you know? True. Like, you don't stick the ends in your palm. That's right. It's true. You choke up on it like a baseball bat.

48:20Chuck Bryant:Yeah, they say in Korea, apparently, that the further down, though, you hold the chopsticks, the longer it's going to be before you get married. Well, yeah, I mean, we could talk about some of these kind of fun facts. Fine. Let me see here. One is if you are given an uneven pair, you will miss a boat or a plane. And this came from Malaysia. I'm not sure if that's ubiquitous all over Asia. I think it's Chinese. Okay. I think. What else here? This is kind of fun. If you use chopsticks, it involves over 50 muscles in the fingers and 30 joints. And the, well, overall in the fingers, arms, shoulders, and wrists.

49:04Chuck Bryant:Yeah. Pretty cool. It is. I mean, how many do you use for a fork? Like two? Maybe. Give me a break. I saw a couple of things. um one is uh that there was a study that found that eating popcorn with chopsticks makes eating popcorn much more enjoyable than eating it without chopsticks with your fingers instead and they even controlled for the amount of extra time it takes to eat popcorn with chopsticks it's not just that you're eating slower so you're relishing it more because they had a control group using their fingers eat at a very slow pace too and apparently they think it's just the fact that you're doing something differently makes you appreciate the thing that you're doing or that you're eating that much more.

49:48Chuck Bryant:Like if you pour water out of like a separate water bottle, like at a restaurant, how they have like the little chilled water bottles they'll bring over. Look at you fancy pants. That water would taste better than water that you just poured out of the tap, even if it was the exact same water because it's being conveyed differently. Yeah. And that's also how you would get popcorn to last through the opening previews of a movie. That's right. Because you're not just shoveling it in your mouth like I do. It's so bizarre, man. I do the same thing. I've tried to do the, like, couple of kernels at a time.

50:24Chuck Bryant:Mm-hmm. And, you know, I do that for the first few, and then before you know it, I've just got handfuls that I'm pushing into my mouth. Right, right. That's how you have to do it. You have to use the palm of your hand to really shove the entire fistful in there. You can't just use your little fingertips. It doesn't work. You'll choke on them. And I don't know if it's sort of a subliminal desire for me not to be distracted during the movie. But in the ideal world, I would just sit there and munch a couple of pieces at a time for two hours. Like just chew them a million times? No, no, no. Just eat a couple of kernels at a time and just really elongate the whole experience.

51:06Put those chopsticks in your murse and take those to the theater.

51:10Chuck Bryant:people would be like look at that guy hey though you have to be careful though yes they yes they would you have to be careful though who you brandish those chopsticks around because so you put this together kudos for that um one of the facts you came up with is that there's something called consecutively phobia consecutively phobia i think i said which is literally a fear of chopsticks. Yeah. There's a fear for everything. But, but yes, but I was reading a blog post on it and some maybe psych net, I think. And they were saying like, there's basically two categories of phobias. Ones that are semi-rational.

51:51Chuck Bryant:They use the example of a fear of sharks. Right. Well, if you did run into a shark, there's a chance you could be killed by that shark. So it's not just totally bonkers to be afraid of sharks, but a phobia of sharks is an irrational fear. Like maybe if you live in Kansas, you got no reason to have a fear of sharks. This, this one, they said, this basically qualifies in the bonkers category. Like there's virtually nothing that chopsticks can do to hurt you. So to be irrationally afraid of chopsticks to where you feel like heart pounding anxiety is, is, is a genuine dyed in the wool phobia. But some people do apparently experience this, although it's super rare.

52:30Yeah. That's interesting.

52:32Chuck Bryant:But you'll, like, avoid entire types of restaurants because you can't be around chopsticks. And you'll get anxious just thinking about being around chopsticks. Boy, that's so sad because Asian food makes up a large portion of my diet. Well, luckily for you, you don't have consecutive layophobia. No. I mean, when I think about sushi, I think about pho. Right. I think about ramen. I think about good old-fashioned Szechuan. Chinese food. Oh, yeah. Think about Korean. Mm-hmm. And that's just the tip of the iceberg. I could eat that all the time. Dude, you've got to get some boudé jigé. I'll take you to go get some.

53:14Chuck Bryant:All right. You're going to love it. It's so good. I can't wait. You got anything else? I got nothing else. 45 minutes on chopsticks, baby. Not bad. If you want to know more about chopsticks, go get yourself some that you can reuse and eat conscientiously with them. and don't forget all the manners, but just go eat some Asian food because no matter where it's from or what it is, it's probably pretty good. Agreed. Since I said that, it's time for listener mail. I'm going to call this two for two. Hey, guys, I wrote a few years ago about Alan Alda and thought I'd share a Sammy Davis Jr. story. Oh, wow.

53:51And this is from Andrew Lindbergh in Pittsburgh, and he got his Alan Alda one read, and when I told him this was coming on, he wrote back, two for two, baby.

54:02Chuck Bryant:Nice. Yeah, there's people out there who are like 0 for 10. I know. I'm so sorry. I assume. It's not like we're keeping track of people like that. Oh, no, I have a spreadsheet. Turn the screws on. Oh, you do? Yeah. Oh, man, that's me. He says, so in the 80s, Sammy had been cleaned out by his ex-wife and was selling barbecue sauce. He was in Pittsburgh to promote it, and my friend Larry, who had a local TV show at the time, got a chance to interview him. When they arrived at the hotel, they were told they would get 20 minutes with Sammy. But when they talked to Sammy's manager, he said only 10 minutes.

54:33So instead of having time to set up a two-shot interview, and for people that don't know the lingo, that means both people are in the same camera frame.

54:42Chuck Bryant:Okay. They kept the camera on Sammy, and Larry would then go back and add his footage later. So he would, I guess, re-ask the questions with a ghost Sammy, just to edit it together. At the end of the interview, they needed just one two-shot of the two of them together so they could edit it realistically. And Sammy's manager said, nope. And Larry looked at Sammy almost begging because they needed the two shot. Sammy took a long drag of a cigarette and said, get your two shot, babe. The manager then said, oh, well, I guess I'm the a-hole. To which Sammy said, as a matter of fact, babe, you are an a-hole.

55:23So this is how the story goes, apparently. And then Andrew says he's been listening since 08 and went to that live show in Pittsburgh, please come back.

55:31Chuck Bryant:Yeah. And he says he has a podcast now called the Pittsburgh Oddcast. Nice. And he said we average about 1 ,500 listens an episode, which is pretty darn good, Andrew. Yeah, it is. Nice work, Andrew. For a self-styled show. That's not bad at all. Especially a local one, too, Pittsburgh Oddcast. Yeah, so Pittsburghians, if you're from the Berg, check out the Pittsburgh Oddcast and Andrew. or even if you're interested in it sure you might live in Philadelphia and just be a a burghead exactly uh well that was a pretty great one thank you very much two for two that's pretty impressive Andrew um and if you want to get Chuck to do any Sammy Davis Jr.

56:14Chuck Bryant:impressions write in with your own Sammy Davis Jr. story and see how it goes uh and you can put that in an email wrap it up spank it on the bottom and send it off to stuffpodcast at iHeartRadio.com. Stuff You Should Know is a production of iHeartRadio. For more podcasts from iHeartRadio, visit the iHeartRadio app, Apple Podcasts, or wherever you listen to your favorite shows.

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