Endless Thread - Snacktime: LSD And Hot Sauce

Episode Date: August 1, 2019

Ben and Josh trade favorite Reddit stories about an Englishman whose bad LSD trip leads to a months-long French charade and a job seeker whose interview tactics leave him spitting fire...but not in a good way.

Support for endless thread comes from MathWorks, creator of MATLAB and Simulink Software, to design and develop engineered systems, accelerating the pace of discovery in engineering and science. Learn more at Mathworks.com. Support for WBUR comes from Is Business Broken, a podcast from the Mayrotra Institute at Boston University that explores questions like, why is innovation in healthcare so hard? Is ESG just greenwashing? of course, is business broken? Listen, wherever you get your podcasts. Produced by the I-Lap at WBUR, Boston. Hey guys, it's Ben. It's snack time time. Just snack time, maybe? Anyway, Amory is on vacation and so am I. So today we are bringing you another snack time episode where we pick a couple of Reddit posts and chat about them while we snack. Today, my snack time partner is Endless Thread producer Josh Swartz. Hey, Josh. Hey, Ben.

I'm making my snack sounds right now. ASMR folks take note. Any ideas yet? No, I'm going to need to hear the food itself. Okay, you ready? Yeah. Oh. I'm a chewer, not a sucker.

It sounds like an apple or something. But I don't know why that would be in a bag. It's a popsicle. Very appropriate. It's hot, man. Yeah, it's real hot. I do not have something appropriate for the temperature outside, but I'll play some sounds for you. Okay, hit me.

Trigger warning to the folks who have misophonia out there. Hmm. It kind of sounds like those famous Amos little mini cookies. Famous Amos? Is that what they call? It's the right shape. It's not the right snack. I've got a bag of those cheese.

These crisps. Hmm. How British of you. Yes. My snack time story today is British. Ooh. Yeah. Josh, I'm going to tell you a story about LSD.

Have you heard about LSD? I have heard of it, yes. Okay. So this comes from the TIFU or Today I Fucked Up community. It is a throwaway account, meaning we'll probably never hear directly from this person. And this is one of those posts that, while we don't, know for sure if it's true. It seems to me to be like just weird enough to be true. I think you and I have maybe talked about this post already, but here's the title of the post.

Today I fucked up by taking LSD and pretending to be French for 10 months. I do remember talking about this one with you. Okay. So this was more of an FU that happened quite a while ago. which only just caught up to me a few weeks ago, so not today, says the original poster or the O.P. What do you remember, Josh? I don't remember any of the specifics. I just remember that I think someone had to pretend to be French for 10 months because they dug themselves in some hole. Yeah, had to is, you know, maybe a little over the line. So this is how this post starts. About 11 months ago, I moved into a new house as a temporary sort of thing until I could just get the

money together to sort of to sort something out properly. I was hoping to have already moved out by this point. On my second day after I'd finished unpacking, I decided to break the house in with a nice acid trip. I brought some with me that I had recently bought but had not had the chance to use yet. Okay, so far so bad. Yep, as you do. As you do. Taking acid by yourself in a house that you just moved into. Great move. Things were going well with the trip, but then seemed to be getting really intense, and I quickly realized that the tabs were much stronger than I had been told they were. I thought being locked up in the unfamiliar house wasn't helping me relax, so I figured the best thing to do to relax would be to go for a stroll because I was

starting to get pretty overwhelmed at that point. So knowing nothing about this, but having heard about taking drugs, this makes sense to me, right? Yeah. Wait, Ben, you've heard about taking drugs? Yeah, I've heard about it. Okay. So this person leaves the house, right? The first thing that happens is they immediately bump into their next door neighbor who's arriving to their house at the same time. And of course, the neighbor is like, hi, nice to meet you. My name's so-and-so. Are you new to the area? And he says, so I basically do this thing sometimes when people try to sell me things on the street, et cetera, where I pretend I can't speak English. I remember a few words. I remember a few words from French class, so I just say

nonsense sentences, and then people usually leave me alone. So he's tripping, so he decides to do this. And apparently he says, Je wouldre a boulangerie, which I guess is I

would like to have a bakery or something? Not really like a baked good, I think. It's more like he wants... I want a whole bakery. The whole bakery. He gets inside his house, and starts freaking out. A, because he's on LSD and he's having a hard trip,

but B, because he realizes, quote, I'd just become French. The next day when I woke up, I realized the best thing I could do as an Englishman was just live with the lie for the rest of my short stay in this house to avoid the excruciating embarrassment of having pretended to be French

for seemingly no reason. I definitely question that logic. I'm not sure that's where I would have landed. Yeah, exactly. Exactly. What happens next, do you think? I think he frantically starts to learn how to speak more French words so that he can keep up this charade. Fast forward 10 months, he says, I still live here and at this point I'm in deep. My life on this street is a web of lies.

I've perfected my French accent, and over the course of 10 months, French me has learnt a decent amount of English so he can hold the disjointed conversation. Oh my God. I've gotten to know the neighbors pretty well, and I was the nice, quirky French guy on the street. I didn't let the lie slip ever because every day, every conversation I had just meant that it would be even worse if anyone ever discovered I wasn't French.

But then there was the day it all came crashing down. I was walking to my car and saw one of the neighbors coming towards me from the opposite direction with someone else next to her I didn't recognize. Oh, it's a French person. She stopped to say hi, As she normally does and then says to her friend, this is so-and-so, the guy I was telling you about.

You might be able to see where this is going. Yeah, yes. This is coming, crashing down hard and fast. Her friend hits me with a question in French that I didn't understand a word of and knew he was actually French straight away because his accent was way better than mine. I didn't know what to do and I just froze. And after way too long of a pause, I just decided to come clean. I told her I wasn't actually French and couldn't speak French.

God. And then I tried to play it off like some kind of practical joke I've been doing on everyone. Oh, see, that's a bad move. Right? Yes, the social interaction skills of this person leave a lot to be desired. Ugh, for sure. I haven't spoken to any of my neighbors since, some of which I'd struck up a friendly relationship with over the last 10 months.

Every time I think about the day I was discovered, the embarrassment physically hurts me. It's painful to hear this story. I know. And how long did he end up being? 11 months so far. Oh man. That's brutal. And like, I do have a hard time fully buying this story.

I know. But it's just weird enough that you kind of get it. Yeah. Yes. It is definitely weird. All right, Josh. You got a story for me, right? Correct.

All right. We'll hear that in a minute. At Radio Lab, we love nothing more than nerding out about science, neuroscience, chemistry. But we do also like to get into other kinds of stories. Stories about policing or politics. Country music. Hockey. Sex.

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power to connect and inspire. Tell your organization's story with a custom podcast from City Space Productions, the Creative Studio from WBUR's Business Partnerships team. Become a thought leader. Recruit new talent, reach new audiences, whatever your goal, we can help. Discover how the magic is made at WBUR.org slash creative studio. Okay, you ready? Hit me. This post is also from T-I-F-U today I fucked up. Okay. It was posted four years ago. I'm not going to read the headline because it kind of gives away the ending, but I'll tell you the username, drank hot sauce dash regret.

Oh no. And it starts like this. I have had a number of job interviews recently that went poorly and did not result in securing employment. So this guy is like, I need to do something to ramp up my presence, make my interviews more memorable. Mm-hmm. And the idea he comes up with is this.

After concluding the interview, after the handshakes, when leaving the room, stop, turn around, and say, quote, there's one more thing you need to know about me. Then pull out a bottle of hot sauce, down the entire bottle, slam it onto the ground, and say, quote, I can handle the heat. And then he leaves the room. This is another example of a story about someone who has a small problem, and they take a very extreme solution. Yes, he's doing so much. He needs to do maybe less. Yeah. Say something nice at the end of the interview. You don't have to, like, intimidate people with hot sauce.

Yes. So, uh... All right. Next sentence. Well, it didn't pan out like I thought it would. Shocker. So he says, you know, the interview goes pretty normal. Normally it ends, and he does exactly the thing he says he's going to do. He turns around and says, there's one more thing you need to know about me. And he writes, I pulled out the hot sauce bottle. In my head, it was all one quick, confident motion like an electric Indiana Jones.

But instead, I fumbled around and had a tough time getting it open, but was probably only 20 seconds, which is still a very long time to be fumbling with a hot sauce bottle. Death. And then he writes, then I guzzled down the entire bottle of hot sauce. I instantly regretted it. My mouth and throat felt like lava was swirling inside me. I immediately started to gag and loudly cough.

I was crying involuntarily, tears, hardcore streaming down my face. I was sweating like a terrible fool. And then he says, I threw up all over the floor. And it hurt as much on the way out as it did on the way in, if not more so. the vomit felt like flaming barbed wire shredding its way through my neck. See, that was going to be my guess, is that he immediately threw up. Because, like, that's what happens when you do something like that with extreme hot sauce. Yeah.

Why not put tomato juice in the hot sauce bottle if you really want to... Okay, that is what someone wrote in a comment. So, you know, he says he hoarsely mumbled an apology, started to stumble as quickly as possible out the door. And then he ends the post by saying, I didn't get the job. Unnecessary, but, you know, good punctuation. What's the title of the post?

The title of the post is, Today I fucked up by drinking an entire bottle of Louisiana hot sauce at a job interview in a failed attempt to be impressive. What people love about it is that the top comment, all it says is, were you always this stupid,

or did you take lessons? Which is a great burn, as it were, I wish we knew the job. I know, me too. Just a few more comments. Yeah. In true Reddit fashion, someone wrote, Maybe next time you can just walk over to the interviewer,

bear hug them from behind while leaning back so that their legs are dangling in the air and scream, I will not let you down. And then someone else said, or carve numbers into your chest and yell, you can count on me. I still think he should have just put tomato juice in the bottle. If you really want to commit, at least make it a little slight of hand or something.

Yeah, or like practice or something. Yeah, practice. He went into this totally cold. Clearly he couldn't handle the heat. He could not handle the heat. Moral of the story, don't drink hot sauce. Maybe drink Kool-Aid instead. All right, that's our snack time for this week, Josh.

Thanks for being ride or die and holding down the fort for us while Amory and I are, you know, Emory's off gallivanting in national parks, and I'm sweating it out in my basement, repairing doors. You got it.