How To Do Everything - Fiddlin', Gruntin', Snorin', and Carlin' with David Axelrod

Episode Date: November 20, 2024

This week from the archives, how to instantly summon 40 worms from the ground. Plus, former Obama advisor David Axelrod addresses listener concerns about engaging with their despised family over the Thanksgiving table. And, when a listener asks how to make his name more memorable, the guys recruit an expert of musical mnemonics.Also! We've loved hearing from so many of you about joining our "You Guys" fast. This is an archive episode, and we'll have an update for you... fellow humans next week. In the meantime, you can email your burning questions to [e-mail] To Do Everything is available without sponsor messages for supporters of Wait Wait Don't Tell Me+, who also get bonus episodes of Wait Wait...Don't Tell Me! featuring exclusive games, behind-the-scenes content, and more. Sign up and support NPR at plus.npr.org.How To Do Everything is hosted by Mike Danforth and Ian Chillag. It is produced by Heena Srivastava. Technical direction from Lorna White.Learn more about sponsor message choices: podcastchoices.com/adchoicesNPR Privacy Policy

Support for this podcast and the following message come from Autograph Collection Hotels, with over 300 independent hotels around the world, each exactly like nothing else. Autograph Collection is part of the Marriott Bonvoy portfolio of hotel brands. Find the unforgettable at autographcollection.com. Hey, we got an email from Allie. Allie says they would like to nominate our episode Fiddlein, Gruntin, Snorrin, and Carlin to be played in this feed.

Allie, without further ado, here it is. It's been slightly Thanksgiving-ified for you. A couple weeks ago in Caryville, Florida, they had the annual Worm Fidlin Festival. Now, if you weren't there, you probably don't have any idea what Worm Fidlin is. Neither of us do. But we are curious. We love worms and we love fidlin and putting them together is probably spectacular.

Online with us now is Timothy Haynes. He's the chairman of the festival. So Timothy, what is worm fiddling? It's a method of extracting worms out of the ground. A lot of people go out and fiddle worms for bait, you know, to go fishing with. And it's quite a profitable industry. We have people that go out and just fiddling, snoring, grunting worms. They're all the same thing. And you can make around $40,000, $45,000 a year

off of snoring worms. I mean, it is quite profitable. And so how does it work? Well, you take a seasoned piece of wood and drive it down in the ground. And then you take either your axe head that you drove it down in the ground. And then you take either your axe head that you drove it down in the ground with and rub it across the top of it, causing the vibration.

The vibration goes into the ground and the worm thinks it's a mole coming after it. And it goes up to the top of the surface. And then you collect the worms. So it feels the shaking in the ground and thinks that there's a predator coming. Yes, yes sir. So what makes for a good hour of worm snoring?

How many would you get? In 15 minutes, we had people collect 82 worms. No. 40, and that's just in 15 minutes. I had a six-year-old that was doing it and she'd done it by herself. She collected six worms in 15 minutes. And, you know, for a six-year-old, that's pretty good. Nat. Wait a minute. So you can put kids to work then, pretty young. Dr. C. Exactly.

Nat. I just think about what it must look like when you have 82 worms coming out of the ground. Well, you know, saying that, there's quite a few, but now you talk about some people when they snore them up, there's thousands come up, you know. Wow. And for somebody to go out and gather in five hours one morning 30,000 worms is not difficult. It's probably like I say five hours worth of work. You gather 20 or 30,000 worms and then you make your money off them. What's the biggest worm that you guys have ever got out of the ground?

Probably eight, nine inches long. And then do you know what kind of fish it caught? Oh, no, sir. We actually turn them loose after the birds go to sleep at night. No, really? Yeah. We actually turn those worms back loose that we snore up out of the ground. And, you know, somebody else can come along and use them for bait, but we're not, you know, we try to be mindful of our earth

and put everything back like it's supposed to be. You said you wait till the birds have gone down for the night. Do you do that because you learned your lesson? No, it's pretty much traditional. I guess it started way back when they knew that the birds would wind up eating the worms if you didn't wait until they went to sleep but It's always said that put your worms back in the ground when the chickens go to roost That's our terminology down here well Timothy thank you so much for telling us about worm fiddling. All right. Thank you Wormfidlin. Mike On Today's Show political strategist David Axelrod helps you with Thanksgiving.

But first... David Axelrod Hi, Karl. What can we help you with? Karl Well, I have a bit of a problem where people almost remember my name. And I am in college right now now and I started a new semester and people are not remembering my name but they're almost remembering my name so people have been calling me Kyle and Connor and Kurt and Kirk etc. But your name is it's Karl? Yes, with K-A-R-L. So give us an example of a kind of sample interaction where you realize somebody has remembered your name almost right but not right.

The other day I was telling my friend in one of my classes about this and she didn't believe me and then my teacher got up and I brought a CD to listen to while we work and he said, Keith has brought us a CD today so that we can listen to while we're working. And then in my senior year of high school, a girl called me Cole for six months, even though I corrected her many times. Until one day somebody referred to me as Carl and she goes, but your name is Cole. And I go, no, it's, it's Carl. I've been telling you this for six months. Wow. When you introduce yourself to people, how does that work? What do you say? I just say, I'm, my name is Carl. I don't know. Something I've found that works sometimes is that I introduce myself as, I'm like, well, my name is Carl, like Karl Marx. And that

makes it stick a little bit more sometimes. Yeah. I wonder if people just stop paying attention that fast. If we have such short attention spans. That is a very short attention span. We can't make it through one syllable. It is. It's just one syllable. You're right. Maybe that's the thing is to think about how short our attention spans are. And rather than saying, Hi, my name is Carl, say, Carl, that's my name. So the first thing they hear is Carl. Yeah. Do it in a kind of a little sing song too.

Carl, that's my name. I'm sure no one would forget it after that. Yeah. Well, Carl, we're going to try and help you out here. Great. Okay, Christopher, we have an idea. Our producer, Candice, has tracked somebody down who might be able to help you. He is online with us now. So, Michael, can you just introduce yourself

for us? Hi, I'm Michael A. Levine and I am a composer. I've written music for film, television, pieces that have been performed at Lincoln Center and theater and this and that but Probably my best-known contribution to Western culture is writing the music for the KitKat Give me a break jingle with lyrics by Ken Sheldman. We should just jump in here. You're not familiar This is the KitKat theme we're talking Give me a break, break me off a piece of that bitch that's gone. Give me a break. Give me a break. All right.

So we're trying to help out Carl, who for some reason, whenever he introduces himself, nobody remembers his name. They call him Connor, Kirk, Cassidy. So I think we could do, I mean, I think it would maybe help Carl, it would help people remember his name if we could come up with a jingle with which he could introduce himself. Well, you know, it's funny you should mention that because Candice did email me that. And of course, within approximately five minutes, I had composed the following. name that's mine you can shove all the others where the sun don't shine and say Carl Carl Carl Carl Carl Carl Carl that's right

that's fantastic and it's so catchy. And it's repetitive. How are you going to remember Carl? So Michael, let's imagine now, let's do a situation where you're Carl and you're going to introduce yourself to the two of us. Let's try this out. How would that go? Well, you'd say something like, see, my name is Carl and everybody gets confused with other names. It goes something like, well, here, let's strike up the band. My name is Carl, Carl, Carl, and so forth.

And you know, he sings the whole song. And if they're still standing there and have not by then had him arrested or anything, they probably will remember his name. He will leave an impression. Definitely. Jared Slauson It's true. Pete But one of the most cardinal rules of writing jingles is if it takes you more than say five minutes to write it You're probably doing something wrong. Ah Okay, and

So the the KitKat give me a break jingle the lyrics were written by Ken and he gave me actually Essentially Warren peace He gave me several pages of possible lyrics and I picked out Give me a break. Give me a break break me off a piece of that Kit Kat bar from different parts of the page. And I got in the elevator at the Doyle Dane Burnback, which was on the third floor. And by the time I got off the elevator on the first floor,

the song was written. It is a fairly slow elevator, but nonetheless, it was probably a faster than real-time process. Do you remember any of the other suggested lyrics? No, I don't. It's been a long time. I do remember the original bridge was, you could keep it to yourself, but that wouldn't be fair because that chocolate crispy taste is loved everywhere. Now the client

objected to this because they thought they could sell a lot more KitKats if everybody had their own. Not ignoring the main appeal of KitKats which is that you break it off and you share with somebody and that frisson between what the product actually is and what the client would like it to be has continued to this day. You'll never see people sharing them in the commercials.

Everyone lives in their own private KitKat world. It's fairly typical of advertising clients that they don't actually understand their own product. Well, Michael, thank you so much for helping out Carl and hopefully this jingle works. Well I hope so. I mean I can, I'll tell you what, I can send you a slightly better audio quality because I'm sure that recording it over the phone probably lacks a little perfection. Carl, Carl, Carl

Not Kyle, Connor, or Kurt, or Cole, or Cassidy Carl is the one and only name that's mine You can shove all the others where the sun don't shine And say, Carle, Carle, Carle, Carle, Carle, Carle, Carle, That's right! other currencies. Send, spend, or receive money internationally and always get the real-time mid-market exchange rate with no hidden fees. Download the Wyze app today or visit wyze.com,

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Hey, if you have a question you'd like us to answer, send us an email. Send it to us at howto at npr.org. And if your question is, how do I get the Carl jingle out of my head? Just go back a few episodes to our episode called Josh Gad Defeats Earworms, which will solve the problem which we have just created for you. Or if you don't want to do that, just chew gum. That's what we tell you to do in the episode. That's basically the gist of that episode is chew gum to get rid of an earworm.

Or maybe don't spoil the episodes because we need the download numbers or we're going to get canceled. That's fair. That's fair. Once again, that email is howto at npr.org. Thanksgiving is next week, and we got a bunch of questions from you about it. A lot of these questions are about how to handle the holiday if you hate your family. We're going to go through some of those questions with David Axelrod. He was an advisor to President Barack Obama. He has a lot of experience dealing with people who hate each other.

David, is this something you can handle? Yeah, actually, I've found dealing with politicians easier than dealing with Thanksgiving dinner with the family. Well, so, okay, as a strategy guy, as an advisor to politicians, what do you tell them? How do you tell them to deal with questions that they really don't want to answer? Well, first of all, you want to steer the conversation, right? In my family, you want to steer away from any reference to my wedding where they got into such a heated dispute that my

mother left and we weren't sure until five minutes before the ceremony whether she was going to actually attend. So rule number one, choose the topics carefully. Choose the innocuous topics that aren't going to set off the fireworks. Rule number two, pay special attention to the seating and keep the combatants far from each other. Well so okay, we want to put your skills to the test. Are you ready to do this? Well, I'm frightened, but I'm willing to move forward. A lot of our listeners have written in with the awkward subjects likely to come up at their Thanksgiving dinners. And we want you to play the role of the Thanksgiving victim, somebody who's at the table, this

comes up, and you need to somehow deflect it. Okay. All right. Okay, so your first role, this is Brent and he anticipates at his Thanksgiving, people are gonna ask him, so Brent, how long have you been single? What's going on there? Well, I would say, well tell me about you, how long have you been together? How did have you been together? How did you guys get together? I'm really interested in that. And I'd turn the service, but I want to also retain always, there's like an out card, and

I don't know, it may be different in every city. Here in Chicago, when someone brings up something awkward, the out card is always, how about those bears? And that creates a whole other set of grievances. What was so well done with what you did for Brent was you not only steered the conversation away but you flattered the questioner. Yes, which is a skill you learn in politics, right? You want to make people feel good about themselves. So turning the conversation back on them is often a good technique, I highly recommend that.

Okay, so here's another one, this is from Katherine and it's not so much a question as it is a topic she anticipates coming up around the table due to the relative age of everybody there and that's colonoscopies and people either sharing stories or asking advice. So imagine you're Catherine and people around the table start talking about colonoscopies. I would say you seem so interested in it, can you go up on the turkeys up there, why don't you demonstrate how it's done. And maybe that'll pull, maybe that will stop the

conversation. But it is, you know, everybody stands around and watches the turkey get prepared, people stuffing things up the turkey's butt. So maybe it's only natural that colonoscopies, as we say, flow from that. Okay, here's another one, and this is from Ellen, and it sounds like for her family gathering, a lot of people, maybe people they don't see very often, and Ellen anticipates that her cousin, who recently announced that he was a furry, meaning he wears usually like a mascot costume, say full animal costume, no part of his body exposed.

She says it's a wolf. She anticipates that her furry cousin will be there and things might get a little weird. In his costume? She says he may come out mid-meal in his wolf costume. Well, first of all, I hope he comes out at the end of the meal in his wolf costume because if his meals are anything like my meals,

that wolf costume's gonna have to go right to the cleaners. How does the cousin eat through the, does the wolf costume's gonna have to go right to the cleaners. How does the cousin eat through the, does the wolf costume permit that? That's a good question. Yeah. I mean, imagine you can probably get gravy through the mesh, but anything solid. All the more reason that this might not be the right time to wear the costume. But you know what, this is a situation where you really don't want to ask, how about them bears? No, no, that could create all kinds of resentments and turmoil. All right. David Axelrod, thanks so much. Okay, good to see you. Well, that does it for this week's show. What have we learned today, Mike? I learned all about worm fiddling. Yeah.

Or grunting, snoring. Yeah. Do you think maybe it'd be smarter just to do fish fiddling? Because that's why you're doing it. You're trying to get the worms to go fishing. Yeah. We just got to find a way to fish fiddle. It's really, you think about how much fish like to eat worms.

Yeah. They've really made a poor choice living in water. Because it seems like in the earth, that's where fish could be really well fed. They would really live a gluttonous life if it could breathe. Hey, so our producer Nadia Wilson, she's left. She has gone on to better things. We don't say that as like a euphemism. No, she's actually true.

Yeah, she's working on a real show and everything. And we miss her. And she did a lot of good things here. Yeah, thanks for putting up with us for so long, Nadia. Yeah. But this show, this show was produced by Candice. Candice Mattel. Nadia's body is not even cold yet,

and Candice is dancing on her grave producing this show. Sorry Nadia, you've been Candice fiddled. Technical Direction from Carl White. Our intern this week is Cassidy. Good job Carl. You can get us your questions, send them to us at howto at npr.org. Our website is carltodoeverything.carl.

I'm Carl and I'm Ian. Carl. This message comes from Grammarly. Back and forth communication at work is costly. That's why over 70,000 teams and 30 million people use Grammarly's AI to make their points clear the first time. Better writing, better results. Learn more at grammarly.com slash enterprise. What's good y'all, it's Gene Dembe from Code Switch.

And on Code Switch, we are deeply curious about race and identity and the way it shows up in the news headlines or in our personal lives. With the wide range of voices in front of and behind the mic, we see how race shows up all over the place. So come rock with us on the Code Switch podcast, only from NPO.