We Go Deep with the Unlikeliest of Performance-Enhancing Drugs: Smooth Jazz
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What is the main topic discussed in this episode?
Welcome to Pablo Torre Finds Out. I am Pablo Torre, and today we're going to find out what this sound is.
It's like crack cocaine, although I don't do drugs. It brings me to my happy place.
Right after this.
I just need to establish for our audience, Mickey, that you represent a challenge for to the advertising of this program, which has been billed as a sports show. And yet when you show up, non-sports things happen. That's very true, yes. One title of an episode you did with us is, quote, I was a goth jock and nobody could stop me. About your tennis career. That was the most sports, I think, that you've done.
It was very sporty, yeah.
Then the last time you were here, you did a show that I think presaged a phenomenon that has swept the country since.
We were ahead of that. We were birdwatching in Central Park, specifically with a man named Birding Jesus. Who still texts me. He's a great guy.
I still want to go to Panama with Birding Jesus.
It's going to happen.
And The Atlantic has published an article. This is just last week, by the way.
What is the surprising claim about smooth jazz and performance enhancement?
The headline is, quote, all the cool kids are birding. And yet, I think some would say this show that claims to be about sports and what things may or may not be cool is neither of those things. At least when you are here.
It's a very specific niche.
I feel like we maybe also just need to establish that the birdwatching episode titled Birdwatching Will Blow Your Mind was also, I think, probably the horniest of all the episodes we've done in now 400 plus episodes over almost three years.
Very proud of that. And we might top it today, though.
So today, the story you're bringing us, the thing you want to take us into the world of, it begins where?
So I come to you today, Pablo, extremely relaxed and stimulated, having spent a lot of time with yet another intense subculture. This one has maybe the most obsessive fans that I've seen in any of these. And as always, I bring you back an incredible discovery.
So you are an award-winning documentarian and illustrator, and I'm going to warn everybody that we're about to show things on our YouTube channel here, as well as on video on Apple Podcasts that I haven't seen yet. Where were we going?
So picture this, Pablo. It all started in 2014. I was at an out-of-town wedding in Redding, Pennsylvania. And unbeknownst to all of us guests, the wedding ended up having a dry reception.
Which means just ginger ale and like soda.
Yeah, like iced tea and Shirley Temples and stuff. It was... Great time, but not like we're like alcoholics or anything, but a group of us after the wedding, we were really looking for a place where we could have like a stiff drink.
Can I point out that this is kind of how your birdwatching episode started? You're in a room full of weirdos.
Yeah. Well, you know, this is just the way that I live, Pablo. This is your reporting process. So my friends and I, we stumble into what ends up being the Crowne Plaza Hotel in Redding, Pennsylvania, which just so happens that weekend to be hosting something called the Berks Jazz Fest. As soon as we open the doors, Pablo, we just see an endless sea of elderly people. A full-on geriatric underground music scene.
I'm imagining Zion from The Matrix, but also the exact opposite. The exact opposite. What's the energy level here? Give us the sort of atmospherics.
Everyone is like... roving they are like dressed to the nines we're talking feathers we're talking sequins we're talking high heels this astonishing scene that i can't quite process So we sit down next to these very friendly, very intense people at a bar. And I should point out, Pablo, that despite what it all sounds like now, this is actually going to be a sports story with this very specific kind of music that was billowing out of every single one of these conference rooms at the Crowne Plaza Hotel. And that music was
smooth jazz you're trying to sell our audience on kenny g Being sports, the kind of music that you hear when they're trying to anesthetize you during wisdom teeth removal. That's the one, yeah.
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