Wednesday Jul 26, 2023

#013 The Shocking Subterranean Surprise

This Week on Another Brother:

In episode #013, The Shocking Subterranean Surprise, Jared replaces Josh. You know how the old saying goes, "when the kids don't sleep, the dads don't get to record their podcast." The rest of the brothers recount what summers used to be like in simpler times. To sum it up, video games, bikes, and slurpees. Of course there were other shenanigans too and visits to the pool. Then Alex tells us about a surprising discovery while going through underground tunnels at work!

Episode Links (***Spoiler Alert***):

Transcript:

The following transcript was in part created using the Deepgram API:


[00:00:00] This Week on Another Brother

[00:00:29] Another Brother Theme Song

[00:00:46] Stewnerds Segment

Alex: Well, Josh is sick. No, he's not sick.

Jacob: No.

Alex: Josh is detained.

Jacob: Children.

Alex: So we've got our other brother here today again, Jared. Yay.

Jacob: Woo! Yeah, yeah. Woo!

Jared: Thank you, large crowd. Thank you.

Alex: So we wanted to do this last time, and then I think I stole the show and decided unilaterally at the last minute that we were gonna talk about Zelda. But all of us, including Jared, grew up in Oregon. So we're gonna talk this time about, like, you know, the things you did as a kid growing up in the summer in Oregon. Who wants to go first? This is kind of blind, none of us have really thought this through what we're gonna say this time. So this could be interesting.

Jacob: So for us, it was all about 7-Eleven and Dairy Queen. In Keizer, they were right next to each other. Like you couldn't just throw a rock, you could throw like a boulder and hit the other one. They were that close. So we would typically, depending on the summer, we would, some summers it would be like scooters, Some summers it would be bikes, but you know we'd always get on our things and ride down together. You'd have someone who would come from Gubser neighborhood and then I'd link up onto 14th Avenue, not 14th, on Lock Haven and others would link up somewhere else and we'd all just kind of converge at some point and then we'd get to first 7-Eleven and we'd buy, you know, well I would get a donut because donuts and a Slurpee, you know, sometimes we'd get the weird rolled taquito meat things on the hot rollers. Maybe a slice of pizza. But again, Slurpee's always the Slurpee.

Alex: I think those were more, nevermind, not important.

Jacob: Slurpees were so cheap. And then we'd go over to DQ and we'd sit outside on DQ's tables.

Alex: Oh. Ohhh.

Jacob: Because by that time the sun would be far enough where they'd be in the shade from the building. And if it was really hot and we wanted to go inside, one of us would buy like an order of french fries And we'd go inside and eat all of our 7-Eleven stuff because one person bought french fries

Jared: Did they ever get mad at you for having 7-Eleven stuff in there?

Jacob: Not if we bought the french fries So that's what that's gonna. They did until yeah, that was right.

Jared: Okay.

Jacob: They did so that's what we started-

Alex: Did you have to find out the hard way?

Jacob: Yeah, we definitely got kicked out. And then sometimes it ended up being, sometimes we would actually buy a Sunday there even. But for the most part it was all about the 7-Eleven food. That to me this is like the thing of summer. That was it for me. There's obviously more but that's the thing that will always stand out. Riding down to DQ and 7-Eleven And everyone else pretty much had a membership to the local pool. So a lot of times, which was, which ironically, we were the ones who lived closest to the pool. I think it was just two streets down from us.

Alex: Down a very dangerous hill.

Jacob: The best hill. So yeah, we would spend a lot of time at the pool too. A lot of time video gaming.

Alex: Like, what games?

Jacob: That's a good question.

Jared: What games screams summer?

Jacob: Well this is an interesting one. The first one that came to my mind was Fantasy Star Online. Yeah, we all had it on GameCube.

Alex: Was that multiplayer?

Jacob: Yeah. Four player split screen. Had it on GameCube. It was a Dreamcast port, I think. Yeah, there were a couple summers where That was the big game for us. And then things change once you all got licenses and cars. And it just, not that it wasn't fun and good still, but I guess the childhood innocence is kind of gone once you're up to that age. It's not- different kind of memories I think for me.

Alex: I don't know if that that's necessarily the case for me.

Jacob: You liked the freedom?

Alex: I guess I stayed a kid for a longer time.

Jacob: Not that we started getting into different things, just, I don't know, something about those early years of like the preteen years, 12, 13 of, you can only get around on your bike and your scooter. To me, that was like the epitome of summer joy, for some reason.

Alex: Well, I didn't get my license until I was 17. So that gave me an extra year of not having a car that maybe had an effect on that.

Jacob: Oh, another thing. At that age, none of us had like cell phones.

Alex: Right. Yeah.

Jacob: Once I was in high school all my friends had cell phones so I feel like that also kind of changed things where they were all texting calling each other and I didn't have a cell phone. But when you were all that young and none of you had cell phones you know it's just kind of this long thing of phone tag until everyone's gotten called and you're all synced up on your plans and then you head out at a specific time and meet up. It was just different times than it is now.

Alex: Yeah, my friends did not have cell phones, even as seniors in high school.

Jacob: So maybe that's more the bigger differentiation there is, I wasn't the only one out of the loop. I knew everyone was as out of the loop as I was, and you all just kind of went out on faith that you were all gonna show up at 11 o'clock, you know?

Alex: Right.

Jacob: Whereas when I was older, I'd hop in the car and like I was no longer in contact, but everyone else was still in contact between them.

Alex: Yuck.

Jacob: Yeah.

Alex: So they could change plans.

Jacob: I mean, they never would, but.

Jared: "Tell Jacob we're going at 10!"

Alex: Okay. Jared.

Jared: I feel the same as Jacob in that. I think of summer differently depending on the age range. Early summer, I'll skip past Arizona because summer in Arizona was boring. You just had to stay inside all day because-

Jacob: Too hot!

Jared: it was always at least a hundred.

Jacob: When did you live in Arizona?

Jared: From 5 to 8. So those summers were just being inside with the AC cranked up, trying to not go outside.

Jacob: Did you guys not have a pool?

Jared: No, we were the only house on our street without a pool. I've confirmed this on Google Earth, But then someone put in a pool recently. So now it is no longer, but at the time it was.

Alex: So you continue to creep on these people in this house.

Jared: Occasionally I get the Arizona need to creep. No, but in Oregon when I actually could go outside Summer was still a lot of water stuff. You know, so We had gotten so accustomed to go into a neighbor's house to go to their pool in Arizona that when we moved to Oregon we felt the need to go to a pool, but we didn't want to go to the public one because we were so used to just being able to go to a neighbor's house to do it. So our mom got one of those big blue inflatable pools.

Alex: Like an above-ground pool?

Jared: Yeah.

Alex: Oh nice.

Jared: That take forever to fill and pump up. Yeah. If you kick them too hard all the water sloshes out. We got one of those and so there was a lot of that, especially when I was younger, there was a lot of slip and slide stuff.

Jacob: Oh yes.

Jared: Especially in Arizona, which was not fun once you fell out of the Slipping Slide because then it was on to like sand or rocks.

Jacob: Yeah because you didn't have grass yards there.

Alex: Like pumous.

Jacob: Ouch.

Jared: We did have a grass yard but the grass is almost burnt so not exactly a soft landing compared to Oregon. Then as I got older like 10 or 12 it was definitely more summer's the time to get through all the games. So a lot of Ocarina of Time, a lot of Kingdom Hearts, pretty much switching back and forth on those two and always playing the Manu, getting up to a certain point and then giving up and then going to the other one. And then next summer it'd be the same thing. So it actually took me quite a while to beat either of those games. I've started them each probably 20 times. I've beaten them only a handful. That's how I used to play games though as a kid. I would just play until I got to a point where I either got bored or I hit a wall And I was like I'm doing this for fun. I'm not gonna push past this wall. We're done. We're doing something else We're going outside So that was games We went to the beach quite a bit.

Jacob: That's what I was going to ask. How long has your family had that house? At Rockaway beach?

Jared: So my grandpa got it. If I remember correctly in the late forties, I could be wrong.

Alex: Wow

Jacob: Oh. This is a long time Family property.

Jared: Yeah. I know the property property was made I think in the 1920s. 40s might be undershooting it he might have gotten in the 60s but sometime in that time period is when he got it and then we've actually sold it since Liz and I got married. So we were, we were one of the last people-

Alex: Wah, you really are Ben Wyatt.

Jacob: Yeah. It was rough. That episode was traumatizing. It's like, Not again! We went there a lot. We would go to the Tillamook Cheese Factory, we'd go to Cannon Beach, we'd go to Seaside. We always went when it was super duper windy.

Alex: That's... On purpose?

Jared: No.

Alex: Okay.

Jacob: Just happened.

Jared: Our luck, yeah. We would either get no wind but rainy or nice weather and super windy. We never seem to get one of the other.

Alex: Yeah. And that can be pretty unpleasant on the beach, being sandblasted.

Jacob: Yeah. Well, especially in Rockaway, the shore is pretty flat. And so if you're sitting there, you're getting pelted in the face with sand. If you try to lay down, the sand's gonna get up your nose, it's gonna get everywhere. But we loved it, we always went to the cabin and that was kind of our family thing and our extended family would come a lot. Sometimes that was fun, sometimes that was not fun because then there would be 30 people in a tiny little cabin and there's no AC and things can get pretty bad.

Alex: Yeah, Oregon coast, no AC.

Jacob: Yeah, that's a lot of people. So how long of a drive was that for you guys?

Jared: About an hour and a half. Oh, okay, so that's-

Alex: Similar.

Jacob: Pretty much the same for us. Different part of the coast of course, but-

Alex: definitely.

Jared: I feel like if you live in the most populous area of Oregon, you're only going to be about an hour and a half away. Anything east of that, you know. Yeah. The only other thing I can think of is I Had the same mentality with video games, but for book ideas so growing up I wanted to be an author And so summers were a lot of brainstorming about worlds and characters and plot lines and stuff. And I never actually wrote anything. Never.

Jacob: Oh really. Not even notes.

Jared: No, I would just think about it a lot.

Jacob: Do you remember any of it though? Like any of your favorite ideas?

Jared: Oh yeah. Oh yeah. I have several.

Jacob: Dude. Yes. You should, you should hop on that with like AI help have AI help you write it all out.

Jared: Well I finally started writing one.

Jacob: Yeah? And Lizzie could illustrate it for you?

Jared: maybe yeah it's it's gonna be a-

Jacob: pressure's on now Liz!

Alex: yeah geez

Jared: it's a zombie book so I don't know if she'll want to draw it but that's kind of the direction I'm-

Jacob: I can hear her in the back of my head right now. "Yeah, I'll totally draw that!"

Jared: But yeah, as a kid, I don't know why I never thought to actually write stuff down or actually start writing the book. I just had so much fun thinking that I would just do that. I'd go back in the backyard and pretend I can map out the world and map out the characters and the plot and this is going to be what the first book is about. And then the second book, it was all very detailed. And then I would just, all right, onto the next thing.

Alex: Sounds like you should have studied philosophy. Just thinking about everything.

Jared: Sociology. I ended up somewhere... not really close. Oh, last thing before I pass it. This BYU sociology shirt I'm wearing. I was at the Dollar Tree last week and the cashier when I went up and talked to him, he said, "Ohhhhh, sociology. I thought that said BYU Scientology!"

Alex: That would be weird.

Jared: I thought, that would be so weird. What would BYU Scientology look like?

Alex: Okay. Well, I had a pretty good group of friends as far as size and how tight we were. We did lots of different things during the summer. It's hard for me to really focus on anything in particular. Like later on there were summers where we did a lot of paintballing. But that was with a smaller subset of those friends, mostly the ones that went to the same church with us. Yeah, My friends that weren't in our church didn't really do any paintballing.

Jacob: I never connected that.

Alex: However, we did all do a lot of laser tag in the summertime.

Jacob: It was Russell's backyard!

Alex: Yeah, Russell's backyard, Danny's front and backyard, Willark Park.

Jacob: Oh, I didn't know where Danny lived, apparently.

Alex: Kurt's house, too, their front and backyard. Then from those yards, Russell's and Kurt's, from those yards into the park, between the two, because they both lived on the same street and their backyards abutted directly against the park so we could just... zip around.

Jacob: So you actually used their backyard as part of the playing field?

Alex: Sure, yeah.

Jacob: Of course. Dang.

Alex: Yeah. You know, set up barricades up on the deck or something. We had a grenade, a laser-tag grenade that we could chuck from up there. But I think maybe the thing that stands out the most, I think probably came when I was 14 between middle school and high school. I was about to go to high school. We did a lot of biking, just a ton of biking that summer. I think it was that summer and probably other summers, too. But there was a state park. It was about seven or eight miles from town. Willamette Mission. We called it Mission Bottom. I don't know why.

Jacob: Wait.

Alex: It was a low, a lower area than where we were, but...

Jacob: Its name isn't Mission Bottom?

Alex: No, it's Willamette Mission State Park.

Jacob: My whole life has been a lie.

Alex: I'm pretty sure anyway I could be wrong.

Jacob: That's what you both call it, you and Josh call it that.

Jared: Is that that big wide open lawless feeling space?

Alex: Yeah.

Jared: Okay, Liz took me there and I felt freaked out the entire time.

Alex: Yeah, I mean there are densely wooded areas you can get to the Willamette River at the park. There's a section of it that's along the river.

Jacob: There's also a really tall tree there. It's the tallest, tallest, whatever species in Utah. Gah, Oregon.

Alex: Yeah. Tallest Black Cottonwood. But I believe it is where, I mean, it's called Willamette Mission because it was like a Catholic mission. Like, it had the old-style, Adobe-type mission building. And I think it's still there. I think it's like the official office building for the park now. But you don't really go there for that. Like you drive, you sail right on past that building. And I think, I don't even think you can see it. I think it's got trees around it. It's such a way that you drive into the park and you don't even know it's there. And we would ride our bikes all the way out there. It was rough, because there was a big hill you had to get up. But then once you were up there, you got to go back down it on the other side to get down to the park, and you could get going pretty quick.

Jacob: Because that other side is way steeper, right? It's like a, no?

Alex: Yes.

Jacob: Yeah, I thought it was like,

Alex: No, it is.

Jacob: Super steep.

Alex: Well, there's a side street that goes down the hill more steeply and we would sometimes stop and spend some time with someone down at the bottom of the hill watching for traffic.

Jacob: Watching for cars. Yeah.

Alex: Say, "Yeah, okay, go ahead!" See how fast you could get going. But sticking to the street that takes you to the park wasn't quite as steep. Nevertheless, you could get going pretty quick. And I lost some weight that year. That summer for sure. Because we did that ride really frequently, like 14-mile round trip, not including all the riding inside the park that you would do. And the park was littered with horse trails that were pretty rough terrain for a bike. And we would go bike on these trails that were just full of roots constantly, up and down, kind of hilly. Not super hilly, but not really gentle terrain for the most part. Just a lot of roots that had taken over.

Jacob: So that's what you'd do. You would ride to the park to ride in the park?

Alex: To ride in the park, yeah. Yeah, Or play laser tag. We played laser tag out there, too.

Jacob: Okay. I was going to ask. K. Good good.

Alex: Sure. We did do that from time to time. There was some good training out there for that. That was like before we had found the thicket of trees where we ended up playing paintball, which would have been a good spot for laser tag, too. But you'd never be able to play paintball out at Willamette Mission State Park. But you know, we also rode to 7-Eleven sometimes, got Slurpees. We only ever got Slurpees, we didn't get food there. We would get Slurpees. 99 cent giant freaking Slurpee.

Jacob: So good. Mix all the flavors in?

Alex: Yeah. Yeah. Do at least three flavors at a time. But we would also do lots of sleepovers, lots of Legos.

Jacob: Yes. Yeah, lots of sleepovers.

Alex: Lego stop-motion movies. Did a couple of those. One friend had in their basement a giant chalkboard, really long chalkboard on one of the walls in their basement. And we would do these, we would draw these stick figure wars where someone would just draw out the terrain and it would include caves that would go down inside, kind of like an ant farm almost. And then we would just start drawing these stick figures all over the place.

Jacob: Like Worms Armageddon, but on chalkboard.

Alex: Yeah, like one of those video games. And one side would have bandanas on, I think. That's how we differentiated them. Rocket packs, rocket launchers, machine guns, swords, baseball bats with nails. There was no limit. We just draw them all over the place. Yeah, that was, I mean, sandbox, blowing up sandbox with fireworks.

Jacob: That's what I was thinking of. You guys did all kinds of stuff at Russell's house.

Alex: I mean, just, we had so many different things that we did. I'd never be able to get through all of it.

Jacob: There's one I'm surprised you've left out so far. Tennis ball golf.

Alex: Yeah, that was an excellent summertime invention.

Jacob: Yeah, it was.

Jared: What's that?

Alex: So it's basically golf, but you use a tennis ball, and We only ever used old-school woods that we would get from Goodwill for like a dollar. Probably even less than that. And the rules were more or less the same, except that the hole was determined by the person who was in the lead at that point in time. After you finish a hole, whoever's in the lead gets to determine what the next hole is. So at this park, Willark Park, this game is really an invention brought on by Willark Park. I've tried to duplicate it, replicate it here in Utah. I can't find any parks that are good for this game. You need a park with varied terrain, trees, a creek. Going through it would be great, especially if It doesn't have any water in it.

Jacob: Basically, you need Willark Park.

Alex: Yeah, trees, backstops, swing sets, other...

Jacob: Random manholes sticking out of the ground.

Alex: Yeah, just all kinds of crazy stuff and no people.

Jacob: That was the key.

Alex: That's the most important thing, or else they will complain. I mean, you get hit by a golf ball or a tennis ball falling from one of these swings, it's not going to hurt very much. Even a little kid, it's not gonna hurt too much. We would do holes such as hit the ball across the creek three times, then go literally over the bridge. You can't just chip it over. You have to make it roll over the bridge, and then the hole is hitting the drinking fountain.

Jacob: So you just count your strokes.

Alex: You count your strokes. The entire time. And then at the end of each hole, whoever has the lowest number of strokes, everybody subtracts that number of strokes from their score just to keep all the numbers low. You don't end up with like 50 strokes at the end of the game. Well, you might, but you do get really bad because someone ends up at the end of the game with zero strokes. The winner is always a person with zero strokes at the end of the game because you just keep subtracting that lowest number from everybody's score.

Jared: Nice.

Alex: It was so much fun.

Jacob: It was a lot of fun.

Alex: It's a very fun game.

Jacob: As someone who doesn't golf at all, can't drive even, it was a lot of fun. Even I was able to pick it up and play it with my own friends a couple of times.

Alex: I think this might have come from Kevin's adventure-style croquet. I think I'm pretty sure it was him that brought it to the group where you don't set up the normal figure eight croquet course you set them up a lot like what I was just talking about you set up each one like all over the place you're going all over the park and you're just going from wicket to wicket and it's really just a race to the end

Jacob: for some reason just the phrase "Kevin's Adventure-Style Croquet" just feels so right. That just, that feels like Kevin for some reason.

Alex: Kevin was probably the most creative person I've ever met.

Jared: I don't even know him, but it sounds like a weird eighties teen show.

Alex: That would be fun.

Jacob: Oh, man.

Alex: Yeah, you're just racing to the end of the course to hit that, what do you call that? The peg at the end?

Jacob: The stake.

Alex: The stake. Yeah, The stake at the end after the last wicket. And as soon as you hit it, I'm pretty sure you become poison at that point. You might have to hit it a certain ways out before you're poisoned, I can't remember, but... Yeah, good times.

[00:24:15] Stewnerds!

[00:24:23] Storytime Segment

Soundbyte: Hey kids, do you know what time it is? Story time!

Alex: So speaking of summer memories, this story comes from a much later time in life than my childhood. While in college-ish, while I was still living in Provo, where the college that I went to was. I got a job working at the Missionary Training Center for the Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints in Provo.

Jacob: Curious where this is going.

Alex: There's a few of them around the world. A lot of people probably don't even know that we have any such training facilities. But those missionaries out there in the white shirts and ties and skirts and on their bikes with the black tags, they do receive training because most of our missionaries don't stick around in this country. They go out in the world, and so they need to learn the language. They need to learn-

Jacob: how to teach

Alex: yeah how to teach well, not just how to say certain words about church stuff in the language they're learning, but literally how to be good at talking about anything, really, just how to teach people. These training centers have a lot of professional personnel. I can't even remember the number I heard last before I left the MTC, but I worked at the Provo Missionary Training Center. From now on, I'm going to refer to it as the MTC. I worked there from 2011 to 2018. So for a little more than seven years.

Jacob: Man that was a long time.

Alex: Just a couple months more. And it was kind of like of Mice and Men. They were the best of times and they were the worst of times sometimes. It was an intense, intense job. Most people that are members of our church, when they hear that you worked at the MTC, immediately ask you, oh, what did you teach? Because there are a lot of teachers there that teach the missionaries the language that they need to learn and or how to teach. I did not teach. There's a lot to do there professionally besides just teach. I worked in broadcast media, which I will try now to explain as succinctly as possible, because I've found it's very hard to explain this to people who just don't understand what goes on with this sort of stuff. So I'm going to speak about probably the biggest thing that we did. Maybe not the most frequent thing that we did, but the biggest, most important type thing that we did. On Sunday nights and Tuesday nights, all of the missionaries, which ranged from 1,500 to 2,500 missionaries at a time while I worked there, would all gather in the gym, which was able to be converted into an auditorium with, like, pull-out seats, just like any high school gym. And there would be a special speaker that would talk to the missionaries for 45 minutes or so about some spiritual topic or something uplifting to help them feel motivated to go out there and teach the world. Because it can be kind of hard sometimes to do two years, year and a half of just being a missionary and nothing else. You don't get to be a boyfriend, you don't get to be a girlfriend, you are a missionary. First and foremost, the end.

Jacob: And that MTC experience was, for a lot of people, like grueling. It is nonstop. The entire day, you are doing nothing but learning.

Alex: You are hearing from someone that would know right now because you spent eight months learning Russian.

Jacob: So, yeah, I was in the MTC for 12 weeks.

Alex: 12 weeks! Not eight months. I said eight months, didn't I? I meant eight weeks. 12 weeks. Some languages you were there for 12 weeks.

Jacob: 12 weeks. Where your brain is, well, yeah Jared learned Japanese.

Alex: Oh yeah, geez, two guys.

Jacob: So that was probably also 12 weeks, or was it reduced by then?

Jared: It was nine.

Jacob: Okay. Oh, you would have been twelve earlier.

Jared: I also took four years of Japanese in high school.

Alex: You did?! You cheater! You stink!

Jacob: Wait a minute, what? How did I never, you what?

Jared: It was great going in the first day, knowing everything that was going on.

Alex: Just showing up literally everyone.

Jacob: You can read all of the characters.

Jared: Like, who's this white guy and why does he know how to...

Alex: Dang.

Jacob: Okay. Well, for others of us, no-

Jared: Yeah. I'm not representative of most people.

Jacob: Like your brain is just wanting to explode the entire time. Not just the language, but also you're trying to memorize specific scriptures, figuring out how to ask- I don't know. It's hard to explain it, but It's just, it's a tough experience. I loved it. Other people, they're just dying to get out of there. So these devotionals were like pretty core for a lot of people.

Alex: Yeah, especially, I would say, Tuesday nights were particularly uplifting. Those were the nights that the, I guess what you might call the upper echelon of the leadership of our church would come to speak. Whereas on Sunday nights, it could be a BYU choir, Brigham Young University Choir, could sing as the devotional that night. Former football players that are now motivational speakers slash news broadcasters would come and speak about their mission experiences and try to inspire the missionaries, you know?

Jared: Sounds like a very frequent combo.

Alex: Yeah. Very. But Tuesday nights was probably what the missionaries looked forward to the most because most every missionary, once they're at the MTC, they catch the bug. Like, the spirit is just so strong at the MTC. And you just want to know more. You want to learn everything you possibly can. And getting it from these people that have been called by God to lead the church, it's like a second dessert, because they go to dinner right before. And usually, maybe not on Tuesdays, on Sunday nights there was an ice cream bar usually, but not on Tuesday nights. So I guess the first dessert after dinner? Anyway, these meetings were pretty big productions. I would liken it to a TED Talk with a higher level of production. We had five cameras, mostly robotically controlled, some manual. Sometimes all of them were manual. It just depended. Two different audio mixers. One guy mixed the audio for the audience live in-house down on the floor. We called it a floor mixer. I think it's technically in the industry known as the front of house mixer, not the floor mixer. But we did develop our own jargon, much to the chagrin of one of the full-timers that had worked at NBC previously. He hated that we had our own jargon. He just wanted us to be industry people. But, you know, it happens sometimes. Anyway, and then there was another guy who mixed in the booth for the recording, because we recorded all of these and would even play back the best ones on Sunday nights after the devotionals. There would be another hour and a half of movie, quote unquote, movie watching.

Jacob: Oh yeah, I never stuck around for those.

Alex: That often included, not often, always included in one area of the MTC, playback of really good devotional talks. I got paid to basically listen to these great people, men and women, speak about amazing topics, like, how do you recognize the Holy Ghost? It's a difficult thing for a lot of people to understand how to recognize the Holy Ghost, and I got paid to listen to people talk about this sort of thing. Anyway, back to what the job actually was, because the job wasn't just to sit there and listen. We had five cameras. We had two audio mixing positions. We had someone on lights. We had someone in the director's chair. And when I say director's chair, I really mean the technical director's chair. That's the guy in front of that Death Star-looking board with levers and buttons and everything, and a giant monitor with all kinds of different camera shots on it. That's the technical director's position. He would actually force the video to change between the cameras, whereas the director, which we didn't always have, most of the time we had a technical director who was also the director. But sometimes for really big productions, we had both. The director was the one that would say, ready camera one and take. And the technical director would be the one to push the button when he says to do it. When he says ready camera one, that means camera one, the operator at the joystick of camera one knows, okay, I need to not be fiddling with my camera right now, they're about to take to me. Or the director will say, I want you to do a slow push until you get to a certain level of tightness on the shot, and then I just want you to come to a halt naturally. Ready? Start your motion and take camera one. And so when he says start motion, you start that push. That way when they take to the camera, there's not this weird transition of you starting the movement, you're already moving and it's nice and smooth. We had someone working the graphics position. That person sat at their own computer and often ran a camera on top of doing the graphics. And if the speaker had some kind of PowerPoint presentation, the graphics person would run that presentation. They would advance to the next slide. There would be hymns being sung throughout the show, usually at the beginning and the end, to open and close the meeting. And so the graphics position would have the lyrics to the hymn up on the projector screen. Oh, yeah, I haven't talked about the projectors yet. On either side of the stage, there would be two, I think 300 inch projection screens. And each one of them had, by the time I left, a very bright 3D projector. We never used the 3D capabilities of the projector. We got the 3D projectors because, in general, 3D cinema projectors are brighter than regular because each eye needs its own image, which means the overall brightness is cut in half because each eye is getting half that light. If that doesn't make immediate sense to you, I don't know if that can make sense, but that's how it works. So they're brighter to make up for that splitting of the image. So like when I saw Avatar for the first time in 3D, it looked really dim. I don't think they had a very good 3D projector because it didn't compensate for the loss in brightness. You also tend to have an extra bright silver lined screen to help increase the brightness too. I don't know that we had special screens, but our projectors were extra bright 3D projectors. And they were on little scissor lifts that would go up into the ceiling so that stray volleyball when the auditorium was in gym mode wouldn't break one of those very expensive projectors so some person would have to go up into the rafters and bring them down until we finally got them rigged up so that from one of the booths, they could be lowered and raised.

Jacob: Are you kidding me?

Alex: No I'm not.

Jacob: That's funny.

Alex: It was fun.

Jacob: I mean that'd be cool.

Alex: Yeah, it was really fun going up there.

Jacob: Huh, wouldn't have guessed that.

Alex: Let's see what else. Graphics, camera.

Jacob: Sound.

Alex: Two audio guys directing lights. That's pretty much it. Sometimes we would have teleprompting. If the speaker wanted to be teleprompted, we would set up those little screens that had slanted glass so that you could shoot your camera through the pane of glass without, like, distorting the image too much. And they could see on that glass a reflection of the screen down below it to see the words that they wanted to say and someone in a booth would have a little spring-loaded twisty controller that would advance those words for them so as you twist it in one direction-

Jacob: No way. I didn't know that's how that worked.

Alex: -it would start to scroll slowly and the more you twist it the faster it would scroll

Jacob: So you're listening to the speaker and reading it along with the text itself to keep it on pace with their cadence.

Alex: Yeah

Jared: That is interesting.

Alex: And you can twist it the other way to make it go the other direction if you need to back up for some reason. And it was a very interesting thing to do because you don't want to lead them. You always want to make that person feel like they're in control because-

Jacob: yeah, which sounds really difficult

Alex: -they are very nervous about giving someone else control, especially "some college kid that's not really a professional". We were, I mean, some of us didn't get to do everything often enough to be like really great, but some of us were dang good at everything that we did. And that was pretty much always the case for the teleprompters when I was there because the teleprompters were always a member of the graphics team. So there were no more than four of us that got to do teleprompting instead of all 20 of us that never got to do it. And so you had some guy that had maybe done it once that was terrible at it. Yeah, you had to make sure they felt like they were in control, that you were following them. But then you also need to keep, there was a little triangle on the left side of the screen that was to like indicate to their eye where they should be. Like which line they need to be reading from.

Jacob: Oh, gotcha.

Alex: But that's not for in process speaking. You want to have that be a little lower than the carrot. But when they come to a stop, or they start stuttering, like maybe they lose their place, then you use the carrot to point to them. This is where you are. So you can kind of go back and forth a little bit, rocking on that line, and it helps, "oh, yeah, okay". And they keep going.

Jacob: Weird. I really thought it would have just been an automatic process. You just set it at a speed and it goes. But that makes total sense that someone would need to manually get in there.

Alex: That would be great if that worked.

Jacob: I would think now with voice recognition.

Alex: There are some pieces of software that do that now.

Jacob: Now software should be able to.

Alex: Definitely. But I would doubt that the church would be using it for general conference, for example. Have to ask someone. I know the guy that does the teleprompting for the church, And he's excellent. He has the trust of all of the Quorum of the Twelve Apostles. They know him personally. They really know Wolf. His name is Wolf. He's rad. He's a really cool guy. Actually, no, I don't think he's retired yet. He might be, I don't know. Anyway, so this was like a really weird job. Like nobody in the world knows this is going on at this place in Provo, Utah. Like all of these things that you have to do, because due to scheduling, it would be impossible to say, okay, you are a camera operator. This is what you do all the time. But then you get into a school schedule that makes it so that you can't be at all the things that you need to be at as a camera operator necessarily. So everyone needed to be cross-trained on everything, just for logistics' sake. So that was a little rough on some people. I didn't get to do a lot of-

Jacob: Cross training? Getting- like well trained on all of the-

Alex: being really good at mixing audio, but also being really good at running a camera, that is not a normal thing. But Yeah, those are pretty different skill sets. It is pretty normal for a graphics operator to run a camera. That's in the news broadcasting world, for example. That's pretty normal. But not really camera and audio, I don't think. Maybe in really small places that can't afford to hire a bunch of people. Maybe that's normal. But, yeah, and for most of my time there, we were in white shirt and tie or dresses.

Jacob: So uncomfortable.

Alex: Blouses and skirts, you know, like more like business formal wear for most of the time. And when I first started, we were a small group of people. There was like maybe 10 of us. And we were kind of goofy, except for when it was time to work. When it was time to work, we took it very seriously and we did good work. But the rest of the time, there was a lot of downtime. There was a lot of hurry up and wait type stuff going on in the position, and we loved to goof around and have fun, play card games while we were waiting for the next thing to start. One of my-

Jacob: Maybe it should be said or noted, for a time, Josh also worked on this team.

Alex: It's true yeah Josh and I worked together for a good few years at the MTC.

Jacob: Not bad.

Jared: I didn't know that.

Jacob: They tried to get me in but...

Alex: Did you actually apply?

Jacob: No.

Alex: I didn't think you did.

Jacob: No. I think it was my freshman year. Yeah I think my freshman year?

Alex: No definitely not.

Jacob: No?

Alex: No.

Jacob: I just didn't think I'd cut it.

Alex: Because I didn't start it until 2011.

Jacob: Oh, yeah, that's right. Yeah, okay.

Alex: So, after your mission, after you came back from your mission.

Jacob: Yeah, okay.

Alex: So, this is a pretty big campus. Okay. Here we go. There's... I meant to count ahead of time, but there's at least 20 buildings that are multi-storied on the MTC campus. And kind of like Disney World, like Magic Kingdom, there are utility corridors underground. They're not like Disneyland's or Disney World's. Actually, I don't know if Disneyland has these, but I know Magic Kingdom does, where you can, like, drive golf carts and still have plenty of room on either side of you for another golf cart and a bunch of people walking.

Jacob: Oh, boy.

Alex: They weren't anywhere near like that. These were more like tall crawl spaces. But they weren't like a crawl space under a house. Like, these were concrete, enclosed, dust- Very dusty, actually. Yeah, very dusty. But not dirt. Well, no, they were dirty because they were that dusty. They were pretty dusty.

Jacob: Wait, are you saying like three, four feet tall?

Alex: Four feet tall, yeah, maybe.

Jacob: Why?

Alex: Well, it really helped us a lot to get fiber optic cables between the building I knew as 1M, which is the building where Large Group Meeting type trainings would happen and where the cafeteria was, where all new mission presidents were trained for a long time.

Jacob: Yeah, but they couldn't have just dug two feet deeper when they were making those?

Alex: I mean, I remember having to crouch a little bit, not like a lot, but I had to crouch a little bit.

Jacob: I guess a lot of people don't spend a lot of time down in these.

Alex: And not even for all of it. Some of it I needed to crouch low, but not all of it. In the early days, we were a little more rambunctious because we could be. We went exploring in these corridors. I don't know that anybody at the MTC in the media department now is probably even aware of how to do that anymore, but back in the day we could get away with a little more. And we were crawling through these tunnels, walking, stooping, lots of pipes, and it reminded me of high school. I had a friend who loved to explore underneath the high school, because it was very much like the high school, where there were these little corridors that you needed to crouch under with all the pipes and cables and everything. And it was so much fun. We're going from, I think the building was 20M, no 19. The building where our office was and where the gym and auditorium was. We were in those tunnels going to 1M, following pipes and stuff. And it felt like half an hour. It probably wasn't, like, not even close. I start to hear some music, and it is not normal MTC missionary-approved music. These are not hymns.

Jacob: You found a tunnel?

Alex: Is that a guitar? What? Is that a drum set? We come out of this tight corridor into a large basement storage area beneath the cafeteria, and my boss is playing bass guitar with his band. He's five years or so, no, he's seven years from, no, sorry, nine. He's nine years from retiring and he always rode a motorcycle to work. He was the best. Stan was an excellent, excellent boss. He's sitting there playing his guitar with his band. There's a drum set, a keyboard, another guitar, someone's singing.

Jacob: He brought his entire band into the MTC with all of their musical instruments.

Alex: Into the basement of the cafeteria to practice. I don't even remember why. There was an explanation. I just don't remember what it is.

Jacob: I don't want to know why, I want to know how!

Jared: At the time, did you know he was in a band?

Alex: No.

Jacob: Yes.

Alex: No, I did not.

Jacob: That makes it so much better.

Alex: It surprised the heck out of me. And then and then it and then it didn't because you know he rides a motorcycle to work at the MTC. It was definitely the craziest thing I ever saw at the MTC but I do have plenty of other crazy stories at the MTC.

Jacob: What were they playing?

Alex: I don't remember.

Jacob: Was it rock? I mean genre.

Alex: Yeah, there's something rockish at least, yeah.

Jacob: Oh my word. I thought you were gonna say you found a tunnel that took you out to BYU campus.

Alex: No, that's a rumor. I don't think there are any tunnels that do that. And if they do, they're probably a lot deeper than the ones we were in, because we went pretty deep, and there was literally no other tunnels there. So unless you could somehow turn a key and make that elevator go even deeper, no.

Jacob: So he had a reason why it was happening.

Alex: Yeah, I just don't remember what.

Jacob: Was it a justifiable reason? Like did you buy it?

Alex: Buy what?

Jacob: His reasoning. Like was it was a sound reason?

Alex: Oh yeah.

Jacob: Did it actually makes sense why this band would be there?

Alex: Absolutely. I just can't remember. He was going to be playing for something MTC related. I just don't remember what.

Jacob: Yeah, was it Talent Show? They did Talent Show when I was there at least once.

Alex: It was summertime, and the professional side of the MTC, as in versus the ecclesiastical side, the people that got paid to be doing stuff at the MTC. There was always a summer barbecue for the professional staff, at least for the three-quarter and full-timers. The part-timers didn't really get much of anything. So they were gonna be playing at that and they needed to practice and for some reason they did it in the basement of the MTC.

Jacob: Because certainly the barbecue wasn't gonna be at the MTC.

Alex: It was just so random. It's so weird. The day we decide we have enough down time to go explore is the day we run into Stan and his band in the basement. Oh my gosh.

Jared: I thought, I thought you were leading up to stumbling upon an upper echelon church leader listening to hardcore rock in the basement.

Alex: I wish. That'd be pretty cool.

Jared: And like head banging or something.

Alex: Yeah, no, not so much.

Jared: That's still cool though, especially because he didn't know he was in the band. Yeah. So I was just like, what is happening?

Alex: I was still pretty new at the MTC at that point too. So I was like, oh, this is okay, huh?

Jacob: No kidding. So were they any good?

Alex: They were all right, Yeah.

Jacob: Good job, Stan.

[00:48:54] Another Brother Outro

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