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Audio for sleep by hatch.
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Hello and good evening everyone. I'm Josh.
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And I'm Elise. Welcome to the nightly from Hatch, where your late night thoughts go to rest.
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Elise, I'm so excited that you're here with us. As listeners know, this summer we're bringing in lots of fun and exciting people to co host with us in the pillow fort. And listeners, if you have anyone you want to hear from or anything you want to hear us talk about with our guest hosts, please reach out at thenightlyatch. Co. We love hearing from you. This week I am joined by podcaster, journalist and all around delight Elise Hu. You may know Elise from hosting Ted Talks Daily, the Forever 30 podcast or for her work on NPR. Welcome to the show, Elise. Thank you so much for joining us in the pillow fort.
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Thank you for the warm welcome and I am super excited that we'll get to know each other through this guest residency. And I'm a big fan of pillow forts, actual pillow forts themselves. We've been building them in our house a lot these last few weeks.
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Do you have children or is this like an adult pillow fort situation exclusively?
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It's usually my youngest child, so I'm a mother of three, three girls. They are third, fifth and seventh graders and they're wrapping up the school year and wanting to stay up later and make pillow forts or try and sleep in these pillow forts. And so I'm noticing that there's different interior design or structural engineering when it comes to how they're making the forts themselves. It's really interesting. Their personality, your personality can really shine in your pillow fort design.
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B
I love this. Can you give me an example? I don't want to, you know, pry for too many details, but can you give me some examples of like how a personality might manifest in pillow fort construction?
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Yes. So one is how destructive you are in the first place. So like, how much of the living room or garage or wherever you're making it, how much are you tearing apart in the first place for materials?
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Got it.
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So like I have my eldest daughter, she's more of a pillow for purist and she will only use pillows.
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Okay.
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My eldest daughter or my youngest daughter will borrow cushions, like actual cushions from the couch itself and just deconstruct major pieces of furniture or bring in patio furniture so that she has more supports.
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Okay.
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For the walls. Okay.
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Wow. This is like a real infrastructure undertaking for her.
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Right? Right. And there's also style distinctions. Right. Because do you want an open air fort? Do you want a covered fort? If you're going to do a covered fort. Are you going to make it like just a blanket for your cover? Are you going to actually use another cushion itself, you know, to have a more structural or a sturdier roof or ceiling for your fort?
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Yeah. You want to be fortified against the elements. So with this situation with your children, are you, are these forts you're expected to be participating in the construction of and leisure within or is this like to fortify them against you?
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It's the, it's more the latter. It's more the latter.
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Okay.
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Though my partner really likes to make them, so he gets more involved in making them. And I prefer just to like let this be an activity so that they can occupy themselves. And it's really fun. You know, it's cozy in there. You can bring all your blankets and stuffed animals. My youngest Luna is bringing in lighting now and so she'll bring in like a little night light in there. Oh, that's so cute. And snacks. She'll make like little snack plates for inside the fort. So it's very lovely. So I feel great to be in this figurative pillow fort with you all.
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B
Thank you. Thank you for joining. I guess. Well, we know what's been, we know the kind of topographical sleep situation going on in your home. What have you been thinking about at night lately? What's been, what's been on your mind as you drift off?
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Well, we're heading into summer and it's kind of the end of the school year, the beginning of the summertime. I like this time of year because it's a little bit more unstructured and I live in Los Angeles and the weather's been fantastic. It hasn't been too hot. And we're going to host what, eight World cup games here in Los Angeles coming up. And while the tickets themselves are thousands and thousands of dollars and for most folks too expensive and out of reach, there is so much going on community wise for Angelenos to get together and watch the games in restaurants and pubs. And there's big viewing parties, outdoor viewing parties in places like the Getty Museum. So lots of different spaces are opening up as an opportunity for folks to gather to celebrate and watch the World Cup. And I'm really excited. Is that all happening on the east coast too?
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I imagine so. I'm in New York City and the World cup is still kind of like at the time of the this discussion we're having, the World cup is still like looming off in the distance because all of this is currently happening to celebrate the Knicks Playing in the NBA Finals, as I'm not a native New Yorker, although I've been here for a long time. So this is. The Knicks celebrations are. It's not my joy. You know, I'm happy for my friends and neighbors to be having a good time, but I would feel like a turncoat to my native Massachusetts taking part in it. But the, the World cup does feel like a time where I can get into this communal celebration and just the
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celebration of sport and the cultural exchange and all of it I think is really lovely. The, the more destructive pillow fort maker, Luna, my youngest, she is also a soccer player. She's played for many years and so this is an opportunity for her to see a lot of it at the professional level. And then there's all sorts of activations and pop ups and things going on for kids as well.
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Are you a big soccer fan outside of like the World cup, or is it like every four years? It's fun to get swept up in the fever.
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I was gonna say I don't have a English Premier League team. You know, like, you know how people have their teams. Yes, yes, yes, yes. So I don't have a particularly particular loyalty there, but I do love watching like live professional soccer. So we'll go and see LAFC here in LA and we'll see Angel City, which is the women's expansion team, and that's a lot of fun. But most of the soccer viewing I do is on the sidelines of nine year old games, which is frequent and it's helped me really up my, my lawn chair game, my, you know, wagon game has really improved over these past few years of soccer spectating.
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What kind of spectator are you when you are watching your children play? Are you like, are you able to breathe and just take it all in or do you get, you know, really emotionally invested in an intense way?
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Oh, no, I'm not too intense because I actually read or I listened to an audiobook that Michael Lewis did on this not too long ago where he essentially just followed his daughter's softball team, like travel softball team, a very competitive one. And at the very beginning he shares this anecdote about Scandinavian youth sports and the rules for Scandinavian youth sports. And one of them is that as a parent, you're supposed to kind of the best, the best thing you can do for your kid is to not like care about it more than your kid. And so because that's like where it gets worrying, right? Or it might be too intense. And so the rule for the Scandinavian style league is that when the parents are on the sidelines and yelling and cheering, they're not allowed to use a verb.
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Interesting.
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So you can't say block, tackle, go, jump, spike, hit, you know, whatever it might be, depending on the sport.
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So you can be like, great job. I love the effort.
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Or just the name of the person. I could just be like, luna.
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Oh, that's sweet.
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So the kind of cheering I do tends to be just saying the player's name loudly.
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I didn't realize that was a Scandinavian thing, but I love this. This is such a. I bet it feels grounding, right, to be prohibited from reaching a certain level of, like, sideline participation.
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You certainly can't coach from the sidelines when you can't use any verbs. And just to be clear, this is a general guideline I try to adhere to for myself, not for the other parents. This is not a league rule. I mean, we have some really intense parents. I saw one that ran like her kid got a breakaway, and the mom or the dad, I can't remember, ran along the side of the field at the speed of their kid.
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They need to find, like, a rec league to play in. This is like, this isn't about the kids participation anymore. You know what I mean?
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It was fun to observe, though. And I also didn't use a verb to cheer for the parent.
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That makes sense.
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I also wasn't like, go.
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I would have maybe used the verb stop or what are you doing? There are some verbs in that sentence. That's really funny.
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Yeah. What about you? What are you looking forward to? When it comes to this time of
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year, I'm kind of dabbling. Or not dabbling. I'm lightly considering learning to, like, mend because I have some favorite T shirts where the armpit seam is coming undone. And I feel like that would be such an easy thing to learn how to fix and would be the kind of thing I could learn, like, in an afternoon, and it would change my life forever. So that is. But like, visual arts, I am not good at to a degree that, like, even people who are like, no, you do it for the joy of making this thing. They'll see something that I've, like, drawn or crafted and been like, oh, yeah, this would frighten children. So maybe this is. This. The level of clumsiness that you bring to this is borderline unprecedented.
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I don't know. I mean, there's. Isn't it. Isn't there this old adage about how there's no bad art? Right. Because you're at least expressing yourself that Was.
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That adage was written long before I started making bad art.
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Okay, I'm going to have to see. Yes, I'm going to have to see what you're talking.
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Are you. Are you, like, a visual arts person? Do you have, like, crafty hobbies?
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I did start needle felting, which is why I asked.
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Okay.
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It involves, like, lots of little stabbings. Have you seen?
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Have you seen.
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Yeah. So the finished products, you can make a sheep with it. You could make. You know, I can only do something very simple, like a flower. But it's something that can keep your hands busy. You know, you're not, like, twiddling your thumbs. Nobody twiddles their thumbs anymore, though, these days, because we all have phones. We're all twiddling our phones. Right. There's no thumb twiddling.
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Yeah.
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The way I learned was from a community of people at kind of an adult camp type situation, like one of those weekend retreats. And so, I don't know. I like it. It's just. I feel like as the world gets more digital, a lot of us are. Our rebellion is the analog.
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Yeah. No, totally. I love that. I love, like, a physical book to read. And, like, crossword puzzle by hand is like, a big one for me, where. Where I don't have to create any shapes. I can just do letters.
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Yeah. I mean, I just recently. Speaking of analog, I just recently found this old cassette tape.
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Whoa.
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With my handwriting, I actually wrote on the label and it said, songs that ruled in 1995.
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Wow. Okay. What was on this cassette?
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I need a cassette player.
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Oh, you didn't do the track listing. It just was the title of the mix.
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It could just have magic on there. Who knows?
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This is so thrilling. Do you have a hunch, like, if you were to put yourself in the head of Elise, circa 1995, what do you think she thought? Ruled.
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So I would have been about 12 or 13. So sixth grade. Sixth grade. Hooty and the Blowfish.
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Okay. Yeah. Okay. We're on the same page here.
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Soul Asylum. Was it Soul Asylum, Runaway Train.
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Yep, that ruled in 1995. Alanis Morissette around then.
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Oh, yes. Jagged Little Pill. Was that when Jagged Little Pill came out?
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Maybe Jagged Little Pill and Cracked review, that first huge Hootie and the Blowfish album. I remember us coming out very close to each other in either 95 or 96.
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But it's just gonna be such a treasure to finally be able to play that tape.
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Now. Are you going like, boombox? And you're like, the family must hear this or are you going Walkman just for your ears only?
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I think we should find. We should have a listening party. But what is the quality of the tape itself? I'm wondering if there's major tape degradation.
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Yeah, I have not played an old cassette in a long time. In 2016 maybe I did a stand up album that I put out on cassette and got the cassettes manufactured. But those were all new and you know, fresh like that. So there wasn't that like long standing decay.
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Right.
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So. But it is fun. I was just, I just brought one to a friend recently.
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So you have a cassette player in your home?
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No, I don't. Well, I don't need to listen to me. I know what I sound like and my wife certainly doesn't need double my voice.
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You could. Yeah, you could. She could hear you in stereo.
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Well, I did buy for the release party, I bought like 20 off brand walkmans, like personal cassette players from. I think I got them at like CVS still has them.
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And I like how you called them personal cassette players so that the kids understood he did that for you, the youths.
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And this isn't, this isn't a Sony brand loyal endeavor.
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The yellow ones, do you remember the
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yellow waterproof ones, do you remember the. Those were like for sport.
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Yes.
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Those are like if you're going running,
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if you're gonna sweat on it.
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Yeah. If you're gonna play dodgeball while you're listening to your Walkman or inline skate. Inline skate. That's right. That's right. Which I guess we should also define that for young people.
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Rollerblading. But that's a brand name, right?
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Yes, I think that's right. But that's one, I guess Walkman came out the same, right, where like Rollerblade, Walkman, Kleenex, Band Aid. Right. Like there must be a name for when the brand eclipses the generic word, but I do not know it offhand. How do you think your kids will react to. To this? Are they. Will they be like, whoa, cool and like an old timey relic? Or will they be like, I don't want to listen to Hootie and the Blowfish.
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They're going to think it's cringe, of course, because they don't like anything that I think is cool. Almost like reflexively. However, the technology, the device, like the, the tape itself might be interesting, you know, as just a relic. Right. Or an object. As an object, it might be interesting because back when Taylor Swift was the last time she released some big album, she releases her albums on vinyl and she also releases them on cd.
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Oh, wow.
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And so my daughter was going through like a big Swiftie phase and so she got CDs of say, 1989, like the re release of a Taylor Swift album on cd and she couldn't get the CD out because she didn't know how to use a jewel case. Like, she didn't know how a jewel case worked.
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Oh, wow. Well, I mean, yeah, to her credit, getting that shrink wrap off does take a little finesse, but once you get that off, then it. We know how to use it. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah, totally. But I remember it took so when the first time someone showed me. And this is like super dating myself, but the first time someone showed me that you could. You. You know, the top and the bottom of the jewel case, the. The square CD case is ridged. It's like there's a texture to it and you can like rub that against the corner of a table or something. And that phrase, the shrink wrap. And I was like, this has changed my. You've saved me hours a year.
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Oh, I was today years old when I learned that. Whoa. We shouldn't have saved that until the end of this episode, sadly, because now there are likely listeners who have missed that gold.
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If you're a Swifty, because she puts out physical albums, Taylor Swift, or if you. If you own a time machine, are planning to travel Back to like 1997, this is helpful for that. But for most people, I think it is just kind of locked out of every laid. But it is like, truly. I mean, you don't want to do it on a table that you could scuff up with with the plastic and the hard plastic. But it is. I remember the first time I saw the rap start to fray like an old, like violin string or piece of dental floss. I was like, things are coming up, Josh.
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What else could go right?
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I know, right? That's exactly it, man. Well, thank you, Elise, so much. But for now, I think it's time to say goodnight. So I'd like to say goodnight to you, Elise. And I would also. I'm gonna say goodnight wherever she is out there in the world, to Alanis Morissette. I hope she's not having too ironic a night.
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That was beautiful. Thank you. I will say goodnight to my former friends in Hooty and the Blowfish, wherever they. Darius Rucker, specifically, shout out.
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And the other guys.
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And the other guys.
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The Blowfish, if you will.
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And Josh, goodnight to you.
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Thank you. Goodnight, Elise. Sa.
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To learn more about our phone free
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light and audio experience.
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Head to Hatch Co. You can also follow us at Hatch Podcasts.