Scribe

This is David Rees. Welcome to erasable podcast number 50, starring me.

Yeah.

Oh, yeah, yeah.

I don't know.

That's like ink.

Boo.

Let's.

Yeah.

Where can I get one?

Yeah.

I love it.

I use it every day at school.

Yes, A lady.

and

Oh man.

Our guest today may not actually need an introduction. As a cartoonist, a former census worker and a fact checker, David is no stranger to pencils. He made IT official in 2010 when he began his artisanal pencil sharpening business and gained fame or notoriety by being profiled in the New York Times, the LA Times and other dead tree based publications. He took the skills he learned while sharpening pencils to the next level, writing a book called how to Sharpen Pencils, a book that was reviewed by both Johnny and Andy and other less notable publications like Huffington Post, New Yorker Books and the Nerdist. In July, David widened his appeal of interest in narrowly focused skills and took to the television with his National Geographic show Going Deep with David Rees leading an audience through Seemingly simple tasks like how to make ice, how to open a door. David gains a whole new perspective and talks to experts in the field. We're honored that David has joined us to talk pencils. David, thank you so much for coming on Erasable.

Thanks for having me on one of my top 20 favorite pencil related podcasts. It's an honor.

Yeah.

You guys have to be number one.

Now we're just erasable.

I think that, I mean, I don't have specific memories, but I just have clusters of memories. Like when you would the night before the first day of the school year, my mom and I would go to the mall, go to roses at the mall and buy new school supplies. And then you have that night where you're getting them all ready and everything is just so pristine and clean. And you have like a three ring binder. Like when I was a kid, the thing to have was a Trapper Keeper.

Which is a particular brand of plastic binder. And you'd have a pencil case, soft pencil case that slipped into the rings of the binder and you'd have like a bright pink gum eraser and unsharpened flawless yellow pencils, which probably back then in the 70s were probably still being made in the United States. And then in the school itself. In my elementary school, there was a school supply store that was open every morning and you could buy pencils and erasers if you were running short in those vending machines. Wow. We never had vending machines.

Oh, we have those.

So it was just my association with pencils, obviously, like most people is just from being a kid at school and, you know, drawing mazes or playing games with pencils and stuff like that. So nothing. I don't have any, like out of the ordinary, extraordinary memories of pencils until recently. Until recently, I guess. Yeah. Now I have memories associated with pencils that are probably not typical. We're talking about. Yeah. When I realized I was going to make $20,000 sharpening pencils. That's probably a pretty specific memory to my experience.

Yeah, exactly. I usually pay people.

well, David, usually you send folks a general semi hex number two because it's one of the few number two yellow pencils that are made in America. Left. But what is your favorite pencil?

Okay, that's. Yeah. So originally when I started artisanal pencil sharpening, I, you know, I actually didn't know that much about pencils. So I would just go to Staples or wherever and just buy yellow number two pencils. And I started to realize that there was, you know, obviously there's a big difference in quality of pencils. And a lot of the pencils that we buy now at big box stores are usually made in China. They're not made with cedar. They're made with like substandard wood. And, you know, the graphite isn't centered in the barrel or, you know, the graphite isn't glued correctly to the interior of the barrel, so the point will disappear. I mean, I assume you guys know what I'm talking about. I assume we're all speaking the same language here. And then I started researching American made number two pencils, of which there are next to none. I found the general semi hex number two. I started using those. And then when my friends and I were making a promotional video when we were trying to sell our TV show Going Deep, we toured on camera. I toured the general pencil factory in Jersey City and met all those guys. And I was very impressed with just the fact that they do everything in house. The graphite is made in the basement. And then you go up, up the different levels to the top floor. They're putting the erasers on the pencil. It's like a very Willy Wonka style, very charming, family owned business that seem to treat their employees decently and has been in that neighborhood for years and years. And so then I was like, yeah, okay, so if the client isn't shipping me a pencil, this makes the most sense for me as the pencil that I'm going to use. And you know, I'm not a huge user of pencils, actually.

Yeah. What? Yeah, well, because I'm left handed and so it always smudges the graphite. As your hand works across the page, you always wind up with graphite all over the side of your palm. I mean, obviously I use more pencils now than I did five years ago before I started the business, because there's like 80,000 half sharpened pencils just lying around every square inch of my house. So usually if I reach for something, it winds up being a pencil. But in terms of other pencils that I do enjoy, I really like, the Mitsubishi 9850 is a really beautiful Japanese pencil.

Is that the burgundy one?

Yeah, yeah, with the white eraser. I mean, that's just a beautifully, beautifully made pencil. You know, Japanese and German pencils, my understanding are those are the best. Those are the best pencils. And then, you know, those black wings that Palomino started, you know, those are made with California cedar, but those are assembled in Japan. I think

You know, those are nice because they're a bit. There's, you know, obviously they're darker and softer than a standard number two pencil. But really, I mean, between the four of us, I mostly use ball punk pens.

Oh, yeah, that was. Yeah. When we, When I built that totally janky display.

Yeah. I wanted to give them a shout out.

Yeah. I mean, a lot of people asked us when we sold that TV show, are you going to do an episode on how to sharpen pencils? But my attitude was, you know, I've already done so much video and TV stuff about that. And we really did want the show to be me learning how to do things that I wasn't yet really familiar with. But there are, you know, throughout the series there are little hints at my other job as the pencil sharpening guy. And you know, Generals has been really nice to me. Sometimes I buy the pencils from them and other times they just send me boxes of pencils. And so it's not like having a sponsorship or something. But, you know, I believe in their products. So I like, I gotta fit one of these in the show at some point.

We definitely were texting each other when we saw that episode saying, hey, did you see like big time nerd moment?

But we are the coin. We split.

Well, if you truly obsessively watch the show, you'll Notice because we shot, you know, that we shot the show in my house. That's my living room. And in the background you can see that the art designer, the set designer brought in, like a really nice display. Little, like, display shelves for all my hand crank pencil sharpeners.

Yeah, yeah.

So if you go into total obsessive compulsive DDR mode, you should be able to see a bunch of sharpeners that you guys have actually talked about, like classroom friendly supplies and Elcasco and, you know, The Carl Angel 5 and the Little Shaver, you know, the Lee Valley Tools reproduction of the old little shaver sharpener. All that stuff is hidden on the set, too.

Sure, yeah.

Could you just give us. We've seen this in videos, interviews you've done, but just could you give us a quick run through and breakdown of how the idea for the pencil sharpening business came about?

Yeah. So I had been a political cartoonist from the fall of 2001 until January 2009 when Bush left office. And people always assumed that that's how I got into pencils. But that cartoon was actually all digital. I just made it using clip art. So I actually never used pencil in making that cartoon. But when I stopped doing that cartoon, I had no backup plan. And also, we were in the middle of a global financial collapse, so I basically ran out of money and was broke. And by the summer of 2010, I was in the middle of getting separated from my wife and I didn't have any money. I was like, in a really weird, messed up place in my life. And my friend was like, why don't you just go get a job working for the census? Like you need money, they're hiring. So I went and filled out the aptitude test up in Poughkeepsie, near where I live, and I passed the test and I got a job as enumerator. You know, the people who go around and knock on the doors with the forms and fill out the forms. And the first thing we did in staff training was sharpen pencils, because in our supply bag that we had been given, you know, we had a clipboard and we had all the forms that we would need, and we also had number two pencils, and we also had a government issued hot pink plastic case, single blade pocket sharpener.

It was, you know what? I'm trying to remember if I still have one lying around. I think it said United States Census on it, but I might be confusing it with an older, decades old census pencil that someone gave me when they heard that I had gotten my start as a census worker. I honestly can't remember if it was a yellow number two pencil or a black. I have a feeling it might have just been a black pencil with no lettering on. I can't remember. It wasn't like a high end luxury pencil. But anyway, so we sat around sharpening pencils and watching the shavings fall out into the trash can. And it was like this weird nostalgic moment for me in the middle of just a time in my life when I felt kind of like I had lost my bearings a little. Like I had no professional identity and I didn't really have like a relationship identity anymore. It's kind of how I've explained it to people before. Like I was kind of adrift, you know, and so I was doing this very nostalgic, simple thing and I felt like I was doing it well. I was like, oh, these pencils are looking pretty sharp. And, you know, that's when I asked myself, like, what would it take to get paid to sharpen pencils? What would you have to do to convince people to pay you money to do something they usually do themselves? It was almost like a marketing experiment, art project, financial desperation strategy.

Well, his three books are mostly fake facts. I mean, he does weave in true stories about his life, but the foundation for those books is kind of just this crazy alternate. They're like reference books for like an alternate universe almost. Do you know what I mean?

Yeah, exactly. That type of stuff. And so there's some of that in my book, but in the project more generally, it's like the best description I ever heard of. It was a friend on Twitter who said, basically, the joke is, there is no joke. I mean, I realize that it is unusual to the point of absurdity to have an artisanal pencil sharpening business, but on the other hand, it is an honest to goodness artisanal pencil sharpening service. Like, I do do it. You know, it's not like a fake. I've made fake Internet business websites before.

It's not one of them. Like, I felt like in order for it to work, I had to actually do the thing I was promising because that would just make it more interesting and more fun and more lucrative. You know what I mean? And as I went along and was doing it, obviously, like I mentioned, I realized, oh, there actually is a difference in the quality of pencils. Oh, there is a difference in the quality of pencil points based on the sharpener that you use. Oh, there is a difference in the quality of pencil sharpeners. What's the history of pencil sharpeners? And when I got my book deal and started researching the book, obviously I read Henry Petrovsky's book, the A History of Design and Circumstance. And that was one of those moments where I realized, oh, yeah, anything. You know, I've mentioned this in other interviews, but that book, Petrovsky's book, is very interesting because that was one of the very first, if not the first books to do that very common trope now in nonfiction, which is to focus on something very specific and very esoteric and use it to kind of explain a broader history of something massive. In Petrosky's case, he is talking about the history and the practice of engineering. Right, right. And all the incremental improvements that go into engineered objects and how often those histories are, there's no record of them, because once something has been improved, there's no reason to hold on or celebrate their earlier, crappier iteration. And so, in a way, that book is very interesting because the subject that he chooses, which is a pencil, which obviously is a very powerful metaphorical device, because pencils themselves are almost invisible in our lives. You know, we use them every day without usually thinking about them, except for maniacs like you people. And so, yeah, you don't usually think about them. And then in turn, that suggests the entire history and practice of engineering, where there is not much of a written record of the history of engineering. And so that book was Very interesting and very eye opening to me and really convinced me that the book I was going to write, how to Sharpen Pencils, it was going to be crazy. I knew that. But also I did want it to be a celebration of pencils and to make people think about pencils in a new way, you know, in a different context, to make them strange again. Which obviously then became the spirit of going to the TV show. So that's kind of like. But it all started basically with me just being completely broke and getting a job at the census. I mean, so I have to give a shout out to the United States Census.

Well, I'm happiest when somebody sends me some old beat UP pencil from 20 years ago that looked like their favorite pencil from childhood. Because that was initially my. That's what I thought the business model would be, when people would send their pencils to be refreshed the way knife sharpeners work with the knives that their clients already own. So whenever I get a nostalgic pencil, that's usually my favorite. And you know, I've done, I don't know, almost 2100 pencils at this point over the last four years. But you have to understand that the ratio of people who send in pencils to people who just ask me to provide a pencil, it's probably 1 to 200 or something. I mean, it's very unusual for me to get a pencil in the mail. So those are the ones that stand out.

Yeah, that's happened. I mean, the other thing that's happened is somebody, they literally just drop a number two pencil in a regular letter envelope and mail it to me. And so I just get an envelope with a hole in it for the pencil escape in the post office sorting mechanisms. And I have to write them and be like, sorry, there was no pencil in this envelope.

I have two questions and they're both related. So the first question is, what is your favorite method for sharpening a pencil? And then the related question is, what is your favorite sharpener that's on your magic shelf.

Favorite method. I kind of rotate through methods. I mean, I think when it comes to an iconic super long pencil Point. I mean, the classroom Friendly supplies sharpener is amazing, especially for its price point. And then I always finish that point on a high grit sanding block and that usually looks pretty incredible. You know, the classroom Friendly Supply sharpener is very interesting to me because it seems almost structurally identical to the Karl angel five sharpener. And I wonder if they're made in the same factory in China and just, you know, everybody slaps their own brand on it because I think I have at least three or four iterations of that sharpener where when you take it apart, the components are basically identical. But I do feel like the classroom friendlies one does have a slightly longer point. So maybe there are structural differences with those machines. On the other hand, sometimes it is satisfying to do it just with a straight blade that's obviously time consuming and that will come out looking hand sharpened. You won't mistake it for a machine sharpened point. I also have a El Casco, which I know you guys have talked about.

I haven't used that in a while. And I actually just sent the burrs, the cylinder blades off to a fan who said he could sharpen them. And I also sent off the blade for my little shaver, which is another great for the price, another super fun, really great, cool pencil sharpener slash conversation piece.

Yeah, I was totally feeling you guys when you guys were talking about that on that podcast. So what I've been doing is just taking like a post it note wrapping a few times around the barrel of the pencil. I haven't actually adjusted or manipulated the teeth in the window, the grippers.

on the barrel of the pencil and sent it through. Although part of me does like leaving because a big part of me for that project is in getting people to think about pencils and kind of look at them closely again is those little indentations that kind of look like, you know, when you chew on a pencil. They do offer some clue as to the mechanism that was used to sharpen the pencil, as do the shavings.

Yeah, right, exactly. And when you look at a bag of shavings, you can usually tell what type of, you know, pencil sharpener was used to sharpen it. Because obviously a hand sharpened pencil with a straight blade is going to look different from the ribbons that you get with a single blade sharpener. And those are going to look different from the curly cues that you get from the classroom friendly supplies sharpener, which are going to look different from basically the pulverized wood mush of the El Casco. And I once had a dream. I haven't had that many anxiety dreams about my pencil sharpening business, but once I had a dream that I had a huge pile of shavings all mixed together and I realized that I was going to have to just separate out everybody's shaving all these shavings with my tweezers and then sort them into their appropriate bag based on analyzing the points of the pencils and matching the point of the pencil to be like, oh, this looks like it was done by the El Casco. This was done by and it was just going to be like this meticulous hours long process anyway, maybe the dorkiest dream I've ever had in my life.

Actually, once I had a dream that I was hanging out with Paul Krugman, Stephen Dorky or pencil sharing and more intimidating maybe. Yeah.

Could you tell us a little bit about how the business you mentioned a little bit about it earlier, but could you tell us about how the pencil sharpening business transitioned into the book? Or was it the other way around? Or was the book the first idea?

No, the idea? No, no, the business came first and I was doing it and I got a fair amount of media attention for it. And then this little publisher in Brooklyn, Melville House, approached me and said, do you think you could write a book about it? And I can't remember. The book came out in the spring of 2012. So the book came out just under two years after I started the business, which means I probably got the deal for the book a year before that. So maybe about a year after starting the business, I got the book deal and I didn't really know. It took me a while to figure out what the book would be. At first I thought it would be like this memoir about this weird place in my life and then I would talk about pencils. But then I realized that I wanted it to be a how to manual, because I collect how to manuals, especially early 20th century how to technical manuals. Or I used to. Now I have so many of them I feel like I don't need any more. And once I hit on that and realized that it was going to be really instructional and photo based, then writing the book was just a total pleasure. And it went pretty easily. And I wanted it to be a mix of, you know, straight ahead, how to real information, written in kind of a fussy style in a way that was very typical of those early technical manuals, a lot of those manuals. The language is kind of literary and aspirational and poetic, which I really admired and found really charming. And I wanted that because, again, I wanted to make sharpening pencils kind of a weird experience again. And then as you move through the book, it kind of just gets crazier and crazier and. And more and more metaphorical and more kind of just abstract and strange, I guess, is a way to put it. So the business started first, and then the business led to the book. And then the book led to enough media attention that my friends were like, oh, maybe we could sell a TV show.

Yeah. Thank you.

I mean, the TV show we wanted to. It's kind of like with the book, like the episode ideas, you know, how to open a door, how to shake hands. You want people to think, like, what could I possibly learn about this? It has to just be an extended comedy routine. Yeah, but for us, we were very, you know, we were very dead set on. No, we actually need to learn the best way to do these things. And in doing that and talking to experts and doing the research and breaking things apart, hopefully we will make these simple, everyday activities really strange and beautiful again.

Oh, yeah. Thank you. Yeah, that was cool. I always knew going into that episode that a big, you know, a big part of we wanted to have those. We wanted to be able to make those kinds of left turns and show connections in a way that maybe you wouldn't think about, but that hopefully feel very obvious in retrospect. And when we were sitting around just, you know, planning out the beats for that particular episode and figuring out what we wanted to learn. And then at one point I was like, well, you know, we're going to spend all this time making this ice cubes, and then it's just going to melt. You know, pardon my French. That's going to be very frustrating because it is going to be very time consuming. And so I had seen sand mandalas in the past and always. It's very jarring for a Western sensibility for somebody to spend hours and hours making something beautiful and then deliberately destroy it. That doesn't sit with our experience in the Western artistic tradition in many ways. And I always was very intrigued by that. So we thought, well, this is a great opportunity to make this type of connection. I mean, obviously the visit with that monk did not go the way we thought it would, because we were hoping that he would just give a very pat, beautiful, considered Buddhist response about embracing. And he just yelled at you, which was genuine, you know, which genuinely surprised us. Like, it was a very exciting, funny moment. And we didn't get it on camera, but the other monks were, like, completely just sitting there cracking up off screen because he was like, yeah, grow up, you big baby. Don't do it if you don't want to do it. Which was. Which took it. Which even just took it to another surprising level. That was an amazing afternoon.

I would say you're wanting him to be all sagely and give you this.

Yeah, totally. So, yeah, in a way, it was good because it challenged our assumptions. We were like, oh, Buddhist monk, he's gonna be so blissed out and whatever. But, you know. You know, maybe he was annoyed with me goofing off or whatever, but he really just shot me down in a way that was just like. It was great. It was bracing and exciting and very human and very wise in a way. You know, as someone who is very anxious for him to just be like, yeah, you don't want to do it, don't do it. Get over it.

I always mention this in interviews, that the great. One of the best things about pencils is how metaphorical they are. We have one end that creates, and then on the Other end, you have an end that destroys or erases. And as you use it, the life of the pencil gets shorter and shorter, literally until it's unusable. There's a lot going on. They're extremely iconic and metaphorically powerful in a way that an iPad or a laptop computer will never be. Because they are so simple and because of their material conditions and the way they function. To use it is to destroy it in a way that is very obvious visually, especially when you are sharpening it. That type of stuff is totally symbolic and philosophical in a way that's very appealing to me.

Right.

Chapter.

Well, I just refer him to chapter 11 of the book.

There you go. Not safe for work.

I mean, one of the things that we had. So we eventually had to cut the manuscript of the book, and one thing that we cut was I had written actually a very long chapter about mechanical pencils and the marketing and the aesthetics of mechanical pencils. The point of that chapter was that a lot of mechanical pencils make a big show of their engineering and that the barrel is transparent so that you can see the spring and you can see the graphite rod and you can see the clicker mechanism and all that stuff. The point that I made in this chapter that was cut was that actually, you know, a regular number two pencil is also an ingenious bit of engineering. But it doesn't need to brag about it because it is so efficient and so simple that you'll just discover. You'll discover its ingenuity through using it. Do you know what I mean? It doesn't have to make a display of it in the way that a mechanical pencil does. And I had gone to the drugstore in my little town, and I had. I was describing. I was doing written descriptions of all the mechanical pencils and pointing out how obnoxious they were. And then when the manuscript was like, well, we have to cut a bunch of the manuscript. I was like, all right, I know a simpler way to express this over long chapter. I think I can do it in one sentence. And then that became the most famous chapter of the book.

One of the cool things about the design was that the ribbons on the spine, the top was pink and the bottom was gray.

Okay, here we go. Was that your idea? That was Christopher King. I have to give a shout out to Christopher, who was the book's designer, who did a great job. I had sent Christopher a bunch of my old reference manuals, you know, my industrial manuals, as references in terms of typeface choices and layout choices and how to do the illustrations and stuff. So Christopher and I had a great time designing the book together, batting ideas back and forth. And he came up with that idea for the. I can't remember the technical term for those ribbons. Ribbons at the top and the bottom of the binding. And that was such a subtle, beautiful touch that so few people have ever noticed. But I'm going to let him know that you noticed that because that was a great contribution on his part to the book. I just felt like that took the design to a whole other level.

You're not going to have that. You won't have it with the paperback. You'll only have it with the.

Yeah. So when you look at the spine of the book, there's a pencil running down the spine, obviously. And the binding at the top that matches the eraser is pink, and the binding at the bottom is gray, which matches the graphite. Yeah, that was a badass move. Christopher King, great designer.

Yeah. So that cover is based on a ship fitter's manual that I've had for years and years. It was very inspiring to me that I give a shout out at the end of my book to that Odell's ship fitter's manual. And we basically kind of copied that cover because it has a black. It has a black frame around it. And it's in Futura, like many of those books are set. At least the titles are set in Futura. Because that was just a big font back in the 20th century.

Oh, yeah. Well, yeah, Field notes is making a fortune off that typeface. They're riding Futura all the way to the bank. God love those guys. Yeah, so it's the same kind of like mid century aesthetic. Very industrial, very clean, very like. I don't want to say noble, but, you know, very. It just evokes discipline and good practices. And then we felt like that was very appropriate for the pencil book especially because I was really basing it off this ship fitter's manual.

Well, yeah, there's all the stuff like celebrity impersonation.

But I should say the wine pairings. I mean, again, we really did that. I mean, there's some stuff that is just purely insane jokes, like common and uncommon children's names. Like, that was just me goofing off, trying to crack myself up. But the wine pairings, my friend who owns a wine store actually took it really seriously. I brought him a Tupperware bin of graphite and a Tupperware bin of cedar shavings. And we just opened a bunch of bottle. I mean, and I remember once I did an event to promote the TV show a couple months ago. Maybe it was like a big lecture or something. And a guy, A guy asked at the end of the lecture because I had mentioned pencils. And a guy asked, and I think he was kind of joking, like trying to be funny, like, hey, could you recommend any wine pairings with pencils? And I was like, dude, you need to go check out the appendix of my book. Because I literally did that, bro. And it kind of blew his mind.

Yeah, exactly. Backwards mind reading.

Well, we wanted to transition and talk to you about your show. Now, we're all already huge fans.

Oh, thank you.

Of the show. And I actually, I'm an 8th grade English teacher and I showed an episode last week in class because one thing that middle schoolers have a tendency to do is to take nothing into detail ever. So I actually. So I showed them episode. I showed them how to flip a coin and then I had them actually write a David Rees style explanation of how to sit down at their desk.

Oh, awesome.

And so they had to go into, you know, what type of floor are you dealing with? What shape is the desk? And it was a lot of.

Man, I would love to see that stuff. That's awesome.

Yeah, I'll pass them along to you so you can see it. But. So we just love the idea for the show and we're just. You've kind of mentioned it, but how did it develop and how long has it been in the works?

An old friend of mine, Christine Connor, is a TV producer and I've known her for years and I've performed on her. Her husband is Jonathan Colton, singer, songwriter, who does a Caribbean cruise every year for his friends.

And yeah, he's the best. And Christine, you know, so she had seen me do a lot of live performing and then my book came out and she saw all that stuff. And she and her friend Joe Honig, who's another TV producer, you know, they just said, let's get lunch and talk about tv. You know, have you ever thought about hosting a TV show? And I was like, no, but, you know, it would be interesting. And we batted around a lot of ideas off and on for maybe a year because they were busy because they had big TV jobs. And eventually we realized that the best idea would be the simplest, which is to kind of just do what I did for pencils and just do it for everything. You know, teach people the best way to do very simple things. And by doing that, make simple things strange again, so that you appreciate all the science and anthropology and humor and aesthetics that go into everyday activities, you know, and kind of make it a big celebration of. Of just how interesting the world is, you know. And so once we set on that idea, we decided they put up all the money to make a sizzle reel, you know, like a little seven minute demonstration video of what we wanted the show to be like that we would take out when we pitched it to networks. And so that's when we went to general pencil and we also. Basically, the sizzle reel was a very condensed version of the ice cube episode.

Yeah, so that's why that one is the first episode because we already knew a lot of it down pat because we had done some of the stuff previously with the sizzle. Like I had met with Shintaro the ice sculptor for the sizzle reel. So when we went back for the actual episode, it was just easy to get everything that we needed for that, you know. So, yeah, basically we took that little video around to maybe 10 or 12 networks and pitched them. And then NatGeo seemed super excited and so they ordered some episodes and then we. Yeah, and then we just started making it.

Oh, I would have Bravo, man. They have money. No. And then so the whole, once we got the deal and started pre production and, you know, researching and staffing to when we finally finished the 10th episode in post was about a year. It went from about August to August, or maybe August to July, I guess.

No, that's why I wear the same clothes every episode. We just figured because we were recording, we were recording multiple episodes simultaneously, out of order.

And I had to keep straight in my head, like, wait a minute, in this scene when I'm interviewing this person, have I already interviewed so and so, you know, you understand what I'm saying? Like, there were moments in an episode where I already knew what the person was telling me because we had shot a later scene earlier. Do you know what I mean?

So there's a, you know, there's like an artifice and a little bit of fakery and all of it. But we did try to keep me in the dark about a lot of the specific stuff I would be learning so that I could actually, you know, learn it in real time and they would try to capture those moments.

The big, like when the, the thing that. So there are different levels of that. When people would share their research with me. Like, sometimes the researchers did a great job in pre screening the experts and convincing them that it wasn't a joke, that we were there to learn about their research. And then they also did a good job of telling me just enough information so that I kind of knew

why

we were visiting a particular expert. And they. So I would know. Or sometimes they would just tell me in the scene, like, okay, we have to get this on camera, you have to learn, blah, blah, blah, or whatever. But the most exciting moments for Me, in terms of just real discovery and excitement, would be moments when they would finally just. They were done talking about their research and they would just show me the research and how to light a match. Fire science lab in Missoula when they show me their controlled burn field where they have identified the structural principles that determine how fire actually spreads. And they have visualized for the first time the fact that fire is not chaotic, that it spreads in a predictable pulsing wave like structure. And that was like a goosebump moment for me. That was really incredible. Or when. And then sometimes it's just the environment that you're in is just overwhelming for whatever reason. Like the ice core lab, when we walked into this incredibly cold freezer and you're just surrounded by tubes of like 400,000 year old ice. It's just amazing to be in that space and to think about the discipline and the reverence that these scientists have for these incredible, incredibly valuable pieces of ice that have been drilled out of the Arctic so that we can analyze the temperature of the clouds that made the snow almost half a million years ago. It's just mind blowing. It just becomes overwhelming. And the crew and the showrunner and I, our attitude was like, yeah, if you're feeling something, just feel it. Don't worry if it's kind of over the top. Because we did want to convey the kind of excitement and giddiness that you can have when you're doing science or when you're investigating something that doesn't seem worth investigating. That was very important to us in the show. We wanted to have that spirit of, like, excitement and reverence for simple things and especially for science, you know, especially for hard science.

Well, that was another thing. To Natio's credit, they really let us keep in a lot of those kind of crazy moments. And to the scientists credit and the experts credit, like a lot of times they would join in and goof off, which.

Yeah, John Collins. That was. That was outstanding. That was a really, I'm gonna say a genuinely joyous afternoon. I mean, we were feeling a lot of joy and happiness in that airplane hangar.

Because he was going to show us all these different airplane designs. And I was just thinking in the moment, like, how are we going to make this, like, dynamic or interesting? And then I was like, let's just think. Let's make up a paper airplane musical. He was like, okay, sure. And the crew were like, yeah, Go for it. Like, let's see if you can do it. And we did it. And then at the end of the day, we're, like, driving away. And Dan, our showrunner, you know, the guy who's kind of in charge of the shoot, was like, you know, I just realized we shot nothing else. Like, there is no backup plan for the network if they don't like our musicals. So I hope they like their musical. But in the end, it's like those moments that the viewers really respond to, I think, because they're a little out of the ordinary. But, yeah, John Collins was. He had a great singing voice.

That took us. It took us a long time to get through some of those songs with a straight. Because, you know, we made them up in the moment. You know, we didn't go in with, like, a script or anything. And so we would make up these songs, and then it would take us, like. I feel like the one about. The one about the orphan. I feel like it took us maybe 20 times to get through that without. I mean, obviously we lost it at the end, but to get through that with a straight face, just to get the lyrics out, it kind of took forever. Like, we were running out of time. But everybody involved was like, if we capture this and we get this, this will be like nothing in the history of tv. And those moments were always super exciting for all of us. You know, when you feel like, yeah, we're doing something a little bit different here, and if this gets on tv, then it feels like we got away with something.

He had some pipes.

Yeah, what's that?

He had some pipes.

No, he had a wonderful, wonderful Barracombe singing voice. I mean, it was perfect. Yeah.

What are some topics that folks can look forward to? Or what are you definitely doing? And what would you like to do?

I don't know. We have to wait and see about a second season. I mean, a lot of topics that have been suggested. We have a list of 100 topics. When we went out to pitch the show about a year and a half ago, we knew that we would have to convince people that this thing had legs and that we could keep going and going. So we came up with a list of 100 topics and a lot of the. I mean, actually. How to sit down. It's interesting that you chose that for the students. How to sit down was one of them. How to walk.

Oh, really?

Does he have a good singing voice? Do you, Tim, sing a song about sitting down right now.

This is your audition. I really want to do how to bounce a ball. I think that would be cool because I think bouncing is very interesting. And how to clap, I think. I mean, the thing that we realized in watching people's reactions to the episodes is that people really respond when there's something they can do, when they can participate at home while they're watching. So how to throw a paper airplane or how to tie your shoes were big hits because people could just sit there and press pause and actually practice tying their shoe. The different techniques that I did with Professor Shoelace.

What's that?

Yeah, he was incredible. Yeah, I'd wanted to meet him for a while. He was another. I mean, that's another example of a guy who was just up, just up for anything and was such a good sport and just so knowledgeable and goofy and delightful. That was just. That was another amazing shoot. I was just so happy that he agreed to fly to America and hang out with us.

All right.

Right now.

Oh, my God. All right, you're kind of putting me on the spot here.

This is David Rees. Welcome to erasable podcast number 50, starring me. There's a melody in there somewhere.

It's gonna take archaeologists a thousand years to find the melody.

We can auto tune you.

Yeah, do that. Make me sound like T pain.

That was awesome.

Oh, you mean on the show?

So the apron on the show is actually different from the apron in the book. The apron that I wear in the book is an old Katz's deli apron that somebody gave my ex wife and me as like a housewarming gift a long time ago or something that I just turned backwards when my friend who's a printmaker and uses an old Vanderkook press said, well, if you're gonna look like an artisan, you need a black apron. That became like a very. That became like a crucial, like, you know, visual component to that book and to the Whole pencil sharpening thing.

So that's just a. That's just a backwards Katz's deli ape. And then when it came time to shoot the show, I realized that I wanted an apron that was the same length, but I wanted pockets because I wanted to be able to hold note cards or pens or whatever. So we bought an apron, and we only had one. We kind of goofed because we had four identical pairs of shirts and four identical pairs of. Four identical shirts, four identical pairs of blue jeans, four pairs of identical black socks, four identical undershirts, and one apron. And then one day we lost the apron and we were supposed to shoot and we went into a panic and they went out and bought a ton of aprons. But I was very particular about the aprons. Like, some of them, the straps were too narrow or the apron was too long. Anyway, at this point, I have the original Katz's apron. I have a black apron that I got in Germany when I was on the German book tour, because I had forgotten my apron. And so somebody went out and got me a German apron. And then I have four, I think, aprons from going deep. And then I think I have another apron. That's. I think I have, I don't know, seven or eight black aprons.

But we wanted the black apron to be like Mr. Rogers cardigan sweater. Like, it's something that's a trademark. Yeah, exactly. And when I go out into the world, I put on my apron, you know, I'm the guy wearing. And it was amazing to us because the network never, never. Because we were like, are we going to have to explain preemptively explain to the network about this? And my recollection is no one at the network ever asked a single question about the apron. And I feel like in all the times I see people talking about the show on Twitter, I think maybe two people ever have been like, oh, and by the way, why are you always wearing a black apron? It was just. People were just like, very understanding. Like, yeah, I guess this is just like. This is just his uniform.

Doing his research.

Yeah, exactly. Right.

Well, you mean. Well, I just went out on tour with him. You mean then.

No, I used to wear the black apron when I would do live pencil sharpening things. But when I was out with John last week or two weeks ago, I was actually teaching people how to fold a simplified version of the Suzanne, the John Collins airplane. I would just wear whatever because I didn't want it to be a thing. Like, every time I perform live, I have to wear this. I don't want it to feel like, where's your apron? Yeah, like a gag, you know, or whatever. Like.

Yeah, it was very fun. We used to tour a lot together back when he was writing his books and I was doing get yout War on. And we would go out and a lot of times we would tour with Jonathan. Jonathan Colton. This was, I don't know, 10 years ago. And then we hadn't done it. We hadn't done it in a while. And he asked me to go out and, yeah, we had a really, really super fun week. I mean, it was good, cool cities. A couple cities I'd never been to. Like, Birmingham was incredible. He's a good travel company. He's a great conversationalist. It's good to just hang out and goof off and stuff. And then I had a question. Listening. Have you guys made any? I can't remember which one of you guys was talking about it, but one of you is obsessed with the same sharpener that I have, which is that single blade sharpener. The German one.

I'm blanking on the name. The one that kind of produces the same tapered point that my El Casco does.

Yeah. And that's no longer in production, right?

Are you serious?

And are those blades the same blades that you can get? Just like a standard KUM blade, or are they longer?

But a little blade like a KUM might have enough flex in it that you could just force it. I didn't realize that the blade itself is curving. It's not just. It's not just the chuck. It's not the hole that you're putting it into.

Yeah, it's a badass sharpener in my book. I did a bunch of stuff with antique pencil sharpeners up at an antique store in New England. That specializes in old office equipment. And a lot of those are so beat up, you can't use them anymore again, because they were just like prosaic machines that were just used until they were worn out. But a lot of those things, I feel like, man, if you made a new version of the Jupiter 2. Which is essentially a milling device. That you would just swap out different blades for different points. Like, surely you could sell that at some highfalutin store. You know what I mean? Those things are just so beautiful. And then when I was in England and I went. I mean, I'm sorry, I was in Germany and Berlin, and I went to. What's it called? Dusee Dadinga, the Museum of Things. Which is this massive collection of, like, very, like, salt shakers, transistor radios. And they had the Iduna sharpener, which I had read about in Petrosky's book. And never seen one in person. And again, that thing was just like. Then they let me hold it and take a photograph with it. When I explained that I was there to promote my book about pencil sharpeners, pencil sharpening. And that, again, was just like an amazing. You know, those old sharpeners, if you didn't know what they were for, you would have no idea what they were, what their purpose was.

Back in an era before we had settled on these. On the few standard designs for pencil sharpeners. And you would have, like, the perfect point. Which doesn't look anything like a pencil sharpener. You know what I mean? Like vertical pencil sharpeners with rotating blades. And then something like Jupiter, which you. You know, the pencil is completely encased in the sharpener. You know, you don't hold the pencil. It's all within the sharpener.

You know, all those things. A little shaver at the. You know, at the time, you don't see that anymore, except in that reproduction. All that stuff is very interesting to me.

Right? So this guy, Branford House Antiques, his actual, his typewriter collection is what bankrolls his store because typewriters are actually his specialty. Pencil sharpeners. He was like, yeah, just throw them all in this Tupperware bin and go out to that barn and take your photos. He was like really mellow about it. We were really all right. But his typewriters, he's selling for 20, 30 grand to European collectors. And those typewriters again, yeah, you look at it and you're like, what planet on what kind of spaceship is this thing? The dashboard? There's no way this is the typewriter. They're completely nuts.

David Reif, thank you so much for joining us on the Ares fool podcast. It's really been an honor. It's been a whole lot of fun talking to you. Where can people find you on the Internet? And is there anything else you'd like to plug before we sign off?

You can go to artisanalpencilsharpening.com and you can watch Going Deep with David Rees on hulu. Now all 10 episodes are up on Hulu, so those are probably the best things to do.

Oh, my Twitter name is DavidRease.

Well, that's very. So that was my. I joined Twitter when I started a URL shortening service for Twitter called your sheltoningsurfacefortwitter.com and my username was Lets Get Short. And at some point my agent said it would be good for your online media presence if you had your actual name. Alright. So that was a compromise they made in the interest of base commerce, base popularity. So now I think let's Get Short is just like a Russian robot sending out text. So My Twitter is DavidReis. R E E S.

Johnny, where can people find you on the Internet? I am@pencilrevolution.com on the browser. On Twitter I am Ensolution, which is hard to spell but easy to say. And on Instagram I am JohnnyGamber. All one word, no punctuation. How about you, Andy?

I'm not gonna sing it.

Oh man, that's tempting. If somebody lays down a beef.

That's really fast.

You can follow me on Twitter or imwassum and you can follow me on Instagram. Therewriting arsenal. We are the Erasable podcast, and we thank you so much for listening. You can visit us on the web. The URL for this this episode is erasable us15. Please join our Facebook group. It's a whole lot of fun. People talking about pencils in extreme detail. And that's facebook.comgroups erasable. Is that correct? Yes, that is. And you can also follow us on Twitter raceablepodcast. Thank you so much for listening, and we'll talk to you soon.