A Story and a Song (A Memory Palace/Song Exploder Crossover Event)
the memory palace
Nate DiMeo
4.8 • 7.3K Ratings
🗓️ 10 April 2026
⏱️ 27 minutes
🧾️ Download transcript
Summary
Order The Memory Palace book now, dear listener. On Bookshop.org, on Amazon.com, on Barnes & Noble, or directly from Random House. Or order the audiobook at places like Libro.fm.
The Memory Palace is a proud member of Radiotopia from PRX. Radiotopia is a collective of independently owned and operated podcasts that’s a part of PRX, a not-for-profit public media company. If you’d like to directly support this show, you can make a donation at Radiotopia.fm/donate.
You can hear Rollercoaster and more of Hrishi's music at Hrishikesh.co. Pre-order his new album wherever you do that sort of thing!
Music
- Halcyon and Photosynteses and Embryo by H. Takehashi
- Intro by Library Tapes
- The Florist Wears Knee Breeches by M. Sage
Notes
- I found Andrew Isenberg's book, The Destruction of the Bison, An Environmental History, completely fascinating.
- If you want to do a deep dive on Madison Grant, I'd recommend Defending the Master Race: Conservation, Eugenics, and the Legacy of Madison Grant by John Peter Spiro.
- If you want to do a deep dive on the Catalina Buffalo, this site is a fun place to start.
Transcript
Click on a timestamp to play from that location
| 0:00.0 | Last weekend, I was standing on a bluff above the ocean, and I felt one of my very favorite feelings. |
| 0:09.0 | It's this feeling that I love so much that I have come to realize that I tell these stories here on the Memory Palace, |
| 0:16.0 | largely because I'm chasing that feeling, maybe trying to conjure in others too. |
| 0:24.7 | It's a thing that happens to me, and honestly, maybe only me. |
| 0:26.4 | You may not relate to this at all. |
| 0:33.8 | But sometimes I'm flooded with the sense of the past and the present overlaying on top of each other in the same space. |
| 0:40.4 | I'm suddenly aware of myself there in the present moment as just one person living one life in the flow of time. It is heady and kind of dorky, but I love it so much. It happens most often |
| 0:47.8 | when I am returning to a place, as I did on this particular weekend, on this particular bluff in |
| 0:52.9 | Rancho Palace Verdes, a town on the Southern California coast. And so there, on this particular weekend, on this particular bluff in Rancho Palace Verdes, a town on the |
| 0:54.9 | Southern California coast. And so there, on this perfect California day, looking down and out and across |
| 1:01.6 | the water from up there on this bluff, I had both a sense of that place's history, about how |
| 1:06.9 | the resort where we were staying was once an amusement park called Marine Land, and was there for decades until SeaWorld, its main competitor a couple hours down the road in San Diego, |
| 1:16.6 | was denied a permit from the United States government to capture any more live orcas. |
| 1:21.6 | And so they went to marine land and bought not just both the orcas that it had on display at the park, |
| 1:28.1 | but the whole park along with it and shut it down. |
| 1:32.0 | Then I thought about how the hills and the fields around that spot |
| 1:35.1 | were farmed by Japanese immigrants for nearly a hundred years, |
| 1:39.5 | except for the ones in which those farmers were sent to concentration camps |
| 1:43.2 | by that same United States |
| 1:44.4 | government. But how before that it was all ranchland for horses and cows, all owned by an |
| 1:51.9 | Easter land baron come west to extend his empire. Now before that it had been the land of the Tongva, |
| 1:58.5 | who had fished and foraged and raised their kids there. |
... |
Please login to see the full transcript.
Disclaimer: The podcast and artwork embedded on this page are from Nate DiMeo, and are the property of its owner and not affiliated with or endorsed by Tapesearch.
Generated transcripts are the property of Nate DiMeo and are distributed freely under the Fair Use doctrine. Transcripts generated by Tapesearch are not guaranteed to be accurate.
Copyright © Tapesearch 2026.