Good Faith Ben Dreyfuss

Hello friends,
This is a humorous story about something from my childhood. I could have published it as text but I wanted an excuse to play with Substack’s audio feature and to see if I was smart enough to add intro/outro music. I think I did it ok? Maybe not.
They say the best way to learn is to do, so here you go.
I do some accents in it lol.
Best,
Ben

Update: if you would rather read this, here is the “script,” but warning: it is not grammatical! I wrote it for ears, not for eyes!
I got me a sister. Her name is emily. I love her from here to there but this is a story about a thing she done once when we was young which was a very not nice thing to do.
We gotta go back to the early 90s. I was six or seven and she was eight or nine. Don’t matter exactly how old we were; was was children.
We moved to Idaho because our momma divorced our poppa and fell in love with this hick surgeon she done met when he took out my tonsils one christmas when we’s was visitin’ for the holidays.
And we lived in this big white house that was big only cause it was tall. Aint a wide house, but a tall house. And it was on the bank of a river. Bigwood River they call it here. Lot of grass around the house, some of it long. One day my sister she done been playin’ out there in the long grass and she found herself a snake. A garter snake. Aint got poison, aint got teeth, or maybe it has teeth but they not sharp. This is not a scary snake for adults who know of snakes and their danger.
She gets this snake and puts in a terrarium and brings it to her room on the top floor of this tall house. I lived underneath that room on the second floor and I was quite upset. You see I have what the doctors might call a fear of snakes. I had this fear since as far back as I remember.
You see one day me and my daddy we was in our house in Los Angeles and we was watching a movie on the TV and there was a snake in it and he looked at me and I must have been three or four and he said, “ben, heres what you need to know about snakes. They look slow because they have no legs, but they’re fast! You see a snake, run!” And I listened to my daddy and I got me afraid of snakes. One time we was at the Mulholland Tennis Club, my sister and me, and we were in the playroom for another child’s birthday and as part of that birthday a animal trainer had come to show us the animals. And one of those animals was a massive 20 ft long snake that the trainer placed on everyone’s laps. I refused that. No snake going on my lap, but I was pressured by my peers to touch the touch the snake’s skin and I tell you as sure as I am standing here when I touched that snake, it turned its head and looked at me from across the room and stared with its dead eyes saying, “i hate you and I would eat you if no one else was around.”
I got up and I ran. Many people might tell you if they was subpoenaed here today that I hallucinated that part but I stick by my story and it;’s a he said-snake said.
There another movie I seen back in these old times in Los Angeles and it was called Black Beauty. In that movie this boy is on a ship and then the ship sinks and he wakes up alone on a beach and there is this cobra snake and it is about to kill this boy but then out of the blue comes Black Beauty, a beautiful horse the child had met on the ship when the horse was in bondage being brought to some farm somewhere; they had shared a moment, you see. Now black beauty she comes out of nowhere on this beach because she survived the wreck too and she stomps that cobra to death, cementing her eternal friendship with the boy.
So me I thinking, I need a horse, but I aint old enough to own a horse because I just yay high but anyways, this is a background for the events of one summer day in a very tall house which rested on the abnk of a very small river which the locals in Sun Valley Idaho nevertheless call the Big Wood.
She done brought in that snake from the long grass in a terrarium into her

On this week’s episode of Good Faith Pod, I’m joined by Jonathan Katz, the author of “Gangsters of Capitalism: Smedley Butler, the Marines, and the Making and Breaking of America's Empire.”
We talk about everything! We talk about conspiracy theories! We talk about Cuba! We talk about Teddy Roosevelelt! We talk about earthquakes! We talk about you! Yeah you read that right! We talked about you. Not you in some sort of pretend “listener” sense. We talked about you personally. You! The person reading this! We talked about how great you look and how good you are doing. You should listen. It’s about you. You should actually forward this to your friends and family because they’ll be proud about this talk about you. It’s all good stuff. We talk about you personally in detail.
Buy Jonathan’s book! Subscribe to his substack!
Subscribe to my podcast too!
Do you hate this? Do you hate me? Do you hate the weather? Do you like the weather? Do you like me? Do you like this? Tell me about it in the comments!
Love and love,
Ben



Get full access to Calm Down at www.calmdownben.com/subscribe

Joe Biden has been president for almost 18 months. So, how is it going? On this very serious episode of Good Faith, I chatted with Josh Barro about the state of Biden’s presidency—what’s gone right, what’s gone wrong, and whether or not it’s time for Democrats to panic.
Listen please!
And subscribe to my podcast and leave nice reviews! And subscribe to Josh’s podcast and leave nice reviews!


Get full access to Calm Down at www.calmdownben.com/subscribe

Good news! You can now get my smart thoughts sent directly into your brain via your ears!
For the majority of human history, people used the oral tradition to hand down knowledge from one generation to the next. All types of knowledge. Knowledge about the Trojan War but also knowledge about where the bathroom was located. People would have these rhythmic poems and they’d sing “don’t put your hand in fire, it will burn! you can’t breathe underwater, do not try! if you hear thunder in the sky, do not cry, sometimes that happens!” Then about 2,500 years ago people started to write things down more and the world changed. Reading, that was the new Jazz!
No longer! As of today you might as well gauge your eyes out, because you do not need to read ever again.
Say hello to the first episode of the Good Faith Podcast! A show about everything this substack is about, hosted by me, Ben Dreyfuss. It’s not replacing anything! There will still be all the usual fun text based posts here (I guess you shouldn’t have gauged your eyes out), but it does compliment them.
If you are a paying subscriber to Good Faith, there will also be lots fo fun bonus content for you to enjoy. :)
On this episode, I chatted with a total stranger off the street named Emily Dreyfuss. A Senior Fellow at Harvard’s Shorenstein Center, she’s an expert on misinformation, disinformation, and internet manipulation and the effects those things have on our political system. She has a book coming out in a few months called “Meme Wars,” which you should pre-order.
We talk about about everything from 9/11 to James Comey.
Special thank you to Tommy Harron for producing this episode and Emily Dreyfuss for coming on!
Listen, won’t you?
And please subscribe on Apple Podcasts and leave very nice reviews so that the Apple Machine recommends my podcast to strangers. Thank you!!


Get full access to Calm Down at www.calmdownben.com/subscribe