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Conversation Lesson

Dan: Aaron Campbell, how are you doing today?

Aaron: Hey, Danny D Douglass, what’s going on man?

Dan: Not much. Should we let the listeners in on the fact that we’re doing this across the ocean? Me in Japan and you …

Aaron: Yeah. Why not? I think it’s a technological wonder.

Dan: Your secret location, where are you today?

Aaron: My secret location. I am in the state of … The Sunshine State.

Dan: The Sunshine State, is this a quiz? Or you’re going to tell where it is?

Aaron: No. This is the Sunshine State, the state of Florida.

Dan: Hawaii really should be the sunshine state. They probably get a lot of rain there.

Aaron: Yeah. I don’t know. But the nickname of Florida is the Sunshine State. That’s where I am.

Dan: You are doing what?

Aaron: I’m hanging out with my family. We’re getting some good family time.

Dan: We are doing this recording today over Skype and we’re talking about mistaken identity.

Aaron: Yes. Exactly. Mistaken Identity.

Dan: There’s some pretty wild stories this month.

Aaron: Pretty wild stories, I mean, mistaken identity can easily happen.

Dan: Have you ever been mistaken for somebody you aren’t?

Aaron: Not seriously. I think sometimes people might think I look like a certain famous person or movie star. But I think it’s just in jest. I don’t think they’re actually serious about it.

Dan: Didn’t you tell me once you got assaulted by a random person in Mexico? Did that person think you were someone else?

Aaron: No. That person was just kind of crazy and they wanted to punch me or something. Fair enough.

Dan: You’ve got a kind of punchable-looking face.

Aaron: Yeah. Why not? Go ahead and punch me. But, no, I don’t think I’ve ever been seriously, you know, my identity. How about you?

Dan: I have. Thank you for asking. I have. When I was at the young age of 20, I think around 20.

Aaron: You were just a baby.

Dan: I was in Union Station in DC waiting for a train, I think, to New York. I noticed a whole gang of deaf girls following me around the station.

Aaron: Oh, really?

Dan: I was reading a newspaper and I saw a crowd or like 20 deaf girls wildly signing and pointing at me.

Aaron: When you say girls are you talking about teenagers or are you talking about young, like elementary school girls?

Dan: These were high school girls. I was in college, I was 20, they look like they are in high school. I started to get a little uncomfortable. I was starting to get a little weirded out, because there was all this wild signing and pointing at me.

Aaron: Who did they think you were?

Dan: I moved to a different part of the station. They followed me. Finally, one of the deaf girls came with a note saying “Are you Keanu Reeves?”

Aaron: Oh, god! You said “Yes, I am”.

Dan: They weren’t blind. They recognized a good looking young man.

Aaron: Yeah, right.

Dan: Yeah. That was pretty funny.

Aaron: You didn’t milk it?

Dan: No, I didn’t milk it, I didn’t ask for any phone numbers. This month’s story started with Beck, Adolf Beck.

Aaron: Yes. That’s right. Adolf Beck. Good old Adolf.

Dan: Adolf are not a name that’s very popular these days.

Aaron: No. I think Hitler had something to do with that.

Dan: I wonder how many people are named Adolf. Probably not many.

Aaron: Probably not so many.

Dan: But the guy that got Adolf in trouble’s name was John Smith. How many John Smiths do you think there are in the world?

Aaron: There’s a few.

Dan: I did a little research. John is the most common men’s name in the US. Smith is the most common last name in the US. But, interestingly, the combination John Smith it doesn’t even make the top 10.

Aaron: Are you kidding me?

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: Really?

Dan: I think probably because people know … People have this connotation that John Smith is such a generic, phony sounding, place-holder name. It sounds like an alias, John Smith. I think people whose family name is Smith are hesitant to give that name to their son. James Smith, most common name in the US, James Smith.

Aaron: Really? James Smith.

Dan: Followed by Michael Smith. Top three combinations are all Smiths.

Aaron: Wow, I did not know that.

Dan: Put that in your back pocket. Use that to impress someone.

Aaron: I’ll put that in my pipe and smoke it.

Dan: John Smith … I wonder even back at that time if John Smith was just a placeholder name.

Because for a con man to use the alias John Smith sounds like he wasn’t so creative.

Aaron: No, he should’ve used Dan Douglass, that would’ve been much better.

Dan: Lord Willoughby on the other hand I like that name.

Aaron: Lord Willoughby, that’s quite a name.

Dan: That’s a name you can trust.

Aaron: That’s fine, Lord Willoughby.

Dan: “Lord Willoughby wants to borrow you jewelry”, sure, why not?

Aaron: Why not? I’d give my jewelry to him.

Dan: John Smith, Lord Willoughby. I think his real name was Meyer or Meyer, Meyer probably.

He actually had quite an interesting back story. Just like Beck was this man of the world who was from Norway, lived in England, then went to South America, was a singer, then an investor, a businessman. This guy Meyer also had quite a history. I think he was from Austria, he had gone to Hawaii of all places in the 1800s and studied people with some kind of infectious diseases. Then he went on to, supposedly, become the personal physician of the king of Hawaii.

Aaron: Are you kidding me? Really?

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: How about that.

Dan: Then he had a history of different business investments. I guess, which all went sour, he ended up becoming a con man. That bad guy, he clearly knew about all the trouble that Beck had gone through on his behalf. He was willing to put him through it again.

Aaron: Yeah. As soon as he realized that Beck had gotten out of prison he went at it again.

Dan: Yeah. I wonder what happened to that guy. If they threw the book at him.

Aaron: I don’t know.

Dan: What would you have done? What would you have done in this situation?

Aaron: You mean, as whom?

Dan: As Beck. How would you’ve proven your innocence?

Aaron: I don’t know, I mean, it’s hard when everyone thinks that you’re that person. How do you prove that you’re not that person? I suppose I would’ve taken the circumcision route to its biggest explain. That didn’t seem to sway the authorities in any way which it should have, but it didn’t. I really don’t know, I mean, what can you do in that situation? Everyone thinks you’re the person that you’re not. How do you disprove them? How do you set them straight? I don’t know.

Dan: Apparently this story is in British Legal textbooks. Because it is, first of all, it was the impetus for setting up a court of appeals, which at that time they did not have, I guess if you are guilty you’re guilty. That’s it. Also, it’s cited to this day as evidence of the unreliability of eye witness testimony.

Aaron: Yeah. Right.

Dan: Apparently, they didn’t really look all that much alike, they dress similarly, they had nice clothes, they were older, maybe both in their 50, 60’s, they had grey hair and a mustache. But that description fits a lot of people.

Aaron: What I wonder is what made those initial women come forward and demand that that is the person, that’s the person that did this to me, that committed this crime against me. How could they have been so sure that that was the guy?

Dan: I think the first person who called him out, she just was mistaken, a guy that looks similar, she thought “this is the guy”, then they pulled in other women who had reported this crimes years in the past. Maybe their memory was a little fuzzy and they put up a lineup and he was like the only older guy with a mustache and grey hair in the lineup, of course they were like “Yeah, that’s the guy”. Then the second time he got arrested, apparently the police kind of set him up. There was another report of the same scam, some Lord Willoughby or some phony Aristocrat borrows a woman’s jewelry with the promise of buying her new jewelry, the cop who took that report remembered the case of Beck. Then, they were “look, Beck’s out, he’s out of prison, it must be him, let’s get him.” The police told that woman who reported the crime “Okay, we know who did it, this is the guy, let’s go accuse him”

She probably saw him, thought that the police say it’s this guy, so it must be this guy.

Aaron: Yeah. Man, what bad luck, you know.

Dan: The power that the police have to shake people’s sketchy, vague memory. Memories are a tricky thing. Then when you have somebody with authority saying “Yes, this is the guy” it fixes. I remember in the 1990’s there were all of these cases of psychiatrist or hypnotist, they were bringing people back to their childhood, they were all these reports of child abuse. Do you remember this? The word that came out to be false.

Aaron: No. I don’t think I remember that.

Dan: Turned out these psychiatrists unknowingly were kind of leading people to create the stories in their head.

Aaron: To make these claims, right?

Dan: Yeah. Memory is a sketchy thing. We think of it as this fixed thing.

Aaron: Maybe it can be manipulated or influenced by people who are talking with you or have influence over you, yeah, for sure.

Dan: The current conception of memory is something that every time we remember something we’re really recreating it and adding to it or taking things away. They’ve done some studies that show that people who think about an incident less or more likely to, upon recall, have an accurate memory of the event. For example, if me and you had a discussion six years ago about what we want Deep English to be, and I think about it everyday and you never think about it. If we’re both to compare our memory of that event, since you have not been thinking about it, it’s more likely that you’ll have an accurate idea of what that conversation was about.

Aaron: That explains a lot Dan. That’s why I have a very accurate view of Deep English.

Dan: Right, that’s why you recognized when we started this thing, you said “Dan, you’re going to be the boss, you have the vision, you’re the skipper, you’re the captain, wherever you go I will follow”

Aaron: That’s right, in your dreams, buddy.

Dan: The other case was that terrible, I mean, I guess terrible for one family and wonderful for the other of Patricia Noonan.

Aaron: Yeah. Terrible for one family, wonderful for the other, but in fact, at the beginning it was the reverse, it was terrible for one and wonderful for the other. I was thinking about this case, specifically, trying to imagine what it would be like to lose a loved one, a daughter, to this kind of accident and think that she’s dead, go through all the mourning and the saying goodbye and burying the body into the ground, just letting go. Then to find out that she’s actually still alive, how would you feel? It would be a mixture of elation plus a kind of horror in a way, because you understand that your elation is at someone else’s expense, who has gone through weeks or however long it took, of knowing that, or thinking that their daughter was still alive, then realizing that actually that’s not their daughter, their daughter had passed away a week or two previous and this is someone who is not your daughter. Imagine what that must feel like, it’s so unbelievable.

Dan: Yeah. That’s an interesting point, you know. When somebody dies in an earthquake on the other side of the world, it’s terrible you think “Well, it’s terrible, but it’s kind of hard to actually empathize” but, if just went through that exact same experience for the last two weeks of your life, well, the empathy levels must be, you know, off the charts.

Aaron: I just can’t imagine it. Yeah. That’s a really powerful story. It hasn’t just happened once.

That’s happened before, right? That particular case I think happened in 1984, in the story. But there was another recent case that happened in 2006 in the United States. A van full of young people crashed, something similar happened, a number of children died and there were still one that was left alive, they mistook the identity of that child and a similar type of thing happened. It’s not unheard of, I’m sure those are just reported cases in the news, but perhaps this is happened in other countries as well and we just don’t know about it.

Dan: Yeah. What I wonder about is her funeral. To wake up after your funeral has happened.

It’s not an experience many people get to hear about what actually happened at their funeral. I bet she has a lot of questions.

Aaron: I’m sure she did. I wonder what she felt like when she found out about it.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: I also wonder, this is totally tangential, but we should have people’s funerals before they die, so they can be present at their funeral and see what people say about them, you know. I wonder if that should be a new custom.

Dan: I’m only going to say good stuff at your funeral.

Aaron: Thanks Dan, I appreciate that, that’s why I pay you to do those things. Because I need somebody to say something nice about me.

Dan: I’ll sing your favorite Whitney Houston song.

Aaron: Thanks man, I appreciate that, that’s very nice of you.

Dan: I am planning to outlive you, I know you’ve been doing a lot of running. But I think I’m going to outlive you.

Aaron: Okay. Fair enough. No. But, I mean, it would be good to have you at my funeral. So somebody can say some nice things about me, that’s nice. Thanks man.

Dan: The final story. Do you know how to pronounce this guy’s name?

Aaron: No. It’s kind of hard to pronounce, man. How would you pronounce it?

Dan: I’m going to have to look this one up. But maybe I’d say Junliang.

Aaron: That’s good enough, I think.

Dan: It’s actually, I’m not sure how accurate it is, I can only find… There are lots of articles on the internet that will put links to. Most of them said that he was unidentified or they refer to him as Mr. L.

Aaron: Really? Why is that?

Dan: One article said Junliang, so that makes me wonder is Liang, Mr. L. Is that actually his last name, Liang, and that article just mushed two names together?

Aaron: Yeah. It could be. I don’t know. Anyway, the ordeal he went through was pretty incredible.

Dan: Yeah.

Aaron: Considering he was just a tourist.

Dan: Yeah. It just goes to show. You got to study that English. End up in a refugee camp.

Aaron: If you can’t communicate in English, man. You’re in trouble.

Dan: Yeah. We should put that on our website.

Aaron: That’s right. We should get him to say something.

Dan: We should to this guy some free English lessons, I didn’t think about that.

Aaron: We should. We totally should.

Dan: How do we find this guy?

Aaron: I don’t know.

Dan: 31-year-old Chinese backpacker, I wonder if it was his first time out of China and he ends up in a refugee camp.

Aaron: …31, I doubt it. But, it could be. What I find amazing about this is the fact that something like this could happen, the German bureaucracy could allow someone to fill out a completely incorrect form and not have some system of checking as to whether this is legitimate or not.

Dan: Yeah. The red tape, just amazing. This guy, they didn’t understand him, but apparently they understood that he wanted his passport back. Like kind of saying “Passport, passport”.

Then they go “Just go sit down, have something to eat”. They gave him, along with all the refugees, some pocket money equaling about 30 dollars or so. Which makes me think it wasn’t like they were locked up, maybe they had some freedom to move around this town. But, their passports were taken. Which is odd. Why would be they taking refugees’ passports, these refugees don’t want to leave, they’re requesting to stay.

Aaron: How many of the refugees have passports? Maybe a lot of them don’t. I don’t know.

Dan: The majority are from Syria or the Middle East. You would think a Chinese guy would really stand out.

Aaron: Apparently he did. That was the whole reason that … One of the guards or one of the staff members went to him and notice that something’s different about this guy, because he’s dressed differently, he seems totally confused, he just seemed really out of place. It’s funny that he used an app on his smartphone to do the translation. That’s very telling of the times.

Dan: Smartphone app. You want to spend 15 days on refugee camps, stick with your smartphone app. You want to get fluent, Deep English. Our new sales, our new tagline.

Aaron: Yeah.

Dan: That one had a clear-cut happy ending. Unlike the earlier two stories. Apparently the guy was not afraid to continue on with his travels.

Aaron: That’s kind of the part I like most about the story, was that he was willing to just let that go, chalk it up for experience and move on with his original plan of doing some sightseeing, enjoying the wonders of Germany. I thought that was kind of cool.

Dan: Well, with that. We bring this to an end, I hope your travels, you get some free time, I know you’re doing a lot of work there. Safe travels and until next time.

Aaron: All right, man. We’ll talk to you next time.

Dan: See you later.

Aaron: See you.