Secretly Incredibly Fascinating - here's what we're doing for the Maximum Fun Drive! (plus a free bonus show for you)

Episode Date: March 18, 2024

Today is the start of Maximum Fun Drive 2024! Alex and Katie are here to talk about the podcasts, live shows, gifts, potential art, potential game nights, and other rad stuff we're doing to celebrate. Then, the rest of this file is last week's bonus show, as a treat for you.To experience the many things Alex and Katie talk about, and make this entire podcast possible, become a Maximum Fun member! Here's the link: https://maximumfun.org/join/Come hang out with us on the SIF Discord: https://discord.gg/wbR96nsGg5

Folks, hello. If you hit play on this message, thank you, because it's a special treat for you. And also, we want to tell you about the Maximum Fun Drive. It's me, Alex, and I'm with Katie. Hi, Katie. Hi. You mean drive like in a car, like in an automobile? No, silly. A fundraising drive for our donor-supported podcast network that we're so happy to be part of. And you can't spell fundraising without fund and D and also raising. So we made you guys a bunch of fun stuff for the Maximum Fund Drive.

One of them is recapping a pretty wonky PSA type show, which I think is influencing our vibe right now. We have just been talking about. I don't know what you mean, Alex. influencing our vibe right now. We have just been talking about- I don't know what you mean, Alex. We made you guys a bunch of stuff. And then also we have goals for this drive. If we reach certain amounts of donors,

we'll do even more wonderful stuff that we'll talk about. And then most of this audio file is a recent SIF bonus show because we make those every week. So you'll hear last week's bonus show about decaf coffee and how fun that is and how nice it is as a show. I feel like not everybody knows we're making a second entire podcast every week. And for a very small and easy amount of support of the show, you get to hear it. Yeah, it's a little treat. It's a little just a little treat just between us and you and all of your favorite podcast

listening friends. Yeah. Honestly, like I have heard from some MaxFun donors that they say they only listen to the bonus show and they haven't checked out our main podcast yet because they see the bonus and like the MaxFun feed. That's a little weird. Yeah. It's a little weird, but look, I look i'm not gonna look they're paying us so

i'm uh that's if whatever floats your boat also i do feel like once we have recorded the show and we go into the bonus it is sometimes like a different energy because we've done the show then we do a bonus and maybe we even get a little more wacky. I agree. Because each bonus show, like I say in the outros, it's about one obviously incredibly fascinating thing related to the topic. So it is like wilder most of the time and really fun. Yeah. Like I think it really stands up as its own entire podcast if you just listen to it back to back. I go from main podcast mode to bonus mode. And this is my bonus mode.

Woo-hoo. That's the voice I speak in. People love it. He does that voice the whole time. It's inexplicably people do love it. And you will too. Yes, you will. Okay, enough of that.

Anyway. We are doing a bunch of things for the Max Fund Drive, no matter how it goes. The PSA thing I mentioned, we made a totally different podcast episode from what we usually do. And it's a recap show about the first episode of a TV show that was made by the U.S. Postal Service. It turns out the U.S. Postal Service made an entire scripted crime drama for teens and education. And it's really bad and weird. And it's about postal inspectors who inspect postal crimes. Yeah. So that is in the bonus feeds for Maximum Fun.

And it's the BOCO, the bonus content for The Drive. And everybody already supporting the show gets it. And you get it if you start to support us in this time. And we also appeared on a like kickoff podcast for the Max Fun Drive where we play trivia and it's hosted by J. Keith Van Straten and Helen Hong from the podcast Go Fact Yourself. We did it with our buddies, Ellen and Christian Weatherford from the podcast Just the Zoo of Us. That should also be in feeds for a whole bunch of Max Fun shows. Us on that. It was fun. I'm bad at trivia, but at least I had fun. And I took some big swings. So I had fun too. Yeah, it was a good time. And we are also going

to do an online live show in about a week. It's on March 24th, Sunday, March 24th. We're guesting on it. It's organized by our buddies, Ella and Caroline and Tom from the Let's Learn Everything podcast. So there's details about that in the description of this if you want to join that live stream. I feel like that's the best live show format for us because everybody in the world can see it. Yeah, I'm a little nervous because I feel like I've never been live. And usually we edit out the like high-pitched screaming I do every five minutes or so. So I hope people enjoy that. Yeah, because people will not tolerate a strange voice on a podcast. Whoa!

Like that's how I talk on the bonuses, remember? Anyway. It sounds like you're doing someone. What's his name? It changed into Mickey Mouse at the end. I'm sorry. Yeah, but it's not. It's what's his name?

It's the guy who's in the Marvelous Mr. Lumpet. Don Knotts? Don Knotts! Don Knotts. It's Don Knotts. There we go. We got there. What are we talking about?

Please give us money. I promise not to talk about Don Knotts. So yeah, that live stream, it's going to be really fun on the live stream. And on top of that, we might be in more shows or streams. The SIF Discord is the best place to find out if any of that happens. And then also today, since it's a Monday, we're putting out our weekly bonus show like we do every week. And then I'm attaching a previous one to this for everybody to hear.

Only members and donors get to hear that bonus show that's new this week. Like every week, we really are making a 15 to 20 minute episode of an entire another podcast. Like if you listen to our main show in this public feed, you don't hear the whole show. There's something else that is also amazing. Yeah. It's like ketchup on your fries. You're just going to eat dry fries? on your fries. You're just going to eat dry fries? I mean, I do, but you shouldn't. I sometimes eat them without ketchup if I want the taste. Can't get into it. Can't get into it. Oh, no. We're breaking the paradigm. I don't like ketchup, so I don't know why I phrased it that way,

but I feel like it's relatable to people who do like ketchup. Maybe we're both trying to be the most relatable and normal we can, but it's coming through that we're not. I also drink ketchup. I don't, but yes, for the purpose of this podcast, I also drink ketchup. On top of this Max Von Drive time, which by the way is two weeks, it starts today, On top of this MaxFun drive time, which by the way is two weeks, it starts today, March 18th, and then it runs for two weeks. And there's a bunch of just rewards that people get if they support the network. There's pins, there's tote bags, there's like a game board, I believe, this year. And then on top of that, we're going to do special benefits for Sith backers if we hit amounts of donors during this time.

Backers with benefits is what we're calling it. Nope, nope. Why won't my machine edit that out? Typing, typing, typing. Oh, no. The first goal, if we get 150 newer upgrading donors, we'll hold a game night. It'll be sometime in the next year. Me and Katie and a couple of guests will live stream a game of Wingspan, the board game of

birds. It's a cards and board game of birds. It's really fun. Yes. I like birds. I enjoy a good bird. I enjoy a good game. Yeah. Wingspan is a good game because no matter what happens, you have a bunch of birds, right? Even if you're losing,

you're like, I have a lot of birds. It's pretty good. Yeah, exactly. How can you be a loser if you are surrounded by birds? And then next goal, 200 donors. We will do something for our 200th episode, which will come out in like middle of June. And so we've commissioned digital poster art in the past for anniversary episodes. If we have that support, we're able to pay an artist the right amount. And it's an excellent artist named're able to pay an artist the right amount. And it's an excellent artist named Adam Koford who did our previous posters. He's on board to do another one if we have enough support. So if we get 200 donors,

you'll get digital art in mid-June celebrating that. And he smuggled himself onto the unsinkable Titanic and he promises to paint Alex. I'm thinking of the last art of his I saw. So I thought of the line, draw me like one of your cartoon Fulus. That would be the last thing I saw from him. Previously, it was Cyclops from X-Men. Anyway, all the most erotic characters. Next goal, 350 donors will do a watch party because like people often ask me, hey, Alex, you made the bison emoji. Are you excited about that Ken Burns documentary about American bison? What did you think of it?

And I haven't gotten to see it yet. Stuff's been really busy. And so I thought if we can hit that level, we'll do a watch party of finally getting to see it. And we'll just watch the two parts of it spread out across two events. It's a short documentary as they go. So we'll check that out. The American buffalo.

Surprisingly, it's not the water buffalo in a slow pan across a buffalo. It's patriotic music swells. So excited. Please donate so we can watch that. Because the other rule is like we're not allowed to watch it unless we reach that goal. We have promised never to watch it. I don't get to see it. We don't get to see it.

It's a difficult contract I signed. Oh, I shouldn't have signed that contract. Was that with Thulu too? I have Thulu on the brain. I don't know why. Is it Cthulhu? I've only ever seen it written and it's the Lovecraft monster. Ah, Cthulhu.

Yeah. I've always pronounced it with a little C in there. It's probably... Cthulhu. Yeah. Who cares how he did it? He was a jerk apparently in his personal life. So yeah, I'll call it Hulu.com.

I thought he was a giant squid monster. Oh, Lovecraft. But yeah, sure. The monster apparently devours cities or something. No, H.P. Lovecraft, the maker of Cthulhu. Oh, him. Yeah. Well, you know, he had his problems with, I think, anti-Semitism.

Anyways. Yeah. And all races apparently. Oh, okay. Across the board. Just across the board races. All right. Yeah. Last goal for fun. If we hit the amazing number of 400 new and upgrading donors, we'll make a second podcast episode of the show we made a silly podcast episode of for you that's out right now of the Postal Inspector TV show by USPS. We'll do more of it. And when you hear that show,

you will know that's a big favor from us because, boy, it's hard to watch one. So we're going to watch a second one if you guys get us there. I'm excited to watch the show about the United States Postal Inspection Service, a.k.a. UPIS, in which there is an inexplicable chemistry between the actor playing the college son and his mother. It's a lot of foreshadowing. And please hop in. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah, it's stiff that it exists. I love it.

There are 105 episodes of that show. Apparently Alex told me that. And I guess I believe him. Yeah. We watched one and there are another 105. So you guys can make us watch more of it if you support our show. And I hope it's coming across like how joyful it is that we have audience support because we want to make that as fun for you as possible too, by doing weird stuff and fun stuff and stuff

where we're outside of our comfort zone. Because it means a lot that any of you back this at all and it makes it possible. And so we want to have fun with it and want to celebrate it. And if we reach 500 donors, we will exhume the corpse of that racist guy we were just talking about. And scold him. And no one will know that's our plan because we, oh no, the mics are on. Oh no, oh no, we did exhuming crap and people know. Love craft. We didn't exactly love your craft when it came to racism.

And yeah, and so there's a link to join the Discord as always. And I'm so excited for you folks to enjoy all the different Maximum Fun Drive stuff of these two weeks. And enjoy the rest of this file. It's last week's bonus show about decaf coffee. We do a bonus show every week. And here's last week's show as a treat. Enjoy. We made it.

We made it to the bonus episode, which means we're enormously thankful to you. Your donations make Secretly Incredibly Fascinating possible. That's why you get a whole nother story that's great, weird, and obviously incredibly fascinating. And Katie, this story is coffee decaffeination. Yeah. How it works and where it came from. I'd never thought about it. I have actually thought about it. I used to hate the taste of coffee. Now I actually quite enjoy

it. I still feel like it feels weird to have like decaffeinated coffee because the expectation is the coffee is the vehicle for the caffeine. But I may the more and more I enjoy the taste of coffee like this, it may become a reality for me where I do start drinking decaffeinated coffee. So I want to learn about it. So I want to learn about it. I was thinking about it. I perceive decaf as the drink of older guys at weddings after the dessert and the cake. I was like, yeah, that's what, because it's free. It's just part of the night, right?

And they would have it. And then now I have it once in a while because I have grown to really like the taste of coffee in my search for all things bitter. I would have never thought I would enjoy the taste of coffee enough to justify me ever having decaffeinated coffee, but it may happen. You never know what direction life is going to take you folks. Key sources for this, we've got digital resources from the Wolfsonian Museum at Florida International University, and also a piece for BBC Future by Stephen Dowling, a rundown of how decaffeination works by Encyclopedia Britannica, and a video by YouTuber and coffee expert James Hoffman.

The topic of coffee could be a whole SIF episode. Super short version of how we have the coffee drink is it is the seeds of the fruit of a tropical shrub. We pull the seeds out of the fruit, roast and grind those seeds, and then steep them in water. And basically everybody calls those seeds coffee beans, even though they are not beans in a botanical sense. They're not a legume. But yeah, it's like the coffee fruit is like a little it's it looks kind of like a little oval red berry type thing. Right. Like, yeah. And then the bean is inside, which is really just the seed.

And you strip out the that fleshy exterior to get to the crude bean, which which is, that's the special sauce that goes in our coffee. Yeah. And any kind of decaf coffee is made by adding one step to the processing of coffee beans. And this step always happens when the beans are what's considered raw. We've pulled them out of the fruit, but we have not roasted them into a brown color. They are still a green kind of fresh seed from a fruit. Yeah. Yeah, and you don't see those in stores because people roast it first, but they are green before people do that.

And the roasting also helps preserve the beans, right? So that's why you would roast them first. So to preserve the bean, increase the shelf stability of the bean. Man, I really want a cup of coffee right now. Sorry, buddy. I should have had us take a break, but nope, we're talking about decaf. We're going to decaf the whole thing. And yeah, and so there's a few different ways of doing this one step that makes beans decaf.

And they all involve the fact that caffeine is a molecule. So we can do chemistry to a molecule. And the first way people developed is to use a chemical solvent on the beans. In modern times, it's usually either a chemical called ethyl acetate or a chemical called methylene chloride. All you need to know is it's a chemical that binds to caffeine. So we repeatedly rinse beans in a chemical called methylene chloride. All you need to know is it's a chemical that binds to caffeine. So we repeatedly rinse beans in a chemical that binds to the caffeine molecules. And then when we remove that solvent, it's taking the caffeine away too. Right.

I know chemical solvent sounds like it would be bad for you. It's not necessarily true. Like there's a lot of chemicals that are fine. And especially like, because like if you bind certain chemicals, they start out bad. But then after the binding process, they become inert. Like, you know, table salt, you know, like sodium on its own and chloride on its own really bad. But sodium chloride, table salt. So chemicals, not necessarily bad.

I don't know anything about these specific chemicals, so I don't know if there's any negative side effects of having those be involved in decaf, but yeah. So just because they're called chemical solvents does not mean they are like Drano or something. Yeah. And super short version, all the modern ones are fine because there's rules and the inventors of this might have used dangerous chemicals. We'll talk about that a little later. Oh, okay. But you're fine today if you have decaf coffee. Yes. When the chemical is dangerous, then you should not drink it. That's my advice as an expert. Yeah. We can turn on our doctor lamps for that, I think. Yeah. Yeah. That's my advice as an expert. Yeah. We can turn on our Dr. Lamps for that,

I think. Yeah. That's good. Yeah. Yeah. And we've invented a few more ways to do this too. There's one that is named the Swiss water process and it's considered organic because there's not solvents involved. What happens is we immerse some beans in hot water long enough to take all the caffeine and flavor out of the beans then we just discard and throw away those beans they're gone and then the water gets run through a carbon filter and the filter is sized in a way where these very large caffeine molecules get trapped in the filter and other molecules that we taste as coffee flavor go through. And then we use that filtered, just the flavor water as a repeated many, many times wash on a second batch of beans. And with an immense amount of washing from that flavor water,

we get the caffeine out of those and generate decaf coffee beans. That's wild. So like you create a wash of pure coffee flavor, no caffeine, take regular beans, and then just whip the caffeine out of those beans by waterboarding them with the pure flavor water. Interesting. It's really weird, yeah. That's super weird. It's like, are we torturing these beans? Do these beans know the location of some hostages?

Right, the people making the decaf are like, I'm haunted by this, and we're going to make an unpopular Oscar movie of the early 2010s about it. Oh, geez, yeah. And then last process to mention here, it's the newest one. And the name sounds hardcore. It's called the supercritical carbon dioxide method. Hell yeah, put it in my mouth. And this process, we do several hours of hot pressurized carbon dioxide blasted onto these green new coffee beans after soaking them in water. And the CO2 takes in the caffeine, then liquefies and evaporates, leaving behind beans without caffeine. Is this allowed in Mormonism?

caffeine. Is this allowed in Mormonism? It's like, I do that all the time. Print it, tape it, broadcast it, pull numbers down, down, down, down, down. Who doesn't like hot carbonization? Am I right or am I right? And yeah, all these processes, they vary in how expensive they are, how time consuming they are. Coffee people debate which ones preserve the most flavor. Like some people feel like the solvent, for example, might be taking out some flavor, not just caffeine. But they all happen at that one stage. And they also all leave behind a little trace amount of caffeine. Right. Just a much smaller amount.

Yeah. Yeah. The Mayo Clinic says that brewed decaf coffee and instant decaf coffee both have about two milligrams of caffeine in an eight ounce cup. The regular kind has 96. So two is not a big deal, but it is there. It's never totally erased. I don't know if you could even really like feel two milligrams. Yeah. It seems like that can just happen and nobody cares your notices. Yeah. Right. Like I think if you had like what, 10 cups of coffee, you'd start feeling it. Oh, of decaf? Yeah. Yeah. And you'd be in the bathroom so much. Like that'd be your main issue.

Not if you calf up. And then other thing for this bonus show is the surprising and weird story of the invention of decaf. And its legacy is still with us in one specific way. That'll be the very end. Coffee, if we ever do a show about it, we'll talk about the many centuries of people making regular coffee. We've had decaf for about 120 years. And this was invented in the early 1900s by a German coffee merchant named Ludwig Rossellius. Of course he's German. For people who like the bitterness of coffee, but do not enjoy the feeling of joy and the release of dopamine following the intake of this bitter, bitter drink. Right. Dopamine is weakness and bitterness is strength.

I'm sorry, Germany. I can say it. I'm German American. Yeah, it's cool. I have some German friends, including Alex. Yeah. And so Ludwig Rossellius, he was in Bremen, Germany. There's now a museum dedicated to him because in the early 1900s, he invented decaf coffee and he also secured U.S. patents for it. He was both a skilled inventor and skilled businessman.

US patents for it. He was both a skilled inventor and skilled businessman. His story is that one day he had a batch of green raw coffee beans that got soaked in some seawater at some point. His company just went ahead and roasted it, tried it, and he thought it tasted good, but not quite as caffeinated as other coffee. And so then he experimented with a bunch of other soaking beans and chemicals and things. He was like, if seawater does a little bit, what would do a lot? He was also, through that accident, thinking about this at all. Most people had never even considered even just this idea, like just caffeines and coffee. It's what it is. Of ruining coffee?

No one had considered doing that? No, I'm joking. No, I'm joking. And yeah, and then Roselius, after trying a few things, he hit on a chemical called benzene as an effective remover of caffeine. Benzene. That sounds familiar. What else do we use benzene for? And we think it's carcinogenic, and so people stopped after a while. Didn't we have to remove that from gasoline or something? Yeah. Benzene is something we use, but the American Cancer Society says that though we use it to make plastics, resins, lubricants, rubbers, dyes, if you're

exposed to too much of it the wrong way, it increases your risk of cancer. And we don't have like actual studies to know if rinsing coffee beans in it increased anybody's cancer risk, but everybody just decided, let's stop and use the modern, safer chemicals today. If there's other ways, yeah, why not? Yeah. Cause, cause also Roselius, he was not primarily a chemist. Like this was just something he could figure out. He just had a bunch of chemicals and he's like, what about this one? What about this one? Yeah.

And he was primarily a businessman. So then he founded the first brand of decaf coffee and it was a big hit worldwide. It's still a brand that exists. It's owned by the same conglomerate as Pete's Coffee now. It's not like dominating it anymore, but it's a brand called Coffee Hog. I can see why the brand isn't like super well-known. Because of the hog part? Yeah. Coffee Hog. Yeah. It turns out that that hog is an acronym, H-A-G. It turns out that's German words meaning coffee trading company. So it's also not like distinctive. It's just coffee trading company.

Although like the American pronunciation would be coffee hag, which does feel like who I am, coffee hag. I used to live near a witchcraft themed coffee shop in Brooklyn. So that makes sense. Yeah. Yeah, man. Now I, I do feel like I want to identify as a coffee hag. It seems fun. So I'm into it. It's like my title, my title. But, uh, and yeah, because the very last thing here is coffee hog, you know, since then other companies have become decaf people. There's no one company we all associate with this.

But Coffee Hog had really strong branding in the form of a distinctive white and orange tin that it was sold in that we'll link pictures of. It had like an orange circle logo. And the way that's with us today, at least in the United States, is restaurants and diners approach to labeling the pot of decaf coffee because the orange logo of Cafe Hog. Oh, right. It's got that orange ring on it. It got associated with that topper. Right. That a lot of restaurants and diners have for like there's the regular coffee and then the one that's orange is decaf.

Oh, right. Yeah. Yeah. Okay. Well, now I know a lot more about American diners. Thank you, Benzene. We all toast a big cup of Benzene and then just melt as we drink it. Like, oh no. Worth it.

Thanks for listening to this bonus episode. Get research sources and more at MaximumFun.org. Next week, a whole new bonus.