Wonderful! - Wonderful! 145: Cracker Barrel Potions

Episode Date: August 13, 2020

Griffin's favorite tree juice! Rachel's favorite beach find! Griffin's favorite communal eating experience! Rachel's favorite Chicago hip-hop duo!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus ��� https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaFor more ways to support Black Lives Matter and find anti-racism resources: https://blacklivesmatters.carrd.co/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

Hello, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. This is Wonderful. This is the podcast Wonderful. If you were trying to listen to a different podcast, like, like, I don't know, S-Town? Weird. Why would somebody be listening?

It's 2020. But anyway, you've clicked on the wrong thing. This one's about things that me and my wife, Rachel, we really like. Things that we're into. Things that are good. Things that you might be into also. Probably not. And maybe you don't know it yet no rachel and i are into some pretty hip like obscure shit sometimes you talk about one time rachel talked about like rye bread like who's who's into rye bread nobody i believe you're

thinking of pumpernickel oh damn it which is pretty i mean that's a pretty obscure that's even deeper than rye i would argue uh sorry that we're late it's been uh i mean it's weird it's not like there's been one thing this week it's not like oh no i dropped my computer in the toilet again it's just life life man life happened i guess nobody cares no one cares guess. Do you have any small wonders? I'm going to say the seasoning that is found on an everything bagel. Oh, you mean everything then? Yeah, I guess everything. Just all of it? What is that?

Let me see how much. Poppy seeds, sesame seeds. What else is on there? Salt. Salt. You know, you got the onion garlic situation. Oh, God. Yeah.

Oh, that's wonderful wonderful a little bit of furikake on there oh yeah there's all kinds of fun stuff chili flake uh and some arsenic and uh and there's light bulbs it's everything it shouldn't be there's some of that stuff you shouldn't keep eating those until they can be more specific about it. Probably is kind of risky. What's your small wonder? The heating pad that we have. I've hurt my back.

And I find that there's a lot of things that when you have an ache or a pain on your body, which I want to do, a lot of different ways to try and address that. Pastes, salves, ungiants, creams. But the only thing that gets in there and seems to get the damn job done is the heating pad.

I have to constantly remind Griffin that this is a thing. Yeah, it's true. This is a thing that we have had for a very long time now. Everyone has one. And Griffin keeps using these stick-on patches. Useless.

Like a fool. Like a dum-dum. They don't do nothing. And I say, you know what? We have something that plugs into the wall that is much hotter. Yeah, I need it right right now i'm still in a tremendous amount of discomfort it sucks i was telling rachel yesterday i don't feel i don't like feeling like a 150 year old man which i always do when i particularly because you can't identify i didn't do anything it's not like

i just helped my friend move as far as i can tell, I put my creamer and my coffee, and I started going up the stairs, and I took one step up the stairs and was like, nope. Anyway, I go first this week. I have two food things. I was prepping the second thing, and I realized when I was almost done with it, like, oh, damn, that's another food thing. So I guess I'll just go ahead and start out with maple syrup, which is so interesting, maple syrup, because it's one of the few things that I brought to the show, one of the few foodstuffs I can think of, where when you need it, when you want it, like you gotta have it.

And the absence of it in that moment is so painful. And so like just soul crushing and meal ruining like if you make pancakes and it's like hey everybody it's pancake sundae i have a bunch of different types of pancakes now let's pour that good golden brown juice on it that sugar juice let's pour that right on it and you don't have it it's like what's the fucking point but on the inverse as soon as you have consumed it on a breakfast meal, the smell of it makes you want to yarts. When I met Griffin, he was existing in an economy where maple syrup was something that one needed four to five bottles of at any time. Well, I knew bringing this would bring upon me even more derision. It's just so comical.

Every time I went to the grocery store, I would have to ask the question, do we need maple syrup? And it's not even that we were eating a ton of it. It's just the idea of not having it when you need it. Right? Am I the only one that's like, ooh, I feel a tightness. I feel a tightness in my chest and my gut. If I were to sit down with a waffle or a pancake there is no substitution no it would scratch that itch and i've had to oh god we've all been there where you take some honey and you

put a little food coloring in it and maybe water it down a little bit and you're like i made syrup or you go out to a tree and you just start hitting it and hitting it and hitting it and hoping the good juice will come out but it doesn't work that way it works almost that way i've done some research into maple syrup and and uh learned a lot uh but it's it's uh i love it i love it so much except for when i don't want it and then i smell it and it's like what is that smell and it's it's kind of a curse because when you're eating the food with the maple syrup on it you're like fuck yeah this is amazing this is so sweet why am i not eating this all the time But then even if you don't like get it all over yourself, the aroma kind of lingers. I can always tell when a person has just eaten syrupy breakfast

foods. I mean, it is sticky, just at its core. And that stickiness keeps it around for sure. I guess so. I've always enjoyed maple syrup. I've always been a big fan of it. We used to go, I mean, my family used to go on a lot of road trips. We were a family of five and we went to the same like three beaches my entire childhood.

So we took road trips just constantly, like a couple a year and we would always hit the Cracker Barrel and I would always get those little glass bottles of syrup that they had at Cracker Barrel, partially because I liked the syrup, but also because, hey, free glass bottle. That was always so seductive to me.

Because then I could pretend that they were little potions or whatever. Oh, that's nice. It was really, really nice. And I just, I've always enjoyed it. Unsurprisingly, come from tree. Come from tree. It comes from a few different types of trees.

And of course, Quebec is the largest producer of syrup in the world. Do you want to guess what percentage of the world's maple syrup Quebec, just not Canada, just Quebec produces? What percentage? 79. 70% of the world's maple syrup comes from Quebec. And I like that a lot. I mean, it all comes from sort of the Northeastern, North American sort of region.

The definition of maple syrup is also usually like very restrictive. There are very like tight guidelines that I'll go into here in a little bit that Canada and America, what the USDA, the food and drug administration or whatever have like gotten together a cross-country collabo on like determining what maple syrup is what grade it can be you know i feel like around these parts you hear about vermont a lot when it comes oh yeah vermont i mean vermont's big in the game uh but in order for something to be called maple syrup obviously it has to be almost entirely made from maple sap, from maple trees. And there's a few different maple tree specimens that you can get that good syrup from. There's other types of syrups.

You can get walnut tree syrup. You can get palm tree syrup. But I don't know what those taste like. They may be very, very good. Maple sap has an extremely high sugar concentrate compared to other saps and so that is why it gets the flavor that it has uh and also there's like various i i didn't write down the exact kinds but there's different types of maple trees and certain ones have like certain production schedules that can change the flavor of them

uh and that that is that is where you get this sort of different the different notes the different uh the different tones this one has tobacco rich tobacco uh scent uh indigenous communities in in northeastern north america were the first to make maple syrup and maple sugar and though like the process has become obviously much more industrialized since then like it hasn't actually changed all that much the basics are you tap a maple tree and the maple tree has got to be between 30 and 40 years old in order to start like producing that good sap but once it is making that sap it can produce a lot of it uh it can make what is it up to 12 liters per day that's like that's like a juicy boy when you tap on them juicy boys and it just like comes to gushing out it's like wow this is this is a juicy boy and

then they can keep making that good syrup until they're well over 100 years old so you get once you get a good tree once you get that investment you're you're on the roller coaster baby for a good 60 70 years of delicious maple syrup production. You get the sap, right? And you boil it down without adding anything. No chemicals, nothing else like goes into the process because it is an extremely finicky process, maple syrup production. You boil it down and you have to concentrate it down like pretty dramatically, depending on the season and the type of tree that you get it from.

You are boiling it down from a 20 to 1 to a 50 to 1 ratio. So 50 parts of the sap that you get, you concentrate down to one part. And that is the maple syrup. And there's not really a whole lot else to it than that. You have to filter it out to get the sugar sand. There's like a chemical term for it. But this like gritty substance in the syrup, you have to like filter it to get the sugar sand. There's like a chemical term for it, but this like gritty substance in the syrup, you have to like filter it to get that out.

But then that's basically syrup. That's basically it. You have to be so careful though, because if you boil it too much or at too high a heat, or just like you get some part of the preparation process wrong, it crystallizes and in like the flash of a second like it's ruined if you don't reduce it enough it can be super liquidy and if it's

too liquidy obviously the consistency and and texture is on but also it will spoil very very very fast because the liquid that's in it um there's also like the same things i don't know if you've ever like been involved in any sort of like beer homebrewing process before, but it's like very like breaking bad. Like there's a lot of different points of failure along the way that can happen because, you know, you're messing with fermentation, you're using a lot of different sort of metallic equipment that can sort of impart a metallic taste into the beer or whatever it is that you're making if you do it the wrong way the same is true of of syrup uh in this case like you don't want it to ferment any sort of like the smallest sort of micro organic like flaw in the syrup uh that introduces fermentation into the process is just like that that batch is skooked that batch is no good syrup lasts forever like syrup is one of

those things that you can like keep for like a year and it is fine. Exactly. Yeah. And also like if you get the sap from a tree at the wrong part in the life cycle to get the sap from it, for instance, if the tree has started to bud, then it's like it puts a weird stink on the flavor that is not necessarily pleasant. So like it is an extremely finicky process and the way that they grade it sort of reflects that there are three grades of maple syrup uh that again america and canada boom got together and

said let's let's make this shit top tier grade a is the best you can get that's got the golden color and delicate taste amber color and rich taste a dark color and robust taste or a very dark color and a strong taste. Any of those can be grade A. Any difference in the color, the taste, not being compatible, the texture being off in some way, then it gets bumped down to processing grade. I don't know what that means. I think it means like we're going to send you back to the lab or we can use you as a cooking ingredient and certain other things. It's like a cooking wine.

The grade below that, substandard. Get that shit out of here. I wouldn't put substandard syrup on my worst enemy's waffles. This makes me want to look at those like Mrs. Butterworth situations to see kind of like where they're scoring at, you know? I mean, if it's being sold in the US, it's grade A.

If it's being sold in the US or Canada, like most of the commercially available uh like commercially available products that's great they're not gonna sell they're not just wonder like if there's standard you know it's kind of like cheese food if there is like maple syrup but instead it's called like like tree drink and that way they get around the like the scoring maybe you know if you look closely at your at your off-brand syrup cover cover your french toast and tree drink uh also the terminology for like uh the manufacturing like farms where uh syrup is made is very good i had heard the term i I think probably from Riverdale, Sugar Shack,

that's where the actual boiling takes place. And it's a building with like a specific sort of arched roof design to like lower condensation or whatever. Maple farms are called sugar bushes. That's very strong to me. Oh, that's adorable. That's very powerful.

Yeah, that's it. I've been craving pancakes lately and it's got me like, we have, joking aside, we have joking aside we have syrup in this house right now right if i needed it yes okay uh we should do breakfast for dinner we should do a little brinner oh a little you'll brinner it's been a while henry would lose it for that that'd be so good let's do that okay not tonight though oh this spaghetti night thursday nights are spaghetti night and you know this can i share my first thing you can it relates

a little bit to your little glass bottle oh fantastic uh in that my first thing is sea glass sea glass yeah sea glass is really cool i have have some. Yeah. I did not really have any exposure to this in the wild. I mean, I have not been to a lot of beaches. It's probably not too uncommon for people that grow up in the Midwest. Like, my summers were not big beach trips, typically, because you could not get there in a car very easily. What did you do? Silver Dollar City most of the time?

I mean, yeah. Lake of the Ozarks was kind of the closest. Ooh. Love it. A lot of Cusar. A lot of qzar a lot of lakes a lot of lakes yeah a lot of saltwater taffy i'm guessing uh-huh oh yeah 100 um but it was when we went to hong kong yes that we went to the beach and there was just tons of sea glass and i thought like oh, oh, here it is. We found it. This is the stuff. It's on this one beach in Hong Kong. I'd never like seen it outside of, you know, like little, little hobby shops, you know. It's weird seeing glass in the wild that's different colors. That's

not from broken, bigger things, huh? Well, I think for a long time, I thought it was like, I thought it was like a kind of shell. I didn't realize that it was just actually glass from glass bottles. I thought it was like, you know, like a colloquial name for some kind of sea creature. Wait, is it glass from glass bottles? Sea glass? Yeah. Sea glass is just broken glass from glass bottles? Yeah. It's not like glass that got formed somehow, like under like the pressure? No.

I thought it was like sand. Okay, good. It's not just me was like sand it's okay good it's not just me no it's litter oh that's a bummer i thought it was like a nice thing but it's just trash it's just trash okay i mean it's it's gorgeous so no it's not it's trash so when i find little brown shards of sea glass that's just like somebody's fucking miller light bottle that they just like smashed against the side of their boat in the the the bay of hong kong uh-huh that's a bummer yeah so here so here's the thing with sea glass so it takes 20 to 40 years to make sometimes as much as 100 years because what happens is the weathering process in the water is what frosts it.

And this is specifically saltwater. There's also something called beach class, which is freshwater. But when you talk about sea glass, you're talking about saltwater. And that's how you get the smooth edges and the frosted color, and it kind of rounds. Right. So you don't cut your feet on somebody's old Natty Light bottles. The most common colors are green, brown, white, and clear,

which is mostly from beer, juice, and soft drink bottles. And then just like, you know, windows and glasses. Sure. Yeah. There is, I've never been there, obviously. My first sea glass exposure I mentioned was in Hong Kong, but there is a beach called Glass Beach in Fort Bragg, California that was once a trash dump. And so it has a bunch of broken bottles on the beach, but you are not allowed to remove

any glass from glass beach well then it would just be called beach i think that's a good policy um a lot of these colors are becoming more and more rare because as you know like you don't see as many glass bottles as you used to in the like 1950s and 60s sure i guess there's no like great c aluminum that everybody's talking about or plastic for example um so there are a lot of like ways to kind of date the the glass based on the color because of whether or not it was made so for example there is a specific kind of green that comes from the early to mid 1900s that was found in coca-cola dr pepper and rc RC Cola bottles. And then there's even more rare colors like gray and pink, which often come from like Great Depression era plates.

You'll find yellow from like 1930s Vaseline containers and red from old Schlitz bottles. So that's what I thought was kind of cool, this idea like you're walking along the beach and you're seeing these different colors and you can kind of date how old it is based on the color. Yeah, it is interesting. I'm thinking of like Ale 8. Aren't those like green bottles in Ale 8?

You know what Ale 8 is? I don't know what you're saying. Oh, okay. Never mind. Is that a type of beverage? Yeah, it's a beverage I believe in the American South. The Carolinas I, has Ale 8. And it's fine.

It's fine. Is that their slogan? I think it's in the... I think it may or may not be in like... It's definitely in the cheer wine genre. It may be the same like manufacturer. Okay. You'll see other colors like cornflower blue which are from milk of magnesia bottles uh vicks vapor rub uh and aqua from ball mason jars

um so there's you know all the different colors kind of attach it to a different bottle a different time period so we break the glass and throw it in the ocean or into a river that dumps into the ocean and 40 years later and the ocean like glazes it and softens it so it's not dangerous anymore and spits it back up on the beach like don't do it again and you can obviously i mean just you know like there are rock tumblers for example like you can do this outside of the ocean which is probably a lot of what you're seeing in your craft stores. Yeah, sure. But But yeah, so what we did when we went to Hong Kong is I scooped a little bit of this and brought it home with us. And it's just kind of neat to have this little souvenir. Yeah. And you did your part to, I guess, clean the environment.

Yeah, but don't do that at Glass Beach. Don't do that at Glass Beach. They want to keep it there. They like it there. It's their favorite glass. Can I steal you away? Yeah. Do we have Jumbotrons? We do. Exquisite. This first one is for future Becca from past Becca.

Hey, future Becca. I know the first half of 2020 has been rough but guess what you're 25 now and it's time to dust yourself off and kick some ass hopefully by now you've written a good chunk of your novel and you're working hard to get into grad school but no matter what i'm proud of you give fitzroy a kiss for me. Love, past Becca. Now, is that referencing a person? It is egomaniacal for me to assume that's talking about the character I play on Adventures. Oh, do you think it's based on Fitzroy Stevenson, the famous attorney? There have been other Fitzroys. Fitzroy Juleson,

the jeweler. Yeah. I love his stuff, man. Necklace bracelet. So good. Here's one that is for Amanda. It's from Dustin who says happy second anniversary.

Thanks for being the best wife and introducing me to the wonders like survivor Disney running Disney running videos, and McElroy podcast. You inspire me every day to be the best person I can be. Also, thanks for letting me adopt the first cat we tried fostering. Sorry I wouldn't let you wait for one with a human face. I mean, we're all waiting on that, huh? We're all just hoping and praying. Hey, you think they're making Survivor right now? Oh, man.

um hey you think they're making survivor right now oh man you can't quarantine harder than survivor on a remote island yeah yeah you know what i mean like they can't do the like they probably can't go to like the ponderosa what if everything is survivor like in the future like top chef also just happens to be a bunch of people also survivor right but then they don't if it's top chef they probably don't have the reward challenge where they go to the outback steakhouse sort of like victory lounge because that seems below them in some ways hi i'm allie gertz and i'm julia prescott and we host round springfield round springfield is a new simpsons podcast that is Simpsons adjacent. In its topic, we talk to Simpsons writers, directors, voiceover actors, you name it,

about non-Simpsons things that they've done because, surprise, they're all extremely talented. Absolutely. For example, David X. Cohen worked on The Simpsons but then created a little show called Futurama. That's our very first episode. So tune in for stuff like that with Yardley Smith, with Tim Long, with different writers and voice actors. It's going to be so much fun. And we are every other week on MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. I want to talk about my second thing.

It's another food thing, and I'm very excited about it. It's the one we were downstairs earlier today. And I was like, I don't have my second thing. And you're like, yeah, it can be tough sometimes. And I was like, oh, now I have it. It's a bolt of lightning. Powerful bolt of lightning. It is the communal seafood boil.

It is my favorite, like a crawfish boil or shrimp boil. How did this come to you this morning? Yeah, I don't know. It's not like we were, it's not like we, I opened up the cabinet and a bunch of old bay fell out and like went all over my face it's something you had specifically seen in the refrigerator when you opened it no we don't have shrimp we do not have uh corn we do not have crab we do not have crawfish we do not have any of the constituent ingredients typically found in a seafood boil um but man there are very few sort of social eating events that excite me more than

the communal seafood boil and also probably there are a few that would be more irresponsible in the current sort of uh global quarantine climate that we all find ourselves in so it's really harkening back to a better uh simpler time and i've only been party to maybe like a dozen, maybe fewer than a dozen. Yeah, I was gonna ask you about that. Because my only exposure to this came when I moved to Texas. Texas, we do it right anywhere. The Gulf Coast region is known for it. But really, most coastal regions of the United States have some sort of variation of the seafood boil. sort of variation of the seafood boil. Typically, the protein involved differs based on where you live and what the time of year is and what the traditional seafood boil ingredient is. A lot of mine came from Mr. Tommy Smurl, who is an academic of the low country boil,

which is typically the genre of boil that you get in South Carolina, Georgia, the low country boil uh which is typically the the genre of boil that you get in south carolina georgia the low country you know the low country uh but yeah we've done it a few times here in texas using various things uh and i've been to one in new orleans that was like a proper crawfish boil that was like the best like genuinely quite spicy uh crawfish it was at a friend of a friend's house where like i didn't really know anybody and that is the ideal situation to find yourself at a crawfish boil because it's like a nice you kind of have to let your guard down and there it's there's a weird mutually agreed upon suspension of dining etiquette that happens at a crawfish boil, but also I am going to eat like a weird jackal man, and I don't necessarily want to

do that in front of people who are going to see me the next day. Do you know what I mean? Yeah, no, that's a good point. I have difficulty, as you know, with a messy food. Yeah, sure. Because it's hard for me to enjoy the experience while my hands just get grosser and grosser. Oh, yeah.

But I will say that this is an example that I'm okay with. Yeah. You kind of have to be or else why are you here? You shouldn't have come to this. It's also like it's not physically possible to really do it with a knife and fork, you know? Like the detail work required. One of the components of a seafood boil is

that there are no utensils like maybe like if you're doing crab you can do some cracking cracking things but i've i you know i you know me i don't need those my hands are crab crackers i turn them i i can turn my thumbs into a powerful seafood destroying fulcrum uh but yeah so again like it the recipe differs based on where you live in louisiana it is an old like cajun cooking tradition uh where crawfish more often than not is customary uh and particularly in the spring this is where like crawfish boils really pop off because crawfish are plentiful and like dirt cheap in like really, really productive seasons. It can range anywhere from like 99 cents to a buck 50 a pound for crawfish. And so that's why, you know, colleges in New Orleans and Louisiana will do like huge campus wide crawfish boils where they will bring in just

metric tons of them. Oh, I didn't know that. Yeah, it's like a big like graduation, like post-finals like thing at a few different colleges down there. Well, probably not anymore. Probably not these days. Probably not right now. But one day we'll get on back there.

And, you know, in the Northeast, you see a lot more shrimp and crab and, you know, different sort of ingredients. Low country boil, it is very customary to use like red potatoes and, you know, little onions and sausage. But sausage can or cannot be in, you know, a crawfish boil in Louisiana. You get a little bit more variety there. But typically you do get the pre-made sort of packet of boil seasonings, which is just this like witch's brew of different things. You get Old Bay, of course, cayenne, hot sauce, lemons,

bay leaf. Does anyone really know what bay leaf does? I've used bay leaf in so many ingredients now and you put it in and it's like this is now this will impart the good bay leaf flavor yeah it's always for soaking and then i had heard that you're like not supposed to eat it and so it feels like a like a dangerous seasoning oh maybe that's what it is it's like a superstitious thing yeah you gotta put the bay leaf in but don't eat it uh then there's like certain technique things that uh again differ from like like tradition to tradition there's a hot debate

i didn't realize about uh like stewing the crawfish in salt water to like purge the impurities before you cook them some people think it's an essential part of the process. Some people think that is sacrilege because those impurities is, that's where the flavor is, baby. And then, yeah, when it's done cooking, you boil it for a while. You have to add the ingredients in a very specific order or else you'll make everybody very sick. You dump it right out onto a big table

lined with newspaper and people just fucking go to town on it. That's the best part. I love eating just shit off a table that's so good and also you can read your stories you can read the funnies you can do a little sudoku you can do a little sudoku beneath your lemon mess that you've made uh and that's very very strong to me uh and i don't know there's just something really you don't eat food like this in any other circumstance and that just all the tradition to it there's a boil master usually who's like you know there's the idea of the grill master but the boil master is just like almost like a

conductor like a sausage conductor they're like a they're like a spices conductor because they have to let the things in at the right time because you're not doing a ton of stuff to it. Really. That's the most important part of the cooking process. Uh, and I just like it. It's, it,

it really is ritualistic in a way that is so intriguing to me. Um, and yeah, I don't have a whole lot else to say. I found this, um, uh, there's a writer,

uh, on, on Creole and Cajun cooking name is howard mitchum and he had this anecdote that i found on the wikipedia page about seafood boils where he wrote about how like they used to do shrimp boils and crab boils back in the day back in like the 60s uh he wrote uh at our last big party we boiled 400 pounds of shrimp and 400 fat crabs for 200 guests, and we drank eight 30-gallon kegs of beer. For music, we had Kid Thomas and his Algiers Stompers, the famous old Gut Bucket Jazz group from Preservation Hall, and the Olympia Funeral Marching Band. Pretty rad party so far.

Their technique was to use new 30-gallon galvanized garbage cans filled one-third full of water and brought to boil with seasonings. The shrimp were divided into 25-pound batches and stuffed into new pillowcases and tied off. 25 pounds of shrimp took about 25 minutes to cook. One batch came out, and the next went in. How's your fucking party, Howard? It sounds pretty good. It sounds like I'd like to be at it right now

that is incredible we are so we haven't you know had a small potluck dinner for two friends here at our house and you know seven months or whatever now uh the idea of going to a party with 200 guests and like listening to jazz music while gouging on 800 pounds of seafood oh god incredible i would do anything what's your second thing my second thing is the american hip-hop duo the cool kids had not heard of the cool kids yeah you know that's probably not too surprising they've only released two studio albums are they chicago based are they yes yes primarily so um the members one of them is from michigan the other is from illinois but they kind of got their start in chicago they're one of the music videos you sent me was like extremely

extremely chicago mostly because it featured prominently a man in a Romney, Emmanuel mask, uh, doing terrible things. Um, this is a group I became familiar with because of their 2008 EP, the bake sale. Um, but they really, they really came up in Chicago. Their, their kind of origin story is, is so delightful. Um, I was in Chicago from like 2004 to 2007. And that's kind of right when they were getting their start. And I just love their origin story so much. They met through MySpace. Oh, yeah. The members are Antoine Sir Michael Rocks Reed and Evan Chuck English Ingersoll. And what happened was Reed found Ingersoll's beat on MySpace and wanted to talk about using it. And they ended up meeting

in 2005 and recording for two hours as a result. They both had kind of similar inspiration. They were really interested in this kind of golden age of hip hop, this like LL Cool J time period, which for some context, when this EP came out that I loved, The Bake Sale, in 2008, kind of topping the charts back then was like Flo Rida, Lil Wayne, and T.I. So they were kind of recalling a time period that was starting to lose relevance in the mainstream um and the part of the reason i like them so much is that is because of that like l cool j time period like they are really interested in this idea of like you just rap about stuff that you like uh it's about who you are as an artist it's not like

what's cool in the time yeah no i mean one of the songs that you sent me that i believe is from that very album is talking about playing street fighter on their sega genesis yeah yeah so uh their first performance after they had started working together uh was at town hall pub in chicago did you ever go there oh yeah of course i used to live in that lakeview area and i saw like improv shows and like weird little tiny indie rock bands there and so it was just kind of funny to have that as context like anybody could play there yeah sure um but when they were there they happened to meet uh diplo okay who offered to release a mixtape of their unreleased tracks uh which kind of is how

they got started is the mid aughts when Justin Timberlake but god I'm like misremembering all this but I feel like didn't he like acquire Myspace or something like that and try to like make it now like an independent music artist like that was the tail end of Myspace for sure I remember there was like we're gonna breathe energy into this uh but it did not okay yeah i guess not um so i wanted to i wanted to play a song from the 2008 ep but first i wanted to give just an example of some lyrics um so this is not a song i'm gonna play but the song is called 88. And it's about them just kind of riding around on like souped up bicycles. Okay. And just to give you an example of kind of the

lyricism that's just like so incredible. So just reminder, I am not a hip hop artist myself. No, you're not. So I'm not going to do justice to this, but just to give you a sense of kind of the flow of it. ride past shorty light skin with no melanin shirt looks like somebody stuffed two melons in had to stop so preach like reverend i grip on the handbrake and say what up i skip on the handshakes i'm straight what else i got two pegs on the back and you got two legs under your skirt so hop we head that's really good that was like a miniature poetry corner you know i couldn't help it um the song i want to play that gives kind of a sense that griffin referenced is called a little

bit cooler the d not ecstasy it's easy to me yes yes indeed it's hard to believe but swallow it so much game that i could put it in a bottle and sell it to lames and getting graphics in your fade was fresh in the day but it was jacked by the losers i'm about to say screw it and grow a jerry curl yeah so this is just them rapping about you know like gr like Griffin said, like Sega Genesis and Star Wars and kind of speaking to who they are. And they said they were really inspired by Lupe Fiasco. Okay, yeah. Who they said, I read this interview with them, and they said they were inspired by him because he was, quote, a black dude who wore glasses, had a song about skateboarding, and was into anime films yeah where is lupe fiasco what's his what's his thing now i don't know is he still doing it i don't know god there was just this explosion in chicago like around the time

like kanye west and chance the rapper were coming up uh that a lot of those artists, like, for example, the Cool Kids, went on this huge hiatus. So their first full-length album didn't come out till 2011. It was called Wind Fish Ride Bicycles. And a lot of that was because they associated themselves with a label that made it very difficult for them to put content out. Yeah, that's true. So they became this kind of huge phenomenon that 2008 ep was supposed to be right before the release of this album but then it ended up taking you know three years for it to come out but meanwhile they inspired a lot of artists like chance the rapper um and uh in

between the fish ride bicycles album that came out in 2011 there was uh six years where they just did some solo stuff and they said a lot of that reason was that they could not get together and put out content without having to pay a bunch of people right through their label and so they just started doing a lot of solo stuff so uh english was working with uh some guys from tv on the radio um and then uh you, they were just doing a lot of a lot of solo work. And then that was finally in 2017 was when their second album came out, which was special edition Grandmaster Deluxe. So one of them was living in LA, and one of them was in Chicago. And so they were putting this album together, basically across the country together.

But they still have a lot, you know, a lot of creative juice there. And so I wanted to play something off of their more recent album that came out in 2017. The song is Check Out. And this is the one that the aforementioned Rahm Emanuel diss track. For a second, I thought it was Rowan Atkinson second I thought it was um uh Rowan Atkinson I thought it was I thought the mask that is featured in this music video was Mr. Bean which would have been a weird like why are these two gentlemen so critical of Mr. Bean but it's um it is Rama it is Chicago Mayor Rahm Emanuel um the the lyricism is so great uh the the music is just really it just feels really fresh every time i hear it um

and i would recommend checking it out you can i mean when you hear that artists like chance the rapper were inspired by the cool kids like oh yeah no i get it yeah um do you want to know what our friends at home are talking about yes so do i nelly says something i find wonderful is the pan flip whenever i am sauteing veggies or making something bigger, like fresh toast or grilled cheese, sending my food, I think maybe French toast or grilled cheese, sending my food flying through the air with a simple flick of the wrist and catching it back in the pan never fails to make me feel like a master chef.

The fact that I don't have to clean a spoon or spatula is an added bonus. Oh, the pan flip. Love the pan flip. I need to like practice this in a low stakes environment because I feel like I only am trying it in a situation where if the meal ends up on the counter,

I'll be very disappointed. Yeah, I mean, I love it. I love a good pan flip. I know you do. For this very reason, but also because like there are certain types of flat foods that when you're pan frying them

and you want to get a good cook on both sides of them, going through and individually making sure each piece gets turned around is such a pain in the ass. And it's so much easier to just flip that shit in the pan. French toast is a good idea, right? Because nobody just makes one piece of French toast. I feel like you could really do some work. It's so big. It's so big. You really got to use some leverage to get such a big boy flipped over

i'm talking about little pieces of beef anyway here's uh curtis says i've always found water beds especially wonderful i'm not even sure if people make them anymore but laying on one of these things was a pretty whimsical experience as a child gosh do you do you have water bed memories no i feel like i had a i had one family member i like an aunt who had like water beds that i think i've maybe slept on them fewer than like five times or something oh yeah even less for me not good not a good sleeping experience particularly supportive experience no a loud experience too a lot of gushing and whooshing uh it is whimsical it It is fun. I'll give you that. But also like water gets funky. Yeah.

Like pretty fast. I'm not entirely sure how it worked. You know, like how did you have to change the water? How did the water not leak? I assume eventually it would leak. It's just when you hear about mattresses these days, it's usually like, we got together with top rocket scientists

to create this nano weave. To me, the waterbed feels like they didn't consult any sort of scientific community. It was just like somebody was blowing up water balloons with their kid and they're like, hey, what if we made this big and you slept on it?

Like, would that be comfortable? Who gives a shit? Let's do it. Hey, thank you for listening. Thank thank you everybody who came out to support us in the max fun drive the the turnout was absolutely amazing and completely blew us away we were not anticipating much because it is a very difficult time to project anything into the future yes the fact that people are like yes i will I will give a monthly donation. I was like, hey, good for you.

So amazing. And thank you to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. And thank you to MaxFun for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org.

Check out all the great shows there. Shows like Around Springfield and... Heat Rocks. Heat Rocks and so many more. MaximumFun.org and I think that's it, huh? What position do

you find most comfortable now? Right. The position I'm in right now is sort of a very, very dense question mark that I've sort of turned

my butt. It doesn't feel very good to be sitting right now. So I'm going to stop the podcast right now. Lay flat on the ground just lay fucking flat man yeah that'll be good and we can maybe we can do a little light as a feather stiff

as a board oh a little craft should i get henry in here yeah get henry in here let's do it let's get crafty Money won't pay, what's getting on me? I'm ready. I'm ready.