Wonderful! - Wonderful! 165: Commonwolf

Episode Date: January 13, 2021

Griffin's favorite metal instrument! Rachel's favorite keepsake poem! Griffin's favorite live TV! Rachel's favorite fast speaking! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya CALL YOUR ELECTED REPRESENTATIVES TODAY: https://5calls.org/ Demand police accountability and reform: https://action.justiceforbreonna.org/sign/BreonnaWasEssential/ Ways to support Black Lives Matter and find anti-racism resources: https://linktr.ee/blacklivesmatter MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

🎵 Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Sorry everybody, I had to drink my coffee. Try saying that word. it's a great character i had a sociology professor in college because that was my minor i don't like to talk about it a lot because i'm worried it'll make people think i'm smarter than i actually am but he sounded exactly like a fusion of both car talk guys like a perfect a perfect fusion like a dragon ball z fusion of these two gentlemen

into one sort of perfect and he he said that word a lot go get some coffee it's so powerful this is wonderful this is a show where you talk about things that are good and things that we like things we're into and it's i think we recorded our last episode in a bit of a um a weird spot and uh guess what we're doing that a second time in a row today i would argue things are still a bit weird but we're going to talk about things we like things that are good things they're into like my old sociology professor whose name i've forgotten oh how you how are you feeling how are you feeling? How are you? I mean. Mind, body, spirit. Okay. It depends on the vector, right?

Yeah. I am very pregnant. Yes. Which is challenging. You sent a Marco Polo. It snowed in Austin. You sent a Marco Polo to your friends of the snow outside. I was breathing so heavy.

And Rachel was breathing so like literally like like a pervert was like spying on a marco polo we we wanted a house with stairs yeah because we wanted some separation back when we had people over from each other from each other we have our own bedrooms and we needed them on different floor no come, come on. No, we wanted to be able to put a child to sleep in a room that would not be interrupted by noise. And we got that, but now it doesn't matter. And all it means is that I am doing stairs all day long. Yeah. And I can't breathe.

But folks, you look at either one of our calves. I mean, great calves. Oh my God, the calves in this household are out of control. Even Henry's got calves um yes so so yeah so to summarize uh okay i guess i would say that i am how about you okay yeah i'm okay too who knows when this thing's this thing's gonna go up wednesday morning right now we're recording tuesday morning where it's weirdly sort of like we're for the past half hour it's been kind of quiet so this is I guess as good a window as any for us to record in yeah we hope you all are doing okay and hanging in there and um uh do you have any of the small

wonders that the people crave and are always asking about I mean I started reading again yeah reading's great yeah that was kind of i decided my unofficial new year's resolution was to read more um i have always really enjoyed it yes easy to stop doing it uh when you have a small child and all you want to do is sleep in the interim but i thought it would be good to read because it's something i like to do. So I started doing it again. I'm reading Untamed by Glennon Doyle. It's a very motivating book for people that are trying to kind of tap back into what makes them happy.

And I would recommend it. I just finished a book that you got me for Christmas, I believe, about deep sea exploration. I think it's called something eternal, eternal darkness. Yeah. There's a game called eternal darkness that I also really like.

It's not that it's about deep sea exploration. And it was very interesting. I've been, I've been researching that for, for reasons. Yeah. I was going to say that probably sounds confusing to our listeners, but Griffin is working on a project in which that book will hopefully be

helpful. Yes. Yeah. There's a lot of, a lot of good books out there. I want to just give a quick shout out to that snow. It snowed in Austin. That never happens. It was beautiful. It was idyllic.

It destroyed a tree in our yard, but that's the price. Sometimes you got to crack an egg. Definitely. I've been in Austin for 11 years, 12 years now. No, it'll be, I don't know. Couldn't matter less. But I will say we have had snow, but that was by far, we got like two inches or something.

It was great. It was rowdy. But my real small wonder is they aired, they simulcast football games on Nickelodeon and they added a bunch of visual effects based on Nickelodeon characters like SpongeBob bunch of visual effects based on Nickelodeon characters like SpongeBob SquarePants occupying the field goal posts like between them the perfect rectangle there was just a huge SpongeBob in there which was hysterical because whenever anybody missed

it was like hell yeah SpongeBob done did it again great defense Bob and there were also slime cannons virtual slime cannons that would shoot anytime anybody scored a touchdown. I don't really care much about football, really at all. But I was heartbroken that I missed out on that because it sounded like a really wild time. Nickelodeon games and sports. They should have access, unfettered access to whatever sports that they want that they can kind of put their own sort of Nickelodeon spin on. It's time, I think. Wild and crazy kids, you know?

They should blend Wild and Crazy Kids with, what's a sport that needs it? Baseball? Yeah. Yeah. You got to like chew a bunch of bubble gum and stick it into like a huge ball. That's the only challenge from Wild and Crazy Kids I remember is you had to chew bubble yum and stick it to this scale to make the heaviest ball of chewed gum possible. And I remember seeing that and thinking, I now have like a thing for gross stuff. Like I now no longer like gross sort of spit stuff. That's going to stick with me my whole life. My small wonder is breakfast for dinner.

Breakfast for dinner. We order food out a lot, mostly because we're not very good at meal prep or planning but i will say that we always have eggs we always got eggs and uh so we have a little breakfast for scrambled them up threw some sausage in there slice up some potatoes cumined them fry them up ate ate them on some uh two month expired tortillas but they they were okay when i when i put and and i'm you know i'm gonna get some tweets about this when i put a bread product in the fridge yeah which is one thing you're not supposed to do but it's just it's what i've always known uh it lasts forever that's. And so expiration dates. Does it get hard and weird and kind of unpleasant to the tooth?

Yeah. Yes. Yes. Yes. I go first this week. My first thing is the beautiful sonorous sounds of the steel guitar. The steel guitar is, I guess that could refer to a few things. If you want to talk about the, you know, categorization of stringed instruments, like a steel guitar could be

any sort of metal bodied guitar, because that makes its own sort of unique sound. But technically, when you're talking about a steel guitar, you're talking about a guitar that is played with a metal bar that you slide across the strings, which was actually how I kind of got into the instrument. The first guitar I ever got, Justin got into the guitar before me, like when we were young and I was like curious about it and I would mess around with his. So for Christmas,

I think he got me like an old guitar that I think was like a Smurl family heirloom or something like that. But the neck was so bowed that I couldn't press the strings to the fretboard because of my, I had weak gamer fingers, but also like, it was just impossible. Like the neck was so crazy bowed. But I could put a Sharpie on the strings

and like kind of recreate a steel guitar sound. So that's kind of how I played it for a while that would that implement is just called a slide and a slide guitar well there's lots of different kinds of slide guitars the the vin diagram overlap is pretty huge right like a steel guitar could be played if you want to talk about like mississippi delta blues style like they just hold it like a guitar and slide the thing around usually they'll have a metal rod on their pinky that they can slide around so they have their other fingers to play.

But a lot of folks do a lap guitar, which is another way of doing it. There's like a standalone console steel slide guitar. Like it's one of those, every slide guitar is a steel guitar, but not every steel guitar is a slide guitar, I think. Anyway, I just really have always been obsessed with like that sound. It gets like a great portamento of the sliding notes and a really good vibrato that you can

really not get out of a guitar in any other sort of way. And I think there's something that I really like about playing an instrument in like a novel way. Like it really makes you think about the fact that like these are just things that make sounds and the way that you elicit those sounds from them is not like inherently incorrect. Yeah, no, that's true. That especially goes against,

like if you've ever like learned formally a instrument, you are always taught very specifically, like this is how it is played. Not me though, I'm a fricking rebel because I couldn't play the guitar. I literally would shred my, very specifically like this is how it is played not me though i'm a freaking rebel because i couldn't play the guitar i literally would shred my i got like really good calluses and they're completely gone now but i got really good calluses on my fingers trying to play that guitar because it was just a it was essentially a a mandolin but not the stringed instrument the fucking kitchen

instrument that you use to slice potatoes very thin. It was essentially that, but for fingers. So the steel guitar, it's also referred to as the Hawaiian guitar. It was invented by a guy named Joseph Kekuku, who was a kid in Oahu walking along some railroad tracks with his guitar. And he saw this big ass bolt on the ground. So he picked it up and the story goes that he like accidentally banged it

against the strings of his guitar. And he's like, oh, that's good. So then he started to find other things that he could bang against the strings to make it like make this this cool sound uh going with like a like a bottleneck bottleneck guitar is another name for uh for for this style of instrument uh but he eventually just sort of landed on a metal bar that he would slide across the strings to make this noise and sort of took that sound on tour all over the um the the contiguous u.s uh like indigenous hawaiian music was super popular in in the u.s in like the 1910s um there was a musical i believe called the bird of paradise that kind of popularized the sound but like in 1916 indigenous Hawaiian music was like the number one like music sold and enjoyed in well yeah

that fascination with Hawaii like carried into like the Elvis years you know yes I mean that also sort of lined up with when when the U.S. hawaii so i mean i you know that fascination uh was timed to that as well um so so joseph kakuku took his took took this instrument all over and that is sort of how it proliferated around the u.s and then it influenced like all these other kinds of music uh i mentioned mississippi delta blues is you know, probably the one that was most informed by it because it's hard to find any artist that like didn't use a slide guitar in that genre, but also like other types of blues. Bluegrass. Bluegrass traditionally leans on a dobro, which is a really fun name for an instrument, but it's basically a resonator box, which is a type of guitar that you just slide a thing on. It's very cool. It looks like a juicer.

A Dobro is actually the virtual instrument that I use for the Taz Amnesty theme song. There's a lot of Dobro in there. But yeah, I just, I really like that sound. And it's also really fun to play. I haven't fucked around with it in a while, but like it's actually in some ways kind of easy because you usually do an open tuning. So if you're new to guitar, you don't have to worry about like chord formations and stuff. You just, that's the sound of a slide guitar and a race car and a motorcycle.

So there's a bunch of different songs I could play, but I want to play a track by Ben Harper, who is kind of like an aficionado of the steel guitar. He has a very special kind of steel guitar that I can't remember the name of, but there was a manufacturer who made like 5,000 of this one very specific type of like, very sort of just straight steel guitar that you play in your lap. It doesn't have like this huge open body like a guitar has. It's just kind of like this, this long bar that you play in your lap. It doesn't have this huge open body like a guitar has. It's just kind of like this long bar that you play. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Yeah, I sent you the

video of him playing this song. It's Paris Sunrise No. 7. And this was on his 2007 album Lifeline, which he played under Ben Harper and the Innocent Criminals. And this song, that whole album they recorded, I loved that album. It came out when I was in college, which is like, if you need make-out jams, like Ben Harper has got you when you are in college. And they recorded the album in analog in seven days while in Paris, which I did not know,

but now all of a sudden the title of the song makes a whole lot more sense. And it's just five minutes and 17 seconds of just unadulterated slide steel guitar. So I'm going to play a bit of that right now. yeah that's it i like it i like a slight have you ever been did you were you did you have like a ben harper phase did you like ever get into the steel guitar at all? No, missed that. Missed that entirely. I mean, I, so in college, my boyfriend at the time, his dad was a musician and he spent a lot of time learning instruments and he had one of those like little slides. Yeah.

And so he would kind of like tinker around. But I don't know that I ever like went to a performance where it was done. Yeah. I don't know that I've ever. Actually, I think I saw Ben Harper at Bonnaroo. That feels right. That feels right to say. That sounds like something that could be true.

I really think it was the time period, right? Because I was in college, you know, like starting in the year 2000. It was coming right out for that like 90s rock and roll heat and so i feel like i was still very entrenched in that yeah and so i was very much like have we have we stopped listening to smashing pumpkins or was that still yeah i mean in the in the late aughts is when we got tender so and i'm t-e-n-d-e-r not the app the application would come much much later um. But, you know, we got gentle. We got gentle. I would go.

I definitely saw Damien Rice at Bonnaroo. Like, we would get Tinder. I remember, like, hearing people talk about Dashboard Confessional. Oh, that's different. And thinking, like, I'm too rock and roll for this new music. Yeah. I mean, everybody was too rock and roll for fucking Dashboard. I'm not going to hate on Dashboard. We probably have plenty of of dashboard fans in the crowd but hey that's it for for my thing for my first thing you want to drink the coffee no i did i can

do it quietly i don't have to make a big production out of it every time but okay yes what is your first thing i want to say something to make you spit take. I've never actually organically done that. Did you know that? No, I didn't. But I'm adding that to the wiki. I don't think I've ever. I've like choked before.

There was like a mabim bam bit that Justin made me laugh while I was drinking and it made me sort of gag. But I've never done it like a spit out. That would be gross. I don't think anybody does that naturally. I think it's always a play. Who spits? Ever. Ever.

It's 2021. Do you ever have that friend that like would walk down the street and just like casually spit all the time? Yeah, sure. No. Yeah, sure. What is that? Yeah.

What is that? I mean, I had friends who dipped. So like that was not uncommon for the dipping. Oh, yeah. Get you a good, good dip going. You're telling me you didn't dip. I'm telling you 100%. I did not.

I didn't. I didn't dip either. I just did big league chew. Would you spit it out? Absolutely not. I, for my first thing, wanted to take us to a oft-forgotten corner of the past several weeks, which is the poetry corner. Hey, okay. It's been a while.

It has been a while. We need to class up the joint, don't we? Yeah. It's been a while. It has been a while. We need to class up the joint, don't we? Yeah. I, you know, so I would say in the first couple years of this show, really tore through a lot of my top poets.

And now I'm kind of trying to learn about new ones. Yeah. Which isn't always easy. No. Because it's not like I walk into a CVS and there's like a poetry section, you know. Although I know you have been asking for that at CVS. Yeah. No, I walk in and i ask the woman at the register i say like okay i i see your hair care products but where where would i find you know the newest anthology i need pringles vitamins and a poem and i know where to get two of those uh the poet i wanted to talk about is anna journey not i didn't know that one yeah she's

she's pretty new she's pretty um i mean relatively new in this in the scheme of poetry uh her first book came out in 2009 okay uh that was 12 years ago yeah but not anybody i learned about in school because when i was in school she did not have a published book yet. Okay. So she is from Virginia, born in 1980. She is a poet and essayist who got a NEA fellowship for poetry in 2011. And she got her MFA at Virginia Commonwealth University and earned her PhD at University of Houston. Did you say Commonwealth? I wanted to say Commonwealth. I'm pretty sure you said Commonwealth, which is way cooler.

That is pretty cool. Which is way, way cooler. I imagine some people have done that before. You go there. I'm not making fun of you. I'm celebrating you right now. And that's an important distinction because I'm imagining a school where people go and they like really wolf out and people like, no, no, no, no, no, no. It's a calm. You got to be a common wolf. Like don't

you're going crazy right now. That's not how wolves do it. I want you to be the median every day off the store shelf wolf. That opens a lot of doors doesn't it it does i mean who is to say what a common wolf is that's a good i mean probably uh scientists who study wolves they would be a good candidate for that i think but i mean what is a common person you know wow right wow you just blew up my all my prejudice yeah you just really you really opened my eyes just now yeah there is no common well maybe that's what you learn when you get your degree at common wolf school when you walk out they hand you the diploma and they're like and you unroll the diploma it just says there is no common wolf and you're like, wow, I paid $65,000 for this. Is his degree still good?

Okay, so she has written several books. The first that I mentioned in 2009 was If Birds Gather Your Hair for Nesting, which I love. Very good. Sounds like a Fiona Apple title. Yeah, very good. She has a book called Vulgar Remedies that came out in 2013. The Atheist Wore wore goat silk in 2017 and then a book of essays called an enragement of skin in 2017 okay uh her poems are very kind of rooted in her experience they're very like visceral and at times kind of graphic, but there's something very

refreshing and exciting about reading her work. It's hard to tell sometimes. You know when you read a David Sedaris book and you're like, how fortunate that his family is so unusual because that gave him so much content. And then you think like, maybe all of our families are that unusual and we're just not as good at writing as he is. Yeah. What's a common family, you know? Yeah. Right? Her poems, a lot of times, like kind of are based in her own history. And you're just like, this is extraordinary. The stories you tell about your family, are you just really good at telling these stories?

Or do you really have just this really kind of unusual experience? So I wanted to read a poem that kind of exemplifies that called Mississippi Origins. My parents come from a place where all the houses stop at one story, for the heat, where every porch front and back simmers in black screens that sieve mosquitoes from our blood, where everyone knows that there's only one kind of tea served sweet. The first time my father introduced my mother to his parents, his mother made my mother change the bed sheets in the guest room. She believed it a gesture of intimacy. My grandmother saved lavender hotel soaps and lotions to wrap and mail as gifts at Christmas.

My grandfather once shot the head off a rattlesnake in the gravel driveway of the house he built in Greenwood. He gave the dry rattle to my mother the same week I was born saying, why don't you make something out of it? That's the poem. Is that it? something out of it? That's the poem. Is that it? That's fucking great. That's the poem.

What a good poem. God, maybe it's just because it's been a while since you've brought the poetry corner to the show, but I was enraptured that whole time. Like, yes. Oh, yeah. Yeah, I wanted to bring the kind of personal narrative. This is like when I started out in graduate school trying to write poems specifically for my program, I really wanted to write from personal experience. And I just had a hard time not being like overly sentimental. You know, or like finding what was interesting and kind of leaving it on its own. And I think a lot of times when you sit down to write a poem, you're like, you know, how do I get this like magical turn of phrase that's going to make everything seem more meaningful? And I feel like Anna Journey is really good at just saying like, this is poetic in itself.

And I'm just going to tell you it plainly. And, you know, and you'll kind of enjoy the story along the way. And it'll be a poem when I'm done. It requires like a superhuman amount of self-awareness, I feel like, to like be able to pick and pick and choose the stuff from your like story that is like beautiful in that way without you needing to like fluff it up you know all over the place yeah so this poem i actually found the missouri review which is the literary magazine i used to work at when i was at the university of missouri columbia uh they asked her kind of to tell the story of this poem and she said in my poem mississippi origins anecdotal fragments sharp and sweet,

poignant and stark, combine to create a locus for the family lyric. And that dried up rattlesnake rattle, which my mother declined to make into a baby rattle, definitely ranks as one of my family's stranger heirlooms. That and the pair of brass knuckles my white-haired great aunts, Mary and Joanna, kept in their shared house in case they were called upon to punch potential burglars in the face. And the skull fragment from medical school my other grandfather uses an ashtray. We're a well-adjusted bunch. Even that was poetic in an incredible way. Just to be able, I mean, it's such a- That was like a sequel to the poem. It's just like, it's a good exercise, I think, to like kind of zero in on those like kind of novel family stories to kind of figure out like, is there a poem here? And so I just read that. I was very inspired.

I was like, this is a really good way to approach like a writing exercise if you're trying to figure out how to put something together. Yes. That was incredible. Thank you for classing up the joint again. Can I steal you away? Yes. Cool. Oh, we have Jumbotrongs.

Do you want to hear them? Because I have them. Yes. Okay, well, this one's for Brianrian and it's from kayla who says hey cutie i hope you're having a good day but if you aren't i hope it gets better soon you don't have to believe in yourself just believe in the me that believes in you your drill is the drill that will pierce the heavens also you're cuter than baby bunny jump kicks what is your preferred time frame for this message to air is not part of the message

i've just realized and i apologize for that kayla and brian but um congratulations on your great drill um oh my gosh griffin has a great drill i do have a great drill i feel like that's an anime thing i don't know a lot about that scene i could i don't want to put that on Brian and Kayla if I'm inaccurate there. But in my heart of hearts, it feels like an anime thing. I'm sure I'll hear about it from our beloved fan base. Can I read the next message? Please. This one is for Nate. It is from Benji. Hey, Nate.

I thought your happy time podcast would be the best place to say this. I'm so happy to have you as my big brother and a best friend, and I'm so proud to watch you grow and adapt through these hard years. It's been a long journey, but we've always worked through it together, and we always will. Love your dingus brother, Benji. That is super nice. That's super nice. Got to have teamwork. nice gotta have teamwork gotta have

teamwork with the with the with the bros that's all there is to it when bros work together that's it that's it what's it like having a bro it's like knowing you can do anything as long as you work together and you form up like a voltron robot that's beautiful thanks yeah no i mean we literally do have sort of interlocking joints you You know how I have that flap on my shoulder that when you pop it down. I do. What is that for? And then my arm goes inside. That's where Travis's knee goes in. That makes so much more sense. Hi, I'm Jo Firestone.

And I'm Manolo Moreno. And we host After Game Show, a podcast where listeners submit games and we play them regardless of quality with a dozen listeners from around the world. We've had folks call in from as far as Sweden, South Africa, and the Philippines. Here's an example. Yesterdog, where players must sing a Beatles song but throw in the word dog and dog-related terms. Like, do you have an example, Manolo? Yeah. Hey, dog. Dog, dog, dog, bone. Oh, okay. Dr. Game Show has new episodes every other Wednesday on Maximum Fun. Check us out.

Ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-ch-check us out. Nice. Can I tell you about my second thing? Yes. Okay, my second thing is an episode of television that me and you watched very recently, and it was one of the hardest I think I've ever laughed in my whole life, and so I want to share that with people.

Although I imagine in our audience, a lot of folks have already seen this episode of television. Yeah, there's definitely some overlap uh it is an episode of the chris gethard show called one man's trash uh and even if you don't like follow i feel like the chris gethard show this episode when it came out uh got so much buzz because it was kind of uh incredible and a perfect little hour of television. And it's boy howdy. It lives up to everything I think everybody has said about it.

Rachel and I have just started to watch Chris Gethard's show. Which is kind of wild because I know a lot of people who worked on it. Yeah, especially because your showrunner jd that you all just hired just kind of based on a good impression like had a whole body of work that you all could have like sat down well no i mean we knew about his body of work and and you know we we that makes it sound like we just picked some random dude off the street no i'm just like, like when he said that he was like intimately involved in that, it seems like everybody could have been like, should we, should we, should we see if he's?

Yeah, it has been great though, because we've been friends with JD for like five years now. And like seeing him on the Chris Gethard show, as he is frequently sort of depicted as the, the sort of object of torment that is sort of raked over the coals uh in in the production yeah i mean the chris gethard show was live and it involved a lot of comedians and a lot of kind of hijinks hijinks. And to have somebody be able to kind of turn that into an episode was a very powerful thing and definitely boded well for your experience with JD. Yes.

And we've also been getting a lot of recommendations from Sarah, who does our social media stuff and, well, a stuff uh at our with our business yeah and she was also there she was also there yeah she was she she worked on the show also uh anyway one man's trash uh do not this is one of those things that you can spoil for yourself and you should not to that point uh i think all the chris gethard episodes are on YouTube, like on his channel. There's two versions of One Man's Trash and one is like the dumpster edition. Do not watch that. Do not watch the dumpster edition, which is longer because it spoils like it spoils the whole episode basically right away. The premise of this show, I mean, the premise of the Chris Gethard Show is it was like a

live public access show and then it was an internet streaming show and then it was on like a few public access show and then it was an internet streaming show and then it was on like a few different uh networks and it is oftentimes like a a complete mess uh but there is something about that that like chris gethard has always kind of celebrated and said like that is more entertaining to me than like very well produced traditional comedy television yeah he is like kind of a real clear mission statement for a show that is as chaotic as it is i feel like he makes it very clear of like i am trying to make something that is unusual and that is more real than a typical like talk show format right so even when like it makes me uncomfortable watching a live performance not go well. And there have been segments that have like not gone well,

but still watching them like give the thing form is like so rewarding and so cool to watch. And then it makes the episodes where everything fires off perfectly, which is the case in One Man's Trash, makes it like a truly spectacular feat. So it's a great show. It's all on YouTube. We've been, it like a truly spectacular feat um so it's a great show it's all on youtube we've been it's a treasure trove we've been we've been diving deep into it but one man's trash is

is the best episode i think we've seen so far it has two guests jc manzoukas and paul sheer who have been on the show a few times one of the episodes they just fucking take over uh chris gethard decides to leave and just like as punishment for bullying him so much just like make them host the show by themselves and they do it sort of empirically it is uh it's yeah i will say so chris gethard has has ucb training right as does paul sheer and jason manzoukas um and the same thing like they try to steamroll him like this entire episode they bully him like this entire episode. They bully him like this entire episode.

And this episode, the premise is there's a dumpster in the studio and there's something inside the dumpster and Paul and Jason and all the callers, the live callers, have to guess what's inside of it. And like there's a twist in the episode. The guesses are like,

they range from like silly to like weirdly accurate. And then there's a twist about halfway through the episode after Jason and, and, and Paul Scheer have just been really riding Chris Gethard's jock where he shows them what's inside the dumpster. And there is a switch that is flipped. There is a reaction from the, because he talks up,

Chris Gethard talks up, like it is life changing. What is in this dumpster is going to change the tone of the entire show. And Jason Manzoukas and Paul Scheer are just like, yeah, whatever, man. And then they see it and immediately just like shut up.

They are just- They're super invested. Super invested. Because the promise of the show is that if nobody guesses it, they are just they never will show what's inside of it uh and i i do not want to say much else i know this is like a short segment but like it is a it is perfect it is just like perfect i think i've

been thinking about this episode of television like every day since the day that we watched it because there were so many times they set up like at the beginning like if somebody guesses what this is in the first 10 minutes we don't have 50 more minutes of show like that's just gonna be it uh it is the the the pace at which the answers like dial in to the correct answer is perfect like so what happens with the callers is they will guess something and they can ask a question and a lot of times they will ask questions that will help people kind of zero in yes on what it is i will say the thing that i told griffin that i thought was interesting is that it was such a phenomenal idea that they could never do again because once like once you realize what is in the dumpster that like sets the tone for like following episodes if you were

to do the gimmick again um so uh so yeah so i was just like what a great idea that you could never never ever do it again um yeah and then after you have watched it there is a an inside the dumpster edition where you can watch the perspective of the episode from within the dumpster it is it is uh seriously if you if you need uh a a a laugh right now not to minimize the you know horrible shit that's going on but uh i it's it's it's amazing it's so good it's funny on an objective level and then from like a live television production level it is a literal miracle. Like it is a perfect thing that I just love to pieces. We've also been watching The Night of Zero Laughs, which is also right up our alley.

It's a series they do where they get a big panel of comedians and nobody can laugh or they get kicked out of the studio. It's got big documental energy. I think we've talked about documental on the show before. Yeah. Anyway, what's your second thing? My second thing kind of came to me and just like kind of like a bolt of electricity. You mentioned this. It wasn't anything that I'd really

thought much about, but as soon as I found it, I was like, well, yeah, this is what I should be talking about. And that is auctioneers. Hey! Yeah. You like that? Yeah, it's fascinating. It's a fascinating talent and there's so much that goes into it

that I did not realize. There's this kind of musicality to it and this performance element and it's such a specialized skill that's been around for such a long time. I've never known anybody to actually doing it. Have you ever been to a cattle auction? No.

I have. You have? Yeah, man. Yeah, I've been to a cattle auction. I've been to two cattle auctions. I've been to two different cattle auctions. But how? How did this occur?

One was our youth pastor growing up uh his parents lived on a farm so we would do like camp out trips out onto the farm and like go spelunking in wild caves and shit like that it was very it was very good very fun uh but then like one morning after uh like one of these these campouts we went to a cattle auction and it was i mean it's rad it's rad. It's as rad as you think it's going to be. They have bars, you know. They go very fast with their talking. I like that a lot. Yeah, but you said you went twice.

I can't remember the other one. I just have a second vivid memory of being at a cattle auction. So the way of speaking is called chanting. And there is a kind of a reason that they do it that way, not only to give kind of a sense of urgency, but to kind of create this structure of call and response. Like people get kind of like pulled into the rhythm of it and kind of encourages them to participate and to kind of keep the bidding going. And apparently auctioneers take home 10 to 20% of the sale price. Whoa!

So that is a big motivator, obviously. Yeah. There are all these techniques about, you know, identifying, first of all, identifying what a bid is. Because a lot of times, you know, you'll like have to scan the crowd and figure out who is actually bidding and who is just very warm. We were explicitly told to like be a statue because you don't want to accidentally buy like a, you know, $900 Black Angus steer. And then to also once bidding has started and you've kind of narrowed down your bidders to kind of look back and forth and kind of build that sense of competition between the people that are bidding yeah um there are about 50 schools in the united states that teach you how to do this um and the uh 27 states require auctioneers to be licensed which is why

those schools exist what a wild thing to require a license, not to diminish the job or whatever, but what a wild thing to require a license for. Yeah. I mean, so the articles I read, so I read one from Slate and one from Vox, and they talk about how this is not a style you would see, for example, at Christie's or Sotheby's. There is a more restrained British style of auctioneering

that does not require this kind of performance. Yeah. But, you know, as you mentioned, livestock, this is the way to go. They get wild in there, man. It's a party. So what happens at these schools? Some of them require 80 hours of training

or you complete an apprenticeship. Some states require you to stand up and auction an item as part of the test. And there are written questions dealing with auctioneering ethics and legal obligations. So, I mean, this is a licensed program. You know, you are learning something

that has a certain amount of knowledge and expertise behind it. Yeah, I guess I don't know what the ethics of auctioneering is. I think, I mean, you're saying a lot of stuff, right? And you're trying to motivate people to bid. Okay. But in the process of motivating people to bid,

you could potentially, you know, bully somebody into spending more. Yeah, come on, don't be a baby. Come on. What are you, a little baby? Hey, stupid hat, stupid hat, what's your business? Stupid hat, stupid hat. Don't have enough money, stupid hat? Is that what's up, stupid hat?

And so there are different exercises. Basically, they said it's not. So the interview I read was with a 2015 winner who said that, you know, you're not actually going that fast you're basically saying the same thing but you're developing these like compound phrases like what I want to give and now a dollar and a lot of like dollar bidder now two dollar builder you're like yeah you're kind of getting into the chant of it and there's all these phrases like, all right, how many dollars there? What do you want to get for them? You know, like that kind of have this musicality built in. Yeah. Say it all together. It becomes this kind of like rhythmic, you know, poetry almost. Yeah. And

then there's other lines where they're like, hey, pretty baby, won't you give me a sign? I'll do anything to make you mine all mine. We'll do your bid and be at your beck and call. Come on, John Michael Montgomery. No, I know. I know, but I don't know the lyrics. You don't know the lyrics. I don't know how to participate in this. Never seen anyone like a profile.

Do anything to make your mind all mine. I'm going wrong. Going twice. I'm sold to the lady in the second row. She's an eight. She's a nine. She's a ten. I know.

She's got ruby red lips, blonde hair, blue eyes. I'm about to make my heart lose its house. You really don't know every word to that song only since I have met you has that song hit my radar your life yeah that's fair so there is a world championship oh yeah that is the Livestock Marketing Association's championship. They do it each year. The Vox article from 2015 was from the winner of that year, who was actually from West Virginia. Hey, all right. And this kind of competition,

like people spend a very significant part of their lives trying to win. He had been in the competition for nine years before he won. But he said, in this interview, he said, quote, we used to play cattle auction with my cousins. When he was growing up, awesome. He said that he was like 12 or 13 going to auctions. And then at 15, he got his first job. And he now lives in Alabama and has been an auctioneer for over a decade. Rad. For whatever reason, the Vox article felt the need to list out the things that he has sold,

including swine, sheep, goats, cattle, horses, and cars. Cars, I was going to ask. That's a high pressure. That's a high pressure sale, I feel like. This winner that I am talking about is Brandon Neely. And he took the step of securing the WLAC champion Twitter account, which he still holds despite not being the champion. So good on you for securing that. So good on you for securing that.

So at the competition, judges evaluate the 30 auctioneers on their livestock knowledge during the interview as well as on their performance in a real auction, including bid-catching ability, meaning like noticing everybody in the crowd, clarity of chant, voice quality, and overall knowledge. The 2019 winner, they did not do the competition in 2020 because of everything the 2019 winner russell sleep is a a graduate of the missouri auction school uh lives in iowa he was also a nine-time top 10 qualifier before he he won the whole thing he's a natural there if you go to the website, the Livestock Marketing Association website, you can purchase a CD of these auctions. Oh, yes.

That's awesome. I'm going to rip that and do remixes. Yeah. Hey, can I tell you what our friends at home are talking about? Yes.

Corinna says, my small wonder is tea sets. I never enjoyed tea because it got cold too fast but now i can make a big pot of it and drink it from small cute manageable cups and it doesn't get cold nearly as fast as making a big mug of tea the process also feels very fancy and ritualistic i miss tea i used to have a little cool tea press thing you remember i was into tea for like a little bit yeah yeah yeah i should get back into tea. Maybe that'll be my weird 2021 affectation.

We always have tea. Somehow, neither of us are particular tea drinkers, but for whatever reason, our cabinet always has like We have a lot of tea. If we wanted to drink tea,

we would have a lot. I don't know if tea goes bad. Probably not. It's just dry leaves. What's it gonna do? Get drier? I mean, spices go bad. I think they lose their potency.

Logan says, My Small Wonder Lately has been the YouTube channel up, up, down, down. It is ran by the wrestler dryer i mean spices go bad i think they lose their potency uh logan says my small wonder lately has been the youtube channel up up down down it is ran by the wrestler xavier woods slash austin creed the channel is all about wrestlers as themselves and not their characters playing video games that's uh that's uh uh the new day xavier xavier woods oh okay uh and he he has other rest. I've watched it. I adore, I adore that channel. What a delight.

I love the new day. It is a delight. It is so fun. Like he really knows his stuff about games and a lot of the wrestlers that he brings on there does too. I missed him at a, he was on, I was on a giant bomb live show

and he was like on the panel right before me. So I missed my opportunity to say what's up. 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. Thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. Go to MaximumFun.org. Check out all the great shows that they have there, please.

I'm gonna recommend this week, Bullseye. Whoa. I'm gonna say Bullseye. What a bold choice. Yeah. No, Bullseye. Whoa. I'm going to say Bullseye. What a bold choice. Yeah. No, Bullseye's amazing. It's amazing. There is a great interview that we promoted, and if you haven't checked it out, between

Jesse Thorne and David Letterman. Ooh, yeah. Jesse Thorne, if you've only listened to Jesse Thorne on Jordan Jesse Go, you've got to check out Bullseye because, uh, he is an incredible interviewer and it is not something that you get to experience on. I've been on Jordan,

Jesse go before. And I felt thoroughly interviewed by the end of it, just about like Pokemon and stuff like that. Uh, yeah. And that's it. Uh, I,

I it's, it, please take care of yourself out there uh we again we're a day in advance recording this so we don't know like what the vibe is when you are hearing it i hope it is okay and i hope you all are doing well um and i don't want to make light of that but i have to go to the bathroom so bad i might oh there's the urgency i don't know if you could tell the energy that i've been putting out for like 10 minutes but it's the uh-oh actually there's the urgency I don't know if you could tell the energy that I've been putting out for the last like 10 minutes but it's the

uh oh there's about to be a whoopsie in the studio energy so let's cut it off in 3, 2, 1 bye Bye. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture.

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