Wonderful! - Wonderful! 252: Hot Tubbin' in the Cold Times

Episode Date: November 9, 2022

Griffin's favorite interactive installments! Rachel's favorite audio blogs!  Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaNorth American Indigenous Tribal Food Systems (NĀTIFS): https://www.natifs.org/ 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. Welcome to Wonderful. This is a podcast where we talk about things that are good, things that we like, things that we are into. It is Wednesday, my dudes, when you hear this. No, okay. You gave me like a bolt of panic.

No, my dudes, it is, sorry, it is Tuesday, my dudes. When you hear this, it is going to be Wednesday, my dudes. You will know the results of the midterm elections that Rachel and I are currently kind of like chilling in and for that I am maybe jealous jealous of future you you all um we don't know which way things are going to go down it's not a particularly fun thing to think about fair yeah yeah and we can't tell you to vote because it's too dang late we hope you did we hope we sure as heck hope you did uh i just knocked it out unsurprisingly dc has its shit together when it comes to you know exercising your democratic

not a lot of candidates or you know that is true or a lot of i think there were like eight nine things on the ballot total yeah i was gonna say like without a representation i don't imagine that ballot's very full yeah it's mostly sort of dc focused but um still it was bing bang boom in and out of there no yeah so this it is a holiday here it is uh and so everything you know consequential to us is shut down sure by that i mean our son's school right which is acting as a polling place now when i was a kid i don't know if this was true for you but like the school was still open people were coming into where i was trying to do my work can you imagine the safety concerns associated with that now that i'm looking at it in my head well there wasn't there wasn't any like

crime back in the oh okay yeah i always forget crime is a pretty new thing um no yeah that's remember like our teachers were like you have to be quiet in the hallway people are voting yeah and we did i would be like why aren't we doing pe and they'd be like because that's the room where they're deciding who the president's gonna be you were like sweet like cool i didn't know that that was so uh that miller elementary school was sort of the nexus for uh the country's political soul but anyway uh yeah so we're we're you know we're here we're gonna do our dang thing uh and we we hope that you enjoy our our jades very formal all of a sudden do you have a small wonder for me to hear i do actually i thought of it just a moment ago good it is when you put on

an article of clothing that you think or you're pretty sure that your partner is going to like. Yeah. Are you currently wearing an article of clothing that you think I like? Yeah. That's flannel, isn't it? I love you in a flannel. Yeah. It's good stuff.

I thought generally this is probably something a lot of couples share where it's like, you know, you have like a preferred item of clothing that your partner wears and you're like i'm real excited to put this on because i know my partner's gonna like it yeah every time i probably and it'll probably be a while before you see these things again because you know winter is coming but when i throw on those five inch inseam chubbies i know i know that you like what you're seeing uh you know the seven and a half inchers, those are, I think pretty, they look pretty good, make my stuff look great. But those five inchers, boy, that's a... An extra couple inches of thigh. I don't know. I can't explain it. It really drives you wild. I am going to say hot tubbing in the cold times, baby. I went to with some friends uh back home from austin and uh we we rented a place in denver that had like a rooftop hot tub and it was so choice it was very cold outside it

just snowed the day before we all got in and uh it's it's it's really i can't understand why it is as delightful as it is, but just being, having your head be real cold while your body's real hot, I like that for some reason. Yeah, no, it sounds good. It's also nice to do with buds because it's like a shared, you know, communal warmth, you know? We're all warm together. Okay. Do you know what I mean? It seems awfully intimate all of a sudden. Of course it is.

It's a hot tub. Yeah. I go first this week, I believe. Okay. I'm going to talk about immersive art. Oh, here we go. Immersive art. What if when you saw the painting, you could go into it and now you were the painting too?

That's the question. You know, there was a whole was it van go was that the whole thing for a while was making the rounds that's still making the rounds and i i will get back to it because that is a big one the immersive van go experience that i believe has been in every major metropolitan area on the planet earth um but this past weekend when i was in denver i consumed more sort of immersive art than i think is probably wise to consume in a like 24 hour period uh do you find now that you're like in in regular society you're like you feel like everything is maybe art i am wondering if i still am in davidrne's theater of the mind. Like my, like my body is still there.

And like, this is just like part of it. Do you know what I mean? I worry about that sometimes. No, I did get a phone call that was like, Griffin's coming back. Continue the experiment.

He'll be different. So freak is fucking bean, man. I'm going to be stretching the boundaries of, of the term immersive art just a little bit because I think that the sort of crossover between a more traditional immersive art experience like the Van Gogh thing you mentioned and interactive theater like the David Burton's Theater of the Mind, I think that there is a lot there to talk about and it kind of scratches the same itch for me so uh this i don't know i'm assuming you know this um it probably doesn't surprise anyone uh interactive theater makes me uncomfortable sure i am talking specifically about uh interactive maybe isn't the right word maybe like uh it's explorable theater open world theater, not where you are expected to do lines and stuff like that, but where you are no longer a passive observer of the thing, but rather the element that makes the art become activated. element that makes the art become activated, right? Okay, yeah, I like that.

No, I like that distinction because for me, the thing that I don't like is when you are called upon to interact and all eyes in proximity turn towards you. And I do not love that. There was some of that in David Byrne's Theater of the Mind, much to the chagrin of some of our friends who do not rock like that at all. But to sort of focus in on immersive art, I feel like everybody is seeing this pop up everywhere now, specifically that Van Gogh experience that you mentioned. I feel like everybody has been served an ad for that on Facebook and Instagram and what have you.

Instagram and what have you. And I think the reason that we are all seeing more of it is because of just how kind of outrageously Instagrammable those types of experiences are, whether it is, you know, a more traditional like pop up, you know, pop art museum, or whether it is something like the Van Gogh experience or, you know, anything else that you can really enter into and become a part of. But this concept of immersive art has existed like long, long, long before social media platforms were like even a thing. There is a woman, a Japanese contemporary artist who is like kind of a pioneer of what this this kind of expansion that we're seeing now her name is Yayoi Kusama and she has been active in the

art scene since like the 1950s her big sort of trademark series and I'm curious if you've seen any of this are called infinity rooms and they are sort of chambers where any of this, are called infinity rooms. And they are sort of chambers where all of the walls are mirrors, and then there will be like hanging sort of polka dot lights, hanging at different, you know, heights around the viewer who, you know, steps onto this platform. And then all of a sudden, sort of the boundaries of the room disappear, and you're in this like infinite space of polka dots and lights and views. I mean I haven't participated in any of that but I know that the concept is still very popular. in installations like around the world, like in New York City and in London and Tokyo and like Tel Aviv.

And she has these infinity rooms like everywhere. And she's obviously, she's been in the ship for a long time and does a lot of stuff. But this is kind of like the big thing that she's known for and sort of something that you see a lot of in immersive

art as it kind of expands as an internet sort of thing um the thing obviously that i am currently kind of uh obsessed with is meow wolf which started out as a sort of artist collective space in santa fe uh and has gone on to expand to become this like massive corporation with locations in Las Vegas and Denver. And I think two are opening up somewhere in Texas in the next couple of years, which is very cool. Meow Wolf is a, God, it is really really tough to define it is a world that you enter into and it is uh to varying degrees like fantastical and vibrant and detailed uh in denver it's at a place called convergence station and there are four unique kind of worlds with four different vibes that all sort of intersect. And you can walk around and check out at your leisure.

Can you help me understand? Because, you know, I haven't done this. Yeah. Are you given any guidance when you enter these spaces or is it just yours to explore? It is just yours to explore. And is it like, you know, you can pick stuff up and open drawers and whatever? Or is it all pretty cemented down like, you know?

No, I mean, it's very much in that vein. Like there's one world that is kind of like a library world. And you can flip through the books, all of which are books about the worlds that exist in inside of this exhibit and it's up to you to like kind of flip around them there's like a there was an arcade game where you controlled rats with these little um almost like rc car remotes and they battled each other but it wasn't a video game it was like an actual tangible sort of like thing in a glass box. You are heavily encouraged to kind of like play around. Were there kids there when you were? There were, yeah.

The Denver exhibit, from what I understand, is like the most sort of family friendly because there is like also this vibe of like, you know, hallucinogenics kind of welcome. Yeah. That is, I would say, maybe a little bit tempereded down yeah denver version of it i've not been to the other version other versions so i can't really say um but it is

incredible like there is a futuristic city street that you can explore and go in all the different businesses or go to the movie theater and like watch these short experimental buck wild films there's like this uh neon castle with like mechs outside that you can sort of interact with uh there's so much stuff to do it you know you could be in there for all day honestly and sort of just see different stuff uh the more that you go through it uh and it's incredible because you feel like the experience you're having is entirely your own. When we circled back with our friends because we kind of got separated

because it was so big, we all talked about the stuff we had seen and like all of us had kind of seen different stuff or seen one or two things that the other people did not know was there. And that is like a really cool thing. And it really brings me back to Sleep No More. Yeah, I was waiting for you to bring that up. In New York City, which is sort of an interactive theater experience set in a hotel that you can kind of explore and witness the events of this story that they tell.

Like however you see fit, whether that is following one character as they go from kind of like room to room and scene to scene to kind of like learn what their arc is or maybe you just stay in one room and see like what what comes your way yeah uh and like you mentioned earlier like it is heavily encouraged that you open up drawers and explore and uh really do that stuff and and me, like one of the most rewarding things, probably the most rewarding thing about art in its whatever form it takes is like catching a glimpse of the artist's fingerprints or like their intent.

And I think that is really easy to do. I think it exists in its purest form when you are when you open up a drawer and there's a book inside and inside the book is like a thing that somebody had to write to be like one of many, many, many details in this much larger experience. For me, that always like gives me such me such a thrill, partially because I feel like I've stumbled onto something special, but also because I know that somebody

worked really hard on this one specific thing that not everybody is going to get to see. Well, and also, you love world-building stuff. Yeah, for sure. And that's literally what is happening in these spaces. Yeah, there's, as somebody who enjoys games, like it is obviously like right up my alley. There is the original Punch Drunk is the theater company that makes Sleep No More. They had an exhibit open, I think in Boston.

And it inspired this game series called Bioshock because like the people who made that game lived in, that studio was based in Boston too. And so like going to explore those worlds kind of like helped inform their artistic work, which I think is also very rad. I think there's obvious criticisms about the rise of and popularity of immersive art where like, you know, you should be able to have that kind of experience without it being like a giant facility that you walk around in and snap pictures of and all of that jazz, right?

Like you should be able to discover artist intent just by looking at a sculpture or a painting or whatever. What's interesting is that we kind of, we both had our own little experience this weekend. Yes. I went to National Gallery of Art here in D.C., which is a very like traditional like art gallery kind of experience. Right. Which can still, as you mentioned mentioned be very powerful yeah uh you know it it's wild to think that you were having a kind of different i think it's uh it's a totally

different thing i think once this once you enter into this cross-section between art and entertainment and interactivity like it's, like it is a different thing where it is less about sort of logic and having, I think you have to have like some knowledge of art history to really be able to do the work of like art appreciation when you are at a more traditional museum this is way more accessible than that and that doesn't make it better of course but like for me it does like for me i i

uh i can't i can't get enough of it i i want to go back to me a little wolf i want to check out all that stuff i think i'm good on theater of the mind i think uh we i got my my bean freak by david byrne sufficiently uh but um yeah i it's it's obviously i'm combining a few different things under this one much larger umbrella but it's something that gets me really excited so that's immersive art also makes you sound like a sort of like a smart like yeah like guy yeah like i could be a teacher of like a teacher at some sort of prestigious university yeah like you'd walk in first day of class and write your name on the board and be like immersive art yeah and i'm wearing like all corduroy yeah every time i take like a step it's just all corduroy. Yeah. Every time I take like a step, it's just like whoop. Corduroy, blazer, tie, button down, socks.

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Hi. Hi, what do you got? So my thing is podcasts. Rachel, you can't do that on the thing. This is the thing. I have talked about interview podcasts uh as a wonderful thing but i think what really made me think about like stepping back and just talking about podcasts generally is that i am in a position now to like ride a train you know from place to place yeah basically for the first time regularly since the year 2007 yeah and in the year 2007 what i listened to and then like what i listened to and how i listened to it very different yeah sure i had um i bought myself my very first ipod in uh 2005 or 2006 um and it was like a a nano yeah sure uh and at that time i'm pretty sure all i had was this american life yeah like i had music obviously but like the only

podcast i was listening to was that and now now, now you have a few. Now when I get on a train, it's just like, it's endless. Yeah. And it just made me think about how grateful I am for it. Yeah. You listen to more podcasts than I think anybody I know. Because it's all I always like, if you're not in a meeting, you're Yeah, I feel like you have a podcast on. No, that's true. Yeah, I don't actually know anybody else that consumes as much as I do. It's cool. I mean, you're putting food on my plate, you know? Each listen. I do. I mean, I do listen to your podcast. I know. Except for the video game one. That's okay. That's okay. Because I don't speak that language. That's all right. You don't have to. Yeah. But I didn't know, and I'm actually curious curious do you know a lot about the history of podcasting

i was wondering when you like did your book with your fam if you like had to you know know about anything i may have yeah at some point yeah i mean i i was listening to podcasts pretty early as well yeah that's why i'm curious because you know obviously the articles i read don't mention the podcast that you were listening to necessarily so i am curious of kind of where that falls in the timeline when did when did like when did you guys start my brother my brother and me 2010 okay but like oh yeah dude started in 06 yeah and you know uh this American Life is obviously also a proto one, but that was also on the radio before it was on the internet, on the podcast network of your choosing. Yeah. And obviously, like, you know, Sound of Young America, Now Bullseye, JJ Go, all that jazz. Yeah.

So iPod debuted in 2001 2001 do you remember when you got your first like ipod 2005 yeah i was pretty i was pretty late i was also pretty late yeah did you have like an mp3 like a like a mp3 no i just had a cd player and i had like a several spindles of burned discs it's interesting now because you're like always on top of the most current tech, but I guess when you're a young person, it's not like you can access. Oh, I have some money now. Yeah. That's kind of the difference.

Yeah. I have. Well, you had your Zune. Yeah. That was, I got that from the GameStop I worked at. Oh, okay. By trading in like a bunch of video games so it's crazy to me that that was like a real currency sure of course you could look around

your room and be like if i pile this all together maybe i can get something else yep um okay so uh 2004 former mtv vj adam curry not anybody that I have heard of. I know the name. I just. And software developer Dave Weiner, not spelled like. Your dad? Not spelled like my father's name. Put together an RSS aggregator software.

So like the initial place where you could get podcasts and put them on like iPod devices. Right. They were not the ones that coined the whole idea of podcast. In February of 2004, a journalist put out an article. His name is Ben Hammersley, who kind of suggested some different ideas. Wait, he just wrote an article that was like, what are we going to call these things? I mean, it was a big part of it, apparently. Webios.

He proposed a handful of prospective titles, including audio blogging, guerrilla media, and podcasting. Well, okay. Kind of seems like that was the one he wanted. And so he included a couple so he did the other ones that were weird imagine if when i met your parents they were like what do you do and i was like gorilla media gorilla radio turn that shit up they probably would have loved that yeah i know i mean you would have seemed like a real bad boy

yeah for sure i feel like it's something you've been going for for a while now thanks yeah um okay so then uh libsyn yeah 2004 uh libsyn emerged as kind of the first podcast service provider that's what we used for a hundred hundred years yeah i mean how long before anybody else came out? I mean, there were competitors, OBS, but I mean, it was first and best kind of execution for forever. I mean, that's how when we were doing Rose Buddies, didn't we? Yep, started on Libsyn. All of our shows started on Libsyn. 2005, Apple introduced podcasts into iTunes 4.9 and builds this directory so you can search. In 2005?

2005. That feels quite early for that. Yeah. The podcast app didn't come out till 2012. Yeah. But the idea that you could go in iTunes and, you know, find a podcast by category. you know find a podcast by category um and then uh 2006 steve jobs like shows people how to make their own podcast um at a conference he gets out garage band and he's like hey here you go yeah even you can do this and then 2006 is when this american Life launched their podcast version of their radio program. Right.

And then, I mean, it's like steadily increased. That's when you see like Ricky Gervais and Adam Carolla and Marc Maron, you know, from 2007 to 2009. This is like idea of like, you know, even celebrities are doing it. Yeah. And I'm glad that that's a change that has stopped, you know, even celebrities are doing it. Yeah. And I'm glad that that's a change that has stopped, you know? I'm glad that no more celebrities launched any podcasts after that. So only five years after podcasts came about, Edison Research reported that 43% of Americans had heard of podcasting. Wow.

Which, I don't know if that was your experience in, you know, 2005 or seven. I mean, we didn't even start until 2010, right? And so, but for forever, for a very long time, people didn't know. And when I say people, I usually mean like, you know, older relatives didn't really know what it was. Yeah.

And then what really I mean, what really exploded everything is Serial in 2014. Yeah, sure. Serial was the first podcast to win a Peabody Award. And listenership just grew tremendously. And listenership just grew tremendously. This is an article I found that said, the number of monthly podcast listeners in America practically doubled in the five years after 2014, from around 39 million Americans to an estimated 90 million. Hell yeah. Thanks, guys.

In the five years preceding 2014, the same metric only grew by 35%. So, yeah, it was enormous. I mean, and also, I mean, 2014 was like a big year for y'all too, wasn't it? Yeah, that's when we wrapped up Adventure Zone. That was very much when podcasting kind of became a very viable kind of like only career for us. Yeah. And that was the thing that the article I read kind of made the point that, you know, 2010, 2012, like the amount of ad revenue was kind of stagnating a little bit.

Yeah, sure. And then 2014, it just like exploded again because everybody was like, oh, people are listening to this and we can advertise mattresses yeah you know and yeah i mean obviously now it's i mean it feels just as big as ever i would say there's certainly a lot of them yeah serial also was kind of instrumental in creating that like true crime podcast which i know is real popular with a lot of people every other podcast yeah yeah i don't know i mean obviously podcasting is important to me as as somebody who benefits from its existence in multiple ways yeah uh but i don't know i just

feel like it it like fundamentally changed the way people experience like i don't know their time their daily like their commute and their work and i don't know i kind of always have a voice in my ear like all day long yeah um which is like fundamentally different from any other human beings experience prior to this time yeah i mean if you want to look at like broad strokes, like it wasn't it's not like it invented like a new form of communication because it's like it basically is a radio. Like it basically that basically is like you're under the thrall of my voice and you're going to stay that way for an hour or so. And with brief intermissions in there for me to tell you about, you know, yeah. Burt will Ford 60. Uh, but at the,

but there's something about sort of the ubiquitousness of it. Yeah. Especially once it was like integrated into. Well, every streaming platform and like, yeah, all that. I mean,

to listen to the radio, like there's some, there's such a small percentage of people that get their own radio right of course you know like you're getting to hear voices that you otherwise wouldn't hear yeah you know it's it's not something that existed when i was when i was like coming up like in high school and so it's funny because that's the time in your life where you're thinking about like what your career is going to be. And I think maybe if it had existed, it would have been something I would have been interested in

because a lot of the sort of like, you know, genetics of what we did as when we were younger of like entertainment and radio and all of that, I think it would have been a very logical career path. But instead, we just kind of

had to stumble into it. Yeah, I mean, well, I guess none of you guys thought about pursuing radio. No. Well, no, not really. I mean, you were broadcast journalism. I was broadcast journalism, and I did radio for a couple of years, the college radio station, which we've talked about before. about before um but i don't think it was ever something that i wanted to pursue because frankly uh the way that the big sort of players yeah the like one or two monopolies that controlled all of radio the way that they treated their employees which i got to witness firsthand and continue to and continue well no i mean he doesn't work there anymore no i'm just saying that people that work for radio to this day yeah are not treated well at all um and so i didn't

i didn't want to do that yeah you know what's to a lesser extent um i mean i felt the same way about teaching you know like i my not just my my mom but a lot of my relatives were teachers and I saw like what a difficult job it could be. Yeah. And I just didn't have any illusions about that being, you know, an ideal position for my mental health. And so I never, I never pursued it. But obviously, you know. It all worked out in the end. It all worked out.

Yeah. Yeah. Hey all worked out, yeah. Yeah. Hey, thank you for listening. Thank you to Bowen and Augustus for the use of 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. It's a great, great place with lots of podcasts on it.

So if listening to Rachel's segment made you feel like you really needed to start getting into these podcast things, MaximumFun.org will have a lot of good opportunities for you. Hey, we will not have an episode out next week, and neither will any of the McElroy family of products. We are going to be doing kind of a staff retreat experience. We work with a lot of people who help us to make and promote the shows and play on merch

and live shows and all that jazz. And we haven't really ever gotten together all in one place to sort of talk big picture stuff. Yeah, I was going to say, nobody actually lives

within real close proximity to anybody else. Yeah, so we are going to be doing that next week and we're going to be taking the week off. But we will be back the following week with a new episode of Wonderful. So keep it locked.

Oh, and there's still time for people to get tickets to see us in D.C. There are time. There are is. There are time to do it. There are time. Go to MacRoyDotFamily. Go click on the links.

We're going to be opening up a Bim Bam with Sawbones this coming Saturday at the DAR Constitution Hall. So come out and see us. It'll be a hoot. I don't actually think there's that many tickets available. Wow. So don't sleep. Yeah. You know what it was?

It was like when old people were like, well, is one wonderful, wonderful is going to be there? Yeah. That's probably what happened. That's probably what happened. That's probably exactly it. Uh-huh. Anyway, thanks for listening. Have a good one. ¶¶

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