Wonderful! - Wonderful! 301: Thanks Science, You're Doing Great

Episode Date: November 9, 2023

Rachel's favorite brain-stimulating activities! Griffin's favorite differently-mathed music! Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvm...Woya Fair Elections Center: https://www.fairelectionscenter.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

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Starting point is 00:00:00 Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hi, this is Griffin McElroy. This is wonderful. A show where we talk about things that are good, we like, and are into them. This is a show where we talk about things we like. That's good. I'm going to say one thing I like, Small Wonder right off the bat,
Starting point is 00:00:32 the SAG strike has ended. Yeah. I think maybe two different times that I've prepared segments, and then I was like, wait a minute, I can't talk about this at all. Yeah. We can trot those right back out. There's going to be so much stuff we didn't talk about this at all. Yeah. We can trot those right back out.
Starting point is 00:00:46 There's going to be so much stuff we didn't know about that's all going to drop today. Shrek, they already announced a new Shrek today. Not a joke. Shrek 5, they announced today. Magical. I'm on Tinder hooks to find out what other kind of delightful surprises. Boss Baby 3. What else does DreamWorks got fully ready to launch? Yeah. to find out what other kind of delightful surprises boss baby three like what else does dreamworks got like fully ready to launch yeah and they said whether or not michael myers
Starting point is 00:01:11 is also attached to this product maybe maybe we don't know i don't know if mike myers is attached to it yeah i realized as i said his whole first name that that was not a wild take we can also talk about the fact that apparently i am in the new trolls movie because they have my voice in the trailer doing a joke from the second trolls movie yeah cheaper didn't ever got to the bottom of that couldn't really put the put put trav nation on the case to dig into it because i couldn't ding dang mention it didn't know wasn't informed but uh who knows man who knows we're looking forward to those resiggy checks thanks sag for uh for for getting that good deal um yes so that's that's very exciting news do you have a small wonder yeah i wanted to bring up the realization we had yesterday
Starting point is 00:01:58 which is that our uh one of our neighbors has their christmas lights up huge huge huge choice to do that on november 8th yeah yeah i was talking to griffin about it because it's not like they don't have like inflatables it's it's like it's festive but not not like tied really to the holiday the only reason i recognized it was because it was the same light patterns last year and i thought like oh they're doing it well i, I'm sorry, honey. Are you suggesting that there is a version of what they did that could be charitably considered Thanksgiving lights? Like if people festoon their house in small lights, I usually, I don't assume like, oh man,
Starting point is 00:02:38 they are really going all out for Veterans Day this year. Well, it's just like, it's a little less committal, I guess. It's, I mean, obviously there's not really a widely known tradition of Thanksgiving lights. Yeah. But it's not like they have like Mr. Claus out there like with a bag saying like, hey, I'm on my way.
Starting point is 00:02:57 Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's more like, look at all these lit up trees. Isn't that pretty? Yeah. And I thought like, yeah, it is pretty. Thank you. You're saying slapping nativity out there. Too much, too early. Okay, too much, too early too much too early but lights why not okay that's awesome I'm I'm I I
Starting point is 00:03:11 didn't know how I felt about it at first I felt challenged but then I realized it's not about me exactly you go first this week I do let's hear it this is another one where it's difficult for me to figure out what to call it i have the same issue with my shit this week yeah uh but i feel like it it's just kind of learning new things as an adult okay uh it's kind of my general category if i say like adult education that's like a very specific kind of thing uh so i didn't really want to say that i just realized for me part of what i like about my job and i'm speaking of my job outside of the podcasting space although it happens here too uh is that i'm always getting to learn new things sure keeps me like more engaged and enthusiastic about what i'm doing and i feel like it does something in my brain that
Starting point is 00:04:04 feels like good. Yeah, I think that's what all brains do. When they learn something new, they're like, they shoot out the juice that makes the brain feel good so that the brain is like, well, let's keep doing that then. And I think when I was researching this topic, it helped me kind of get a more positive perspective on it. Because like there was a period of time back when I had free time where I would take up like I'm going to do pottery. Yes. And I'm going to do rock climbing. I just thought like how uncommitted was I that I gave it up so quickly, you know?
Starting point is 00:04:40 Well, rock climbing is hard. Yeah. So I can understand that one. Pottery is also very hard you would come home from pottery class and your arms would look like the rock thank you i'm gonna take that as a compliment you should but now i'm realizing that just the act of learning something new even if it is only over a short period of time is valuable in itself sure and then i don't need to feel bad about not committing to something like
Starting point is 00:05:05 for the rest of my life yeah you know yeah uh so i wanted to do some research on kind of what what benefits you got from that and kind of what it said about the brain like as you try to learn things as you get older yeah uh so first what i found was a lot of like adult adult stuff like a person. Pornography. What pornography does to your brain? Yeah well your your algorithm is as such that when you google anything you have to sift you have to wade through a good few pages of pornography before you can reach the sort of search search results. But the important thing is that you tried you know sure you put the effort in to find new pornography yeah now i'm talking about like people who are dealing with like the effects of aging like people in their like 60s and 70s who like are at risk for a number
Starting point is 00:05:57 of health conditions right namely like dementia for example um and how the benefits of learning new things for them are significant, particularly if it's like a hard thing. There was a research study that I saw from UT Dallas that talked about assigning 200 older people different activities. One was just like a more social activity. One was actually specifically digital photography and Photoshop. Cool. It was interesting.
Starting point is 00:06:28 They showed an interview with one of the guys who was like, it was really quite a challenge for me when I got into the photo class because it involved a computer and I had never even touched a computer. I love that. When was this study done? This was 2014. Okay. So we should have been all,
Starting point is 00:06:49 done uh this was 2014 okay so we should have been all we should all have met uh mrs beacon and done her incredible typing classes at this point uh but that um the greatest improvement was for people who learned digital photography and photoshop uh because it was perhaps the most difficult whereas the people that did tasks that were maybe simpler didn't have as long term of uh gains well and also they learn photoshop yeah which is fun you know they can go and make themselves look young in all of their photos or stronger or it's actually something my grandma used to do when she got into like retouching photos she would always improve her neck and she was like i did not know that she was like i haven't seen my real neck and i don't know how long we've i mean we've talked a bit about rachel's grandmother on this show maybe even in this exact context but rachel's grandmother was an early adopter of computers
Starting point is 00:07:34 and specifically was into early computer games yeah so like showed you like Wolfenstein and. A lot of like CD-ROM games. Yeah. Like I learned about like Heretic and Doom from my grandma. That's so funny. Just hearing you say Heretic out loud. I know. Really, really makes me excited. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:07:59 But then I wanted to look like more specifically at like adults, you know, in our age group. Yeah. So there was a New Yorker article that came out in 2021 where they interviewed a variety of authors who have kind of written about this thing. One of them was Rich Karlgaard, who was the author of Late Bloomers, The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace. author of Late Bloomers, The Hidden Strengths of Learning and Succeeding at Your Own Pace. And he said that our brains are constantly forming neural networks and pattern recognition capabilities that we didn't have in our youth when we had blazing synaptic horsepower. So he talks about a couple of things. He talks about fluid intelligence, which is your ability to suss out novel challenges and think on your feet.
Starting point is 00:08:44 And he said that this is often enriched by advancing age and the particular cognitive skills rise and fall at different rates across your lifespan. He said that processing speed peaks in your late teens and short-term memory for names at around 22. That sounds right to me. Short-term memory for faces at around 30. And vocabulary at around 50. Cool. Yeah, I know.
Starting point is 00:09:07 I remember words much better than names. That's why I usually give people names that are just words in my mind. I think about that a lot because I feel like if you asked me to name 50 people I went to high school with, I could do it. Really? Yes. First and last. Well, okay, that is cheating because like i like i had a lot of jessicas i can just say jessica jessica jessica yeah yeah no i i feel like but if i had to name
Starting point is 00:09:35 anybody i went to college with gets a little bit harder that's a really good point yeah really good i mean granted you had more continued access to people when you were younger. Sure, yeah. But still, it's interesting to think about that. I also thought it was interesting, short-term memory for faces at around 30. This is something that's come up for us, I feel like, because we have met a lot of parents at Henry's school. Yeah. a lot of parents at Henry's school.
Starting point is 00:10:04 Yeah. And many of them I can recognize on site. I could not tell you what their name was. Yeah. Part of it is my own fault because someone will tell me
Starting point is 00:10:14 their name and I will do nothing to retain it. There's a little guy in my head that you activate by saying, oh, sorry, what's your name? And then the guy turns on and the guy's just like,
Starting point is 00:10:24 wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah, wah name and then the guy turns on and the guy's just like and then the guy's like just say oh cool yeah i'm like oh yeah all right we went to a function the other day where people had to wear name tags and i was so grateful for it normalize this normalize this normalize just daily name tags do you remember when people would wear jewelry that with their name, like JLo sort of got that ball spinning. That would be so huge if we all could have just sort of like accessories with our names. That reminds me, I was in a conference with somebody earlier today who wore their astrological
Starting point is 00:10:58 sign around their neck. Awesome. And I just thought a lot about it. I thought like, I bet that's a great conversation starter. Were you able to clock the astrological sign? No, because it was one I didn't know a whole lot about. Sagittarius.
Starting point is 00:11:11 Yeah. The fish. I think. The archer. No. The archer. The deer. I think that's actually what our sun is maybe.
Starting point is 00:11:21 I think it's like a fall sign. I don't really know a lot about it but i just thought like oh wouldn't it be great if i knew anything at all and i could speak to that with this person yeah but i didn't it's a shame so i'm a shagatarius you know what makes me sad is that's probably going to be the episode title and that makes me sad well that's the's the challenge. The glove has been dropped. Oh, now we have to say something more compelling. Now we have to say something better than shagatarius.
Starting point is 00:11:51 So I think this is particularly interesting. And this article talks about it. In science and technology, the article says we often think of people who make precocious breakthroughs as the true geniuses. For example, Einstein developed his theory of relativity at 26. And at the time, Einstein said, quote, a person who has not made his great contribution to science before the age of 30 will never do so. Awesome.
Starting point is 00:12:17 Get him. That's easy to say if you're Albert Einstein. But in a 2014 paper for the National Bureau of Economic Research, the average age at which people made significant contributions to science has been rising during the 20th century, notably to 48 for physicists. Okay, but it's just a sort of counterpoint to that. It's important from a statistics standpoint to keep in mind that people don't die when they're like 48 years old anymore. That's a good point used to be you got to 48 and you're like oh man any second now right i should just stop doing science and go hit the beach but now it's you know now we're now we've got longevity
Starting point is 00:12:55 that's a good because of science that's a good point thanks thanks science we don't say that enough thanks science you're doing great the other thing thing I wanted to say is that there has been research to say that people may learn better when they are learning multiple skills at once. A recent study looked at the experiences of adults over 55 who learned three new skills at once. For example, Spanish drawing and music composition. Found that they not only acquired proficiency in these areas, but improved their cognitive functioning overall, including working and episodic memory. So this is basically like go back to school. School, yeah.
Starting point is 00:13:32 It's called school. I never really thought about the fact like you have to take a certain number of classes when you're a student, but now it makes me wonder like, oh, is that for a reason? It's just a compound effect. I thought it was like to just get you out there as quick as possible. Yeah, your parents have to work for eight hours today. So we need to find lots of stuff to fill up here. Do you feel, I've almost certainly talked about that, this on the show before, but like
Starting point is 00:13:52 an overwhelming sense of guilt for like, I'm so deeply curious as an adult about anything and like delight in, you know, tumbling into into a you know youtube crash course uh and just like learning about a thing and then i think well shit i had the opportunity to do that uh for for many hours in my youth that i just did not could not have been asked to do yeah That's a bummer. Yeah, it is. And also, a lot of what I was reading suggested that the interactive element of sitting in a classroom can be really valuable. It is easy to watch a video and think that you are retaining and learning at your full potential, but to have the feedback and the engagement is actually a more accurate demonstration. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:14:45 Okay, so the last thing I'll say. The feedback and the engagement is actually a more accurate demonstration. Yeah. Okay. So the last thing I'll say. So there is a 2017 paper by Rachel Wu, who is in neuroscience at UC Riverside, proposes six factors that are needed to sustain cognitive development. I'm listening. These include what the Stanford psychology professor Carol D Dweck, calls a growth mindset, the belief that abilities are not fixed but can improve with effort. Yeah.
Starting point is 00:15:10 Yeah, of course. A commitment to serious rather than hobby learning in which the learner casually picks up skills over a short period of time and then quits due to difficulty. Yeah. That would be maybe an issue that I have had in the past. Or everyone over the pandemic, every living human being.
Starting point is 00:15:25 Very true. A forgiving environment that promotes what Dweck calls a not yet rather than a cannot approach. Cool. Which, of course, that's tremendously valuable for me. For example, I don't know that I would take up rocket science at this point. Because if you struggle with that, there are some real consequences. But I feel like-
Starting point is 00:15:50 You blow up a rocket in space and people get hurt? Is that the consequence? Yeah, yeah. But if you take on something that like, maybe you don't know it yet, but you can kind of struggle towards success, like maybe that's a better thing to take up now is what I'm saying. I agree. And the final one is a habit of learning
Starting point is 00:16:05 multiple skills simultaneously, which I just mentioned, which may help by encouraging the application of capacities acquired in one domain to the other. So that's another thing we didn't mention is that when you're learning a bunch of stuff at once, you can kind of ping pong them off of each other, which gives you like a new kind of understanding. We had this great opportunity at my high school. I don't know if I've talked about it before. It was junior and senior year. You could take your literature class paired with your history class. So it'd be a two hour block and half the block you would spend reading a book of the time.
Starting point is 00:16:39 And then the other half you would talk about the historical aspects. And it was incredible. Oh, it sounds mad boring to me but you and i feel different ways about stuff so we would leave we would look for example like we read the grapes of wrath and then we learned about like depression era like u.s and kind of yeah but see i don't want to do either of those things anyway i just felt like all classes should be taught this way. I mean, obviously, it's a little trickier with math because then you'd be like, well, if you had.
Starting point is 00:17:11 Math and cooking. That would be kick ass. Yeah, that's true. Math and music. Yeah. That's great. Spoiler alert. That's what my segment is going to be this week.
Starting point is 00:17:18 Yeah. So I think that that's a good pairing. So anyway, I just, the whole reason I brought this up, it was also kind of helpful for me because I always, whenever I sit down to do something, I'm like, well, how long are you really going to do this, Rachel? You know, it's just kind of my own, like, I don't want to start something I don't think I can finish. But like, this is just a reminder of like, there is always value in putting time into
Starting point is 00:17:39 learning something, even if you don't stick with it. I find that in my adult life, I am having to deprogram sort of all or nothing thinking in general especially when it comes to areas of self improvement or or learning where it's like you know i could start playing piano again routinely and like you know practice my scales and what have you but i'm never gonna play at carnegie hall so what's the fucking point of any of it? Yeah. That is how my brain tends to go, and I have to fight that instinct at every step. Can I steal you away?
Starting point is 00:18:14 Yes. Thanks. What is up, people of the world? Do you have an argument that you keep having with your friends and you just can't seem to settle it? And you're sitting there arguing about whether it's Star Trek or Star Wars, or you can't decide what is the best nut, or can't agree on what is the best cheese. Stop doing that.
Starting point is 00:18:42 Listen to We Got This with Mark and Hal only on MaxFun. Your topics asked and answered objectively, definitively, for all time. So don't worry, everybody. We got this. Hey, Sydney, you're a physician and the co-host of Sawbones, a marital tour of misguided medicine, right? That's true, Justin. Is it true that our medical history podcast is just as good as a visit to your primary care position? No, Justin, that is absolutely not true. However, our podcast is funny and interesting and a great way to learn about the medical misdeeds of the past as well as some current not so legit health care fads. So you're saying that by listening to our podcast, people will feel better? Sure. And isn't that the same reason that you go to the doctor?
Starting point is 00:19:27 Well, you could say that. And our podcast is free. Yes, it is free. You heard it here first, folks. Sawbones,
Starting point is 00:19:33 Merrill Turow, Miss Guide to Medicine, right here on Maximum Fun, just as good as going to the doctor. No, no, no, still not just as good as going to the doctor,
Starting point is 00:19:40 but, but pretty good. It's up there. I think it's really funny that that was the segment that you had because my segment is sort of the case like proof of that uh in in practice of like a thing i have been learning about the past couple weeks that i've gotten very excited and fascinated in that i'm now going to attempt to explain and probably only do an sort of okay job of it. If I can pull off sort of okay job on this, then I will be thrilled. I want to talk about microtones. It's a fun name already. And do you know anything about this? Because you played music
Starting point is 00:20:22 for school, you played instruments and stuff i don't know how like funky with the theory they got no uh in fact one might say there was no theory i i mean we learned how to read music uh and we practiced playing music um but i never really understood anything about it i mean i would say being able to read music represents a pretty firm understanding of the core principles of music. Yeah, but it was like more memorization than like, I don't know. Why it sounds good.
Starting point is 00:20:52 I didn't have any kind of deeper access to it. I don't have like a, I, you know, I've been making music for Adventure Zone to varying degrees. I used to make it a lot more. And so, you know, this is not a this is not false humility. Like I did not have a particularly formal like music education growing up outside of like piano class in high school, which was very much the same, like memorize the notes in order
Starting point is 00:21:18 that you play in order to get a passing grade on the thing. But my youtube algorithm now is like all wild music theory stuff um and i find that a whole sector of youtube just like infinitely watchable because i've been listening to music for such a long time and i love listening to music but the more i watch of these videos the more i like understand the fact that like i only understand maybe 2% of like music theory and why music sounds good and, you know, chord progression, like logic and all of that jazz. And jazz. I'm so like out of the loop. That's the thing. Like if I had done any kind of improvisational music,
Starting point is 00:22:07 I think I would have learned a lot more. You would have to. Yeah, right. This is the basics of that. I think I got onto this track, by the way, by watching like a lot of Lawrence videos and Wolfpack, like a lot of like Jodart based solos and shit like that. And then I followed a sort of path through,
Starting point is 00:22:23 there's a guy named Jacob Collier, who is very, very prominent in this scene. He has a great video he did with Wired, where he explained the concept of harmony to five different groups of people. So there was like a kid, and then like a middle schooler, and then like a college student, and then a professional pianist, and then Herbie Hancock. and it's just like a evolving conversation about harmony throughout those i that i love that shit and so this is like where i've gotten uh deep into what my my fascination these past couple weeks is microtones so i'm going to try and summarize this and i don't have like a music theory background so if you don't i hopefully this you can grok this uh so pretty much all music all western music at least for the past like five centuries has been created using a series of 12 notes that fall along what's called
Starting point is 00:23:12 an equal temperament that's the 12 notes that we have so you think about a piano you have the seven white keys in an octave and then the five black keys right you? You have A to G and then the flats and sharps. Those are the 12 notes that we have divided the music system that we all know. And that is called an equal temperament. It was sort of like codified in the 16th century. And it all works because the wavelength of all 12 of those notes follow like a logarithmic scale.
Starting point is 00:23:47 They follow a pattern so that they play nicely together to the ear, I guess, subjectively, right? Like this is just the way that music has been because people thought it sounded good in like the 1560s and then people were like, fuck yeah, man, that's great. Let's go with it. And there's an infinite way of like exploring just those 12 notes and that is where you get most of like
Starting point is 00:24:10 composed music uh a440 is the standard tuning that's 440 hertz for the a above middle c that is like the goal the the starting point for how you would tune that 12 note scale uh everything would be in relation to that following this logarithmic pattern. It's called 12 EDO is another way of describing it, 12 equal divisions of octave. And what I have learned because of weird music theory, YouTube, is that that is not the only way to divide up an octave into a series of notes. For example, there's something, a much, much older way of doing this called the Arab tone system, which is one of the oldest equal temperament models, where instead it uses 24 equal divisions of an octave. So twice as many.
Starting point is 00:25:00 This, I think, is kind of easy to visualize, even if you've never heard a song using 24 EDO, because it's just like you think about the step between C and C sharp. Just imagine an invisible step between those two. And it sounds pretty wild. You can listen to a full range of the 24 notes on this division of the octave. And it sounds wild. It sounds wrong to an ear that has been trained to just think in terms of 12 EDO equal to one.
Starting point is 00:25:32 Yeah. But this is an older sort of way of thinking about notes and tones. It still has scales. It still operates on scales following like wicked different rules, but scales of seven notes with different intervals between them, but it can pull from twice as many tones as a traditional 12 EDO sort of, uh, tonal scale. Um, so like that's still kind of makes
Starting point is 00:25:57 mathematical sense, right? Like it's just our 12 note model, but with a half step between each of the things, right? You can kind of, even if you're not listening to that, you can kind of envision what that sounds like, right? Then you can get into like really, really wild shit. So like a very popular one in like weird YouTube theory is 31 EDO. This is 31 equal divisions of the octave. So now it's not like you're moving from C
Starting point is 00:26:24 to a weird CC sharp to c sharp to a weird c sharp d to d now it's like fucking all like it does not divide evenly at all and so you hear some uh you know you can get to the standard range of you know natural notes that are in there but scattered in there is just a fucking plethora of other wild sounds that do not divide up evenly into like any other type of music you've ever heard before. It sounds very, very strange. You have to like compose in a completely different way. The harmonies are all completely different. And it still sounds kind of bad to the ear if you are not kind of like accustomed to it or able to sort of like think about it in like a weird lateral way uh i find that so fucking cool i find that so cool because
Starting point is 00:27:13 it's not like a new genre of music it's not like a new instrument playing a song it's not like a new composition that is an arrangement that is clever you've never heard before it's like what if there was different math and yeah uh and that is like really very very cool and exciting what sort of makes it more exciting is that a lot of the videos that i have watched of people playing piano in 31 edo you can't just use a piano right because it doesn't have the buttons for it. It uses a device called a Lumitone, which I sent you a video of someone playing this instrument. And it is gigantic. It's like the size of my desk. And it is covered in like a few dozen glowing hexagons that sort of look like they follow a piano pattern of like, you know, notes in rows, except there's like six rows of different shades and they play like the different, you know, semi flats and other weird.
Starting point is 00:28:10 Yeah, I thought it was like a soundboard, which I mean, I guess it basically is. But like, I didn't realize it was like a whole new system. Yeah, so the whole Lumitone system is specifically for pianists to explore other equal divisions of octave. Because 31 is not the only other one. There's like, I mean, virtually, you can divide up an octave, any number of notes that you want.
Starting point is 00:28:34 Some of it makes a little bit more mathematical sense than other ones. And 31 just happens to be a sort of standardized version of that. This thing looks like the flight deck of like an alien spacecraft. It looks really, really sick. And I realize I've described like a music theory thing without actually playing it.
Starting point is 00:28:50 And I probably haven't done a great job explaining it. I apologize if there's like, you know, music majors out there who have been pulling their hair out listening to this. But I'm going to play a piece by a YouTuber named Gianna E. Rose. a piece by a YouTuber named Gianna E. Rose. And it's in 31 EDO on one of these like crazy lumitone keyboards that you should just look up a video of because they are sort of hypnotizing just to see. It's an etude.
Starting point is 00:29:16 I don't think I'm saying that word correctly, but it's a piece called Paranola. And it is just this minute long microtonalonal piece that just boggles my mind. So I'm going to play that now. Thank you. Can I say something yeah i thought it sounded a little bit like the music they would play in mr rogers neighborhood oh wow like but like but you know like the little transitional music and the music they'd play like when they would go to the land of make-believe i don't know why maybe it's just like the kind of i don't i don't know i don't have a lot of reference points for like kind of jazzy piano yeah i mean i think that has more to do with like the jazzy nature of the piece and less to do
Starting point is 00:30:54 with like the microtonal yeah nature of the of the piece because i don't know if mr rogers neighborhood got that fucking trip probably not uh because it like a lot of music theories like a major key being positive happy bright and a minor key being like sad and melancholy even though like that's a human association like those those notes don't it that's not a sad note on the piano it's just like when you hear a minor key you your brain thinks like oh oh, that is a sad, that is a downbeat thing as opposed to an upbeat major thing. All of that is like how we map our emotions and response to the music that we hear, right? And the microtonal pieces, it feels like just like comes swinging in on a vine and just like smashes through the wall Kool-Aid man style. Like, what do you fucking make this i bet you don't know because it doesn't even use notes that like my first blush is like it kind
Starting point is 00:32:10 of sounds like a piano that's out of tune being played but then like in the context of a bigger piece as it starts to like you know contextualize itself and harmonize with itself and these like weird offshoot notes it's like oh there's a lot of comments that are on on that video that i just uh played a clip from uh that kind of like echo my first thought which is like it's like seeing a color that you haven't seen before yeah which is not really an experience you get to have in the visual realm all that often but like this this is something that like once i started watching these like weird microtonal compositions, it's like, oh, okay. So like there's a whole different ballgame that is out there that is like infinite and kind of crazy.
Starting point is 00:32:55 And I just think that's so cool. That is cool. I don't know that I'm going to be like, you know, bopping to microtonal beats. I mean, who knows, though? You know, the future of music can be anything. Fair. Yeah. It's almost like finding a secret room or like a secret passageway.
Starting point is 00:33:14 It's just like this idea that, I don't know, there's this whole other existence that you hadn't even considered. Anyway, I hope I did an okay enough job trying to explain that. Hey, I got some small wonders here um i would like to read them mel says my small wonder is sharpening my set of colored pencils there's something satisfying about the routine and seeing them all freshly sharpened right before starting a new coloring page that's really great i do like that i miss colored pencils a lot i guess i could just get some uh. I'm an adult. You're an adult. Awesome. Alex says, my small wonder is static electricity at night, like when spreading a blanket over a bed.
Starting point is 00:33:50 Seeing the dim flashes of tiny lightning really is a cool reminder of how the world is the same, even if the scale is different. Beautiful. Beautiful. I like that. I used to like biting into certs in a closet. Getting that little spark. I don't know if that's the same concept. We have a lot of static electricity experience on our tramp know if that's the same concept we have a lot
Starting point is 00:34:05 of static electricity experience on our trampoline that's true that's true that's fun i have my face against like the mesh net surrounding the thing like pushing it in trying to like do like a funny you know a funny face uh-huh the kids bouncing on it and then gus reached forward and touched me through the screen and it hurt like it hurt. Like the zap was so fucking powerful. He actually touched my lip through the screen and it zapped my lip and it like really, really, like I felt numb for a little bit afterwards.
Starting point is 00:34:35 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. Why don't you go check that out for me and go check out all the stuff we have over at maximumfun.org. We got some details. Our Candle Nights virtual spectacular is going to be happening again this year. All proceeds are going to be going to Benefit Harmony House. And we're going to have a bunch of fun stuff. You can watch it, you know, live when we put it up or video on
Starting point is 00:35:00 demand. And you can find all the details for that over at Macro.Family. Perhaps not as important but just as exciting is the now promised return of Till Death Do Us Blart. Yes. Yes. There was a while there where we were wondering if we were going to be able to do that project this year with the ongoing strike. But Fran and the gang have given us the all clear. That is where Griffin and his brothers and Tim Batt and Guy Montgomery are friends in New Zealand.
Starting point is 00:35:34 Correct? They all get together and they watch Paul Blart Mall Cop 2. Yes, which is now on the flicks. And record a commentary or an experience track. Is this our 10th year? Jesus Christ.
Starting point is 00:35:50 Is that possible? I don't know. It can't be. I can't. I can't. I can't think about that. I can't do that. I can't do that right now.
Starting point is 00:35:56 It's a delight. It's very good. I haven't watched it this year, but have I made you watch it? I watched maybe part of it with you. Let's do it you let's do it let's do it we have so much that we like watching that we haven't been able to talk about
Starting point is 00:36:11 that's true our flags is death our flags is death it's so good but enough of that enough of us, away with us, enjoy your day off with you sorry we're late again it's fucking wild over here it is But enough of that. Enough of us. Away with us. Enjoy your day. Off with you.
Starting point is 00:36:26 Sorry we're late again. It's fucking wild over here. It is. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Working on it. Money won't pay. Maximum Fun
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