Wonderful! - Wonderful! 71: Baby Like It Sweet

Episode Date: February 13, 2019

Griffin’s favorite software preservation effort! Rachel’s favorite vitamin consumption method! Griffin’s favorite place to walk around! Rachel’s favorite new taste! Music: "Money Won't Pay" by bo en and Augustus - https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoya MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

🎵 Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hey, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is wonderful. I've got a cool lean... Don't I look cool? Tell... Hey, babe.

Tell everybody how cool I look right now. You. Got one finger just lovingly stroking the dials. That you make the sound that you all hear. I look cool as hell, don't I? Like I could give a fuck. With your laptop precariously under your left elbow and a. Drinking a sparkling water right over that water and you're

right hey does it look like i give a dang it does actually very much so okay well hey i missed you so bad i missed you and so i was trying to look seductive and cool like a sexy man with my cool lean and you know fiddling with the sound knobs um and drinking my my flavorless sparkling water i thought that would make me look like a badass biker boy or something like that i mean it obviously worked because uh while we were sound testing i did make a joke about knobs yeah you did um and you'll never guess what body part she was equating those two folks it was really good hey do you have any small there's a show we talk about things that we really like and i'm very excited to do it this week

do you have any small wonders i do okay getting digital photos printed huh that's a that is one that you are actually very much into more than anybody i've ever met you know i realized like we're probably going to be the last generation that grows up with photo albums yeah unless unless we take it on ourselves to keep the tradition alive i think it's important i really like it i think it's important too um that weirdly dovetails with one of my subjects i i have a small wonder it's a book i've been reading called seven eves by neil stevenson uh it's it's neil stevenson is like a sci-fi hard sci-fi author he did snow crash and a bunch of different books snow crash is basically like what inspired The Matrix and a bunch of stuff like that.

And I've liked a few of his books and some of them are super long and technical and scare me off. And I thought 70s was going to be one of them. But then my therapist was like, stick with it. It gets good. And holy shit, he was right. Are you saying 70s or 7? 7 Eves. It's a palindrome.

7 Eves. Yeah, yeah. It's basically about the moon blows up and then the earth has two years before the moon falls down on it and kills everybody. And so like humanity has to figure out a way to shoot themselves somewhat into space and keep like homo sapiens like going and figure out how to live up there. But it's like super realistic. It's not like Battlestar Galactica where it's like we shoot up there with robots it's like how do orbits work is this what the movie was based on with ben affleck and live tyler uh yeah this is so if you've seen armageddon or deep impact they both

are adaptations exactly okay okay uh no it's really it's real it's just really fucking gripping and it goes places that uh i i didn't expect and oh also is hugely depressing for the first part of it as you can imagine because of what i described but uh yeah it's it's i'm i i was engrossed in it the whole tour you're a real sci-fi guy lately i guess i am yeah i mean yeah i guess i am yeah uh who goes first this week i think it's you um i'll do my second thing first because it kind of dovetails with what you were talking about printing digital photos. And when I say what this thing is going to be, there's going to be the little man who lives in your brain who tells you to pay attention to things or not. It's going to shut off.

And that's not just for our listeners. That's also for Rachel. Yes. Because what the sentence I'm going to say is going to sound like I'm just saying like vegetables out really loud or something along those lines. Okay. I want to talk about uh video game preservation now listen hear me out it's a fascinating topic i promise because i started thinking about it today because i was thinking about like emulators and stuff like

that uh and i remember hearing like can i wait can i make some guesses yes please can make some guesses yes so you said video game preservation. Yes. Is this like art restoration in that it's people with little brushes preserving old Nintendo cartridges? You're not, you're like halfway there. Okay. I thought you were going to say it's when you like put it.

When you blow on it to make sure that. Yes, that's actually, that's really bad for it because your saliva is like in your, in your blowing and that gets on the contacts and rusts them which is really bad uh but like this is actually kind of what i'm talking about so like you think about uh photos or art or um books or film to an extent and all of these things are relatively easy to archive. Movies actually is maybe not a great example because a lot of movies made before like the 1950s are just gone forever because they were just, you know, printed physical media. And then when every copy of those got like destroyed, like that's it for that movie and humanity never gets to see it again. Maybe I'm thinking about

this because of this Seveneves book that I've been reading. But anyway, games are a lot harder to do with that uh it's not like a book where you can pick it up and read it if you want to save like a sega genesis game yeah uh you have to have like the the you know the software code that is on the physical cartridge that has to be played in another piece of technology like a sega genesis uh even then like how you go about ripping it off that cartridge, if you don't have like the source code that you know, Sega had when they first made the game, it's incredibly complicated. It's also illegal because it's according to the what is it digital digital rights Millennium Act, something like that. I was actually gonna ask you, you know, when your brother Justin was doing that whole FMV questv quest yes how was he playing those games do you know on a sega cd justin still has a sega cd it's the dmca digital millennia

copyright act or something like that that basically says like anything you do that goes around drm which is digital rights management which is like uh how you it's what makes it illegal to like rip a copy of sonic the hedgehog off off the cartridge and then give it away for free because that copy is yours and that's what the DRM says. So anything that goes around that is illegal. So there's all of these challenges put towards saving old games. But it's gotten to the point where we kind of have to poop or get off the pot with some of these. Even now, like a lot of games, there was a video game market crash in 1983, where like games first started to become a big, big thing in the household. And so everybody started making these cheap, shitty, awful games. And it caused the market to crash because people

didn't want to buy video games anymore. A lot of those while they were bad are just gone because there was no way to digitize them. And these companies went under instantly. So they don't have the old like code for them uh which you think about that and it's like oh who cares if you don't save a bad game these games represent you know thousands and thousands of hours of of work that went into them and all of these different art you know disciplines of art uh that went into them and the idea that they can just kind of disappear is wild yeah it's like any other like art piece and that it inspires later pieces yeah there's relevance to it because you're curious like oh i wonder where they got this idea

and you can like trace it back and you can do that with pretty much any other medium games are so unique in that there are all of these steps that you have to go through to actually experience them and those steps are exactly what sort of make them difficult to archive and then like modern day you're talking about stuff like uh games that have to connect to remote servers to even function games that have to do like uh an authentic authentication check like with an online server like a game on steam that has to like check on steam uh before you can even play it like if those servers disappear that game's gone there's a multiplayer only games that are just gone. If the server is-

Could that happen to like Second Life? It happens all the times with MMOs. Yeah. So there have been countless. I mean, MMOs are maybe get the worst of it. And there's actually like a lot of MMO developers who are like very enthusiastic about this exact topic. Yeah.

There's a guy named Rafe Koster, maybe Raph, probably Raph. It's short for rafael i would imagine who was like a pioneer in like early mmos he's like a big leader in this because a lot of his games uh mmos take so much work to put up and they have all of these technological restrictions and they require you know a server where other people can go and access it together uh all that stuff disappears and this game that you just spent all of these thousands of hours working on can be published, released, and then die and disappear forever within the span of a decade, which is insane. That is a very, very short turnaround.

And so I think that video game preservation is important and very, very fascinating. Obviously, it involves getting sort of physical media off of the physical media that it's on i didn't know this discs like optical discs uh after like a couple of decades they can start to rot wait when you say optical discs are you talking cds like okay any any sort of any cd whether it's you know an old aol demo cd or like old pc games printed on cds uh they can rot like there's actual sort of uh like there's aluminum that is used as like a reflective surface on a lot of old discs and it's layers and layers of like aluminum and plastic and all these different layers and there can just start to be this natural decay within the layers of the disc that will

render it a read unreadable and if that's the only thing that a game is printed on and that happens to every disc, like that game's just gone forever. And cartridges are very bad too. I've actually experienced this. A lot of old games, especially ones like RPGs that you can like save your progress have batteries. And those batteries like are what allow you

to like continue to save the game, right? When you take a Zelda out of the Super Nintendo, the thing that remembers what it is needs power or else it's just going to go. If that battery goes, then that is rendered. Yeah, I guess that makes sense. And I think about it. And then obviously, when games stop being successful or when they're printed on things, consoles that are no longer viable, no longer relevant, then people will just start

making stop making those games. And then it's like a doomsday clock is going, unless the developers of those games are forward thinking enough to like preserve that source code, which in a lot of cases, they are not game blaster 72 is on eBay with the only copy left. exactly um and so there there are people out there who are like working to to preserve games there's specifically there is a an organization called the uh video game history foundation that is like just enthusiastic about this like doesn't want us to have another repeat of like the you know countless films that we lost just to just to time and decay. And then there's organizations that like, you know, find ways to display those games, like the Museum of Art and Digital Entertainment, or MADE, is doing this exact kind of thing too. What's interesting is the only way

that they are able to make a legal headway in this is working with the Library of Congress. I didn't know this. You can petition the Library of Congress every three years to make exceptions to various copyright laws that will allow you to do exactly this kind of thing. So the DMCA basically says, you can't do this thing. And they went to the Library of Congress, if you don't allow us to start ripping games off legally, they're going to disappear forever. And so in 2003, the Library of Congress made this landmark ruling that said games that are in, quote, formats that have become obsolete and which require the original media or hardware as a condition of access now have an exception where you can preserve that digitally yourself

and sort of circumvent DRM. That still makes it illegal to give it away to people, but that is what makes it legal for you to rip something off of your own thing and save it digitally. And then in more recent years, they've sort of broadened it. Just in 2018 alone,

this is maybe the wildest thing that I found out about this. They made it legal to copy wholesale MMORPGs. So like there was a game called Star Wars Galaxies that you just can't play anymore. It's just gone. Everybody who worked on it can never show anybody this game.

And now it's legal to take the code from that if you acquire it legally and allow people to actually play it as long as they are inside of a museum or an archive of some sort. So there could be an archive or museum of some sort where you can go and play Star Wars Galaxies with with other players but all of you have to be within museums where that game is stored i wonder if there's a future where like arcades are getting classifications

as museums so that they can still make money and legally share games yeah maybe i mean maybe that's i mean arcade machines though that's a that's that's that is already i watched my own arcades at the huntington mall like very quickly die where i would go in one day and it'd just be like oh that uh you know that that bass fishing game that you like is gone forever because it broke and we're not going to pay to fix it um i think that's really interesting i think that the idea of the idea of going to a museum so you can play old MMOs is interesting in and of itself. And also there's like pushback from game developers and the Entertainment Software Association, which is like the big lobbying group,

doesn't like all of this stuff happening because they hear, you know, you can play all these games for free and that smacks of piracy. And then the people who actually make these games, Raph Koster has a quote where he says, I would rather people play my game for free than have it disappear forever.

So from like an artist perspective of like, I don't want the thing that I worked so hard on that I poured my heart into to just be gone forever. Yeah, no, it's not like it's like the newest, you know, Fortnite or whatever. It's a game that nobody can play anymore. So what's the harm? Yeah, there's so much that goes into this.

There's so much lobbying and so much like politicking. This movement that got the MMOs preserved last year with the Library of Congress was like a huge thing. A lot of people working on it because if it didn't happen, then, you know, more MMOs go under every single year.

Are we going to lose them forever? I just think the whole thing is so fascinating and also like really super important uh and i did not sort of appreciate how how complex an issue it was until i started digging into it i'm really excited about what this might do for museums too yeah i mean there are there are lots of the history museum and the art museum and like science and industry like all have video games in them all of a sudden there are i mean there are maybe not those but there's like the museum of moving images and uh museum of modern art i believe has a has a whole bunch of games and they have a like a cycling exhibits that come in with with game developers like a bunch of kids saying like mom can we go to the museum this weekend it's not gonna be yeah it's not gonna be like a uncommon

thing like we're we're for sure you know going to have going to have more of those and it's not gonna be yeah it's not gonna be like a uncommon thing like we're we're for sure you know going to have going to have more of those and it's gonna be because of efforts like these where if these weren't happening like who the fuck knows like super mario brothers the original nes game if nobody was ripping them it could just be gone but luckily the opposite is true archive.org which is like the the library of congress website actually like you can play a lot of these games just on there a lot of these games like old uh like arcade and main games are just like up there and you can play them for free and it's all part of these these efforts it's super fascinating that's cool what's your first thing sunshine

the the space movie the sci-fi movie you ever see that one no all right well the sun stops working so it's like the opposite of 70s but they have to fly a ship into it and blow it up to get the sun what is with this weird sci-fi trope of like something's going wrong in space we have to hurdle a craft at it the celestial bodies got all fucked up. It's a good flick. No, I'm talking about light that comes from the sun. I like that too. It's important. It is important.

That's why they sent a ship to blow it up. To save it. To blow it up to save it. Yeah. There's something there, Griffin. Kill your darlings. The sun is my darling. And one day I'm going to blow the fuck up out of it

i don't know if i would say that i have seasonal affective disorder which is like people that when the winter months come yes feel like this kind of oppressive uh weight on their just general being sure because they're not getting sunlight but i will say that it was super cloudy every single day you were gone and rainy and cold and miserable. And then today it was sunny and I just practically whistled out to the car. Yeah, that's a different thing from seasonal affective disorder.

But I noticed how lack of sunlight really bums me out. Oh, for sure. It's the fucking worst, man. That's why I had to leave Chicago because I was sad for fucking five straight months. I know. Yeah. So a lot of the benefits of sun comes down to things like vitamin D.

That D though. Oh, that D make you strong though. Vitamin D and then serotonin levels. Oh, yeah. Will increase. That's the sugar sprinkled on top of that D cake. And then the absence of sun encourages the increase of melatonin, which is what makes you so sleepy. Oh, okay. Because you know how when Henry was having a lot of trouble sleeping, people were like, you need to get him out in the sun during the day.

And so the absence of the sun will encourage him to be sleepier at night yeah uh so when it's like super dark and gloomy outside people are more likely to be kind of sleepy and lethargic and we had to explain to those people you can't take babies outside because their birds are just waiting to swoop down and grab these guys every day every day no 50 babies get just like scooped by a grackle i thought you're talking about every day how we had to fight off birds. No, we just didn't fuck with them. We didn't take them outside. And so his sleep was weird, but I wasn't about to sacrifice our baby

to the grackle gods. Yeah, I'm glad that he made it through that first year. Yeah, me too. Also, grackles don't have a god. They're the fucking demon animals. No, they're great. I love them, but holy holy shit when they poop everywhere all over the central market parking lot and you can't i got shit on by a crack we i did do that segment and then a grackle shit right on me while we were having a little picnic behind

the central market and then my feelings took a shit if video game preservation somehow found a way to shit on me while i was having a nice picnic with my wife and son and friends, then I would not like them anymore either. Yeah. So let me tell you a little bit about this vitamin D. So you only need about 5 to 15 minutes of sunlight to get the benefits of vitamin D. Okay. So that kind of assuages any fears you might have about sunburn or sun damage. We're only talking about 5 to 15 minutes.

Yes. Although that stuff is obviously very real. And be smart, be safe out there. Yeah, no, I encourage you if you're thinking like, oh, the sun's going to change my life, you should probably talk to a dermatologist because I am not an expert. But one thing that happens is that people that have increased melanin, people that have darker skin complexion, actually are less likely to benefit from the vitamin D in the sun because that melanin acts as like a natural defense.

Yeah, I guess. What is it? Wait, I thought darker colors absorb more light, but lighter colors reflect it. Dark pigment in the skin reduces the skin's ability to synthesize vitamin D from sunlight. Huh. Interesting. Okay. So if you have olive brown or black skin, you already have a high concentration of melanin,

which makes it more difficult to benefit from that. Awesome. Vitamin D. I know. It's tricky. I guess you guys just drink Sunny D at that point, which is also good. I actually think i prefer that to sun sunlight on my skit i do think i prefer that very sweet orange beverage really oh

fuck yeah are you kidding me i will crush some sunny d any day of the week i want to make a sunny d mimosa you heard it here first i'm gonna make a Mimosa. I will report back to you all what it's like. You know, this weekend, let's take a trip. I want to get strong and drunk. We have some champagne right now. We could really go for it. All right.

So vitamin D helps the body absorb calcium, which helps maintain bone density and prevent osteoporosis. There's also been research to show that vitamin D may also protect against diabetes, cancer, rheumatoid arthritis, and heart disease. That's a good vitamin, man. It's a good vitamin. Probably the best one. According to the World Health Organization, sun exposure might help treat skin conditions. Doctors have recommended UV radiation exposure to treat things like psoriasis, eczema, jaundice, and acne. That one I'm fully on board with. My skin gets so garbage during the winter.

I've known people with psoriasis who have actually done like- I've never done like UV treatments, but like literally when the summertime comes around, I look like an Adonis out there. Yeah, you do. But then when it doesn't, I look like the sleeping beauty witch or something. Five to 15 minutes of sunlight.

That's it? Two to three times a week. I can do that. Yeah, I think it's worthwhile. I definitely got out there for a few minutes today just to get a little sun on the arms and the hands and the face. Sunlight also cues special areas in the retina, which triggers the release of serotonin. Well, that one seems weird.

Your eye can see a thing so cool. The light-induced effects of serotonin are triggered by sunlight that one seems weird your eye can see a thing so the light induced effects of serotonin are triggered by sunlight that goes in through your eye oh okay i stand corrected i love these peepers what can't they do for me which may relate to the whole seasonal affective disorder if your serotonin dips uh in the winter time yeah because you're not getting all that that sun serotonin i'm not you know again not an expert uh i did about 20 minutes of research but i will tell you what what i believe it the sun is good because i love the sun yeah and i miss it when it's gone you mean every night at night time do you get sad every night now i can make it through the night it's the daytimes that are the toughest

she says she said the sun is going away to die. And I said, no, baby, we'll be back tomorrow. And then I sang her the relevant song from Annie. What's your next thing? My next thing is stealing you away. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Do you want to hear some personal messages?

I would love it. Ooh, what was that voice? I don't know, but it's fun. I've never made that voice before. I can't do it again. Okay. This message is for Nir. It is from Robin.

Hi, Nir. Sorry to bug you, but I love your dork butt, even if you do have a weird obsession with eating bugs. You're a pretty fly gal and a really great mother. I think it might be moth-er. Moth-er. Yeah, that's hyphenated. Also, P.S., want to get married and stuff. I don't know if this is a proposal or a cute way of referring to the fact that they are already engaged.

If it's the former, this is one of the wilder ways we've seen doing it. And congratulations. I hope I'm not talking over it right now. But I do want to know what a mother is. I think it's somebody who owns moths, which is his own story. Can I read the other one? Yes. This one's for JB, and it's from Connor who says,

Hi, baby. Hi, baby. I just wanted to remind you that you are amazing, talented, and deserve the best. I can't wait to spend the rest of our lives making the world more wonderful together. If we're in the same city, come hug me once you've heard this. If not, let's call. Hopefully, we're having an excellent 20 by teen. I hope so, too. i hope so too i hope so too i hope

you're in the same city and i hope that you can give each other the deepest hug now by deep hug you're probably wondering what i mean yeah it's my own secret technique and you got to get way up in those armpits way up there greetings i am plexsetter, contacting you from the Zik Squadron, which is, frankly, sort of crappy, but I'm here on a heroic mission with my trusty crew, C-53. Heroic feels like an exaggeration. Okay, sure. And security officer Dar.

Plek, don't put me in your stupid recording. And we're all traveling aboard our trusty starship, the Bargerian Jade. Bargy. What? Sorry. I'm awake. I'm awake.

I was just flying while asleep. Hey there, this is Alden Ford. I play Plek, and we are so excited to announce that our podcast, Mission to Zix, is now part of the Maximum Fun Network. Our third season launches on MaxFun on March 20th. Binge seasons one and two right now. That's Mission to zix z y xx can i tell you about my second thing yes please my second thing is going to sound strangely

worded my second thing is visiting new orleans going being being in new orleans i didn't want to just do new orleans because i feel like that there's a whole bunch of like culture and history there that I wouldn't be able to tap into. See, I read it as like you saying like, wouldn't want to live there. Happy to visit. Oh, no, that's not it. I'm sure the people who live there are having themselves a great time, too. I just want to talk about visiting it because I've only visited it and I've never really learned a lot about the, even if I had sort of come up with an exhaustive report on its, on its culture and history, this would, you have barely scraped

the surface of New Orleans. That's exactly it. I've been there four times now. We went for a tour last week. And by the way, this is not a judgment on Birmingham, which we also went to on this tour. It was lovely, but I was there for all of like 16 hours we spent a nice three days in new orleans and rachel and i have gone up there a few times um and i genuinely feel like and this is gonna sound like i'm in danger of that one snl sketch where they talk about new orleans uh i really feel like there's not really another place like it on earth and i've been to lots of very cool cities and i love traveling to to new places uh and and obviously cities have their own sort of unique stuff going on there but new orleans has so much unique stuff that it feels like the word city shouldn't even apply like there's towns and

villages and cities and then new orleans is like a something like always kind of magical happens when we go to new orleans i feel like we always end up having some kind of like really unique magical experience yeah uh and that's what i really like about it i had a day on this tour where like before everybody kind of got up and moving i just like left the hotel which if i've never really talked about my sort of tour habits but that's not something i even do a lot of the time i just like left the hotel and just like walked around for a couple hours. And it was so good. It's such a good place to walk around. It's like a living, there's so much living history there from all of the different sort of cultures that have gotten a hand on that ball and helped shape it. So just from like an architectural

standpoint, like why the fuck is there a garden there, there, there, there, there, and there, and there. Like that stuff is very interesting. Everything is really tight and compact and very walkable. And there's just all these different places that you want to, you know, dip your snoot into. And there's, like, entire streets. There's just, like, every storefront here is an art gallery or an antique shop. You're talking about downtown New Orleans. I'm mostly talking about the French Quarter, yes.

Although we've spent some time in other places sort of walking around and obviously it's not quite as as as compact it's not as condensed uh but even though the we rachel and i were lucky enough to stay in an airbnb in i forget which neighborhood uh but that that street was so wild like every every house on that street looked so completely different we stayed in a house once that i think was they actually shot some of trim a in which was also like yeah it was in the neighborhood where it was shot yeah but obviously i'm focusing mostly on the french quarter because that's where i spent most of my my time it's where our hotel was but there's obviously a lot more going on in new orleans just that just just than than that um but man that that spot makes for some

good aimless wandering. Like you can just be walking around and like dipping into like these different art stores and then you can just turn the corner and there's a huge like park where people are, you know, painting and there's a dance troupe and there's a half dozen buskers and there's a dude doing some magic.

That's not an exaggeration. Like these are the things that you can just see there. And then there's a big church you can go inside and that's really nice and then you go a few more blocks and there's an open market by the river and like you just keep going going around without much of a destination and just like see a bunch of cool shit and i like that a lot because i get very anxious that i'm not going to see cool shit if i put in the work to actually like go out and walk around. It's nice too. Cause so I went to New Orleans the first time when I was like 20 years old, maybe. And it's nice to go as a older adult because I feel like when you're very

young, the biggest, most exciting thing about New Orleans is just drinking a whole lot. Yeah. I don't even like that. But as you get older, it's like a whole new nice experience too to be like an adult in a city that is that beautiful it's a and it's like a very localized

like culture there's a lot of stuff there that you can't really recreate in a lot of other places yeah i'm not a big bourbon street fan i think it's i don't like it it's it doesn't there's a smell there that's quite bad and then there's's like a desperation and a, just a, just a weird energy. Yeah. There's just a lot of sort of, um, just sort of roving packs of midlife crises, just sort of going around and making bad smells in places. That's not, that stuff's not great, but there's great bars there. There's really cool bars.

We can go and get like a very fancy, weird cocktail. Rachel and I and our group of friends once went to a bar. I forget where it was, but it didn't- It got hurricanes? Well, we did that. That was not the story I was going to tell because that makes it sound like the Walking Midlife Crisis people.

But we went to a bar that had no electric lighting in it. It was all like gas lamp lit. And there was a dude just like playing piano like inside the whole time. And it was so weird and such a cool experience and then like i'm very picky about uh food i get sort of um the idea of going out with my whole big big family to like a restaurant uh stresses me out because there's a lot of us now uh and so like you know if we're gonna make reservations at a place i want it to be super nice uh we made some pretty like quick fire reservations for some places that we all got

to eat at and share these nice meals and every fucking one of them was so good there's food that i only eat there that i forget that i really like until i come back for three straight days two meals a day i basically ate some sort of fish or seafood with rice covered in a sauce that was flavorful and it was red to brown it was in the red to brown spectrum somewhere in there and every single bite of it was so fucking good um this is sort of just a lot of um uh aimless talking but like that's kind the thing i like about new orleans is any other city we go to i want to have a fucking plan i want to know where we're going i want to know where the best stops are and just like go there uh and new orleans is the only place really in the world that i've been to where i feel like i can just like walk out the front door and like let's kind of see what happens

and i feel like that that is the that's the cliche about about new orleans i know that's what everybody says about but there's a there's a functional reason behind it. It's not just like, hmm, things are different. Everything's the destination, baby. But like, yeah, kinda. Yeah. Kinda, SNL sketch. Kinda.

Yeah. I guess what I'm saying is kinda. When I, the first time I went to New Orleans, we stayed in a hostel. And my friend and I woke up a little bit earlier than everybody else. And the guy that worked there just decided to make us these really nice omelets. All right. And it was just like, it was just this moment of just like, everything is so magical here. I just stumbled on this.

I stumbled on this store that sold like sold like handmade wooden crafts and i found this like wooden train set for henry so i bought it and the woman at the cashier took like 15 full minutes to ring me up which i would have been frustrated by but it was really nice talking to her about all of her cool like wood projects uh yeah i i like these are like the experiences that you want to have when you travel and i feel like new orleans it's not just like it's not just like a company line it's not just like a motto like it's it is engineered from the ground up to just be sort of that all over i really like it a lot me too we went to a wedding once in a wax museum there. This city fucking kicks ass. What's your second thing?

My second thing is umami. Yeah. Yeah. I just had me a big umami dish. Had that romesco chicken from Snap Kitchen. It's got that smoky flavor and then the earthy mushrooms and the kale. It's just all umami all the time. Mm-hmm.

all umami all the time i uh i was thinking about this uh recently because umami like the concept of umami is a relatively new thing which is kind of rad to think about like like the the established name for the word of it that yes yes yes like the flavor itself no right no obviously the flavor has existed but there wasn't really a name for it for a very long time it was just you know like the standard like sweet salty sour bitter yeah i love that show on netflix it's so good in the early 20th century a japanese chemist named kakune akedo was puzzled by this dashi broth that he was eating the broth contained no meat or kelp which were kind of traditional things you would find in dashi, but it had this seaweed and it was like this flavor that he was just like, you know what?

I don't know that there's really a word for this. So he chemically treated the seaweed and found that the crystals were chemically identical to glutamic acid, which is a type of amino acid found in the human body. And when those crystals were dissolved again into liquid or sprinkled on food, the flavor exploded. And so he coined this as the fifth taste, umami or deliciousness, which is what umami means. There's so much shit in that story that I want to dive into.

That is, first of all, that's a very presumptive, hey i invented a new flavor what is it deliciousness all right dude all right but at the same time can you imagine how psyched you this would be like seeing a new color and it's like oh okay there it is yeah hey guys do you notice this it was here the whole time third thought if i eat a tennis ball how would you describe that flavor? I mean, probably bitter. Yeah, probably. This is fun. I'll do another one. Okay.

What about a crab apple? A crab apple, probably sour. Oh, maybe. What about a... This is fun. This is fun for everyone. What about a car tire? Probably bitter again

Yeah most things It's very similar to the tennis ball When you think about it Most things If I tried to If I licked everything in this office And I kept a graph of it I feel like it would be

99.9% bitter Yeah So I'm looking around Is there anything in this room That's sweet, sour Or salty or umami? I mean salty probably

What like our skin? Well like you know The stuff that you get sweaty Brown, is there anything in this room that's sweet, sour, or salty, or umami? I mean, salty, probably. What, like our skin? Well, like, you know, the stuff that you get sweaty with your sweatiness. Oh, grody. Why'd you have to go there, babe? So grody. So this glutamate that is kind of the main characteristic of umami flavor can be found in beef, pork tomatoes mushrooms soy potatoes carrots parmesan cheese green tea tuna and shrimp is this what monosodium glutamate is

like yes i'm gonna get there okay interesting uh so yeah so like a lot of proteins but then also stuff you know like mushrooms as you mentioned and then uh parmesan cheese which i'd never really thought about but that's definitely true yeah i mean it's definitely not a salty cheese i never really thought of like pasta as like a particularly umami dish but it has tomatoes and parmesan yeah sure yeah you spice it up though you make it you make it you make it spicy rachel makes it spicy in all things thank you if you know what i If you know what I'm saying. Griffin, thank you. I'm doing my pasta mostly.

No, just kidding. All things. That's my wink noise. Well, the eye's wet. So as you mentioned, MSG, or monosodium glutamate, is a compound molecule that contains glutamate and binds with sodium in order to stabilize into something that can be packaged and sold in seasoning bottles. MSG became widespread in the US after World War Two, when people in the industry realized that the Japanese military had been using MSG to make things taste better. And at that point, Campbell's Soup, among other

companies began to incorporate MSG as a flavor enhancer. Wasn't there kind of like a run on people saying MSG is like super bad for you? That was actually deeply steep. Oh, sorry. You really, you're just, you're, you're. I guess I'm kind of, I guess you can call me Dr. Umami. No, you're, you're just like, you're, you're serving them up and I'm, I'm just ready. Knocking them down yeah please so in the 1960s there was an a infamous controversial letter from a doctor about what he called and again

controversial he called chinese restaurant syndrome oh god the doctor wrote that he experienced symptoms similar to those of an allergic reaction this is this it was all from one fucking doctor having a bad yelp review so yeah so he started it up saying like you know msg is is dangerous and then there was uh a study in which researchers injected laboratory mice with msg which they found led to brain lesions and other neurological problems but there were problems with the study because the researchers, one, injected MSG. I was about to say, what the fuck, guys? Under the mouse skin, which obviously is not the way that we ingest MSG. Oh, no, I totally do.

I get it up in there. And also mice were injected with doses fit for horses, which obviously like no human being is going to take in that much MSG. Yes. In one meal or like 100 meals, most likely. So yeah, so there were a lot of flaws with that study. And obviously the MSG stigma kind of prevailed for a long time.

Deeply, deeply rooted in racism, which is like, if you denied yourself this good flavor because of this bullshit, then you deserve not to have the good flavor in your mouth. So, umami picked up speed in the 1990s when they started doing studies on taste receptors. In 2000, molecular biologists at the University of Miami published a paper where they discovered a unique taste receptor for umami on the tongue of a mouse. So, back to the mice. This time, mouse doses. in favor of MSG. They didn't just throw a snowball of MSG at a mouse's exposed brain. This is science.

The paper demonstrated that the presence of glutamate sent a signal to the brain and caused the taster to experience the sensation of umami. of the brain and caused the taster to experience the sensation of umami uh and that then contributed to kind of the sea change in the past you know 20 years or so fuck yeah and then like people looked at that one study from that one doctor and we're like oh wait that's just not how science works gang yeah so so back in the 1920s like oh this is an interesting taste and i'm gonna give it a name and then now they're like you know there's actually a taste receptor on your tongue for that taste. Interesting. It's a real thing, guys. And it's incredible and wonderful. And I love it. I mean, obviously the best umami sort of zone for me, the obvious like winner is, is any ramen sort of experience. I mean, just soy

sauce, you know, like soy sauces. Yeah. But yeah, like if you think about ramen, that's got like pork too, you know, like there's a lot of umami elements to that i'm trying to think of my other like favorite umami shit um like i like it i like a mushroom cooked well a nice mushroom well like a mushroom pizza you think about that's the tomato and the mushroom good stuff you know parmesan cheese like that's that's super umami too what's this is your favorite flavor would you say i think honestly i think it is like i tend towards savory most of the time like if i'm going to do a breakfast for example or like a drink if there's a savory drink a lot of times i like that too i think it is i think it's my favorite i like sweet

i know you do i like sweet you like sweet and sour baby like sweet. I know you do. I like sweet. You like sweet and sour combo. Baby likes sweet. Do you like him? No. Baby like it sweet. Baby like it sweet. This is, so I don't know if our listeners are familiar with this thing in our relationship. Where you just do something over and over and over again until you get me to laugh.

Regardless of how terrible it is. Baby like it's sweet. Oh, and he's adding some gestures. Baby like it's sweet. He's doing a real Jim Carrey over there. Baby like it's sweet. Okay, okay. That one got me. I'm just giving her some real Bob Fosse in there for a little bit.

Do you know what our friends at home are talking about? Please tell me. Well, I'll tell you. Allie says, I think accidentally matching outfits with your friends is wonderful. It's pure coincidence. It's always funny. It makes me feel like my friends and I are on the same wavelength, even if it means we look a little silly. I love this, too.

I do, too. This happens a lot with our friends. I feel like we spend a lot of time with each other and everybody favors like gray and khaki. Exactly. Yeah. Well, there's been a lot of parties where it's like, oh, you got the black pants, gray shirt memo. Congratulations.

This happens a lot on more of a specific scale thanks to Stitch Fix and how everybody in our family uses it. I saw so many Stitch Fix shirts on the bodies of my brothers. You would not believe it. Here's one from Emily who says, My small wonder is the moment when streetlights turn on at sunset. I walk through a park on my way home from work, and if I get lucky, they'll turn on as I walk by.

That makes me feel like a wizard. Oh. Rachel doesn't like that, though, because it means the sun goes away, and that's her best friend. No, it reminds me of Mary Poppins, so I like it. It reminds me of Harry Popper. Harry Potter is what i said here's a different emily who says my wonderful thing is seeing movies at the drive-in there are two drive-in movie theaters within an hour of where i live and i go every chance i get there's something so magical about watching movies

under the night sky with friends family and strangers if the movies are good watch those but if they're bad you can just look at the stars. Holy shit. Do you think she saw Harry Popper at the drive-in? Pretty sure I said Popper. Which is not even a word. We used to have a drive-in here in town that died. Yeah, well, it just moved far away.

Yeah, I'm not going to do that. It used to be right next to the new fancy HEB, so you could go and get yourself a bottle of wine and a nice meal. We had to see Independence Day at a drive-in which was incredible on Independence Day. It was so good and so is the use of our theme song Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description.

That one's from Bowen and Augustus and it's fucking fantastic. And so are all the shows on MaximumFun.org. Hey Griffin, do you like when two or three nice people talk to each other? I do. MaximumFun.org has a lot of good shows for you then. Some of them just have one just talking nice stuff about themselves.

It's really great. Maximum Fun Drive is coming up soon. There's going to be a bunch of bonus stuff, but we're going to talk about that. Yeah, there's going to be a wonderful pin. Yeah, there is. I'm very excited for that. Thank you to Rachel. I love you.

You're doing a dang good job over there. Thank you to the fun folks in our Facebook group. If you're looking for our Facebook group, it is still under our previous show title. Yes. But it is worth the join. And oh, if you like Mbembe Amortaz, we're doing shows in April in San Jose and Salt Lake City that we just announced.

You can find tickets to that at macroy.family. I think they go on sale on Friday if you want to come out and say hey. I mean, we probably won't get a chance to meet, but we'll say hey at you. Griffin and his family do real good live shows. Thank you. I would recommend it. It's always a really good time. Thank you.

Gosh, you're making me blush over here. Making me all red and rosy all over. Baby, I'm sweet. Hey, look, you got to look at me. It doesn't work if you don't look at me. Thanks for listening guys You can stop listening now Money won't pay

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Listener supported. Since the dawn of time, screenwriters have taken months to craft their stories. But now, three Hollywood professionals shall attempt the impossible. Break a story in one hour. That's right. Here on Story Break, I, Freddie Wong, Matt Arnold, and Will Campos, the creators behind award-winning shows like Video Game High School, have one hour to turn a humble idea into an awesome movie.

Now, an awesome movie starts with an awesome title. I chose The Billionaire's Marriage Valley. Mine was Christmas Pregnant Paradise. Okay, next we need a protagonist. So I've heard Wario best described as libertarian Mario. And of course, every great movie needs a stellar pitch. In order to get to heaven, sometimes you gotta raise a little hell. Ha ha, that's the tagline!

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