Wonderful! - Wonderful! 79: The Gooshy Carpet Incident

Episode Date: April 10, 2019

Griffin's favorite geological feature! Rachel's favorite pre-school study! Griffin's favorite tunes to vibe out to! Rachel's favorite admission! 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. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Tragedy has struck the wonderful home studios. The studios have been struck by a most vicious tragedy, a most unkind event. Do you want to talk about it? Do you want to be the one to sort of make the announcement to our friends or do you want me to do it? I want you to do it because I don't know what you're referring to. Rachel made a big spill. Rachel just made a big, big spill on the carpet with the La Croix she's drinking.

And it's one of those tall glasses, one of those tall cans. And I think they probably have more fluid in them, which meant more for you to sew. They definitely don't have more fluid in them. Well, it's sweeter. So it's creating a more pungent scent. These like hybrid La Croix. I think I do have some traces of... Regardless, the carpet is now fully saturated

would you say um i would say that sparkling water yeah uh is actually like used often as a cleaning agent so i don't feel too guilty about my problem though there was nothing to clean was there was there i mean this carpet's probably pretty gross. This carpet's pristine. Are you kidding me? It's my office. I keep this shit like fully. This shit's like a laboratory where you could make dinosaurs or something.

It's like the Andromeda stream. What are you looking for? Do you want to talk about how many empty cups you have on your desk right now? Three, but they are completely sanitized. Also, look at the liquid in them. Do you know where the liquid went? They're mostly empty. You know where the liquid went? In my mouth and belly and my

balls where the pee is kept. But yours went on the ground. Do you want to explore that? I just took a step to the bathroom to get a towel to clean up the foul mess and the whole time, every step. Is this how you want to start our enthusiast podcast? Well, it's just i wanted to

tell report on the accident because i'm still basically a journalist yeah still mostly a journal yeah that's that's true i mean so i guess i could i thought this would be a good opportunity for a press conference about this bill so we take it to live live to rachel so am i am I giving the conference or are you? Yeah, you are. Okay. Yeah, you're the president of the office. I did a whoopsie and I didn't do it on purpose. It was what some people might call an accident. Typically, yes, I'll respond to your questions in a moment. Typically, when someone does an accident, they are met by their loved ones with understanding. But this does not seem to be the case. Yes, Griffin, do you have a question? It's not Griffin. My name is Brock Brankin from the New York

Magazine. And a quick question. There's a rumor going around the press bin where we all go out for drinks after we finish doing newspaper. I'm familiar with the bins. So the rumor going around is that you did it on purpose because you were mad. So can you reply to that? Can I hear about your source on that? It's confidential, of course.

Okay. I respect your integrity, Brock. Thank you. Brock Brannan. I will say that I did not do it intentionally. Okay. Although, I don't regret it. This is Chaz Charman from the Los Angeles Magazine.

Two questions. One, when you say you don't regret it, where's that sort of fury coming from? And second of all, there's a rumor going around my press bin that you just like the carpets gushy. So I'm wondering if you could address that one actually first, that you like gushy carpets better. Jazz, I have read some of your work. It seems like you try and bring gushy into all your stories. That's my thing. So I don't know that I can really take your question seriously.

I don't blame you. Seems like all of your stories have a gushy element. I'll be honest too, Los Angeles Magazine made that up. So this is my deal. I go to press conferences and try to get people to say the word gushy and I have succeeded.

So I will take my leave. Do you have any small wonders? I do. Have you seen the photo of Martha from Great British Bake Off? She got married recently. Oh.

And a bunch of the contestants from her season went to the wedding. Oh, that's good. And they all made cakes. Oh, that's good. And there's pictures of it on the internet, and it's wonderful. Oh, I'm full of power.

I've just been filled with pure energy. Martha was the very young woman. Yes. And I guess, I think it was season five? I cannot keep them straight. But there's just beautiful photos of all of the contestants with her. And they're all so happy. Why wouldn't they be?

There are so many cakes. That makes me so pleased. I'm pleased as punch to hear that. Yes. My small wonder, it could be a big wonder, but I'm worried if I made it a big wonder, it would come off as sort of, I don't know the word to like sick sick ofantic or something but brian david gilbert's uh oh my gosh i'm so glad you brought that uh pax east uh let's do it again today i did too he did a live version of his show unraveled which is on polygon and i

am so fucking like happy and proud of of the work he is doing over there uh and pat is also you know an integral component of the live show process especially towards the end but he it's a 33 minute long panel where he writes the perfect poker rap and it is uh you watch it thinking it's gonna be funny and then when the poker rap gets there and it's actually a fucking slap you're like oh wait a minute wait what he really breaks down his whole process and putting it together and like as somebody who is enthusiastic about poetry i really appreciated yeah some of his uh precise terminology yeah uh and i will also say that i am not particularly familiar with the pokemon but i still very much enjoyed it i did

too i'm also playing a very good video game called sekiro shadows die twice i'm not going to go into talking about it but it makes me feel like a cool samurai dude and i did not know that that was an aesthetic that i appreciated but you get it you get in on some like some good sword fighting some good ghost dog you are a man that has owned a sword it's more than one yeah um but it's good there used to be a game called bushido blade for playstation uh And funny enough, Chris Plant, when he moved here, like one of the first hangs he did at his house was to hook up the

PlayStation and play this game with like me and Justin, some of our friends. And the whole idea is you're sword fighting. And if you hit the other person once they die because it's a sword. So it's not like every other fighting game where you're like whittling them down. And this, this game does that too.

And it just, it feels nice. It's got a good sword feel. I go first this week okay my first thing i could not think of a good way to phrase it so it's going to be strangely phrased which is i feel a zone i feel comfortable in visible mountains i enjoy and that is not to suggest that there are such things as invisible mountains but i i'm talking about mountains, or is there? That's the X-Files noise. It's hard to do that with your mouth.

What I'm bringing is the idea that it is just good to see a mountain, to be able to see a mountain. And I'm specifically bringing this because I just got back from Salt Lake City where we did a tour. And there's mountains galore there do you think people like not seeing mountains your suggestion is that being able to see a mountain is wonderful which i would just say maybe just mountains are wonderful maybe that's what it is it's not the ability to see a mountain but when you were in a place and there's mountains there i think i'm specifically thinking in contrast with a city where where you're in maybe urban mountains would have been a better thing but that sounds like you just like seeing mountains i think i may be okay i like mountains but that makes it sound like i'm always like climbing mountains or i like them

you know geographically topographically you like tigers but not you know hang out with tigers all the time that's fair so anyway uh since i've been touring with the podcast i've been lucky enough to go to cities that just have like mountains just like has them and like phoenix was like that surprisingly i didn't expect that and then we flew in it's like oh cool mountains uh and then seattle is so good for that. There's mountains galore. That is a really good point because you grew up in West Virginia, which is fairly mountainous,

but not in that way. So yes, it is more, I mean, it is mountain-y. Obviously, there's the Appalachian Mountains there, but Huntington is more hill-y, I think, for lack of a better term. We got some topography. It's topographically diverse, I would say,

because there's rivers and valleys and, you know, hills all over, but we don't necessarily have, like, the huge mountain. We don't necessarily have, like, you know, the big just awe-inspiring mountain peak. The Appalachian Range is more sort of just like topographically diverse, sort of long, long, long ass, like eternally reaching forever stretches of hills and mountains and stuff like that. And that's good. Like that's in my DNA. Like I will always, always like.

It's one thing that I don't get a lot in Texas, right? We're in hill country, but there's very, very few places that I feel like I drive regularly or on like texas car trips where you get that feeling of being in a road that is like nestled between mountainsides and i get that in west virginia and i get that in certain places you know throughout the um throughout new england and you know anywhere where there's sort of that that mountain range you think i've never actually driven that much on the west coast because i usually like fly out there um but uh just like being in Salt Lake City I think is what like sort of floored me because they're the mountains there are huge and like snow-capped majestic mountains I wanted to go hiking in them which is new for me wanting to do that while on tour and

not just like sit in my hotel and play switch um but then I found out it's like 40 degrees still in the mountains and there's like like lots of snow on the ground so i would have died up there which is not great you did that prep work before you went out there me too it could have been a real horror story um i think like just having your horizon broken up with like upward land is a really like uh is a really beautiful thing um when we were younger, the McElroy family would take a summer vacation every year without fail. We'd all go on vacation together. And the options were either beach, where we would usually go to Myrtle Beach or Nags Head occasionally, or somewhere in Florida, usually Vero Beach, or we would go to the Smoky Mountains.

We would go up to Gatlinburg, Tennessee. And Gatlinburg has it all. I don't know if you've ever been. I'm sure you've been to places like Gatlinburg here in your. I've been to Memphis and that's about it. Okay. I've heard your experiences from Silver Dollar City and it sounds kind of reminiscent because it has the Smoky Mountains, which are gorgeous, beautiful mountains.

And there's plenty of cabins to stay in. And we always stayed in a big cabin with a hot tub and got to like chill in the hot tub at night and look over the mountains it was beautiful and then in the city they had mini golf and laser tag and like a thousand places that sound like ranch and they had a place that sold replica swords and bb guns for some reason um but even when they had you know swords and bb guns and infinite fudge all i really wanted to do was hang out in the cabin in the mountains because it was so pretty and so nice and i preferred it to the beach which i know i do this is a weird dichotomy that sometimes people float uh the beach versus mountains which one you'd rather go to but

the mountains do have less sand and so i really don't like sand i really am not a big fan of it um i had a very formative week uh when i was in high school where i went with uh some family friends from church uh to hillsborough west virginia uh which was actually what inspired the setting for kepler in uh adventure zone amnesty because we went to the green bank telescope on that trip because Hillsborough is very close to it. It's just like a small town, like 260 people live there, but it's in this like basin. It's in this basin just surrounded by mountains on all sides. And it was just such a like gorgeous, gorgeous place to be.

I just like being around mountains. I don't usually, I don't like, we did one hiking trip when I i was in uh when i was in colorado in breckenridge and i cannot remember like what the hike was but we hiked for like almost three hours and went way up a mountain and then we're there like by the like uh the the climb up to the mountain up to the peak and it was like raising up over this beautiful lake and there was still like some snow in places and it was the most gorgeous thing I've ever seen. And then like when we were in Hakone,

that was one of the prettiest places I've ever been for similar reason. We were there right when fall started to go and like it's in the mountains and we went to like these spectacular places and Mount Fuji was in the background supposedly. We couldn't really get a good look at it, but I just like visible mountains and i think

what people find like so inspiring about mountains is the sense of scale like how humbling they are because it's uh it is it is tough to see something like that in the distance and feel like big shit i feel like especially when it's right next to a city like here's all this huge stuff that people made like in seattle look at all this big stuff we made. It's like, yeah, that's pretty cool. But here's a mountain. So. Yeah, I can't.

I am not. Obviously, I am not somebody that grew up around mountains. And I've only spent a very small amount of time. But I am curious how that kind of changes a person. Yeah. Just to have that connection. I feel like you'd be a lot more outdoorsy and adventurous if you just had this like big incredible thing near you all the time this happened to me on this trip i was in salt lake city i had when i went on this vision quest of

going hiking uh and i found this seven mile hike down to like a similar kind of lake next to the mountains and it looked great i was trying to convince my family members into doing it with me before i found out that it would be lethal um but it made me want to like go to rei and just fucking stock up and go live in the mountains for a bit on my flight home i watched free solo and i was like this is me this is me now please please no and then i watched him climb el capitan by himself without ropes and i was like this is not me no please no who is this the movie's balling My butthole was so clenched during that entire, I'm demonstrating to Rachel. Yeah, he's giving me like a hand. It's like.

Like a very tight okay sign right now. It's like not even, yeah, it's like a molecular level sort of butthole sort of. What would you say if you had to give me a hand gesture for how your butthole is normally oh i mean on a normal day like i want to compare you know so i really appreciate the tightness do you just want to see it no that probably wow is that bad i mean it's a pretty pretty big letter o right there well actually looks Actually looks more like a D. Is your hand okay? No, my butthole's bad. This is gross.

You started it. I don't want to slam beach people because I think you can also get this from the ocean. I've never gotten this feeling from the ocean, this awe-inspiring humility until we actually went on the boat. Because there's a difference between hearing a bunch of people playing volleyball and you're sitting on the sand where you can still see land and being on a boat where you're like, uh-oh, if this boat went down, I'd be fucked because the ocean is so big.

So I got that on the cruise. But again, sand, no good. Not a beach guy. Yeah, I really hate sand. I do love, as we all know, the sun. Oh, sure. You have it tattooed on your body. What's not to love about it?

Oh. Do you not like people knowing that? I mean, I'm okay with it. It's just kind of embarrassing. She got the Sunny Delight logo tattooed on her buttock. No. No. Hey, what's your first thing?

My first thing is the Perry Preschool Project. Don't know it. I figured you wouldn't. I love Perry's work, but I don't know about i figured you wouldn't i love perry's work but i don't know about their wonderful preschool project yet so uh so the perry that is being referred to is perry elementary school uh and this is a randomized control trial that took place in the early 1960s. I was thinking of Matthew Perry. He did his own thing. But it was with middle schools. And it was called Chandler's Kids.

You always say Chandler. Do I? Yes. Is it wrong? Yes. It's so strange to me. How does a person get like that, I wonder? I don't know.

I've seen friends quite a bit it's not it's not an affectation when i say it does it sound weird you say it chandler you just said it the way i say i know i'm saying when you hear that does it trigger you of like this is the wrong way to say no that's right chandler okay so strange okay so this project basically validated the importance of high quality preschool for kids oh okay that's kind of the the um elevator pitch okay i didn't know that we had decided that was that was something that was necessary uh what high quality preschool yeah no i mean i guess it's better than the alternative But it's I learned how to sure I learned how to skip in preschool. I don't know that I needed that to thrive in the workplace. Well, let me tell you. Okay, please. Yes. What happened? Dunk on me. So they went into an area

of high poverty and looked at 128 three and four year old children that were assessed to be at risk of school failure, whether it's like their background or, you know, their income issues or whatever. It began as a research study seeking to answer whether access to high quality education could have a positive impact on preschool children and the communities where they live. Okay. It was conducted from 1962 to 1967, and then they followed up with the kids at age 27, then again at age 40 oh they're on some like seven up shit so at age 27 uh oh and let me just say randomized control trial means like some of the kids were in this high quality program and some were not okay uh they were divided into

two groups one received the high quality preschool and one received no preschool education were three of them triplets but they didn't tell them no although that's a very good movie heartbreaking so they followed up with these kids at age 27 at age 27 the kids that had the high quality preschool had completed on average one more year of schooling uh had a 44% higher high school graduation rate. Wow. And then at age 40, they followed up and they were 46% less likely to have served time in jail, 33% lower arrest rate. Just from preschool?

Just from going to like a high quality preschool. Just for like a year? How long? Like just like a little bit? Three and four year olds. Wow. Yeah. That's such a narrow, that scares the shit just like a little bit? Three and four year old. So. Wow. Yeah. That's such a narrow, that scares the shit out of me as the parent of a two year old.

It makes me think in the next two years, shit's going to like pop off. That's going to decide everything. That's, I, I've known for a while now that preschool is very important because I worked at United Way and early childhood education was a big part of that. Right. And it's part of the reason that I worked so hard to find henry a preschool that was naeyc accredited okay uh because there are certain quality standards that preschools uh have to meet when they receive that accreditation right uh and a lot of it is like class size and you know access to learning materials and you know teacher child ratios and is it a barn and is there actually

hay everywhere and is there animals everywhere and is it actually a farm that you're dropping your kid off at and is the farm abandoned and is it run by feral goats and the feral goats like the taste of children flesh and hair uh let me tell you about some more of the results. Okay. So again, at age 40, the children that had been to the high quality preschool had a 42% higher medium monthly income and were 26% less likely

to have received government assistance in the past 10 years. So there's just this suggestion of investing in high quality preschool has a huge return. And this is actually one of the first studies because longitudinal studies are really rare. Right. You know, committing to these kids for like over 30 years is significant. But it showed just by, you know, keeping these kids out of jail, for example, like the ROI on it was significant.

They were actually able to demonstrate to communities like invest in early education it will save you money in the long run uh because these kids have much better outcomes when they go that's why has anybody ever done a study like this since then that has like corroborated those those numbers seem fucking buck wild i know they seem buck what they make me i know that they got like uh over 100 kids for this study but it makes me think that there must be some sort of wild outlier because fucking like 40. If you have a good preschool when you're three and four, you don't go to jail. But if you do, it's a 45 percent. Like that's so high.

That's so much. I think part of it, too, is they're looking at low income kids. So they're kids that don't have access to a lot of resources. And so the school was an opportunity for them to get access to resources they might not have had otherwise okay and so if you think about the kids that didn't get to participate you know they were missing all sorts of resources that the kids that did did you know like if you look at like a middle income or a high income neighborhood you probably wouldn't see these kind of results did people take this study too hard? Did this lead to a serious change in how communities thought about early childhood education? In the 60s, around this time period, and I don't know that it was as a result of the study because it was the very beginning of it.

But that's when Lyndon Johnson started Head Start, which is the big program for low-income kids. and started Head Start, which is like the big program for low-income kids. He was a big proponent of saying that everybody, regardless of income status, should have access to high-quality preschool. Yeah. And I just, I talked about how I'm passionate about teachers and education.

And as Henry gets older, I just feel more and more strongly about this like i see the benefits with him having been in a school program already you know he's two uh and i just i just think it's so tremendous because it's such a like spongy age you know like to to invest at this time where kids are really like setting their trajectory of how they learn and how they discover things like is such a huge opportunity i don't remember anything from preschool say for one memory and it's that i didn't there was a period where i didn't like napping this is this may be my first memory when i was like three or four and we had these cots that were just these

metal racks with this stretched it was almost like a trampoline material that was stretched and that was the cot that's what a cot is well yeah but there was nothing else on it you're just sleeping on this trampoline that's not what they sleep on at at daycare at henry's daycare is it maybe it is wow okay never mind um but i couldn't sleep and so i had the blanket pulled over my head i was just like holding on to it like i was in a horror movie holding on to it over my head and the uh the teacher walked up and pulled the blanket off me because i guess she could tell that i was awake and she went go to sleep that's my first memory this is real that's a real memory because i remember it was like so that's a good first memory to have because of course that would be burned into your skull because first of all that's not how it works that's not gonna get me to drift on off the first

preschool memory i have i think is when i was on the playground and they had those big cement tunnels and i like bashed my head into it oh no so i i don't think it's fair to say that the memories are really reflective of preschool yeah because. Because it's easier, I think, to remember the traumatic memories. That is fair. Than, oh, I had really good milk all the time. The milk was good, though, damn. Hey, can I steal you away? Yes.

Hey, can I read you some personal messages? Hell no. Yes. No. What a roller coaster. This first one is for Amy. It is from Daniel. Happy birthday and or anniversary.

It's been about a year since we met and that's pretty dang sweet, dog. I'm so glad to be consciously coupling with such a charming and charismatic cutie. It infinitely rules that you're the one I get to spend my life with. You're my favorite person, my golden hour, and I love you more each day. Definitely still a 10. Nice. I like referring to somebody as a golden hour that's perfect i like referring to someone as still a 10 and then declaring in all capital letters nice uh here's a jumbotron and it's for jenny and it's from sophie who says i hope that by now

we're living together with the cats and the furbies and our eight years apart are finally over if not just pause the podcast until then for eight years stay subscribed i guess those downloads still count i am so proud of you and i can't wait to see everything life has in store for us thank you for always supporting me crushing whatever you put your mind to and making every day a small wonder that's a very sweet that's very nice eight years is a long time yeah Yeah, that's really, really tough. Do you think that Jenny is former President Barack Obama? It's like a nickname for him, and then it's eight years.

It's just the city of Chicago. And it's just the city of Chicago is very excited. Hi, I'm the JV Club podcast, Janet Varney, and I used to suffer from indecision. I couldn't choose between Star Wars and Star Trek, whether to call or text or the best way to cook my eggs. But now, thanks to my weekly dose of We Got This on Maximum Fun, my decisions are made for me. Thanks, Mark and Hal.

Warning, We Got this may cause shouting phone throwing the illusion that the hosts can hear you laughter on public transit and death we got this with mark and hal we know what's best can i tell you about my second thing yes okay i want to talk about chill hop i'm going to talk about chill hop chill hop i'm going to talk about chill hop. I'm going to talk about chill hop. Chill hop. I'm going to talk about chill hop now. That is not an expression I'm familiar with. Same until about a year ago.

And of all of the internet trends that I thought I would find myself susceptible to, chill hop was not among one of the more likely ones. But damn it. These teens are on to something. These millennials have figured something out. Chill hop is, and I'm going to be very reductive and wrong because I'm an old man, but it's kind of this sub-genre that has this wildly specific origin story and also wildly specific purpose.

Basically, I'm talking about lo-fi, typically instrumental hip hop beats that one might say chill out to or study to or prepare an episode of their podcast to. And I was made aware of Chill Hop last year when Polygon did a sort of parodic 12 hour long stream of Chill Hop music to study to featuring W waluigi and at the time i was like oh this is funny but i did not get what he's referring to and now i do because i've been listening to it lately um because i like instrumental music to like work to i have a

work playlist on on spotify but it's like mostly like acoustic like stringed stuff and piano stuff uh but chill hop is starting to sort of supplant that um chill hop is also kind of referring to the this like genre of youtube channels that feature 24 hour long streams of just these chill like lo-fi hip-hop beats and they typically play over these like very relaxing ghibli-esque like anime scenes uh of usually like some characters studying um and if you're wondering like how popular this like sub sub sub genre actually is uh one of the formative youtubers behind this genre is a person named chilled cow they have over three million subscribers and when i was like researching this they had 15 000 concurrent viewers just like watching this chill hop beats to study too so to like give you a feel for the vibe if you're uh

over the age of 30 like me and don't know what this thing is uh this is a chill hop song from an artist called mommy and it's called passing so like what i couldn't understand first first can i say yes so chill it's deeply chill just incredibly chill it like lowers your heart rate my blood pressure is negative. The blood is pumping backwards. I couldn't understand why. It's such a specific thing. These are chill, lo-fi hip-hop beats over anime scenes, and you're supposed to study to it. And that's like what it is. And I could not understand, like, what are the origins of what that is?

Vice did a feature on this subset of chill study beats and where it came from and uh it's just an extremely late 2010s internet culture story um so they're big on youtube because youtube is kind of lax uh for its live streams for like uh copyright laws the other big streaming service is called twitch and like if you run music as somebody who played a game set to orinoco flow 15 times over and like the entire video got just scrubbed from the face of the internet, YouTube is way like cooler about that. Uh, but it didn't start doing streaming stuff until 2013. And then it wasn't really even like good and stable until 2017, which is when this sort of this genre kind of took off. Uh, it's, it's very new very new um the idea of background music that you can like

kind of absorb and have it be like uh inoffensive is is not new right like you are aware of muzak yeah of course i did not know muzak was invented by a dude named george owen square who was a soldier and an inventor and in 1922 he invented wired radio which was a service that you could just like shoot music to businesses and subscribers over wires that they could work to and that music was muzak so like muzak when muzak was invented it was also like a system of transmitting music from one place to the other which i did not not appreciate. That's wild. So I think you could like argue that this is kind of an evolution of that. Yeah. This idea of like wallpaper music.

And you hear it everywhere, right? Like boarding planes or in bathrooms at restaurants, boarding borders, in stores. And this is, I think, better than Muzak, but it's its own thing. And another big reason for this, the the advent of of chillhop is uh streaming music so over the last few years spotify has been putting together like curated uh playlists for you to listen to not just the discover weekly but like uh almost always every time you log on to spotify and load it up there's some chill variety of playlist uh be it like chill hip-hop or chill acoustic or chill piano or chill

vocal or whatever they have something on there uh and funny enough spotify did a study in 2014 on like where people were listening to these chill playlists you'll never guess in u.s states where marijuana is legalized is where they are listened to most frequently so chill so this cross-section of lo-fi hip-hop beats and college students needing music to study to and anime like that was kind of a harder trend to to solve um but this vice article interviewed a dj named celsius who put up the following theory that like blew my mind uh celsius said uh this is actually from the article he theorizes that the chill hop renaissance can be traced back to a bygone nostalgia for cartoon networks adult swim and toonami adult swim specialized in toothsome twilight grooves for its bumpers and commercials

and they also engineered the crossover success of the zonked savant rapper mf doom do you know mf doom like uh only since I've known you. Toonami, on the other hand, brought Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo to a Western audience for the first time with their incredible meringue-tinged soundtracks intact. The teenagers who loved this stuff are now entering their late 20s. Of course they'd be ready

to feel those textures again. That makes so much sense. It makes so much sense. These people who who like, I grew up watching Adult Swim and Toonami. I grew up watching Cowboy Bebop and Samurai Champloo. And like they did have these like black screen with white texts and they would usually have some sort of pithy thing

like between shows and they would all have these like lo-fi grooves under them. And when you put that all together, like, and then some of the people who are watching this are in college now and need music to vibe out to or work to or study to or whatever um i read that and i was like oh i get i typically whenever i have a question about like arcane internet stuff i very rarely find it answered so completely from a single source but like i read that and i was like oh yeah um but for me

it's less about like this aesthetic this like cartoon network adult swim tsunami aesthetic and more about just like i like having chill instrumental music to work to and this is like a whole new world of just of just stuff and there's infinity of it there's infinity i am really fascinated by that like subconscious link to nostalgia is it makes me wonder if every single thing that we're interested in can be traced back in some way to nostalgia. Maybe. I don't know. But this is one example of explicitly yes.

Absolutely yes. That's what it is. What's your second thing? My second thing. Is Vaporwave. Deal with it. I thought we could just all do very arcane internet. I don't know what vaporwave is

oh did you ever use windows 95 yeah that's what vaporwave is huh okay my second thing is saying i don't know that's good and i'm not referencing you can't do that on television oh okay because that used to be what they would say and then the slime would fall on them we are really covering all of our sort of we're covering decades of pop culture interest in this episode there is something and i wanted to introduce it because there are a lot of people that haven't reached this stage in their life yet and it's actually something i talked about with your former boss, Chris Grant. Okay. Genius, genius man.

Genius man. It's something about getting to an age, for me it was like early 30s, where I felt comfortable saying that I didn't know something. And it opened just a whole bunch of doors for me. And I would recommend it to other people. It's a very valuable phrase because you learn something typically when you say it.

Yes. So I will say that I think when I was younger, I felt this pressure of either like guessing at an answer. Yes. You know, or trying to prove that I knew something about it. So instead of saying, I don't know, I would like say the thing that I did know. Or making up an answer,

thinking they're not going to call you on it. And then they call you on it and you get embarrassed. I have reached an age now where somebody will ask me a question. Sometimes it's simple as Griffin asking me if we have any brown sugar and I will just say, I don't know.

And it's so freeing because it's honest. Yeah. And it keeps me from doing the mental gymnastics gymnastics of like i don't know do we should i should i know this now when was the last time i saw you know yeah now you did eat all the brown sugar you scooped all out of the bag like a bear might do and you ate you did eat all of it so when you said i don't know that time it was a lie because you knew that you ate all the brown sugar just right out of the bag and threw the bag away you buried the bag in the yard after i

made your carpet gushy yeah i just rolled around a brown sugar she's out of the bag and threw the bag away. You buried the bag in the yard. After I made your carpet gushy. Yeah. I just rolled around in brown sugar. She's kind of like a big Kodiak bear that has wandered into our house. So I found this great list of 10 reasons it's great to say I don't know on this website called opencolleges.edu. It's from InformEd. Number one, like you mentioned, you learn something new. If you don't know the answer, you learn something new, which is not a bad thing.

Two, it helps you develop relationships. When you are willing to voluntarily learn from others, you can help build a relationship. Yeah. People love saying smart shit to other people and let them do that for you. Three, it helps you avoid complacency. Actively realizing you don't know an answer and planning to do something about it is one of the key successful self-driven learning. It will stimulate engagement. When one person admits it, other feel at ease to speak up. This is another one of my favorite things. Oh my God.

When you're in a conversation and somebody's talking about vaporwave and you're like, I don't know what that is. Yes. Or in class when you're getting quizz about vaporwave and you're like, I don't know what that is. Yes. Or in class when you're getting quizzed on something and you stand up on top of your desktop and you say, I don't know. And then everybody else does too. That'd be a cooler ending for that movie. Yeah, right. And how proud would that teacher be?

Good work, boys. Good, good. None of you learned anything. Wonderful. yeah good work boys good none of you learned anything wonderful um you helps you remain open-minded uh keeps you in line with the truth uh instead of shutting your mind to something uh builds your thinking skills uh you don't necessarily mean you have no idea it just means that you're not 100 sure i do this all the time I used to feel like I had this pressure to like guess. Just like,

oh, when did this happen? And I'd be like, oh, probably in the early 1800s. History is where I bullshit the most. When did Napoleon do his thing?

Oh man, 1482. I don't know. 700? 700? Am I in the right millennia? Number seven, practice intellectual intellectual humility stop trying to be right all the time it's not a goal of education when you know your intellectual limits you can increase efficiency of our learning uh eight improve credibility this is another thing i

really like if you lie less than yeah people people do, especially I'll say, especially men do this all the time of just like, oh, I feel like my answer is probably going to be right, so I'm just going to say it really confidently. Number nine, pursue meaningful problems. The deeper you plumb an issue for answers, the closer you get to the kernel of truth. Oh. you get to the kernel of truth of just like, you know, I don't know why somebody does that. I'm going to figure that out. Instead of just assuming that, you know, people's reasoning behind their actions, I'm actually figuring it out. And number 10, gain academic confidence.

It may seem counterintuitive, but you'll only gain more confidence in yourself if you remain aware of what you do and don't know. I think it's a very freeing thing. Now, granted, it can make you lazy if you're not careful. But it is just a great opportunity to learn more information and connect with people over shared ignorance. Sure. It is also one of the power phrases that you should learn in a bunch of different foreign languages. Yeah.

you should learn in a bunch of different foreign languages. Yeah. When we went to Japan, I made sure to learn I'm so sorry, and I don't know. I don't understand. Do you remember what it is in Spanish? I remember what it is in French. Je ne sais pas.

Je ne sais pas is I don't know? I'm thinking of je ne sais quoi. Yeah. And that means what that booty do? What that booty do? Can I tell you some submissions? Yes, please. All right, here's our first one.

It's from Leah, who says, hey, guys, my small wonder this week is baseball season finally getting into full swing. I've been a season ticket holder for the Houston Astros since 2004, and I've grown up at Minute Maid Park. Such a good park. Holy shit. We had a great time there. Yeah, we went last year. I would love to go again. I think I like the Astros since 2004 and I've grown up at Minute Maid Park. Such a good park. Holy shit. We had a great time there. Yeah, we went last year. I would love to go again. I think I like the Astros. The Reds have been like my team, but that's just because this is the one you're born close to in West Virginia. And I don't live there anymore. So, but I am close to the S. Anyway, this is Leah's

time. Opening day is a highlight in my year and going to baseball games is one of my favorite things in the world. Bonus, this is the first year I've been 21 during the regular season and now I can have those giant frozen margaritas. Maybe you three can get out to a game this season to cheer on the Strohs. Oh, that sounds really fun.

I actually, I really love going to baseball games. Yeah, we go to the Round Rock Express from time to time when it's not 400,000 degrees Celsius. I've always kind of wanted to be a season ticket holder or something but it's never really made sense or been convenient yeah i never have when my dad emceed the river city locomotives team which was our very shortly lived arena football team in huntington we went to every game of that but that wasn't really a season ticket that was was daddy perks. I hated saying that out loud. Alex says, something I think is wonderful is using a very sharp pencil to begin a printed puzzle.

My favorite is Sudoku. Oh. I have not owned. A pencil? Sharpener. Oh. I haven't been in school for a long time. And so like my need for a pencil sharpener is like once or twice a year.

Oh, my parents had one of those electric pencil sharpeners. Those are the best. Oh, we did too at the house growing up. But then, you know, the computers happened. Yeah. And the need for pencils plummeted drastically. Do you remember pencil sharpeners at your elementary school? Oh, yeah.

It was kind of like the water cooler for little kids. Like I just remember remember going to the pencil sharpener and just chit-chatting with whoever was there. I liked seeing how little I could get my guys. Oh, you're one of those. Okay. All right. Emily says, I think that seahorses

are wonderful. Love thinking about them out there, putzing around with those curly tails and the snouts. I love that the dudes carry the babies. That's pretty good, too. I just like a seahorse. Yeah. Some of them look scary. I've seen a few that have a lot of tendrils,

let's say. A lot of extra dangly bits, and I'm not a fan. I don't... They're still beautiful, but they're not my cup of tea there's probably people who love the tendrils though and those people are perverts

thank you to Bowen and Augustus for these for our theme song money won't pay you can find a link to that in the episode description thank you to gosh maximum fun and everybody who came out to support us in the max fun drive we we really really appreciate you helping uh keep our keep our show going and growing and uh thanks to i mean all

the shows on the network are also super good and you should go listen to them uh there's uh what is their mission to zix is real good who shot you who? Who shot ya? Switchblade Sisters. Stop podcasting yourself. There's so many all at MaximumFun.org. And we've got stuff at McElroy.Family too. What else, babe? Those of you

that are in and around Austin, Jordan and Jesse Goh is doing like their first tour in almost a decade. And they're coming through Austin and we are planning to go. Yeah, we're gonna, we would love to see you there.

We've been invited to perform on the stage with them. Yes. We're not just attending. But yeah, that'll be fun. I think it's June. I'm going to get the date wrong. It's in June. I don't want to say the 29th, 20, something like that.

So yeah, come see us in Austin. Speaking of tours, we just announced that we're from a Bim Bam and Adventure Zone. We're doing the Become the Monster Tour. It's basically we've announced all of our live shows for the rest of the year uh so if you want to come out and see us we're going to a bunch of different places uh just off the top of my head like cleveland and um why is cleveland the only one i can remember brooklyn brooklyn chicago minneapolis minneapolis orlando atlanta um uh west coast probably some some anyway yeah good i did a good job it's all at mac right out family you can find links to the stuff there uh one last thing this is kind of a uh bummer i don't really know how to talk about it uh but it kind of came up during the

streaming stuff we were doing during Max Fun Drive, where people were like Justin and Travis were showing off their pets and people were asking about Cecil, who we haven't mentioned in a while. It is because he is very sadly he is gone. He ran off last year and we have reason to believe that he is no no longer with us which is a very sad thing and like it felt weird not to uh like talk about it on the show he was kind of a character on the show he was kind of a character on the show but like i don't i don't know how to like announce that and we're not very like active on social media and it seems like a weird thing to like make a proclamation about but so many people were like asking and it felt yeah it made me realize like we mainly wanted to share so that in the future if

if you have questions yeah you should know that we we are not talking about it because it is not a thing for us it's been it has been a yeah it's been a year also so like if your instinct is to like let us know some tips on like how to lure a cat back like believe me we've done it so please please don't send that in it's kind of a bummer but yeah i know it's kind of like a weird way to end this in the show but it's something we wanted to talk about just because uh you know people are people are invested in our lives and stuff and cecil is a big part of our lives and he's a very very very good cat but uh yeah uh so let's we still have hen though. We still do have Henry. Yeah.

And he's doing great. He's doing very good. So that is it. Let's do some, what's a funny joke now? Maybe we, I'm gonna, should you, you wanna hit me with a pie? You wanna spill, you wanna pour the rest of the drink on the ground? Oh my gosh. You wanna go maybe, there's my closet over there. want to go get a plate of spaghetti just opened it please do i would be lost without you please do not Bye. Hey! This is Jake Heath Van Straten, host of Go Fact Yourself, a live game show here in the Maximum Fun Network.

Make sure to listen to our next episode of Go Fact Yourself with guest Kurt Braunouler. I did a show in Flagstaff, Arizona, where the venue just didn't list that the show existed. Amazing. And it is the smallest crowd that I've ever done a full hour of stand-up for. It was three people. Oh, my God. And Sarah Schaefer. Yes stand-up for. It was three people. Oh, my God. And Sarah Schaefer. Yes, I love crafting.

It's my hobby. I have a craft nook in my home. You do? I do. It has all my supplies displayed in an adorable manner. Wow. Yes. Yes, applause.

Applause for a nook. That's Go Fact Yourself here at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get podcasts.