Wonderful! - Wonderful! 284: We Can Moo It

Episode Date: July 12, 2023

Griffin's favorite television show that exists right now! Rachel's favorite human need that millennials are weird about!Music: “Money Won’t Pay” by bo en and Augustus – https://open.spotify.com/album/7n6zRzTrGPIHt0kRvmWoyaWorld Central Kitchen: https://wck.org/ MaxFunDrive ends on March 29, 2024! Support our show now by becoming a member at maximumfun.org/join.

🎵 Hi, this is Rachel McElroy. Hello, this is Griffin McElroy. And this is Wonderful. Hot days in the summertime, we're here for you. We're here for you to keep it cool. It's a show where we talk about things that are good, that we like, that we're into. The sun is out and we both, at this moment, have our guns out.

That is true. Rachel said to me yesterday, I never want you to wear sleeves again. It made me feel very good about myself and my arms and my strength and my power. And my strength and power, I protect my family. I protect my family with my big arms. Both of them, left one and a right one. I declared Griffin Mr. July yesterday. That's true.

We were out on the trampoline. I had a little sprinkler going. Kids hated it. Griffin was working so hard to try and sell it to them. Woo, I was literally shouting like, woo, have fun. I'm just gonna stand right under this and let the water get on my face look i shouted i shouted hot fun in the summertime we're

keeping it cool here i'm wonderful i said that to our sons and they were like what daddy i don't um yeah it was it was a good time i'm gonna say that's my small wonder is playing on a trampoline with a sprinkler they make trampoline sprinklers and they're sprinklers they strap onto your your trampo and then they spin around and they spray water all over the dang place it's fun to bounce and it's fun to be wet i will say i noticed that the sprinkler that we bought said for ages three and up so we were definitely taking a risk by allowing our two-year-old out there who did slip and fall several times. So many times. Six-year-old also slipped and fell a lot of times. I did not. Because I'm a big man. Strong body, strong legs don't let me fall down.

You're coming with a lot of confidence this week. What can I say? My wife told me that I shouldn't wear sleeves anymore. Gave me, it really gassed me up, as the teens say. Do you have a small wonder? I got my face cleaned you sure did i went to a place right before we started recording got my face cleaned uh i like how it's a facial you got a facial i know that word makes me sound like too fancy though a facial the word facial makes me sound like fancy i think you gotta you gotta deconstruct that i feel like you i feel like it's normal to get somebody to take care of you a little bit like that well okay so i got a facial yeah um

i miss highfalutin over here uh and the thing i don't know what they do they put like 17 creams on your face of varying thicknesses and uh colors is that an estimation or is that exactly how many creams they put? It's an estimation, but it's not far off. Okay, wow, that's a lot of cream. And you leave so shiny. Yeah. And it always makes you feel good. I can see myself in your face.

That sounds like a line. It sounds like you're hitting me. I can see my arms in your face. It seems like you're hitting on me a little bit. I am a little bit. I go first this week yes i'm gonna talk about something we brought as a small wonder before okay but it's i think it's ready to be elevated to big wonder status um i'm gonna move my keyboard because i'm you know

i got my legs up i got i'm kicking it up because it's it's keeping it cool in the summertime i don't want to hit the space bar and stop our fucking recording. The bear. I'm talking about the television show, The Bear. Oh, good for you. Can't stop talking about The Bear. Can't stop thinking about The Bear. Got my bros watching The Bear. Well, I got Travis watching The Bear and he watched one season in like a day.

Yeah, that is what's good about Travis is if you can sell him, he will finish it immediately. Yeah, he also watched all of Siren in like a little less than a week, which has been really fun getting texts from him like team team team uh soldier for life like wow okay team soldier are you sure um i think the bear might be my favorite television show that exists right now wow it does combine a

lot of things you like it does it does i mean objectively like when I think about like the quality of the television show, when I think about how much I enjoy it, how special it feels, like how unique a show it is, how many emotions it is able to elicit from me. Like, I don't think there's anything else that really comes close. Well, have you thought about the poignancy of watching a show about family members that start a business together? No, not until this moment but yeah it is i mean i would like to think that the way we run shit is a little bit less yeah stressful no yeah the bear not as volatile uh definitely not as much um hostility no uh but i would say you know the challenges are there they're there um i talked about the bear season one is a small wonder uh and then in our

recap episode last december of like the best tv of the year i mentioned the first season which is good because the first season's great the second season of the bear is a miraculous thing and uh all i want to do is talk about it which is great because that's what this tell this this podcast program is all about um i want to avoid spoilers because I would hate to ruin any of the kind of like big swings that this show takes before people can watch it. But that'll be kind of difficult

because my favorite thing about the bear is the arcs that the characters go on, which are inherently very spoilable. So I'm going to try and avoid that to the best of my ability. So the bear, if you don't know anything about it, which I think is unlikely because I think everybody's kind of talking about this television show. I will say the name of the show does not give you a lot to go on, though.

So it is probably helpful for people to hear what it's about. We also watched Cocaine Bear this past weekend. It's true. Which is a different type of bear. True. Far gorier, a far gorier affair. This is non-cocaine bear. People may do cocaine in it.

I have not. I can't remember off the top of my head. A live bear is not featured in the bear. That's not true, actually. In the first season, you get- Oh, there is a live bear? There is a live bear that he kind of like symbolically- Anyway, again, spoilers.

The bear, it's on Hulu. You can watch it if you if you got that um it's about a restaurant in chicago chicago beef restaurant restaurant it's a chicago beef restaurant joint um where the main character carme has come to take over after his brother's passing and it's just this greasy spoon hectic uh unambitious sandwich spot and car me is this genius like master chef who has worked in some of the best restaurants in the world like fine dining executive chef high-level dude and a lot of the first season is about sort of the friction between him and the staff as he tries to modernize and improve this greasy spoon restaurant uh and the staff is just

incredible uh there is his asshole cousin richie who doesn't want anything to change uh largely because he's also dealing with the passing of of uh michael carmy's brother um there is tina who's like this line cook that starts off making fun of carmy and giving him a really hard time but eventually becomes like deeply curious about the kind of stuff that he's bringing to the table uh there's marcus who's the pastry chef who discovers he has this latent pastry ability that he just gets so uh energized by uh there's sydney who is a chef that carmy hires who is also brilliant and definitely the catalyst right yeah like i don't think carmy could have turned the culture without her right

and she works as sort of his teammate to help with this big modernization um the show is incredibly stressful um that that is the thing people talk about when they talk about the bear is just it is a very stressful time. And part of that is just like on a here's how a kitchen works level. It is very hectic to be inside of a building where you have to cook a bunch of different kinds of food for large groups of people that sort of circle in and out. Right. Yeah. And that it has to be on the tightest timeline possible. Right.

There's also like the sort of interpersonal conflict level. There is the dealing with grief and loss with this like, you know, specter of Karmia's brother that just sort of looms large over the place and the people that work in it. Money is tight. Things are always breaking. People fight a lot as they sort of try to get through their stuff, etc. Here is the thing about The Bear is that it is an uplifting show on a very profound level, despite all of that stress, despite all that stuff, or maybe because of it, right? While watching the second season, I could not stop thinking and comparing it to Ted Lasso, which we watched all of.

And I don't like dumping on stuff here on Wonderful because I know lots of people like different kinds of things. I was personally like hugely disappointed in the last season of Ted Lasso, partially because I just didn't think it was very good. Like I didn't think it was very, very well, very well made television at all. But my biggest problem is that it like, it's a show also about sort of uplifting character moments and redemption and all this stuff.

But the last season of that television show did not show its work on any of those sort of works. Yeah, right. At all. It was- We were just told as the viewer that some transformations had happened. Off screen.

We didn't see most of them. The biggest episode, the biggest moments that you could want the biggest sort of like conversations that you could want to see the biggest uh turning points and moments of growth uh that you wanted to see from those characters the show literally skipped over whole cloth i was so incredulous about it i kept getting in my head like maybe they're doing this on purpose maybe there's a message in not showing us what we want to see and then i was like spending a lot of time and i was like that's that's still not enjoyable television the bear gets the fuck in there man like it it gets really really heavy in how it shows the the change as it happens and it shows the work that goes into it

and that's hard to watch like there are there are episodes that are difficult to watch there is in season one a uh a one or a one shot episode that is a single shot 17 minutes long it's quite short compared to the rest of the season that That is a hard, a bumpy ride. But like seeing that stuff makes the positivity and the camaraderie hit so much harder because you know what went into it. Yeah. And that is really something magical. That is a really tough tightrope to walk

and the show walks it so well. And I think the similarity too to Ted Lasso is that it's like a team. Like you really get a sense of a team as this show builds. You know? Travis just texted me. Just texted me as you were talking. And literally he said, holy shit, that one shot ep followed by the season finale. So you get the Travis McElroy seal of approval blew me away he says you get the travis mcroy seal of approval on that season two

season one's great right incredible incredible television season two is even better it takes a really unique approach where nearly every episode is focused on a single character. And it does something in those like focused episodes that usually drives me up a wall, which is that you don't see the like main cast interact with each other a ton. Certainly not as much as you did in season one when they're all just kind of in the shit, in the battleground together,

episode after episode, just grinding it out. Season two is, it goes on some pretty long diversions, right? Like one character goes to Copenhagen to train at like a super high end restaurant for a while. And this this requires a lot of buy in as a viewer, like it really had to earn this in the first season, because there are a lot of like practical things that go into the second season that just kind of aren't explained. But you just kind of have to be like, yeah, they have the budget to send this person here. Right.

And yeah, sure. Somebody can fundamentally change their outlook in a week. Right. All that stuff is tough, right? Like doing a whole character transformation in a single 35 minute episode. I can't I don't think any other television show can really pull that off right especially not in in the kind of sequence that the bear season two does it which is like this episode is this character's episode this episode is this character's episode this episode

is this character's episode then there's going to be like a double long full flashback episode that is completely detached chronologically from the rest of the episode and from the rest of the season and then the next episode is focused on this character like that shit should not work and yet it does yeah it strengthens each character individually so that when they all come back together at the end of the season it is spellbinding television it's and i think to my to my point i made earlier about the fact that they undergo these transformations in such a short amount of time is it kind of helps you realize how tenuous this is like they all have like really invested in optimism and this vision and improving themselves but it is new for all of them and scary for all of them. And so in this like

finale of the second season where it's all being put to the test, like you realize like, ooh, this is really tenuous. It's also not like totally clean, right? Like even though it is uplifting and you see these characters who love each other working very, very hard to make this dream come true. And there are definitely feel-good moments that come out of that. There is this constant message of sacrifice and this job demands a lot of you. And it does not shy away from that,

especially in the season finale, which is just fucking fucking amazing amazing stuff and and i think that that's you know that is cool again compared to a ted lasso that is comparatively i think pretty pretty saccharine uh you know in in the way that it handles happy happy outcomes and also just like whether or not it's okay to want good things for yourself i feel like that is something that all of the characters face of like do i deserve this have i earned this like this world of fine dining that is so foreign to me that i've just been thrust into like can i hang like how relatable like how relatable for anybody that is changing careers or

starting something new like very like sophisticated in like the the way of handling it you know not just like oh i'm angry because it's change and then like oh but now i've like it like there's a lot more nuance way way more to it than that You mentioned the way that it portrays fine dining. The tone of the show is really, really refreshing because it's all about, especially season two is all about fine dining, right? But it doesn't portray it as this stuffy, snobby thing, but as like a celebratory, like high act of service.

And that is such an interesting way of, we've watched so many shows about cooking. We've watched so much Top Chef, which is about most of the time sociopaths sort of exploring the highest level of food as art, right? This kind of takes it in a completely different direction, particularly in episode seven of this season called Forks. It's my favorite episode of TV that I've seen in forever

because it flips that on its ear and it's about like, we can make someone's day or we can give someone a really, really unforgettable special moment. The writing is incredible. the cinematography is amazing the performances are next level good yeah um the soundtrack the the the food it's all just so incredible it's funny it's very sad it is lovely uh i can't i cannot say enough about about. The Bear, the television show is amazing. The Bear season two is one of the most spectacular things I've seen on TV and I'm recommending it to everyone

because I think everyone would enjoy it if they can ride out the choppy waters of the stress. Yeah, I mean, the first season for me was more stressful than the second i mean the second is stressful but the first season was more like i need to watch something to come down yeah sure whereas the second season i don't know if it was because i had kind of familiarized myself with the tone and i was more prepared but i didn't feel that as much the second season yeah uh go watch it if you can. It's really, really good. Can I steal you away?

Yes. Hey, MaxFun listeners. This is Cameron Esposito. I'm a stand-up comic actor, writer, best-selling author, and podcaster. This is Cameron Esposito. I'm a stand-up comic actor, writer, best-selling author, and podcaster. I got a great show called Query where I interview LGBTQ plus luminaries across, oh, a bunch of fields. People in entertainment, astronauts, musicians, rock stars.

I am bringing the show to Maximum Fun. You can listen right now. And I am so happy to be on this network. We have new episodes out every Monday. You can listen at MaximumFun.org or wherever you get your podcasts. It's official. MaxFun has become a co-op. We're now a worker-owned network of artist-owned shows supported directly by you.

Thanks to supporters and listeners like you, MaxFun will always be a place where employees have a say. Thanks to you, shows can continue to partner with an independent, values-driven network. Thanks to you, we're able to carry on our commitment to our shows and the community we've grown together. Learn more about what becoming a co-op means for us and you at MaximumFun.org slash co-op. That's MaximumFun.org slash C-O-O-P. uh all right so my thing this week yes hydration yes we have not talked about this okay i did a search on water i did a search on hydrate yeah we have talked about water in other contexts sure swimming splashing but not putting it in uh your body to get your body wet yeah for sure inside wet um this is something i was thinking about both because you've gotten back on your giant jug you know it's not a giant jug it's pretty big jug it's bigger in your head

okay do i have a giant head yes yeah yeah i do now how many how many ounces in that i don't even know 32 maybe it seems like more than that to me 64 it's 32 to 64 we'll call it 48 so that got me thinking about it and also i was talking about it with our friend alex over the weekend about how when we were kids people didn't carry water bottles with them no you know and i and i really kind of wanted to get into that a little bit because i was like why obviously we have known for a long time that people need water to live yeah but i feel like i feel like i did not see people using contigo water bottles yeah or like the nalgene like the big yeah until i was like man jesus like 20 2010 that's the thing i don't remember people having water bottles when i was in college yeah

i don't i don't really remember that either crazy seems wild to me and so i found this article um called why millennials have a weird relationship with water. It's an article by Vice that came out in 2021. I'm gonna guess it's boomers' fault. They didn't do a good enough job. I mean, it's a lot of things. Okay. As tempting as it is. Boomers has drank all the water.

So we didn't get any of it. But the author talks about how like the idea of taking their child anywhere without water is like unthinkable, right? Like this is a big stress for us. Yes. Both like, did we bring the water bottle? And do we still have the water bottle? I lose water bottles like it's my part time job. So many times Griffin and I will go somewhere and I will look at both of his hands and I'll

be like, hey, where's the water bottle? Hey, where is it? 45 seconds ago. And I'll be like, hey, where is it? So there's a few things that are related to this. I mean, I can talk about the benefits of water and I will a little bit at the end, but I think it was more interesting to me. So first of all, we kind of grew up in the age of like fruit punch. Oh, yeah. of grew up in the age of like fruit punch oh yeah you know like the the capri sun like the the hawaiian punch high c sunny d all of that very popular this author mentions the 24 ounce arizona

iced tea see i never messed with that all the other stuff i was vibing on and thinking also while you were saying that list like fuck all that stuff is better than water though dang it it tastes so much better to drink that stuff uh what i what i always forget about is the food pyramid didn't come out until 1995 okay so when we were coming up everybody was freaking out about fat everything was like low fat. But sugar was not as troubling to people. People like didn't really, they knew that sugar was bad for your teeth. But the idea that consuming a lot of sugar and giving your children sugar was just bad for them nutritionally. Like, no one was talking about that. Yeah. And I again, I'm not saying that sugar is bad. I'm saying that this focus on fruit drinks was not like concerning

to our parents it didn't seem any better or worse no because it tasted so good and it made us so happy to drink it um there was also a like shrinking number of water fountains in the 1980s the epa had discovered high levels of lead contaminating the water and public fountains so a lot of them were just removed it just like wasn't accessible uh there was also the the whole increase of milk apparently milk was ramped up during world war ii uh and so the cows were very patriotic they were like our our our boys need our help over there get get squirting a little like cow making a muscle saying like we can do it we can move it no that's good thanks that's what it said the posters the cow posters the cow posters yeah uh so milk started declining in the 80s which is when they invested american dairy farmers invested in the Got Milk campaign.

Yes. So all of a sudden it was like, everybody was like, you should be drinking more milk. Fucking unfathomable to me that there was a huge period of my life where I would go to the fridge with a big cup, fill that cup with milk, you know, the cooking ingredient,

and then just drink that yeah in my body pediatricians now are so chill on milk yeah like i feel like they recognize obviously as a very young child it is important because you were building these bones and these teeth but then the older your kid gets the more they're like you can cut back you're fine maybe it's because they realized that poor little griffin mackerel was curled up on the sofa, writhing in pain. Minutes later, like, oh, man, my bones are getting so strong, it hurts. Right around the whole time of, like, Perrier, and then there's the obesity epidemic. People start talking about Watermore.

Okay. obesity epidemic people start talking about water more okay um and uh millennials became really big on this like organic clean choice of like how do we how do we live more consciously how do we eat more responsibly uh and so people started realizing that there was money in water yes uh and now and now it's like a huge industry i mean you and i like hardly ever drink anything that is just not water it's a sparkling water not not like we don't buy aqua vina um but we we do almost always have a reusable guy ready to rock and roll. So how much water do you drink? How much water are you drinking? How much water are you drinking?

The way that the Mayo Clinic article I'm looking at talks about the necessary amount of water consumption is how much water you're losing throughout the day. Okay, that's interesting. So it's not more like you need this much to be a smart person. It's more like you need to replenish this much. That's great. Because we did also overcorrect where there are lots of people like you need to drink 16 gallons of water every day, or you will die before you are 50 years old. And then everybody's like, are you sure it hurts to drink this much water? And now I think we've chilled on it. Yeah. A lot of people were like, I don't really think there's a benefit past a certain point.

So the article I'm looking at that came from the National Academies of Science, Engineering, and Medicine determined that between two and a half and three and a half liters of fluid a day that could be any amount of fluid that could be any amount of well you think about like a one liter of soda yes okay so then you can kind of visualize what that looks like it's not an absurd amount no it's not wow um but yeah like depending on your environment and your exercise and whether you're you you know, pregnant or have other health conditions, obviously that varies. But the idea is that you should rarely feel thirsty. And then, you know, that pee, you know what that pee should look like, right? Oh, I know what that pee should look like.

It should be like what they describe as straw colored. Straw colored? Yeah. In our agrarian nation, most of us can identify what straw looks like. Straw on site. Yeah, for sure. So when you drink too much water, your kidneys can't get rid of the excess water. And so the sodium in your blood can start to become diluted. So it's important not to like- You want a little bit of sodium. Go too hard. Yeah, for sure. Then you got gotta pretzel up just to sort of balance your humors god i love pretzels so much yeah i know

you do um but the idea is that you know more water it helps with your physical performance dehydration can cause a lot of issues and like in your mental strength and your reaction time. There's all this like studies that say like, if you just lose like 1% of water after exercise, it can impair your mood and concentration. Yeah. One of the most empowering things as an adult that I have learned is that 90% of my mental and physical problems can be addressed by drinking a glass of water and just doing a little bit of box breathing. Just like replenishing the wet and the air in my body. Like it's some sort of car that,

that is one of my check engine lights comes on and I drink a glass of water and just do some breathing. That is my immediate response. So headache is one of the most common symptoms of dehydration. And that's my immediate response. Anytime Griffin's like, I have a headache. I'm like-

Drink water. And I drink it. And I'm like, nope, yep, there it goes. That's what it was. Kidney stones, obviously, you can improve your situation with the kidneys. That's true. I'd stop drinking brown soda pretty much.

Yeah, right. Kidney stones, I'd have surgically removed while I was in college. It was the worst pain I think I've maybe ever felt. And then I just stopped doing that, just drinking water, and they've never come back. A big concern we have lately, too. So now that we have a two-year-old, we are very concerned with constipation. Oh, my God. Water is good for that.

Yeah. He needs to be drinking constant water all the time. Can prevent hangovers alcohol apparently makes you lose more water than you take in yes uh so you're supposed to drink more water big ups to our friends pete and evan who taught me the yeah one glass of water per like alcoholic beverage yeah that you drink at least and it's it really does wonders um yeah we're not doctors by the way we're not doctors nor our friends pete and evan they're the furthest thing in the world from medical

professionals no they just they had a habit of of creating events around day drinking which none of us could really do past about four o'clock in the afternoon like the rest of our evening was over and they could continue largely, I think, because of their commitment to water. Yeah, sure. Yeah, I love hydration. It's great. Summer months.

Summer months. Keep it cool in this hot fun of the summertime. Thank you for listening. Thanks to Bowen and Augustus for these for a theme song, Money Won't Pay. You can find a link to that in the episode description. Thank you to Maximum Fun for having us on the network. We have a bunch of merch over at macroymerch..com you can check out including the poetry corner candle uh which uh i think we have

one on the way here which i can't oh good because it the the smell profile on this one folks it's gonna rock your world i did get consultant on the creation of this candle which i really appreciated as as the creator and uh like groundskeeper of the Poetry Corner. Of the Poetry Corner? Is there much grounds? It's a corner. But there's a lot of poetry in there, and that can get overgrown. That's it for this episode.

We're going to go now because I have to go pick up our son from summer camp, where hopefully he's been drinking lots of water and making lots of fun friends and memories, playing Foursquare and crafts, ashtrays. I'm waiting for those friendship bracelets, man. Yeah. I don't know. I don't think they do those anymore

because it's a choking hazard. Thanks, Obama. Thank you. MaximumFun.org Comedy and culture. Artist owned. Audience supported.