ramble [Music] welcome to best friends back all right the show where two high school best friends try the best friend thing again i’m stevie when levine and i’m nakin hamaifar and today we have a very special very tall guest it’s rhett mclaughlin hey wow now when you first approached me because you’re such a big fan of the show to be honest the first thing i thought was i’m gonna have to ask my boss okay and then when link said it was okay hey come on stevie the second thing i thought was we gotta talk about food and we gotta talk about lunch time more specifically i’m always thinking about food i eat lunch daily same uh nagin do you eat lunch daily i do it’s a new thing but but it’s happening it’s a new thing previously you were anti-lunch no honestly it was just a bad joke we can just keep going um oh you’re doing something with some uh intermittent fasting this old skip lunch night i wish i wish i could never skip lunch i don’t know about your weeks i don’t want to start off in this place but i did want to let you both know i’ve had a little bit of a traumatic week on my end oh what happened so it started months ago i’m gonna take you back cassie had a special gift request she really wanted a proper sharp chef’s knife in the kitchen [Music] and so we got this japanese chef’s knife it’s very very sharp and i’ve been enjoying using it until a few days ago when i dropped the knife onto my foot oh no yes onto a toe well yes okay so i was wearing socks and cassie just approached you had just approached me and it was like you know when something really terrible happens and it’s like plays in slow motion but like in real time and cassie literally was like are you serious at like as the night like the knife had just hit the floor after hitting me and she goes are you serious that’s a brand new yeah yeah yeah and so i i took off my sock not no like i knew it hit me i just didn’t know where it hit me and i took off my sock and of course i i can’t look at it because i you know faint when i see any anything and it cut like a large part of my one of my toes and so now i’m like hobbling around everywhere an important one the middle toe the middle toe i think okay one of the most important third from the you know i was going to say that might be one of the least important because it’s on both sides the little one is the most is the least important no no no no the little one is very important really i’m prepared to like give that up in like a hostage situation i think the second one from the right the second one in not from the right depends on what foot okay uh would be the one to go but uh surprisingly that’s not the most dramatic part of my week but you know but you didn’t have to you can’t just move on did you have to go to the er i chose not to we put like a like a tourniquet situation like it was taken care of it wasn’t bleeding that much i elevated it you guys have health insurance yeah is that what we do i just really didn’t want to go so that they could look at it and be like yep that’s a cut like and my mom of course was like i hope it didn’t cut any muscle and i’m like mom have you seen my toes or like toes in general like there’s not anything there’s no muscle i have like finger toes it’s just like bone and skin but i said it wasn’t the most traumatic part of my week and that is because my usual weekly call with my parents now i get updates like we landscaped the yard we fed the fish in the pond like these are the these are the updates that i like you know my parents live in in rural virginia but this week my mom was like well now your mom sounds like your dad yeah well no he’s lower she’s higher well your sister’s boyfriend he found a dildo near the mailbox what is he going to keep it is he looking for the owner did he put up a sign like what do you do now i don’t know yeah i’m just like i didn’t expect us to be here i was gonna ask about the new paint job that you had done but here we are talking about a stranger’s dildo near the mailbox you don’t know that it could have been a delivery and like the delivery man got embarrassed and just couldn’t quite get all the way to the mailbox i’ll just leave it here like i’m gonna take it out of the box and i guess like after a day like no one touched it of course and then like after a day it was just gone so i don’t know what the story is like either somebody was driving by on the gravel road by the way it’s a gravel road and was like there’s a dildo it’s not mine but i want it and then they grabbed it or like someone was like whoops i left my dildo at the side of the gravel road and i forgot it now i need to grab it i don’t know the origin or the departure of the dildo i’m very interested in how i got that but i didn’t want to hear that update from my mom and i also had her on speaker phone i was as i was walking through the neighborhood after the initial story um and then at the end of the conversation maybe it’s in my blood she likes to bring it back around and that’s when she re-emphasized the dildo uh and of course an elderly neighbor was just you know a tv show placement right as i was passing by so that’s nice were you surprised that your mom knew the word for a dildo did you describe it or she okay she well i mean at first she was she called it a daldo [Laughter] she didn’t give any details though she wasn’t she wasn’t like she didn’t get like it was color size battery powered she’s like it actually looked pretty small in comparison to the ones i’ve seen no this is a mystery oh no and that brings us to the topic of lunch did you guys have any trauma and did you have non non-trauma based weeks before we move on i don’t want to hog the the weak ketchup conversation i didn’t see any dildos hmm that’s no that’s so unusual for you so i guess i came out all right and my in-laws were in town so you know i definitely didn’t see any um okay we’re going all the way back to high school this is the first episode where going back to high school doesn’t mean the same thing for all three of us because despite your youthful appearance you’re about a decade older than us and so you know high school in the early 90s versus high school in the early 2000s i’m very curious because we’re all north carolina but you’re in small town north carolina so let’s start with your school your high school you went to public school oh yes and how big was the school like how many students 1 000 students total yeah so you approximately had 250 kids only in your class well you know we had a lot of dropouts so uh it was not unusual to drop out you started strong right did that call for multiple lunch periods two yeah there was two lunch periods i know that link was in like both of there maybe in one year that he was two lunch periods no i’m just feeling like we we were always we always had lunch together except maybe one year but junior and senior year we definitely had like our friend group pretty much ate together yeah that would really suck when you did not have the same lunch period as your friends it also reminds me of like when you had pe in like the first or second period i’m just sweaty for the rest of the day you guys would shower though i’ve heard you talk about that you you like showered at school no that was probably college that we were talking about showering in the locker room i mean there occasionally but like things had to get really bad for you to take the risk of showering how i would ever shower anywhere on the grimsley campus ever ever yeah i i didn’t know they had running water in the gym no i’m i didn’t even know that was an option there was no time every class period was just like you were hanging on for dear life trying to get to the next oh my god there was no time do you remember that kid this is so far away from lunch and i’m sorry but it just reminds me do you remember that kid who um he had a stopwatch around his neck and he would time himself to get to class the old science building had a door and there was like a little window in the door and he was rushing so hard to get to class that he instead of pushing the door apart he pushed the glass part his hand went all the way through you don’t remember this went all the way through the freaking glass and i saw the aftermath because there was like drops of blood and a freaking broken window and blood all over the thing because because this kid was trying to get to class so he was fasting he would sprint yes he sprinted so hard he sprinted through the door was he on the track team what was he trying to prove trying to invent a new sport i don’t know public school was hard public schools was really difficult i feel for him he’s trying to avoid someone maybe i don’t know i i feel bad for the kid don’t remember his name but i feel like i’m sure he’s gone on a great day um okay so early lunch and late lunch i remember you didn’t really want to get early lunch because it was too early yeah early lunch was like 11 or something yeah it was it was like a brunch it was never too early for me i remember always being so hungry by the time we got to lunch period see i don’t i didn’t love lunch i didn’t love the available um options i didn’t love the packable lunch situation i loved lunchtime and and we’ll talk about our senior year because we had um off-campus privileges did you have off campus uh i mean we may have had them but there was no where to go you know it’s like i think they’re like you can leave if you want and nobody’s like what am i gonna do i’m gonna go into this we literally were surrounded by fields where did you eat lunch every day just a cafeteria inside the cafeteria there wasn’t like an outdoor area or anything there was a place you could smoke oh it was legal for students to smoke cigarettes yes it was fake it may have actually phased out while we were students but there was a smoking pit it was like it was like a it was the ashtray it was this area that was like dropped down a couple of steps that was very near the entrance to the high school and that was where you could smoke oh my god would you take your lunch to school would you buy from the cafeteria i i i’d say the senior year was definitely like you always get buying lunch you never brought it at that point because it was cool it was it was yeah it was just cooler to just not be carrying around your lunch what in whatever container it might have been in yeah i i brought my lunch a lot in elementary school but i love school school lunch every single thing for the entire history of first through 12th grade every main entree every side like i can’t remember anything not being good it was all wasn’t it all like gloopy and like fatty i had i had a favorite lunch in elementary school from the cafeteria which was the spaghetti meatballs with texas toast a chocolate milk creamy chocolate milk and i’m sure there was a square for one more thing and a lot of vegetables oh yes so many vegetables buttered vegetables so that was that was the one day my parents would let me buy school lunches the texas toast day okay my parents wouldn’t let me buy lunch i don’t know what it what it was yes really you had to bring your lunch every day yes yes they didn’t want me to and it’s not like the school lunches were expensive but i don’t know i def that was definitely they weren’t healthy they weren’t healthy that was the main reason yeah i definitely remember in elementary school the milk cartons and like wanting to just wanting to have milk which is so weird did you do it did you have the milk i think a couple days i was allowed to have like the milk i don’t know why that was the most exciting thing did you get the sweet acidophilus what what is it i know it starts with sweet ass but sweet acidophilus i think i’m saying that route right you said that once before and i still don’t know what you’re saying all right okay so there were two milks when i when i first got to like elementary school there were two milks i almost said vanilla and chocolate you know vanilla milk the regular kind regular milk and chocolate it’s a blue carton and a brown carton and then one year all of a sudden there were red cartons too and they said this is sweet acidophilus what are you talking about wait i’m looking this up and you are completely right sweet aphidophilus is sold at kroger what is it it is it’s milk it’s milk it’s a low-fat pasteurized milk to which lactic acidophilus organisms organisms are added i thought it was a greek brand oh so it’s not sweet acidophilus is we epidural acid acid oh sweet sweet okay okay yeah you were right so maybe it was just like a lower fat milk and it wasn’t whole milk and that was the way that bacteria added to it giving it a tangy flavor yes probiotic thickened texture yes i had milk every single i had a milk with every single meal did you swallow switch to sweet acidophilus oh yeah yeah you know me i if the new thing shows up that’s what i go for you’re doing it can i tell you that it says that sweet acidophilus resulted in significant weight gain in humans and animals in all studies i think that’s why i’m so tall and i did and i did this into high school and then i would go home and that’s what my parents would serve with our dinner was more milk oh that’s so much milk strong bones such strong bones iranians were obsessed with height and having their children like gain the height system because we’re not as a nation a very tall very tall people and so you would ask the pediatrician this is like every every iranian has this story of going to the pediatrician figuring out where what percentile they’re in in the height game and i was always in like the lowest 50th percent and so were guys and so the moms especially for their boys would try to figure out how can we make our boys grow taller and so there was a radish milk concoction that moms would make that they thought would help help the boys grow a few extra inches i mean like radishes and dairy milk in dairy land and i don’t know if there was like a radish but every mom is looking at g rhett and it’s like something worked for him it was just sweet yeah i’ll be the i’ll be the like guy on the carton of course that’s like somebody’s missing so probably not i’m not gonna be the person on the card i’m i’m been on the other side it would be very hard for you to go missing so you mentioned that your senior year it wasn’t cool to carry lunch there was no like lunchbox situation at any point for you in high school was there not high school i was definitely afraid to break out a lunch box freshman year yeah so i was brown bagging it by that point what kind of lunch boxes did you have in middle school were they like the plastic like had they come out with like the igloo insulated stuff oh yeah okay yeah yeah yes yes no it was plastic q bert was one of them remember hubert yeah probably not but that’s funny i feel like just like just like us by the time we got to high school it was not cool to have a box you had to have a brownie but i think there was some igloo um adjacent things that were allowed that were a little bit more like utility yeah that hadn’t been admitted yet yeah yeah yeah that technology it was nice you can’t figure that one out but i do remember the brown bag being the coolest because it said i don’t give so much of a [ ] about this lunch right well and some people had thermoses link was a thermos guy he had a thermos i’d say if he brought his lunch most of the time it was a thermos yeah was he was that like soup or he was putting solids in there too well he’s fine in a way he was trying to find a way to make everything into a soup oh really but uh mostly soups yeah he was like a chef boy rd really kind of kid yeah i see i would think he was mostly a bring your lunch situation so that he could control he just didn’t he didn’t like anything he didn’t like what they were serving yeah i would eat my lunch and then begin negotiating other people’s lunch and their milks [Laughter] if you had a sweet acidophilus that you hadn’t fully finished you know you knew what to do you knew where what table to show up at i ate so much food i don’t have no idea how many calories i ate because i would eat when i got home i’d immediately begin consuming more calories when i got home and then it would just roll into dinner and i’d oh there’s more and i would eat that and then i would eat before i went to bed was your food consumption an issue in your house like you ate more than your fair share like that was a problem i think my mom just kept supplying it okay you know it was pretty cheap stuff it wasn’t it wasn’t top shelf items it was just a lot of processed foods a lot of refined sugars will you excuse me to go a little researchy because i i did because i was just interested like would i be able to google early uh 90s i’d say 1900s early 90s school lunches early 2000s and of course there’s like a timeline of like federally instituted things that happen right but in 1995 like the childhood obesity rates were at like a peak by 1995 this is like junior year for me and they brought in the department of defense to help which is so weird but they had been tasked with providing freshly grown fruits and veggies to american public schools and it was a part of the program that also supplied army bases but they were like we need some kind of like fresh produce situation i guess the department of defense can help and then by 2005 which was our junior year an estimated 50 of cafeterias offered meals from fast food places so the cafeteria was like mcdonald’s and taco bell and all the things and then it wasn’t until uh 2010 with the healthy hunger free kids act from the obama era where nutrition started becoming like a real part of school lunches so like you existed at the peak of the most unhealthy well i guess arguably we kind of both did we just had more variety in our unhealthiness but i thought that was really interesting and then of course 2018 uh trump rolled back some of the nutrition and then it was reinstated in 2020 so there was a brief two-year period where we went back but you know well it kind of tracks that 95 was the peak of this problem because that was the year that they installed the trojan cafe and this is not a little spot that was sponsored by condoms that was our high school mascot was the trojans okay and the trojan cafe was a little island in the middle of the cafeteria that served non-square pizza so like pizza that was actually you could see it enormous in a circle and it was like triangle pieces and chicken sandwiches like fried chicken sandwiches yeah and otis spunkmeyer muffins you know about these yes that’s the like big double i mean they got multiple ones but the one i always got was the chocolate muffin with chocolate chips and it’s in that like plastic bag and it’s really big so it was a muffin muffin pizza and chicken cafe yeah and once that rolled around i would say 90 percent of the time because it was cool to go to the trojan cafe i don’t know why but you know how in the middle of the cafeteria that you were already in yes okay because it was like yeah yeah you guys like go and get like a tray with like three things on it like i get pizza a chicken sandwich and an other spunk meyer muffin and of course i still get sweet acid offers i gotta get that but i turns out jerks on you i mean like i don’t know how i didn’t get tired of that yeah they were like there’s no need for condoms at this school yeah the trojan cafe man we just tore that place up and it was not good and one time we got progressively more mischievous as we as we were in high school and i don’t know who shoe it was it was either my shoe or link shoe but it was we decided that we were going to do this but hey let’s put one of our shoes in with all the chicken sandwiches they’ll never know who it was oh this was like a grab a grab-and-go situation yeah but it’s like there’s a tray up there with just chicken sandwiches that are like exposed chicken sandwiches and like oh they’re not even in wrappers or anything no this is 1995 dirty shoe next to exposed chicken sandwiches yeah i listen i can’t explain myself there was like just a gap where some people had taken sandwiches i was like that’s a nice spot for a shoe and so link goes i i don’t usually the way things worked is i would have the idea that link would be the one who did it so i don’t know i’m just saying that’s probably the default situation i was like hey man you put a shoe up there and he’s like all right and so he put the shoe in there and then we go and we sit back down because we like to do something we had one shoe on yes okay yeah yeah and uh so you go and you sit back down and then you you wait because it’s a little bit of a delayed gratification thing and of course you know like 30 seconds after you sit down somebody’s like you see somebody see the shoe and then they go talk to the lady then the lady looks at the shoe what whose shoe can this be men size 11. every second that goes by that shoe is getting hotter and hotter yeah yeah we got in trouble for that i i feel bad that you guys didn’t have like an outdoor space to go into because the cafeteria like stank like i remember that vividly like the smell of school cafeteria well yeah a bunch of teenagers and teenagers too like yeah i mean my kids have it so good because they they they just can walk off campus like lock as a senior can walk off i think every day only as a senior yeah but no but shepard he walks into town he walks into town how long does that walk what do you mean um meaning that like he walks to the like little downtown area close to where he’s at with his buddies at least once a week yeah yeah like seventh grade we had we had senior year privilege where we got to go off campus but we would often go to my house because it was close by and like we didn’t have time there was no time for like a sit-down lunch often and like no the bell would ring and everybody would run to stevie’s car in the in the parking lot we would run to stevie’s car you were you and a couple girls had cars in our groups yeah so we also had to go where you were driving so how big was this crew that would go to your house it’s like a handful of people four or five people and take their own lunch or yeah oh i’m gonna i’m preparing something for you guys with my japanese well i think there’s a special dish i remember uh naked and i don’t know if you if it is in your heart that my mom would uh prepare sometimes for us i i remember your mom always throwing in a little bit of those what are those wiener dogs the ones the the little dog the hot dogs with the bread around them okay that’s not pigs in a blanket not the thing that is so it must have been like costco was like starting no we had appetizers at your house on another level yeah yeah and they have hors d’oeuvres they had frozen quiches that you could like little mini quiches that you could get from costco i don’t i feel like it was new i feel like costco was new so there was like some kind of like sam’s exciting like you just popped these little quiches in and my mom would make us these like little mini quiches in addition to whatever we brought for lunch but it was so like that wasn’t very cool of we would literally just sit in my kitchen and eat our lunch and talk um except for the days well we didn’t none of us had any money except for one of us had had there was money there was one girl who was like really wealthy why don’t you go to her house it was too far away she’s too far away yeah she wanted to go to a sit-down restaurant during a 35-minute lunch period yeah yeah like with whose money yeah are you thinking about the one fit that happened yeah we had so the the affordable lunch spot in town was this place i think i’ve talked about before called yum yums and it was a it is like a hot dog place basically they have hot dogs and they have ice cream and it’s been around forever like my mom when she went to high school they would go to yum yums like we’re talking like bright red hot dogs and they were like a dollar dollar fifty super affordable for a high school kid there was like a fan on the outside um that would blow like the hot dog smell out and so like if you had to park on that side of the building you’d always like crouch low to get under the fan so you didn’t get you don’t want the hot dog smell no because it was like that kind of like oniony they were also boiled hot dogs like it’s not a smell that you want to carry around with you it sticks around and in it there’s a confusing b.o equivalent you know like yeah is that is that food or b.o exactly the old is that bologna or b.o and so do you want to take over the fit story because it was it was a lunch day and we suggested perhaps we go to yum yums along with everyone else who’s going to yum yums and she we have had this debate many times and she just she’s a little girl too she’s small in stature she just slams she hits the side of the car and she says i want to go get indian food ah we can’t afford that she wanted to go to the indian buffet the indian restaurant i wouldn’t even know what you were talking about yeah you suggested that and she was very upset we were going to get the dollar hot dogs with everyone else like she literally took her fist she was sitting in the passenger seat it was the door what i remember she like yeah we all have these different violent versions of very nervous and it was so it was so out of nowhere it’s like why are we having we were like probably 18 years old at this point you’re having a violent fit about going to get food we want afford to go get indian food and also we didn’t have time to go get indian food there was no time i feel like like her i never got the lunch that i wanted in general like when we once wanted like no inject like my lifetime of school lunch i never got what i wanted what did you always want i always wanted the pizza lunchable right okay i wanted to open that plastic thing put that marinara sauce on the pepperoni oh i really wanted that i got that maybe once or twice my entire life but instead my mom would always pack me this very healthy lunch which was very nice thank you like nobody packs my lunch anymore but she would americanize an iranian dish usually leftovers from whatever we had the night before so like she would take um kebabs beef kebabs that she would make put them between sandwich bread make this like egg and potato salad irani potato salad put it between bread and these things on their own were fine but when you pack that at six in the morning and your child eats it at 12. or one it’s soggy it smells like diarrhea it’s so terrible because like this beef smell would just go insane and everybody would look at me any time i opened up you’re talking you’re not talking about height are you talking about high school i’m talking about elementary okay okay okay okay and then by the time we got to high school she was giving me like deli meat because i she upgraded you to billy me and she upgraded me well okay i this is a great time for me to break out my uh show and tell project that i brought because you you really are getting an a for your appearance today and the ties in i’m gonna segue from both of your stories because your yum yum story and then your mom packing something that could be considered embarrassing by noon let me just show you so this is and now i wasn’t embarrassed by it okay because this is my favorite thing that my mom would make for me okay brag did you make this for yourself for today i made this this morning okay and i got very close to making it for shepherd until i described it and he was like i’m good so this is legitimately how i would get it right okay in the paper bag and then this oil that’s fancy oh i already i already see something i don’t like this is a hot dog sandwich now i’m actually surprised at how well it’s held up because i made it at like like 7 30 to try to get it time to what it would actually be so we’ve got white bread wonder bread which i had to go buy wonder bread i don’t buy that anymore and uh you guys bought wonder bread for the potty look look and look and i’ll just just show you you take two hot dogs and you oh gosh i don’t know if it’s gonna stay together oh wow did you long cut those dogs you have to long cut four wieners yeah just like that and then do some ketchup and mustard i probably could have done more ketchup and mustard and then it kind of like kind of sucked i mean this is this is so nostalgic for me because that looks good just feel it just grasp it are you gonna eat it yeah well do you want me to touch it i’m gonna split it so you can have i brought a knife these are raw dogs no i’ve microwaved them oh god what why would he eat a raw hot dog well i mean i mean not that they come right they were never really wrong you heat them up so that they’ll they feel like they’ve been through like some sort of process look at that wow remember that a i said you got for the money i mean and i was so pleased to receive this stevie what does this smell like it smells like i mean truthfully it’s just a hot dog on a bun yeah really it’s just been around for a while i mean there’s nothing wrong with it just take a little bite okay i’m scared yeah wow okay look at your bite and look at my bite and i went pretty you know i was trying to be a little respectable [Laughter] because i could eat this in two bites easily okay i get this wow i totally get this also the thing that i like about this is that well i guess i was gonna say is that there’s a lot of protein because i don’t remember having lunch meats in my sandwiches like i had like the classic pb and j for the most part i think yeah i never got that there’s protein and peanuts there was it wasn’t a sandwich if it didn’t have meat because bologna cheese like bologna american cheese and mustard was was like the go-to right it was easier for my mom she didn’t have to like microwave and cut the hot dogs but if she had a little extra time she could do the hot dog sandwich i think it’s because i went to jewish day school for middle school and part of that was not kosher by the way yeah we were um you’re supposed to keep kosher but because the rules are a little bit complicated instead of saying you can bring something if it’s kosher you could only bring vegetarian things and so the whole school was vegetarian yeah really yeah so that’s why i never got like lunch meat i almost bought hebrew national but i thought that was two on the nose so i just showed you i just i just did oscar meyer just a regular there’s so many hot dogs i haven’t bought hot dogs yeah they got so that section is just overwhelming at this point i was like i don’t i don’t know which one is the one that my mom got so i i know it was oscar meyer so i just got oscar meyer but there’s like three different kinds of oscar meyer hot dogs yeah it’s fancy times yeah kids just they can’t relate so you’re going to be having hot dog sandwiches for the rest of the week that’s my best i think that’s probably all though i think i’ve had enough i love that shep didn’t want to have it that’s when you know that’s when you know it’s bad i also really for my like desired lunch so i said that i didn’t like lunch i don’t know why well i do know why it’s because it was like a peanut butter and jelly sandwich like there was nothing about lunch that i was like oh this is tasty or exciting to me to the point where sometimes i wouldn’t eat lunch and then by the end of the school day i’d have a bad headache because i was probably dehydrated i didn’t have lunch and i also needed to wear glasses but was too embarrassed to wear classics so the end of the day was bad for me all around i had a major headache and i was like hydrate me and feed me right when i got home but i do remember coveting the harriet the spy sandwich of choice do you remember hearing the spy with michelle tretchlenburg no neither of them there was a movie rosie o’donnell was in it it came out like cassie also didn’t see the movie so i understand but for us young people oh crap she’s gonna listen now and anyway um it was a popular movie probably when we were in middle school and she would take um tomato sandwiches which were just white bread mayo and a chunk of tomato and that was like her go-to sandwich so i thought it was really cool so i was like i want tomato sandwiches those are good that was really good those are hard to keep again because that gets better i didn’t take that was not a school thing you didn’t take tomato sandwiches to school but we had them we had them at home for sure stevie my mom would not not do well with you not eating your lunch she had this thing where she was really she was so against food waste and oh oh yeah she would we would get in trouble if we brought our lunch bag home full of food and so i started just kind of throwing away whatever yeah whatever i didn’t keep and she got i don’t know what happened but she somehow caught on and this is this is when i was younger in elementary school but she started telling me that there was a little birdie that was watching me when i this is like let’s start when i’m eight or nine years old there’s a little birdie watching me to make sure that i finished all my food and i guess like little birdie was like god right because he was just like always watching to make sure i wasn’t doing something wrong and so the little birdie i would always kind of look i would i would still throw away my lunch but like a little bit look around behind my my shoulders she upped the ante and she said there’s another person involved with all of this his name is mr gibson so she made up this guy named mr gibson where if we actually threw away our food and got away with it she was gonna send us to mr gibson’s farm to clean toilets and farm his land and she so she had this whole like cadre of fake people that was watching us to make sure that we weren’t wasting food and i am sure that this has [ ] me up somehow i am sure you’ve never trusted a gibson but i’ve never trusted a gibson and for a long time i i really was like okay i don’t really think there’s a birdie that’s following me but maybe someone is watching maybe there is some way that she’s tracking this and so i became really good at just finishing what i was so it worked good parenting up until the point where i went to college and we had a buffet and then it was like you don’t need to finish everything on your plate okay right that’s how you get the and then she was like that might be too abstract enough mr gibson has a farm and he has toilets mr gibson is in close contact with the bird is there anything about your like the way that your mom prepared lunch for you or the kind of liberties that you seemed to have with lunch foods that you have consciously like enacted with your children well it was funny you know being from north carolina and then also my mom she only drew a line on really sugary cereals so you could have all the the processed meat and all the refined sugar you want but if like right there was like a character associated with it that was like crapping out marshmallows or something like that i was like no then we’ve crossed a line yeah so we couldn’t we had to eat regular cereal but everything else we could eat anything and and so nothing was off limits and there was definitely no like what are the ethics of this particular fast food chain or whatever but then yeah but moving to california in 2011 i mean i’ve told this story before about how a bunch of the kids friends had never they kept meeting kids who had never had fast food like never been to mcdonald’s we took a kid to in and out for the first time and when we were in the in the drive-through he we were like what do you want he was like i think i’ll have a burger and then we come to find out he’s never had meat did you get into we were about to give him his first burger but when jesse was like hold on uh you haven’t but you don’t eat meat do you he’s like no but i like to try it please don’t tell my parents but she was like i’m not gonna be the person who introduces you to meat and so he got like a grilled cheese but anyway that has influenced the way we think a little bit more critically about what we’re giving our kids but you know honestly shepherd has essentially just like he’s got his jimmy dean sausages that he he makes for himself in the morning and then he’s got like just the cold cut sandwiches that he makes or jesse makes for him who you know usually makes him for himself that’s what i was going to ask is like i never made my own lunch and looking back i’m like man that’s ridiculous i don’t know why my mom wasn’t like get up make your own oh yeah my mom did everything for for us yeah but i guess that’s not is that not it’s also not cool anymore like at a certain point like you want to make your own lunch for school no i just think that i just think that the dynamics have changed over the this past generation like my mom was like i’m gonna do everything i don’t it was almost like attempting to do something at home for yourself she was just gonna get mad that you weren’t doing it right like i’m not let you do the laundry cause you don’t know what you’re doing let me just do it and so you know and so she would just do everything for me and my brother and my dad you know she just did all of the housework and and that involved all the meals and all getting everybody’s breakfast ready get in packing everybody’s lunch and it was just like it wasn’t even up for discussion yeah that you would be like i’ll step in and do no you won’t yeah so it’s more or less just jessie is not she just doesn’t function in that way so it’s like hey if you can either gonna have lunch if you make it you can have it if you don’t then you won’t have it that that’s the kind of the default you can walk into town right well just walk into town from the desert lunchtime was this like coveted time right like recess was when we were younger it was just this is when you were with your friends you got to hang out and in middle school they used that time as a as an opportunity to punish students as well and so i would frequently get in trouble in school for yeah not for grades but i talked too much so many of my report card says talks too much and i’m like well maybe you should have been more interesting but i go i talk too much and so they would give me what’s called silent lunch have you heard of this yeah yeah yeah because it was like another time where you could have like a detention type of thing instead of after school yeah it was so important were you in the actual cafeteria you just couldn’t talk bad girl this was the worst part when you were in the cafeteria sitting in the middle of the room while everyone around you sat at the booths to eat you were there by yourself sitting in a section of other students who also had silent lunch it was like it was one of the most shame inducing yeah lots of shame things that did you have a teacher sitting with you the teachers were kind of close by to make sure birdie talking [Laughter] mr gibson everybody was in on it but it was this thing that i got kind of you know maybe once every two months and i was so ashamed and i thought i would get in a lot of trouble with my parents i didn’t admit it to my mom and dad until like two years ago i was like by the way i used to get silent lynch all the time oh they didn’t know they would they didn’t know oh no they wouldn’t get notices and they to my surprise were so upset i thought they would have been like yeah negan you deserved it but they they were like are you kidding me i can’t believe that they did this to you why didn’t you tell us we would have said something i thought they were retroactively upset with you me too i thought that’s what you were meant that’s probably what they would have been so interesting i i in middle school i told you i was a troublemaker and i are the class clown and i would get in trouble all the time for talking in class except for like i was a real [ __ ] like i thought that i was being sly and like the teacher would turn around and i’d you know mouth something across the room and then like try and like gaslight them into thinking that i didn’t say anything that they were being ridiculous and like you know like i was i was a real jerk but i got in trouble constantly for that what was the punishment i i remember silent lunch was also a thing um at our school at that time um in third grade i think i’ve told you this i got in trouble and pulled to the side and got a talking tube because they said uh it’s not nice to laugh at people when they get hurt that that’s when i really got in trouble what happened was it funny i think it’s really funny when people not get hurt seriously but like you know if someone trips or like accidentally like yeah they’ve never seen afv yeah but i understand it’s not very nice you have to gauge the situation usually you shouldn’t be like within your shot yeah right as long as there’s no blood no but that’s how you like that’s a test for me is like if you’re with someone they don’t laugh at themselves when something happens it’s like for them i don’t think this relationship’s gonna work out did you how often did you do this how often did i laugh at people yeah it must have been a problem because i got taken to the side i don’t know i i do remember we had those like uh science lab stools and i remember at one point we were all standing up and before it might have been lucinda melvin honestly before someone sat down i removed oh yeah stool very quickly um and they you know fell back onto the ground which was at the time i guess very funny but like now it seems such well i mean yes just to contextualize this i mean that kind of stuff happened all the time yeah you were looking for ways to make people fall down it was just it was just common but our bodies could handle that too yeah when we were younger well we would do that thing where somebody would get into a ball like in the tornado drill behind someone and you would just go up to the person and push them over the person who was kneeling down i mean it’s just like so you know what i’m saying like i know the tornado drill so you get you you your buddy crouches down behind somebody and you go up to somebody and you just push them and they their feet hit the person crouching and they fall over yeah on their head basically and it was just like constantly everyone doing this kind of stuff to each other but like now if shepard came home he was like dad let me tell you what happened i got teamed up on i would be like what this is a try i mean this is an outrage i’m going to be at the school immediately right if i’d have told my dad that that happened to me you’d be like well you gotta keep your eyes in the back of your head yeah yeah yeah there was no sympathy for that man i remember in high school now in the grove everybody would be at lunch and the boys would all try to they called it shanking then oh yeah yeah yeah oh yeah yeah that’s what we called it oh oh there’s an evolved there’s an evolved version of that on tick tock now you grab the people’s pockets yes yes i’ve i found that this weekend oh my god there’s this one guy that they’ve done it to twice you grab them pockets and then you essentially you rip their pants their whole jeans come apart it it’s awesome i’m thinking about doing it there’s somebody here at mythical keep that sack in the back of your head i mean i the first one i saw i thought it was trick pants you know yeah where you get these trick pants and then i i watched another one and i was like oh man this is something that you can do to just regular paint yeah yeah i saw one the poor guy was like they were like on tour or something he was like a grip or something and the guy came up and ripped his pants and he goes oh man these are the only pants i brought yes okay so listen i watched that one and then two nights later last night i found the other one and it was the same guy and they did it to him again oh no like you got like got back to work and he’s like talking to like talking to this girl in this stairwell and then a guy comes up and does the same thing then i would yeah no that’s not for me that’s not for me i feel like the people guys wear tighter underwear now so when you do get pants it’s just your jeans that come off but like loose boxers were the thing in the early 2000s and so everything would show how do you know what the thing was in the early 2000s because i saw victim number one get pants in the grove that’s someone i actually do remember yeah okay so we talked about lunch in elementary middle and high school lunch today is there any is there any shareables about how you’ve evolved your lunch practice you made a really funny joke niggering at the top that you don’t eat lunch um [Laughter] it was really funny let’s bring that one back thank you thank you no i i i prepare my own lunches that’s the biggest difference but like what kind of are we talking like a sandwich situation i have a go-to uh i’m i go through phases i think i think this is a common thing where people go through food phases and they keep going back to the same food and then they’ll switch to the next phase of food my current phase is basically like crew to tape like vegetables like uh carrots cucumbers radishes and hummus and like some nuts and i love lunch for lunch because well because i’m in so many meetings and oftentimes i’m in a meeting while i need to eat and i just like the grab-ability of it and i don’t know i’m that’s what my current obsession is yeah i would like for that to be mine what is yours these like hot dog sandwiches uh yeah i don’t know i’m gonna be finishing that it was funny because we you know there was a time in which we were like we would go grab some we go grab lunch yeah you know go out while working at the office yeah it seems like so long and i don’t know when it was it was definitely pre-pandemic it was like somebody had the idea and this isn’t lots of employees still go out but at this point for me and link it’s every single day where there’s just a lunch order that we get in on yeah somebody’s production yeah if i’m in the office yeah and then at this point i hate having to make that decision and i like everything so i just say get whatever i got last time and i’ll let you know when i want to change that so most of the time it’s just like this is just something that’s pretty decided for you it’s not so it’s not as exciting as it used to be i remember one of the first times i went out to lunch with you and it’s very weird because it was at some kind of fast food place like we chose to go to fast food which is so odd it definitely was you know 20 early 2013 and i remember it because i was filling up my soda at the soda fountain or yeah i think it was me and i heard someone say to someone else like those are those guys from youtube and i and they didn’t realize i was with you i think and i remember being like that is so weird like i can’t believe he recognized you and this is what it was in 2013. and so i remember coming outside uh to sit with you guys and going that guy in there recognized you and then i remember another time we went out to lunch i think at the fish place that you guys like that i really don’t like which we won’t name and um [Music] and i remember seeing a guy had his phone and he uh had obviously googled you and so you were on his phone as we were walking by and then like and these are both like you know long enough ago and we used to go out to lunch together and since then obviously it’s it’s more more overt uh people coming up to you all the time but right yeah i remember those specific instances of being like oh this is so weird this is so cool know who you are this is cool and then the evolution of fast food out like getting go getting to go that’s food fill up your drink with the fountains we made like we were like you want to go to party or not hardee’s i guess and that that was you know that was kind of i didn’t really understand l.a lunch culture right yeah because link and i just a couple years before that we’re just working in lillington north carolina yeah so you got you could go to burger king you could go to hardy’s mcdonald’s subway or the trojan cafe right yeah trojan cafe you could show up at the high school and be like we’re just here for the trojan cafe ignore us and so i think we just adopted the same mentality it’s just like yeah i’m going to spend too much money on lunch it’s like let’s just go like let’s go to the fast food place we get in and get out um and then there was a shorter period of time when it was like oh no like ellie has all this food that you can enjoy and you can kind of go sit outside and and have a meal there was like maybe two years where that happened occasionally and then it was like no let’s just eat here at the office so we don’t have to get into the car it’s so much easier it’s so much sadder but it’s so much easier yeah and and like you said half the time this at this point there is no lunch like even right now right like me and you have a meeting and i’m looking at the clock i’m like i know you have a meeting in 15 minutes yeah yeah and so and it’s a meeting that you can’t like be eating in yeah so some now some time between now and 15 minutes from now i have to consume my entire lunch which is not a problem for me and that brings me to my uh my my next thing which is thank you so much for being here on the podcast you know what it was my pleasure i’m glad i got to share this meal with you uh feel free to have my half no i’m good we can share the the real lunch we’re going to be sharing in a short period of time and for all of our friends listening thanks for tuning in again to best friends back all right you can catch brand new episodes every friday make sure you follow so you don’t miss an episode if you’re enjoying the podcast leave us a review hey if you’ve already left us a review and you’re looking for something else to do with your hands you can go to mythical.com right now and check out our always proud pride collection i’m really excited about this one mythal.com check it out you can follow at mythicalpods on tock for clips to share with family and friends you can follow nagin nagin and me everywhere at steviewavene and of course you can hear me every monday through friday on good mythical morning with rhett and link at youtube.com good mythical morning i’ll see you there