(electronic music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits. I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. Joining this, this– – It’s this week at the round table. – I know, man. – It’s the same every time. – The majority of the episodes we said joining us this week. – Yeah but that was a– – And then we had many conversations about changing it. – Awhile ago. – We know I’m a creature of habit, but I need to be a creature of the new habit, which is, this week at the round table of dim lighting. – Hey! – We’re gonna open an envelope. Inside is something prompted by one of you that will lead to a conversation down a metaphorical rabbit hole. And you know what, we may– – Could be a literal rabbit hole this time, I don’t know. – And you know what, there’s a second envelope too that we also don’t know what’s in that. We might open one, we might open two. Just go with us on this journey once we open the envelope. But first, I would like to hear from you– (Rhett vocalizes low bass beat) In how you’re doing. Stop making that bass noise. – Would you like to hear me make that noise more? – It’s like an odd, it’s like an odd grunt mixed with like a subwoofer test. – Every once in awhile, so my mom has this habit– (Link chuckles) Where she will just be doing something that’s not necessarily difficult, something that you would not categorize as difficult, maybe she’s just like– – Reading a magazine? – Setting a table, setting a plate on the table. – Okay. – And then she’s like– (sighs) Kinda like, she’s making some noises and I think she doesn’t realize she’s doing it, but I’ve noticed it. It’s just kinda making voices of effort, even though what you’re doing doesn’t require effort, and so Jessie pointed out that I have started doing that. – It’s just vocalizing effort. – I’ll just be in a room with her and sometimes I’m just like– (sighs) And she’s like, “What’s wrong?” and I’m like, “Oh, nothing, did I do something?” She said, “You just went (sighs).” (chuckles) And I’m like, I guess it just runs in the family. – (chuckles) It must. So I’m curious– – Have you noticed this about me? – Well I thought you were doing it to distract me from the question. – I wasn’t. – ‘Cause you don’t wanna answer. – I’m happy to (sighs), oh I’m happy to answer the question. – I’m curious, ’cause you’ve been 10 days being the mom and the dad in the house. – I’m glad you rounded it up to 10. Although it was just eight. I’m glad that you did that, it seemed like a double digit. – I didn’t know if that didn’t include travel days, so– – Yeah, it did, it included travel days, my wife– – She went on an excursion. She went to find herself and there was a question if she was gonna come back, right? (chuckles) – The details that you have associated with the trip are interesting to me. They’re all incorrect. – Okay. – She had a friend who was going to Africa for work, a good friend of hers, and she was like, “I’ll go with you.” (Link makes low bass vocalization) So she went to South Africa, had a great time. – She went to Cape Town? – Yeah. – There’s no water there. That’s just a side curiosity, but the main curiosity– – They’re running out of water, yeah– – I have is, ’cause she’s back. – How did I do? – She did come back. – She made it back, yeah. – What do you mean she made it back, she decided to come back. – She was always planning to come back. Because you know, South Africa, I don’t really know what city, if she was in Cape City, I don’t know what city’s more dangerous than another, but, it has a reputation for being a place that you just don’t wanna, you gotta watch your back, you know, she actually told me this story of, she just went out by herself one day, and she was in like a relatively quote unquote safe part of the city, but a place that wasn’t necessarily known for violent crime because there’s a lot of violent crime robber and armed robbery there. But– – Well that’s not what I meant by she might not come back. – No no but seriously, she actually, and she was kinda being dramatic but she talked quite a bit about if I don’t come back, we actually had a conversation about her funeral. – Oh. – Like she talked about details of her funeral, which was interesting, I was like, “You’re not gonna die. “Let’s not talk about that, just come back.” But while she was there, she goes out one day by herself to shopping area, and– – That’s what it was called, she went to shopping area? – A shopping area, like one of the streets that’s known for its shopping, and there was a woman, like a woman who came up to her kind of aggressively asking for money, and was kinda following her, but she kept following her. It was one of those things where you kinda say, “No, I’m sorry, I can’t help,” but they continue to follow and then she’s getting a little bit freaked out and then they had these public safety officers, so I don’t know exactly what this is but it seems like there are these people who are not exactly cops, not exactly civilians who are stationed all these places throughout the city that are kind of just there to make sure that everything is okay. – They packing? – I didn’t ask her that question, ’cause I was thinking that, do they have guns, but I don’t know. All I know is that a public safety officer kinda came up and told this woman who was aggressively coming after Jessie– – Oh wow. – To back off and then she walks a little bit further and another public safety officer comes up to her and she had on a backpack, Jessie had on a backpack and had on a very, very small necklace, like a necklace you could barely even see, and the public safety officer was like, you need to turn your backpack around so that the pack is in the front and you need to take your chain and put it in your bag. Because somebody will come up and rip the chain off your neck. – Whoa. – And then she was like, okay I’m not going out by myself again, so, there was some calls for concern even though I think I just kinda minimized it, but she made it back. – Yeah it’s not good for your back to carry a backpack around like that. It should go on the front– – Really what you should do– – Is that the take-away? – If you’re gonna do that is you should wear a backpack on the front but you should wear a dummy backpack on the back to balance it out and people can take the dummy backpack, it’s just full of book from the dollar store. – Breakaway necklaces, perhaps. – Yeah, exactly. – I thought you were gonna say, you wear the backpack forward and then you wear another shirt over it so it looks like you’re like lumpy pregnant. You know how some people get– – So you’re less of a target that way? – Well that’s true, maybe you’re more of a target. – I don’t know, anyway, thanks for asking about me. That is what you were asking, how I was doing, so I’m getting back to talking about me. Let’s talk about me, talk about that. – She had a harrowing experience on the streets of Cape Town, let’s talk about you. You had to raise your kids without her for eight days, now that’s danger. – You know, it was pretty smooth. I am, I’m pretty hands-off. (both chuckling) And by that I mean things like, well first of all, the kids have quite a few activities that they are involved in. – Uh-huh. – Things that they do during the week, some weeknights, and there was some sporting events on the weekend and I took care of all that, everybody got to where they needed to be on time and et cetera, but– – Uber? – Yeah, I just put them in a Lyft. – Okay. – No, I carried them. I drove them. And incidentally, did you know that our friend Michael, who has the little dog– – Yeah. – He sent the dog to William’s house in a Lyft. Did you know this? – No. – That’s how he got the dog to William. – Are you serious? – He put the dog in a crate in a Lyft and sent him across town. – When the Lyft shows up, you’re explaining to the Lyft, “Hey, I’m not going I just want you to take “this crate with a dog in it to this house.” – And the driver didn’t speak good English and so he couldn’t really, there was no real confirmation that everything was going to be okay. But there was just like, I mean, I have a dog, I put the dog in the car and I typed in the address, just take this dog to that address. It ended up working, the dog’s fine, the dog made it. I wouldn’t do that with my child, though. I’d probably do that with Barbara. – (chuckles softly) That’s crazy seeming. – Anyway– – Why didn’t he just ride, ’cause he didn’t wanna ride across town and then ride back. – I think they were in a hurry to get out of town and it was like the last minute thing to get the dog over. Anyway– (Link chuckles) By hands off I mean things like– – There is an Uber for kids though, by the way. There’s an app, is there not, where you can put your kid in a car and it’s a certified ride service. – It’s got like a bounce house in it or something? – No it’s just a certified ride– – Ball pit? – Ride service for kids. For your children– – The drivers are like, they passed like a second level of the test to be like– – I thought this existed, I might just be thinking it needs to exist. – I have sent Locke about two years ago when he was like 12, he and his friend who was a year older than him, we sent them about five miles in an Uber one time. – And some people right now are thinking that is a horrible parenting decision. But once you ride in a couple Ubers– – I don’t think so. – Nothing. – And we like, we vetted the guy, when he showed up. – You looked at his stars. – Well no, he wasn’t just highly rated, but we had a conversation with him, and we talked about if we feel anything weird at all about this driver, we’re not gonna do this. We didn’t feel anything weird. – I’m pretty surprised you still did it. – Really? – Yeah. – I don’t know– – Put a 12 year old in an Uber. – I’m a pretty, I’m pretty hands-off. – Was Jessie part of this decision? – Yeah, yeah, Jessie was– – That’s surprising. – Like integral to the decision, yes. – Wow. I mean especially ’cause it wasn’t that far. It’s not like, I mean, you couldn’t just take your kid. – I don’t remember the circumstances, but I remember thinking it was a great idea, we should do it more often. (chuckles) So when I was taking care of my kids, so Shepherd is really, he’s got a Switch, he’s got a Nintendo Switch and he spends quite a bit of time on that. Now he has– – Is that how you talk to him? Is there a way to talk to him through the Switch? – Unfortunately no. I limit him, well, I have parental controls set up on the Switch and one of the things you can do with the parental controls app is you can set a limit. – Yeah. – So I set one hour. If he decides to do it on a day, he gets one hour of time. – Yeah and i have that, I have like apps running on the kids’ screens, like there’s a shared family laptop and the kids that have phones, you monitor all that in terms of like time and stuff like that so they do the homework and just don’t scream at them. – But here’s the problem with it. It just gets to an hour and it sends him a warning, and it says, you have reached your limit for the day, or whatever. – So for Shepherd, translation is, it doesn’t shut off after that, I’ll keep going. – No you can keep playing. – So the translation is, good job, Shepherd, achievement unlocked. – Yeah, right. And so I look at the app and it says, your child went two hours and 40 minutes over his one hour limit today, I’m like, well what the crap was the limit for? It’s just gonna give Shepherd a warning and that’s it, no, he’s gotta be. But I did tell him, I was like, “Shepherd.” He did this for a few days in a row and eventually I said, “Shepherd, if you go over the limit, ’cause I get the alert “that you went over the limit and you can’t play “the next game,” so– – Did he stick with it after that? – Well we kinda came up with that plan like the day before she came back. – Oh. – Yeah it took me awhile to realize what was happening. – You discussed the plan but then you put him and his Switch into an Uber and then, he looked up from the Switch, he was in Tijuana. – I shouldn’t have done that. But interestingly, I told him, I said, “Shepherd, “you’ve got to get off screens. “You’ve got to do something other than be on screens. “You gotta stop playing Zelda,” that’s his game. – With his life. – He’s playing Zelda. And so, I tell him that and then 30 minutes later, I come into the kitchen and we have an iMac that’s kinda off to the side of the kitchen and he’s watching YouTube videos about Zelda– (Link chuckles) How to play Zelda. – And I bet you he said, well my kids say, “I’m not playing so it doesn’t count.” I was like, well it’s still a screen. – But the thing is– – Like Lincoln will, I’ll tell Lincoln, “I don’t want you to be on “screens so much, son, I don’t want you to play “whatever game you’re playing.” I know the games but it’s not worth mentioning at this point, and he’s like, well. “I don’t want you to be on screens,” he’s like, “Well, I’m not,” I’m like, “What are you doing right now?” He’s like, “Well I’m on Amazon, I’m kinda looking “at some stuff.” “But that’s a screen.” He’s like, “But I’m not playing a game on it.” – Well I’m shopping, Dad. I’m putting together my wishlist. – Right, right. – That’s what Shepherd does. – And that’s different. It’s not different. – But I will say– – It is different, in his experience– – There is a distinct difference, and I think that studies show this. That’s as authoritative as we get on this show. – Studies show this– – I think studies have shown this. At least, my kids have told me studies have shown this. Playing games is a significantly different experience on your brain than just watching television or movies. So like sitting down and binge watching something, your brain goes into, you’re not making any judgements, you’re not connecting any dots, you’re basically just kinda taking in this story, versus a game that involves strategy, so I kinda go back to that sometimes when I look at how long he’s been in his game, but I think, I spent a lot of time playing the original Zelda, like I would sit up there in the extra room, we called it. – I never did it. – Spent a bunch of time. – Even with my namesake in the game, I never once played the game. – All you had to do was get a Nintendo Power and you didn’t have to play, you just– – It just didn’t seem– – We had Nintendo Power, they have YouTube to tell them exactly how to beat the specifics of the games. – Screens is a problem. I’ll say quickly, I wanted to spend some time with Lincoln, I was like, we’re gonna do something today. You’re not gonna stay here and stay on screens, just ’cause it’s Saturday morning. So I took him and a friend of his to a place where we played VR video games (chuckles). It’s what we ended up doing. – We’re not gonna stay here inside and play video games and watch TV, we’re gonna go to a facility where we have to pay to be on a screen, okay, son? – Yeah we did that and it was actually, and I took Lily too so it was the four of us all with the VR headsets on– – Super cool. – Playing in the same world, and it was, it was a zombie shooter game where it’s like you’re in the desert of Arizona, it’s called Arizona something. – Arizona desert. Arizona something. – You can only move under this tent but then there’s like zombies coming from every which-a-way. And let me tell you– – It was fun. – After it took 20 minutes for us to figure out how to actually start playing the game, I had a visceral fear response, a number of times. – To the zombies? – Yeah, I actually felt like, what I’m doing right now is traumatic, like shooting zombies. It was scary, because they would crawl up– – Were your kids scared? – They could crawl, no. That’s what’s disturbing, they weren’t scared, but I was scared. They would crawl up to your feet when you weren’t looking. You’re looking one way and you literally turn around and look down and there’d be a zombie clawing at your ankles, like I would jump, and then the three of them would see me jumping and cowering and– – There’s Dad. He’s gonna be a great leader in the apocalypse. – You can pick up a tennis ball and throw it at ’em. It wouldn’t do anything. – You were the tennis ball boy? – Wouldn’t do anything. – Yeah I’m interested in doing it. – Very intense. – Speaking of intense, I have every intention, or every reason to believe that going down this rabbit hole is going to be incredibly intense. Is that a good segue? – Oh that was good. That was good. And now you’re gonna say but first– – But first, we are gonna let you know where you can get these amazing shirts that we’re wearing. – Check it out, be your Mythical best baseball tee with the quarter length sleeves. – Hey– – This is a good one. – That’s nice man, it’s got the retro faded pattern there with a little dot matrix action. And then I’ve got another Mythical shirt, it’s a taco shell with a hamburger, cheeseburger inside the taco shell and then it says Mythical right down here as if somebody with the last name of Mythical was like the artist. – Artiste. So it’s like cheeseburger, will it taco? But it’s also just a cheeseburger in a taco shell, which, you ain’t got to know nothing to know that’s cool. – Both of these and many more, we are putting out a lot of new designs, experimenting with a lot of different things, seeing what you guys like, and also trying to do some things like the shirt that I’ve got on, which isn’t necessarily like, “Hey, I wear this shirt.” I was the kinda guy growing up that I wasn’t always into wearing the things that identified me with something, say that I’m a fan of this thing, but if it was more like, that’s just a cheeseburger inside a taco shell, that’s cool. – Bring it on. – I would be all over this, and I am all over it and that’s why I’m wearing it right now. You need to get all over it, mythical.store. – It’s all over you, my friend. – Yeah. – I’m grabbing the top envelope. – I only want to pretend as if there is one envelope. I see that there’s another one, but I don’t– – I don’t want you to think– – I don’t want it to be in the back of our heads that we’re gonna go to the second envelope. Unless the rabbit hole reaches a dead end. – Well not a dead end, a conclusion. – A conclusion? – I don’t want it to seem like it’d defeat if we open the second envelope. I don’t want it to seem like, oh we gotta prove to ourselves we can talk one thing into the ground. – Through the ground. – Here it is, the one envelope. Mark M., I’m not gonna say his last name, ’cause I don’t know what he’s about to say or ask, and it may be incriminating. If you guys were stuck on an island and could only bring three items apiece and one Mythical crew member– – Oh gosh. – Who and what would you bring and how long do you think you’d last? Now this has gotta be a team, this is like a freaking riddle here. What three things do you bring? This is not a, okay, and this is Mark Martinez. Mark. Okay, all right, we’re up to the challenge. We can figure this out. The Mythical crew member thing is kinda tough. – It’s getting a little dicey. – We’ll try to answer that too. – Now are we saying that– – Stuck on an island. – Are we saying that this is one Mythical crew member between the two of us or we each get one? – Well we can bring three items apiece and one Mythical crew member between the two of us. – Oh. – So we can bring six things. You know, I think… (Rhett hums lightly) I mean, you gotta. I’m assuming this island, you know, it’s just like, it’s just, I don’t know what the terrain is. I don’t know if it’s jungle, I don’t know if it’s desert, I don’t know if it’s populated. But the implication is there ain’t nobody there. – Let’s just assume that it is your typical– – If we were stuck on Kauai, I’d probably bring some toothpaste. – I think the implication is this is an island where there are no people other than you. – He didn’t say deserted but let’s just assume that. – Stuck on an island, I mean, by your definition we are currently stuck on an island, you know what I’m saying? Every continent is ultimately an island, right, so no. – Oh that’s true. – So this is like, there’s nobody there except the person that we’re going to bring and the items that we’re bringing with us. – Right. – Oh gosh. – At first I’m thinking something really sharp. – An ax. – But then– – You gotta have an ax. – You gotta have like, you gotta have a sharp piece of metal, and it might as well be an ax, if you’re going that far. – Again, as much as I would like people to think I’m– – I’m not gonna do any blacksmith work. – I am not an expert, I only like to pretend that I am. – In survival, or? – I like the idea of ebing ready for the apocalypse, but I’m actually not ready for it, you know what I mean? But I don’t know if a knife or an ax is a better choice, but I have to assume that you can do most things with an ax that you can do with a knife, but there’s a lot of things you can’t do with a knife that you can do with an ax. Do you think that is logical? And we have to think about this together, if I bring an ax, you don’t have to bring an ax. Or should I bring an ax and you bring a knife, and then we got all bases covered? Because you wanna like cut open the pigs that we’re gonna kill. – Right. – You know, but I gotta be– – I’m glad to hear the island has pigs. – Well every island has got pigs. When was the last time somebody crash landed on an island and there wasn’t like a weird boar situation? – Yeah, well– – Some sort of animal that we can get our teeth in. – I recently rewatched Cast Away with my family, because we were going on this family movie Tom Hanks bender. Somehow we ended up watching Sully, and then the next weekend, I think, we watched minus a few key scenes, we watched Forrest Gump as a family. – Can you describe the scenes that you skipped? – Nope, and then, we watched A League of Their Own, which has Tom Hanks. – How much Tom? – Not only one night– – Where was this span? How many days? – This was like, a bunch of Saturdays in a row, Saturday night, Friday nights. – We’re gonna go deep into the Tom Hanks universe. – What you’ll find if you start to think about it, just look at my list, it’s like– – It’s all great family movies. – It’s great, great stuff, and then we watched Cast Away. – Which is– – That was a good one, and the kids start saying things like, “Oh, there’s so many memes “that make sense now.” We talked about this. – That’s what Locke said after Forrest Gump, yeah. – Yeah and Lily said the same thing. ‘Cause she speaks in meme now. – Right, that’s the only way they can communicate. – But anyway, and I know that you’ve been rewatching Lost with your family, so based on these two entertainment experiences alone, we should have better answers. If we’re now, we’ve said an ax and a knife, so now we have four things to go. I guess a volleyball. (Rhett sighs) – For a little fun? – Tom Hanks– – Or for companionship. – ‘Cause he started, you know, you talk about the whole starting a fire situation, did you honestly think we could start fire using friction? – Well no we could start it with the butane lighter that would be the third item that we bring (chuckles). – And can you get, does like a huge freaking butane refill count as part of the item? – I think what we gotta do is we gotta get a, now first of all, I do think that while we do have a fire with the butane lighter, we also need to be learning how to start a friction fire, but I think you gotta approach this in two different ways: one side of the problem is, we have a fire that never stops. You know like you’ve heard about this. – Oh like a pilot light? – Well, I seem to remember that in some cultures that I’ve read about in the past, that it was like someone’s job to always have the fire going. Like you always have a fire going. – It’s not that hard to start a fire, is it? – You don’t wanna– – Oh my gosh, this thing has to be an eternal flame. – No you want the fire burning at night as a signal because we don’t wanna be there forever. And you want it burning during the day, you just don’t want it to get too cold, but then we’re teaching each other, not teaching each other but we’re trying based on everything we’ve seen in movies to learn how to do friction fire, so eventually the butane lighter is just a backup for rainy days. – Can we have an internet connection that like, is the new version– – Like a hotspot is the fourth item? – Like we had access to the internet but we didn’t have any, somehow, this is almost like a Black Mirror meets Lost situation where, we couldn’t gain rescue via the internet but we could access it just like any normal person. – I think that would be– – I think that’s what I’m– – Highly frustrating. No because you’ve gotta bring a wifi. First of all, realistic as this situation is– – Right. – I think you’re breaking the question apart. Because we can’t have the internet. We can’t have a functioning internet, ’cause now you’re talking about we got electricity. – I was just trying to hack the system, but yeah. – So we’ve got two knives and we got, I think maybe we don’t have something to start a fire. But if we don’t get a fire started– – That initial hump. – In the first month, we could die. – First week probably. – Water filter. – Water filter. – Like a something micron, whatever the number is that you need– – Remember that time that we went on a camping trip with roommate Tim. – He brought a water filter. – And Tim is the college roommate of ours that he’s the reason why the rat lived in the couch. He’s the one that we say that he was always messy. We’d just give him such a hard time and we believe that he deserves it. He’s the guy who, he was a chem major, and we went hiking, we went to Linville Gorge one time, and he insisted (chuckles), he insisted on wearing his steel-toed boots, and then he got so much chafing and blisters from these boots that he literally started hiking in socks. – Yeah. – You remember that? – Yeah. – What a nut. Because I think at the point where the, it wasn’t like at the heel or anything, it was at the point where the steel toes stopped and it became regular leather, something about that juncture in the shoe– – Transition zone. – Got very painful for him and he just kept getting further and further behind. We just stop and wait for him and then all of a sudden we realize he’s holding his boots, he’s hiking in socks. – Yeah. – And then we’re like mumbling to ourselves, it’s like, don’t say anything to him, he’s upset. You don’t wanna have somebody that’s that down, that’s like having somebody with a broken hip hiking with you. – So you’re saying that Tim, we’re not bringing Tim. He’s not a Mythical crew member. – No I haven’t even gotten to what I remembered, which was he’s a chem major, and like you said, another time that we went camping, we get to our first campsite, and all of a sudden he breaks out all this tubing, you remember this? – Yeah, yeah. – He breaks out all this tubing, we’re like, “Tim, what?” – We have plenty of water. – What is this tubing, what are you making? – Yeah the car is right there. – I’m making a water filter. It had charcoal in it. It was a whole filtration system that he built from scratch. – And he got the water from the creek and we drank it. – I don’t recall personally drinking his water. – I drank it, I trusted him. – You trusted him? – May have made a mistake but– – He was a chem major, he was not a chemist. He was studying it, he wasn’t– – He had a water filter, it’s not that advanced. – He had a lot to say about it. – Not advanced of a technology. – Yeah but he was also hiking in socks. I mean at some point– – Yeah I forgot about that. (chuckles) But I’m thinking about the initial, ’cause obviously– – You talking like a LifeStraw? – We need to figure out a way to have like a sustainable water source, we need to find fresh water, we need to use the fire that we’re gonna learn how to start with just friction, sanitize the water, but there’s a learning curve to all that, so we gotta have, to me, it’s less about thinking about all the things that are gonna work long-term. ‘Cause people might be like, “Guys, why are you using “butane lighters and water filters?” It’s because we gotta make it six to eight weeks just to get our bearings, to develop a civilization. – I’ll tell you something else you need. And I think I learned this from time I used to spend with Bear Grylls on television. – Oh, on television. – You gotta keep spirits up. You’ve gotta actually believe you’re gonna make it. That– – Does this translate into who we would bring with us? – I don’t know yet. I’m putting out there that this is the most overlooked and possibly the most important thing is just positive outlook, a confident assertion of survival that very quickly, I think means, we need some form of entertainment. You gotta have something besides tic tac toe in the sand with your toe. – Like a bocci ball setup? – Like a bocci ball. Because, here’s the analogy. I was telling somebody this yesterday. We were hanging out with friends and our kids were there, our youngest kids, Lando and Shepherd were there, and we sent them outside so that we could have adult time and have adult conversation without them coming in again, and this was before you let Shepherd get on his Nintendo Switch. You did a good job for a couple hours without letting him have it. Him and Lando were out there fighting over the dog that took the Uber, by the way. – Right. – And then after they got tired of the dog, they were given a little trampoline. And then they started fighting over who was gonna be on the trampoline ’cause there wasn’t enough room for both of them at the same time and then all of a sudden Lando comes in with a piece of the trampoline that they had sprung off of it. So they sprouted a big hole in the trampoline because one side went boing. And when we were leaving later, turns out that we were trying to put the trampoline back together, ’cause you wanna leave everything better than you found it. We couldn’t find this other piece and I was like, you know what, it’s really dark, I’m sure in daylight, I was talking to Jade and I was like, I’m sure you’ll find it. In other words, I’m not gonna stay here in the dark and help you look for it. – I never saw it. – It was like a little plastic bracket that– – It was a trampoline like an exercise trampoline? That size? – Yeah, but it was fancier than that and it had little plastic brackets, but basically I said, “I’m leaving, I’m not helping you “look for this in the dark. “But I’m sure you’ll find it tomorrow in the light.” But I said, “You know what the key is. “The key is believing that you will find it.” Lots of times when you’re looking for something, even if you got a huge search party, and I’m not trying to be depressing, let’s not talk about a missing child, let’s just talk about like a needle in a haystack, almost literally, and if you got all your friends coming, I’ve gotta find this needle in this haystack. There’s usually one person in the back of their mind that’s like, I’m picturing the moment when I do find this needle, I hold it up and I’m like, I’m not gonna be triumphant, I’m just gonna be like, hey guys, check out what I found. Everybody comes over and they all look. They can’t believe it, he’s holding the needle that was hidden in the haystack, and he’s thinking in his mind, when everybody comes over, I’m just gonna be like nonchalant and then everybody’s gonna be like, “He found the needle in the hay, “he found the needle, come over! “He found the needle!” And projecting yourself into that situation as the hero that found the needle, all you need is one person in a group who believes that they can manifest that situation. – But in our situation– – You know what? – What are we believing? – You’ll find the hero. I mean you’ll find the needle. – What do we believe in? – And the hero if you’re not him. – Are we believing that we’ll be rescued? – We’re believing that we will survive. – But how does this translate into an item? – If you’re confused by my speech, it’s not gonna work when we’re out on the island and I’m giving it to you again. ‘Cause I’ll be like remember on the podcast when I talked about the needle in the haystack? All we have to do is believe that we will survive. The analogy with the needle is that we will not die. – I agree in bringing a can-do attitude, but that doesn’t count as one of our items. – We need an item that, at our lowest point– – Gives us a can-do attitude? – A bocci ball set’s not a bad idea, but it’s kinda stupid, so let’s get smarter than that. – We can create a bocci ball set out of the correct sized rocks, we can do that. – Not really. – I think– – One of the six items needs to be something that, it’s a hope giver. It needs to be… Like, again, for Tom Hanks, it was the volleyball, it was Wilson. – Well I think with a knife we could carve things and you’ve got art. You know what I’m saying, I’m trying to think of ways to double down on some of the items. – Mhm. – We could do tree art, we could become experts on carving weird things into trees and that would be our entertainment. We could actually create little. I don’t know who our third person’s gonna be, we gotta answer that question in a second, but the three of us will do voices. We have a whole forest. What we could do is have a forest of characters, you carve the different characters and then we create our own entertainment system that’s just us voicing different trees. – An entertainment system. – (chuckles) We call it the entertainment system and it’s just a section of the forest. See I’ve answered your– – A sculpture garden? – And we can create a whole play that is about, you can do it. You can find the needle. It can be about finding the needle in a haystack, it could be about being rescued, it could be about starting a sustainable civilization. That’s all in our imagination and with the ax and the knife, I mean, the more I think about it, we might need like a second ax. (chuckles) You know what I’m saying? – We could call it Kniflix. – Kniflix. – Yeah it’s like we’re watching the stuff we’ve made with our knives. – Yeah. – We could Kniflix and chill. – Well no see. – What? – We gotta talk about that third person. Let’s come back to the other two items because I think this is, we’re gonna get into some (inhales), this could get a little weird here in a second. – Oh is that right? – Yeah, right. Because you have to ask yourself the question, is the point of the third person just for us to– (chuckles) Just for us to survive? Or do we need to– – Populate the island? – Populate the island (chuckles). I mean, I’m just saying, that is a legitimate question. If we can just agree right now that this is not about populating the island. – No Rhett, that’s making it about populating the island. Let’s choose an employee– (Rhett chuckling) Let’s freaking, what? What is wrong with you? – I’m just throwing everything out there, just so we can make the best choice! – First of all– – Okay! – We would never talk about this if we weren’t being recorded but I wanna remind you that we are. This is being distributed. – Hold on, this is one of the episodes that’s going on the internet? This isn’t for the private collection? – Even you just bringing that up for comedic effect is problematic. – I thought that one out of four episodes was for the private collection. Sorry! I forget this. Okay so we’re not gonna populate the island. – Just because you’re 40 years old, and you’re an old fart– – Hold on, we both have vasectomies. I mean what are we even thinking? – And that’s your reason that we’re moving on? – (chuckles) We’d have to bring a doctor that’s the third person who can reverse our vasectomies. He has to have the tools that he needs to reverse the vasectomies. – Why’s it gotta be a he? – Well it’s gotta be a she, because then we have to impregnate the doctor– – I know! You’re exactly right. – We need a female doctor. – Right. Who works for us. What? (Rhett chuckles) – The medic. (both laughing) I’m sorry! Listen, I’m just trying to be practical. Gosh, you’re the one who made it awkward. – It’s not Mars, we’re not starting a civilization, we’re just coasting the rest of our lives, and we’re bringing along somebody who’s gonna help us survive. And it boosts morale. – Okay, all right. – You know what, any Mythical employee would be a great addition to our squad. – But we have to pick one. (sighs) And I think we gotta go with somebody who not only boosts morale but is more capable than we are. I think we’re in Morgan territory, honestly. You know what I’m saying, I think– – Yeah. – He’s not gonna die anytime soon. He can solve a lot of different problems. – He’s quiet too. – He’s not annoying– – Last thing we need is another talker. – He’s not annoying, he’s just a guy that while we’re sitting around carving the entertainment system– – He’s thinking. He’s thinking. – He’s coming up with things, you know what I’m saying? I think Morgan is– – The good thing about Morgan is– – He cannot get pregnant. – I know that. He gently redirects me constantly. Especially when it comes to safety, like he’s got a way about himself– – He doesn’t complain. – I mean you guys know that I can’t have, I’m not allowed to use a knife on Good Mythical Morning. But Morgan is always, you think that Chase would be the one who was constantly nervous. He’s only nervous when I have darts. Morgan, before we start rolling on an episode, he’ll come up if there’s anything that I could really hurt myself with and he always has a way to just kind of gently bring me to a realization of– – What’s best for you. – What’s best for me. – And I’m glad he’s there so I don’t have to– – Morgan is my father figure. – In a more direct way. He could be both of our dad. (Link chuckles) He’d be a dad sometimes, he’d be a– – That’s what Morgan is to me. What is Morgan to you? – He’s the guy that says things to you so I don’t have to. (Link chuckles) – Right, he’s a mediator. – So we know what would be great about Morgan. – He’s got a can-do attitude, and he does. He has a can-do attitude and then he does. – Now Jordan, a newer Mythical crew member. – Yeah he’s fresher. – He could be Cotton Candy Randy some days. And Cotton Candy Randy is, you know, we’ve already established is one of my favorite people. – So it’s two guys in one. – And he also can be sexy fireman. You know, he did that one time. – Right. – And I’m sure he can probably invent new characters too. I don’t know how capable he is, he’s from Orange County. He probably is not good with an ax. – But he’s good with flip flops, I bet. – Yep, right, but he’s definitely, in terms of the morale boosting, I mean– – I think we can handle that. – You don’t think we need Cotton Candy Randy. – No, he doesn’t like me. – He doesn’t, he likes me, he likes me more. – That was kind of a selfish choice on your part. – He could be something else. – So Morgan’s coming, he’s got a crate full of this stuff ’cause he can bring whatever he wants. – Oh really, no, no. No he can’t bring what he wants. So right now we’ve got a knife and an ax. You may think that’s excessive in the whole metal tool category. Do we need like a fishing rod? Or a net. Net, a net. (whistles) If we got a knife and an ax, a butane lighter, a water filter, and a net. – What is that, that’s five? – That’s five. I mean only if you’re on board with this, with the net. – Net’s a good idea because of fish. – We can catch people as well. You can catch all kinds of things with a net. If Morgan gets out of– – There’s people swimming by the island? – There’s like a, I don’t know, there’s the Others. Speaking of Lost. But let’s just assume there aren’t other people– – You can also use a net as like a structure system for the tarp that we’ll need to put over the top of, or, forget the tarp, ’cause we only have one more thing, we’re just gonna put bent fronds. We’re gonna put fronds over the net, and that’s gonna be our idea for making shelter at first, until we realize that we can’t fish with a net when it’s our hut. – And I’ve got what I think is the best possible item for the sixth item. – Can I guess what it is by asking yes or no questions? – I think I just need to tell you. – Is it a packaged product? – It’s a yacht. – Oh, it’s a yacht. (chuckling) Well that kinda spoiled my gamemanship there. See with this type of attitude, our morale’s gonna sink real quick. I instigate a game and you’re like, spoiler alert, it’s a yacht. – It’s a yacht. I mean I could have said that first. – Yacht. Yacht the gas guzzler, how much gas? – It’s a yacht full of gas. – Ooh, that’s a quandary right there. So a yacht that we never wanna use. – No it’s a yacht we leave the island with. We don’t even have to have this mental exercise, ’cause we just take our yacht and go back to civilization. – Do we have enough gas to get there? – Yeah. Yeah, so I think we just solved it. – I think we did. – Kind of an easy question, Morgan’s there, he can probably drive a boat. (chuckles) – Drive a boat, heh. We’re gonna give him special training. We’re gonna get him on Lynda.com, yacht training series, video series. – You wanna go to the second envelope? You do? – I can tell. When you brought up a yacht, you were like, I’m done with this question. Mark, thanks for that. Thanks for helping us think through it. There’s survivalists out there who have gouged their eyes out listening to that conversation. – Yeah, if you know anything about surviving, let us know how good our first five choices were. – Yeah, that’s what I wanna know. – ‘Cause I have no idea. This is from Mira. What is it about certain foods that makes them only fitting for certain times of day? Is there some bodily circadian rhythm related function happening that makes us only want pizza for dinner and not breakfast? This is a great question. I have thought about it. – Well first of all, I’ve had, you have thought about it? – I have asked myself the question before, why is it that we limit ourselves to these (clicks tongue), these items for breakfast. – Well maybe this isn’t the right way to do it, but instinctively I just wanna point out the outliers, like I’ve eaten cold pizza for a late breakfast. So brunch maybe doesn’t count. But like a bonafide, I’m getting up at my normal time, in my normal routine and I’m gonna eat a slice of pizza for breakfast, like hot pizza, like order fresh out of the bag type of thing, that does sound weird, but, whenever as a family we’re like, all right, what do you guys wanna do before we watch another Tom Hanks movie? What do you wanna eat for dinner? And if anyone says, “Breakfast for dinner,” immediate eruption and celebration. What! Breakfast for dinner! Woo! It’s like a gleeful subversion of all societal expectations rolled up into the perfect meal. And it’s a beautiful thing to subvert dinner with breakfast, but subverting breakfast with dinner is just… Nasty. – Right. – So I think there may be a clue in this. – Well I think maybe we can zero in a little bit. What is it about eggs, let’s just talk eggs. How did eggs become associated with being eaten in the morning? The rooster. The rooster crows and the hen lays. – Is it the fact that, isn’t it true that chickens, hens lay eggs every day? Like they lay an egg every day? – I believe so, roughly. – Which is just a fascinating thing. – As often as you take a dookie. – Yeah exactly so like– – A chicken dookies out– – An egg. – An egg. – A freaking egg that has a shell. – And a lot of dookie too, by the way. – Yeah, but in addition to the dookie, they have these little eggs that you can– – Manufacturing centers for eggs. – Now you can leave, is it because you go out in the morning, you go to the chicken coop and you got food for that day, and you might as well just eat it now and so we just began to associated it as a culture with eating it in the morning. – Yeah ’cause I’m gonna throw it into before refrigeration, so we’re talking the cultural norm of eggs– – But you can leave an egg out all day, easy. I mean you can leave it– – Weeks or whatever. – Days. – You can store ’em up. – You can leave it, a hen can lay only one egg in a day and will have some days when it does not lay an egg at all. – Right so it’s not like clockwork every single day, but it can lay an egg– – But it is possible. – According to Jacob’s laptop. – That’s what i thought. I think eggs– – Maybe we should have brought Jacob with his laptop to the island. I’m sorry, you’re sitting here the whole time and we didn’t even consider taking you. – That’s one item and one person– – Man, that had to have hurt (chuckles). – Can you drive a boat? – Yeah, you agree with Morgan. Okay, okay. And you’re glad we’re not dragging you to the island. ‘Cause by the way, we freaking drug Morgan to the island. The whole time Morgan’s like, “Guys, I could have been “back living my life but you chose me to “exile on this island.” He would hate us. – You wanna go back to the other question? – I’m sorry, I’m sorry Jacob. I want you to come to the island. – Because I think we’re onto something here. – I do too, go ahead.. – So and the question is, are eggs, if we’re right, and first of all– – Cultural norms, that’s what I’m getting at. – Culturally, people eat different things in different places. When I was in Eastern Europe, I remember that they ate a lot of salamis. Breakfast would often be like what we would call charcuterie plate. You know what I’m saying, so like, assorted cheeses and meats, and it isn’t that we don’t eat meat and cheese for breakfast, we do, but the way that it was presented was very much like, this is new, this isn’t the way that we think about breakfast, but in other cultures– – They also serve that as dessert instead of dessert, like a charcuterie plate. – Yeah cheese can be part of (mumbles). But– – Which is weird to me too. – But is it the case that everywhere on Earth, eggs are a part of the breakfast meal, because then it would hold, what we just talked about, if it’s true that the reason that eggs are associated with breakfast is because people go outside and the eggs are there and they’re fresh and they just came out of the hen and then you go and you eat them, then that should be true throughout the world. – Why wouldn’t that apply just as much to dinner though? The last meal, you know? – ‘Cause you go out there and see if it laid an egg. It laid an egg. – When I went to Granny Caps’s house, which is my ex-stepdad’s mom, every other Sunday, when he was still married to my mom, we’d go to his mama’s house for Sunday fried chicken. Well first of all, occasionally the chicken would be one of her chickens that she had– – Of course. – Lopped the head off of and fried. But most of the time– – Store bought. – Store bought chicken but I would go out into her chicken coop after lunch every other Sunday and get the eggs for her. That’s an experience I had. (Rhett chuckles) And what I’m saying is, it was after lunch. – It was after lunch. – She didn’t go at breakfast. – But you could have gone in the morning. – Well I wasn’t there. – Well okay. – Maybe she left them for me as a treat for me to find. – Let’s approach this from a different way. So, here in the U.S., there’s a few things that we consider normal, right, if you get salad, you have the salad before your meal, then you have your main course, and then you have a dessert. Now, dessert, as we’ve actually talked about on the show before, on GMM, scientifically, one of the reasons that you always feel like you have a little bit of room for dessert is, your stomach actually responds differently to sugars and fats, so sometimes you’re eating a meal that’s got a lot of fats in it, a lot of animal protein, cheese, that kind of thing, and you kinda get to a place where you’re like, I can’t eat another bite of this burger. I can’t eat another bite of this cheesy, fatty thing that I’m eating with my main course, and then, somebody breaks out chocolate pie and you’re like, oh, I got room for that. And I’m gonna open up my dessert stomach, and you literally, scientifically do have a dessert stomach. It’s not a second stomach, but when sugar hits your stomach, it actually causes it to expand a little bit, so it actually makes sense that you follow up fats with sugars. Now salads, we start with salads but that’s a cultural norm here but that’s not a cultural norm elsewhere. I remember, my sister-in-law, who married Chris, who, his dad is Palestinian, his mom is Lebanese, and they kinda were introduced to a totally different cuisine like Ashley was to this. And they were going to these meals and they were all eating a salad after their meal. – Really? – Yeah, and I don’t know if that was just something that was, again, I don’t know if that was something that was isolated to them, but, the sugar thing makes sense but I think that our choices for when we eat things, I think a lot of it may just be completely determined by all these different factors, and you just raised a kid up and said eggs are going to be associated with the evening and then really hearty meals are going to be associated with the very beginning of the day, I’m just throwing it out there, do you think that would backfire? Do you think that trying to give somebody a really hearty, fatty, meaty meal at the beginning of the day is like their body’s not ready for it, so you gotta go with something a little bit lighter? Like cereal– – Well it could be debilitating. I think, you know, you start to feel like you can afford to indulge in something that’s like a gravy-based meal at the end of your day when afterward you’re just gonna pull the lever on your recliner. As opposed to you’re gonna pull the knob on your door and encounter life. – You gotta go do your job. It can’t be something that requires too much from your body. – Yeah I remember the hardest I ever worked physically was, I wrote about this in The Book of Mythicality, like farming and barning tobacco that one summer for my Nana’s brothers. And my Aunt Francis, she made the meanest biscuits, man. And all this stuff, and so we go back to her house for lunch everyday and they would have the heaviest lunch. I’m talking like fried burgers and biscuits and gravy and all types of stuff like that, just heavy stuff, and after a week or two of that, I just couldn’t, I learned that I couldn’t handle it. I would eat it and then I would fall asleep ’cause he would watch, Uncle Ross would watch, we’d eat and then he’d watch the news and the weather. – Middle of the day, maybe. – Yep. Farmer always watching the news, always watching the weather. And I would conk out on the floor. And then they’d have to scrape me up like scraping gum off the pavement. It was horrible. So you learn your lesson, so then, breakfast is the most important meal of the day is what they say, right? You gotta just have a little sugary cereal thing is not gonna cut it. I try not to let my kids have that. So I think– – But why is one– – There’s a middle ground right? – Why if you put, this is a fascinating question because, why if I put pork sausage on a biscuit, I call that breakfast, but if I put beef patty on a piece of bread, that’s lunch? – And Carl’s Jr., they try to slip in their burgers into breakfast on their biscuits, or sandwiches. – They slip in the burgers? – Yes. If you go to Carl’s Jr. or Hardee’s, they’ll have all the typical breakfast stuff, and then you could add a burger patty to any of it and some of it, they have pictures on the breakfast menu. Like they are really throwing everything at it, and that’s crazy to me. – When you isolate it down to something as simple as whether or not it’s ground pork with spices versus ground beef without spices, why is there a point around 10:30, 11 a.m. where all of a sudden, you can make this transition. It doesn’t make any sense. I think that there are some real contributing scientific cultural things that contributed to it, but at this point, it’s arbitrary, there’s no different between the way pork tastes at 10:30, with the way it tastes at 11 o’clock. When do they stop serving breakfast at McDonald’s? Well they serve it all day now, right? – They serve it all day, because– – Traditionally when did they stop? – Because now it’s a treat. – 10 o’clock? – People got really excited about it. And again, I think breakfast, I think it’s 11, but it may be 10:30, but, breakfast can push on– – It can go anywhere– – Celebrate it. – Breakfast can go anywhere– – But we’re bringing that, like eating lasagna for breakfast. – Yeah, that sounds crazy. – They don’t even do that in Italy, do they? – I don’t think they eat lasagna in Italy. – Well that’s a shame. – Probably completely American. – Yeah, probably is. Chicken lo mein for breakfast, dumplings. Like, when we live in New York, Stevie was all excited about taking us to that– – The dumpling place. – The dumpling place for breakfast, right? – And I loved it because– – I had a hard time. Because it’s just an association. Your body knows, somehow. I wish I could explain it, Mira. – The funny thing is is I feel like I could just wake up and eat a giant burger, and the only reason I don’t is because I don’t wanna be judged. But if it was just me, if it was me and you and Morgan on an island– – Right. – And one thing we brought was like burger machine, that was the sixth thing, it wasn’t a yacht, it was just a machine that every time you opened it there was a new burger. That would be cool, first of all, but second of all, I would open that machine up every morning. You probably would too because it would have a burger in it, it would be better than anything we could find to kill, but– – That doesn’t help us then in getting these answers. – But the only reason I don’t order dinner for breakfast is because A, it’s not served often, and B, I’d feel like I would be judged. – But I think if you look at cultural norms across cultures, you’ll find that it varies so much that it has to lead us to conclude that it’s all just regional habits, nothing more, nothing less. – I’m sure if we– – And I think we can trace those regional habits to, okay, it might be when the chickens lay their eggs or when you’re expected to do certain things in different places. But it’s all a construct. That’s my answer. – Of course you could also just Google this question and you’ll probably get a more educated answer, but it wouldn’t be as fun. It wouldn’t be fun, right? – The point is not to know, the point is to– – Act like you know. – Just have a conjecturation about it. – Yeah, just have a conversation. Don’t worry about facts. – We went through two of them but I would kill for some pancakes at this point. Not too late, about dinner time for us, I’m gonna leave here and I’m gonna eat something. – Pancakes, huh? I’m not hungry because we had a late lunch. – I didn’t eat any of it. – Oh you didn’t eat any of it? – No I didn’t. – Yeah, I made a mistake I think. I ended up eating lunch at like 4:30. – Whoo, that’s bad. – And so I’m gonna get home, and sometimes we do takeout, sometimes we do some kind of prepared meal and sometimes Jessie will just make something. Sometimes I make something, but if she’s worked on something and she’s like, she’s kind of excited about me trying it, I’m put into the situation where either I just don’t tell her that I ate at 4:30 and I just eat it and tell her that it’s great. – Oh yeah. – Or I get there, I’m like, “Ah, I’m not that hungry, we had a really late lunch.” I need you to help me with this decision. What should I say? Should I fake it? – Absolutely fake it, because, what’s the worst that could happen? – Well she could listen back to this. – You eat a lot of food. – She could listen to this– – For the first time ever. – But it probably won’t be as much of a disappointment. If she listens to this and I’ll be like, she’ll be like, oh, when you came home and you ate that food, you said you enjoyed it but now I know that you weren’t hungry. I think it’s more important that at the time she felt affirmed. – I think the most important thing is that I elected not to eat my lunch so that I could enjoy whatever plans we have for dinner as a family tonight. That’s much more important than me eating earlier, as long as my family takes that away, then I’m golden. – But is that really why you didn’t choose to eat? – Oh absolutely. – You didn’t choose to eat because we already eat a bunch of crap on the show which is also the case, but the stuff that we ate on the show was so not sustaining. – It never is. – It was just so– – We eat a lot of crap on the show. – Yeah, show days, man. – Speaking of which, whew. I mean we eat a lot of non-breakfast food on the show for breakfast, that’s why I’m like breakfast of champions, I say that a lot because it’s really difficult, we have to get in a lunch or dinner mindset with all the stuff we eat in the show, which is most all the time shot closest to the breakfast meal. So again, we’ve trained ourselves to enjoy all types of things. You can too, Mira. – Thank you for your questions. Thank you for coming down the rabbit hole with us. Thank you for joining us for another episode of Ear Biscuits. – The rabbit had two holes today. – Yep. – Awesome. – [Rhett] To hear this Ear Biscuit in its entirety and make sure you don’t miss an episode, follow the links in the description to subscribe on Apple podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are available. – [Link] To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. – [Rhett] To watch more of our daily show Good Mythical Morning, click the playlist on the left. – [Link] And don’t forget to click the circular icon to subscribe. – [Rhett] Thanks for being your Mythical best.