(upbeat electronic music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. Today at the round table of dim lighting, we ask the question what if the day was 12 hours longer? What would we do with ourselves? What would we do with our lives? What does that mean about, how could that even happen and if scientifically, it were possible– – Oh it is. – If geophysically it were possible, how would that change our lives and culture? I don’t know how far reaching this conversation will go. – It could go anywhere. – We’re hovering around. It’s about time, my friend, maybe time management. Maybe about desires and things we never get to, who knows. I actually don’t know where we’re going with this. – And that’s what’s exciting. The question came from another question that we got on Twitter, which I’m not even gonna talk about now, because we’ll talk about that in a second, a question from a Mythical Beast that made us think of this question. But before we get into that, I feel it appropriate to talk to you about an experience I had last evening. You notice when you watch old movies or when you look at– – They spoke differently. – The writings of people who lived like 100 years ago– – Well their days were 36 hours. – (chuckles) Yeah. – That was a different time. – They just spoken better, you know what I’m saying? The way, I wish to recall a tale of my last eve. How did their brains work like that? We’re so just lazy in the way we speak. – I actually think it’s more of just bad scripting. Like they properized things when they scripted it– – No, have you ever read– – That did not capture– – No, have you ever just read a letter? – No, no, I have not read. – Okay, all right, well that explains a lot (chuckles). – The way they wrote letters is not the way that they spoke. Because letters were an art form. It was a crafted thing that you sat there and it was very eloquent, and you didn’t have casual conversation, like that way with your, you know– – I believe they did. – Your aunt. – I believe they talked the way they talked on the Little House on the Prairie. That’s how everyone spoke and I miss those days even though I was not even alive during them. – I don’t know that I’ve ever watched an episode of that. – But I wanna talk to you about a piece of furniture that I attempted to put together– – In the previous eve? – Last eve, my friend Neal. – Piece of furniture? – Yes, I happened– – Are we about to have an Ikea conversation ’cause I hope you didn’t– – I happened upon a porcel of furniture. – A parcel? – A porcel? – It’s not a word. – A morsel. – Never was a word. That’s part of a cookie. – A morsel of furniture. No, this is not Ikea. It could have been, but it wasn’t. – I don’t do that anymore. Not that I don’t like Ikea. – I haven’t put together anything in quite some time. In fact– – I’m definitely beyond it. – No some of the most simple repairs, now– – I’ve had one near-death experience. I’m not gonna elect to have another one. Kinda what it’s like. – You know like in the early days of home ownership and then in like the early days of, right after we got married, we bought a house, ’cause buying a house in North Carolina was somewhat easier than buying a house in California. And after we bought that house, after a couple of years, we moved into another house and started renting out the original house and I found myself a landlord. And at that point, I was doing, I had been kinda told by people who did this that the only way you can make money off this is to do all the repairs yourself. So I learned how to sheet rock walls and to do plumbing repairs and, like I actually became relatively handy for like a few years, I was relatively handy. Could do some electrical work. – ‘Cause your time wasn’t worth squat. – Exactly. (Link chuckles) – To anyone else besides you, I mean, yeah. I would try to fix my truck. I would try to– – Oh yeah I tried to fix my, the Intrepid one time and totaled it. – I did all types of stuff, yeah. – I got the Haynes Manual, is that what it was? The Haynes Auto Manual that showed you how to fix things. – Showed you how to fix everything but it’s never as simple as– – Tried to change the timing belt on a Dodge Intrepid, and I almost lost a limb. – I dropped a huge, I opened up the top of the engine, I guess just to put oil in there but I was trying to do something else and I dropped a huge screw in there. Inside of the engine block. – You’re the shakiest man I know under 75 years old. You doing mechanical work seems like the worst idea ever. – I remember, I think I told this story in like Chia Lincoln or something but I panicked at that moment and I went to like the advanced auto and I found this telescoping rod that had a little magnet on the end of it, and here I am shoving this thing like a fishing pole, down into my engine block, trying to fish out in the middle of all the oil. – [Rhett] That’s how you fish, you stick the pole in the water? (Link chuckles) We can talk about that later as well. – Trying to get the magnet to hook onto something and I never did and then I was like– – Screw it. – Put the cap on it and just drive it around. – Drive it around. – And I guess it just settled to the bottom, it didn’t get kinked up. – It works its way out. – So anyway, yeah, I thought we were past this. It’s better to invest in somebody else who knows how to do stuff. – At this point I get– – Even building a chest of drawers. – Very, very small repairs. Jessie is like, could you do this, and I’m like nope. But you know what baby, you can call whoever you want to do it. I don’t wanna do it, you get somebody to do it. But it was my idea, so we’ve got this, if you walk out of our kitchen, you’ve got the basketball goal out there and the kids are just, they’re just animals. I feel like I could just have a herd of buffalo and it would be similar to managing two boys. – Yeah I was about to say, at least you don’t have three. – Yeah but your kids are much more– – Like me? – Organized, and they clean up after themselves. – Thank you. – You know, I mean, your family’s different man, and so I think that not only is there dog crap all over this area and it’s Shepherd’s job to clean it up and he doesn’t do it and I end up doing it. We buy these basketballs and I buy the indoor, outdoor basketballs and I say, if you leave this basketball outside in the sun, it will very quickly disintegrate into a very non-pleasing sphere that no one wants to touch or play basketball with. It loses its bounce, it loses its grip, because the sun just eats these basketballs. – You might as well be talking to the ball itself. – Yeah and so I said, Jessie, you know, we’ve been in this house for three and a half years, but I think we need some of sports bin. A sports bin. – Okay. – To put balls in and I mean, it’s gonna make me sound a little bit like a douche. I also recently replaced, I have one little spot of grass. – Hey hey hey, don’t say it. – I have to. I have to talk about it. – The hot tub was a lot, man. We talked about the hot tub. – We’ve already established– – We talked to them about the security cameras– – How much of a douche I am. – Oh you’re going full. – Listen, I mean, I haven’t bought a Lamborghini or anything. So I have a strip of grass that is literally 12 feet wide and it’s the only grass I have. There’s no grass on my property, I just despise it. (both chuckling) And I wanted to eliminate the last bit of grass. – It’s so needy. – And I was like hold on, you know what, I wanna put in some artificial grass, because you don’t have to do anything to that. You just put some artificial grass in there, it looks great all the time, you don’t have to water it, it’s great for everybody. – You’re on a slippery slope now. – And then I was like– – Even though ironically, it’s flat, what you’re talking about. – If I’m going to do this, might it be a putting green? (both laughing) (both sigh) – There it is. – I’m sorry, I went there. – You commissioned the construction of a putting green. – Here’s what I’ll say– – In your yard. – You’re right in thinking this. If you were to put 10 men in front of me, and I’m just gonna say men ’cause I’m a man, it could be 10 people. If you were to put 10 people in front of me and you were to say, one of these people installed a putting green at their house, and then the second question is, can you pick one person that you would not like to be friends with? I’d be like, well, the only thing I got it going is the guy who had a putting green installed at his house. I don’t wanna be friends with him. – Eliminated. – But I am that guy ’cause I had that done. Now my dog is using it as a pooping green. (Link giggles) And I’m trying to train her to do it in one of the cups, but she hasn’t figured that out yet. – That’s a bad idea. – Anyway, it actually is really easy to clean the poop up off of the artificial turf and I got a little hose installed so I can like lift and squirt. A little lift and squirt, which is what she’s doing out there– – Well the petrified dog poop is kinda like, what are those called? – Fossils? – No, in golf terms, not a bunker but like an obstruction. – Bogey? – What’s an obstacle? – A hazard? – A hazard. – Okay, yeah but it’s a movable, you can move a turd. – Or in putt-putt it could be like bank shot. – I think if there’s a turd on the green in golf, you can move it, but if there’s a turd on the fairway, you can’t move it. – Don’t look around for help. We don’t know. – I don’t know the USGA rules. Anyway, what I do now is that, ’cause now we’ve got a putter out there and we’ve got golf balls. – You know what you need? – A sports bin. – Sports bin. – Yeah. And so I’m all– – What a douche. – So I find myself– – Gotta have a sports bin. – Mr. Douche on Amazon looking at sports bins, and at this point, and I’m about to pull the trigger. I’m about to hit one click buy it now. – Oh yeah. – Until my beautiful wife comes over my shoulder and she’s like, what are you looking at? And I was like, I was gonna get a sports bin for the outside. She was like, hold on, hold on a second. – She got an opinion on what the sports bin looks like it. – You’re about to have just a random plastic bin that you’re gonna put outside my house that I just, I worry about every detail of this? And I was like, it’s just a sports bin. She’s like, well, I want– – Did it say sports bin on it? Was it ugly? – No, it was just a rectangular black sports bin. – Like lift the lid on it and you could also sit on it as a bench. – You probably wouldn’t do that but yeah, you could. The one I was looking at was like $49.99, it was like great deal, holds multiple basketballs. – Putter? – And I also bought myself an electric leaf blower to get the leaves off of the putting green before I douche out out there. (laughs) Before I go full douche mode and start putting out there, I have to get the leaves off. – You could attach your putter to the leaf blower and do ’em at the same time. – That’s against the USGA rules. So anyway, she decides on the one and I say you know what? I don’t care, you buy it. As long as it’s shipped here, and of course, she gets one that costs four times as much, $200, and it’s bigger and cooler and it’s got like a weaved, sort of wicker design going on, I don’t know. – Okay. – But I noticed that when I drive home last night, I get to the bottom of the stairs to walk up to my house and they have left the delivery and I see this package that I know is the sports bin and what do I notice about the sports bin package? – It’s a flat box. – It’s flat. (Link laughs) And if I recall correctly, a sports bin that’s flat cannot hold a basketball. We don’t like live in that– – Hold a basketball it cannot. – We don’t live in MathLand, what was that book? Everybody was 2D. – I don’t read, I told you. (chuckles) – That’s a great book, by the way. It’s called MathLand? – I know what you’re talking about vaguely. – We had to read it in middle school. Everything was 2D, anyway, we don’t live in that. We live in a three-dimensional world, depending on who you ask, and I knew that this was gonna be an evening of me putting something together. MathLand, maybe. So I take this thing up to the sports area and really, we have a sports area now. There’s basketball and a putting green. You can have fun for hours. And I open up the thing and it’s one of those things that has what I would call international instructions. And by that I mean wordless. – Oh. – It’s just pictures. Anybody can do it, and I begin putting this thing together with just the tools that it came with, and you know, you’ve got a little Allen wrench that fits the very specific screw– – This was last night? – This was last night. – Gosh. – And 45 minutes into this process, I’m a little bit upset because the way you have to like turn these Allen wrenches and it’s up against this wicker thing and I’m mad that we didn’t get one that’s preassembled and that I’ve decided to do this. Once you just get your mind on something, you just have to do it sometimes. – Well you don’t wanna know what I did last night. – Okay we’ll find out in a second I guess. – It’s pretty easy. Not assemble a sports bin, that’s it. – Well you had a better night than me. (Link chuckles) So then I get– – So you couldn’t use your cordless drill to replace the Allen wrench? – Well. – I always do that. – Standby. – Okay. I didn’t think it was worth the trip downstairs because they were moving pretty good, but then when I had to get to the tightening phase, he says, wait to tighten, and so I waited to tighten until I got the whole thing together and tightened it together, then I get the lid out and I put the lid on there, and let me tell you, there’s a thought in the back of my head, right as soon as I opened this thing. I was like, these two sides are identical and it doesn’t say there’s a difference but I have a feeling I’m gonna put this whole thing together and I’m gonna have done it wrong because I have a tendency to do these things. – But that didn’t happen. – I get the lid to the assembly point, I screw the lid on. The last thing I have to do is take the little hydraulic little things that keep the lid up when you open it and I move it down, I pull them down to– – Attach. – Attach them to the hole that is supposed to be right where I’ve pulled them down to and then I look across the sports bin, rather large sports bin but I can see the other side. The other side of the sports bin has the hole, which means that the sides need to be completely reversed which means I had to take the whole thing apart. Now at this point I was like, I wonder if I have a drill bit, like a star drill bit that will fit this particular Allen wrench, and– – You didn’t explode at that moment, before– – No, no, you know what, I was very upset, but I was like, I’m going to calmly go downstairs and see if I can find a bit for this, and I did have a star bit that perfectly fit it. – Okay so that seems like a count to audible 10 moment. – But it was a 30 minute setback even with the new tools. But let me tell you right now, the sports bin has been put together. There are three basketballs in there. There’s a leaf blower. – In there? – In there. There’s so many things ready to go. – I’m just proud of you that you didn’t explode. I probably would have taken every sports thing that I had and whooped the tar out of that sports bin, ’cause that stuff just boils my blood. – I was very upset about it just based on the face that– – ‘Cause it’s your fault and there’s no one there to blame. – Well I blamed the instructions. – Oh gosh. – I always blame the instructions because who else is there to blame? – And how did they take it? – They did not respond. They just blew away in the wind, but I will say that if I were to write the instructions for this particular sports bin– – Yeah. – I would say, hey buddy, make sure you do this side on this side, ’cause I read them again, there was no indication. What you had to do is you had to look through all the steps, look at the last step, see where it was supposed to attach and then reverse engineer, go back to the first step and know where to put it and that’s asking too much of me. I’m just a dad who hasn’t put together a sports bin in years. You know? Should have got somebody to do it. Lesson learned, won’t do it again. I’m going back to being non-handy. – Well you’re about to have a lot more time on your hands. A lot of time to potentially put together sports bins or whatever else we’re gonna do because I don’t know if you heard, but days are gonna start to be 36 hours now. – I heard about this. – At least in our mental exercise that we’re about to have. – But first, we wanna let you know that you can pick up this wonderful, softest sweatshirt I’ve ever put on. Let me just tell you that right now. I absolutely love the softness of this. – Soft on the outside, soft on the inside. – If you don’t like hard sweatshirts, hard, crusty sweatshirts, then you’ll love this army green Good Mythical Morning sweatshirt, available at Mythical.store. I’m so cozy right now. – Along with other stuff. (sniffs) Rep your Mythical-ness. Mythical.store. – The reason we’re talking about this is because we got a reply on Twitter from Krystal Melodie. Right now I am thinking what the world would be like if days were changed to 36 hours long instead of just 24 hours. I’d probably still procrastinate, is what she said. Thank you for that question, Krystal, that has sparked some thoughts in our minds. – So I’m curious, listener, at this point, are you experiencing an avalanche of things that you would do, ways that you would occupy your life, ways that you would change your life if every single day from here on out, it was 50% longer? 12 more hours, if I’m doing the math right. Allow me to wrestle with that because, my first response is just– – Allow me to wrestle with that. – Oh my gosh, like, it’s not like, yes, finally. It’s like trepidation. And now I have more time to figure things out. Maybe I’ll just, so– – That says a lot about you. – Yeah, it does. – I approach this from a very– – I know. – Very different standpoint. – So my knee-jerk gut reaction is just sleep the rest of it. Oh gosh, don’t try to figure anything out. – Well okay from a scientific standpoint, just to get this out of the way because I don’t want to talk about this too long– – But I am interested in this too, yeah. – A, you would sleep significantly longer– – Well hold on, I wanna go even more scientific, the geology of the Earth, the Earth itself would be big, right? – Well I’m getting to that. The size of the Earth– – It would rotate– – Is relative. – Whether it would have to rotate slower. – Right but you know that the length of the day is based on the time that it takes for the Earth to completely rotate one time on its axis, and that time is actually getting slower with every year that passes. I don’t know what the exact fraction is, it’s like 1/7500ths of a second or something like that. But it’s enough and what’s happening is the moon is actually causing, the moon is moving away slowly, which is causing the Earth to slow down over time. – Hearing that makes me sad, I don’t know exactly why. – Well what this means is actually days, again, don’t quote me on the math, but like, a billion years ago, so before there was any people, way before there was any people, days were like hours different in length, like they were hours shorter ’cause the Earth is slowing down so therefore the days are getting longer. So I think it’s like five hours longer or something like that, a billion years ago. You can look up the specifics but– – Wow. – It’s pretty crazy that, and first of all, life on Earth evolves in the context of the length of the day and the night, and basically everything about our life cycle and also the length of the year, we kinda talked about that before, but you sleep approximately the amount of time that it’s dark, give or take, but that, on a planet out there where the day is a different length, which, planets even within our solar system, the days are different length, if you evolve, if a life form evolves on that planet, your sleep cycle would be relative to where you’re at. So, yes, if it was 36 hours and let’s say, so right now it’s 24 hours, you sleep eight hours. So 36 hours, you’d probably sleep 12 hours. You’d sleep a third of the time. So four additional hours would be you sleeping. – Biologically, you would have evolved in that way. You actually need it. – But you still have eight extra hours. – You wouldn’t be a lazy slob, that would just be how you evolved. So I don’t feel that bad about it. – And also our capacity for anything that we would do during the day would be relative and we would fill the time based on economic factors and all that stuff, and the length of the work day and our capacity for it would be relative. So I don’t actually wanna think about that ’cause that’s just basically stretching something to scale and filling it to the same amount of time. The more interesting exercise is to say, what if all of a sudden, you and me, all of us had 12 extra hours during the day that we would not be tired, and I think for me, as a rule I’m going to say, I’m not just gonna fill it with more work, I’m saying that I would work the same amount that I do now and I would sleep the same amount that I do now but I’ve got 12 completely extra hours, what would I do with it? – But just to camp out on that for a second, I am curious if yes, we snapped our fingers and then all of us experienced this extra daylight that could be working hours. Would something about competition… It’s easiest to speak about our jobs, but maybe we can extrapolate. Is there something about competition that you would just fill it with more work because well, you’re not tired, and you can get more productivity and you could be more competitive and you can make more money or you could chase that devil. Chase that devil of possessions and, and fleeting happiness in what you can buy or conquer. – Of course. – Or powerfy. – This is the case all over the world. Americans are probably, are one of the best examples of people who have just filled their time with as much trying to get ahead as they possibly can, and I’m not saying this is a good thing– – No. – I’m just saying it is a fact. There are other cultures who have said, you know what, we’re gonna work four days or we’re going to work six hour days, or we’re gonna work five hour days. – Right. – We’ve pushed ourselves to the limit and so we’re kinda up against this wall and this is how I feel, and this is why this question intrigued me so much because even just recently, and again, I’m not trying to do the whiny thing about, I’m so busy. I can’t stand when people say how busy they are and I end up doing it all the time, so, I’m not talking about how busy I am. I’m just talking about the fact that I have fallen into the trap of sort of the American dream, and doing something I love to do, doing this job, we’re living the dream, we’re getting to do exactly what we wanna do but I have like, that moment that I had last night when I was sitting there incorrectly putting together the sports bin, one of the reasons it was so frustrating is because I was like, I don’t have this time. – You need to be doing– – I don’t have half an hour at night to sit around and incorrectly put together a sports bin. I didn’t have time to put together the sports bin to begin with and I’m at home and I would actually like to be spending the time with my family or enjoying a television program with my wife. You know what I’m saying? – But instead you built it twice. – (chuckles) Exactly. Because I’ve already filled my time with– – You should have called me, I would have gladly come over and helped you build it and probably not, I’m glad you didn’t call me. – You know what, I tried to get you to help me put the basketball goal up. Remember we had that party at my house? – There were other friends there and some of them were taller than me. – So I bought this new basketball goal ’cause the old one was too rusty. – I remember. – And I was like, I looked at the package and it said, definitely do not try this without two people. I was like okay, crap, and so I was having a party in my house and when you guys got over there, everybody’s kinda hanging out around the basketball goal, it’s like, hey guys, I got a new one. You wanna help me put it up? (chuckles) It was like a barn raising. – Yeah that’s my idea of a party. – But you guys did not– – Hey come to my party. Oh. – You guys did not respond– – Thanks for coming over. – Like the Mennonites, let me tell you right now. You were not helpful. – A couple of them were. It got up. – It didn’t end up working because, anyway, you know what happened? The next day, I did it by myself with a six foot step ladder and a broom and I was doing on this thing, I was propping things. – I thought that Nick and Joseph helped you put it up. – We didn’t do it, it didn’t work. – Well I didn’t know that. – I ended up doing it myself and I almost died. Thanks a lot. – So do you have a definitive answer, did something immediately pop into your head or was it like, yes, this is what I’ve been waiting for, 12 more hours? Or we’re talking about four more hours of daylight, that’s what we’re calling it? – No I’m saying 12 more hours. I’m saying I’m sleeping the same amount. – Okay, okay. – I don’t have definitely answers to what I would do, but okay, so I’ve plugged Josh Sundquist, a friend of ours, a number of times. He made that video we talked about, the JERM method. J-E-R-M, the things that he wants to do every single day, he wants to write in his journal, he wants to exercise, he wants to read and he wants to meditate. In addition to all the other things that he’s gonna do and I was just like, that’s great, because those are the things that I like to fill my time with if I’m able to, right? Both of us have kind of, we’ve gotten into meditation, we’re like meditation lite. – I flirt with it. – We have an app, you know, we’re the guys with the app, and I’ve been known to like, Dad’s out next to the pool sitting criss-cross applesauce. What’s he doing out there? Everybody, you might have a similar experience, but it’s not like you’re a daily meditator nor am I. – Oh no. – I have a journal, you know. It’s my Evernote. I go in and I write ideas and I write things that are happening in my life but I do it how often? Couple of days a month maximum, right. I do exercise a few times a week. Not every single day, and I end up reading, but the vast majority of what I read is just the internet, man, it’s not sitting down with a book. That usually happens on vacation, when I’ve got time off, when I kinda sit down and get into a book. So I don’t do those things, so the first thing that I thought is, I was like okay, I would actually do those things. And when you talk about exercising, I know you go to the gym, I go to the gym. – Different gym. – Different gyms, won’t be caught dead at the same gym. – One gym is like for studs. Guys with beards. – Yeah, I go to an exclusively tall guys with beards gym. They’re all incredibly buff. – I was really trying to emphasize the stud part and then try to be very clear who I was talking about. – Well I used to go to your gym, and, (chuckles) I’m not gonna say anything about it. Studs is not how I would describe the clientele, but it’s cool, it’s cool. I’m glad you feel that way. – Look at me, man. – And so, I thought about the way that I approach my time at the gym. Again, my time at the gym is incredibly scheduled. It’s like, okay, I’m gonna go, I’ve got this class. – So if you had more time you would just go hang out at the gym? – Well okay, stay with me here because at my gym, I know at the studs gym, they don’t have a locker room and a steam room and you don’t get a eucalyptus towel when you get done with your workout. (chuckles) I mean at my gym, those are the kinds of things that we have. – Oh you’re talking about a gym where people who have putting greens at their homes, okay, I get it. – Yeah you know what I’m talking about. But anyway, I have sort of made this decision that when I get down with my workout, I’m going to, if I have time I’m gonna go and spend like 10 minutes in the steam room ’cause I just love that feeling. There’s other people in there and they are having conversations, but I kinda opted out of the whole gym friend thing, right. And then I go back to my locker, I take a shower, then I go to my locker and I’m changing clothes and there’s a couple of people who I have very, on a very surface level, they’re an acquaintance and they maybe ask me about, like, one guy was like, “Where’d you get those shoes?” one time and I told him and because he’s the where did you get those shoes guy, now if I get a locker next to him, I’m like, “What’s up, man?” And then he’ll ask a question, I’ll answer it, but then not ask another question because I don’t want a gym friend, you know what I’m saying? Because I gotta get out of there. This is about getting in there. This is about working out a little bit, getting some steam and then going on about my business. But one of the things I was thinking about is if I had more time, I might develop a gym friend. Like what if I were to ask the where’d you get those shoes from guy another question, like, “Where’d you get those shoes from?” – Oh now we’re getting somewhere. (Rhett chuckles) So with 12 more hours in the day, you would ask a follow-up question about a dude’s shoes in the gym. – That’s exactly what I’m saying. – You would turn the gym into like a social zone. – No, that might be overstating it. What I’m saying is that I have made a conscious slash unconscious decision to minimize conversation and relationship at the gym because I see it as this little window of time which I gotta get out and get here. – Yeah. – To take care of business. I don’t have time. I’m sure you have an equivalent experience because I know you’re working out with people who don’t necessarily don’t have to be somewhere right after they finish working out. – I actually left, my class wasn’t over today, and I had to leave and the instructor was like, “Where you going?” I was like, “I gotta take my son to school, “and I gotta leave right now in order to do that “so I can get here for call time.” You know. I feel like every second of my day is scheduled. Absolutely. And yeah, I just, I have this problem in my brain that I feel like, okay, if I’m not efficiently using every second of my day, I’m just not doing the right thing. You know, I’m not being, I’m not aspiring to perfection. That’s very unhealthy to not allow space for surprise and experience and relationship and– – But how could you change that? – And learning about shoes. – But I mean, I don’t think I could change that without the extra time. And in this case, 12 hours. So I might have a one hour conversation just about shoes with a half naked man at a gym. That’s the kinda thing that would start happening in my life and who knows where that would lead. – Well when you talked about the meditation thing, it’s interesting that you started there. I think our minds are in a similar place ’cause that is one of the first things I thought of when I move past anxiety, and again, that’s where the way that my brain works, something so positive as extra time, which is basically free, unstructured time, it seemed impulsively as a negative because I don’t yet know the perfect plan– – You’re intimidated by the work you’d have to do in order to fill the time? – Well, to know what the right answer is. And again, that’s a problem, but what– – With 12 hours, you can get things wrong. The question about shoes with the half naked man is an example of– – So I’m just making a point– – Just wasting time. – That’s how my brain works and at least I’m aware of that. – We’re not talking about an extra hour. 12 extra hours. – It’s a lot of hours. So then, my first answer is, I think for at least, and I’ll probably make up my mind at the front end of this once I realize, wow, Earth is rotating slower. I have approximately 12 hours every day that I was going to spend X amount of hours every day for six months in silent solitude. – How much time? – X amount of time. I don’t know what that number is. – Every single day? – Every single day. – Well yeah. – For like, I think two hours a day for six months. – Why just six months? Once you do it for six months, it’s just part of your routine. – I don’t know what would come of it. Like I’m so far from knowing what that would do. That would be a form of meditation or many different forms, I don’t know. Meditation, reflection. – Let’s talk– – And then I think I might move onto something else or decide to do something or maybe I would have come to the conclusion to that point, I need to set an end goal. I need to set a goal but then perhaps I will have reached the conclusion by then that I need to increase that number. I don’t know. And that’s probably how I would approach it. – I wanna talk about meditation because we both, again, have flirted with it. And again, let me tell you. (sighs) One of the things about being small-town boys from North Carolina who moved to California is we’re able to hear through the lens of small-town boys from North Carolina when people from California talk, so again, that’s why we qualify things with douche, like douche qualifiers and I understand that a lot of people, as soon as they hear things like, they’re talking about meditation, what happened to these guys? I acknowledge that there’s this tendency to be like, what are you guys talking about? Froufrou meditation? But meditation’s an incredibly old concept that exists across many different traditions and has been, it’s unequivocal, it’s completely scientific the benefits that you can get from it. But I gotta say, it’s very difficult to do and to be good at it and to benefit from it, and I think the average American, and I consider myself the average American, when you first kinda try it, you’re like what? What do you mean? What do you mean sit here and focus on my breath. What are you talking about? And I can’t do that. I’m thinking about 55 different things at the same time. And I know while we’re different, we’re also very similar in the way we approach things like that, and the way we approach that kind of time and I think the way that we would struggle with it when we sit down to try to go through it. But what I found, and I think the longest that I’ve ever sat down and meditated, again, this is like a guided meditation so you’ve got somebody in your ears kinda talking you through it. It’s probably like 45 minutes. And again, that’s not just one thing the entire time, that’s somebody saying, okay, now think about this or focus on this, but anyway, it has this incredibly calming effect and very rarely are you gonna meet somebody who practices this for long periods of time who’s just an, hole. You know what I’m saying? – Or on as much edge as I am. – Yeah, there’s a reason that the people who are able to spend, I mean there are some people who spend hours a day and you may be like, that’s crazy. What a waste of time, but the level of peace that those people have in their lives and the level of peace that they’re able to impart to the people that they interact with, let me tell you right now, my wife and children would love for me to spend more time in peaceful meditation. Because the net effects would be that I would be a more peaceful and meditative person when I wasn’t having a direct, peaceful… The idea of being able to do that and first of all, if you’re interested in it, Headspace is not a sponsor. Hopefully will be at some point. They’ve got a great app for kinda getting you– – An introduction. – Yeah. And there’s other apps as well but Headspace has been good in terms of guided meditation. But for me that’s a big one. I feel like the very first thing I would do is I would find like, I have a comfortable place, meditation cushion, the right environment, and I would actually spend an extended amount of time in meditation every single day to begin with. – Yeah, this is a great question because it’s a daily habit question, it’s not like, ’cause I started thinking, well I’m gonna take a trip or I’m gonna walk the Earth. Well no. – You’ve got 12 hours a day. – I’ve got responsibilities. I’ve got loved ones and interactions and a career, you know? Even friends. But it– (chuckles) – Even friends. – So it’s not the type of thing that, it’s like okay, what becomes a new party of my life? I also have thought specifically about having more time with the kids, like being a part of their life. It’s something that Christy and Jessie, they were homeschooling, they were so much, arguably the center of our kids’ lives, and they’re older now, they’re in school, but who picks ’em up most of the time? Who’s there the moment they come out of school and whatever happened that day, they’re the ones that, they experienced that. By the time I get home, Christy’s just telling me what they dumped on her that they don’t have the energy to explain to me again. It’s like well I told one parent, isn’t that good enough? Can’t you guys just communicate? And I totally relate to that. When something happens to me, at work or something, good, bad, indifferent, it’s not like I wanna tell the exact same story to every family member, even though I love each of them and I wanna share my lives with them. So that’s something I’ve been thinking about and talking to Christy about is, the times where I do hear, this is what happened today that you missed, or just appreciating the sheer volume of time that they spend together that I don’t get to. I’m like wow, they’re gonna be gone before I know it, you know, and if all of a sudden I had that much more time, I think I’d very quickly be shifting my schedule and saying, okay, when more their waking hours, let’s have an overlap so we can hang out so that our lives overlap more than me just getting home for dinner and then for the weekends. – I think there would be, and first of all, not to get to the end of this but I already have in my mind where this conversation is going to lead and to what the application is and I think it’s pretty interesting, a pretty interesting exercise. But I think that what would inevitably happen is if you’re a family person, is that you would end up having, there’d be family time. It might be like the family hour or something. You would end up naturally spending time, you spend more time with your spouse. The way that our time is divided up and this is probably true of many different couples but like if you’re married with kids, how often do you go on a date? Some people are really disciplined about this and they have like a weekly date night. That’s something that I know both of us have had at times but never for too long because if you don’t keep it super consistent, you just don’t end up doing it. And so, I think that having something like that on a daily basis, it would be so much easier to have on a regular basis with this extra time. You’d end up having this, I’m gonna have a purposeful connection. And this is interesting ’cause my relationship with my wife, she is much more likely to be the one to want to initiate like let’s have a conversation that is solely intended for us to connect, right? – Mm-hm. – And it’s not that I don’t wanna talk about that and talk about our relationship, it’s just, I kinda gravitate towards, oh, if I’m gonna talk to you, I’m gonna talk to you about something that happened at work or some idea that we’re working on or whatever. And then she’s like yeah but let’s have a conversation about us or let’s have a conversation where the purpose of the conversation is not to communicate information or to solve a problem, it is legitimately to connect with one another. And that doesn’t end up happening nearly as much as I would like it to and especially as she would like it to, right? And the same thing with kids, it’s like, you feel like, oh I’m gonna sit down at dinner, and I do usually eat dinner with the kids. We all sit down and eat dinner together when we can, which is multiple times a week every week. And I’ll be like, “Tell me about school.” And you know the answers you get to that question. “Ah, nothing,” so you got to find like– – It’s good. – A more specific question, like, was there something good that happened? Was there something bad that happened? Did you make a new friend, did you lose a friend? Like you try to find ways to get your kids to talk to you and like I said, well, they kinda talked to Mom about that when she picked them up from school. I definitely think that relationships with your immediate family would be something that would fill that gap but another thing is relationships with friends. Now we’ve got some great friends and we in a lot of ways share a friend group that we end up hanging out with on a regular basis and in a very unusual, non-2018, non-Los Angeles way, we actually found a way to connect with our friends on a regular basis because we schedule time together. We’ve actually regularly scheduled time for us to get together and hang out. – Right. – Which has like been an incredible thing. I know for both of us and for others in the group, it’s just been great to be able to have a group of friends that you can hang out with on a regular basis and actually get into each other’s lives and– – It’s a standing appointment. – Learn about each other and kinda get through life together. That’s been something that’s been so beneficial and so great, but still, it’s scheduled, and it’s like at best weekly, and then I do my monthly game night that you and Christy are a part of that is like a bigger circle of people, like 25 people if they all come, and they never all come. Which is like, I love that. I instituted that time, I told Jessie last year, I was like, I want to do a game night because A, I’m super competitive and I love to play games, and B, I have this group of friends from all over the city that I know from different parts of my life and I think they would be super fun to bring together into an environment and I just wanna hang out with them on a regular basis and in Los Angeles, monthly is a regular basis to see somebody. That’s seeing somebody a lot. But I think that if I had 12 hours, and everybody had 12 hours, some sort of connection with friends, again you can’t fill it with more work. Nobody’s filling it with more work, nobody’s sleeping more. You’d end up spending more time with friends. You’d end up filling that time with relationships. Maybe the guy who likes my shoes at the gym. But hopefully just the people I wanna connect with already. – Yeah, it’s interesting to me that it still comes down to scheduling. I think that anything worth prioritizing, I don’t know if this is just me or from the experience you just described, but, I feel like even things that are very important to me, if I don’t schedule them, they don’t happen. I mean, you talk about the date night that we each had with our wives and like– – Do you currently have a scheduled date night? – No but we’re almost about to get that going again because it involves child care and figuring that out. So having someone that, I’m gonna pay you to free me up to be able to do this, you know? So we got those logistics figured out. But it drifts. Life happens and things shift and all of a sudden, something that you’re so excited about and that you totally want to prioritize still doesn’t happen so what I’m getting at is even when you have all this time, I think it still has to be scheduled and I think I would even have to schedule just the surprise time, just the go with the flow and talk about shoes time. – Schedule surprise time? – Yeah. – Schedule spontaneity. – Spontaneity, schedule spontaneity. It’s like what’s gonna happen now? Because– – It sounds like a t-shirt you should wear. I schedule spontaneity. You know what, there’s probably a lot of people who would buy that. Write that down. – Well I think, I know for me– – I’ve got an appointment for spontaneity. – It sounds funny but I think I need that. Maybe that’s not for everybody. It’s probably not but I know that’s how it works for me. And I’m so far from being able to afford to just have scheduled spontaneity where it’s like no plans, whatever happens, happens. Whatever I feel like at this moment, I can do that. I don’t know how that works. – And that makes me think of, and I don’t remember who this was so, no one’s gonna get in trouble. Somebody who knew about another content creator’s schedule was talking to us about what they were doing, and trying to schedule something for them or with them or something like that and they literally sent them their calendar and every single day had a huge chunk, like at least four hours, maybe six hours on some days and this chunk was labeled unstructured creative time, every single day. And we heard about that and we were like– (exhales) I mean like what would that be like? – Like to say you know what– – Unstructured creative time? – You know what I’m gonna do? – Wow! – I’mma go to a museum. I’m just gonna walk around, and I might invite a friend or a loved one or a family member, or just go by myself. It’s like, there’s so much of that here but I haven’t done that. I think, you know, this is my corollary. Do you really have to have, if that’s the case that everything needs to be scheduled, maybe this is just for me, even if I had 12 more hours in a day, well, isn’t there a way for that to happen now? Isn’t there some of the spirit of what we’re talking about that can be applied to our actual real lives? So you have an idea of where you wanna go, and maybe– – That was it, that was the inevitable conclusion of our conversation, but I have a step along the way to get to that because… One of the things I think we’re talking about, ’cause we could talk forever about what we would do with 12 extra hours, I mean, I would read a lot ’cause I love to read. I would write, I would write in a journalistic, self-discovery sort of way. I think I would spend time just sitting there thinking. I would have unstructured creative time that was not necessarily geared towards contributing something to our business, but like, there’s a whole slew of things that I would love to create that would not be beneficial to us. As an example, you know what I’m saying? Like if I told you that I wanted to go and paint, you’d be like, how do we sell your paintings? (chuckles) At Mythical.store. And I’d be like, I just wanna paint. I can’t get to a place where I just paint. – You could call it Bad Paintings, and sell them. – But I have, of course, I’ve thought about painting. I’ve walked through craft stores and seen the painting section and gotten this close 12 times to buying a canvas and all the stuff because I thought I might paint. Now I haven’t done that for a number of reasons. But one of the reasons is because well, there’s a whole list of creative things that I wanna do that are part of what we’re doing at Mythical Entertainment that we haven’t gotten to, let alone the things that I just wanna do just creatively. Let alone the things I just wanna think about. You know what I’m saying? – And let alone, with that much time, you have so much more capacity to do good. I mean, it sounds like an obligatory addition. – Oh you had to bring that up. – But I mean it is true. – Charitable works. – And it’s one of those things that I think that once you allow yourself to serve, you gain so much more from it, so I believe that service has a selfish component that’s justified, that it’s good for everybody. Think about culturally if people who were at a loss with what to do with themselves were more mobilized to serve together, so I’m even building from just one person, like from me, like volunteering, to a culture of, well we can’t work, but let’s not sit on our bums and fight depression. Let’s get active. – Yeah. – And serve, that’s an exciting thought, that– – What we could accomplish. – If we just slow the rotation down a little bit, all of a sudden, we got all this service blossoming. That would be amazing. Of course I don’t know what other scientific repercussions there would be that would make this whole thing careen off of orbit. – Like I said, if it continues to happen at a slow pace that it is happening, we’re just gonna continue to fill it with the same BS that we already fill our lives with. We’re gonna continue on the same hamster wheel. – And it’s hard to even have space to say how can I engage my heart and my passions in something that is outward focused and that is not even about the exciting aspect of expression, which by the way, all those things could come together, you know? Your bad paintings could, I don’t know, somehow result in a lot of good. – I don’t understand how that would happen. – Socially. You’d have time to figure it out. – Okay so, one of the things that I think we’ve been flirting with as well is, we’re having this conversation. You’ve heard me talk about this a lot, ’cause I’ve gotten it from other people, but you know, we’re essentially Stone Age software running on modern-day hard, sorry. Stone Age hardware running modern-day software, meaning that, we have the bodies and the brains and the capabilities of people who did not have anything to do with the modern society that we have now, but we’re pushing ourselves through this. But these bodies that we have, for most of existence, human existence, you go back to hunter-gatherer days and they actually, no they were in small groups of people, about 150 or so or less, and they had meaningful relationships with not only their immediate family but the people who they were in a tribe with and yes they spent a lot of time gathering food ’cause when you’re gathering and hunting, you’re spending a lot of time gathering and hunting, but it was pretty much taking the time to survive. They spent most of their time surviving, but they relied on one another, they spent lots of time talking to one another, doing good for one another. They spent a lot of time killing each other, I’m not trying to paint this, speaking of painting a picture, yes they killed each other in droves. Humans have always done that. But the time was structured so much differently than our time now that we are in this capitalistic, modern society where we’re constantly just pushing ourselves to create and produce and make the pie bigger and bigger and the population is growing and all of the things that contribute to modern society and the hamster wheel that we’re in, that didn’t exist because you basically lived a life where you did exactly the same thing that your mom and dad did, that their mom and dad did, that their mom and dad did, that their mom and dad did. It was the same technology, it was the same goals for generation after generation after generation after generation because technology changed so, so slowly. There would be like one invention in like 100 generations. I mean it was crazy how slow things moved for so long, and even though the days were a little bit shorter back then, not much, a few seconds probably or a few minutes, life was a lot different and I think that a lot of these things that we’re talking about, like self-reflection, like sitting there and thinking or spending time with your family. Hunter-gatherer people weren’t like, man, I need to spend more time with my family. They were probably more like, I need to get away from these people. They’re the only people I see all the time. So I think that’s part of our problem is that we haven’t changed biologically, but we’re trying to adapt to this environment and it’s resulting in people getting incredibly stressed out, depressed, getting all kinds of diseases, being sleep-deprived, all the things that happen. But I was exactly on the same page that you were, what you said a second ago which is, if the first things that we talk about when we say that we would have extra time is, well I would meditate every day, I would read every day, I would spend more time getting to know people, I’d spend more time with my family, I’d spend more time with my friends, I’d spend more time just thinking, I’d spend more time creatively pursuing things that fulfill me. Well we’re not gonna get those 12 hours, but we have the power, you have the power, to make decisions that introduce those things into your life on a regular basis. It will not come without sacrifice. And I think the question is is like, what are you willing to let go of? – Do you have an answer? – Link, I think I have to quit. (laughs) I think I gotta stop doing Ear Biscuits, because this is time I could be spending with my family. Oh gosh. Did he just say that? No, I’m not gonna do that. (Link sputters) I’m not gonna give this up. (Link laughs) Not gonna stop making that internet show that we make. Of course I’m not gonna do that. – Well the thing that we don’t like to do on this podcast is be prescriptive, because maybe it’s obvious over the course of this conversation that we didn’t know where it was going, we did not talk about it ahead of time, much less say this is the point we’re trying to make for you. I could say, well you’re a student, or you’re working a nine to five, or you’re working a lot more than that, or you have these demands or these needs or these problems and these restrictions on your life. You don’t have the luxury to say, well I would just like to read more so I’m gonna make an adjustment. We’re not trying to read your mind and be prescriptive to your situation, we’re just verbally processing ours, which, we are in a very, I’m very grateful. We’re extremely fortunate for the position that we’re in that we… We run a business and we’re creative, and things we said before, we’re living our dream, engaging our passions and doing by and large what we wanna do. Then when it gets down to the nitty gritty of it, sometimes it doesn’t feel like that. A lot of times it doesn’t feel like that. It feels like an obligation that it seems like it’s external forces, even though it’s something that we have set up and that we’re ultimately in charge of, but once you set this thing in motion, it doesn’t feel that much different than just something that’s like– – Somebody else is in control. – Someone else is in control. I think it’s– – Our wives remind us of that all the time. “You’re the boss. “You could take the day off.” No. – Yeah and then we’re like, you don’t understand, and it’s like, well, I don’t think, maybe we don’t understand. – No, I agree with your point because we say it in a very privileged, naive position in a lot of ways. We met a guy on this recent little mini tour who was a truck driver and was like, “I listen to Ear Biscuits while I’m driving.” – Mm-hm. – Met a guy who’s a postal worker who was like, “I listen to Ear Biscuits on my route. “Thank you for Ear Biscuits because it fills this time.” And I think people who are doing, some people are working 12 hours a day, maybe more, to provide for somebody, for some people, and they don’t have the luxury in order to continue to pay to live, to pay to eat, they have to continue working an incredible amount of hours. I mean that is the situation that a lot of people find themselves in, so they’re not able to say, “I’d like some unstructured creative time,” because well if I get unstructured creative time, somebody’s not going to eat. We’re not in that situation and we recognize that a lot of people are. So I think that really just highlights a deeper problem with our society and listen, I don’t claim to be an economic, socioeconomic expert. I don’t understand. I have lots of different opinions about stuff and how it should work, but ultimately, I don’t know what the solutions are. But I know for a fact we’ve gotten ourselves into a situation where people are doing things and we develop habits and we’ve made certain, we’ve created obligations as a species which are not healthy. And if you have the option to kinda step out of that, step off of that hamster wheel and actually begin to kinda chip away at some of the things that you think you’re responsible for. I was talking to my therapist about this. We talked about meditation, I was like, I just wanna make it a part of every single day, and he was just like, you just have to make the decision that it’s not negotiable. But I’m still living in this world where it’s so easily negotiated away because I can sleep a little bit longer and I can justify saying I need to sleep a little bit longer. – Mm-hm. – You know? So I don’t know what the process of chipping away and getting some of that time back. Besides actually making the Earth slow down, which I think is gonna be very difficult for us to figure out. It’s probably gonna take more time than we have to figure that out. We’ve got the time, we’ve got 24 hours in a day. We have to be intentional in some way to get some time back. – But today’s 24 we’ll never get back, Rhett. – Nope. – Well, thanks for hearing us out. – Yeah, good luck with that is a great mug to have on the table because I think we just highlighted a big problem in our species, in our society, in our own lives and maybe your life and just said good luck with that. We don’t really know what you should do. (Link chuckles) Maybe commiserating is the first step. – Let us know what you think or commiserate using #EarBiscuits, we can keep the conversation going. Amongst all of you as well as with us, and we will speak at you next week. – Yeah. Or maybe we won’t. (laughs) – I have an idea. – Maybe this is the last Ear Biscuit ever. – Let’s take the last 10 minutes, for starters, of every podcast and just have a mindfulness meditation. – Hm. We’re gonna have to press play on the app because we wouldn’t know how to do that. – No, it’ll just be silent. – Oh. – For the listeners and for us, but it would force us to do it. It’s like wow, we’re monetizing our meditation, that’s a beautiful thing. – What if we did that– – That’s the spirit. – What if we did that before we started recording? – No. I want it to be part of the show. – What if we just played ads while we meditate? – I think what would happen is– – 10 minutes of ads, it’s worth it ’cause we’re meditating. – We would just silently walk off. Well there’s a video version. I was gonna say we silently walk off and just run it for 10 more minutes, Kiko, and just say that we’re here meditating. You can be there meditating. – Okay. – So I can walk away like this. – You’re basically just talking about creating a guided meditation, I mean– – Not guided, silent. – That exists. You’re basically talking about creating nothing. You’re talking about creating the absence of something, which is not creating anything at all. – I’m talking about creating a 10 minute audio file of silence at the end of whatever conversation we had. – But what if instead of creating a 10 minute file of audio silence, you just said, sit there for 10 minutes after this is over. – Then we wouldn’t sit here for 10 minutes. We would go off and work. – But we could. And just not record it. – That’s no fun. (soft music) – Man, what a conundrum. 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.