Welcome to “Ear Biscuits”, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time, I’m Rhett. And I’m Link, this week at the round table of dim lighting, we’re ringing in the new year, happy 2021. We’re not recording this in 2021, you know, just full transparency. We can still celebrate it. I still believe that it’s a happy 2021. Yeah, we’re gonna make it in 2021. And for you, listener, you’re certainly in 2021 or later, it could be years later. Like an archive? Yeah, it’s nice to know that this is as permanent as. Are you saying you think this is gonna be the Smithsonian? No, I was not. That’s a little pompous of you. I agree, ’cause that’s not what I was saying. What does that even really mean anymore, though, to be the Smithsonian? And that’s what we’re tackling today, new year, new issues. What does that really mean to be the Smithsonian Institution Museum. Who cares about the Smithsonian? I like the Smithsonian, shout out to all of the Mythical Beasts who work at the Smithsonian or the National Archive, and all that type of stuff. Yeah, right. But today we gotta tell you about our expedition with our boys. Yeah, the camping trip. When we went to Death Valley. I, as you might have remembered, in my top 10 moments of the year, I don’t remember what number it was, but it was up there, it was in the top 10 of my favorite things that happened, was our trip that we took with the boys. Me and my boys. I think it was number four. Maybe, me and my boys, Locke and Shepherd, you and your boys, what are their names, Lincoln and Lando. I think their names are Lincoln and Lando. And to Death Valley. And so we said we would not talk about it at all on that podcast because a number of stories were generated during our short trip, that we will now share. I’m so glad that we did it, I gotta say it was my idea, I don’t know if that’s true but I’m gonna say it, it was my idea. I was like, let’s take the boys on a camping trip. I don’t recall, so I’ll give you credit. I was definitely looking for another opportunity to rent a Sprinter van and dabble, once again, in that #vanlife. So, that’s been on my mind a lot and Christy and I went, highlight of 2020. But yeah, I wanted to give it a kid mode test. And I’d only used my, I call it my rig, is that what you would call my FJ Cruiser? Sure. My FJ Cruiser, which I recently invested in some work being done on it. I got the rooftop tent, that was all for my solo trip. But the thing that I learned on my solo trip is that I needed a more efficient way to store things, especially if I was gonna take any other beings with me on a camping trip. And I don’t know if you noticed how proud I was of my drawer. I did notice how proud you were of your drawer. Yeah, I got a drawer and you might think, what do you mean you got a drawer? I got a drawer, a metal drawer, that, if you look at an SUV, the back of an SUV, you’ve got the part behind the back seats, what would you call that? The boot is what Christy and her family call it, but I always called the boot the thing where your boots would go, where your feet go in the front of the car, but I think I’m wrong, actually. That doesn’t make any sense. They call a trunk a boot. Well, it’s not a trunk because it’s just the back of an SUV. The back end. There’s a drawer that has been made, a metal drawer, to fit the entire thing. And so, basically, it raises the level of the floor up, so you still have all that space, but then there’s a foot deep drawer that covers that whole thing. It’s not cheap. It’s not cheap. Are you prepared to say how much you paid for one drawer to go in the back of your truck? No, I’m not. It’s a very expensive drawer. Less than $1,000. Oh, okay. I actually thought it was more than $1,000. No. So, and by the way, I’m sniffing ’cause of an allergy, I waited too long to take my pill today. I waited too long to take my pill today. I hate when I bring allergies to “Ear Biscuits”, but, every once in a while, I do. So anyway. If it makes your eyes water it can look like you’re getting emotional. This drawer, I was excited about time with my sons, but I was most excited about the drawer. But pulling it out? Over and over again. Then pushing it back in. So smooth. But it’s funny how just one drawer, properly spaced, can change everything. Really, though? Really? You didn’t see how inefficiently I had packed everything on my solo trip, because I didn’t have to worry about it too much. ‘Cause you gotta unpack the stuff to get to the stuff behind the stuff and you have to repack it to move. Is your drawer, even right now at this moment, still full of stuff? I could go camping tonight. You could bug out, you have a bug out vehicle now. I have everything except food. Okay. Food and water, but equipment and lights. It’s stored there permanent? Ways to start fire and tools, and all that stuff, all the camping stuff, the cooking stuff, it’s all in there. See, if I owned a van. You’d be ready to go. I’d have one of those too and I’d also have a shower, a toilet, a sink, a burner, and a bed inside of a vehicle. But would you have a drawer? I’d have a lot of drawers. No drawer’s as big as my drawer. No big-ass back metal drawer, no. A lot of little drawers, I don’t think a lot of little drawers can add up to one big drawer. I don’t know how drawer math works, but. No, the van was incredible, I will say, I was envious of the van. I rented a different van. It was very big. From a different set of people. It was very tall, too tall for a drive-through. Yeah. You can’t get drive-through food in this van. Could you stand up inside of the van? I really didn’t invite you in. Do you know the only time I got into your van, the entire time? There’s one specific time, do you remember this? When you did number two in my van? No, I did not, I was not one of the people who did number two in that van. You could tell that I wasn’t really chomping at the bit for you to do number two in my van. I didn’t do number two in your van. The one time I got in your van, it was on the way to Death Valley, when we stopped at that gas station in the middle of nowhere, basically, it’s one of the only things on 395, you’re going up towards Mammoth, and it was that gas station that had the Subway and we ended up eating at Subway, and it was the first time we had eaten at Subway in a while. Yeah. And we were sitting there in the parking lot, eating. Shout out to the Mythical Beast who worked at that Subway. Oh yeah, yeah. And then he came outside and got a picture with us. Yeah, he did. We didn’t take our masks off. No we didn’t. Try’na be a good example. A woman came up and started asking questions about your van. That’s right. And she was like, can you stand up in there? And I was like, well, let me see. Oh, you literally never went in there. Never, other than that one moment. I kind of feel bad that you never went in the van. I didn’t have a need to, You didn’t have a need to. While it’s very big, in some senses, it’s really like, well, there’s the bed in the back taking up most of the room and then there’s the bathroom and the sink, and then there’s seats, and I wasn’t riding in it, I was driving my own car, so I didn’t feel left out. And, to answer your question, as a six foot seven man with shoes on, meaning a man who was six foot seven with shoes on ’cause I’m six six and a half. Oh. I could not stand up exactly straight in your van, I had to hunch a little bit, which is not a problem for me, I’m used to it, a lifetime of hunching has made me used to it. So I think it’s probably six foot five, six foot six clearance. This is a different van than the one I got before, but it’s basically the same model, it was one year newer. It’s a 2021. Mercedes. Yeah, for real, it was like fresh off the lot kind of a thing, the couple gave me a thorough tour, but I was like I’ve already done this, I’ve been to Utah. Because you rented it from an individual, a couple, a private person. Private people put their vans on, there’s a website called Outdoorsy. There’s probably others too, but, anyway, they gave me the tour and, yeah, I got the impression that they probably had rented it out just a couple of times. It was very new and very fresh for them. Yeah, it was a very nice van. Very detailed tour, a little too detailed, I mean, a 45 minute tour of a van, but I get it. Big van. You’ve got this really expensive van, you’re letting some stranger use it, you’re charging ’em and they got insurance and all this stuff that you have to get for it, but, still, it might be a little nerve wracking to rent out your Mercedes baby. But, anyway, we went to Death Valley ’cause, at that time of year, it broke the record for the hottest place where? Not on earth, on earth? It might be the hottest place on earth this year, it was 131 or maybe 134 degrees, I don’t know. Fahrenheit. Yeah, thank goodness. Yeah, but when we went. Mid 70s during the day. The weekend before Thanksgiving, yeah. Perfect weather. Perfect time to be there. And, let’s see, so what’s the first story? We drive in and we’re taking some good photos, taking some group photos, I’ve got one photo of the boys and it looks like a band photo. We’ve got some really, really good photos that we’ll give to Kiko. For the video version of this. Because there’s some, that’s right, there’s a video version of this on YouTube, if you happen to be listening. And really great photos, I took some 360 photos. I haven’t seen those yet. Well, I think I took it of the first night’s campsite and I did not take any more, which you will learn why I didn’t take any of the second and third night’s campsites. And I got some drone footage. Oh snap. I got some drone footage of you driving through that canyon, through Titus Canyon. Oh, is it nice? Haven’t looked at it yet. Okay. I’m sure it’s nice, nice enough. We get there, this time of year and especially in that valley, the sunset’s quick, it’s like 4.30 and the sun goes over the mountain ridge and it gets really dark really quick. Yeah. But we had kind of beat the sunset to get to the first thing we wanted to see, which was some sand dunes in the middle. It’s just like sand dunes, I don’t know how else to describe it, there’s a really tall sand dune at the northern end, but we’re right in the middle, coming in through Stovepipe Wells. Yeah, these are the sand dunes that are easy to get to and it shows, there was a lot of people on these sand dunes. So it’s like you’re in the middle of the desert and in this giant valley, and we’re talking sand dunes that are 150/200 feet high, maybe some of the biggest ones. There’s definitely bigger in other places. The Eureka Dunes are like 700 feet tall, is what I’ve heard. Crazy. Can you imagine that? ‘Cause these are giant and it really is that kind of thing that I’ve only seen in movies where somebody’ll be in the Sahara and it’s just like they’re walking up the ridge of one of those giant sand dunes, through the desert. Yeah. Well, there’s that, that exists here. And the boys loved it, that was a really good call to go there first because we were walking out on these sand dunes and it’s really exhausting walking up these sand dunes, but everybody had a ball and, you know, you really don’t know. I feel like it was my mission for my kids to have a good experience. I’m building a case for van life, or at least being an outdoorsy person. And I will say that both of our teenagers expressed some teenage-ness about going, before the trip. Before the trip. Thinking that, going to the desert, I don’t really understand why you want me to do this and is it really gonna be fun? But you know what, to their credit, they brought positive attitude. They had a great attitude right from the beginning. And then when we got on those dunes, before we know it, Shepherd, we get to the highest dune that we, realistically, could walk to and walk up, which was one of the highest ones in that set of dunes and before I know it, I look over there and Shepherd is halfway down the dune doing a log roll and just plumes of dust, just coming up. I knew this was going to happen because I know Shepherd, what I didn’t know was that it would inspire Lando to, ultimately, try the same thing. He’s not a roll down first, figure out if it’s good idea, second, kind of a person. Right. And, I guess, he observed Shepherd. But, you know, it warms your heart as a dad seeing your kids barrel rolling and all four of them were doing it down this sandy slope. But not the dads. Not the dads. Not the two dads. I’m thinking about my shoulders, this broad shouldered man could just crumple up in an instant. I just took photos and videos, I was a cinematographer, I was not a roller. It was a cool start and then once we were alarmed with how quickly it was getting really dark, we found the first place that felt, it felt like it could be, almost, off-road, you need a high clearance vehicle to get to a place where it would feel isolated and we could find a campsite, actually, not a campsite, but just a spot. Dispersed camping. Dispersed camping, once you get out a mile off the main roads, you’re allowed to camp anywhere you want in designated swathes of land. And there’s a beauty to the desert, there’s a mindset to appreciating it but, as we were driving out there, and I had the youngest boys in the van with me, and I’m just like this is what this van was made to do, boys. We’re rollicking over some rocks and going through these washes with sheer walls on either side. There was some slight canyons. Yeah, and we were going through that. And I was like, when I think about what I wanted this trip to be, this is it, we’re gonna find a good spot. Death Valley, which now me and you have been to three times, Death Valley has it all. Well it doesn’t have trees, it doesn’t have water, it doesn’t have shade. It has everything that you would expect in Death Valley but, just so you understand if you’ve never been to Death Valley National Park, if you are just picturing a giant empty desert, well, yes, that is part of it, but, along the sides of the desert, there are so many different geological formations and canyons, the kids were immediately into how cool the geography was, right. Yeah, it’s otherworldly. When you’re driving through this canyon. It feels like something off of a movie set, you’re on a foreign world. And if you just have a regular old car, a Sedan or whatever, you can experience a lot of this. But if you really wanna get away from the touristy spots, you need a vehicle that can get there. Now, we had been a couple of times before, and, actually, we chronicled at least one of those trips with our friend Nick and the other people that he does overlanding with and off-roading with. Yes, when we took the showers naked in the. Hot springs. Hot springs, yeah. So, yeah, we’ve done the extreme, technical off-roading thing in the FJ, you and I both in that. With the van and the kids and not a lot of confidence to be able to fix a problem in isolated locations, like any mechanical or technical issues. I don’t even like to think about something going wrong because I just wanna be in a place where, if something goes wrong, I can just say it’s not up to us. Yeah. And the van and the rental agreement would certainly not allow us to do what we did before. And you wanna minimize, you’re managing the expectations of children and teenagers. And they don’t like to just stay in the car. You don’t wanna be in the car too much. They wanna get out and do stuff, but I will say just because you don’t like to think about something going really wrong, doesn’t mean it won’t, because it did. Yes. And we’ll talk about that. We’ll get into that and more in a second, but first, listen, we’ve got the all new Good Mythical mugs, fresh for season 19 of GMM. You might say, you might even call this an old school mug, black mug, nice GMM, but then you’re like, nope, nope, nope, on the other side, you’ve got the “Good Mythical Morning” with Rhett and Link logo, so you’ve got double the logos. But there’s more. And a retro styling. But there’s more, I can’t currently reach it, so. Let me do the honors. When you fill this thing up with hot liquids, all of a sudden. It springs to life like the desert at night. You get the cockatrice in the night sky blowing a fiery “Good Mythical Morning” with Rhett and Link, basically inspired by. The intro. The new intro. Yeah, so the whole thing with heated liquid reveals a night sky and a cockatrice blowing the flame. And then when it cools down. It goes away again. It goes away and it’s black again. Color changing, scene inducing, heat activated mugs, we keep upping the ante, that’s what we keep doing. What’s next? I don’t know, a conscious cup. There it is. Sounds like something that’s made out of recycled materials. No, this is a cup that thinks for you. Yeah, that’s 2022. I’ve been letting my cups think for me for years, it just hadn’t amounted to much, see where that’s left me. Mythical.com. Mythical.com. Whoa. Wow, 2021, man, we are in sync. We are in sync, yeah. So that first night, the older boys had to camp in a tent and then me and Lando were gonna sleep in the van, and then you and Shepherd were gonna sleep on top of the FJ in that fancy rooftop setting. And you might ask yourself, well, why’d you make the older boys sleep in a tent? Well, technically the rooftop tent that I got is a three man tent, but if you are a experienced camper, you know that three person means two person. It does, doesn’t it? A three person tent is comfortable for two people. Don’t fall for it. And when one of the persons is as big as my person, even if the other person is as small as Shepherd’s person, Shepherd and I were basically right next to each other, could not have comfortably gotten another being in there with us, anyway. And you technically could’ve gotten somebody into the van, but it would’ve required moving a bunch of stuff out. Yeah, it would be underneath the bed and a bunk bed situation. And we also thought this was a good opportunity for our teenage sons to learn how to set a fricking tent up and break it down. You know, what they did it. They did. I gotta give ’em credit, man, just positive attitudes. If it was just me and my kids, it would have been a lot more challenging. Yeah. And I have to think the same, the other way, right, so it was nice that they had compadres. You’re less likely to say and do embarrassing things and lose your cool, both ways, both the kids and the parents, when you are co-mingled. The thing that I learned the first night, it hit me like a ton of bricks and we talked about it, is that my previous camping experience with Christy, the first time we had ever gone on a camping excursion just the two of us and, of course, you were alone, both of those, which are different than each other, are still starkly different than going camping with multiple children. Because the amount of time devoted to getting everything right, that includes getting everything right for them, we barely had time to sit down. We were scrambling to make dinner and you got me over here cooking burgers, while you’re cooking mac and cheese and other stuff on your setup. And cooking is a relative term. Yeah, I kinda got steaks and burgers confused, and I got in my mind that if I overcook the burgers, it’s kinda like a steak, if you overcook the steak, they’re gonna complain, you don’t want it well done. But you do want ground beef. Yeah. Unless it’s been pasteurized. It was kinda dark, but everyone did seem to notice that the burgers weren’t cooked all the way through. It was more of seared tartare. Oh gosh. Which I didn’t mind. I couldn’t finish it, Lando was horrified. So I was like, okay, but, you know what, I played to my strengths and when we were done eating, I said I’ll focus on doing some dishes and cleaning up, and I’m back in my zone, in the cleaning zone. There was a lot of cleaning going on. You were cleaning too. Of course it’s been dark for hours, after we’re done eating and the older boys said, we’re just gonna go off and explore, I thought that was a good idea. So Locke and Lincoln went off, they just walked down the way that we came and there is nothing, no other civilization or no other sign of human activity within sight. Really activity of any kind. Of any kind. There are some plants, not many, but some. And so they walk off and then I’m doing the dishes, and I’m trying to remember what happened if you told me, yeah. I knew as soon as they left what my my plan was. So I come out from finishing the dishes and the younger boys were sitting by the fire, and, of course, they’ve got screens out I’m like, boys, put your screens away. And I was like, I’m gonna hang out with you guys because you said. I’m gonna go scare Locke and Lincoln. I’m gonna carry on the McLaughlin tradition of trying to give your fellow campers a heart attack. Shepherd and Lando’s eyes got as big as saucers and you walked off into the darkness. And then I’m left, maybe I’ll tell my perspective of this story and then you can tell yours. So I’m sitting there at the campfire talking to Shepherd and Lando, and I ended up talking about, I don’t know how we got on it, but I started talking to them about, I think it’s ’cause you’re out camping and there’s a spirit of independence to camping. And I started talking about our friend Ben and his adventurous spirit, and the things that he would do in the woods and out in nature, and how he fostered, the stuff that we’ve shared with you last year on the podcast. I was just kinda telling them stories of all the things that he would do and inspire us to do, out in the woods and on canoes, and how his parents, when they were not much older than him, would take him and his canoe and drive to Lillington and just drop him off. Not much older than Shepherd and Lando, at the time. Yeah. You said not much older than him, like his parents weren’t that much older than him. No, I said not much older than them. Yeah. Lando and Shepherd. So I was like, can you imagine me and mom driving you guys, with a canoe, to the next town over and then you’re just gonna canoe down the river, and then half a day later, we’re gonna pick you back up. And they’re super into it, and I’m like, yeah, this is what camping’s all about, you got a fire, you got these kids who are just expanding their horizons and forgetting about their screens. And then, all of a sudden, I just heard this blood curdling scream and kerfuffle in the way distance, and I’m like, Shepherd, that’s your dad, I think he found the older boys. And then we just waited for you to come back and hear the story of what had happened. Well, I think I’ve talked about this before, I have a thing for scaring people, it’s one of my favorite things and I’ve done it all my life, and it’s a family tradition, my dad did it to me. And so as soon as they left and they had their headlamps on, and we’re kind of in this wash, so it’s, essentially, sort of like a shallow canyon, they can go this way or they can go that way, there’s not that many places they can go and you can see where they’re at because it’s so dark. And so I could see that they were a long distance away, ’cause I could see their lights, ’cause it’s so flat. And there was a little bit of moonlight, there was enough moonlight for me to walk out there without a light and my eyes adjusted to the desert, so I could kind of see where I was going without being in too much danger. So I was like, okay, I’m gonna walk down towards them, I could see them in the distance, oh, they’ve turned back around and now they’re walking back towards the camp site, but they’re still many, many hundreds of yards away from the campsite. So I’m like, all right, what am I gonna do? I’m gonna get on the side of this path, behind this bush, and wait for them to come by and scare the crap out of them. But then I was like, man, the desert plants are so sparse and small, and I’m like, if they’re shining their headlamp and they see me behind this very sparse cactus bush kind of thing, the whole thing is ruined. So I was like, I’m gonna move further off of the road, get down on my belly behind this little embankment, and let them pass and then come up behind them. Because not only is that, you know, they can’t see me, but it will scare them so much to have something come from behind. The unknown. The unknown that they’ve just been in versus the campsite, it makes sense that somebody we know might be on that side. So they come, they’re walking, they walk by me and then. Didn’t you hear Locke say something? Well, here’s the deal, I had to stand up and start walking towards the road and as I stood up. After they passed? After they passed, as I stood up and started taking a couple of steps, they heard something and then later we find out Locke was like, Lincoln, do you hear something? And he was like, no. So Locke is paranoid. Locke was already scared, he’d been scared the whole time. He’s kind of skittish in general. Yeah, he’s scared of the dark. He’s like me. And so. He’s looking over his shoulder, not seeing anything. And then I stop, but then I walk out into the middle of this, basically, this dirt road that they’re walking down. And then I start taking more and more steps and then right before I really start running, where they’re gonna know, I probably get 10 feet behind them and I was like, I’m gonna let out the lowest, most guttural sound that I can make that will sound as unhuman as possible. And I was just like. Okay. And Locke screamed, I don’t think Lincoln screamed, I didn’t hear him scream, I heard Locke scream. When they tell this story, what did they say that they each thought? Locke thought it might Bigfoot, which is what I was hoping and Lincoln said that his brain was saying he was super scared, but he was thinking if that’s not Rhett, I don’t know what we’re gonna do. Yeah, yeah, he’s more of a strategic thinker than me, he knows how to play chess. Right. Yeah, so I was encouraged that he didn’t lose his cool completely, but I know he was scared because when they came back up and the three of you walked back, they just had this sweaty, exasperated, wide-eyed, heart rate still pumping kind of vibe and I could tell that Lincoln was legitimately scared, along with Locke, which was obvious. Listen, it’s scary, it’s not as scary as it was when I was out there by myself like I told you on the solo trip, but being out there when there’s just no point of reference, there’s no other people, you just feel exposed and you don’t know what mysteries lie in the dark. I think one of my favorite things was what happened next in that you came back and you told that story, all three of you told the story from your perspectives and then we went on, all of us, sitting around the fire, you and I started telling stories, kind of building on what I was doing with the stories that I was already telling them. Just telling the story about how we would go camping across the Cape Fear River and the one time that you invested over an hour of disappearing from me and the rest of the friends that we brought camping, and fully committing to long-term scaring the crap out of us by laying in the water like Arnold Schwarzenegger. Only my eyes and nose were above the surface, like a gator for a long time. You know, telling ’em that story, it was just cool to see our boys so into us telling the stories and I think we ended up telling a few stories that we had written about in the “Book of Mythicality”, and I just realized, you know what, you can’t just write stories in a book and expect your kids to read ’em. These stories were still new to them. Like the story of my brother’s which, in the “Book of Mythicality”, it’s like a comic strip, so I don’t know how well it’s conveyed, but it’s the story of my brother in his middle school science fair project which he called “Birds”, which did not have a hypothesis or any sort of experiment. It just had a bunch of dismembered birds. I think it was one bird that he had shot and then taken apart, and put on his poster board. And, to just show you the body parts of the birds, it definitely seems like the kind of thing a serial killer would do as a middle school science fair project, but my brother is not a serial killer. And they all knew him. It was a different time. Even my kids know Cole, so they got a kick out of that story, all of those stories. Lando in particular, that was the conversation in which I saw Lando check out a little bit. Yeah, he’s younger, he’s such a sensitive soul and it turns out he loves birds. When you’re adjusting to camping, there were a number of moments when I had to pull him to the side and say, hey, we’re still having a good time. He had a number of moments where he bounced back. He did well. And he was good, and it was helpful that we had the security of the van, where we could get snuggled in our blanket and feel more secure. Yeah. So the next morning, we had to drive out of the campsite back to the main area to go and explore, and find our next campsite. And Locke, a lot of the kids these days and kids in California, I think, especially, are on a slightly different schedule when it comes to getting their driver’s permit and license. Me and you, as soon as we turned 15, we got our driver’s permit, as soon as we turned 16, that day I got my license. Things move a little bit slower and, obviously, the pandemic has had an effect on this. So Locke basically just got his driver’s permit right before we left and he’s not really driven a car, we haven’t really done the thing where you just let your kid drive when they’re 14, like, oh I’ll let you drive around the neighborhood, or something like that, we just haven’t done that, don’t really have that kind of neighborhood. I’m gonna sneeze. Do it in your sleeve. Okay, I’m not gonna sneeze, apparently, it went away. So he just got his permit, so I’m like, this is the perfect opportunity for him to drive, you’re in the desert, you’re on a dirt road, there’s not any other traffic. I mean, in the vlog where we went off-roading with Shepherd, you let him drive. Right. But he was in your lap. I was in the driver’s seat still. This is for real. This is giving them 100% control of the vehicle. But yeah, we’re out there in the middle of nowhere and it’s just dirt roads leading back up to the main road. In fact, you told me you were gonna do that and I’m like, well, I’m gonna go ahead far enough so that he won’t be driving in my dust, so I go far ahead and I do not witness anything that is about to happen. Okay, so this is a single lane dirt road, they come through there on a regular basis with some sort of. Scraper. Scraper that pushes the dirt to the side, almost like snowbanks, right? So there’s no shoulder. They’re dirt banks and there’s big rocks in these dirt banks. And one of the things that happens when you start driving is you don’t know where your car is at on the road, you’re on the left side and you feel like you’re in the middle, but no, you have a whole piece of car to your right. So a lot of new drivers will be hanging out to the right a little too much, I remember doing it as a new driver and Locke was doing that almost immediately. So there’s some big rocks in this embankment, I’m like, Locke, you’re too far to the right, you’re too far to the right, come back to the left, he’s like, I don’t think I am, I’m like, listen. And I actually said something like, all right, the only way that this is going to work is if you assume that when we are in the car together and we have a different view of driving, I will always be right, okay? During this stage of the relationship, that doesn’t mean forever, but while you’re the pupil and I’m the teacher, the only way we can do this is just assume that I, in my driving experience, know what I’m talking about, right. And he, actually, was like, okay, that makes sense, so I was like, and here’s how you can tell where you’re at on the road. Anyway, so we’re going along, he’s doing great, he’s doing fine, I’m having to correct him a little bit and get him to move to the center, but I’m trying to be calm. And then, all of a sudden, I see another vehicle coming towards us because, again, this is a single lane, we’re gonna have to move to the side to let each other pass. I see that the guy has stopped and moved to the side, to let us go, he’s in a Subaru of some kind, not really super off-road but enough to be out on this dirt road. Okay. But Locke has seen the car and he has come to a stop, so that guy thinks that he’s saying that he should go. Yeah. But by the time I say, “Oh he’s letting you go”, Locke starts to go and so does the other guy. It’s like what you would typically do on foot with someone. Yeah, you’re walking down the sidewalk. We’re both going right, we’re both going left, and we’re doing a dance. You’re playing Chicken at this point. What ends up happening is there’s a little bit of yelling from me. Saying something like, just go, no stop, he wants you! I’m basically embodying the process, vocally, I wasn’t helping, I’m sure I wasn’t helping. And Lincoln’s in the back seat just kind of. Smiling a little bit. Smiling. So we get to the point where it looks like we’re both just gonna drive past each other with one wheel up on this dirt embankment on the side. You both stopped and started how many times at this point? Four to five. That’s awkward, man. That’s okay, it’s okay to have one tire up on this embankment when you’re in an FJ Cruiser, right. Even though Locke was getting so far to the right that I thought he was gonna get high centered or whatever, when, basically, you get stuck and both wheels, you know. And so I was like, stay left, you’re getting too far to the right! You know, slightly calmer than that. The other guy is doing the same thing and we eventually get past him, and then Locke gets back in the middle and goes, and then I turn around and look, and I’m like, I think that guy got stuck. He’s not in a off-road vehicle and he doesn’t seem to be going anywhere. And so I was like, Locke, I think that guy got stuck, stop. So Locke stops, I said “Get out.” I get in the driver’s seat, I put it in reverse and I back all the way up to this guy. And, sure enough, he’s stuck, but not only is he stuck, but three additional vehicles in a row, three guys who are on an off-road trip have come out of the mountain. Same place you came from. Yeah, are now stopped and they’re out talking to this guy. And then within the time that I get out of my car, they start pushing him off and they get him off of the embankment, and they help him. I get out of the car. I’m sure that guy said some nice things about your vehicle. When I walked up to him, I was like, hey man, hey listen, even though Locke is 16, I was like, hey, I got a 15 year old new driver, he’s driving for the first time, sorry about that and he’s like, ah, no problem, they got me, it’s great, it’s fine, whatever. So then I get back in the car, I drive a little bit, I’m like, well, we still have a lot of dirt road to go and I stop and I was like, listen, okay, let’s start over. That was something you couldn’t anticipate. It was probably your fault. And that was a difficult thing to navigate in your first driving experience, and I don’t want you to be nervous and have a bad taste in your mouth on your first driving experience. So listen, let’s stop. Let me give you another bad experience. Let’s recenter, I’m gonna calm down a little bit, you calm down a little bit because we were both yelling at each other, we have very similar personalities, and let’s switch. So we switch, Locke gets in the driver’s seat, I get in the passenger seat, and the three guys who have helped the Subaru have come up behind us and stopped right behind us, so the lead car is right behind us. So Locke puts it into gear, presses the gas, problem is the gear that he chose was reverse. How much gas did he press? Enough, enough for me to yell again. I’m telling you, man, anticipating going forward and finding yourself in reverse. And knowing there’s the guy right behind us, I was like, Locke, Locke, Locke! I think I just said his name three times. And he ended up, I don’t know if he just hit the brakes or he just moved it back into park, either way, there was a grinding noise. Oh. From our car. We did not ram, how awful would it have been? How close did you get, you didn’t hit him? Several feet, which is close in a car, right. And how awful would it have been for his, again, his first driving experience, to be running this guy off the road and then backing into a guy who helped him. But after that. So at that point, what did you do? He said, “Dad, I don’t wanna drive anymore.” I’m sorry, I got a 13 year old driver here, he’s getting younger with every mistake. And I felt for him because what I thought was gonna happen was the same thing that happened as we drove in, which was no other cars, but on the way out we have to run against this person coming at us and we’ve got three guys behind us. So did you switch back at that point? Switched back and I drove out. He actually did not end up driving again, that wasn’t by design, that was more related to what ended up happening, which we’ll talk about next. I was waiting for you and I was like, why are they not here yet? He gave me permission to tell that story. And I was like, listen, and, as we were driving out, we actually had a good conversation, I was like, listen, man, this kind of thing, this is why you do this, so you can have a story. Or so your dad can have a story, you get a podcast one day, you can have the story. No, I was like, you’ve got your first driving story. And second. Yeah, first and second. I’d call that two stories. Two for one, and you’re safe, no one got hurt, we can have a laugh about it, you learn something, you move on, and we actually got to a good place. You catch up with us, I hear the story and then we ended up driving all the way out of the valley to Beatty to refuel, and then we knew there was a ghost town there that we dropped in on, we ate some lunch, then we came back into the canyon, Titus Canyon, which is one of the more popular drives, but, again, that time of the year, not that many people there, great drive. The best drive. Like, again, it’s not technical, it’s best to have high clearance, but no problem at all for the van. We saw a guy in a Maxima. We did. And it’s a one-way thing. Do not recommend that. It’s got a lot of wash boarding. But there was a Maxima there. Your car is shaking as you go. Also saw a guy on a bike doing the whole thing, that’s nuts. There is this, and this is where I got drone footage, I haven’t looked at it, it probably won’t be that impressive. But as you come down out of the mountains and the canyon, you’re on one of those ice road truckers sort of roads in which, obviously, there’s no guardrail and there’s just a sheer drop into a canyon on one side, and it’s one lane wide and that’s exciting, we had a good time. And then at the end you get into the slot canyon. Amazing. Where you’re literally driving in a canyon. The width of the car. Is the width of a road with straight, stone walls. The width of a single lane of a road. Yeah, right. One way. And it’s not just straight. Winding back and forth. It winds back and forth, so you can never see more than 15 yards in front of you. And that’s why it’s one way. Yeah, that bottleneck. Yeah. So we go through that and it was really cool to go with the boys and to have these experiences. For the first part of that trip, Lando, actually, was asleep in the back, I don’t know how he did it, it was so bumpy. We were worried and there was a couple of places where Locke would be like, dad, dad, you sure about this? ‘Cause it freaks you out, ’cause you’re like, well, if a rock falls. If you reach down and change the radio station, if you got a radio station at that point, then you could careen off the side of the thing. All systems are online when you are doing this. Absolutely. And Lincoln was like, I don’t know how Lando’s doing. That’s a good point, well, he was sleeping. He was sleeping. That’s the miracle of it all. So I got Shep to sit in the front seat with me and I’m like, you like Steely Dan? Shepherd’s an old soul. You’ve been training him on what to listen to, he didn’t know them by name, but we were listening to some Dan. I really feel like we had this kind of uncle moment, it was cool for all of us to hang out and, incidentally, Lincoln told me about sleeping over at the house with Locke, subsequent to this trip. Everything he told me that he did, he was like, me and Locke and Rhett, we ate this and then me and Locke and Rhett, we watched a movie, I was like, it sounds like you were hanging out with Locke and Rhett the whole time, I felt a little threatened, I was like, you know what, this is good uncle vibes. We watched just a heinous horror movie. He told me. That trip really fostered an extended family type of connection and that’s just the magic of camping, is that you find yourself around a campfire and you can over glamorize it, and, trust me, there’s a lot of stuff that, the majority of time, is not glamorized, but then you find those moments that you can hold onto, like the Steely Dan moment when it’s this amazing view, you guys were way ahead of us and then you had the drone by the time we caught up. And then you just stop at this, a ghost town, there was a place called Lead Field which is just a place that sprung up when they thought they were gonna be mining lead and it turns out that the place had a post office for 11 months and 300 people lived there. And they’ve got the pictures out there of what it used to look like, and there’s still three buildings standing that you can walk around. The mines are closed off. The mines are closed but you can walk up to ’em and look in, and they’ve got ’em marked off. Yeah, super cool. And the kids were really into this and us talking about what would it have been like to be out here 120 years ago, mining lead? You know? I mean, we come back and we’re telling all these stories and Lily’s like, I kind of wish I would have gone and I was like, girl, you can go next time. But it was cool for her to say that out loud. ‘Cause she was definitely not down. Yeah, she wasn’t interested and her and Christy were hanging out, and it was good for them. So we leave Lead Field and, again, you go through that slot canyon at the end of that trip and then you’re like, man, we’re chasing daylight here, we gotta find a place to camp for the night. And, again, we didn’t wanna be in the middle of the valley where there are some pockets of civilization, like a gas station and a campground, and one hotel with a bunch of palm trees, which is so super strange. I would say a resort. Yeah, a resort, it’s strange. Super nice. The only one they let in there to develop or maybe the only people willing to do it and to keep it up. But, anyway, we actually drive past that and you had found, on the map, if we go up this canyon called Echo Canyon, we start going up that on that high clearance road. A lot of people camping there and there was a truck in front of us that was going so slow, he let us go by, and then I’m like, man, we’ve been driving all day, my shoulders are sore, I am exhausted, I just feel like I can’t steer this thing anymore. I’m feeling every bump in the road, I’m glad we’re almost to finding a campsite. And with every rock we hit and every turn we tried to make, I was like, man, if I didn’t know better, this feels like my first pickup truck, a 1987 Nissan pickup, had no power steering. Yeah. I was like, that’s what this feels like. And then I was like, hold on, I think that might be what happened. The thing we haven’t talked about. And it’s getting dark. We were talking on our walkie talkies, having a walkie talkie. Oh yeah. Being able to, hey, big boy, over. Little boy, over. Talking back and forth to each other, that’s the way to go on a off-road trip like that. There was lots of checking in and also lots of walkie jokes. Walkie jokes, yeah. If you’ll look to your left right now, you’ll see a big pair of boobies, things like that. It’s just rocks. Yeah, you gotta make those kinds of jokes when the boys are around. Just squint a little bit. Yeah, right. I say that ’cause you were on the walkie and you were like, I’m having trouble steering. I’m tired. I think there might be something wrong with my power steering. And, I’ll be honest with you, when you said that, I was like, I just think he must be tired, there’s nothing wrong with that, there’s nothing wrong with that brand new, super nice van. It’s getting harder by the second to steer, it’s getting darker by the second. We’re having to pass all these people camping and then we. Go up in a slot canyon. We go in a slot canyon and we found this super cool campsite. Oh man. And you hop out and I hop out, and I’m like, man, I swear, I’ve lost power steering, I’m losing power steering. And you look under the front and something’s leaking, it’s wet under there, that’s exactly what it is. It’s a scary feeling, ’cause we had gotten to the point where we felt that isolation, ’cause that’s where we like to camp. And it was just, there’s this sinking feeling of this could get bad real quick, you know? ‘Cause it’s like, it’d be so hard to get a vehicle in here, like a tow truck in here to get this thing out. So I’m like, we can’t camp here, we gotta get this thing back out of here right now. If it’s leaking power steering before it’s all bone dry, which could potentially do damage to the vehicle, I gotta try to get this thing back out, closer to civilization. So we turn right back around and go all the way back out, and by the time we got back out, I’m like, hanging a right onto the paved road, I’m trying with all of my might to turn the wheel to get this thing back. ‘Cause this is not an ’87 Nissan pickup truck. No, it’s not. This is a big vehicle. We drove back down into the valley, to a campground, which said it was totally full. Furnace Creek Campground, ’cause I wanna give a shout out to the rangers, the park rangers who were at the camp. ‘Cause there were some Mythical Beasts. There were Mythical Beasts, yeah. But the night before, we talked to the guy who lives there permanently, older guy who was like, well, they didn’t show up, you can stay in this reserved slot. Lyle. Lyle, love you Lyle. So we’re like, you know what? I can still camp in this thing for tonight, I called the owners or texted the owners, I told ’em what was up. They were understanding and helped me problem solve in terms of what we’re gonna do with this thing. They said, well, since you’re situated, we’ll have to find out the next morning what the best course of action is in calling the roadside assistance. So that night was, we were able to have an actual fire there, not with the propane fire. I went to the fancy general store, which was at a little outdoor mall resort kind of situation in the middle of the desert, to get this firewood that costs me $13 a bundle and I got three bundles, that’s some expensive wood. We had a good night that night. The next day we find out that no, they can’t come out and fix it, this is such a new vehicle, they’re gonna have to come tow it to the nearest place, which is Las Vegas. And can I say that we, you talked about our non prowess when it comes to diagnosing vehicular problems, but I say, between the two of us. We were right about that. We thought what had happened was is that the hose to the pump had completely come loose, based on the spray pattern. Oh, forensics. Of the power steering fluid, and it turns out, that’s exactly what had happened to the car. I’ll fast forward, so we arranged for the tow truck to come and then the owner said “We’re just gonna get ’em to tow it all the way back to Los Angeles”, three and a half hours? From there it was four and a half hours. Four and a half hours. And the tow truck came from LA, picked it up, and then went the four and a half hours back. And it couldn’t be fixed because the clamp is a proprietary clamp that you found out very soon after, that Mercedes. People talk about it online. Had issued a recall. Well, that’s what I found out, weeks later. So, just to close that loop, yeah, whenever I was returning stuff to the owner that I’d taken out of the van, she was like, I just got the notice today, the recall for them to fix that. So I know I didn’t do anything inappropriate, but it made me feel better that like, hey, this is a Mercedes problem, not a. A Link problem. A Link problem. But that took most of our day ’cause we had to drive all the way out, you had to drive me out to the nearest place to rent a car, all the way out of the valley and rent a minivan, bring it all the way in, and so we kinda lost a day. Significant downgrade in how cool you seemed the rest of the trip. Yeah. You went from having a van that was so big. #vanlife goes to #minivanlife, totally different life. The minivan life was not, I didn’t wanna be in pictures with you and your minivan anymore. I took a picture of the Sprinter being loaded up on the ramp. I got that on video, too. Oh, cool, drone footage? No drone, but I got that on video. I wanna see that, that’s cool. Last story we gotta tell. We had enough time. Is we all hopped in the minivan as the sun was setting and we drove to this one canyon, it was called Sunset Canyon or something like that and we knew it was gonna get dark, that meant I grabbed a jacket, but it didn’t mean that I grabbed flashlights or headlamps, or anything, ’cause we did not do that. Right, but, as it was getting dark, it was clear and me and Locke were, actually, we kinda got up ahead of you guys and we were walking ahead of everybody. And, again, it was this crazy canyon that’s got this chalky white rock, that’s almost like dirt meets rock, like dirt that hasn’t yet become rock, so, sedimentary rock that is still very sedimenty, right. And a lot of people are walking out as we’re walking in, up into this, basically another slot canyon. But you could see that the moon was gonna be bright and, actually, as the sun was going down and the moon was coming up, you could already see your moon shadow. Pretty crazy. And I was like, oh, this is gonna be fine, we don’t need lights, let’s just keep going. I will say, when it was all said and done, I’m like, Lando, what was your favorite thing? He was like, the night hike. ‘Cause, at a certain point, we started calling this, all right, guys, this is the night hike, we’re doing it, you know. And we went in a few miles, you get up against this sheer mountain faces they call it the cathedral. The Red Cathedral, yeah. There’s red rock wall. And you and Locke had gotten a lot farther ahead and, matter of fact, I convinced myself that you guys were gonna try to scare the crap out of us and I was not that happy about that. But when we got to the cathedral. You and Locke? Yeah, so we got to the end of the end of the line and there was a cave you had to walk through to get to the final end of the trail. And we could hear, this is so weird, we could hear you guys talking to each other. Crisp? Like I could make out the words that you were saying. And so I wanted to make sure that you were gonna come all the way and you weren’t gonna turn around. And so I was like, Link, I yelled as loud as I could. Didn’t hear anything. No response. But you could hear me just talking normally. Some acoustic issue, where I couldn’t get my voice to go to you and I think it might be because you were in this little cave thing and it was coming out of the cave, but I couldn’t get my voice to go into the cave. Rhett, no one will ever know, it’s a mystery. It’s an acoustic mystery. It’s an acoustic mystery. That keeps me up. That keeps you up at night, you’re thinking about it. But then you finally show up. And it’s pretty cool because, at this point, you go into the sheer wall of the cathedral and then you double back and go up this pyramid of dirt to this ridge that, then, we started taking pictures of the kids. I took a silhouette picture of the kids. Backlit by the moonlight and it was super cool. And so I’m down below, you’re up a little bit ahead of me, taking a picture of all of the boys up there on the ridge and then we take the pictures and we’re like, all right, let’s start heading back down. And just as we start heading back down, there’s some sort of a, there’s a little bit of a kerfuffle, there’s something going on, there’s some shimmying happening and some grunting as people are starting to come down. And the first thing that I hear said, I could tell people were concerned and Lando says, please, nobody say any bad words. And so I’m like, okay, what has happened? Well, apparently he had picked up on a pattern, which is if things went wrong, there were bad words that were said. Please nobody say any bad words. That upset him. I was like, what’s happened? It turns out what had happened was Shepherd, who let me just go on record and say that Shepherd, actually, has a great track record with keeping up with his phone, not so much with my other son, but great track record of keeping up with his phone and not losing things. But Shepherd had dropped his relatively new phone that had proceeded to slide down this cliffside, I mean, we’re talking a 45 degree angle that just kind of went down into the lower part of the Red Cathedral. Which was a dark abyss, really. And we could not see anything. And even when we shined our phone lights onto the slope we were like, there’s no way that we’re gonna find this, but it felt like the phone has gotta be right there. And so. Did you say any bad words? I didn’t say any bad words, ’cause Lando said not to. I don’t think that’s true. No, I said one, what did I say? I think after looking for about 15 minutes and crab walking down that 45 degree slope, and kind of feeling like you don’t know what you could tumble into, you kinda started getting a little bit more grouchy. Well, here’s the thing. And I’d walked down below, ’cause I was down at the bottom and you were up at the top, and the phone was somewhere in the middle. As I was walking down this cliffside, I was thinking to myself, am I going to die trying to find my kid’s phone? He’s never gonna forgive himself, is he gonna watch his dad tumble off this cliff in the moonlight and be like, ah, my dad’s dead because I dropped my phone. So that’s when I started to joke with them about that. Yeah, again, Lando. Lando didn’t like that. Yeah. ‘Cause I was like, all right Shepherd, here I am, going to find your phone, this might be the last time we talk. You’re twisted. I’m a little twisted. Scaring the crap out of children. But I also felt like I wasn’t gonna die. Dismembering birds, who are you? That was my brother, and it wasn’t like at the end of the cliff it just dropped off to nothingness, it was just the trail. Right. So I was like, at worst, I’ll just be badly injured. Right, you’re not gonna fall into oblivion, you’re gonna fall to the trail where I’m standing. But, as you know, I’m scared of heights, I was trying to overcome that and not let anybody know. But eventually, I was like, I can’t see this phone and I’m afraid that if I get to a place where I can’t get back up, then we’re gonna be calling in the chopper, assuming there is one. And so, come back up, we go around to the bottom and we get down there, and Shepherd, of course, is already climbing up the cliff to try to get his phone. He might be addicted to screens, that might be what was driving him. He’s way up there and I’m a little worried about him, and then I’m like, well, I gotta go up there too. So I went up there and five minutes passed, I ended up finding the phone, I was able to spot it with my light and we got it. And we got out with only one, maybe two curse words said, and no injuries. Yeah, Lando was cool with that, that’s the end of that story. He still said, my favorite thing was the night hike, so you didn’t ruin it for him. Good. Completely. But yeah, that’s the catch phrase now, if anything wrong happens, first thing you need to say is, okay, please, nobody say any bad words. I’m about to tell you something you’re not gonna wanna hear, just don’t say any bad words. It ended up being an incredible trip. I’m so glad, we’re saying that it was your idea, I’m so glad you had that idea. I wish we had had already done it more, now that our kids are the age that they are. They’ll wanna go next time. Here’s the thing. That’s the good news. Is that before we went on that trip, I think, in Locke’s mind it was like, I’m not gonna do this again, but, by the end, he was talking about how good of a time he had had, how much he liked being out in nature. And then, on the way back, I drove Locke and Lincoln, and I let them be my DJ and, boy, the musical journey that we went on that started in dad music territory, John Mayer, et cetera, slowly started getting into some hip hop that I enjoy, then began to transition into maybe, some modern hip hop, à la 21 Savage. Talk about bad words. We made up for all the bad words that we had held back in the presence of Lando, we went well over the limit. If you include what the artists were saying. If you include what the artist said in the last hour of our trip. My van did not have the capability to connect to my phone and most of the time. Oh, I was about to say that Mercedes, but I forgot, no, you were in a Dodge. I’m in a minivan at this point, it did not connect to my phone and we hardly had any radio stations, so the only thing I listened to was how bad my kid’s and your kid’s feet smell. Yeah. Like, we had to pull over, Shepherd was wearing shoes with no socks. And he’ll take his shoes off when he gets in the car, can’t let him do that. I’m like, man, we had to pull over so he could go up to your car, pull out that drawer, and get some socks out. It’s like a biohazard. We had a great trip, it’s our privilege to have shared it with you on this “Ear Biscuit”, a great way to kick off the year, it’s just a good thing to build on, is that we can be outdoors. I still don’t know what I wanna do about the van, if there’s a van in my future, I think I’m just gonna stay on the rental front ’cause this kind of scared me a little bit, something that drastic, that required that much towing. It was nice to rent it and not be responsible. I think the rental. Is nice, yeah. Is the way to go for one of those. Yeah. It’s not that hard to load your stuff up. That’s what I’m leaning towards at this point. It was a good trip, man. And next week we will talk about, it seems like every time we go somewhere or there’s a break, there’s stories to tell, so we’re gonna talk about. The holidays. The holiday break. Whatever came from that. Next week. I’m assuming that we’ll talk about that, but #EarBiscuits, let us know if you wanna weigh in on any of this. Oh, and I got a recommendation. First ‘rec of 2021. New year, new ‘rec. I’ve found this series on HBO Max, forgive me if you don’t have HBO Max, but it’s just another reason to get it. “Calm” is one of the apps that does meditations, but they have a series, you know about this series on HBO? No. It’s called “A World Of Calm” and, let’s see, there’s a number of episodes, but, basically, it’s reminiscent of the calming nature of watching primitive technology on YouTube, just watching somebody in a process. They have a more meditative, it’s much more edited and produced version of that, it’s the most calming documentary that you could watch, intentionally calming documentary. I’ve only watched one episode. Give me an example. The episode I watched is called “Living Among The Trees”, narrated by Keanu Reeves. Oh. And it is a guy who takes one felled tree and turns it into a canoe, so like a single tree, whole canoe. And he doesn’t talk, there’s no interviews, it’s just calming music and footage of him, narrated by Keanu, of him making a Kaneu. How old, I mean, how long is this? This episode, it’s 23 minutes long, so it’s super cool to watch. That’s the only one I’ve watched, there’s one about snowfall, “The Bird’s Journey” narrated by Nicole Kidman. I mean, it sounds like I’m giving an ad, but it’s just a really cool idea. HBO Max has been a sponsor. Yeah, that’s right. “The Coral City” narrated by Lucy Liu is episode one, “Glassmaker” by Zoe Kravitz, narrated by, “The Great Beyond” narrated by Idris Elba. Now, this is a good idea. Yeah, this is super cool. Oo, “A Horse’s Tale”, like T-A-L-E. Who does that one? Kate Winslet. Oh my. “The Gift Of Chocolate”. Dang, so there’s 10 episodes on this thing, “World Of Calm”, check it out. It’s nice to be able to watch something that kind of feeds your soul and gives you rest, and doesn’t just distract you, but is a meditative experience. I need to watch that before I help my son drive. There you go, man. Or maybe after. Or during. All right, we’ll speak at you next week. To watch more “Ear Biscuits”, click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous episode of “Ear Biscuits”, click on the playlist to the left. And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. If you prefer to listen to this podcast, it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your mythical best.