Welcome to Ear Biscuits.
I'm Rhett.
And I'm Link.
This week at the round table of dim lighting,
we ask what's it like inside NASA.
Yes.
And we should know.
Because we've been inside NASA.
Houston we have a problem.
We've let Rhett and Link inside.
Yeah, you know the saying Houston we have a problem?
Well it's because if you're in space and you have a problem
you tell Houston, and that's where we were,
in Houston at the Space Center there.
The Johnson Space Center.
Yeah.
They graciously invited us and gave us a tour.
I learned some stuff.
Yeah.
I feel like the wheels are really turning for you.
So I really wanna know what came of that
cause we never discussed it,
cause we had to do a show that night.
Right.
So we'll dedicate this episode
to unpacking NASA's secrets.
The secrets that they're willing to disclose
to anyone from the public who comes inside.
But we are fresh off of a little mini tour,
we were in Houston for our comedy show.
And we went to, shout out to Houston,
New Orleans, Birmingham, Jacksonville, and Tampa.
We had some fun on all those stages.
All those stages. All those stages.
It's like a stage five rocket.
Yeah, and you know what, we're not done
with the fun while we're talking about that.
Okay, yeah.
We've actually got, again,
this is just, we're not planning on touring much
in the near future after this,
take a pretty good break from that.
So this is the last chance to see this particular show
for a good while.
Yeah, just this fall of 2019,
just go to RhettandLinklive.com,
but to wet your appetite, first of all we've got a week
of special, well I'm just gonna call it a special thing
called--
The Bleak Creek Conversations.
Bleak Creek Conversations where around the launch
of the novel, we're planning a very, very special
evening in Boston, New York, Chicago, Dallas-Fort Worth,
two shows in Winston Salem, North Carolina
and then back here in Los Angeles,
and that goes from October 27th through November 1st,
November 3rd, I'm sorry.
And then we're doing more of our musical comedy show
in Albuquerque, Phoenix, Sacramento,
and Valley Center, California November 20th through 23rd.
So go to RhettandLinklive.com to get tickets.
But um,
we did have some fun.
We didn't bring the kids this time.
Briton was still there.
Yeah he was, he's a kid, he's 19.
Yeah, well.
Technically he isn't.
Oh and let me, I do wanna clarify
cause I wanna say it, every time we talk about
the Bleak Creek Conversations that you a copy
of the novel when you get that ticket.
So think about that.
It's a deal.
As you're considering coming out to that.
And we're showing a documentary that we shot
back home in Buies Creek, North Carolina over the summer.
So, it's gonna be an intimate, one of a kind evening.
And then for these shows, I mean,
I really think we're stretching our legs.
Like, we had some crazy moments with fans.
I wanna give a shout out to you guys for being
so supportive and letting us talk about
whatever we wanna talk about.
We don't even know what's gonna happen.
We're talking about like soil eating fish.
You remember soil eating fish?
That was one night.
Right.
We talked extensively about that.
Another night we talked,
and I can't even explain it, you had to be there.
Well that's the thing is that the,
each show ends up being different,
we have some things that we say before songs
that we always say, but even that changes up.
But we use the energy and the vibe
of that particular location.
And sometimes it's just in a weird place.
We channel the voodoo of New Orleans.
We saw some voodoo dolls.
We gotta tell this story that we told from stage.
We were in this place cause you and Briton
are into all this type of stuff,
and it turns out voodoo dolls are supposed to be nice,
mostly used for positive purposes.
Well voodoo as a whole, voodoo as a whole, which,
okay, I'm probably gonna get some things wrong,
so lemme give that disclaimer.
You're not an expert.
I'm not an expert.
You shouldn't be.
But I've been to the voodoo museum in New Orleans
and that has given me enough of an authority
to say that voodoo is like a meeting of,
you know, predominantly African ancestral religions
meet some elements of Western religion like Catholicism,
and kind of, so sort of a hybrid sort of comes out
and that's what you ended up having in New Orleans,
in the New Orleans area.
But I think that culturally
we tend to be kind of fascinated with
what we see as like the subversive,
maybe we would say evil side of voodoo
cause it's like witchcraft and spells
and sacrificing chickens and stuff like that.
Poking pins in a doll so that you can hurt somebody.
But in reality, most of that stuff,
the intention of it is all good.
Like you said, to bring good to someone, but yeah,
sometimes you might want to bring some bad to somebody.
But I'll tell you what you can't do is
you can't roll into one of these voodoo shops
and take a picture of the voodoo dolls.
They won't let you do that.
So we're walking around,
it says no photos, no photos.
And I heard a girl come up to Rhett,
and it turned out to be two girls,
and I was a little further away but I did
hear the entire conversation.
And, but do you wanna tell it since she said it to you?
Yeah, well, for those of you who haven't
been to New Orleans before,
it doesn't matter what time of the year it is,
a lot of times there are just people.
Or time of day.
Everyone is walking around.
Yeah, cause this was like one o'clock.
Everyone is walking around with large beverage containers
of different sizes and shapes, often very tall.
Like the one that this girl had was.
Big as her head.
36 inches tall.
This giant, plastic.
She had a 36 inch doll head.
Plastic cup full of alcohol.
Well who knows what.
A lot of times it's just--
Voodoo doll piss, who knows?
A slushie.
I mean, they got whole bars that behind the bar
instead of seeing taps it's just alcoholic slushies.
Yeah, for the children.
And, so she comes up and she's already a little bit
New Orleans-ed,
and she sees me and she says oh,
and then she sees Link kind of behind me
and she's like oh aren't you guys Thomas and Rhett?
And I joined the conversation at this point
in order to say--
Why yes.
Well yes we are.
Well, the interesting thing is we've gotten mistaken.
Thomas and Rhett.
We've been called lots of things.
Thomas Rhett is a country music performer,
if you do not know that.
So that's what makes this particularly funny
because she was getting in her mind the only
Rhett that she knew was Thomas Rhett
so aren't you Thomas and Rhett.
That's the best one we've ever gotten.
Yeah, and then she took a picture
and then the guy who worked there is like no pictures.
And we're like well she's taking a picture of us,
Thomas and Rhett, she's not taking a picture--
Don't you know who we are?
Of your voodoo dolls.
She certainly does.
They had a glass case with a paper mache head in it,
and then they had a news paper clipping
that's like this head had been found somewhere
but it was clearly paper mache.
Yeah, right.
I don't know if that was a recreation.
I think it's just all part of the act.
So we did that.
Oh and we ate.
This is also New Orleans, where we ate lunch,
I had a spiritual experience.
I mean, you wait in line, and then you order at the counter
and they're like frying chicken and frying fish and shrimp,
and chicken was the special,
everyone was getting like, it was like a meat and three
type of situation, you get your meat
and your three sides, three veggies.
But I think it was two.
It was meat and two, okay.
And, you know, I'm like, well I kind of want some shrimp,
I like a good fried shrimp at a place like this,
so I ordered that, but all you guys got the fried chicken.
It did look very good, but I didn't get it.
This place was called,
I wanted to say Margerie's but it wasn't,
it was Majoria's, with no R,
Majoria's Commerce Restaurant.
Lot of locals in there.
And when you're up there getting ready to order
it seems like chaos and no matter what we did
it seems like we were always doing the wrong thing.
Like you're not supposed to,
like she would yell at us like come over here.
Say, I got you, well have you ordered?
It's like well, no,
can you order, what do you want?
It was like the taking of the orders
like there was an aggressive.
Frustration.
Sort of stance.
And I was like, you know what, this feels right,
you know, if you're going into a place where you see,
I mean I saw a guy who looked like he was on meth,
I saw a good who looked like he could be the mayor
of New Orleans, they were both there eating at tables,
eating the same fried chicken.
What if the mayor of New Orleans is on meth?
Well let's assume not.
Okay.
I'm just saying there was like a politician dude,
and you know, it was a melting pot of locals.
And then we just felt constant shame
for doing everything wrong.
I'm like this is how you should feel.
You know you're in the right place
when you feel like you're screwing it all up.
Well when Briton sat down after being through that line
he was like whoa, that was a very
stress inducing experience.
Yeah.
And it was, cause you just felt like an outsider.
But then it was replaced with the--
Pure joy.
Dining experience.
Shrimp were amazing.
They had these twice baked,
they called them twice baked potatoes,
but they scooped it out just like mashed potatoes
and put gravy on it still, it was amazing.
Right.
No skins.
There was no skins on the twice baked potatoes.
And corn!
And I'm going through this shrimp
like there's no tomorrow.
Loving it.
You guys are saying the chicken's amazing.
I look over and I see half a chicken leg uneaten
on Briton's plate and I'm like we're blood
you done with that chicken leg?
Are you gonna eat that?
He's like you can have it,
I took a bite of that chicken leg.
It's the best chicken.
I was transported to my nanny's Sunday after church
kitchen table where she would always fry up chicken.
She, oh man, I got goosebumps,
and then I started talking about how good this chicken was,
and I got my goosebumps, I got goosebump bumped,
and it just felt so good to eat that chicken.
It was the best.
I was eating Nanny's chicken again.
It was the best fried chicken.
Oh I've ever had.
I mean, I can safely say.
I've had a lot of fried chicken.
I haven't had friend chicken than that.
Maybe there's a time that I've forgotten
that I had as good of fried chicken,
but the ratio of crispiness on the outside
to juiciness on the inside,
and of course I'm a white meat man,
and a lot of people are turned off by white meat
because they think that it's dry
and they think that a breast is dry.
Yeah.
But I think that the breast is the perfect
piece of chicken because it's the most chicken
concentrated without any hindrance of bone.
It's just, you have a giant piece of muscle.
But you don't get as much of that crunchy
and that skin, I like that too.
You get a huge blanket of skin, man.
You gotta, you gotta ration that out.
The largest concentration of skin and meat
on the bird.
It's like the place that you're intended to take
a bite out of a bird.
If you were just to pick up a bird,
you would just take a bite out that area.
I'm a dark meat man, but, I mean, listen.
But hold on, but it was so juicy.
It didn't matter.
That it would turn a dark meat man into a white meat man.
Now I didn't even let you have any
cause I wasn't gonna give any up.
But Briton did, thank goodness,
and it was absolutely transformative.
I mean, it was transportative.
It transported me.
Cause my nanny's not able to fry chicken anymore
and she had, you know, there's something to the brineing,
like if it's really salty you're on to something.
You gotta get the brineing right.
The brineing does something with it.
Something with milk.
The juiciness though.
Did something with brine and milk or something.
But it's apparently irreplicable until this place Majoria's.
Highly recommend it if you're in New Orleans.
Oh yeah, it was just, it was good, I mean.
Now I will say, cause speaking of food,
we were doing the Chow Down in Your Town thing
that we do before each show where we take
the two things that are recommended to us on Twitter
and we pit them against each other.
And, I can't even remember what the New Orleans'
recommendations were, that's how.
It was gu--
Oh it was gumbo. Gumbo.
And gumbo and beignets.
And it was beignets Cafe du Monde,
which is the place to get beignets,
but they had been in the bag for 45 minutes
by the time they got to us
and you really need to eat those fresh.
They still won.
We thought the gumbo was,
should have been jambalaya
and we were trying to figure out why it wasn't red.
But it was a pot of gravy.
We were just super ignorant about what jambalaya is
versus gumbo, and gumbo, because of the rue,
is supposed to be brown.
But I just don't, I mean it wasn't bad,
I ate an entire, like, you know, cup of it.
You eating an entirety of something says nothing about it.
Right, that's what I'm saying,
it was edible, but it wasn't like
I have to tell someone about this
so they will also eat it,
which is what I would do with the fried chicken.
I don't lick the plate unless it's lickable.
You lick the plate because.
I'm hungry.
I'm always hungry.
It's edible.
I'm hungry right now and I just ate.
And then we went to an escape room.
You know it's like--
In Tampa.
Am I wrong to say that escape rooms are
not like a hot bed of coolness.
It's like you just don't think you'd like--
But what is a hot bed of coolness?
Like. Give me an example.
Like a rock and roll bar, like out back in the ally,
like if you're walking in the back ally
and you see like, I don't know, you see,
somebody from Motley Crew back there.
Maybe in movies.
Escape rooms are kind of like, I don't know.
For nerds, is that what you're saying?
Yeah, it's kind of, well, and then it's,
it's like you've got this grand idea,
we're gonna put people in a room,
they're gonna solve these problems
but it's gonna be immersive
and you're gonna forget where you are
and it's gonna be like Disney Land.
But you never quite forget that you're in a strip mall.
Right.
It's hard.
In an old converted office building.
Yeah, it's hard to make the set dressing
work that well in what used to be a dental office.
Right, but we had a great time.
No, escaping a dental office,
hey, maybe that's a win, win,
maybe that's what we should do.
Just, acquire a dental office and just lock it.
Put some clues in there, you gotta pull some teeth
to get some keys.
I could get with that.
The one in Tampa was, it was pretty fun though,
it was like, it was zombie apocalypse,
and I'm like I don't wanna do this if there's like
people dressed as zombies, I just,
I'm not, I don't wanna have to have
that type of interaction.
But as soon as you went in the place
you kind of knew there wasn't gonna be
anybody dressed as anything.
It's just gonna be some faint sound effects
of zombies outside, and we are inside tasked with
developing the, unlocking the antidote
for the zombie apocalypse.
Pretty cool actually, we had a lot of fun.
Yeah we did.
We didn't get in, we didn't fight too much.
And we got out.
You and I didn't fight any,
I think Briton and I fought.
Which I think is, that's the great,
I think that's the dynamic when Briton's there
it's like is that what happens?
Like, you know, I start to get grumpy
after a couple of days on the road.
True.
And I'm like, I think he's there to,
he's there to absorb that.
He absorbs your grumpiness?
I direct it towards him sometimes.
Do you observe my?
Absorption?
His absorption?
Yeah, I mean I actually think that
he changes the dynamic of us spending that much time
together on the road.
Yeah.
Because I think that, we talked about this
on this past trip, which apparently I lost my voice
on the trip because.
Do you need to hack something up?
Yeah, I've got like a--
Do you want me to cut the throat of your voodoo doll,
give you a little tracheotomy?
I've got like a constant production of phlegm,
that's just like, it hasn't been happening until right now.
Well it started happening with me yesterday
and I think it's a return to Los Angeles.
There's something in the air here.
The pollution?
Yeah, something, I'm serious.
Well I know there's a lot of pollution.
My nose started running a little bit more.
My throat felt a little congested.
Well I guess I'm gonna be struggling
with it the whole time.
We should move to Arizona.
I don't even know what I was gonna say.
Oh, he changes the dynamic,
because when we spend a lot of time together on the road,
first of all, our work responsibilities back here
don't go away, now we've got a great team
and there's not a whole lot on a day to day basis
that we have to worry about anymore
form the company's standpoint.
But there's still a lot of things,
and then Jenna is there, she's getting a lot of emails,
she's handling a lot of things,
asking us a lot of questions.
We made the observation that we don't get a lot done
other than touring even though the act of
getting ready for the show, you know signing the posters
for the meet and greet and then meeting some,
you know, meeting some of the Mythical Society people,
or anybody else that might be in that town
that we've arranged to meet,
and then you do the show,
and then you've got the meet and greet after.
I mean that's all the work, work that we do.
But it's pretty emotionally draining.
And so if you're gonna do something else
you want it to be like something that can kind of
be engaging like going and eating fried chicken, or,
going to an escape room. Going to an escape room.
We did get out by the way.
Yeah, which apparently only 35% of people
who go into this escape room get out and I gotta say--
That's what she told us to make us
feel good about getting out.
Do you think they're lying about the escape percentage?
That makes absolutely, there's no,
I can think of zero reason why they would lie about that.
I just think people, if people don't escape
aren't they angry.
I've been to an escape room before
and not gotten out?
And aren't they still in there?
When the time's up they just let you out
and say you're a failure?
Yeah, escape rooms.
You didn't escape from an escape room?
I've only escaped from escape rooms.
Would not be fun for people for people who like
escape rooms if people who were coming to
an escape room for the first time always get out.
That seems pretty straight forward to me.
Because. Yeah, yeah.
And we had very motivated, we were all very motivated,
and we all worked well together.
And then Briton and his friends
had been to an escape room like the day before
so they were kind of primed.
There's only so many different ways you can hide a key
in a box, you know what I'm saying?
They had some pretty cool ones.
It was very cool, but,
or it wasn't cool cause you don't think it can be cool.
It's not cool.
It's like magic without a magician,
is kind of what it feels like.
It feels like you're doing all the magic,
but it's just puzzles.
That's an interesting perspective.
I don't know, it feels like it's in the same genre.
Even though there's no magic involved.
You think people who like magic
also like escape rooms?
Yeah, big overlap there.
That makes sense to me.
I can't exactly explain why, but I agree with it.
But we got out, so we are in the top 35 of all people.
Top 35%. Top 35 people.
We're the top 35 people on the planet
cause we escaped from an escape room in Tampa, Florida.
Yeah we're in the top 35% of people who have escaped
a very particular escape room in Tampa.
And I gotta be honest with you, nothing against Tampa,
or nothing against any place in the world,
but when I found out that 35% of people
had made it out of this escape room in Tampa
I was like I'm gonna feel pretty bad about myself
if I don't qualify in the top 35%.
Mm.
I mean that's just kind of pride,
that's how much pride I have.
And I was like especially with the team that we've got here.
I feel like this is gonna happen,
we don't have any strangers,
no randos, sometimes you get randos in your group.
That's bad.
I had a drunk rando.
The only time I've never gotten out of,
I didn't get out of escape room,
is because there was a very distracting drunk rando
in the room with us.
Hated that guy.
At a certain point, I remember you told me,
you just kind of have to turn to him and say dude.
He couldn't take any-- Sit in a corner.
He could take no direction.
Sit in a corner man. He was such a distraction.
Sit in a corner and make sure you're not
sitting on anything like a key, a lock, or a clue.
Right.
So we went to NASA.
More questions than answers perhaps, let's get to those.
But first, let's ask you to buy stuff.
Mythical.com has all types of stuff for sale,
including this shirt.
Nope, nope.
Link, it does, but it doesn't have that shirt.
Cause that shirt is available at Amazon.com/Mythical.
That's right.
Because the whole point of this ad.
Ah shoot I blew it, blew it!
Is to let you remember that Amazon.com/Mythical
has t-shirts on demand that you cannot get
at Mythical.com.
Don't even try it.
Don't listen to me.
And you know, are those Prime?
Are they Prime?
Is that stuff Prime on Amazon?
Prime eligible.
So if you're a Prime member go over there and do it,
free shipping, all that, Amazon.com/Mythical, man.
Check it all out.
Check it all out.
We seem tired.
Right now?
Yeah, I mean, I am tired.
I'm sleepy.
Because we went on tour.
I feel like I'm not giving my best work.
This podcast sucks, is that what you're saying?
Well, I mean, no, I wanna lean into this
because I think this is just.
Let's go tired-er.
Part of an Ear Biscuit is an authentic like hey,
we're checking in in one sense, having an conversation.
Let's be real.
In the current state.
I mean I'm in this state where I've got phlegm
that is being produced and changing the character
of my voice, and then I have to do that
and then get it back to normal.
I just don't think people wanna know that
if we had a choice we wouldn't be doing this right now.
You are putting words in my mouth.
I'm not saying I don't wanna do this.
No, I'm just being honest.
What I'm saying is that.
Do you wanna do this right now?
I definitely wanna do it,
I wanna lean into it.
The whole point of what I'm saying is that I wanna do it.
It's a privilege to do this.
It's unusual for us to go on tour
and then to come back, like we were gone,
we were gone over the weekend,
and then even though we typically try to get back,
and then the day we get back we have like a day off
because we're trying to like replicate the weekend,
we couldn't do that yesterday because we had to
get on the phone with a guy who was reading our Audible book
and kind of go through and answer some questions.
Which was fun.
It was fun.
But then--
But I'm struggling man.
Kind of continued on with the day,
and now we got up today and we started with like
very businessy, corporate stuff right from the beginning
and then we had to go do an interview,
and people came here to do the interview
that was also for the Audible thing,
and then we step right into here
after about a 10 minute lunch.
So that's where you're catching us right now.
But you're not complaining, you're just saying.
No I'm just saying that like,
typically we would have had a chance,
like we haven't talked about the fact that we went to NASA.
No we haven't.
So now we're gong to talk about the fact
that we went to NASA and what that did for us.
I mean I don't have any agenda here.
You said--
Moon landing. You said that I've got
a lot of thoughts, but. Can be real.
The moon landing doesn't have to be fake.
That's not what we're getting at.
We did accept, we were humbled to accept the offer
to go to Johnson Space Center,
and so we pull up there, of course there's a gate,
you know, they have security, you just don't wanna roll
in there and start kicking over rockets, you know?
You gotta be with the right people.
They give tours like via a tram, cause I saw that.
Yeah.
Oh we got walked around.
And, John Water came up and filmed it for us
and some of this is gonna make it into a video piece
on LTAT at at later date.
We ate some astronaut food,
and that's the main point of that video that we shot there.
So that was really cool,
but we should probably talk about some
of the other aspects of it.
Well, I had no idea what to expect,
and the first thing that we went in was
called the vehicle, it was like the space vehicle
mock up center or something like that.
Big old room and all of the sudden it's like,
like multi-wheeled vehicle, look, I mean
that didn't look like the Mars rover,
just all different types of things
that they were building.
Like they had this thing that had six wheels,
but then it had a torso and the head and arms.
I think it had four wheels.
Of a, like a person.
I called it the redneck centaur because
it was an ATV on the bottom and a man up top.
Now I think that they, there's a competition series
where people build different things.
Like students.
In order to foster, yeah, students,
to foster innovation.
And I think we were looking at some of those things.
But the main thing that I was thinking,
this room is absolutely massive,
it's probably longer than a football field,
and maybe as wide,
has this giant couple of cranes that can move up and down
almost like you're at a ship yard, you know,
to be able to pick up these giant pieces of equipment.
And it has everything from a full scale,
kind of a replica of the International Space Station
with the different modules kind of connected together.
And then it has all those prototypes,
prototype vehicles that Link was talking about,
the competition vehicles that can do things
like throw a basketball through a hoop and stuff
that the students, engineering students have done.
Throw a rock through the moon.
And then it has like part of the shuttle,
like the practice part of the shuttle,
so the cockpit of the shuttle.
Let's talk about this.
Okay, so, it's literally the space shuttle cockpit
that they built to put the astronauts into train.
But you don't need the whole shuttle,
you just need the front of it.
And so we climb up in that thing,
of course, the space shuttle is not,
they don't use that,
they don't use the space shuttle anymore.
The things that they're doing now,
they're sending,
there's two different types of missions,
they're sending people to Mars,
and then they're sending people to the moon.
And the people that they're sending to,
which one is like, almost,
they call it commercial travel, right?
Yeah, I gotta be honest with you,
I didn't understand exactly what they were talking about
every time they said that.
They're just gonna start sending people.
People who want to go can just get on the thing?
Is that what you're talking about?
Like what Richard Branson was talking about?
Yes.
Maybe we should've asked some more questions.
We'll talk about it.
But the space shuttle,
they don't use that anymore.
The space shuttle is obsolete,
but they've still go the front of the cockpit in there,
and so we climbed up in this thing,
I mean we got to sit on the toilet,
it's got a suction leaver.
Yeah it sucks the poop right out of you.
Well.
It sends it in the right direction.
Once you get the poop out it sucks it down, so.
If you just poop in the open air in space, I mean,
there's no gravity.
News flash.
So it sucks the poop and the pee.
Which I'm thinking about getting one of those installed
in my house because better be safe than sorry.
I mean a flush kind of does the same thing on Earth,
just saying.
And then we crawled into the cockpit,
two seats up there, and here's the thing man,
back when they first built this stuff and used it,
apparently everything needed its own dedicated button,
like we live in a world now when it's like
you got the little screen and then everything that
you wanna do is all within the screen, you know?
It's like, but then it was just buttons, levers,
knobs, and if it were really important
that you have to lift something up
in order to then push the button.
But every single square inch of real estate
inside of this cockpit just buttons.
Well I think one of the things that I was struck with.
So overwhelming.
Is, and this is a combination of seeing the inside
of what they would actually have to fly,
seeing the cockpit,
meeting a couple of astronauts,
you know, we met Matthew who we did the tasting with,
and then we met the retired astronaut and his wife
who their grandkids are big Mythical Beasts.
I was just struck with how much they have to know.
Well yeah, first of all you gotta know what
every button does and you gotta know where it is.
I guess you start to associate like,
the physical location of the thing,
and like after a while, and that's why they have
this thing there so you can train and like second nature
you just know where to go for these buttons.
Well, and they have contact, I mean,
theoretically you can lose contact,
but you do have contact with the ground, with Houston.
So you're gonna get, they're monitoring things
and getting feedback,
and they're gonna be able to like tell you
what you need to do, and maybe tell you
what button to press, but, you know,
when we talked to Matthew he was like coming off of his,
basically finishing his training to become an astronaut,
and he was like going into his geology class.
Yeah, because you have to, when you go up there,
there so few people are up there
and you have to know so much more because
you just can't send a specialist for everything,
you can't send a doctor just to have a doctor,
you know, it's not like Star Fleet Command.
They do send doctors, but they're doctors
who are also astronauts who have been trained
in all these other ways.
But, he said not usually they don't send doctors
because you gotta have this breadth of knowledge
that goes beyond that.
Well I guess what I'm saying is
if you were a doctor or you had a medical background,
you would then have to have all the other same training
to be able to physically do what astronauts do.
Right.
And to mentally do what astronauts do.
And I asked him--
Yeah cause he's, like you said, he had taken,
he had just finished a two week course in geology
and you ask him what else he had studied.
Well he was like, you know, I've got dental care,
I can extract a tooth.
I was like did you pull somebody's tooth for training.
He was like no.
I was like well dude you didn't go all the way.
You gotta pull your own tooth.
Right now.
But here's the thing that kind of stuck me as crazy.
Is that there's 13 astronauts in the current class,
and so I asked him how many people applied
for those 13 positions, he said 18,000.
Yeah.
So if you think about the selection process.
Pretty elite.
Like when you meet somebody who's and NBA player,
I don't know what the percentages are
of like the number of people who want to be in
the NBA and the number of people who are,
but it's an elite thing,
but it's somebody who's really good at basketball.
Which is impressive in and of itself.
But it's still basketball, I mean like,
there's no indications that they're gonna be good
at everything else.
But an astronaut has gotten, you know,
they have gone through this evaluation
to test their physical capabilities,
their mental capabilities, their emotional stability,
they have psych evals because you're gonna go up
and you're gonna be in this confined space
and you can't go nuts.
You can't be difficult, you can't be hard to get along with.
You can't not play well with others.
You have to be the kind of person
who can be a leader but also can be a follower.
Here's a fact, high school senior players
eventually drafted by an NBA team,
about three in 10,000, or .03% chance,
but again, that's again still talking about somebody
who's in basketball.
This is someone who has been through this incredibly
stringent application process
who is like the best human, the best humans
we can come up with to send away from Earth.
We're sending the best of them away.
Well I would say the most well rounded technically.
You don't think they're the best?
Best is kind of a catch all term,
it's a little too generic.
Okay, well I consider them the best.
The best of the best.
He said that anybody can apply, it's a government position,
you just go to the website IWannaBeAnAstronaut.com.
But how many people who go through that process,
I would say the vast majority of the people
who go through the process of application
probably have some reason to think that they're qualified.
But that got me to thinking about, you've got these people.
More and more people are gonna be going,
and the qualifications are gonna be coming down.
I think that, well.
Commercial travel.
I don't agree with that
because they said that there were gonna be
maybe like 40 different people in space
in the next X number of years,
and so there was gonna be more astronauts,
but I don't think when you take the top 13,
if you expanded the top 13 out to the top 50,
I think the drop off from number 13 to number
50 in a group that small is not gonna be that measurable.
I think a certain top percentage of these people are gonna
be the most incredible people that Earth has to offer.
Now here's what I was thinking, and this gets into
ethics and other things, but like, shouldn't those people,
shouldn't those people be the ones who are
doing the sperm donation?
Oh I thought you were gonna say run for president.
Doing the sperm donation.
What are you referring to?
What are you talking about?
Shouldn't they be the ones to do the sperm donation.
For everyone?
Like only their seed or eggs I might add.
Right, shouldn't we be trying to.
Right, shouldn't we be trying to.
Create a master race of astronauts, that's horrible.
I know, I don't wanna get into that kind of,
maybe I've stepped in it by accident, I'm just saying.
One small step for Rhett, one dumb ass leap for sperm.
One giant leap for sperm.
I just think that the sperm at the sperm banks
could be a lot better if we were making astronauts
just add to it, they don't have to go in,
it doesn't have to be all astronaut sperm,
because you don't want everybody to look like
the few number of people who are astronauts.
Mhm.
I think you should be able to get your hands
on some astronaut sperm, if you need it, if you want it,
if that's what you want.
I guess what I'm saying is is I think astronauts
should be required to have a certain number of samples
to the sperm banks.
Cause like if you're gonna go through this trouble,
and first of all you have to donate sperm before you go up
because once you go up your DNA is all compromised
because of solar radiation and stuff.
Yeah seriously, your DNA changes.
Your telomeres shrink or something.
Yeah, she said it had to do with like the physical
lack of pressure and weightlessness.
First of all your head swells, we were told about that.
Yeah, well not only that.
Your face swells up.
Your nasal passages become completely
blocked when you're in space.
You don't have a sense of smell, fart it up, who cares.
So one of the reasons, and again,
we're probably gonna retread some of this
when we show this video, but, on LTAT,
but one of the reasons that a lot of the food
that the astronauts want is spicy,
like they like wasabi and hot sauce and that kind of thing
is because they can't taste anything
because they can't smell anything.
You taste with just your mouth,
which is highly underrated.
So I was like, this sounds absolutely miserable,
and that was when Matthew said well the thing
that you don't wanna get is you don't wanna get a cold
in space because when you have a cold on Earth
gravity is working to drain your clogged nasal passages
and you're swallowing it or coughing it up or whatever,
but gravity is constantly moving it out.
When you don't have gravity it can actually
become a serious situation when you've got a cold
and you're producing all this extra fluid and mucus
and it's just staying in your head.
And they don't give them like any sort of like
you couldn't just give them nasal spray
indefinitely because the effect,
the head swelling effect is so large
that you can't really counteract it with drugs longterm,
so he said that's one of the main reasons why
astronauts have an isolation period
before they go up because if you put a group of people
in an isolated place and you don't let it
be contaminated with the cold virus, or a virus in general
for a certain amount of time,
as long as you keep that group of people isolated
they cannot become sick.
It seems so obvious to me.
Cannot become sick at all?
If you take four people,
cause they wanna send four people to the moon by 2024.
Yeah, I didn't realize that's what he was saying.
Yeah, and you put--
I refused to believe that because, yeah.
You put them in a room and you say
we're gonna make sure that none of you have a cold,
we're gonna get you tested,
and then we're gonna isolate you
and you're gonna have no contact with,
like you can talk to your wife behind like a glass.
Yeah, you'll be in an aquarium.
Then when we walk you out to get into the Lunar Module,
we're gonna isolate you the whole time
so that you cannot get sick.
Now it is conceivable that sometime in the process
of like putting on the suit, or somebody involved
in the process ends up transmitting the virus to you,
but the plan is is that people who are on space missions
don't have any viruses that can cause
them to get sick.
Or bacteria, I guess.
And there's quite a protocol to this
because you gotta, you know,
the International Space Station,
which, we meet a guy, I wish I could remember his name,
he even gave us a business card
and then his grandkids came to the show.
Yeah, great guy.
Was it Bill?
Let's say Bill.
Oh man, I wish I could remember.
That's a good astronaut name.
I have his business card. Short.
In my suitcase at home, but he spent 190 days
In my suitcase at home, but he spent 190 days
on the International Space Station
with one other Russian dude.
Yep.
And they trained for years together to be up there.
And I was like so did you like each other?
And he was like we were good buddies
cause we trained so much together,
you know, I guess they hit it off,
and they keep in touch and they'll like still get together
every year, there's like this space explorers academy
and convention.
Well, and you have to have orbited the Earth 100 times
to qualify for it.
Yeah.
So if you've orbited the Earth 99 times
you're not invited to this convention.
You can be out from like at an info counter.
Send me up one more time, I want the buffet.
But the funny thing about--
He can work at the buffet, they let him in.
So we were talking to his wife and his daughter,
and his wife said he would call me every single day
because apparently there is a phone in the
International Space Station that can call any landline
or any line on Earth at any time.
And he was up there in 2006, 2007.
Yeah, and he said that it would be like.
He would call her every single day.
Every single night when he was about to go to bed.
Yeah, when he was about to go to bed,
but he was on, they operate on Greenwich Mean Time.
So it was like three in the afternoon
whenever he would wanna start talking.
Which, that was interesting.
These little things that I learned
that I never thought about.
Astronauts who are in orbit operate on Greenwich Mean Time,
and why wouldn't they, right?
You gotta pick something because your position,
day and night means nothing when you're up there
cause you're going around,
I don't know how many times you go around.
I would think they would pick Houston time
if they're talking to Houston the whole time,
but they don't.
No, and so he would call her and it would be
the middle of the afternoon and she said literally
every time he called he would say whatcha doing?
And she would say I'm at work.
I'm doing the same thing that I'm doing every day
that you call me.
And I'm in the middle of it.
And then he would say well can I tell you about my day?
Poor guy, he only had this other Russian dude to talk to.
Yeah he needed to talk to somebody.
And then he, he said that he'd call his daughter
and she'd be like well I'm going to class dad.
And then she said that she literally did the
you're breaking up dad thing where it was like
trying to get him off the phone,
she literally did that to him.
Right.
Poor guy up in space just.
Well poor guy up in space, I mean.
The International Space Station travels
in orbit around Earth at a speed
of roughly 17,150 miles per hour.
That's about five miles per second,
this means that the space station orbits Earth
once every 92 minutes.
So it doesn't take long.
An hour and a half you see a sunrise.
To go 100.
I mean when he was up there 190 days,
and he's been in space 225 days total,
and you get patches, it's kind of like
Cub Scouts, like the Boy Scouts.
Their patch game is on fleek.
We got some patches.
Well he has 100 day patch,
but he did not have, I was like where's the 200 day patch,
he's like they don't have it.
Even though he's been up there 225,
and he did 190 days in sequence.
But you're saying?
Consecutively.
If you're very selective about quarantining,
you could colonize Mars or put, set a base,
they're building a base on the moon,
that's one of the things they wanna do
as basically a staging area to get to Mars
and other places.
So you can have everyone working on the
International Space Station or this staging station
on the moon or on Mars in the future
and just eradicate disease.
Now will that, of course it'll find, disease finds a way.
But you're quarantined and then you're wearing
that orange suit, and you're going out to the thing,
and I think at that point you're donating
your sperm or your eggs.
They donate the sperm right before you take off
cause you need to get your mind clear anyway.
You know?
I don't know how relaxing it is to donate an egg.
That's true.
I think it's a lot more fun to donate sperm
than it is to donate eggs.
Yep, probably is.
Significantly easier.
You know what, we need to work on that.
And there's a whole lot more too.
We can work on that.
You do all that work and you get one egg,
you get like five billion sperm, we got it easy.
We got it too easy. Yeah we got it easy man.
But we also have, it's easier for us to use
the bathroom, we can stand, but not in space.
It's the great equalizer.
Everybody sits.
Everybody sits in space.
Last night, I gotta diverge a second, cause,
Lincoln comes in here in the living room and he's like
I wasn't the one who used the bathroom
all over the floor.
Somebody sprayed all over the floor,
Briton, Lando, dad, which one of you guys
splattered all over the floor?
I think it's Briton or Lando.
Thank you.
And if I had to narrow it down to one
I would say it was Briton.
We all looked at him and then he said
I haven't used the bathroom since I've gotten back.
I was like it's been four hours.
You've been back four hours homie, you're lying.
No, I went in the bathroom and we put in this,
we put in black tile on the ground.
Here's a hot tip, don't put black, like,
matte finished tile in a boys bathroom
because you can see, with the way the lighting is.
You can see all the splatter all the time.
Splatter everywhere.
It's like looking at a crime scene where the serial
killer used only urine.
Right.
I think there was a serial killer,
they called him the Pee Pee Man.
Pee Pee Killer.
The Pee Pee Sprayer.
Lincolns like, first of all I was proud of him
that he was outraged about it.
Even though I still feel like maybe he did it.
They called him the Golden Shower Killer.
Not the Golden State.
With the Golden State, what was that guy's name?
Golden State, Chris Moane, Chris Mullens?
I was trying to come up with a pun and I can't do it.
I feel like the phlegm is construction,
is constricting my ability to make puns.
Obstructing.
Obstructing, I can't even come up with the right words.
You are not astronaut material.
So, I ended up making Lando clean it up with a rag.
But I'm just saying, hot tip, no black floors
in a boys room.
And I was like guys, I'm just telling you,
you just need to sit down to pee like the astronauts
and me because you never know, it's very unpredictable,
it's a lot of distance between.
John Wayne Spraycy.
There it is, you got it.
I knew I'd find it somewhere.
Okay, you found it.
That was pretty good.
John Wayne Spraycy.
Okay, so back to astronauts.
So we think that they should be donating sperm,
not to build a master race,
just to supplement sperm banks,
just to make people a little bit smarter.
I just don't think they're big on personality.
I'm not saying that I didn't like him,
I didn't like the astronauts that I met.
Well they're not very reactive.
Yeah they're very, they're so even keeled.
You can't be reactive, you have to be
a non-reactionary person.
I just don't think that makes for a fun space situation.
It's like when everybody's unflappable.
You don't want, you're saying you want it
to be like Bachelor in Paradise up there?
You don't want that.
You keep bringing it back to like spreading seed and stuff
I'm just trying to make it about fun.
First of all, this is a clear indication--
You don't have to have sex to have fun.
This is a clear indication that you thought
that my reference to Bachelor in Paradise
had to do with sex.
Yeah.
Jacob and Kiko clearly knew I just meant
putting emotionally unstable people
together in a small space.
Oh.
That's why they both left.
Because reality television is about putting
emotionally unstable people together in a confined space
and that doesn't have to be like a confined
physical space, but it's just like confining them
in some way, like you can only talk to these people.
So if you put those kind of people together
in the International Space Station.
Jacob says with alcohol.
With alcohol, right.
The whole space station would just somehow
end up getting burned up in the atmosphere.
It just wouldn't, it couldn't succeed.
Now, but if we could all watch it on television
every Monday and Tuesday night on ABC,
we would think it was worth it.
But yeah, you start colonizing places,
you start to realize you think with,
it's just not a fun, it's not a fun colony,
I'm just like, it can't be.
You can bring the fun people later.
At what point?
But you can't have fun people do the initial colonization.
At what point do I, fun guy, get invited?
I don't know if you ever get invited.
I never get invited cause I'm too tall for the space craft.
6'4" is the limit.
Yeah, you're too tall.
So I'll never go, I'll never go.
I can do maybe the antigravity flight
or something like that, but I can't, well maybe the,
I might be able to take a commercial flight,
maybe they'll have some option at some point.
But another thing I wanna talk about that hit me
when we were, especially in the space
vehicle mock up center.
I was like, now I am not a conspiracy theorist,
I know I play one on Good Mythical Morning from time to time
but I cam not a conspiracy theorist in actuality,
and I do not believe that there's compelling reasons
to doubt that we have been to the moon.
But I would say is if I were a conspiracy theorist,
specifically one who doubted that the moon landing was real,
I do not believe that taking a tour of NASA
would make me feel better.
And here's what I would say,
going into the space vehicle mock up center
and seeing like the red neck centaur,
you're like what is happening here,
like I know that they're just experimenting with
different things, but even if, when you get inside
the Lunar Module, which we stuck our heads in,
basically the kind of contraption that's gonna go up there,
you're like this all seems so tenuous,
it just doesn't seem.
I know it's a bunch of engineering,
and it's all well thought out.
But it just seems like it could just,
and of course at times it has completely fallen apart.
There's so many things that could go wrong,
it just feels like I wouldn't have a whole lot of
confidence, it wasn't the type of environment
that I expected it to be.
Like, the fact that we were able to touch things,
even though it was stuff that wasn't gonna go in space,
this is the mock up center,
they don't let us touch the real stuff,
but I just got this sense that like
man if I thought this was fake and this was all
just to carry on a lie.
That's quite an investment.
I would probably still believe it having seen this.
The only way you could prove it to me
if I was a flat Earther, or if I didn't believe
in the moon landing, I'd have to go on the ride, you know?
Have to go up.
I think it's quite an investment to pull
the wool over the eyes of the public.
To what end?
Well yeah, that's why conspiracy theories,
for the most part, don't make sense,
because when fully analyzed, almost all conspiracy theories
carrying out the conspiracy theory
becomes more of a conspiracy
than the conspiracy theory itself.
And that's why most conspiracy theories,
logically fall apart.
But most people who want to believe conspiracy theories
cannot be swayed by logic or facts.
I think, the thing that I reacted to
was that a lot of it, especially the experimental stuff,
by design, was like hey, we're just gonna
see where this goes, you know?
This spirit of exploration, like,
trudging towards a big question mark,
and, you know, like investing in the unknown.
We're gonna build this thing,
we're gonna have all these college students
compete to build all this different type of stuff
because they'll probably come up with something
that's awesome that we'll need for something else
and you know, they talk about all the things,
you can look at the list of all the things
that we benefit from on Earth because they were
byproducts of all the innovation for space travel.
But it is infectious to be there
and to see that it's just,
we set, we looked up, and then we were like
let's check it out, let's bend our will,
and then, you know, you talk about people working together
like on the International Space Station,
you got like the whole Russian part,
you got, the Japanese built a whole rec center
for the freaking space station.
A gym, yeah, they had the gym module.
Yeah, it's a big one.
And you can, it's one of the only places that you
can send experiments out of the International Space Station
so it's not just for push ups and burpees.
You're saying you could do like?
They send experiments out.
There's like a special hatch.
You can do the elliptical outside of the Space Station?
Well, yeah, like on the Jetsons,
where it's like you got that elliptical out there.
Yeah.
Walk the dog on it.
But, that spirit of exploration is infectious
and it was, I don't know,
it made me feel good about all the stuff we try
and we don't know why we're doing it.
You know?
Yeah.
In our own little way, it was like a kinship.
And I know that people say that a lot,
they're like why worry about this
when you've got, you know, you've got people
on Earth who are not even getting properly,
you know, getting proper nutrition.
Well first of all I don't think that it's
a net zero situation, so I don't think that,
it's not a zero sum game.
So if you invest in space travel,
it's necessarily means someone's not getting a meal,
but I completely agree with you that
we should be trying things just to try them.
It's like why go, like,
some people are like why go to Mars, I mean,
we have, we're having trouble enough
keeping the inhabitable planet, you know, habitable.
Why are we gonna go someplace else that
we're gonna have to geoengineer this place
just in order to live there.
And I think it's because you gotta constantly
be moving forward and innovating,
you gotta be constantly be trying the things.
Sometimes people ask us that question,
and I'm not gonna make a,
I am gonna make an analogy.
And I do not think that what we do
in Mythical Entertainment is comparable
to what is happening in NASA,
even though they did have that red neck centaur,
which is the kind of thing we've totally done on the show.
We've gotten Paisley to build one of those.
Yeah.
But sometimes people are like,
what are you, like what are you trying to do,
what do you hope to do,
like why are you trying to keep growing this,
and to me, apart of it just--
The thrill of discovery.
Yeah, exploration, it's just like--
The thrill of expression, and discovery.
Why am I gonna throw this, you know,
sodium into the middle of a lake?
Well we're not gonna do that.
No, but there's like, you know,
there are like high school chemistry teachers
who will take like pure sodium and throw it into
the middle of a lake to watch it explode.
I mean you can't do that anymore,
but you could probably do it in the 80s.
Why do that?
Because it's like well,
it'd be cool to see that lake explode.
I'm just saying, sometimes you just, you start a process
just to see where it's gonna end.
I'm all in on space travel.
I'm all in.
You gonna go?
I ain't gonna go unless I have to.
Yeah, I'm all in into going to the moon, going to Mars,
and I don't think I have to have like a why
beyond just because let's see if we can do it as people,
let's see if we can do it as a civilization.
Yeah, well.
So if Rhett ever goes up,
we can credit that little tour we took.
He's gonna be gripping lovingly to a centaur rover
cause I'm not gonna be there.
I'm gonna be John Wayne Spacey.
The puns keep coming.
All right, I'm gonna look up my rec
cause I got it here in a,
let's see where is this.
Are you ready for my rec?
Yeah.
Rec baby, rec baby, one, two, three, four,
rec baby, rec baby, um,
all right, I'm gonna recommend the sleep headphones
Bluetooth 5.0 wireless eye mask.
Recently featured in the Rhett MC Instagram.
Yeah, our friend Jenny,
she knows I'm big into like sleep masks,
and she brought one, I had a party,
she brought one over, I was like you expect the party's
gonna be this bad?
You gonna be sleep masking it up in the corner?
She was like no, I wanted you to see this
because I knew you'd be into it.
Because, on the bus, maybe she heard me complaining
that I had a really good sleep mask,
but then I would put my ear buds in,
and if you sleep on your side, like,
it crams them into your ears,
and you're trying to listen to the deep sleep playlist.
This solves that problem.
The only thing it doesn't have is noise canceling,
and you have to jack up the volume all the way
when you're on a tour bus because it's like.
Cause it can't do the noise canceling
unless it has something in your ear canal, right?
That's the problem?
No, it's different technology too.
Well cause I felt those and there was no,
I couldn't tell you where the speaker were.
There's little speakers right over your ears,
but if you lay on your side it does feel like
you're just laying on plush headband.
And I mean, not a sponsor of course, it's only $20.
And it connects Bluetooth to your phone.
Is it highly rated?
775 reviews, 4.5 stars, yeah.
Oh that's very highly rated.
I just think, I don't, yeah,
I mean, it's not.
It's only $20?
And I use it on the plane.
Yeah it's only $20.
Yeah, you'd think it'd be more than that.
So yeah, that's my rec, man.
Again, Homder, H o m d e r.
Do you recommend wearing it with a hat and a bandana
on flights and looking like Darth Vader?
Yeah, the guy beside me who I did not know
had to have been into it.
I'm sure he loved it.
I've gotta say, I'm gonna continue taking pictures
of you while you fly.
Just know the mouth is open underneath the bandana.
Is it?
Definitely, right?
Definitely.
That's why I do that.
Cause I don't really care about the picture
but I just don't like the idea of--
Breathing in people's stuff without the filter.
Yeah, or looking, or putting stuff in my mouth.
Yeah, people have been known to do that.
People could do that.
Yeah.
But not now with my bandana.
I also recommend a bandana over your face.
So there you have it.
I am glad that we were here and that we did this.
Don't get me wrong, it's not that.
I, I perked up a little bit.
I wanted to take a nap, but so what?
Thanks for hanging out.
No naps needed.
Hopefully you didn't nap through this.
#EarBiscuits.
We'll speak at you again 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.
