Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - 209: What's It Like Inside NASA? | Ear Biscuits Ep. 209

Episode Date: September 23, 2019

Houston, we have a problem. We've let Rhett and Link inside. R&L look back at their special experiences inside the Johnson Space Center in Houston, where they met up with a real live astronaut, on this episode of Ear Biscuits! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is Mythical. Before we get started, we wanna let you know that to celebrate 1600 episodes, we're pricing all of our teas at $16 for only 16 hours at Mythical.com today, Monday the 23rd. That's Mythical.com, only today. Now on with the biscuit. 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. 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 because we never discussed it because we moved right up, we had to do a show that night. Right. So we will dedicate this episode

to unpacking NASA's secrets. But yeah, we're. 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. 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 redlinklive.com to whet 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 playing 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 we did have some fun. We didn't bring the kids this time. Britton 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,

because I wanna say it, every time we talk about the Bleak Creek Conversations, that you get 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 did, we had some crazy, 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 don't, we have some things that we say before songs that we always say but the, even that changes up but we use the energy and the vibe of that particular location and sometimes it's in a weird place. Yeah, we channeled 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 because you and Britton are like into all this type of stuff and it turns out voodoo dolls are supposed to be nice. They're supposed to be 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 let me just 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, predominantly African ancestral religions meets some elements of Western religion like Catholicism and kind of, it's 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 because 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 wanna bring some bad to somebody, but. 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. 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, everyone is walking around. Or what time of day. Yeah, because 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 cup. She had a 36 inch doll head. Full of alcohol. Who knows what? A lot of times it's just like a slushy. I mean, they got whole bars that behind the bar, instead of seeing like taps, it's just alcoholic slushies.

Yeah, for the children. And so she comes up and she's already a little bit New Orleansed. 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, well 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. I think most people know that. 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.

Yeah. 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 newspaper 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, but I. 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. 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 kinda 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. And it did look very good, but I didn't get it. This place was called, I wanted to say Marjorie's, but it wasn't, it was Majorie's with no R, Majorie'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. It's just one of those places. You're not supposed to, like she would yell at us like, come over here, I got you, have you ordered? It's like no, can you order, what do you want? It was like the taking of the orders was, like there was an aggressive 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 guy who looked like he could have meth. I saw a guy who looked like he could have been 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? Oh 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 Britton sat down after being through that line, he was like whoa, that was a very stress inducing experience. Yeah. And it was because you just felt like an outsider. But then it was replaced with the Pure joy. Dining experience. Shrimp were amazing.

They had these twice, 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 Britton's plate and I'm like, we're blood. You done with that chicken leg? Are you gonna eat that? It'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. Oh man, I got goosebumps. And then I started talking about how good this chicken was and I got my goosebumps, I got goosebumps. I got goose bump bumped.

And it just felt so good to eat that chicken. It was like I was eating Manny'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 better fried chicken than that. Maybe there's a time that I've forgotten

that I had as good a 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 this giant piece of muscle. Yeah, but you don't get as much of that crunchy in that skin, I like that too. You get a huge blanket of skin, man. It's like 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 of 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 let you have any

because I wasn't gonna give any up. But Britton did, thank goodness, and it was absolutely transformative. I mean it was transportative, it transported me. Because my nanny's not able to fry chicken anymore and she, you know, there's something to the brining. Like if it's really salty, you're onto something. Yeah, well they do. You gotta get the brining right.

The brining does something with it. Something with milk. With the juiciness though, too. She did something with brining and milk or something. But it's apparently irreplicable until this place, Majorey's and. Highly recommend it if you're in New Orleans. Oh yeah, it was just, it was so good.

I mean. No, I will say, you know, we were, because speaking of food, we were doing the the chow down in your town thing that we did, 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 gumbo. Oh, it was gumbo. And gumbo and beignets. And it was beignets from Cafe Du Monde, which is the place to get beignets, but they had been in the bag for maybe 45 minutes

by the time they got to us and you really need to eat those fresh. They still won. We thought the gumbo should have been jambalaya and we were trying to figure out why it wasn't red but it was just a pot of gravy. We were just super ignorant about what jambalaya is versus gumbo and gumbo, because of the roux,

is supposed to be brown but I just don't, I mean it wasn't bad, I ate an entire 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.

Yeah, 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, 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, am I wrong to say that escape rooms are not like a hotbed of coolness? It's like you just don't think you'd like. But what is a hotbed of coolness? Give me an example. Like a rock and roll bar like out back in the alley. Like if you're walking in the back alley and you see like, I don't know,

you see somebody from Motley Crue 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, it's like you 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 Disneyland. But you never quite forget that you're in a strip mall. Right. In like 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. Now 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 kinda 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 unlocking the antidote for the zombie apocalypse. Yeah. Pretty cool actually. We had a lot of fun. Yeah we did. We didn't fight too much. And we got out.

You and I didn't fight any, I think Britton and I fought. Which I think is a great, I think that's the dynamic when Britton'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 and I'm like, I think 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 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? No, yeah, I've got like a. You want me to cut the throat of your voodoo dog, 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. I noticed 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 from a company 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, signing the posters for the meet and greet, and then 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 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.

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. You think that they're lying about the escape percentage? That makes absolutely, there's no, I can't think of zero reason why they would lie about that.

I just think 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 would not. You didn't escape from an escape room? I've only escaped from escape rooms.

Would not be fun for people who like escape rooms if people who are coming to an escape room for the first time always get out. That seems pretty straightforward to me. Because, and we had very motivated, we were all very motivated and we all worked well together. And then Britton 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 we wouldn't- or it wasn't cool because you don't think it can be cool.

No, it's not cool. It's like magic without a magician. It's kind of what it feels like. 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

because we escaped from an escape room in Tampa, Florida. Well 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, 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%. 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 a skate 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 kinda have to turn to him and say, dude.

He couldn't take any. Just sit in the corner. He could take no direction. Sit in the corner, man. He's such a distraction. Sit in the 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. Shop Best Buy's ultimate smartphone sale today. Get a Best Buy gift card of up to $200 on select phone activations with major carriers. Visit your nearest Best Buy store today. Terms and conditions apply. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you.

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Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Terms apply. 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, I think, no, I wanna lean into this because I think this is just- Let's go tireder. Part of an Ear Biscuit is an authentic, like hey, where it's checking in in one sense,

having a conversation 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 that. 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 the 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 now. 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. The people came here to do the interview that was also for the Audible thing and then we stepped 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 going 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 that I've got a lot of thoughts. Moon landing can be real.

The moon landing doesn't have to be fake. That's not what we're getting at. Yeah, 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, 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, because I saw that. Yeah. Oh, we got walked around. And John Warder came up and filmed it for us and it's gonna be, some of this is gonna make it into a video piece on LTAT.

Right. At a 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,

it was called the vehicle, it was like the space vehicle mock-up center or something like that. Big old room and all of a sudden it was like, like multi-wheeled vehicle, 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 the torso and the head and arms of a. I think it had four wheels. Like a person. I called it the redneck centaur. Yeah. 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, now 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 shipyard, you know, to be able to pick up these giant pieces of cranes that can move up and down, almost like you're at a shipyard, 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

and 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 engineering students have done. Throw a rock through the moon. And then it has 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. Yeah. 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 don't use that, they don't use the space shuttle anymore, the things that they're doing now are, 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 didn't, 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 and can just get on the thing? Is that what you're talking about? I think so, yeah. Like what Richard Branson

was talking about? Yes. Maybe we should have asked some more questions. We're gonna talk about it. But the space shuttle, they don't use that anymore. Space shuttle is obsolete. But they still got 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 like got a suction lever. Yeah, it sucks the poop right out of you. It sends it in the right direction. Yeah, 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 at my house because better be safe than sorry. I mean, a flush kind of does the same thing on Earth. Yeah. 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 this little screen and then it, apparently everything needed its own dedicated button.

Like we live in a world now when it's like you got this little screen and then everything, like everything that you wanna do is all within the screen. Right. You know, it's like, but then it was just buttons, levers, knobs, and if they 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. 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 it like second nature, you just know where to go for these buttons. Well and they have contact, I mean, theoretically, I guess 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's 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 Starfleet 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 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, because he's, like you said, he had taken, he had just finished a two week course in geology. And you asked 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. 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. But here's the thing that kind of struck me. Right now. It's crazy. Is that, you know, 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 an 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,

they have gone through this evaluation to test their physical capabilities, their mental capabilities, their emotional stability. They have psyche valves 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 to, 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 still talking about somebody who can play 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? I don't know, 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, Iwanttobeanastronaut.com. But how many people who go through that process, I would say the vast majority of people who go through the process of application

are 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. 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 that 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 the 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're gonna say run for president.

Doing the sperm donation, what are you referring to? Shouldn't they be the ones to do the sperm donation? Yeah. For everyone? Well, you don't want- Like only their seed or eggs, I might add. 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 that if you had to make a choice- One small step for Rhett. One giant step 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. 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 I think that astronauts should be required to have a certain number of samples to the sperm banks. It's 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 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? One of the reasons, and again, we're probably gonna retread some of this when we show this video on LTAT, but one of the reasons that a lot of the food that the astronauts want is spicy,

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 then 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, you 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 any sort of like, you couldn't just give them nasal spray indefinitely because the effect of the head swelling effect is so large that you can't really counteract it with drugs long term. 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, because they want to send four people to the moon by 2024. I didn't realize that's what he was saying. Yeah, and you put. I refuse to believe that. And you put them in a room. Yeah. And you say, we're gonna make sure

that none of you have a cold, that we're gonna get you tested, and then we're gonna isolate sure that none of you have a cold, that we're gonna get you tested, and then we're gonna isolate you and you're gonna have no contact with your, like you can talk to your like wife behind like a glass. Yeah, you'll be in an aquarium. Then when we walk you out to get into the lunar module. Hold your breath.

We're gonna isolate you the whole time so that you cannot get sick. Now, it is conceivable that sometime in the process of 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 got the International Space Station, which we met 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 his name. That's a good astronaut name. I have his business card in my suitcase at home. I wish I could say good astronaut name. I have his business card 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, yeah, we're good buddies because 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 front like at an info counter. Hit me up one more time. I want the buffet. But the funny thing about- He could work at the buffet. They'd 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 and she said. Every single night when he was about to go to bed.

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. That was interesting, these little things that I learned that I'd 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 because you're going around. I don't know how many times you go around. I would think they would pick Houston time. Depends on what orbit you're in. So 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 afternoon and she said literally every time he called, he would say, what you 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 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. 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 to go 100. I mean, when he was up there in 190 days, and he's been in space 225 days total. And you get patches, it's kinda like the Cub Scouts, like the Boy Scouts. Their patch game is on fleek. He's got, he has. We got some patches.

Well he has a 100 day patch but he did not have, I was like where's the 200 day patch? He was like I 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 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 a way, 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 they take off because you need to get your mind clear anyway.

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. Yeah, it probably is. It's 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 a five billion sperm, we got it easy. Yeah we got it easy, man. But we also have, it's easier for us to use the bathroom, we can stand. True. But not in space.

In space, everybody sits. It's the great equalizer.. True. But not in space. In space, everybody sits. It's the great equalizer. Everybody sits. Everybody sits in space. Last night, I gotta diverge a second because 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. Britton, Lando, Dad, which one of you guys splattered all over the floor. Britton, Lando, Dad, which one of you guys splattered all over the floor? I think it was Britton or Lando. Thank you. And if I had to narrow it down to one, I would say it was Britton. We all looked at him and then he added,

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 finish tile in a boy's bathroom because you can see with the way the lighting is, you can just see.

You 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. The pee pee killer.

The pee pee sprayer. Lincoln's 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 call him the golden shower killer, not the Golden State. What was the guy's name? Golden State.

Chris Mullen. I was trying to come up with a pun and I can't do it. I feel like the phlegm is constricting my ability to make puns. Obstructing. I can't even come up with the right words. You are not astronaut material. I ended up making Lando clean it up with a rag,

but I'm just saying, hot tip, no black floors in a boy's 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. There's a lot of distance between. John Wayne Spracy.

There it is. You got it. I knew I'd find it somewhere. Okay, you found it. That was pretty good. John Wayne Spracy. Okay, so found it. That was pretty good. Yeah. John Wayne Spracy. Okay, so back to astronauts. Okay, so we think 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 that 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. 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, man. I'm not, you keep bringing it back to like spreading seed and stuff.

No, no, no. I'm 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 that I just meant putting emotionally unstable people together in a small space. Oh, I've never watched. That's why they both laughed. Because reality television is about putting emotionally unstable people together in a small space. Oh, I've never watched. That's why they both laughed. 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. Those people, 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, I mean, it's just not a fun place to, it's not a fun colony.

I'm just like, it can't be. You can bring the fun people later, 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. To the colony. I never get invited because I don't know if you ever get invited. To the con. I never get invited because I can't, I'm too tall for the spacecraft.

Six four is the limit. Yeah, you're too tall. So I'll never go to, I can do maybe like the anti-gravity 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 mockup 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 am 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 what 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. Here's what I'll say. Going into the space vehicle mock-up center and seeing like the redneck 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. The fact that we were able to touch things, even though it was stuff that wasn't gonna go in space, it was, 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, if I didn't believe in the moon landing,

is 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. 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 gonna see where this goes. You know, it's this spirit of exploration, like trudging towards a big question mark and 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 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 freakin' space station. A gym, yeah, they have the gym module. Yeah, it's a big one, and it's one of the only places

that you can send experiments out of the International Space Station, so it's not just for pushups and burpees. You can do, you're saying you can 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, to me. 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 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're having trouble enough keeping the inhabitable planet, you know, habitable. Why are we gonna go someplace else that we're gonna have to like geoengineer this place

just in order to live there. I think it's because you gotta constantly be moving forward and innovating, you gotta constantly be trying 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 at NASA,

even though they did have that redneck centaur, which is the kind of thing we would've done on the show. We would've gotten Paisley to build one of those. But sometimes you're like, what are you trying to do? Like what do you hope to do? Like why are you trying to keep growing this? And to me, a part of it is just the- 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 probably do it in the 80s. And 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're gonna go? I ain't gonna go unless I have to. Yeah, I'm all in and 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. Right. He's gonna be gripping lovingly to a Centaur rover because I'm not gonna be there. I'm gonna be John Wayne Spacey. Yeah, the puns keep coming. All right, I'm gonna look up my rec

because I got it here in a, are you ready for my rec? Yeah. Rec baby, rec baby, one, two, three, four, rec baby, rec baby. 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're gonna be sleep masking it up in the corner? She's 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 earbuds 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 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 brrr. Because it can't do the noise canceling unless it has something in your ear canal, right? Yeah. Is that the problem? Because this is like- No, it's different technology too.

Well, because I felt those and there was no, I couldn't tell you where the speakers 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. That's only 20 bucks. And it connects Bluetooth to your phone.

Is it highly rated? 775 reviews, four and a half stars, yeah. Oh, that's very highly rated. I just think, yeah, I mean it's not. It's only 20 bucks? I used it on the plane, yeah, it's only 20 bucks. 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. Would 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 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. Because I don't really care about the picture, but I just don't like the idea of-

Breathing in people's stuff without a filter. Yeah, 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 got 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. Hashtag air biscuits. We'll speak at you again next week.