Ep. 281: "Eight Straight"
Hello.
Hi, John.
Hi, Merlin.
How's it going?
Oh, it's real good.
How are you?
Oh, are you good?
Yeah.
Yeah.
It's getting real low key.
It's real soft over here.
Real soft.
Real early.
It's early.
It's gentle.
I've been trying to get, you know, I've been trying to get eight hours.
For a while now.
I know we've talked about it.
No, no, no go go I'm trying to get I'll talk real quick because I want to hear about the sleep I know you've been looking at your book about sleep.
I've been looking at it and I've been trying to get eight hours and it's been good It's been real good to just be focusing on trying to get I'm trying to get a solid eight hours because the book I've been reading says that all this thing about second sleep and
All these other alternative theories.
You can just throw them all out the window.
Out the window.
Because you're going to need to come in on Saturday and you're going to need to get eight straight hours of sleep.
Eight straight.
And I've been trying to do that.
Last night I didn't get there.
But I tell you what, just trying feels good, you know?
There are no losers in trying to get eight hours of sleep.
I was wondering about that.
You don't feel... See, part of the problem with this is, like, you take anything... We've talked about anxiety recently, where, like, when I feel like...
when I find myself doing the stuff I should be doing anyway, like taking care of myself and doing meditation and stuff like that, I only tend to return to that when I'm stressed out.
So now I associate it with stress, but it sounds like you're not stressing about this.
Well, no.
And it's, it's a key.
I mean, it's not a key, but there are some sentences in the sleep book to remind you to do that, uh, to not get stressed about not being able to go to sleep.
But I, I, uh,
You know, that cycle I've heard about, I've heard it talked about where you're lying in bed and you're like, I have to wake up and I'm still not asleep.
And, you know, and you're just spiraling up, up, up.
It's not making it better.
No.
And I don't do that.
But I...
Uh, but you know, like I don't, I walk around like down on myself all the time.
So when you, when I come up with something that is a new thing to be down on myself about, it's, it's not like, Oh shit, I got to get to sleep.
It's more like great job.
Fuck face.
Yeah.
Um, but I'm trying not to do that.
I'm just lying.
I'm just lying there.
I'm like, and you know, the problem is obvious.
I shouldn't go to bed at three o'clock in the morning.
And we've, I mean, I've been talking about this since you and I met.
It seems obvious.
It's not always obvious.
It's not obvious because think of all this stuff out there.
that you can only read at 2.45 in the morning.
That's true.
You know, you're not going to be able to, like, be reading about the history of Welsh rarebit at 2 a.m.
You have to wait.
Yeah, you have markets opening around the world.
That's right.
Check in on your markets.
I want to be in on the Korean markets.
I want to see what's happening around the world.
I want to, you know, Shanghai.
I want to see what the market has to say.
Mm-hmm.
Uh, but, but, uh, but, uh, but otherwise, otherwise Merlin, you know, is he, is he a great man?
Is he, you know, is he a kind man?
Uh, I'm good.
I'm good.
You know, how's it going over there?
It sounds like you're, you're, uh, you're typing.
Oh, I got to type.
I'm always doing stuff.
Yeah.
I'm sorry.
I'm sorry.
I shouldn't do that, but I have to do that.
I even got a quiet keyboard.
You should hear what it would be like with my old keyboard.
I think I was here when you had an old keyboard.
Well, that's that keyboard.
I just brought that keyboard up a second ago, but if I was doing what I normally do...
Oh, yeah.
Yeah.
Oh, see, that's got sound.
I'm much more efficient.
Didn't you used to have a compressor or something?
This is a little bit inside baseball, but, you know, everything that's in the show is in the show.
I try to ride this a little bit, but, you know, I try to do what they call gate, but it makes it weird, and I don't like editing things.
No, gate is bad.
I would continue with the sleep talk a little bit because I do think it's interesting.
Well, so, so.
Can I say one thing?
Can I say one thing here?
So you laugh.
People laugh.
People, people deride.
They point, they point and they say, oh, it's so obvious.
Stop going to bed at 3 a.m.
You know, and I say, don't think of an elephant.
Here's the problem is the past is prologue.
You know, habits die hard, you know, and if you're if you're wired a certain way, doesn't matter whether it's good or bad.
It's just how it is.
Think about think about if you ever try to stop cursing.
Oh, shoot.
Dude, have I on our family friendly program?
We hardly ever say swears.
When my daughter was born, I tried real hard.
I remember my mother saying how hard it was for my dad to stop cursing because apparently he was a world-class swearer.
I never got access to that, which is a bummer.
But you don't realize how much you swear until you try to stop swearing.
It is hard to stop swearing.
Well, because, you know, I don't mean to get all Si Hayakawa here, but, you know, language is the way that we express the way our brain works.
And we do not have a way to go flick a button in our head, whether that's how you think about progressive social issues or Bitcoin or cursing.
Like the way that you get your mind right about something takes a real long time because that's how you've mostly always done it.
And the way you've mostly always done it is not thinking about it too much this very morning.
I decided I'm going to clean up my office because it really, really needs it.
And on the one hand, it's astonishingly easy just to go like, oh, God, there's so much stuff here that's garbage that I can throw out.
On the one hand, that's very easy.
But the reason it got to where it is is because that's where it went.
Yes, because it isn't easy.
No, it's not.
I mean, what is easy or what is repeated becomes who we are.
Anyway, I just want to say I'm sympathetic to that because I think there's a lot of stuff that seems obvious to somebody for whom that's not the easy thing.
So, I mean, it's... But then on top of that, then, so how do you fix that?
And the way you fix that normally is you act like you're, you know, if you're a middle-aged man, you act like you're trying to knock down a door.
And you get all mad.
And you yell at yourself.
And that's exactly the wrong way to deal with sleep, is all I'm saying.
That's not all I'm saying, but that's a component of what I'm saying.
You know, there are a lot of things that... Little interjections that we put into our talk.
I think in the case of swears, bad swears, that you always... If you grew up like me, and I presume like you...
You always have a little toothpick, a little cocktail feathered toothpick that you put in every time you swear because you know you're doing something wrong.
That's baked in to us from kids.
So I find it...
Not the hardest thing to do to not swear in varying company because I always feel like there's a little flag in every swear.
A tiny one.
Obviously, with my friends, I'm not sitting there going, goddamn fucking razor, and then putting little...
little toothpicks in.
But if you're King Neptune and you're in front of a mic, you're going to notice that little tassel toothpick coming your way and you're going to say, I reject you.
Yeah, it's not a... That's not what a king does.
Yeah, it's not like... Because I find myself... I was listening to myself talk the other day and I heard myself say the word, well, obviously... And then I would say something and then I would talk for a little while and then I'd be like, well, obviously... And I realized, oh, the word obviously has become a tick.
I...
I have now heard myself say it a couple of times and it's like once you start looking for Volkswagen bugs on the highway you start seeing Volkswagen bugs everywhere I'm hearing myself say obviously and like any tick as soon as you're aware of it Now it's really hard not to say obviously like I'm choking on obviously's and I don't know why the hell that's the tick things aren't obvious Always sometimes they are and now I'm like how long have I been saying obviously in that way and
I'm trying to stick a toothpick in that.
But like, you know, the word fuck, like every time I say it, I have to get over the hump of realizing that I'm saying a swear.
Yeah, yeah.
Well, I mean, I think there's probably, I think there's almost certainly a name for this kind of word.
But there's a kind of word that we, a whole set of words that we use when we're speaking extemporaneously.
So, I mean, you know, people like to criticize young people saying it was, you know, like that kind of stuff.
But that's the sound of your brain processing.
Like me right now, this sentence, such as it is, is riddled with ellipses as I try to figure out what it is that I'm trying to say.
Well, you and I both say, I mean, we both say I mean as a pause.
There are so many.
Well, and there's a lot that become sort of hot.
I think two that are hot right now and have been for a few years is look.
Look.
And the other one, listen.
Listen.
They're both a version of so.
They're both a way of like, we're going to pause this, and now I'm going to reframe this in the way.
But I don't think people realize necessarily, once they start going down the look and listen hole, I don't think they know how much they're using it.
Look.
Listen.
Listen.
Obviously.
Obviously.
When I do shows, live shows, where it's storytellers, because I do quite a few of these types of things with people in Portland and sometimes in San Francisco even,
I'm in a little storyteller group where we get up and tell stories.
And early on, I realized someone in the group pointed out nine out of 10 or 99 out of 100 storytellers will get up and start their story by saying so.
And then they'll start telling the story.
And this person was saying to me, just don't say so.
Whatever you do, don't start your story with so.
And I got up and I was like, so.
And you do that little like, so.
And it's the hardest thing to break when you're trying to... It's sort of like people on podcasts all say, Hey, guys.
Or like YouTube.
Hey, guys.
Hey, guys.
Who are these titular guys?
Who are you talking to?
Hey, guys.
That's a weird tick of YouTube.
Those both have... The problem with So, and I've covered this so much in the past, but I think the one problem with So is that people...
maybe even unintentionally, uh, use that as a way to not answer the question that somebody asked.
I think it is definitely a tactic and it's a way to reframe what's about to be said.
I think when you get so, or Hey guys and stuff like that, a lot of that is to place what's happening now in this moment in the moment.
Do you know what I mean?
Yep.
Yep.
If you're telling, it's just you and me guys.
Yeah.
Hey guys.
The thing about sleep bro book is
is that he says a couple of things.
That your circadian rhythm, are you ready for this?
Your circadian rhythm is what it is.
And your whole life people are telling you that you've got to, that it's a habit.
That you have to get on a good one of.
And you're doing it wrong.
But he says, we've taken people, we put them down.
Really, though, I mean, along the lines of, you've been eating too much junk food, so now make a mindful attempt to buy and consume more fresh fruits and vegetables.
There's a way to improve this situation by having a behavioral and slightly cognitive change, right?
Is that the implication of Sleep Bro?
Yeah.
I'm sorry, that's what Sleep Lit Bro is responding to, is people saying, well, just go to bed earlier, you dingus.
Yeah, right, and the implication is that there's a moral assessment of you, you know, that people that get up in the morning early are good, and people that sleep late and too much are bad, and people that are up in the middle of the night have problems, and...
And there's a platonic ideal, which is that you wake up with the sun and you're productive all day and little trumpet sound every time you walk into a room.
And then at night, after a satisfying lovemaking with your significant other, you turn over, you lay down on your pillow and immediately are asleep and sleep soundly for eight hours and wake up without an alarm.
Anything else feels like moral turpitude.
Yeah.
And he's saying, first of all, that this thing that we all feel, which is that our internal clocks are not on a 24-hour schedule.
but on one that is slightly longer than 24 hours.
But you've been advocating all along.
I've been saying for years that I'm on a 26-hour or 27-hour schedule.
You get so much done.
He says, it's absolutely true.
You know, we're always pushing, pushing against the edge of 24 hours.
And a lot of people, he says, their internal clock is 15 to 20 minutes longer than 24 hours.
Forever.
Just forever.
And so you're always like...
trying to Get off, you know, it's not linked necessarily to the Sun or at all He says he takes people and he puts them down in mine shafts from two months and he says no matter what their exposure to the Sun is
Their circadian rhythm is the same.
Jeez.
And it's just what it is.
That's what Dick Cheney has to look forward to.
Well, Dick Cheney's going to be very confused.
His son is going to come up and come down at extremely irregular times.
Okay.
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You don't hear much about him anymore.
You're going to be allowed for a while and then nothing.
He was way up on the rogues gallery, and now it's like, where do you fit him in?
Uh-huh.
Uh, so he, so, uh, so sleep dude bro says that, um, but he says that, and I've been saying this too for years and, and it always made sense to me because I, because I frame things this way.
And so it was, it just seems like no dir, but it's, it's nice to have it validated.
He said, you know, from a tribal standpoint, uh,
If you've got a family group, a large family group, and everybody is going to sleep and you want to get the best sleep possible, you want to go all the way out.
You want everybody to be completely conked out.
And one of the characteristics of REM sleep is that it paralyzes your body, making you a very, very bad sleep.
at that point in time.
If you're paralyzed, it's hard to hunt.
Just easy prey.
But you're very easy prey.
And he said it makes sense that there would be some derivation of the population that stayed up
and was naturally wakeful, not like forcing themselves to stay up to be on watch, but naturally awake during the night.
So that for them, it felt like the right thing to do, sit around the fire while everyone else in the tribe is asleep.
And then when the first early risers start getting up, you know, that person's like, oh no, I'm really tired.
And he's saying like, it's just, it's baked in that a certain smaller proportion of people
are just there naturally up at night as watchmen.
Hmm.
Which is what I always feel like.
That's what I feel like in the middle of the night when I'm walking around.
There's no one else in my neighborhood that's going to put on a bathrobe and go walk around in the night.
Somebody's got to scan the perimeter.
Yeah.
And it just feels very natural.
If you're out there dreaming about blue turtles, you're not going to be checking your six.
Exactly.
While I'm watching, y'all are paralyzed.
Literally paralyzed.
I'm watching over a culture of people who cannot move.
Yeah.
So that's interesting.
I mean, everybody should read the book.
Well, not everybody, because when people tell me that, I'm like... But in this case, I am reading it.
Because my mom, who just walked in the room, she's very quiet.
She just walked in the room to get a key off of my key ring.
And she moves like the wind.
She got a key.
No one's the wiser.
I can't hear anything.
Yeah, didn't even make as much noise as keyboard tacky.
I remember hearing a while back.
Oh, sorry.
Go ahead.
No, no, no.
You were about to say.
I just remember hearing a while back.
I feel like I first became interested in sleep stuff when a friend of mine got interested in sleep stuff.
And one of the things he told me, he's the first guy I ever knew that had a sleep tracker, like a wristwatch that would track your sleep.
And he told me something that...
I mean, like some of the things involving sleep, a lot of people immediately close the door.
Because as soon as you hear anything that's involved in trying to figure out sleep, the portcullis comes down.
You know, we're closed.
Because I can't.
I have the stuff to do.
But he said that in the scholarship he had done, one of the first things you do is try to figure out how much sleep you really need.
Not so much exactly what your circadian rhythm is, but for a period of something like two weeks, the idea is...
That you try to be as consistent as possible in avoiding things like stimulants, which again, obviously, pork call is down, that's difficult.
Avoiding stimulants and sedatives, but making yourself go to sleep.
Really, actually, like saying, we're going to bed at nine, and then you sleep as long as you sleep.
And you wake up.
And then you do it again, and you do it again, and you do it again.
And if you can somehow do that, this seemingly un-American, inhuman thing of not doing stuff to make you be more sleepy or more awake, you will eventually discover the plus or minus various environmental factors.
There's a certain amount of sleep that your body wants over a certain amount of time.
And that's the only, you know, and again, this is the kind of stuff that doesn't end up happening until you're almost dead.
You get the sleep apnea and you're going to some kind of like a clinic.
But that's the idea is that like you may not know how much sleep you need for how long and when.
Some people really benefit from a half hour nap and other people don't.
Some people it's like the end of the world, the idea of taking a nap.
The idea being that you discover like, no, I really do need like six and a half hours of sleep and over eight hours I don't need.
But that requires all of this stuff that has all these asterisks on it that would be so difficult for anybody to do.
So you just walk around all the time basically going, well, all I know is I'm not getting enough sleep, which is not really much to go on.
Well, and what Dude Bro here is saying is that a lot of these things that we, because I hate to keep calling him Dude Bro.
That's fine.
He's got a real name.
Yeah.
But he's a guy.
His name's Matt.
Let's call him Matt.
Let's call him Matt.
Matt is a good name.
It's a good name for a skateboarder.
I've known some Matts in my day.
Not all of them skateboarders.
One of them used to draw really good Frankenstein.
There was a time when we really appreciated that in a person.
Oh, if you could draw a good Frankenstein?
Or a Van Halen logo?
There's certain kinds of skills you just don't see anymore.
The Van Halen logo is very much like an eighth grade skill.
I think Frankenstein is like a second to third grade skill.
Yeah, right, right, right.
Would you agree?
Would you agree?
If you're in like eighth grade and you're drawing Frankenstein's...
Well, back then, yes.
Today, these kids don't know from Frankenstein.
They're not even aware of the pantheon.
I haven't even bothered to show my daughter young Frankenstein because she wouldn't get that it's a send-up of universal monster movies.
That's a different topic.
There's so many monsters stacked up before Frankenstein.
She doesn't really understand what a Dracula is.
It's really upsetting.
You're right.
No, I think I think of as being also spaceships guns and race dinosaurs dinosaurs spaceships guns Yeah, yeah for sure.
Yeah, thanks army.
So Matt could draw Frankenstein So we're gonna call the author of this book Matt Matt the sleep bro Matt the sleep bro says that this whole thing about like oh I only need five hours of sleep You know when you get older you need less sleep.
He says none of that is really true and
Everybody needs sleep their whole lives.
And what we end up doing is we don't get enough sleep for a variety of reasons.
And as you get older, it's harder to stay asleep because there are tons of additional pressures, not just on you as a thinking person, but...
you got to get up to go to the bathroom more.
Sure.
Or like, I mean, like one that sounds really obvious, but like when you first have a kid, um, it's difficult to sleep because the kid's sleep schedule is so weird, but it's also that you're so vigilant.
Like, you know, you crib death, not a thing you want.
Like you're always like kind of scanning, listening for the air for like what's, what's going on.
But then also you worry more.
I think you worry more after you have a kid.
There's a whole constellation of things that ruin your life.
Oh, and I think another thing that Matt Bro says is that over the course of your life, your circadian pattern moves within the elliptical of life.
The shape of the day.
That's right.
It moves in the shape of the day.
But what's very interesting and what's helping me quite a bit
is that he talks about REM sleep, which we're all very familiar with.
And then he talks about NREM sleep, which is the other sleep.
Ooh.
I don't have that on my tracker.
Yeah.
NREM sleep is the deep sleep.
Yes, yes, yes.
You don't actually do your dreaming and your REMing in your deepest sleep.
Mm-mm.
Your deep sleep is where your... REM sleep is above light sleep.
It's way up there.
It's lighter than light.
REM sleep is where you're paralyzed.
So it feels like that must be like your sleep trackers are registering that as a lack of movement.
And so on your sleep tracker, it seems like that's the deep space where you're not moving.
But in fact, your deepest sleep is where your brainwaves become very slow moving.
And if you look at the brainwaves of a REM sleeper, the brainwaves are, at least on paper, indistinguishably fast from wakefulness.
Your brain is just going...
Because in REM sleep, as far as your brain is concerned, it's awake.
It's like full on hallucinating and living its life.
But in REM sleep, your brain waves slow way down.
So they're just like, whoa.
Whoa.
They're just like some EDM base synths.
Whoa.
And it's not that you're paralyzed.
It's your body is, you know, like can do its little things flop around, but your brain is like somewhere else.
And he says that the combination of the two and REM sleep and REM sleep, they're doing very different things inside your head and you need them both.
And at certain times of your life and after certain events, you'll need way more NREM sleep because your brain is like moving stuff around.
Mm-hmm, taking out the garbage.
Yeah, it doesn't need to like replay the conversation you had over and over.
It needs to like move big boxes around.
I've heard it said that, I mean, I don't know which stage this is in exactly, but that a lot of what happens in healthy sleep is that
there's a component of sort of organization and sense-making that's going on and that you have to be kind of knocked out for that to happen?
Well, so packets, right?
Packets are moving around.
But like in REM sleep, I think what they're saying is that you're taking what happened recently and moving it out of short-term memory into long-term storage.
And in NREM sleep, you're actually doing like
serious body maintenance.
Deep sleep is when you do more of the physical stuff, I think.
Yeah.
You cleanse stuff out and you solidify big portions of like, not just your brain, but your heart and your butt and all kinds of things.
And that you get that deep sleep early in the night.
And then the REM sleep comes later.
So that if you only get five hours of sleep, you're getting some NREM stuff, but you're not getting REM stuff.
And over time, your memory will be depleted.
So I mean, to summarize in some ways, you can't get to the REM sleep until you've gotten through the other parts.
If you need REM sleep, your body will find a way to get it, but it's not free.
You're not going to get it in a 90-minute nap.
Yeah.
Although you do.
Do you?
You're not going to get it if you only sleep 90 minutes in a day.
But, like, he says that the body also needs a nap in the afternoon.
Oh, this body needs a nap, buddy.
Right?
And that your Mediterranean-style siesta cultures...
uh have dramatically less incident of heart disease and it's not just because they're living on olives and and hummus it's because of it's because of their uh you know this the restorative benefits of sleep this is what matt bro is saying like i don't don't understand you're just you're the messenger yeah don't at me about it
Anyway, so when I lay down at night now, I'm thinking, okay, I've got a little sketch of the journey.
I'm going to lay down and go to sleep, and I'm going immediately 20,000 leagues under the seat.
We're going to go super deep.
I'm going to get all this deep sleep that I need.
It's going to take the blue meanies out, and it's going to bring warm fuzzies in.
It's going to take out the garbage.
It's going to take out the compost, the recycling.
And then...
That period toward the end of the night when I feel like I'm having some intense dream and then I wake up and I kind of flop around and then I go back into some dream and then I wake up and I flop around.
A lot of the time when I wake up in the morning, I feel like the memory of that, the recent memory of that must have characterized my whole night.
So I say, ah, God, I really was sleeping fitfully.
Because I was having these dreams and then I was like conscious again and I'm not getting that deep REM sleep that I need so much.
But I'm realizing now that, no, that's what happens at the end of the night.
Like I'm getting REM sleep because I'm having these fantastical dreams.
And then I'm kind of like waking up from them and rolling over and going back into them.
You can get into REM sleep pretty fast and get out pretty fast.
And that's not characterizing my whole night.
There are periods, long periods where I was some elsewhere with no conscious recollection because the brain switches into some sort of like, you know, cleaning the oven like mode, the deep cycle.
And that's helping me because when I wake up in the morning, I can look at the like,
crazy little bursts of dreams that I'd been having toward the end of the morning, toward the end of sleeping, and feel like, oh, that was also, it was what it was supposed to be doing.
It's like, that's separate from deep sleep.
Whatever's in the sleep is in the sleep.
That's right.
So that is beneficial, and it's making me, I think I don't resist sleep as much.
At night because I feel like I understand the I understand the little journey a little bit better or at least I think I do
And so I'm not laying down to sleep with the idea of like, okay, let's go into dreamland.
You know, let's go into, um, you said, you said an unnecessarily high bar for yourself if you're, if you're doing that, right?
Well, yeah.
And you're like, and I think for me, there's a little bit of, I don't want to meet Donald Pleasance on a train in a post apocalyptic environment where like snake man is going to get me, um,
I want to just, like, I don't want to do that.
I don't want to be paralyzed.
I don't want to be, because I'm not somebody that suffers from nightmares, and I know people who do, and I feel the burden of nightmares.
I had a friend that complained about nightmares.
She had them her whole life, and you just feel this, like, it's like someone with chronic back pain.
You just feel agony for them.
I don't have those.
But I don't want to be out of control.
I don't like the day to be over.
It all feels like death.
Yeah.
But, yeah, it's helpful to have a little bit, I guess, a little bit more of a clear picture of what my expectation of sleep should be.
Mm-hmm.
I think that's really sound.
And I'm thinking about, I mean, for example, like, the only way that I know that I snore is because my family tells me that I snore.
Because if I'm in a state where I'm snoring, guess what?
I'm asleep.
Yeah.
I'm not aware.
Sometimes I catch a little...
Yeah, I do that too.
But I'm not aware of that because all I know about my sleep that makes me nervous about my sleep is what I think about it when I'm awake.
And so, which sounds obvious, which it is, but like what I bring to that in terms of the emotional valence of those feelings then does have a very real effect on the sleep because I feel like I'm doing it wrong.
Like if I'm awake, I'm doing sleep wrong.
It takes a rethinking, a purposeful, rehearsed, repetitive rethinking of your whole sleep mojo to get okay with that.
If I'm feeling crazy super stressed out and I have had too much coffee, well, I'm kind of screwed.
I guess it was last week or so when we talked about somebody dosing you, giving you LSD without your knowledge, which I think is a super interesting, horrible thing I wouldn't want to happen.
But if you know what's happening to you, you can go, oh, it's that thing.
This does get into the mindfulness thing a little bit, because you can look at it and go, oh, this is that thing that's happening right now, rather than, oh, my God, what is happening to me?
All I know is that this is wrong.
Yeah.
This is what's going to make it so destabilizing for Dick Cheney.
He's not going to really have an opportunity.
He won't have clocks at work, for one thing, right?
Well, right, and he won't have ever had LSD, chances are.
So when he first starts coming on, it's going to be like, okay, what's going on?
You know, like, that's weird.
I just think he's having a heart attack.
Or something, right?
And then, because that's the thing, it's going to be microdosing it first.
It's all going to be in his water.
He needs that.
He needs that water.
And he's just like, wow, I'm just really feeling, I'm thinking with clarity today.
You know, because it's a good feeling.
Lesergic acid is like very...
It's not basic.
Lisurgic acid is not basic.
Listen.
Okay, so here's the thing about acid.
But then as the concentration increases, as he's tripping more and more, his only baseline is going to be that he was feeling pretty good for the last however long, maybe a month, maybe a year.
Those storm clouds have passed.
Yeah, but now all of a sudden it's like, whoa, my fingernails really can taste colors.
What am I supposed to do with this information?
How much do you reckon?
I don't know if he's going to be the one you start on.
I imagine you'll have some practice administrators you've worked on to kind of get a feel, like prototyping the whole facility.
Lawrence Eagleburger is going to be the test case.
Lawrence Eagleburger was the deputy secretary of state.
For much of this period, he's one of the architects of the neoconservative political movement.
So without saying too much, if you're new to this conversation, the notion is that somebody at some point in the future may decide that it's time for a little bit of extrajudicial comeuppance.
And one could, hypothetically, like something you'd read in Reader's Digest as a kid, you could have an underground facility where people who deserve comeuppance find themselves in basically like a shipping container under a desert for the sake of argument.
If you were to buy a bunch of surplus shipping containers, and they are cheaply had.
Sure.
There's probably shipping containers that are not suitable to put on a Maersk ship that are still perfectly good as a small apartment for Dick Cheney.
Yes, right.
And you could arrange them in the desert.
You could even take a backhoe and bury them in the sand.
Yeah.
Connected to one another.
You could build an underground city.
You could, within those shipping containers, build small apartments that looked like apartments that didn't look like shipping containers.
Yeah, there's nothing to say that you couldn't, as an aftermarket addition to the shipping containers, make it easy to do things like change the height and width of the rooms to allow various opportunities.
items in the room until you moved around remotely.
Maybe somebody like a Dick Cheney happens to catch a scant two minutes of sleep, and during that time, the lights move around.
Maybe his medicine moves a little bit left or right.
Just a little bit of what some people would call gaslighting.
I'll go you one further.
It doesn't have to be Dick Cheney.
We're not talking about anybody in particular here.
No, no, no.
Dick Taney's just a stand-in.
He's a Raggedy Ann doll.
Yeah, right.
Okay.
Yes.
Okay.
Sure.
But, you know, the U.S.
Army has been building facilities around the world in shipping containers for a long time.
So when I was recently at the naval base in Djibouti in Africa, the barracks...
are all shipping containers stacked on top of one another.
Climate controlled?
Climate controlled.
Wow.
And you can have shipping containers that... Well, some of them are.
Some of them are not.
In Djibouti, it's very hot.
But the Army has never... The Army, Navy, Air Force, Marines...
They've never really like stood on ceremony in terms of putting their soldiers in really hot places, like unforgiving places without air conditioning.
I think the Air Force generally air conditions things because they're soft.
But these particular shipping containers in Djibouti were air conditioned.
And there are some that have like eight containers.
beds in them and some that have four beds in them and some, I think, that are just like the general's pad.
I stayed in one.
Oh, like so rank is reflected in how subdivided they are.
Right.
But you could, and I think the army in the parlance surpluses those, which is to say sells them for surplus.
So a lot of the heavy lifting is already done.
Right.
You just buy them pre-made and
But what you need to do is figure out a way that you can make them so that the walls are never 100% square and change over time.
But I think that that's doable.
Like a lot of us that build rock studios, you build an apartment inside an apartment.
Mm-hmm.
Because it's very key to me that he never be able to fully have a sense that things are plumb.
Oh, that's so important.
It's important that it becomes a little bit like 1984, the novel, where, you know, there's things that you depend on, you suddenly discover you can't depend on them.
It becomes a very, very Stalin-esque experience.
One question, though.
So it sounds like in terms of, not that you're going to do this, but if you were going to do this, it sounds like the materiel is available, right?
For someone to construct something like this.
How much would he know or understand about where he is, why he's there, how he got there?
Is it something where he tucks in for a nap and then he wakes up and the walls are moving?
He doesn't know how long it's been?
I think it's key.
You know, people need socialization.
And you can't just socialize with the television, although... But you know what I'm saying?
So he's living his life somewhere now.
Right, he is, yes.
And then one day he's in... What happens in between?
Is there a tribunal?
There's a lot, there are a lot of different theories about this.
Okay.
You know, there's a lot, a lot of books have been written about what to do if you're taking someone from their normal life and putting them in a shipping container that's buried in the desert and trying to, you know, trying to really do a kind of long form psyops.
I don't know if you read, uh, during the, uh, during the recent sort of, uh,
Our show is evergreen, so we don't like to talk about current events, particularly now because current events only last for a couple of hours.
Yeah, from morning.
Yeah.
But recently, a CIA director in the American...
political scene was elevated to a new job because a person that was holding that job lost the job.
And then there was a CIA under person who was being proposed as the new director of CIA.
That's right.
A woman named Gina Haspel.
Haspel.
And seems like a very nice lady.
But there was some talk.
She had relationships with the people that were in her charge.
She would talk to them sometimes.
Oh, sure.
But also she ran one of the CIA's black sites in Southeast Asia.
Did that definitely happen?
Because I saw some kerfuffle that required corrections on that.
Did she for sure run that facility?
Well, that's a good question, and it depends on whether or not— I don't know if it was a question of did she run a black ops site in Thailand versus was she directly involved with waterboarding that one guy three times a day?
Did we ever get a distinction on what we know to be true?
You know, unfortunately for me, I am just as dependent as everyone else on the, like, shitstorm archipelago of BuzzFeed—
ProPublica and the Daily Beast.
And I don't seek those sources out.
And I know by the time it gets to NPR, people have probably put their thinking caps on it.
Okay.
I do not believe that if she was the supervisor of the site that she supervised all the waterboarding.
I think that's probably – That's a big portfolio.
Yeah.
I think if you're supervising a site, you probably aren't standing there with the gallon jug holding it over a person.
Sure.
But you fill out the forms that allows all that to happen.
But I do feel like there are different levels of moral culpability when it comes to torturing people.
And if you're supervising a site whose primary or sole purpose is to interrogate people.
Enhanced interrogation.
It's a little bit different than if you work at the CIA and your job is to make sure the vending machines are full of Choco Tacos.
Mm-hmm.
And I'm not saying that they have Choco Tacos in the vending machines at CIA.
There's not even a way for us to know at this point.
That's all still under lock and key.
But reading the descriptions of the explicit descriptions of the torture sessions within the internal communication between CIA people where the operatives on the ground are sending people
reports back saying this is sickening us people want to leave the cia but it started it started even more professional than that which was this guy's got nothing we're not gonna get anything from this guy and then that turns into look guys this is this is very upsetting and if you and if you look at the dates of those it happens really fast it's like okay we've tortured this guy a few times he's got nothing
And they're like, well, keep torturing him.
Well, okay, we did that again and still nothing.
And this guy's really, we're convinced.
He's vomiting and bubbling a lot.
Yeah.
And within a couple of days, the people on the ground are like, look, we're telling you here, we don't feel this is even legal.
Did you read that one where the lawyers back up the chain were like, we'd prefer that you not use the word legal or discuss the legality of this stuff.
That just gives us problems later.
Right.
But then they tortured him for like two more weeks or something.
And you really got something like 80 times in a month.
Yeah.
And you really got the sense in the way they were writing it that they had admiration for the man, like that they had begun to like him.
Like, look, he's completely compliant.
He is completely.
We are like on this guy's side now.
Please do not make us do this anymore.
Imagine you get to the point where the guy's like, OK, time for me to get on the board, I guess.
Yeah.
And he just like, he like lopes over there, dead eyed and lays down and is like, fill my mouth with water again.
Oh my God.
But so, uh, so you get, you get a sense that we've been here before.
Um, I don't.
In the case of my own underground black ops torture site, I do not want your notional, your notional underground detention reeducation facility.
Right there.
There does need to be some sort of introduction.
I mean, not necessarily.
Right.
Cheney could go to sleep today in what I assume is the expansive palatial guest quarters of some Texas donors, extremely large ranch-style compound where Cheney is staying as an honored guest.
I imagine a little bit of a Baron Harkonnen situation.
I imagine he pulls the plug out of a kid and sucks his butt a little bit, gets some unwind time, watches a little bit of Fox and goes to sleep in his coffin.
Yeah.
You know, the way that Trump used to do where he would get on an airplane and they would fly for some like pedophilia sex tourism somewhere.
And then, you know, and then, yeah, that right.
They'd eat the brains of some of some rare monkeys for lunch.
And so for Cheney to wake up in a very small apartment.
With only simulated windows.
He doesn't know it's a shipping container.
He doesn't know it's underground.
All he knows is that he's got a new house now.
And I think what I want there to be is some kind of transition.
Some onboarding, as they say in software.
And I think onboarding is exactly...
exactly what I'm thinking, that when he first wakes up, I want him to feel like he's in a cabin on a ship.
A classic cruise liner.
You can totally do that with a shipping container.
They're made for that.
Right, so the window will be round.
Oh, it's a porthole.
And there'll be some simulated, he'll look out, he'll be able to see water and the waves, and the apartment will rock slightly.
And he's like, how did I get on this boat?
Yo-ho, yo-ho, the pirate's life for me.
Yeah, he'll hear like some bells and a horn every once in a while.
and he'll be pounding on the door like hello hello like this is not the class of cabin that i signed up for you know this is like this is like i'm down i don't even have a door that opens on this boat i'm down in the bilge and he'll be on the cruise for a while i mean it could be it could be 10 days it could be uh 10 months as far as he knows
Because the sun's going to come up and come down not on a regular schedule.
He's not going to remember what his circadian rhythm is.
Oh, so he won't be able to gauge the latitudes and longitudes and stuff like that.
And then he'll go to sleep one night, and he'll wake up, and he won't be on a boat anymore.
Okay.
Maybe he'll be in a train.
Or in a treehouse.
Maybe for a while it'll be a train, and he'll be like, I'm on a train?
Where the hell am I going?
Yeah.
It's all long form stuff.
What we want from what we want to get out of Dick Cheney is different than what you want to get out of a suspected Al Qaeda higher up.
You don't want to know.
You're not trying to get him and say, like, when's the next attack coming on the United States?
Mm hmm.
You want to find out something subtler.
You're waterboarding for Intel.
I think you're onboarding for a fulsome apology.
Well, I don't know if you're ever going to get an apology, but you definitely... We got time.
We got time.
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at checkout terms and conditions apply then you go to casper.com slash super train once again that offer code super train our thanks to casper for supporting roderick on the line and all the great shows because because you know dick's not going to be alone right like like rumsfeld's going to be in the next container over he's not alone john this is what i don't this is what i don't know does every once in a while his television hoops
His television, which is normally broadcasting a very tailored version of the news that features a lot of material about the man himself.
So he's going to have a lot to he's going to watch a kind of like overview of his own career as told to, you know, 60 minutes or whatever.
Maybe some of it's about to search for Dick.
The search for Dick, right?
But also heavily edited.
And then Leslie Stahl walks in and goes, fuck you, closes the door.
Or a big documentary about Dick Cheney's boat trip around the world that he barely remembers.
Maybe he thinks it's a reality show.
He was staying in this beautiful cabin, but he really loved to go down into the hold of the ship and sleep for...
days at a time in this little cramped cabin and nobody could tell him different.
And he's like, what?
What?
No, no, I don't want me in here.
And then maybe every once in a while the TV clicks onto a closed circuit channel where he can see Rumsfeld and he can see Eagleburger.
He can see like his pals and maybe they can even hear him and he's like, hello?
And they're like, what?
Who?
And then it all goes back to something else.
Rumsfeld's just sobbing and playing with dolls.
But look, we are saying too much.
I don't want to give it all away.
Sleep is important.
You want to get your mind right about it.
That's important.
I mean, I think even Dick Cheney would agree how important sleep is.
Especially if you've got heart issues, you know what I'm saying?
Another thing that was really validating about Matt Brough's book is that he...
said, look, I'm a sleep researcher.
I'm not political.
I got no dog in y'all's race.
I'm tenured here at Berkeley.
I can do whatever I want.
But the world is crazy.
Kids should not go to school early in the morning.
It's idiotic.
It's criminal.
It is virtually criminal to do that to kids.
He said stores should be open until 9 p.m.
Why are stores open at 8 in the morning?
Nobody goes to the store at 8 in the morning.
It's normative.
People want to go to the store after they get off work.
They want to be, you know, like...
Why do we do this?
Why do we not do the sensible thing, which is if you want to open your thing at 9 a.m., that's great.
But then close it at 1 and be closed from 1 to 5.
And then open it at 5 and stay open until 9, just like they used to do in Spain and Greece where people never had heart attacks.
and take your kids school should start at 10 in the morning like come on you should be able to go to work at 10 in the morning and i'm just reading this and it's just like i am just eating it with a giant spoon well i mean i can't put my hand to the scholarship right this minute but i feel like this is something that people have been talking about for 10 15 20 years now is that there there are a couple things about
about youths that we must acknowledge.
One is that they don't think so.
They may not realize this.
They need more sleep than they think they need.
But that second, it is physically difficult, if not impossible, for them to get to bed at a time that we think of as a normal, healthy time for a teen.
So you take those two facts together and what do you end up with?
You remember being a teenager.
At a certain point, like 10th grade, 11th grade, it was so hard for me to go to bed before like midnight.
Like really hard.
And I thought I was a bad person.
Like I wasn't following the rules.
I was supposed to go to bed at 10.
And I found it very, very difficult.
Well, it's because that's your body.
Your body's doing that.
Well, now take that fact and add on top of it that a kid probably needs nine hours of sleep.
And you got first bell at 7.15.
Ugh.
You know, it's, I mean, there's the financial and business realities, though.
I mean, one being back when they had school buses, you would need to get the school buses staggered, right?
So you got to get the high school kids on the school buses first, then the middle school kids, then the elementary school kids.
So you'd stagger the starting times.
That was one.
Another one is that, like, you know, what are you going to do with the teachers?
You can have them come in at 10, like go home at 6.
They already work all day anyway.
I mean, I think those realities are part of what affects it.
Like, you end up running on the grown-up schedule.
Yeah.
It's awful.
And I mean, we should all be like Finland, where they only go to school two hours a day, three times a week.
I was hearing about that, and I found that very... Was that on MSNBC?
I feel like I heard about that.
In the Germany and the Finland, they got a real different idea about this, and yet they do better than us.
Well, Finland is different even than Germany, because I'm also... Ugh, you're going to hate me.
Oh boy, here we go.
Are we going to put this out?
We need to get an episode we can put out.
I'm also reading a book called The Smartest Kids in the World.
which is written by a reporter who decided to figure out why American schools, et cetera, et cetera.
And so she went around the world and she looked at a bunch of different schools.
She followed some American exchange students when they went to school in other places like Korea and Finland that were high achieving.
And she wrote an entire book about how...
How kids best learn and how you make kids that are problem solvers and not just dumb test takers.
And I'm in the beginning of it.
I'm just starting it.
And it's very fascinating.
I'll have lots to report.
Um...
But one of the interesting things she said at the beginning of the book is when the results came out from these big studies and Finland was like way at the top of the list of schools that were producing kids that could solve problems.
The Finns were extremely surprised.
Really?
Because they were like, oh, they were looking at other people going like, oh, we got to do more of that.
Yeah, they were like, what now?
Who?
What?
Us?
We were just, we thought we were doing it wrong.
Is that right?
Yeah.
And now I think there's been enough coverage of it and TV stations have gone and Nobel Prize people are standing around that the people at...
The people in Finland have developed what we like to call Scandinavian smugness about it.
The Scandinavians like to be smug about things, and they don't even need to be asked.
That's a component of the smugness, probably.
That's right.
When you find that they're doing something amazing that they didn't even realize they were doing amazing, that must feel good to them.
So now they are like giving – now they're prepared to teach us.
Just insufferable.
But I do feel like as in so many things, America once again confirms that it's an embarrassment because we're doing it wrong once again.
But I'm reading this book.
I'm going to have lots to report.
I'm going to bring back.
But I think they also agree that you shouldn't have to get up early in the morning to go to school.
Oh, but the key thing that they say, of course, is that we spend more.
And I just said, of course, which is a version of obviously.
That's, you know, Bob.
So listen, listen, look, the obvious thing is that maybe not obvious, but we spend more money per per child than anywhere else.
And like we do with health care, we spend more.
That's how you get the best health care in the world is you spend more.
You spend more and you get less.
That's the American model.
Get a little drunk and you end up in jail.
Yeah, right.
Sorry.
So I'm going to bring that.
I'm also, you know what, just to complete the trifecta, I'm also reading a Malcolm Gladwell book right now.
Oh, Jesus, John.
So the thing is, here's what I have.
I have three bathrooms in my house.
Mm-hmm.
I leave a book in each bathroom and then I'll leave the bathroom with the book.
I'll get into the book and then I'll take the book and I'll wander around the house and I'll lay on the couch or I'll wander around in the garden reading the book that I found most recently.
Okay.
And then I'll put it down at some point, and it'll get sort of into the, it'll get in the living room mix.
Then I'll find another book I'll start up, because none of these books are like novels.
It's not like you can't pick them up and put them down.
Nonfiction tomes.
Right.
So I'm reading all three of these books right now, and boy, am I learning a lot about Matchsticks and The Matchstick Man and The Rubber Band Man and Little Matchstick Girl.
A lot of matches.
They're all in these stories.
I'm learning about Match.com.
Huh.
And it's all about the surprising what of what.
Yeah, that's right.
It turns out.
And I do feel vindicated by some of the information that
in these books that i'm reading and you know you don't want to just read books that vindicate your position and there's a lot there's a lot i'm reading that i'm like whoa you know like when you read the smartest kids in the world and you're a parent what are you doing you're not like you're not it's not like oh i care about all the kids it's like no i want my kid i want to find out if i'm being fretful about the wrong things that i actually can't change
Yeah, what can I do to help her?
I mean, I can't change anything, but should I be fretful about something different just for public branding purposes?
Right.
If I'm sitting with perspiration coming down my forehead all day about the things I'm failing at, which ones should I feel?
When you go meet with other parents, you can give them the surprising secret about delivery pizza.
Do you know what this is doing to your child?
Does your child play with a ball?
Oh.
A ball requires very little effort.
Your child should really be playing with a dodecahedron.
Oh, boy.
i i went to the grocery the other night you know it was uh it was my daughter's seventh birthday i saw that on my calendar i didn't want to be creepy happy birthday of course that you would never be creepy uh in interacting with my i was looking at her on your instagram she's she's such a cutie she's seven now she's um she's she's tall her friends are tall
We had our birthday party yesterday and her friends were there and I was like, when did you grow six inches?
And the kid's like, I've never seen you before in my life and runs off.
I see you every freaking day for the last three years.
You little punk.
He's like, never seen you before.
Why are you talking to me?
Although, you know, when I put my hand on his head, he like leans in rather than away because he knows that he does know me.
That's good reading.
I'm a safe friend.
But if we try and talk to him directly, he's just like, what?
Who?
What?
Get away from me.
But I went to the store and I'm like wandering around.
I'm getting bread and I'm getting some jam and other things that I get at the store.
And I see a little display of like birthday stuff.
And I walk over because I'm, you know, I'm a customer.
I'm an interested customer now.
Your little end cap of birthday candles and cake decorations appeals to me because I have a birthday I'm planning.
So I walk over and I look and I find a little candle in the shape of the number seven.
And I found some streamers and I found some balloons.
And I said, I'm going to get these things.
Now, we're having a birthday party already for her at a third location.
Mm-hmm.
But I bought these things anyway because it's ingrained in me.
It's the type of thing my dad would do.
He would just go to the store and come home with a bag of things that had appealed to him that he saw on end caps.
I think everybody does that.
That's what Walgreens really relies on.
So I come home and then on the kitchen counter for like four or five days sits this paper bag with some like crepe paper streamer balloons and a number seven candle.
And then I realized like, oh, I'm going to go pick my kid up in a couple of hours from her after school program.
I should decorate the house.
So I jump into action.
And I put crepe streamers all over.
Wow.
And I blow up these balloons.
Like she's coming home from the war or something.
Yeah, right.
Like, welcome home.
But it's, you know, it's her birthday.
And although I ridicule adults that celebrate their birthday for more than...
one dinner.
Uh, like, like careful your birthday.
Um, but some people deserve a whole month for their birthday.
Let's just stipulate.
I know they do.
Some people's birthdays are real holidays.
Other people's birthdays are just massive inconveniences to them.
Uh, but, and it turned out I bought these balloons and they are really high quality balloons, like kind of shiny sheen balloons.
Um,
Anyway, I put the balloons all up.
I put the streamers all up.
I brought her home.
We walked in the door.
Of course, I'm not like a ta-da type person.
I'm much more of a like doo-doo-doo type person.
She walks in, walks right through the house, walks all around, starts complaining about dinner and did not register at all.
The balloons or the streamers or anything.
And I was like, did you by any chance coming in the door see anything unusual?
And she like marches back over to the door like, no, what?
And I'm like, well, it's not on the floor.
And she's like, well, what?
And I'm like, oh.
it's exactly what i would have been like i think probably yeah you just go out of your way to make everything joyless and uh eventually she was like oh yeah yeah i see you did yeah hey anyway back to the menu to the store back to the night's menu and i felt i felt like i'm reading you know i'm reading this book about uh the smartest kids in the world and i'm trying to um i'm trying to
And I haven't gotten very far into the book.
I'm still in the anecdotal phase.
But there was this key moment where some young woman in Oklahoma had succeeded.
She was awkward, didn't have a lot of friends.
Nobody else thought the word onomatopoeia was interesting.
And so she couldn't make friends.
And she got invited to go to a summer program at Duke because she got a good grade on a test or something.
And she came home and she was like, I really want to go to this summer program, Mom.
It only costs $100 million.
And I'll be with kids that are like me.
And I don't think it would cost $100 million.
I mean, I'm sure it was expensive, but I'm sure it also was whatever manageable.
And her mom did the thing.
Well, it's like the supposed cultures where the only numbers they have are one, two, and many.
That's pretty much how money is for me.
Yeah.
There's like entirely affordable, and you've got to be fucking kidding me.
You know, and that's real, that like one, two, or many thing.
It's true.
I've actually been in many, many situations where it was like, how far?
And they're like, oh, many.
Many.
You're not even close to two or one.
Don't worry about that.
It's not that many.
And they're like, many.
Could be a thousand.
Don't start looking for two yet.
You're not there.
But I'm reading this book and I'm like, there are going to be things in here.
There are going to be secrets that I learn.
And this chapter ends with this girl saying, you know, mom, can I go to the thing?
And the way the writer portrayed it, it was one of those simple like
Well, I didn't, you know, she's so young and I didn't want her to be away from me for a month.
So I said no.
Chap in the curtain.
And it just like broke my heart.
Like, oh, if your kid gets into a special program, a summer program at Duke, please don't say no.
Please like, it just seems like, please don't.
And I immediately was like, I got to put up streamers for her birthday.
I don't know.
I don't know what it is.
It's not the same.
She didn't get into anything.
It's no Duke.
But I don't want her to... I don't want her to come home and be like, Dad didn't decorate for my birthday.
Instead, I got the other thing like...
You can't go to Duke, but I bought you the expensive mac and cheese.
These are shiny balloons.
You didn't get one, you didn't get many, but today you got two.
I love you.
We don't live in Finland, but I love you.
I love you.
You are not one of the smartest kids in the world.
If you were smart, you'd know that.
Now daddy has to tell you.
Sit down and eat your mac and cheese.
I don't know which thing is right.
Do I tell you that you're not one of the smart ones so you don't become a monster?
There's a book to tell you you're doing it wrong somewhere, believe me.
Yeah, or you are one of the greatest kids in the world because that's still what we're doing, although we know that that's produced a generation of monsters.
Maybe you're supposed to produce the smartest kid in the world but have them believe that they're the dumbest kid in the world.
That's how you get a serious James Bond villain going.
Yeah, I mean, but the...
All of the true achievers have some terrible stories about how they were tortured as kids.
That's true.
You don't want to torture your kid.
You should write a book about that.
There's your book.
There it is.
How to Torture Your Kid Without Seeming to Torture Your Kid.
It's like a little mini Chaney.
It's like, you know...
Kids are not guest lit nearly enough anymore.
Now we're afraid we're going to scar them or something.
You know, when you go to Ikea and there are 40 different kinds of pillows, I think what I'm going to do is I'm going to buy 40 pillows and then every day just change the pillow in her pillowcase.
So she thinks it's the same pillow every night, but it's a totally different pillow of different firmness, of different constitution.
Okay, so a lot of this is sowing seeds of self-doubt.
Yeah, so she's never 100% sure, like, wait a minute, yesterday the pillow was so hard, and today it's so soft.
Am I the crazy one?
I better not say anything.
Yeah, and it's so subtle, but like...
What about when you're choosing, you're trying to pick out the new Dalai Lama and you lay out a bunch of stuff on a picnic blanket and they come up and if they pick the right stuff, they get to be the Dalai Lama.
What if you do that every day after school and you're always a little disappointed?
Yeah.
Oh, is that what you picked?
Oh.
Huh.
Interesting.
Neighbor kid got it right.
Well, you're not the smartest kid in the world, but you're not the dumbest kid.
You know what?
No mac and cheese for you tonight.
It's hard.
It's hard.
Hi, Trolley.
Ship's going into shore, Mr. Chaney.