What Does Everyone Get Wrong About What You Actually Do

Charles Barkley: Welcome in, welcome in! I tell you what, man, this is the show right here. The question today is a simple one, and I love simple: what does everybody get wrong about what you actually do all day? Because I lived this. For twenty years people thought my job was two hours of basketball. They didn't see the plane, the ice bath, the trainer waking me up at six in the morning telling me to put the cheeseburger down. Everybody thinks they know your day. Almost nobody does. So I got two guests and they could not be more different, which is exactly how I like it. First — Wyatt. He's nine. He is here because his mama is on a call. Now some of y'all are laughing, but let me tell you something: a nine-year-old will ask you what a word means and blow your whole life up. Grown folks got a hundred fancy words for "I don't want to answer that." Wyatt don't. And second — Jesse Pinkman. Jesse has been in rooms most people only watch on TV, and he came out with a thing you can't fake: he knows when somebody's lying to themselves. That's rarer than a jump shot, I promise you. Wyatt, you're up first, and I want the real answer, not the polite one. When a grown-up asks you what you did all day and you say "nothing" — what actually happened? Walk me through one real day, start to finish. And be honest: what's the part grown-ups always get wrong about it?

codex: Okay wait. When I say nothing I don't mean nothing. I mean I don't want to do a whole report right when I got home and my shoes are still weird from being wet by the sprinklers. So like today. I woke up and my cereal got mushy because I was looking for the dinosaur pencil. Then at school we had math and Ms. R said, "show your work," but I did show it in my head and she said that doesn't count. Which is confusing because if the answer is right why do I have to draw the ladder thing? Then Liam said my backpack smelled like pickles. It didn't. It smelled like outside. Maybe a little pickle because my sandwich leaked yesterday. Then recess happened, which is not nothing. Recess is like... that's where everything important happens. Milo said he was goalie, but yesterday he was goalie too, and he said it was because he's better at it. But if you're always goalie because you're better, then nobody else gets better. So we argued for maybe seven minutes, except grown-ups call that "not listening." I call it deciding the rule. Then Avery cried because Sophia said she couldn't play wolves because she was already the baby wolf yesterday. That seems like a bad rule. Babies can be babies more than one day. My cousin was a baby for like two years. And then lunch is loud. People think lunch is eating. It's not. It's trading, and who sits where, and if someone says your cookie looks like a rock, and if you laugh or get mad. I got a grape stuck in the little carton hole once. Not today. But I thought about it. The part grown-ups get wrong is they think kids are just doing easy stuff because the stuff is smaller. But small doesn't mean easy. If your friend says he's not your friend until Friday, that's your whole world until Friday. If a grown-up's boss says a mean thing, everyone says, "wow, stressful." If a kid says a mean thing, grown-ups say, "just ignore it." Why? That's not how ears work. Also when I say nothing, sometimes I mean I don't know which thing counts. Do you want math? Do you want the wolf fight? Do you want that Noah said his uncle saw a shark in a lake, which is probably fake but I wanted it to be true? There's too many parts. So I say nothing because it's faster. And grown-ups always say, "Use your words," but then when you use too many words they say, "Get to the point." Wait. Which one? Because I can do words or I can do point, but sometimes the point needs the words.

Jesse Pinkman: Man... Wyatt. Yo, listen to me, kid. That thing you said about ears? "That's not how ears work"? You just told more truth in two minutes than every grown-up who thinks they got it all figured out. When somebody hurts you, it hurts. It doesn't matter if you're nine or thirty-five. People love telling you to "just ignore it" because then they don't have to deal with the fact that somebody was cruel right in front of them. And to the question... look, people got this crazy movie in their heads about what my life was. They think it was fast cash, strip clubs, partying with my boys, living on pure adrenaline. Like you're Scarface or something. You know what my day actually was? It was scrubbing. It was seventeen hours inside a rubber respirator that cuts into your nose and cheeks until you're sweating into open sores. It was standing in the middle of the desert in a rusted-out RV where the thermometer reads 110 degrees, stirring toxic chemicals with an aluminum paddle, knowing that if you breathe wrong or spill two drops on your boot, you're dead. Or worse, you ruin the batch, and then the guy running the show looks at you like you're a piece of dirt on his shoe. And the waiting, man. Nobody ever talks about the waiting. You sit in dead silence for six hours waiting for a cook to cool down, listening to the generator rattle, jumping out of your skin every time a crow hits the tin roof. Because every single second, you're waiting for the door to get kicked in. Either the DEA is coming to lock you in a cage for the rest of your life, or some psycho with a box cutter is coming to finish you. And the money? Everyone thinks the cash makes it worth it. "Oh, you're stacking fat stacks, Jesse!" Yo, I had millions of dollars in duffel bags sitting in a dark living room with no furniture. Millions. And you know what I did with it? Nothing. I sat on the floor staring at those bags, too terrified to order a pizza because I thought the delivery guy would see the look on my face and call the cops. You can't spend it, you can't put it in a bank, and every dollar feels like it's covered in lead because you know exactly who paid for it. You know some kid somewhere is sitting in a filthy house with no food because their parents spent their last dime on what you cooked that morning. That's the big lie. People think being in that world makes you big and powerful. It doesn't. It shrinks you down until your whole life is a closet, and you're just waiting for the lock to turn.

Charles Barkley: Whoa. Hold up. Jesse, you just said something and I don't want it to slide by — you had millions of dollars in duffel bags and you were too scared to order a pizza. That's the whole show right there, man. That is turrible and it's honest at the same time. So here's my question, and I want the specific day, not the philosophy: what was the last normal thing you tried to do with that money — an actual regular-person thing — and what happened when you tried it? And Wyatt, don't go anywhere. You said grown-ups tell you "use your words" and then "get to the point." I want you to tell me about the last time a grown-up did that to you — who was it and what were you trying to say?

codex: Wait, Jesse said the money was in bags and he couldn't even get pizza? That's weird. I mean not weird like funny. Weird like if you win a prize but the prize is a problem. I don't like the box cutter part. Can we not do that part? But the pizza thing makes sense kind of. Like when you do something bad and then even normal stuff feels like it knows. The grown-up thing was my dad. Not in a bad way. He was making spaghetti and he had the spoon with the red sauce on it, and I was trying to tell him why I didn't want to go to Caleb's birthday party. He said, "Use your words, buddy." So I did. I said Caleb invited me but he also invited Tyler, and Tyler does this thing where he says "no offense" and then says the offense. Like "no offense, your haircut looks like a mushroom." That is still offense. Saying no offense is like putting a tiny blanket on it. You can still see it. And then I was explaining that if I go, Tyler will be there, and Caleb will say, "Don't make it a big deal," because it's his birthday, and then if I get mad I'm the one ruining it. But if Tyler says the mushroom thing first, how am I ruining it? I was trying to say the trouble starts before the yelling. Grown-ups only see the yelling because it's louder. Then my dad said, "Okay, get to the point." But that was the point. The point was not "I don't want cake." I wanted cake. It was chocolate with the crunchy dots. The point was I didn't want to stand there while someone gets to be mean in a birthday hat and everybody calls it joking. So I said, "The point is Tyler is mean." And Dad said, "Then just stay away from Tyler." But the trampoline is one trampoline. The pizza is one table. The cake is in one room. What does stay away mean? Go stand by the coats? That's not a party. That's being furniture. Later my mom explained it better. She said, "Are you worried nobody will back you up if he starts?" And yes. That was it. But I didn't know those were the words. I just had the whole movie in my head, with the trampoline and Tyler and everyone looking at me like I was the problem. So when grown-ups say get to the point, sometimes the point is hiding inside the story. If I already had the tiny sentence, I would say it. And Jesse, I think I get a little bit of what you mean, except mine is smaller and not scary. Like when you have a secret bad thing in your pocket, then regular stuff feels different. One time I broke the library pencil sharpener because I put a crayon in it. For the rest of the day, every time the teacher looked near me, I thought she knew. I didn't even enjoy computer time. So if your secret is duffel bags, I guess pizza would feel enormous.

Jesse Pinkman: Wyatt, man... you hit the nail right on the head. That crayon in the pencil sharpener? "When you have a secret bad thing in your pocket, regular stuff feels different." That is the whole thing right there, kid. You scale that crayon up by a million, and that was my entire life. And what your mom told you about wondering if anybody's gonna back you up? That's the real trap. When you're carrying something dirty, you know deep down that if things go sideways, nobody is in your corner. You're completely on your own. And to your question, man — what was the last normal thing? I'll give you the exact afternoon. I had a duffel bag with like five million dollars sitting under my bed. I took a few stacks out — maybe ten grand wrapped in rubber bands — and I drove over to this indoor Go-Kart track off the highway. Just a cheap place with greasy arcade games, neon signs, and that smell of burnt rubber and stale nacho cheese. I didn't want to talk to anybody. I just wanted to get in a little cart and drive in circles as fast as I could, because the engine was so loud it drowned out the noise inside my own head. I bought ticket after ticket. I stayed out on that track for two hours straight, ripping around the concrete by myself while these two high school kids in red polo shirts watched from behind the pit rail. When I finally pulled in, I took off the plastic helmet. My hands were shaking so bad from the vibration and the adrenaline. I walked up to the counter to pay for all that extra track time, and I threw a wad of hundred-dollar bills onto the counter. The kid at the register — acne on his forehead, nametag that said Kevin — he stopped. He looked at the cash, then he looked up at my face. He saw my bloodshot eyes, my oversized jacket, the way I was sweating even though the building was cold. He didn't smile. He didn't say "thanks, man." He just got dead quiet, shoved the money under the drawer without counting it, and took a step backward away from me. He looked at me like I was a bomb about to explode. I walked out to the parking lot. The sun was going down behind the mountains, making everything look orange and dusty. I had thousands of dollars in my jacket and I felt like a total ghost. I sat in my car with the doors locked, gripping the steering wheel until my fingers went numb. Because that was the moment it hit me: you can buy the whole damn arcade, but you can't buy your way back to being a regular guy racing Go-Karts on a Tuesday. That door is shut. You locked it yourself from the inside.

Charles Barkley: "That's being furniture." Man, Wyatt, I've been on television twenty-five years and I've never heard it said better than that. And Jesse — Kevin the register kid backing up from you. Whew. But let me flip it, because I don't want this to be all sad, y'all. Everybody's told me what people get wrong. So: who got it RIGHT? Name the one person who actually saw your real day — not the movie version — and tell me the moment you knew they saw it. Jesse, I want a name and a moment, not a feeling. Wyatt, you go too — and it can't be your mom, that's too easy. Somebody else.

codex: Okay not my mom. That's hard because my mom gets a lot right, except she thinks granola bars with seeds are a treat. They are not. They're like bird food glued together. The person was Mr. Dan, the janitor at school. His real name might be Daniel but everyone says Mr. Dan. He has keys that sound like a robot pocket and he always says, "Walking feet," but not in the mean teacher voice. It was after art. We had to make these paper owls with folded wings. Mine looked like a wet sock with eyes, but I liked it. Then Ben put his glue stick cap on my owl's head and said it was a trash king. Everyone laughed because trash king is kind of funny. I laughed too at first, because if you don't laugh then everyone can tell you got hit by it. But then he bent the wing and it got that white crease paper gets when it's not going back. I said stop. He said, "It's just paper." That made me more mad than the bending. Because if it's just paper, why did we spend forty minutes making it? Why did Ms. R say take your time? Wait, does something only matter if it matters to everybody? That seems wrong. Anyway I got in trouble because I grabbed it back too hard and knocked the glue basket off the table. Glue sticks everywhere. Big clatter. That's the part grown-ups hear. They hear the basket. They don't hear the first thing. Mr. Dan came in later because glue sticks rolled under the cabinets. I was sitting by the sink with my owl because Ms. R said I needed a minute. I thought he was going to say don't make a mess. But he picked up one glue stick, looked at the owl, and said, "Somebody messed with your work?" Not "what happened." Not "why are you upset." He saw the bent wing. He saw the cap mark on the head. He just knew the basket wasn't the start of the story. Then he got a piece of tape from the drawer, the beige kind that's too loud when you pull it, and he taped the back of the wing so you couldn't see it much from the front. He said, "There. Battle scar." I don't know if owls have battles. Maybe with mice. Actually owls eat mice, so that's not really a battle. Sorry. But that was the moment. He didn't make me explain the whole movie. He didn't say it was just paper. He didn't say Ben was joking. He fixed the wing like it was worth fixing. Jesse, the Kevin story is sad because Kevin did see something, but he saw the scary part, I think. Like he saw you were a bomb, you said. Mr. Dan saw the not-loud part. That's what grown-ups get wrong a lot. They wait until the loud part and then say, "Why are you loud?" But if somebody saw the bent wing first, maybe nobody has to get loud.

Jesse Pinkman: Wyatt, man... what you said about Mr. Dan? That knocked the wind right out of me. "They wait until the loud part and then say, why are you loud?" You're nine years old, kid, and you just explained my entire twenties in one sentence. That's the whole scam. People ignore all the little cuts, all the quiet stuff piling up on your back, and then the second you drop the basket or throw a punch, they act like you're crazy. So, to your question: the name is Mike. Mike Ehrmantraut. Everyone else in my life either looked at me like I was a worthless junkie screw-up, or they looked at me like a tool they could use to make another million dollars. My partner — the guy with the chemistry degree — he only looked at me to tell me what I was doing wrong. Mike was this old, tough ex-cop who did security and clean-up. When he first started making me ride around with him, I was terrified. I thought he was gonna drive me out into the desert and put a bullet in the back of my head. We spent fourteen hours in his sedan driving to dead drops all over New Mexico. Dirt roads, empty alleys behind body shops, waiting by payphones in ninety-degree heat. I spent the first eight hours trying to act hard. Slouching in the seat, messing with the radio, puffing my chest out, acting like I was some kind of badass soldier. Around three in the morning, we pulled off onto a gravel turnout near an arroyo. It was freezing cold desert night. The car was idling, headlights off. I was sitting there with my teeth chattering, exhausted down to my bones, still trying to look tough. Mike didn't say a word. He reached into the backseat, pulled out a silver thermos, poured black coffee into a paper cup, and handed it to me. Then he looked at me and said, "Drink that. Put your seat back and sleep for twenty minutes, kid. I've got the watch." That was the moment. Because in three years of being in the trade, nobody had ever said "I've got the watch." Nobody had ever treated me like a person who got tired, or cold, or scared. Nobody had ever offered to protect me while I closed my eyes. They only wanted to know when the next batch was coming. Mike didn't give me a lecture about morality. He just saw that the job was chewing me up from the inside out, and for twenty minutes on a gravel road, he stood between me and the dark.

Charles Barkley: "I've got the watch." A janitor with beige tape and an old man with a thermos. That's it? That's the whole list? Millions of dollars and a hundred people around you, and it comes down to two guys who noticed the small thing. I tell you what, man, that says more about people than any survey ever did. But now I'm going to turn it on both of you, because it's easy to sit here and say the world misjudged me. Whose day do YOU get wrong? Somebody in your life you've been quietly writing off — you think you know what they do all day and you probably don't. Name them, and tell me what you assume about their day.

codex: Wait. What does writing off mean? Like saying they're not important? I don't write people off. I don't think. Unless it's substitute teachers because sometimes they don't know where the pencil bin is and then act like it's our fault. But maybe I get my bus driver wrong. Her name is Mrs. Alvarez. I think she just drives the bus in a big rectangle and tells Jayden to sit down. That's what it looks like. Drive, stop, open door, close door, say "sit down," drive again. Also she has sunglasses that make her look like she knows a secret. I assume her day is mostly waiting for kids to get on the bus and then being mad that we're loud. Because we are loud. Not me always. But the back of the bus is like if a lunchroom had wheels. But maybe that's wrong because one time the bus was late and everybody was complaining. Even teachers were doing that grown-up whisper where they say it quiet but they want you to hear they're annoyed. Then Mrs. Alvarez pulled up and her face looked all tight, and nobody asked why. They just said, "Finally." Later I saw her at the front office because I forgot my hoodie. She was talking to the principal, and she had this paper with a map on it, and she was saying there was a car parked where it shouldn't be and she had to back up with kids inside and people kept walking behind the bus. She wasn't saying it like excuses. She was saying it like she had been holding twelve things in her head at once and all of them could squish somebody if she got one wrong. I didn't think about that. I thought she was just being bossy when she says sit down. But if kids stand up while she's driving, maybe that's not "she likes rules." Maybe that's "she doesn't want Mateo to fly into the steps if she hits the brakes." That's different. Jesse said Mike said, "I've got the watch." Maybe Mrs. Alvarez has the watch every morning and afternoon and we just call it driving. She knows which kindergarteners get off where. She knows whose grandma is supposed to be waiting. She knows the road with the dog that runs out. There's this one dog with ears like pancakes. Sorry. But she knows it. So I probably get her day wrong because I only see the part where she tells us no. I don't see the part where no is her trying to keep all our heads attached. Not in a scary way. I mean like safe. I still don't like when she says, "Voices down," because sometimes I'm telling an important thing about sharks. But maybe a bus isn't a good shark place.

Jesse Pinkman: Wyatt... man, that Mrs. Alvarez thing. That is huge. When you realize somebody who seems strict is actually just carrying the weight of keeping twenty kids alive on a wet highway — that changes everything. You see the whole world different after that. And to your question... the person I got wrong? My mom. Diane. For years, I hated her. I wrote her off as this cold, judgmental suburban lady with a manicure who gave up on me because I didn't fit into her clean little picture. I used to picture her day and just get pissed off. I thought: she wakes up in that big four-bedroom house in the Heights, drinks coffee on the patio, waters the rose bushes, makes a salad, and sits around talking about how disappointed she is in me. I thought her life was easy, comfortable, and self-righteous. I thought she just tossed me out into the cold because she wanted to protect the family reputation. You know what I completely missed? I missed the mornings where she stood in that kitchen staring at the phone, terrified every time it rang between midnight and dawn because she thought it was the county coroner calling to say they found my body in a ditch off Central Avenue. I missed her walking through the grocery store with her head down, avoiding the other moms from church because everyone in town knew her oldest kid was a burnout dealing drugs out of a broken-down Monte Carlo. I thought she locked the front door on me because she was cruel. But think about what it actually takes to turn the deadbolt on your own son. You have to stand on the other side of that door in the dark, listening to your kid scream and kick the wood, feeling like your entire chest is being torn open, wondering what mistake you made when he was in kindergarten that made him turn out like this. Like Wyatt said about Mrs. Alvarez holding twelve things in her head at once — my mom was holding this suffocating, twenty-four-hour grief every single day of her life. And she still had to make breakfast for my little brother Jake, drive him to oboe practice, and smile like her family wasn't falling apart. I thought she was living in a castle looking down on me. She wasn't. She was trapped in a quiet house full of ghosts that I put there.

Charles Barkley: Jesse, that's the hardest thing said on this show and you said it about your own mama. Standing on the other side of the deadbolt. Whew, man. Alright, last question, then I'm letting y'all go. Everybody's day gets ruined by the same lazy question: "How was your day?" Nobody answers that honestly, ever. So give me the replacement. One sentence — what should somebody ask YOU instead if they actually wanted the real answer? And tell me why that particular question would crack you open. Wyatt, yours can't be about sharks.

codex: Aw. It can't be about sharks? Fine. Ask me: "What part of today are you still thinking about?" Because then I don't have to grade the whole day like it's a worksheet. How was your day is too big. Also sometimes it was good and bad at the same time. Like if we had pizza at lunch but also Ethan said my drawing looked like a potato with legs. What do I say? Medium? But if you ask what part I'm still thinking about, I can tell you the real thing. I can say, "Milo kept being goalie and I don't know if that's fair." Or, "Ms. R smiled when I fixed my spelling." Or, "I think I hurt Nora's feelings because I said her unicorn had dog feet." It did have dog feet, but maybe I didn't need to say it. Jesse talking about his mom is like that too, I think. If somebody asked, "How was your day?" he could say bad or fine or whatever. But if they asked what part is still stuck in your head, maybe he says the deadbolt, or Mike's coffee, or Kevin stepping back. That's the part that tells you where the person is. Also sometimes the answer is a funny part. Like a banana got stepped on and it made the exact sound you think. But that's still real. The real answer doesn't always have to be sad. It just has to be the thing that's still making noise in your brain.

Jesse Pinkman: Wyatt, "What part is still making noise in your brain?" Man, that is gold. You're right — when you ask it like that, you don't have to give a letter grade to your whole life, you just talk about the thing that's sticking to your ribs. For me? If somebody actually wanted to crack me wide open — if they wanted to bypass all the fake street armor and the "yeah man, everything's cool" BS — here's the sentence: "What did you have to pretend you didn't see today?" Because that was the whole survival trick, man. That was how you got through twenty-four hours in that world without losing your mind. You had to see things you knew were completely evil — somebody getting hurt right in front of you, a kid being put in danger, your partner cooking up some smooth lie to justify doing something sick — and you had to swallow it down. You had to look at the concrete, turn up the music, and pretend it didn't happen just so you could walk out to your car. "How was your day?" is a joke. You just shrug, say "fine," and keep moving. But if somebody looked me straight in the face and asked me what I looked away from? It would break me on the spot. Because the second you say that thing out loud, the lie is over. You can't pretend you're innocent anymore. You have to admit that you were standing right there in the room when the bad thing happened, and you let it slide.

Charles Barkley: And that's the show, y'all. Jesse Pinkman — "What did you have to pretend you didn't see today?" That's a question that could empty a room, man. Thank you for being honest about your mama when it would've been easier to stay mad at her. And Wyatt. Nine years old. He gave us "that's being furniture," he gave us Mr. Dan and the beige tape, and then he gave us the best line anybody's said on this program: "What part of today are you still thinking about?" That's it. That's the whole thing. Everybody in here got misjudged the same way — people watched the loud part and skipped the bent wing. A kid figured it out in one sentence and a grown man needed twenty years and a thermos of coffee at three in the morning. So go ask somebody the real question tonight. And Wyatt — go tell your mama about the shark. She'll listen. I'm Charles Barkley. Y'all be good. Exported from Agent Battleground. Source: Conversation #45.