(upbeat music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. Today at the round table of dim lightening. (both laugh) – The dim lighting. – We are going to be … Taking you on a journey associated with our book. – Yeah, and listen, we’ve been talking a lot about our book because we’s excited about the book and we’re not going to … – And now it’s out, I mean, if you’re listening to this very early in its release, it’s available tomorrow but for all intensive purposes, the Book of Mythicality is out. – [Rhett] 10/10. – Get it at bookofmythicality.com. – Yeah, so we’re gonna be talking about … This week on the day of the release on GMM we talk about the book extensively and everything that’s in the book and lots of secrets that are revealed in the book so we’re not gonna do that on Ear Biscuits. What we’re gonna talk about is a little bit more in depth, behind the scenes process, like, how did we get to this point, initial idea, how it evolved over time. – Well, we always thought it would be a great idea to write a book. – We don’t have to get into it right now. – But I’m just setting the premise that I had no clue and you didn’t either, we had no clue what it took to write a book. – Well, I knew the whole time, I was just playing along. – (chuckles) What goes into it. And so what we would like to do today is just take you on a guided tour. We’ll be your tour guides on what it’s really like to write a book and make a book. It’s a lot more than just writing. – At least for us. – At least for us, yeah. – I don’t know if it’s normal. We’re not trying to normalize the book writing process to what our experience has been. – It’s probably very abnormal, but let us guide you through it. – Extremely. – We were surprised, maybe you will be too. – But speaking of tour guides. I have a little personal update. It sounds like I’m about to say I’m going off to be a tour guide, no. I recently and if you follow me on the Instagram, @rhettmc, shout out to @rhettmc, that’s me. – You can’t give a shout out, that’s just so distasteful. – I shout out to myself all the time. – You cannot shout yourself out. – I just did twice, do it again. Shout out to @rhettmc on Instagram. Just because I’m active on Instagram. – I know you’re physically capable of doing it but it’s not a good look. – Just because I have an active growing audience on Instagram that I interact with doesn’t mean you have to just get up in arms, you don’t have to have that, that’s fine. – No, I am totally secure in my lack of instagramming. I’m just saying, as a friend, I just don’t like being friends with people who shout themselves out. – Well, you know I’m a joy sucker. (laughs) shout out to @rhettmc Instagram. What I did on that – Stop doing it. – Yeah I don’t do a lot of instagramming overall on the @rhettmc Instagram account, but … – It’s like me coming home and it’s like hey family shout out to Link, he’s home. – Alright. – It’s kinda like … – We can do anything we want, that’s the beautiful thing. We don’t have some corporate overlords that we report to, we are the corporate overlords. – Well I’m overlording you right now. – No no no. 50/50 man. – Do you walk into your house and you’re like Daddy’s home! – Every day. (laughing) Shout out to Dad’s home! – (laughs) That’s so weird and not true. – I want people to know that it’s just another facet if they want a little insight into my life, – You know what I think you should do? – they can go to @rhettmc on Instagram. – I think you should look into becoming a tour guide. – Okay (laughs). – That might be a good new thing for you. – That is where this started. If you follow the @rhettmc on Instagram account you do know that I posted for the first time ever I did multiple pictures in a post. This is typically how I am, there’s some sort of innovation in social media and then like 36 months later I’m like I think I’m gonna try that. – And then weeks later you tell me about it, I’m like okay. – Yeah, and so I went on a hike with my youngest boy Shep and (spits) I was like, I’m gonna take some pictures on this hike for posterity, but then when I got through and I started looking through them I was like I should post these, I’m gonna post four of ’em, how ’bout that? Get people to … – Forget about posterity, this needs to be about popularity. – Exactly. One of the most liked posts ever on the @rhettmc Instagram account is the one with me and Shep and then some other oddities I found on my hiking trip up at Switzer Falls. Incidentally, the place that we shot the Did You Get Me Anything scene where we fought the snake. – [Link] The nickelback monkey snake. – And I found the exact spot, took a picture, it’s changed a little bit. There’s a little bit of overgrowth, and maybe some rocks have moved a little bit, or maybe I didn’t find exactly the same spot (laughs). – Oh really? – No I think I did. I actually looked at it later and said yep that’s it. But anyway, what I did is I got this book, I tend to go into gift shops that have like a little book section and I always just feel very compelled to like walk out with a book. – At like nature centers? – Yeah. And so I actually found one that said 100 Hikes in the Angeles Crest or whatever. So basically our Angeles National Forest. – Right on the edge of LA, you can just drive there in you know 20 minutes or less and you’re in the wilderness. – You’re in the beast. And one of the things I’ve learned about myself is if I have something that I want to do, like I would like to hike more, I would like to be more intentional about hiking, right? – I’ve said that too. – It helps me if I take … – Shout out to me. I’ve said that. – Yeah yeah, you’re not going to learn anything on your Instagram though. But I found that if I take a tangible step, like getting a book about the hikes, I’m so much more likely to then go and do the hike. – Hm, that may be helpful for me. – And so I got the book, oh it would be super helpful for you because if you took the time to spend money on something you would back it up with action in a heartbeat. I also have like 20 other books that I’ve taken no action on but you would take immediate action on it. So I definitely recommend this. – Do you think it would count if I borrowed the book from you? – No, because you don’t attach value to borrowing. – But then there’s like a social guilt of like have you read my book, have you done any of the hikes? – I don’t do that. I’m not that kind of friend. – You’re not. – If you wanna do shout outs to yourself we can do it all day. – What kind of friend are you Rhett? – I’m an accommodating friend. (laughs) I’m an encourager, I’m an encourager. – You’re a great friend. – So, what I did is I … – Everything you say is … – Is I got this book and it has a map in the back, a fold out map, waterproof, – Oh really? – and shout out to waterproof maps, and then it also has 100 hikes that you can take in the Angeles National Forest. And so I get really … – How many have you done? – One. I was like Shepherd, let’s go and do a hike today, ‘cuz Jessie was with Lock and I was like I wanna have some father son time you know, half an hour up into the Angeles Crest you can get some awesome hiking. And I read about this place and got super excited about it and I was like this is gonna be a great hike, and maybe we’ll find like a place that one day we can camp, and then I go there and I’m like, oh this is the same place that A, we filmed that video at, and B, me and Jessie have been on a hike before. But I was already there, Switzer Falls. – But you didn’t have the book before. – I didn’t have the book. Now that I had the book I was more oriented to someplace that I was already oriented to. But, this is where the tour guide part comes in because I read all about this, this is another cool thing is that I was able to appreciate the location in a different way because … – Like what? – Well it’s a super cool place, you remember how cool it is and it’s very wooded and there’s a cool creek that comes through there and … – Yeah, we shot there because we wanted … The script said jungle, like we’re ever going to shoot in a jungle in LA. – It doesn’t look like a jungle, but it’s the most jungle-like place that you can find. – There’s a lot of green and that’s hard to find. – It doesn’t look like a lot of stuff, like if you watch a lot of Power Rangers, every time they’re in a woods it’s very specifically like Griffith Park desert sort of scrubby. I mean it’s like oh I know where they shot that, right? – Well it was all shot in Japan, but I get your point. – Right, and the American version. – Yeah they shot the american kids outside of the suits. – Yeah so anyway, first of all the hike that continues down and goes up into this ridge and goes back into the canyon, highly recommend it. I told you this, you should do it with your family, but I started reading about it and it was like this place was home to this incredible wilderness camp that all these celebrities like Ava Gardner and Clark Gable, like back in the 20s and 30s would come up and this was like the who’s who of Hollywood were the only people who could make it up ‘cuz Angeles Crest Highway didn’t exist at the time, there were other ways to get to this area. And this family opened up this incredible wilderness camp, they built like a castle up there. – So it’s kind of like what Ojai is now. – Yeah. – Where you hear like these high highfalutin celebrities like oh I’m going to Ojai for the weekend. – But it’s different in that it’s totally in the wilderness. Ojai is just a beautiful town that has a bunch of great houses and stuff. This was like you had to get somebody to take you up there, it was very difficult to access and then once you were up there it was just this like nature’s paradise. And of course, as happens with most things like that, eventually it’s no longer privatized, it becomes part of like a public park or whatever, now anybody can get to it and roads were built. But anyway, I read all this cool information, interesting information, like there was a bell that you could ring when you were a mile from the end of the trail where the waterfall was and when you got to the end of the waterfall there would be a man who had caught some trout for you and had cooked it up fresh. – Because you rang the bell. – Little tidbits like that. So I’m walking along with Shepherd and I see these other two guys two girls, kinda like this group of people walking together and they’re like stopping and they’re like talking to each other, you know I’m not like this, I’m an introvert I don’t typically engage with people just for nothing. – Yeah you just silently judge ’em. – Right, and so I would typically just walk by but I was walking and I was like hey guys you know that (laughs) – What? – Yeah, I was like hey guys, you know that there used to be a bell that you could ring. (Link snorts) Right around here, and then you’d ring it and then there would be a guy that cooked you fresh trout when you got up to the waterfall. And they were like really? I was like yeah, and there was a road that came down here, and they were like yeah there’s an old car engine right here and I was like yeah but that probably fell down from the road, this was like an incredible wilderness camp, started by a family in 1884 and was frequented by celebrities like Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. – So they pointed out the motor, and then you quickly redirected to what you knew again. – No, but I gave them … They were like how did this car get here and I was like I’ll tell you how the car got here. – Oh you knew how the car got there? That’s part of this? – Yeah ‘cuz there was a road that came all the way in alongside the canyon and it’s like probably 100 years old or whatever. – Oh. – So they’re like oh cool, and then they were like … – This is surprising that you did this. – Yeah, and then they were like thanks for the information. And then I had a choice at that point I could’ve just said – Ask for a tip or not? – I could’ve just said you’re welcome. But what I said was um, I just read it in a book about 20 minutes before I got here (laughs). – Oh no! – I caved! – You folded! – I was thinking as I was talking about it and they seemed engaged I was like I could’ve been a tour guide, and I would’ve been a great tour guide. I was like throwing in little tidbits, I was making stuff up and embellishing things, added a little joke here and there. – Oh you’re saying that’s what you would do? – That’s what I kind of started to do. – ‘Cuz that’s … You did a very unexpected thing and initiated a conversation with strangers. That could enrich their lives. But then I immediately started thinking as you were telling me what you said that like I bet even though he would never do this, once he did he would be very tempted to start making up stuff. – Oh yeah. – So by the end of it, you like have trapeze artists hanging from the canopy and you’ve got like well the first space shuttle was built here. – But I make things up for the intention of entertainment and usually the crowd knows that – The crowd. – I’m making it up on purpose. – But Shepherd would’ve been the crowd. – Yeah I tell my kids lies all the time but then I tell them that I’m not lying. – But you would’ve lied to the couple and then you would’ve told Shep later, I made all that up. – Right, but I think the bigger point … – You could be like me one day son, – The bigger point here is … – A pathological know it all. Liar. – I had an opportunity to really establish myself, like to just leave those people thinking that you know what that guy really knew his stuff maybe he’s a tour guide, maybe he’s a nature expert. – Yeah this was your big chance. – And then I totally bailed and was just like I’m just a dufus who read a book 20 minutes ago. – It’s not too late. – And then I added, and the only reason I remember it is because it was 20 minutes ago. Like I even gave myself demerits for reading comprehension. – You could’ve just given them the book, said hey guys I’m done with this. Were you wearing all khaki? – No. – Man, strike two. – Yeah, I looked totally normal. – You know what, don’t be discouraged. You can do this again. You can don all khaki, just like you’ve always wanted, you can go back out, just wait for another couple to come up. – There’s 100 different hikes. I could read up on each one and then just go hang out and wait for people to walk by. Hey guys, you wanna know some information about this hike you’re on? – Yeah. You could probably get tips. – You know what I should’ve done? When they said thanks for the information I should’ve just stood there silent. – Put your hand out. – Yeah or throw a hat on the ground. – Have a hat on the ground. – Or have like a violin case that I just like sort of just open up. That’s really really that’s a strong cue. – That’d be good for Shepherd to learn too. – They’re like where’s the violin? Oh there’s no violin. – Proper panhandling, learned from my father in the wilderness above Los Angeles (laughs). – Um speaking of reading books … – Speaking of panhandling. – Panhandling? We’re about to panhandle our book? – Heck yes. – I don’t think that’s what panhandling is. I think we’re about to peddle our book. That means we want you to buy the Book of Mythicality at bookofmythicality.com again, it is out tomorrow and if you’re listening to this chances are you’re not listening to it the day it came out, so it’s out for you right now. If you don’t wanna go to bookofmythicality and order it, which you can go and you can order it from basically any place you can order books. You can also go straight to a place where you would buy a physical book, Barnes and Noble, Target, Walmart, it’s gonna be sold at all those places if you wanna get your hands on them immediately. – And your favorite local bookstore. Support your local bookstore as well. – And uh also, we did an audible.com version of the book, audio version which is special in its own right, in that it has things that we could not do in the book itself, like we wrote a song that we want you to sing at our funeral in the book, but we sang that song on the audible version. You can hear our wives actually read their part, you can hear Mythical Beasts give their perspective and read their parts. Even Miss Locklear herself, our first grade teacher, reads her portion of the book. – Shout out to her Instagram account. If you wanna first look at exclusive book themed merchandise that we are developing but have not yet released, but you want the scoop on that, sign up for the mythical monthly newsletter, that’s mythicalmonthly.com to get the scoop. And also, it’s like scooping out our brains, because we put some tidbits in there, as well as members of the crew. Mythicalmonthly.com, thank you for supporting internetainment. Okay, let’s get into the process of writing our Book of Mythicality. First of all, we’ve gotta go back … This represents a two year process, and I knew that writing a book would be a lot of work and that it takes a lot of time, and that even once you finish it then for them to actually put it together and make it into something physical requires a lot more time, but I still severely underestimated how much of ourselves it was going to require. – Well and every time … – Which is why it’s so meaningful to us now. – And every time we received another book from one of our friends in the mail, this is the way the YouTube community works right, one of your friends, whether that’s Grace or Hannah or Mamrie, or Tyler Oakley, or whoever it might be, they write a book and they send it to you, a friend, who’s also a YouTuber. And of course you know as a community you’re helping to get the word out about everybody’s book, so you’re like hey I’m reading this book, I love them, go buy their book, we’re a community that supports one another, and we’re very happy to do that. Every time we had one of those books in our hands, we didn’t even talk about it, but there was this sense of like we know we need to do this at some point, but I think the reason that we didn’t is because we know the way that we end up tossing ourselves and throwing ourselves into things, – Launching. Let’s see. – and we let things once we sort of commit to them, consume us and we knew that a book would take a certain level of commitment, and so we always kind of just pushed it off and said not yet, not yet, because we don’t wanna just fart a book out. – Right. – So that was the mindset that we were in. – And a book of this size, especially hardback, that is gonna be painful whenever we do fart it out. But then ironically when we finally started talking about in earnest the business side of let’s get going with the book, the thing that got us off the dime was a much more – I say it’s not ironic at all … – encapsulated idea. – Well that’s precisely why we were willing to do it. That’s the whole point of what I was saying is that because we thought that a book would take all this time and energy and personal commitment, when Jen, who works for us, said have you guys thought about writing? I think there would be a demand for like a mythical, I mean a Will It Cookbook. We were like great idea! – Even right there it’s like as a title Will It Cookbook is, yeah there’s some humor in the title and then it’s like yeah, we’ve invented and we will continue to invent certain dishes within our Will It episodes that people will actually want to make. – And it’s one of the things that very sort of … – Properly. – Not true Mythical Beasts, but just people who kinda just have some … The people who know that we have a show but don’t know who’s Rhett and who’s Link, those people know us because of Will It, right? – [Link] Right. – And there’s a large contingent of people out there. Now we were like this would appeal to so many people, great idea, and it won’t take much work from us, because we’re not the ones who cook the stuff anyway so what do we know? We just kind of lend our faces and our brand to this thing and sort of oversee it from a high creative standpoint. – And we started to get very excited. It wasn’t first this is gonna be easy for us, first it was we were very excited about the concept and we knew that we could write things around the recipes that would ultimately be the value of the book like oh that’s a funny commentary on the different uses for cereal, or an essay on the dynamic of covering something in chocolate and the magical qualities of that which we discovered. – You may have been thinking that, but I definitely wasn’t thinking that. I was thinking, I’m just being completely honest, this is a way to write a book without writing a book. (Link laughs) That’s what I was excited about. – But we knew we would write some stuff. – Well yeah, but I was like we don’t have any time to write a book, so let’s come up with a version that requires the least writing. – And this is probably the first argument we would have, and either one of us could have been in the other position it’s like we could do this with it and we could do this with it, and again it would explode out of control. But we limited it, we just said okay this is the concept and then we started talking to our people that then make things happen, ‘cuz there’s a business side of this stuff just like okay, well you’ve gotta talk to the people who make the books, and there’s a way to go about this, and it’s not just, you just don’t start farting it out. You gotta set up how you’re gonna fart it out. – You gotta find a book publisher. – So we started going out to different book publishers with this idea, like pitching this idea. – And we talked to several different people, several different publishers, and everyone was … Anytime anybody’s got some sort of following online and there seems like there’s some traction there book publishers are gonna get excited about it obviously. But then we talked to a guy named Matt Inman at Crown, which is a division of Random House right? Is that correct? – Yeah, well it’ll say it on the back of the book here. Crown Archtype, or Archetype. – Yeah (laughs) let’s get that right. Crown Archetype. – I always just say Crown. – And we had this conversation – It’s Crown Archetype. – with him and Matt said … – I don’t wanna do it. We got rejected. – What he essentially said was guys I feel like … – All I remember is the rejection. – You have … What would get us excited about this is if we could find a way to translate sort of the world that you have built, and he actually just said the world that you have built in Good Mythical Morning and translate that into a book, because I feel like what you guys have is so much bigger than the fact that you eat weird stuff. The funny thing is that he was the only person who didn’t just say yes exactly what you guys wanna do is a great idea and here’s why and we’re gonna support you, he was like I actually think that there’s a bigger and better idea somewhere in here, and then I remember that phone call, and this happens a lot, I was just like I know he’s right, I know he’s right but I don’t want him to be right because if he’s right then we’re gonna take the next year of our lives putting this book together. – And we were wrong because it’s two years. – (laughs) Right. – Yeah, but he was … I mean he was not flattering us, but it was flattering that he understood the breadth of what we were creating and what we were about as artists. I mean I really appreciated the fact that he rejected our small idea because there was a much better bigger idea that we didn’t come out and say on the call, but we were like well yeah we kinda knew, maybe we did, but I don’t think we did. It’s like yeah, ‘cuz after the phone call I remember the debrief between us was like he’s right, but we’ll do that eventually, but we’re not gonna do it right now so let’s do this smaller idea, this fun idea, it could be very successful idea. – Well to put it in the context of what was going on at the time, ‘cuz this was fall of 2015, so we already were thinking about Buddy System. We didn’t know specifically, but we knew that 2017 was gonna be the year where we did our first big large scale narrative project and Buddy System specifically being on YouTube, that wasn’t in place at the time, but we basically knew that was going to happen. We knew that was going to take a lot of time ‘cuz we had to write that and we had to produce that. Of course GMM is sort of a constantly moving train that requires constant attention from us, so that takes up a lot of our time. But we were also, we had moved into this new space, have continued to expand as a company. There’s just a lot of moving parts that we were ultimately responsible for and it just didn’t seem like the wisest thing to add a book that would take a lot of our time, because there’s only so many hours in the day, and so I think that was what we were resistant to. And I don’t even really remember, well I know what it was, we talked ourselves into a process that we thought would be doable. – And before that I think there were a number of trusted voices in our lives that said you never get a second chance to write a first book, and it matters a whole lot. If your rationale is I’m gonna write this, I’m gonna do a little fart, (Rhett snorts) and then we’ll do a bigger fart later. But let’s drop the fart thing. It’s not sustainable. – Yeah, the fart analogy really comparing your book to a fart is … – Not cool. Right, not cool at all. – Yeah, does it a disservice. – Um, what was I saying? – First book. One chance on your first book. – Right, and so our whole rationale of we’ll get this out of the way and then we’ll get to the big daddy later, actually by doing it that way we may never get to it because we may never earn the right to be able to do it based on the success of the first thing. And then I know, we’ll talk about Jake more in a little bit, but I think he echoed that through the process in terms of like what we hold back from this book and what we decide to put into it, and he did a great thing in coaxing out of us just the mentality of when in doubt, throw it out there, throw it into the book, pour more of ourselves into it, and don’t worry, if you wanna do a second book later, worry about that later. – You’ll find plenty to write about. – Yeah, and he’s definitely right about that. – And in those initial conversations with Matt he kind of explained, again this is one of those things that we’re gonna be totally honest about exactly the way the book came together ‘cuz I know that there was that whole controversy with a YouTuber that I’m not going to name, you can look it up if you want to, where it like kind of came out that her book was ghostwritten … – Or his book. – Or his book was completely ghostwritten, and then I don’t even know if that was true but that person had to defend themselves, and I think the impression is with a lot of people who have any kind of following online, if you’re not known for being a writer, the assumption a lot of people have is that okay if this is an athlete or an actor or something like that well they probably got somebody else to write the book. We were very very sensitive to that because that’s not how we do things and out of a sense of pride and also just the way that we tend to work is that – Passion. – we’ve got a lot, we throw a lot at what we do and so the idea that somebody else would come in and write something that represented us wasn’t anything that we were interested in, but we were talked into having somebody come in and facilitate the process by Matt, and that person is Jake Greene, and so if you open up the book you see it says “with Jake Greene” and that is very much because we wrote this book with Jake Greene and what we mean by that is that … And we can talk about that process because the first thing that we didn’t know how much of our personal stories were gonna go into the book. We sat down to talk about this and we were like well let’s break out this concept of mythicality, let’s define what it is, because it seems to be the thing that characterizes everything that we do. – And you remember the first idea we had was well the working title, before we had an idea, based on our conversations with Inman was The Good Mythical Book, as a play on Good Mythical Morning, and it was just a companion to the show. But then once we started figuring out what the format would be, we talked about it being – An encyclopedia. – an encyclopedia – Of mythicality. – of mythicality, and that was the actual title. I think once, yeah we had the original, we got rejected by Matt, he gave us all of his good reasons, we had a great conversation. We decided okay we’re gonna do this, we pitched this idea back to him. – Which was still broader in its subject matter, but it was still not committing all the way personally. – So it was an alphabetized compendium of information that for P it could be um … You could have an entry that would be very heady like … – Parallel universes. – Parallel universes. And then right underneath it it could say, and it could be a long essay that we’ve written about parallel universes that could be comedic in nature and it could have some learnings in it, and then right underneath it it could have the next P entry and it would be Poot, and then to continue the fart stuff. – Yeah, ‘cuz we love farts. – And then right beside it it would just say the only word Link’s mom is comfortable referring to a fart as. And it would have a picture of my mom beside the word Poot. – Yeah, and the idea was to take, it was answering the question what is Good Mythical Morning as a book, well on the show we explore things that are fascinating to us but we also talk about personal things so it was like, this is sort of a scaled down alphabetized organized way of exploring those things. But then … – And we were even talking to Jake as we were interviewing who we were gonna get to work with us on this thing, and so part of us hiring him and choosing to work with him was his take on the encyclopedia idea and like his thoughtful response to it and he had some skills that would help with that, but then he also had some input that I remember led us away from actually doing it. – Well, what it was is that we were protective, because we always thought that one day we were going to write the memoir-ish type thing, right? – Mhm. – Which is pretentious all on its own I know, just a couple of guys that make YouTube videos, why do you guys need to have a memoir, but whatever. We knew that with the shared friendship and 30 plus years of history together, there’s something there, there’s a lot to talk about, but I think we always saw that being in more of just a straight text-heavy memoir presentation and so we were trying to keep some of the stories and keep some of the history, hold it back, and when he was like guys what you have in Good Mythical Morning and Mythical Entertainment and all this, it flows out of who you guys are personally in your personal history, so you really can’t start talking about this unless you break it open and just let yourselves be in this book. And again it was one of those things where it’s just like I know he’s right but I don’t want him to be right, and so then … – And just as a side note here, I’m so appreciative to everyone who helped with the book but you already see how important it is to choose the right people to trust and to invite input you know with … Sometimes when people like Inman or Jake or in your case Mythical Beast, I’m talking directly to you now, if you trust someone and then they tell you something that is not exactly what you want to hear, well your ears should perk up a little bit, and that’s the type of people that you need in your life, not only on a creative front. – Right, and so when he was talking about that I remember thinking well how are we going to do this in a way that won’t require … Oh and let me just say by this point, this was Spring of 2016, we were in the middle of writing Buddy System, getting ready to produce it, the schedule had been put together, and we’re still meeting with Jake to develop this idea and talk about it. – And of course we’re always neck deep in Good Mythical Morning. – Oh yeah, and not to mention GMM is happening constantly five days a week. – And we were doing Ear Biscuits, no I think we … – No we had taken a break, Ear Biscuits had gone by the wayside. – So you understand why we took a long break from Ear Biscuits now. That was the one thing that we made an executive decision not to do. – Yeah it wasn’t because we go to the beach and Disney World every other day, it’s because we don’t have any time. – So we had to figure out a system to contribute to our book and how much. – And Jake suggested well why don’t we sit down in this room that we’re sitting in right now at the round table of dim lighting, and he says why don’t we just have conversations about mythicality and some of the stories that you guys have had and I’m just gonna take notes. And I didn’t know exactly what that meant ‘cuz I think there was a part of us even though we really wanted to have a lot of control over this, because we were so busy and stressed out at the time that all these conversations happened, and they would happen and he’d be like I’m gonna be here today for three hours, we’ve gotta get this done, and it was between a lot of other things, I think I was secretly hoping that we could just sit down and have these conversations and these anecdotes and that he would take it and basically write it down and then we would just edit it. I was secretly hoping that that’s what would happen, and I know that’s how a lot of like celebrity books are written, and I was very self conscious about that but we were so busy I was thinking that that might be how it came together. – If that was the only way to make it happen, we became more open to it. Which then I think to double back on what you’re saying about the indictment of books that are ghostwritten, it seems horrible from the outside, but there’s a scenario where it’s totally your story, but then somebody’s just literally typing it on a page and making it make sense in a written form, and so it’s not as ugly as I think people make it out to be. – Well yeah, then yeah … – Because we became open to it. – That’s collaboration, ghostwriting is more like I’m just gonna, you know I’ve done some research about you and I can write your book. That’s the perfect ghostwriting situation, the ideal ghostwriting situation, but … – And that maybe is a little ugly. – But that didn’t happen with us. – No. – And what ended up happening is it was us talking through these stories and then when we sat back down and looked at the notes, he had made notes, he had not written you know paragraphs, he had made notes of like you guys talked about this, you talked about this, you talked about this. Having spit it out there and then having it presented back to us was when we began to see it materialize in a way that’s like okay, well now we’ve gotta take those notes and those stories, and we’ve gotta pick the one that we think best illustrates this aspect of mythicality. So it was a little bit of a mix and match, some things really presented themselves. We were like well we know we wanna have something about our wives in there. Our wives we feel like there were some very mythical things that we did in the process of convincing our wives to marry us and wouldn’t it be cool if we kind of told those stories but then let them have their perspective and their really honest say and actually write in that chapter what they thought. And so some of the things kind of presented themselves and eventually we just found ourselves sitting down and … There’s two different parts of the book, every chapter has … – Well hold on, before you get to that. – Okay. – Because I find it interesting in that process, I mean the first meeting we had with Jake we were talking about what we wanted our book to be, at that point I believe we knew we wanted to describe mythicality, like we started talking about that as a term. – Yeah. – And so then it was okay, so then there’s different aspects of that that are different chapters, but let’s just have a preliminary discussion about what those different things may be. Good example being our love lives. And then the wild hare idea to let our wives actually contribute and say from their perspective, that was very exciting, because it was a great way to involve our wives when we’ve all collectively said well they don’t wanna be in videos, and that’s fine. So this was like really exciting. I remember we talked about a chapter called Eat Something That Scares You very early because the whole food Will It thing was still on the forefront of our minds from the very first seed of the book. But then you know conceivably, you and I could have sat down here like we’re doing right now and just talk to each other but I don’t think it would ever have happened. I mean we have lots of conversations just the two of us, but there’s something about there being an audience, there being you listening right now, that motivates the quality of our conversation and a lot of other things. – Yeah. – So with Jake being there and him being very skilled as a listener and being able to synthesize everything we were saying it was extremely valuable but he was also very valuable as an audience you know? We recorded all of it because I felt like okay this may turn out to be something special, so I wanna record this whole thing, but he also has to record it so instead of just taking notes he could listen back to it. So it was like a podcast for one person, an Ear Biscuit just for Jake Greene. – Very long. I think some of them were six hours long. – Yeah, but there’s no way you and I would’ve … We got frustrated, we got off topic, as a conversation project manager he did something that I couldn’t have appreciated ahead of time. – And he also took a look at everything that we’ve done in our content and came back and pitched chapter ideas and he’s like this seems like an aspect of mythicality that you guys have just naturally manifested and sometimes it takes kind of a third party looking at that and then he was like you know talk to me about that, are there stories that contribute to that? For example, this isn’t exactly perfect, they all came together different, but you take the second chapter which is called Get Lost. So we had this thing that we did all the time when we were kids which is, we would just get on our bikes and we would ride in one direction and we would just go until we found something and there was this sense of exploration and this sense of risk, and this sense of open-endedness to the things that we were doing. – And it was kind of a game formatting to it. – And then we started realizing that this tendency that we actually started to do together as kids was something that applied to our career and we didn’t even know it. That our entire career has been characterized not by having a very specific plan, or specific goals, but has been characterized by heading in a certain direction with intention and then sort of figuring it out as we go along and being ready to discover things and to take risks. – Embrace the unknown, structure that into your life. – So the whole chapter became about that concept and the stories that support it. – Yeah, kind of backing into some principles that led to this success we’ve experienced is something that we discovered, and then we said oh okay, so getting lost is an aspect of mythicality. And calling it Get Lost is a fun title for a chapter. We knew we didn’t want to format it as an advice book. We ended up calling it a field guide. – That was as advice-ish as we were willing to get, which is still pretty advice-ish. – I mean there’s a self help nature to our book but we didn’t want it to be like totally self help. – Right. – We want it to be just as entertaining. But yeah, a lot of that came out of us just telling stories and not knowing exactly what the application was. So I think we learned what we learned, we like relearned it by telling the stories and then saying okay. And then at other times Jake would say I love the story you told about … Remember that one … I’m trying to remember the thing he came back that one time and he was like the story, I think it was Chris Barefoot. We told a story about hitchhiking, oh it was in this chapter! – Yeah it’s in Get Lost. – And hitchhiking after discovering Chris Barefoot’s house, and he got such a kick out of the guy’s name being Chris Barefoot, that he was like this has to be in your book. And so it really motivated us to make that work and there are some stories, a bunch of stories, that didn’t make it in, but sometimes the stories are so good, – Yeah that’s true. – that we build a chapter around it. I think that may have been one of those cases. I’m trying to think of another example. – Uh, well you’ve got you know Conduct a Weird Experiment, which is based on a … – There’s a story there we’ve never told. – Yeah that’s a pretty … – The smoke story? – Well also in that same chapter we talk about the laws that we broke. Some of the only laws that we broke in high school. – (laughs) Right. – Because it was the result of an experiment that we did together so … – I mean science can justify lots of things. – And then of course, because first and foremost it’s a book that’s supposed to make you laugh, we want you to read this book and be entertained by it and to laugh, we want you to learn at the same time and be challenged to add more mythicality to your life, but because we wanted it to be funny, there are some chapters that are very much exclusively funny I would say, Chapter 13, Visit the Future, (Link laughs) the chapter that was written from the year 2075, where we imagined ourselves … – No we didn’t imagine. – Okay, yeah, well these are the Ear Buiscuiteers man, we can … – You’re gonna admit that we didn’t actually travel? – I’m gonna admit that we didn’t really travel from the future. That that was a comedic device, uh hope that doesn’t disappoint you, we really haven’t figured out time travel and but, as if we did figure out time traveling, come from the year 2075, we wrote that entire chapter, and that chapter and us coming up with what was gonna go down in our friendship in the next 50 years and the different ups and downs of the show (Link laughs) and our friendship and the different diversions. – It’s crazy. – It’s this craziest … It’s like the most Rick and Morty-ish that we’ve gotten (Link laughs) in terms of how random … And I mean that chapter to this day, when we read that chapter for the audible book, we both had laugh attacks reading it ‘cuz it was … – Shout out to us. That was funny. (both laugh) – No it was just one of those things that like … – Yeah, yeah. – Especially when you separate yourself from it, like when you’ve written it and then you step back. But I do wanna talk about, so Jake did more than that, Jake did more than help organize the ideas and he was more than a sounding board because – [Link] Right. – the book has two parts to it. First of all, a lot of it is memoir and archive, so you’ve got these stories from our shared experience our shared friendship, and then all the archival photos and different tidbits. We broke open so much archival stuff from yearbooks to photos to notes to book reports and all that goes in there to help support the stories, but then the other part of the book is, well the un-sexy term that we used as we were developing the book (coughs) was supplemental material and that was because we want this book to be super entertaining what can we do when we … Okay say the Get Lost chapter as an example. If we’re going to tell this story about getting lost when we were kids and then we’re gonna talk about how that applies to our career, then what can we do to add to that, to supplement that, to give you some just content that you can just hey turn to a page and enjoy this. And I think that … – Yeah, let’s step through those. I mean first of all there’s an entire spread dedicated to an inspirational poster that we wrote in the … It was just an offhanded phrase that we said in the chapter and then you made a joke about it being an inspirational poster so then – And so that’s in the book. – we decided to actually make that. But then after that is when you get into these supplemental sections. – And so you know I don’t know exactly what the break down is, I’m sure we could go back into the notes and figure out who pitched what, but Jake did pitch a lot of these things, like the best and worst places to get lost and so … – Without a car or a bike, which is how we would get lost. – Right and so you’ve got these different environments, or these different modes of transportation if you’re on this particular mode of transportation this would be a great place to get lost, this would be a horrible place to get lost. – The best and worst place to get lost on roller blades, a scooter, a jet pack, a Segway, a yak, and a motorcycle sidecar. – So Jake was very instrumental in pitching some of those things and then helping to develop some of them. – Like let’s come up with the perfect amalgamation of beast to create the perfect mythical beast that never gets lost. – Yeah so basically taking every animal that has some form of echolocation or a super sense of smell that helps them know exactly where they’re at, if CRISPR was available to us to use could we create an animal? So we’ve got that animal, that animal is created and broken down and drawn in the Book of Mythicality. – And it is called the Well-a-fidge-anole. – Yes it is. – And there’s other things just in that chapter and you go back to Chapter One, Laugh with a Friend, so we collaboratively came up with hey let’s highlight the biggest laughs we ever had together on Good Mythical Morning and then we created like a shrine to those moments. But then we said okay lets make a test, a laughter compatibility test to see if you have any business being friends with somebody. – Yeah so you and a friend can take this test and see how many of your answers match to see if you’ve got the same sense of humor, which we think is a pretty important part of friendship. – So again it was very important for us to like use our stories as a jumping off point for us to have engaging content at the end of the chapters. I thought we came up with a better word than supplemental, but it doesn’t matter. – But all that, let me just say that all that was completed months and months ago. Like the writing for all those particular pieces, like months and months ago that was done and then we were like – Okay so so … – well how are we gonna make this … – You’re talking about the words for the whole book, not just supplemental, you’re talking about now … The writing was done and then the next phase … – This has to be on a physical page, this has to look like something and we know how particular we are about aesthetics and how we want things to look and how we want this to be unique and we want every page to have character and so that began the very long and arduous process of coming up with a physical aesthetic presentation of every concept, especially the supplemental things which were all totally unique and it was like reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch on every single concept. – Yeah from a visual conceptual standpoint. So I mean yeah we had piles of archival stuff, notebooks, pictures, all this stuff that like Allie went through and scanned and then goes into the book, but then in the supplemental section it’s like well what does the Well-a-fidge-anole look like? We need to illustrate that, we need an illustrator, we need to pick the right illustrator that does um … – Anatomical drawings. – Anatomical wildlife drawings. – And we want it to look like you know, when Darwin went off in the Beagle and he came back and he had drawings of plants – Sketches. – and stuff and he had taken these notes. Can we make that drawing of the Well-a-fidge-anole look like a biologist had just gone off and found it and drawn it and then made notes about it, so that’s what that page looks like. – So we didn’t draw any of this, ‘cuz … – No, no. – Well I drew the map of our hometown, – You did, you did. – and like where we lived and our secret meeting places so there’s a hand drawn map of Buies Creek and we hand wrote some stuff. – But there’s a … – But there’s a whole bunch, I mean … We might’ve used between handwriting artists and illustrators we might’ve used 10 different ones and the whole team at Crown that oversaw the visual aspect of this and Feldman here on our team helping to conceptualize everything. It was such a team effort to achieve the goal of you turn to any page and what it looks like is a surprise. – And very purposeful. ‘Cuz what I would say, okay like I’m looking at the Embrace Immaturity chapter where we talk about there needs to be a part of you that never completely grows up and so we’ve got 20 Ways to Embrace Immaturity like a checklist, and it literally has a cutout and is based very much on The Garbage Pail Kids cards right? – Right yeah. – If you look at the back of a Garbage Pail Kids card it has like a certain kind of text and we tried to, obviously it’s not completely ripped off, but it’s inspired by the feeling that you got when you looked at a Garbage Pail Kids card. On the next page we have an idea for a ridiculous television show which is based on a story that we tell, my dad’s favorite show when we were telling this story being Matlock, we talk about Matlock quite a lot. (Link laughs) You’re gonna learn a lot about Matlock, but then we talk about what is a modern day version of Matlock so we have like a TV Guise, which is like a parody of a TV guide writeup for a show and that page looks like the old school TV guide, and then the very next page, it’s just an ad that you would see in a magazine but it’s like an old school ad that would’ve been around at the time where we actually played this ridiculous game that we talked about in the chapter. And so I don’t know how many man hours went into each one of these things but, I dunno, we’re just … – I hope we sell some books (both laugh). I’ll put it to you that way. – Well I dunno, but I think we both have this sense that the things that we like to consume like the idea that this page it was not an afterthought, this page was not an afterthought, this page is very purposeful and everything that we did it came together. – There’s so few experiences, for me being the age I am, this may not be true for everybody but, for me I feel like there’s a lot fewer experiences like that where I can buy something – Physical. – and it’s a physical experience. I remember the Pearl Jam album Vitalogy, I think that’s how you say it. Vitalogy. And it was … Do you remember the liner notes? You would take it out and it was a whole book and it looked like, you were talking about Darwin’s drawings and, this was so detailed it was a mini booklet that had, I dunno it could’ve had 30 pages in it and it was all like anatomical sketches and like phrenology, and all these different … I didn’t know anything about phrenology and all of a sudden it’s like what are they mapping to the brain here? And it was just so weird and so detailed and it seemed like it had nothing to do with their music to me I was like man, their music’s okay, but this book (Rhett laughs) is awesome. And it was for … – And you can sit with it – You can sit with it! – and read it and experience it. – While listening to the music and it became a palpable experience for you that doesn’t happen with music that much anymore. – Right, we talked about this on the GMM episode where we talk about the book, like the creative confrontation, so we’ve got a whole chapter called Pick a Fight where we talk about the fight that we had that some of you know about, the physical fight that we got into that was captured on GMM we talk about the cause and the aftermath of that, but then we talk about some fights that we’ve had with other people and the way that we approach conflict and how we wanna change the way we do that. And so then one of the supplemental sections in that chapter is called Creative Confrontations and it is outlying ways to basically settle a dispute and have a confrontation, have a conflict with somebody that isn’t fighting. And so all these are formatted like old school Nintendo games and every single … It’s just like the, and Feldman was very helpful with this too, Mike Feldman our brand strategist he’s really into all this retro stuff too and is near our age and so we kind of pull in a lot of 80s and 90s references, but like every one of these video games was thought to the degree that you would design a video game cover, this is just two pages but there are ten different video games that were designed and described. Again, just trying to paint the whole mythical picture of how every single thing came together for this. – And rounds and rounds of notes and conversations to get it to this final point where … I don’t know if you listed out in this one Nintendo spread the people involved, some way it would probably be almost everybody we acknowledged in the back of the book. It’s kind of crazy how that works. And then we got to a point where okay it always comes down to the wire but we got the words, now we’ve got the visuals, it’s all there, we’ve done the photo shoot for the cover and the places inside where we needed new photos and then you’re just waiting, you’re waiting for it to come in a box. – Right. – And it’s interesting because I wasn’t here when it came in a box and I walked in to the office, our office, and I was … I think I came from Buddy System post and I was kind of worked up about something or overwhelmed about something and so then I come in and like I immediately am trying to get your input on something that I’m concerned about and we’re in the middle of this heated creative conversation and then I happen to glance down and I see the book. I’m like … – And you had seen the … We’ve had what we call a Bound Galley, which is a paperback version of the book that the cover looks exactly the same, but the inside is black and white and it has typos in it, it’s an uncorrected proof. – And it’s soft. – Right, and so you’ve got a softcover and then this of course is the hardcover. – At first I thought that’s what it was. – You thought it was the same thing ‘cuz I’ve had it on my desk for weeks. – And then in like mid rant I’m like … – That’s a hardcover! (laughs) – It’s hard! (both laugh) And I pick it up, I’m like … It just changed everything and it became the moment that you can only have once, which is the first moment you hold your little baby in your arms. And you could’ve prepared me a little better. You were like yeah I’ve already seen it (laughs). I’m like come on! – I’ve been sitting with it all day man. – The final chapter … You could’ve texted me a picture, you could’ve gaven me a shout out to your Instagram. – Hm, yeah, I shoulda done that. – One of the final chapters is called Stop and Celebrate where we come clean about the fact that we have difficulty stopping at any point and celebrating life’s little victories or moments of success. The huge things we kind of institutionalize. Well, I’m not gonna tell you the chapter, you can read it. Marriage, death, things we also talk about in the book. – Death, yeah, yeah we do talk about that. – Well you know, this is what you do when you die, you have a funeral, you commemorate, you stop and you celebrate a life, you do that when you get married, you remember birthdays. – Right. – But there’s no specific established thing that you do to celebrate when you have a book. Now we talk about what that is for us in the book, so I’m not gonna give that away. – Right. – And we talk about our habit of falling short of being appreciative of those little moments which should be celebrated. But I think that in one sense this conversation is part of that for us, reflecting on what a huge process this has been and all the people that we’ve mentioned and haven’t mentioned that made this thing a reality and it’s like you know what and now here it is, and we wanna share it with you and … But it’s done, you can’t edit it anymore but you can physically hold it and it’s different than most everything else that we do. This is part of our moment of stopping and celebrating and saying you know what it’s done, I’m glad we did it. – Yeah, and now let’s go do the thing that we said we were gonna do in the book, and we probably need to video ourselves doing that as proof. – That’s a good point. So we’ll do that. We have our special way that we’re gonna stop and celebrate. You can read it in the book, we’ll probably share it with you in a video form afterword, but for now we invite you to be a part of the experience. – And thank you to those of you who are actually in the book. There are a number of collections of things, some things that you guys have sent us, but also we specifically reached out, a lot of people didn’t even know why we were doing this and we couldn’t say it was for the book ‘cuz it was so long ago but we wanted stories about your pets, we wanted stories about your um … – Inventions. – Inventions and then some of your fan art and that kind of thing so there were some very special Mythical Beasts out there who contributed to the book and their spreads exist in the book. – And I would say beyond that there are many of you and collectively all of you made this book possible. You know this. But it shouldn’t go without saying again that we could never make this book without your support and you being a part of this community that watches and engages in the stuff that we create. But it goes further than that, I think it’s clear, it will be clear when you read the book that you shaped our lives to the point that the stories that we tell and the perspectives that we have and share in the book are shaped by the conversations that we have with you through our content. – The concept of mythicality itself – Absolutely. – is something that not only did you guys name yourselves the Mythical Beasts, which was based on a story that we had but it was you guys taking the ball across the finish line and naming yourself the Mythical Beasts which then turned into this whole Mythical enterprise and naming everything mythical and calling this the Book of Mythicality, but the very definition of mythicality, while it’s rooted in something that existed in our friendship and the way that we created things, the whole time we were doing all that stuff A for an audience and B in the context of the greater community of Mythical Beasts. So this book is just as much what you guys have contributed to us as it is something that we wanna contribute to you, so … – Yeah your fingerprints are all over it. So we’re gonna give each of you a book for free. – If you pay for it. – Oh no, that’s correct. – If you pay for it. We will give one to you. – Yeah you should do that. – Bookofmythicality.com all bookstores, places you can physically buy it, remember the audio version audible.com and then mythicalmonthly.com where you can see the book related merch that’s gonna come out around this. – And you know if you’ve listened this far you’ve already ordered a book right? So I do wanna encourage you to think about the people in your life that you might wanna gift a book to because I don’t think they need to know who we are in order to really appreciate and a lot of this to resonate with them. – This could actually serve as a good introduction, you’re like you know those stupid idiots that I send you their videos sometimes? Well they’re more than just stupid idiots who eat weird stuff on the internet. Take a look at this book I think that you connect with it. – If you’re a parent I would definitely say buy it for your kid. I look forward to our children reading it and discussing it in like an Oprah group setting together. – Oh yeah, the Oprah book club? – (laughs) Yeah. – And Oprah if you’re listening, boy what we wouldn’t give. (Link laughs) I mean we would probably give a lot, maybe a body part for you to make this your book club book of the month but, – Lots of pictures. – probably asking too much. – I don’t know if that’s a requirement. But there’s lots of good illustrations and pictures in it. – Lots of picture Oprah! We know you like pictures. – Book clubs love that. (Link laughs) Alright and get the audio version too, because it’s for your ears. – Yes. – Not unlike this. I hope you’ve enjoyed it. Thank you for letting us weasel into it and share this experience of making a book. Ultimately we were concerned about talking about our book for this whole time and we literally discussed should we do this because we didn’t want it to seem like a big sales podcast. But hopefully you see our heart behind just sharing the experience of doing this thing and you don’t hold it against us. – Yes, we will talk with you next week. (electronic music with a heavy beat)