(upbeat electronic music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits. I’m Rhett. – And I’m Link. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we’re gonna tackle the question do YouTubers watch YouTube? – And the only YouTubers that we can really answer for are– – Two. – Ourselves. – Us two YouTubers. – So it’s really do we watch YouTube videos, but do YouTubers watch YouTube videos sounds better so that’s the question that we’re exploring. – We’re going to explore our interesting relationship with YouTube as viewers given that we’re also creators. And I think, let’s just get right into it, right up top, a little bit of a confession. – Oh it’s a confession. It is a confession ’cause it does make me feel a little dirty. (Rhett chuckles) – I think– – I mean not dirty, but I just feel a little guilty about the way that I’m going to answer this question. – We’ve been on YouTube since basically the beginning. Not technically the very, very, very beginning, but you know, months. – Less than one year in. – Yeah. We were in it, on it, doing everything we could, not knowing how or even what this could be to get to this point and then still struggling with whatever else is next in association with our professional exploitation of YouTube as a platform. – Right ’cause do you remember the period of time before the story of why we ended up uploading stuff to YouTube was, people were taking our videos that we had on rhettandlink.com, our website that we hosted on our server and we paid for the bandwidth as people downloaded them. So when people downloaded our videos, we were paying for the traffic, as they watched them, but then we realized that they could just download the videos, have them locally on their computer and then upload them to YouTube where people started watching them. Do you remember watching YouTube videos before we discovered that someone had taken our videos and uploaded them to YouTube? – I don’t, no. – I don’t even recall if I knew that it was a– – A thing. – A thing. – Because we were focused on our own website using QuickTime like you said, but then Apple Video Podcasts, which still exists, but came out about the same time and we were focused on that and what we could create. We knew what Apple was, so it was like, oh this is legit, when you try to get something on here, but there was a barrier to it. But to continue my thought, we now owe our entire livelihoods to YouTube as a platform. We would not be where we are. I would say, we would not be who we are if it wasn’t for YouTube. – What would we be like? I’d be wearing tank tops. – Of course a lot of other things too. – I’d be wearing a lot of tank tops. I’d have a goatee. – If you remove YouTube from the influential thing which have baked us to be the way we are, we would be totally different. Of course professionally we would be totally different. So we owe so much to YouTube as a platform for the opportunity it gave us and still gives us. – And so I do think it is interesting, given the way that YouTube has been so instrumental for us to explore how we actually experience YouTube as a user. Not as a creator but as a user, but the funny thing is is that, at least what we wanna talk about first is how almost exclusively our experience with YouTube, even as a user, was in the context of being a creator. It wasn’t for entertainment purposes, it was for– – Well let’s just come out and say it, man. – Business purposes. – Let’s just come out and say it. Rip the Band-Aid off, at the top. – Oh you wanna confess it right now? – Yeah. We don’t watch YouTube videos. (Rhett chuckles) – Ugh. Oh, I feel like I need to leave. (Rhett grunts) I feel like I need to put my tank top on and shave my goatee in and go home! That’s shamed Rhett, wears a tank top and has a goatee, I don’t know why. – He slumps a lot too. – Yeah. – He’s 6’1″. – Slithers around. – We don’t watch YouTube videos– – Well, okay– – I would say that often. – That is a sensational claim. Let me justify it or, I don’t know what the word I’m looking for is. – I say let’s just leave it lay and let’s trace our relationship with YouTube like you were doing and let’s just come back to it. Because I don’t think it’s that simple. It’s not, “Well we don’t watch YouTube, “we just upload videos to YouTube.” We have an evolving relationship with YouTube as a viewer and I think it raises some big questions about, if we want the platform to go somewhere and for the audiences to grow in a certain way… If we’re a part of that as creators, shouldn’t we also be a part of that as viewers? – We probably should be. – So let’s come back to that. – I will take a second to let you know that Jacob just pointed out that this podcast will be live on the day 10 years to the day from the anniversary of us starting out YouTube channel. Is that what you said? – Well, what the crap? – Starting the GMM channel. Staring Rhett and Link two. The YouTube channel’s, ’cause that’s been like 12 years, but the Rhett and Link two, the Good Mythical Morning channel, which was Rhett and Link two at the beginning. – Well happy anniversary. – Look at that! – We’ve been 10 years with a second channel which evolved into the Good Mythical Morning show. – Yes. – Ha! – The Good Mythical Morning show. – I feel even more guilty for saying I don’t watch YouTube. – Okay so, I remember those early days, and I remember what I was doing when I went onto YouTube, mostly for me, it was going to the homepage and seeing what was up there, most often from Barats and Bereta. (chuckles) – Oh yeah. – Joe Bereta, you may now him now of The Valleyfolk. Formerly of SourceFed. Before that, he was with Barats and Bereta, famous comedy duo that we idolized and despised all at the same time. (Link chuckles) – But they, along with everybody else who was on the front page, or the homepage was, somebody decided to put them there. – Right and so we would watch, I remember watching their videos and thinking like, man, they really got this figured out. It was like a stress watch. It wasn’t watching it for entertainment purposes; it was simply watching it to see what could happen. I remember looking at them and seeing, they were number one at one point. 65,000 subscribers and I was like how in the world? How in the world can that happen? How can you connect with 65,000 people? – Yeah so we would be– – What? – And of course, you focus in on– – That’s bigger than an arena. – You’d focus in on Barats and Bereta because they were most like what we saw that we could be. There were certainly all types of stuff on the homepage. – Mhm. – Everything you can imagine. And I’m not gonna mention cats– – Just imagine it. – But of course cats. But we honed in on that because, well, I wouldn’t say they were our competition. We would consider that but they wouldn’t have at the time because who are these guys in North Carolina? – They didn’t know about us. – But I’d watch or watch you watch one of their videos or something else that was like– – You watched me watch? – I would watch you watch sometimes. – Secretly? – Well no, I would just glance over at you watching something– – Oh, good. – It’s a funny video. It’s supposed to make you laugh or at least smile. And I guarantee you– – Oh we didn’t smile. – You look at our faces, it was just like, and it had nothing to do with what we thought of Barats and Bereta except for what they made us think about us. – It’s like the first time– – It was watching a rival. – Yeah well do you remember we ever watched, and again, this wasn’t a YouTube video– – Stink face, we’d have like a stink face. – Flight of the Conchords. Not YouTubers but I remember we were in a hotel room, traveling. I don’t even remember where we were, why were there, but– – They had HBO. I ain’t got no HBO at my house. I’m gonna turn HBO on. – We turn HBO on and there’s these two New Zealanders up there on stage and we were doing some musical comedy at the time, and we just sat there and just looked at them– – In silence. – With just a slight grimace. How are they so funny? (groans) What is it going to take to be like those guys? I hate watching them. – Let’s give up musical comedy. – We didn’t give up. – We didn’t give up, but we felt like it. But that’s how we interacted with YouTube was, okay, this is what we’re trying to do now. We started uploading to our channel, the Rhett and Link channel and we were waiting, we were just looking for an opportunity to get something that could be featured on the homepage, I mean, that was the holy grail. But everything else we watched, sketch channels mostly. It wasn’t a lot of musical comedy on YouTube. – We tried to watch and find the videos that other people were watching so that then we could create a video response to those videos so that then people would watch our channel. So I specifically– – It was all so strategically driven and so professional. – Like those skateboarding twins. – Yeah. (Rhett chuckles) I didn’t even watch the video. Rhett just told me there’s this– – These skateboarding twins, man. – We need to make a response. I was like, okay. I never watched the video. It wasn’t about watching the video– – There was a video of a man drawing a perfect circle on a chalkboard and everybody loved it. Now you can see that a million times on YouTube, but there was the original dude who could draw the perfect circle. – I saw that on Reddit last week. It’s still being memed. – It’s still impressive. I mean, if I could stop right now and just watch somebody do that, I would do it. But we did it and we made a response video just so people would come and watch our videos. And of course then we would watch our response video to see other people watching it. It wasn’t fun! – It wasn’t entertainment, it was– – It was desperate. – It was a job. We’re trying to make this work. And so whatever’s working, everything that is working needs to inform what we’re gonna do on our own terms in hopes that that will also work. And even as we got successful, it didn’t change. You know, we’ve always been older than what I felt like was the average YouTube viewer. I think this is something that’ll keep coming up. – Well and the average YouTube creator, really. – Yeah. – We got in the game late, man. I mean, I had a chinstrap. Didn’t have a goatee. (Link chuckles) Didn’t have a mustache yet. But I was like 28. – Right, I mean– – With children. – Yeah, it’s like who else has kids on YouTube? – Who does it at that point? It’s too late. But we did. – That Shay Carl guy, he was a DJ. I knew he had kids, but he was just doing videos because he was a DJ, he wasn’t doing videos with his kids. – Right, and I remember seeing those videos, well and Charles Trippy before that, right, ’cause he started it before Shay. Right around the same time. But I saw that those were the guys who were doing, oh now they’re doing a daily video. – That was a couple years later, but yeah. – Well it’s been a long time. But watching them, again, while… I find those daily vlogs that they did back then, I would find them, I would understand why they were entertaining but I didn’t even open myself up to being entertained by them. There was not a part of me that was like, I’m going to enjoy this and make a consumer-level choice to enjoy this, but it was still in research mode and I guess maybe there was some things that happened that made me crack a smile but I still was thinking, hm, these guys are doing this. It’s every single day, and then that began to plant the seed even for GMM back in the day for us. – But we missed the whole community aspect. I mean when we had DeFranco on Ear Biscuits, I remember he told us the story about how he got started and it was very much, he was just a member of the YouTube community. He was commenting and conversing with other people. And then he started making whatever he made at the time and how it morphed into what it is now, but you can still see how his content is driven by, in many ways, the community. That was something that we just never got. We didn’t look at it properly. We missed that. We didn’t understand. I’ll blame it on our age, but it was like, we’d just go home and watch television or movies. – Mhm. – We would come to work, we’d sit at our desks and we’d watch YouTube videos to inform our business. – And then meanwhile– – But we didn’t really talk to people, I mean video responses, perfect example. That’s a great way early on to foster community. Oh, I watched your video, I’ve got something to say in response to it. No I’m just gonna do, who are these two jerks silhouetted by light trying to make a joke about these two skateboarding twins? – That’s what we were doing. We were a couple of jerks. – It was so self-motivated, 100%. So we really missed the boat early on– – Meanwhile we were at home watching– – Community. – I was watching reams of DVDs of Alias. (Link chuckles) That’s what I was actually enjoying. I don’t even know where we got ’em, but Jessie came home with just– – The box set? – Seasons of Alias. Jennifer Garner, man. Sydney Bristow. (Rhett laughs) I mean, it was electric. – It was a great show. – I wanna see, she’s got that new movie where she’s bloody and she’s going after people. – Oh really? – Jennifer Garner’s back and she doesn’t care what’s in your wallet anymore, man. She’s coming for your wallet! – Oh. – It’s like a total role reversal. It’s the old Sydney Bristow, man. – She’s gonna be disappointed in my wallet. I got a thin wallet, man. I mean I’ve got a license, I’ve got a health card, I’ve got a– – Wallets are going away. – I’ve got a credit card, debit card but I have no cash. – Wallet’s gonna be on a chip, man. It’s gonna be inside your hand. You don’t need a wallet. “What’s in your chip?” is what she’ll be saying. – Oh she’ll be back on that by then? – What’s in your forehead? The mark of the beast. Sydney Bristow. – But I remember in the first YouTube official gathering, YouTube Live, 2008 in San Francisco. We were barely invited. They had a main stage inside. Katy Perry is gonna perform in a sequined bathing suit. – I remember that. – You know her because she kissed a girl, and that’s all at the time. – Right, mhm. – But then they had a trailer, like a flatbed trailer out front that they made a stage out of that. – I wasn’t even sure if it was part of the venue. That’s where they put us. – We were allowed to get on that and sing like five songs. And I don’t even know how we were invited. – They gave out flip phones. They gave out flip phones and we didn’t even– – Flip video. – Flip video cameras, you remember those little flip video cameras that were before you had cameras in your phone? They gave those out but we didn’t even make that list. They didn’t give us those. – Oh, no. – I think they gave Shay Carl one. – Oh, all those people were up front and we were like barely in there. – Oh, you got a flip video camera? Huh. – And then that night in the lobby of the hotel, you’ve got Ryan Higa, Philip DeFranco– – Bo Burnham. – Bo Burnham. – Yes, I remember that. – Ian and Anthony from Smosh. A bunch of other people, there was a photo that was, I think Joe Bereta posted ’cause Joe was there. And we were on the fringe of that photo. We weren’t allowed into the board game that they were having, ’cause we didn’t know anybody. They might have known of us but they knew each other because– – But they knew each other like– – There was a sense of community that we didn’t understand. – They had been to one additional YouTube gathering. – But they were talking, a lot of them were talking to each other online. – Yeah. – I wouldn’t peg Bo Burnham as one of those people but he was also very funny and very cool, so there he was in the middle of all of that, I don’t know. – Yeah, yeah. – Maybe he was talking to them. I don’t think he was a video response type of guy, but anyway, we just didn’t, I think we missed the boat on that. – Right. – But then in spite of it we were still able to get some traction. So that didn’t draw us in either. That was the big thing at first was the community and the connection and the conversation. It wasn’t just the quality of entertainment that, the funniest skits you can ever find are here. Forget SNL. That wasn’t really the case. – But how does this relate to your use of YouTube? Where are you going with this? – I’m saying that it just, as time progressed and we started to get successful, we still didn’t really invest personally. We didn’t talk to other creators. – Right but what about– – And we didn’t watch. – The use of the platform for your own personal entertainment. – That didn’t start happening. – No, it didn’t. And what we just said in the confession is that hasn’t changed a lot. So let’s take a break and come back and talk about how we use it today and if anything has changed in terms of how we view the platform and maybe what we desire for ourselves, and what you might be able to help us with. – Change is gonna come. – But first, we wanna let you know that you can grab the shirt that I’m wearing or one very much like it– – I just grabbed it. – As well as the mugs that we are drinking out of. And the jar that we are drinking out of. We are both double-fisting, not because we’re super thirsty, but we’re super thirsty for you to (chuckling) buy these jars. – And mugs I guess. – Yeah we got limited quantity. Limited quantity. Decreasing everyday. – Go to mythical.store. – Make it decrease more. Mythical.store, you’re thirsty or you need clothes. Eh, well, it’s really not like– (Link exhales deeply) That basic of a need kinda clothes, it’s more like, it’s clothes you wanna wear. I don’t know, I shouldn’t have brought that up. Mythical.store. – You wanna know how I use YouTube now as a viewer? Here’s one example, here’s a story. Warning: it may involve a little nakedness. Man, I don’t know how I’m gonna tell this story. How far should I go? I should have told this story in my own brain before I’m telling it with my mouth. – This is very risky. – Because there’s some pitfalls to this story. – Uh-oh. – I just don’t wanna overshare. – Okay, probably too late. – Okay. Let’s see, last week I didn’t have to be here at a certain time, I actually knew you weren’t gonna be here until later, so I’m like, I ain’t gonna be there either. (chuckles) So I was hanging out at home. – Oh, yeah. – Christy was also at home. And nobody else was. – All right. – And so we just had some– – And what? – We just had some– – What happened? – We had some business we had to take care of. When the kids are around, it’s like a zoo at my house. – Sounds like it. – I got three kids. – I’ve been to the zoo, I’ve caught animals in the act before. – (chuckles) No no no no no. I’m not talking about that at all. – Oh. – I’m just saying that– – See you’ve already gone off track. You brought up zoo. That didn’t help the mental images. – In the hustle and bustle of life at home, there’s just certain things that you put off, like a stack of mail that you need to go through, okay? So let’s just say that Christy and I had a stack of mail that we needed to go through. – You probably shouldn’t use that analogy with her, just so you know, baby, you know– – I don’t know what you’re talking about. – When we’re enjoying– – I’m literally talking about mail. – When we’re enjoying each other, I think of it like a stack of mail. You know what, but you could say, but technically I am a stack of male. (both laugh enthusiastically) You know? – Yeah! But I don’t know what you’re referring to ’cause I’m just talking about literal mail here. – Okay. – M-A-I-L, so, you know the best place to sort through your stack of mail– – Is in the bedroom? – Is in our bedroom upstairs. – Right, yeah yeah. – But she’s like, well, the painter’s coming over to paint our bathroom, which is in our master bedroom. – Who’s the painter in the analogy? Oh a literal painter? – It’s all literal! (Rhett laughs) Okay, so I’m like– – You had construction at your house. Got it. – And the painter has a key to our front door. And then lots of times he comes in when we’re not there because the lock boxes, he’ll just come up to our bedroom and start painting. – Oh wow. – So locking the front door of the house doesn’t help us, but locking the deadbolt on our door does help us, which we did. – The bedroom door. – So took the mail up there. Christy locked the deadbolt, because you wanna have a secure zone when you’re sorting the mail. – Right, yeah, ’cause there’s confidential documents. (both chuckle) – Right. – Sensitive information. – (smacks lips) Am I gonna be in trouble. So… Sorted the mail, that was great. It was good, sense of accomplishment every time you do that. – Right, yeah. Something you’ve got to do. – Painter didn’t show up, whew. Just like, we’re in the clear, everybody wins. – Yeah, right. – And then, Christy goes over to the door and she’s like shaking the door and I’m like, “What are you doing?” And she’s like, “Uh, the deadbolt is stuck. “We’re locked in our bedroom.” And I’m like, “Well, let me handle that,” and I mosey on over there. Of course I was naked because– – Yeah. You don’t want the mail to soil you. (Link chuckles) – I don’t know. – You don’t want to get a stain. – I’m like, “You’re right, the deadbolt is stuck.” I could see it move a little bit but it didn’t go, it didn’t retract far enough for the door to open. – Again, the deadbolt is literal, right? I’m just making– (Link laughs) I’m trying to, I want to parse because it– – It’s all literal! Stop asking. – If that’s metaphorical, we have a medical situation. If the deadbolt gets stuck. (Link chuckles) – Oh gosh, I needed a good laugh today, man. This is exactly what I needed. Of course this is all gonna get cut. This is just for me and you. – Okay. – So I’m like, “Let me step in and shimmy the deadbolt.” There’s no hope with that. I mean it’s not the type of thing you can put a credit card in there. I didn’t have one of those anyway. I actually looked around, I was like, in my bedroom, I didn’t have anything except sorted mail. – You got a small wallet. – And it’s a double door so at the top, there’s one of those things that if the door were open, you can pull down on the thing that goes into the ceiling– – To lock the non-swinging door. – To lock the non-swinging door. – The non-primary door. – So I could push really far and try to shimmy that, but I thought my fingers were gonna get caught and then I’m like, okay… We’re gonna have to unscrew the deadbolt and disassemble it in order– (chuckles) Your eyebrows are raising just ’cause I said unscrew the deadbolt. We’re gonna have to disassemble the deadbolt but I need to get a Phillips-head screwdriver. Don’t have one of those up here. So I’m like well– – You just throwing me a lot softballs but I’m just let ’em all go by. I’m waiting for the home run. (chuckles) – So then I’m like, I’m going to have to go out on our balcony, jump off our balcony into our pool– – Oh, just like a douche. Got to jump into the pool. – In order to get down, to go into my garage and get a screwdriver, to then throw back up to you, Christy, so you can disassemble the deadbolt while I’m down there, naked. Well I’ll put on swim trunks, which I did. And so, we had this whole plan. And then I’m like, you know what, don’t panic. Don’t do that. You could injure yourself jumping into your pool from the second story. That’s crazy. You have your phone. Go on YouTube. I actually just Googled– – I see how this really is. – How to unstick a deadbolt. – Mhm. I don’t think that’s on YouTube. It’s another thing you gotta go to. – A YouTube video came up and I started watching it, and it was a guy telling you how to, step-by-step, it’s magic, right there. I knew watching a video’s so much better than just reading it. – Just out of curiosity, what is the process? – Well as I started getting into it, all of a sudden I hear this noise and Christy’s over there with a Dr. Pimple Popper blackhead remover, which was given to us by Dr. Pimple Popper. It looks like a, however long that is. I’d say that’s– – Three and a half inches. – Nine inches. – Oh gosh. – Three and a half inches long. Just a metal tool and she was over there just going at the door with it. (crew chuckling) And so all of a sudden, I’m like about to get to the part of the video where it’s helpful. He’s about the pop the lock and then all of a sudden, (blows air) she’s like, “I did it!” – She gets it. – She got it. – She got it, solved the problem. Didn’t need you. – So didn’t need me, didn’t need my swim trunks, didn’t need my screwdriver and didn’t need YouTube. But I watched YouTube. That’s the point of my story. (Rhett laughs) – Last time I watched YouTube, let me tell ya, I was sorting mail. – Actually there’s one more part of the story. I’m like celebrating. I’m like, “Sorry I didn’t believe in you, baby. “You did it.” The door swings open. The painter’s standing on the other side. And he had been there the whole time. – No. – No I’m joking, he wasn’t even there. Didn’t even show up that day, what a jerk. – Yeah, painters are really, really unreliable. Your dad’s a painter. – Very reliable painter. – Interestingly, I recently used– – It was a big story to just say that’s how I use YouTube. – Well and I use YouTube in a similar way. I wasn’t sorting my mail. But I was having car problems and that is not a euphemism. We’re using the FJ Cruiser. The four by four truck that we have been off-roading in before but we have not done it lately, so it’s been sitting under a cover for a pretty extended period of time. – Kinda sad. – But we’re actually using it for YouTube. We’re using it in a Good Mythical Morning video coming up. But I needed to drive it in as they were going to conduct some tests for the purposes of how we’re going to use it and I’ve been letting it sit so long that the battery was dead, and then, I popped the hood of my car to use my car to try to charge the battery of the truck and the car is a 2017 model. – Too fancy. You had to go on YouTube just to skip to the chase here. – Just to figure out– – Just to figure out how to get– – Where the battery, where the terminals are. – You can’t find the battery? – (gasping) The battery’s in the trunk, guys! – What? – The battery for my car is in the trunk. – Did YouTube tell you that? – Jacob, did you know that? We have the same car. The battery is in the trunk. – [Jacob] I did not know that. – Did YouTube tell you that? – What YouTube told me, I opened up the trunk. I opened up the hood. And I was like, where’s the battery? And then I’m like, this whole thing just looks like a computer, it looks different than the last time I opened a hood of a car. You know what I’m saying, things have changed. It’s clean. I couldn’t even find the dipstick and listen, that is a euphemism. (Link chuckles) So then I’m like, where are the battery terminals? – About three-quarters of the way down, your stack of mail. – On a make and model of the car that I have. And it turns out that the battery’s in the trunk but because they know that you might wanna connect, it’s under the spare tire. – Oh God. – Which incidentally I watched another YouTube video about how to get the freakin’ lug nuts off of my, anyway, so, it turns out that they send terminal connections up to the front of the car. – Oh. – And there’s a positive and a negative, but you have to know where you’re looking. So you can still do traditional things like (clicks tongue) clasp your jumper cables on there– – That’s interesting. – And slowly charge the thing. – But again, did YouTube tell you that? – Yeah. – Okay. – ‘Cause when you type in battery terminal locations on this particular model of car, the first thing that came up was a YouTube video. It was like a four second video of just a guy going, he has a phone and he’s just like, “There and there.” And that’s it (chuckles), the video’s like four seconds long. – That’s great! That’s the best– – It’s like thank you! – That’s the best ones, instead of like 10 seconds of intro and then three minutes of, all right, click the bell and the like and subscribe ’cause I do lots of these. – Yeah, it was exactly what I needed. It was so great. – There and there. That’s beautiful. But you can’t monetize a clip that small. So again, I go back to business for these things and we’re like old guys who are just so practical. It’s like, “What? “YouTube’s gonna tell me how to do things, “how to build something. “How to fix something.” I think… – But do you entertain yourself? ‘Cause we use it functionally. – I watch YouTube less now than I did five years ago. I mean since the success of Good Mythical Morning– – Wow. – I’ve actually, we have a system for how we churn out these episodes and it’s not so dependent from video to video on learning from what else is happening on YouTube, to a fault. I think it’s, I mean… I think it’s actually a problem that we can get too lackadaisical in the rhythm of how we produce Good Mythical Morning than we used to be, ’cause every video was starting from scratch on the Rhett and Link channel. We’re like, okay, what are we gonna put on the menu at the end, or, what are we gonna use these annotations for? How can we get more people to actually watch it? Every video was like a strategy session to learn from the last thing and that doesn’t happen every single day now. And we’ve got a whole team of people that put out the show so I’m not as motivated to scour YouTube every day to figure out what someone’s doing better than us. And that’s a problem but it actually gets me further away from, now I’m not even watching videos at all unless I need to shimmy a deadbolt, you know? – I feel like I am watching. I am watching. – So you feel like you’re– – But I don’t feel like, it is definitely not my primary source of entertainment. Let me just tell you how I find myself using it, right? – What’s your routine here? – Again, the way that we’re logged into YouTube is, we are logged into YouTube on the account that manages the Good Mythical Morning channel. Right, I think we can select some other accounts that are kinda tied into that but essentially, I’m not a personal user on YouTube. I’m just kinda watching it through these managed accounts and so, who the Good Mythical Morning channel is subscribed to which is a conglomeration of people that we subscribed to back in the day along with typically people who are guests on the show we’ll get subscribed to and you know what I’m saying? I’m not in control. – Right, we’re not using it– – I’m not actively managing it, so I don’t actually have a channel where I am putting in my preferences or Google is recording my personal preferences so I don’t have a personalized, curated experience as a user. Now it would be easy for me to do that because I could just simply make the decision to always watch YouTube through my personal Google account, but I don’t. So just right off the bat, because I wanna check in and I wanna see things that I can see in the creator studio back in for our channels. – Right. – And I don’t wanna be constantly switching. So right off the bat– – We don’t have a user experience. – The algorithms and the robots behind-the-scenes that are supposed to be determining what I need to see are not having a two-way conversation with me. So I don’t look at the subscription tab. What I do is I’m just like, trending. And I go to trending for two reasons. Three reasons. Reason number one is to see if we’re there, right? I’m gonna go and see if there’s an episode of GMM that has made it to the trending page. – And I would say that there are many legitimate arguments that it doesn’t matter, but what’s on trending? There are people who will make that argument. – It seems to matter less than it did at one point. I’ll give you that. – Even though that may be true, it still is some sort of quick check indicator of something that would make us feel good about ourselves and also feel like we need to apologize ’cause we’re in there a lot. – The second thing– – I just want to apologize that Good Mythical Morning is in trending so much. We haven’t done anything illegal. – I’m not gonna apologize. I’m very happy about it. Second reason is to see what else is trending, again, from a business standpoint, to be like who else is trending? Who’s breaking through? Who in the old school, the old guard is still, oh, Phil DeFranco, he’s got something else trending. He has stayed the course as well, that’s cool. And I will actually, if I see Phil trending and he is talking about something that I’m interested in, some news item or whatever, I’ll click on it and typically go to him talking about that specific thing. I don’t watch the entire thing. I go to him talking about that specific thing. So I will go a layer deeper. And sort of the third reason is, is there something that I could be legitimately entertained by right now? – But when you do that level two and level three, you still only have a limited window of time that you’re willing to give to YouTube. And it’s gonna be like what, four minutes? – This does not happen in what I would call my designated entertainment window. – Right. – My designated visual entertainment window. Now this may be not just because I’m old but because I’m married and because of my schedule and the fact that I’ve got kids and we are typically hanging out or whatever and they go to bed and then Jessie and I make a decision to visually entertain ourselves, unless we wanna sort the mail. – Which is also very fun and productive and at the end you don’t have to, there’s a sense of accomplishment that the mail is gone. – Sometimes you can sort the mail and then watch something, and sometimes you can watch something and sort the mail. I typically recommend sorting the mail and then watching something because if you watch something, you get too tired, you don’t wanna sort the mail. – I’ve tried to sort mail while watching something. – It depends on what you’re watching. – But I just think that it’s disrespectful to the mail. – To the creator of the program you’re watching. – No, I don’t think they know. – Do the mail (chuckles). – I think it’s disrespectful to the process. And I’m only talking about literal mail again. – And then when I make a decision to visually entertain myself, it is– – Visually. That’s a weird slogan. To visually entertain yourself, go to youtube.com/rhettandlink. Two. – It is most often television series on platforms such as Netflix, HBO… – Amaze-on. – Amazon. Showtime, Hulu. It’s series that nine times out of 10, friends who I respect have told me about, right? And then I get into some of the things that I love, like Handmaid’s Tale which is, the second season is over at this point. I absolutely love that show and every single time an episode came out, Jessie and I would rearrange our visual entertainment schedules so that that would be the next thing that we enjoy together. – Mhm. – Typical sort of 40 year old viewing habits. Now, movies, less and less and less. Why? They’re too long, right? – They’re too long but yet they’re not long enough. – I absolutely love films and it’s a passion of ours and we hope to make one. Another one besides the one we made a long time ago. But when I just think about my lifestyle, I think about the fact that, okay, kids are in bed, we’ve got time, if we wanna sort the mail. We definitely can only watch a television show, that’s 40 to 60 minutes is all we’re gonna give to this. 90, two hours, three hours? You remember three hour movies? – No, yes. – When does that happen? – I’ve wiped that off my memory. – Who has the time? And so, I believe, I don’t believe that the golden, this is a tangent, but I don’t believe that the golden age of television is simply based on the fact that Netflix decided to start making television. I think it’s definitely based on this combination of the amount of programming that is available, people’s schedules and I think that the length of a television series has fallen into a sweet spot that has become easily insertable. Nah, probably shouldn’t say insertable. Easily accommodated by people’s modern-day schedules. – Definitely. – Tangent. – I have the same routine. I mean, Christy and I, we just never sat down and watched a YouTube video. Now, there’s a television within eyeshot of our kitchen and sometimes we can throw a YouTube video up there. I’ll say the kids will do that sometimes just to like watch a YouTube clip, and the kids will watch. I’ll look over their shoulder. Lincoln watches some gamers and he has an assortment of YouTubers that he’ll watch and they’ve started to move through things like Lily used to be really into Minecraft and Stampy Cat and that’s a thing of the distant past now. She’s very into Netflix shows. She went through Parks and Rec and now she’s onto The Office and I’m extremely proud of her. – That’s what my kids do. My kids binge-watch old shows. – Lincoln’s more of a YouTube watcher and then Lando is not, yet. So Lincoln, I’ll look over his shoulder and watch gaming videos. You know those Let’s Play things? – I’ve heard of them. – Does Locke watch YouTube or does Shepherd watch YouTube? – Shepherd watches Good Mythical Morning. Shepherd is like the one person in my household who watches Good Mythical Morning. And pretty consistently, and he watches… I’ve noticed there’s a couple of other, I can’t even tell you who they are but basically he’s really into, is it Roblux or Roblox? – Roblox. – Roblox, and so he plays that game all the time. He watches a lot of videos about that, so Let’s Play and instructional videos about that, ’cause it’s all the games within the program. But Locke watches, he just goes through a bunch of shows, shows that I really want… He actually is almost all the way through Breaking Bad by himself and I wanted to watch that with him. I was looking forward to that being like a– – Oh you’re talking about on Netflix. – Yeah, but now it’s on Netflix and I see him watch it and I’m like, “Whoa! “You’re already watching Breaking Bad without me. “You’re like in season three,” he’s like, “Dad, it’s the best show I’ve ever seen.” And then I’m like, okay, missed that bonding opportunity. But the YouTube that he does watch is basketball-related videos. – But not shows. – No… First of all, you wouldn’t be surprised but there’s basketball instructional videos but then there’s guys who just talk about, there’s NBA compilations but then there’s also basketball experts and people, and so he’s into all that content. And he was also, he was really into Complex and Hot Ones and so us being on Hot Ones was like, at that point, that was the coolest that we have ever been. It was the coolest that I’ve ever been as a dad is when I was on Hot Ones. The Tonight Show five times, who cares, is a 14 year old’s perspective. – The only videos that I’ve watched, when you introduced me to primitive technology. This is the guy, where is he? – Australia, I believe. – It’s silent, you just see footage of him, some time lapse, mostly just cut of him creating huts and stuff. And I would just watch that. There was one sitting where I watched three of those in a row. – He puts so much effort into each video because there’s so much effort into the actual physical thing that he’s documenting that you can watch his whole channel in a few hours. – And by the way there’s rip-off channels that do the exact same thing now. – He is in the far north Queensland, Australia. – There’s people in other places now who are making swimming pools and they don’t seem to be, there are more questions raised about how legitimately primitive– – Are they talking? – No, they do it– – He created a genre. – He created a genre. – I love that. – And they are emulating it and it’s getting just as many views ’cause they’re making, but I question whether they’re doing it as legitimately primitive. But I have found myself watching those, and then every time a bad lip reading trends, I will make sure to watch that. – Well first of all, if you’re in a relationship with somebody and you’ve chosen to be visually entertained with them like we have, there’s not a lot that I watch on my own, and so I think that right off the bat, that ends up kinda changing your habits. When I’m alone, when I do have an option to watch stuff alone and I don’t choose to, sometimes I’ll be like, I’m gonna watch a war movie because she would never watch this. But those are the times in which I find myself being personally entertained by YouTube. – Because you’re watching a war movie on YouTube? – No no no no, when I’m alone and I decide not to go, and sometimes I do it a little bit out of, again, like a sense of guilt. Like, man, I should be watching YouTube. There’s so much stuff on there– – How do you do it? You’ve literally spent an hour to have like a session of I’m just gonna watch YouTubes and see what happens. YouTubes. – I watched about an hour’s worth of cringe compilations. That was a loop that I got lost in one night. – Cringe compilations. – I highly recommend them, not– – Well this is ironic because– – Based on some of the comments that we’ve gotten before on some of the cringier things that we’ve done. (crew chuckling) How is it? It’s good, right? Let’s grow a pair and eat a penis. (Link and crew laughing) – All right. – Get it lined up with me. – Chomp in three, two, one. (crunching) (crew moans disgustedly) – Anytime we’ve done anything that made anyone feel uncomfortable, like the vast majority of the Mythical Beasts have reacted negatively to it, so I don’t expect the average GMM watcher to enjoy these things. You probably hate them but there’s just something about the dark, sinister side of me that loves cringe compilations. – And so you’re trying to find one that, okay this one’s got 12 million views and it’s got a long run-time so this is the one I’m gonna watch. – I found one guy that just numbered them. Cringe compilation five. I was like, oh there’s six, there’s seven. There’s eight. Cringe all night, brother. – I do now remember that Lily sat down a couple weeks ago and she was like, “Mom, I’m gonna give you a crash course on Vine.” Which of course is no longer. – This happened recently? – Yeah. – Did you tell her that it’s a dead platform? – She knows this. She pulls up Vine compilations on YouTube. – Your kids watch that any time my kids are over at your, we do a social event at your house, I have noticed that by the end of the night, all the kids are watching Vine compilations. – And so Christy didn’t do it but I sat down– – They are mesmerizing. – I sat down with Lily and I watched almost an hour and a half of Vine compilations on YouTube. – And how did it make you feel about yourself? – I was like, oh I get Vine. I should have done this when Vine existed. Maybe then I could have been a part of the zeitgeist. – But don’t you feel like you just ate a lot of candy? – Oh yeah. – It’s like, you can go to a– – But it was fun ’cause Lily and I were just laughing and it’s just, I mean incessant is usually negative but it was like a barrage of laughs and it’s so quick. It’s like a weird Clockwork Orange situation where I feel like my eyelids are peeled back and I’m just like laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh, laugh. It’s a weird thing. – It’s like sitting down and just eating just a pound of bacon. You know what I’m saying, it’s like, ugh. Watching the cringe compilation, and every once in awhile sitting down and eating a pound of bacon is awesome. But I don’t wanna do it with my wife. – Here’s the thing, and I did talk Christy into watching game show blooper– – Yeah those are good. – And again, that’s a compilation. So the way that we have found to enjoy YouTube as a viewer is just these compilations that range from like decent to absolutely crappy. – Well and let me make an observation about this, ’cause this is where I feel a little shame, is that none of the stuff that we’ve described is content that was created with a YouTube audience in mind in the way that Good Mythical Morning, what we do. So we’ve got a show that has been seen as much as any show. When you’re talking about a show on YouTube and we create that with the internet in mind. That’s what we do for a living. But yet what we enjoy on YouTube is not anything that was created with a YouTube audience in mind. Now, let me just say, there are some exceptions. And I wanna talk about one because I tweeted about this. Shout-out to @rhettmc on Twitter. You wanna follow the best in the YouTube world. (chuckles) At least one time I talked about it. Go make sure you check that out. No, no talking– – What? Just tell the– – No talking of mail sorting on @rhettmc Twitter. – What is the thing? – Shane Dawson. – Oh yes. – So I talked about, first of all, this Tana Con thing that happened around the same time VidCon did and if you know us, you know that Tana Con is not the kinda thing that we would get roped into typically. But I was very interested in all the hub-bub around it and then I found myself, I saw that Shane had, the thing that got me was that he had a very long video that was trending. A 30 minute video, maybe it was longer than that. I was like this is interesting, and again, my initial interest in it was the fact that I’ve always kinda known and I kinda keep up with what Shane is doing because he’s an OG, he’s constantly innovating and reinventing his channel and he’s got a super successful podcast. He signed this table somewhere. – He’s a trendsetter, man. – And so I’ve always respected how he’s kinda inventing himself and also inventing, trying new things on the platform, also doing it with YouTube in mind from the get-go. And so I was like okay, what’s he up to? – And I would add with artistic integrity. – And so I see this Tana Con thing and I start watching it and I am immediately mesmerized, and I think that I’m just in one of my toe-dip YouTube sessions which is like 99% of my YouTube watching is like checking in on something. Even if I like something, I don’t watch the whole video. – You reach a conclusion about what he’s done and then– – I’ll send you a text. – Be informed by it. – Send you a text. Let me tell you what Shane’s doing. I watched two minutes of it and know everything about it. – And I’m like yeah, I watched the thumbnails. I know. It’s literally what I do, I watch thumbnails and I feel like I know enough. – So I go into this thinking this is just an education experience and I find myself being drawn into the content in a way that I would be drawn into, and this is what I said on the @rhettmc Twitter account, like Making A Murderer on Netflix. – The documentary. – Which was a documentary series that was mesmerizing and my wife and I enjoyed it together, right? And I watched this 45 minute thing and then immediately tweeted about it and said… I don’t know what it was, but it was essentially, this has got me. This content has absolutely sucked me in in the way that what I consider sort of a higher tier of content traditionally, has sucked me in and of course I watched the whole series. And then since then he’s done, he did the Jeffree Star series which I haven’t watched yet. But the way that he has approached it is again, it’s in this YouTube meets this crime conspiracy documentary process. And I’m absolutely mesmerized and I was like, I think I could just watch this for entertainment purposes! – What! – And also the thing that was weird about it is that it was long, so it was, it began to fit into that little window of time, that sweet spot, the 42 to 59 minute sweet spot that entertainment kinda fills in my life right now, which is so smart of Shane to start pushing the content to those lengths. And so, it’s funny. ‘Cause at the same time that Shane is doing this. He’s not the only one, again, we just don’t dig deep enough to know. I’m sure you guys would be like, and that’s what we’re gonna get to in a second is you telling us who we should be watching. The same time, ironically, that this has been going on, YouTube has been doing, YouTube Red, now known as YouTube Premium which incidentally, there are two seasons of a show that we made, Rhett and Link’s Buddy System available on YouTube Premium. We have a YouTube Premium account. And we have the ability to watch YouTube Premium and basically this whole old fart conversation that we’ve been having this whole time, recognizing that we are entertained in a certain way and we didn’t feel like YouTube fit that bill– – Premium’s supposed to address that. – YouTube, yeah, attempted to address that, is attempting to address that with YouTube Premium and I haven’t found myself going to that platform in the same way that I go to these other platforms, even though we have a show on it. I haven’t even watched all of Buddy System. – What? – Yeah, I did, I watched all of Buddy System when we reviewed it but I haven’t watched it on YouTube. I watched it for professional reasons to make sure it was what we wanted it to be. – That’s the last time I watched it too. – We should watch it, it’s good. – Yeah, I watched part of Cobra Kai because I was just curious but we watched it at work and we just judged it and we said well, a lot of people really like this, even friends of ours that I respect their taste. So I was celebrating the fact that, okay this is moving the needle. This is bringing people over. – Yeah. – But I personally didn’t keep watching it. – I had multiple mutual friends of ours whose entertainment opinions I respect who really liked Cobra Kai and so– – Of course I haven’t seen Karate Kid, so maybe that’s the problem. – That is a big problem. As a Karate Kid watcher but not necessarily, I wouldn’t consider myself a huge Karate Kid fan. I wasn’t like super into it. I had trouble getting into Cobra Kai. Did you like Cobra Kai a lot? – [Crew Member] I liked it. – Feldman’s just rolling his eyes ’cause I haven’t seen Karate Kid. – It’s crazy that he hasn’t seen it. – Let’s just start making a list of all the movies I haven’t seen. – [Crew Member] Oh yeah, I’m working on that. – All right. – But then there’s another handful of things, and again, I don’t wanna get into, I do find it a little bit odd that I visit YouTube, the homepage of YouTube every single day for professional reasons and I’m also a YouTube Premium subscriber but yet, what’s on YouTube Premium is not on my radar. I’m not being introduced. I know there’s other stuff that’s on there. – There’s a tab you can click on but nothing compels you to do it. – I don’t find myself being confronted with it. I haven’t crossed over into a place and also don’t know if there would be enough stuff there currently that would cause me to then incorporate it into the larger conversation that I’m having with Jessie which is what do you wanna watch tonight? – One of my favorite things to watch are music documentaries. Shout-out to @linklamont on Twitter, ’cause I will tweet a really good music documentary in podcast form or otherwise. How’s that? – Isn’t there a music documentary on YouTube Premium? – The history of G Funk. And I’m like, I’m gonna watch that. – But you haven’t yet? – Going there, I keep forgetting to go to YouTube Premium because I don’t think of it that way. I’m like, I’m ready to watch a documentary. I don’t remember that that’s there. – What is the problem here though? How can two guys who are the target audience for, especially one guy, who is the target audience for music documentaries who makes a living on the platform, who has two seasons of a show on the exact premium platform. How come you’re not watching the music documentary that is available on said platform? – Viewing habits. It’s all about habits. I mean I’m big on habits and systems, you know that, so I go into my ruts. And yeah, I think we’re highlighting a big problem. We want YouTube, even Good Mythical Morning, I want to grow an audience that is broader and even older, right? So if we start to see more fans join and be vocal that are in our age range, I think that would be a good thing. Not instead of a younger audience or whatever, but I just wanna expand in that way. But I think in general I wanna see YouTube be a place where those people come as well and start to see it as a legitimate source alongside Netflix or– – And I’m not necessarily, we can talk about YouTube Premium. I’m not that interested in figuring that out. Obviously YouTube is invested in trying to figure that out and hopefully the people who make those decisions and got me to a place where I was willing to pay for Hulu and Showtime and HBO and Netflix and Amazon and all the things that I pay for will get other people like me who aren’t YouTubers to a place where they will pay for YouTube Premium and they’ll just incorporate it. But I also feel like in the big slice of pie, the whole pie of YouTube, YouTube Premium is going to remain a very small slice because of the billions and billions of minutes of videos that are being uploaded. And so, things like what Shane is doing– – Yeah I wanna see just normal YouTube do something that– – Get to a place where you actually are compelled to watch it for non-business purposes. – Right. – And here’s what I think. – Because by the way, it benefits our show, so I’m just being honest that my professional, selfish motive is that if I’m motivated to watch other stuff on YouTube, then other people like me will be motivated to watch me on YouTube. – Well the tipping point for me is going to be when I feel like my wife will watch it with me. If it’s going to break through into my habit, it’s going to have to be something that Jessie will watch with me, and I didn’t show her the Shane documentary. I think she probably would have been interested in it ’cause it was fascinating and I did recommend it to some other friends and they were like, “Yeah, it’s super fascinating.” But I think that I wanna find that kind of content. And again, this is strange, this is a little bit of a strange conversation because as we said many times, YouTube, my perspective on YouTube is that it is largely personality-based, it’s not necessarily content-based. – Right. – And it’s also the type of content that you produce is, if you’re gonna put it in front of, if you’re not gonna put it behind a pay wall but it’s gonna be AVOD they call it. So basically it’s just free to watch. It’s ad supported. That’s gotta be cheap, per minute. You’re not gonna be putting a lot of time into that and that tends to– – Money into it. – You’re not gonna put a lot of money into that so that lends itself to personalities that can, getting somebody to be themselves is pretty cheap and so those are the kinda things that come to the fore on YouTube. Shane has found an interesting way to do something that’s very compelling because of him but the way he has created, crafted these stories. He’s investing some money into it but it’s getting a lot of views so it’s probably paying for itself. All I’m saying is that I don’t think I could get my wife excited about watching someone vlog. Unless they were talking about something very specific that he was interested in that I probably wouldn’t be interested in. – Right. – So getting into that place where, what is the nature of the kinda content that we want to sit down and enjoy is probably gonna be something that has got, we’ll watch, it doesn’t have to be scripted. We’ll watch a documentary, we’ll watch reality television. So I do think that it can live just in regular YouTube world but I don’t know what it is. So I’m asking you guys who are watching– – With your ears or with your eyes. – And listening, to tell us what you think we should be watching. Now it doesn’t have to be something that is like, “Oh you and your wife will like this.” – On YouTube. – That would be great. – Only on YouTube though. – Yeah, just YouTube. YouTube content. If there is a YouTube Premium show that you’re like, you definitely should watch this one. I do think you’d like it, you can recommend that. It’s gotta be on YouTube and if you think it’s gonna be something that we would actually be drawn to for entertainment purposes only. And we’re gonna take your suggestions. We’re gonna follow those rabbit trails. We’re going to enjoy, seek to enjoy some of this content and then we’re gonna have a part two. – Oh snap, so this is a grand experiment of can we find enough stuff already on YouTube that will compel us to then change my viewing habits and to shift my own brain to see YouTube differently? I feel like it’s so important. We got a lot riding on this. Am I building this up too much, am I wrong? ‘Cause I feel like if we can’t– – We’re just gonna quit? – Then I have a lot less hope for where our career is going. – Well, would you watch Good Mythical Morning if you didn’t make it? – Oh. Let’s table that question. I need to think about that. Let’s table that question for part two. And part two’s not– – Don’t recommend Good Mythical Morning in your things. We’ll watch our own show in conjunction with the rest of them and then we’ll let you know if we recommend watching Good Mythical Morning. – Yeah, maybe we think too highly of ourselves. I think that’s a fair question, that’s a good question. I don’t know exactly what’s riding on this in terms of what I feel about YouTube, but I’m hopeful that you’re gonna help give us a shortcut to the work that we’ll be doing on our own to find these things. Maybe we’ll help some of you out when we share it on part two, but there’s lots to learn when we independently conduct these experiments and then report back to each other in part two, which won’t be next week. – Yeah, we’re gonna take some time to digest and enjoy your suggestions, to do some research and then when we think that we’ve got our answers, we will come back to you and report back. – So use #EarBiscuits and just let us know. I think you should watch this on YouTube, or YouTube Premium. – Last thing I’ll say is it doesn’t have to, I know I said some things. We were just talking just off-the-cuff throughout this thing, so this is actually an unscripted podcast. So, I said 42 to 59 minutes. It doesn’t have to be that, because obviously, you could watch a series of videos that would add up to that sweet spot for me personally. So just anything you think we would enjoy for any reason. But I do think that you should keep in mind it’s things that, there’s enough of it to kind of commit to it, you know what I mean? It’s not like, “Oh! “There’s this really great video “where this guy does this one thing.” It’s like, no, a place that it could be like, oh I’m gonna go back to this place, like a show. Maybe a channel, a personality, whatever, that we can kinda go back to. Those are the kinds of recommendations that we’re looking for. Cool? – Cool. All right guys. Thanks for hearing us out. I feel a little dirty still. I feel like– – Yeah, a little shame. – Man, some shame. – Yeah, yep. – Except for the mail story. I felt really clean about that. – (chuckles) Yeah. – I shouldn’t have mentioned that since that’s gonna be cut out. – Right, right. Nobody knows what you’re talking about. – All right we’ll talk at you again next week and we’ll be working on your assignments. #EarBiscuits. – [Rhett] To hear this Ear Biscuit in its entirety and make sure you don’t miss an episode, follow the links in the description to subscribe on Apple Podcasts or anywhere else podcasts are available. – [Link] To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. – [Rhett] To watch more of our daily show Good Mythical Morning, click the playlist on the left. – [Link] And don’t forget to click the circular icon to subscribe. – [Rhett] Thanks for being your Mythical best.