Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I’m Link. And I’m Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we are exploring the question, how has Ear Biscuits changed over the course of 200 episodes. 200 episodes! That’s right, this is the bicentennial. Yes! We’ve been going for 200 years. 200 episodes. Can you say bicentennial when you’re talking about just the number or does it have to be the year? Not anymore than you have but I think you’ve reached the quota. I’ve got a couple in my back pocket. You know what, it’s been a pleasure sitting here for all two, well, there’s been a few exceptions but– You’re saying it like this is the last episode ever. Sitting at this round table. It’s been a pleasure, we’re stopping at 200. For 200– Hope you enjoyed it. This is a milestone so I like to get sentimental so in this episode, I asked Kiko to pull some clips that span the history of Ear Biscuits to kinda jog our memory of some things that we’ve been through here at the round table and reminisce, probably analyze, and pontificate about the future, perhaps. If you’ve been with us since the beginning or if you’ve done what some people do is and that is you get in late but then you go in early. Go back. Go back early. And you catch up, you’ve known, you’ve learned that what this show is has evolved pretty significant. Yeah. So I think that first of all, the clips that we’re gonna be playing are mostly… Well not mostly, it spans the changes but we are gonna spend quite a bit of time talking, hearing from some of those people we had as guests early on but then we’ll talk about what the show has become and what we think about that. Yeah, what does Ear Biscuits mean to us? And I think we’ve got a handle on what it means to you as a listener as well so the interaction between those two things, I think we’ll land there. Before we get into it, I just wanna say I’m getting whiffs of myself, this is not the first time or the last that I’ve done what I did this morning which was, for the past few days I’ve been rubbing my deodorant stick sans deodorant on my underarms. You know how when it basically runs out but you don’t have a new one so it’s like I bet I can’t see it but there’s some deodorant on there and I’m just gonna rub harder. Oh oh oh oh oh. How many family members do you have? Five other ones including the dog or six if Britton happens to be in town. Okay, you don’t– My boys have deodorant and– But hold on. I’ve talked to you about how big my house is, I mean, it’s so huge to go down there and get their deodorant. That’s what you’re going for. Option number one is to use your wife’s deodorant. That’s what I’ve done, that’s what I switched to and now I’m getting wafts of this powder scent that’s literally giving me a headache. I was gonna say something, I was gonna compliment you but– It’s like I’m in a frickin’ baby powder factory. I’ve never gone up to my wife– Does she use Secret? I think it’s Degree antiperspirant and deodorant, powder scent apparently, not a sponsor. The ladies like to smell like powder. Well when I get close to her, she also hits that Mythical Number Nine and that really draws me in. Mythical.store, but this powder’s not, can you smell it? I’m gonna waft my jacket. I can’t smell a lot of things so I don’t know if I’m a great candidate for that. It’s a head sickness. I’m having trouble with it. I’m thinking about getting– I like it. And wiping down my armpits and just going, ’cause the past two days I’ve been stinkin’, like the left pit, not the right one, but I don’t use antiperspirant so today I also feel like not only am I getting powdered up but I’m also gettin’ clogged up ’cause I don’t use that antiperspirant. And you know what, it will negatively affect you. Okay so– One day of it? Well I went– We talkin’ about cancer, aluminum. No no, I’d say three days, okay, I don’t know if we’ve ever talked about this on Ear Biscuits but we had a friend Nick who told us to take the Old Spice challenge which I don’t even know if the Old Spice challenge is what we or he interpreted it to be. Right. But he said it was when you go deodorant only and you stop antiperspirant and he’s like after a certain period of time, it varies from person to person, you will no longer need antiperspirant. Now I will say that neither of us are very sweaty guys. In fact, and I’m not saying this as a point of– Braggadocio. Yeah, I’m saying it because Ana who did hair and makeup for Buddy System during a very hot summer and then has also done hair and makeup for GMM for quite some time, she said, she talks about how some actors are super sweaty and you have to take certain precautions. They’re gonna sweat through their stuff. You have to give them special things. And she’s like you guys are very on the low end of sweatiness so maybe– That’s right. This doesn’t apply to everybody but both of us took the Old Spice challenge with straight deodorant, I would say within– And I didn’t even do it with Old Spice. Yeah yeah I don’t remember what I did but– I’ll just call it the deodorant channel. The deodorant channel, it’s a new YouTube channel. Why did I say channel, challenge. Because we’re YouTubers. ‘Cause you know, even when you use antiperspirant, if you forget to use antiperspirant for that day, sometimes you’ll just be in the middle of a non-stressful activity and you’ll feel like a drip come down– Or like a fountain. Like a sprout, it’ll sprout. Since taking the deodorant channel , since taking the deodorant challenge– Subscribed. Since subscribing to the deodorant channel, I haven’t had that drippage. I haven’t either. Ever, until I ran out of deodorant but you know what I was doing, I made a mistake, man. I made a big mistake. I actually went to the drug store to get deodorant to re-stock and I think I do– You got distracted by gummy bears again, didn’t you? No I got like a couple of Old Spices. I fall for their marketing and the way they talk about the funny stuff that it says on there and it’s just deodorant, at this point I don’t need the antiperspirant so I just, any deodorant will work. But there was this thing on the top in the natural section and it said, I think it said magnesium-based or something like that, it was like no aluminum, magnesium-based and it was also, it had charcoal in it and I just– That’s such a trend. I don’t have any need for it, I just got it ’cause I was like hmm– Cool, new. Here’s what I said to myself. I wonder if there are some circumstances in which I still might need antiperspirant. Let me test this out since this doesn’t, even though I don’t believe– Even though for the past four years at least, maybe six since we’ve taken the subscribe to the deodorant channel. I don’t think it’s been six years but and I personally don’t believe in the aluminum thing, I think the aluminum thing being bad for you is bad science based on the last time that I looked at it but why take a chance right, so I used this stuff for three days. Mm-hmm. And then the reason I stopped using it is because it was so hard, it would rip the hair under my arms out. It didn’t have the smooth, just go across there real fast so I stopped using it, went back to the Old Spice. That day, drippage. Triple? I mean trickle? I don’t understand– My words are coming out wrong. What’s happening, I don’t understand how your body is adjusting to this but it was like my body got the cue that it was okay to evacuate water under my underarms. Pooch pooch pooch. But within three or four days– You’re back. I was back to normal. Back to normal. So I encourage everybody to do that, you know, unless you’re just a sweaty person. I do get Old Spice ’cause I also fall for it. I mean I gotta hand it to ’em. It also smells good but they have a lot of really good smelling scents. But the one I get is Fiji and the man reason I do it– Oh I’ve had Fiji. ‘Cause I’ve been to Fiji. Now that I’ve been to Fiji, every morning my armpits go back to Fiji. Hmm. So I gotta go in for some more Fij, you know what I’m talkin’ about. I completely understand that. I gotta feed the Fij, so I was self-conscious about the powder, I’m glad to hear that you can’t smell it but I’m sorry to hear that you can’t smell. That’s gonna really put a damper, I don’t wanna put that damper on our 200th celebration that we’re in the middle of. As long as there’s nothing else to smell, I’ll be fine. You know you can access memories through smell and I had this whole thing I was gonna bring and, oh this is episode 47. You would bring like articles of clothing from past guests? You know how we always snip off a little part of their clothes. Well we haven’t listened to these clips together. We’ll do that, we’ll go on a joyride back through Ear Biscuits. But first, let’s plug some merch. I can’t talk about this Ear Biscuits mug enough. Well talk about it some more. When you drink out of it, it’s like putting a podcast in your mouth. That’s a great analogy and I would also say that I didn’t realize until recently that this mug is very large. You’re eating our conversations. A lot of people don’t understand how big the mugs are because we’re very large people. I saw that people didn’t like one to be big so we were gonna downplay that. No no, I mean– They’re so small. What are you trying to do? What are you trying to slip your mug, you trying to take it on a plane, don’t take it on a plane, just put it in the cabinet and use it in the morning. I love a big mug, there’s value. You get more liquid in a bigger mug. I mean it’s not a Thermos, we’re not talkin’ Thermos capacity. I’m just saying it’s large– I love how I made you angry at them. I’m just saying it looks like a normal mug but it’s a slightly extra large mug. ‘Cause we’re slightly extra large people. And I go through a full whatever this is, Ear Biscuits mug of tea or water at least every one– This is 64 ounces. It’s like a big gulp. If you wanna get a big gulp, Ear Biscuits mug. Go to Mythical Store, or actually, Mythical.store. Mythical.store. Mythical Store which is at Mythical.store. That’s what I meant. All right, I’ve got some clips that are in chronological order, so let’s just start at the beginning. Well this is episode three, released on your birthday, October 11th of 2013. Oh so young back then, mid-30s. I believe Grace was our first guest– I had my whole life ahead of me. But this is a clip of Shane Dawson. Shane Dawson’s still around arguably more than ever so let’s listen to this very short clip. When I was a kid, I grew up on horror movies. Not whore movies, horror, harrer? Harrer? Horror movies. I grew up, that’s all I watched, that’s all I knew. Still that’s all I watch really, so I was so desensitized to violence and cussing and boobs and all of that stuff so for me, I wanted to be genuine and authentic with what I thought was funny, what I thought was cool and I was into dark humor and all that stuff and I was like maybe there’s other kids out there that’ll like that too and when YouTube first started, it was those kids. Now it’s a little more mainstream but back then it was the dark, gothic kids at school and that’s what they thought was funny too and one of my first sketches was about phone sex where I had phone sex with a girl and she ended up killing somebody, I don’t know, it was very dark. And yeah, and that’s just what I knew. And then the moral was phone sex kills? Yeah. The moral was, there’s always, if you think your life is bad, there’s always somebody out there whose life is worse than yourself and you should appreciate what you have. It was always like, the morals were very, very loosely tied to it but my whole thing now is I look at it like okay now my goal is just to give five minutes of entertainment to somebody who needs it and if there’s a moral, great, if there’s not, at least they got five minutes of free entertainment and then hopefully now just keep proving people, like oh I can actually direct because my goal now which has been my goal since I was five is to direct so now I’m not really in my videos anymore. All my last hit videos I guess, so hard nowadays to get a hit, but my last couple good videos, I haven’t even been in. My last couple parodies I wasn’t even in. Mm-hmm. Just behind the scenes writing, directing so that’s kinda my goal now is to take a little step back. End of clip. You gonna say that every time? This is us actually talking. I’m not gonna say that anymore because now that I’m talking it seems obvious. Why don’t you just do, beep. Boop boop. Boop. So a couple of things about that, I’ve got a number of thoughts but I’m not gonna hog all of the thoughts here. The fact that– Oh really? He talked about five minutes. Talk about giving somebody a five minute video and then also talkin’ about how it’s hard to find a hit and how it’s, he’s not even in a lot of his videos anymore and then he aspires to, very interesting. To me it just shows you that Shane’s mentality has always been experimenting and he’s always had his sights set on succeeding at this platform which this may sound like an overly simplistic statement but if you don’t commit to trying to win at the game that is YouTube, you will not end up being, you may have a successful sort of stint as a YouTuber, but longevity in this game is recognizing it as somewhat of a game that has to be played. The rules constantly change. Evolve or die. And he’s done that. We talked a little bit about his dark humor which if you’ve been following anything, you know that his dark humor has gotten him into trouble from time to time but I think the interesting thing about him saying that he was moving into this place where he was directing and also not being on camera, and then you think about six years later where he’s at now which is still kind of directing and producing but he has re-inserted himself into the center of his content because turns out, that’s what works and also I can’t think of many examples where that hasn’t worked on YouTube since it’s so personality-based. And also he’s gone to the opposite extreme. He’s not talking about five minutes, he’s talking about like an hour and a half. What is the– Well over an hour. His documentaries– I think he’s done almost two hour length. Two hour videos. On some of those. I’m just very grateful that Shane is doing well and is so relevant more so than ever. Maybe I won’t say that, just as relevant as he was in his previous versions. I’m just so glad that there’s people who’ve been around who know how YouTube used to be and they’re still making it work. That gives us hope because that’s obviously what we’re continuing to work hard to do. Stay relevant, stay on this thing so I’m grateful for Shane because from a selfish standpoint, it gives me hope. I was also very grateful that he came on the show because it’s not the type of thing that he loves to do I don’t think. No he didn’t at the time and he still doesn’t. We should acknowledge that if Shane hadn’t done his podcast, I’m sure we’ve said this before, I don’t know that we would have considered doing a podcast. It wasn’t the only factor by any means but it was a factor. He was not only doing a podcast but it was doing well and it seemed to be able to support itself financially, there was a business model there. Yeah. ‘Cause we just can’t justify doing some, it was speculative for a few years. I don’t think we were making money off the podcast. There weren’t sponsors involved in the very early days. But the plan was that there would be. And if you only listen now, yeah Shane was the third guest of many guests, at least two years worth of guests. Let’s go ahead and go to another guest. Episode 25 released on March 21st of 2014. This is Colleen Ballinger. She also played Miranda in part of the Ear Biscuit. She came on as Miranda and then she– Left and came back as Colleen, yeah. Yeah and I don’t know, I think this is gonna be a Colleen clip, I don’t know for sure. You’re obviously talented, not only as a comedian but as a singer and a performer so how do you balance that when you think about the future? Are you like okay well, I’ve got these two tracks. I hope that Miranda will keel over at some point or I’m gonna take this all the way. What are your thoughts? I don’t wanna kill Miranda. I think Miranda will live as long as people wanna watch. She’s gonna get pregnant and get– That’s exciting. She’s gonna go through it all with me. Are you pregnant? This is the announcement. I’m pregnant, guys. Okay, you’ve heard it first. I always wanna make sure because I wanna, that’s the key to our show working is somebody’s gotta get pregnant on the show, well, I mean– On the show? There’s another Miranda tweet. That’s another Miranda tweet, I know. This is your fault. Whoa. Whoa. And lo and behold, she did get pregnant. She did. Miranda got pregnant. So that was a forecast, that was a premonition. So you did hear it first. Colleen is pregnant. You heard it first on Ear Biscuits, it just, it wasn’t true at the time. And you know, she has, and the reason I ask the question about are you going to kill Miranda is you never know how people feel about the thing that everybody loves about what they do. Yeah. And the thing that everyone has latched on, a lot of times it was like, well that wasn’t even supposed to be the thing. Really what I want to do is this. And she is, she’s got a role in a musical. Broadway. Broadway musical? What is it, Waitress? That sounds right. Congratulations Colleen. She’s gonna do a little run there which is, that’s been her dream forever and she’s not doing it as Miranda. Nope, and she got pregnant and then had a baby. That’s usually what happens after pregnancy. Yep. And then it was, so a little boy that’s all over her Instagram. So I would like to say we broke that story. Can I say that? You can say that and I think the thing about Colleen as well, going back to 2014, and I think this is pretty much the case with, I don’t wanna get ahead of myself but we don’t have any examples of like you remember when so-and-so was really popular and we interviewed them and now they’re completely off the map. I’m sure we could come up with examples of that but we’re not because we’re nice guys. But the way that her career has evolved and how she isn’t as reliant on the YouTube game as she once was because I mean she’s still doing very well. She had a Netflix show, she had a Netflix special. Special. That’s out now. And just her touring that she’s done, I’m sure that’s gonna slow down or has slowed down because of the baby but so much touring that was super successful and now getting these traditional roles that she’s playing the worldwide game. She met her baby daddy on her Netflix show. She did. Yeah ’cause he was the love interest on the show. That’s why you gotta be careful who you cast. If you’re an executive producer on your show, you gotta cast somebody that you wanna hook up with. Lesson learnt, you know, make those babies. Casting. That’s probably illegal. You can’t, yeah, let’s not get into that. Yeah. Let’s say relationally. If you wanna get to know somebody, you cast, let’s just make it– Well I’m not making it anything. I’m not making it anything. So you can say I’m gonna make it, don’t say let’s make it ’cause I didn’t make it anything to begin with. Episode 29, released on April 18th, 2014, Troye Sivan, and we recorded this one at VidCon so it may sound a little different. How many details can we get out of your secret project that you’re working on that you mentioned at the beginning? Yeah, go. I’ll say it’s potentially the biggest thing that I’ve ever done in my whole life, like work-wise. I’ve been working really, really, really hard for I guess just under a year now. There’s gonna be a big launch. But you’ve written it. Maybe. It took awhile to write. Maybe. And– Maybe I’m writing it now. Can I see your palm? Yeah, that’s gonna help me. Go ahead, but– Okay yeah we’ve got the life line here taking a left. So it’s– It’s a novel. Is that an actual thing? How old am I gonna be when I die? It’s an album, I can look at your palm and tell it’s a blockbuster album. And Rhett, you nailed it. Beep beep beep beep beep beep. He did not say, he didn’t really respond to your prediction because he knew it was absolutely true, 100% true and– The look on his face which we did not, we did not– Have video. Video that at the time was a uh-oh, yeah. You got me. Totally right. His first major label EP TRYXE, I don’t know if you spell it out, if you say it, ’cause I’m a dad, peaked at number five on the U.S. Billboard 200. Had another album since then. He shows up to perform with Taylor Swift. Yeah he is in a different stratosphere. The music has kinda, the music thing’s kinda worked. Kind of worked– Congratulations. For Troye. And you know what? All because of you, Rhett. Up until that moment, this is the thing I didn’t wanna say, it turns out that the thing that Troye was working on was not an album. It was a claymation movie that he had spent a lot of time on. Claymation takes forever and when I said album, once the cameras stopped rolling, once we stopped recording he was like you know what, it’s actually a claymation thing but now that you said album, I should probably do an album. And I haven’t heard from Troye since. But that’s pretty cool, you know what, I wanna talk about what we think about this interview phase of Ear Biscuits but let’s just get through a couple more of these interview clips. This next one, skipping forward to May 9th of 2014, this is episode 32 with a comedy duo known as– Is it Smoosh? Smosh. Smosh. Smosh, okay Smosh, yeah. The overall plan for Smosh isn’t just about Ian and I so our main focus isn’t let’s go do a movie, let’s go be huge Hollywood hotshots or whatever. Let’s grow the brand and keep our comedy alive in as many different forms as we can. We have our gaming channel, we have a cartoon channel. We’re trying to introduce new personalities that totally get our humor that we think our audience will like. They love all the Smosh games guys now and they love Mari so those have been some personalities that we’ve introduced that totally get it. So more of that type of thing too, other Smosh properties. Yeah, other people that we really love that we know that our audience will totally get. Yeah ’cause we can’t create 50 shows ourselves but we can create other shows that other people make that our audience can enjoy just as much as they enjoy watching our shows. I think that’s cool. Guess I just need to say thanks for all that strategic development. They turned a corner at that point in terms of casting, expanding the Smosh cast to include everyone that we know very well now because they work in our building. And then Anthony and Ian, they separated creatively and if you listen back to that podcast, I think in hindsight you can probably read into it maybe more than was actually there, but that’s a valid exercise if you wanna do it to see if you wanna over-interpret some creative tension or just creative trajectory being kinda splitting up. And that was still pretty early in 2014, it would be another, what, four years, before Anthony left. I don’t know, if I would have known that we would have acquired Smosh and brought them in-house, and given Ian the freedom with his team to continue to create as they have, I just don’t know how I would feel doing that interview, I’d probably be like, that’s why I can’t be a time traveler. ‘Cause I’d have this weird grin on my face, they’d be like what’s wrong with you, man? Well we had no point of reference. Absolutely, I mean, I would say that up until the moment that it started to seem like it could happen, we had no point of reference for acquiring. You know what I’m saying, that wasn’t really, it wasn’t really on our minds, it wasn’t part of the strategic plan. But yeah, ’cause we’ve looked up to Smosh for a really long time. You go back to the very beginning. Probably when we started our YouTube channel, they had to be number one, it was either them or Barats and Bereta. No, they were number one. Historically they are in the top five, maybe the top three most subscribed channels on YouTube in terms of longevity. Obviously holding that title for a very long time. Yeah, obviously PewDiePie is up at the top. Which we also have an interview with him. We don’t have a clip of talking with Felix but– But you talked about another clip we’re not gonna play but I wanna talk about it ’cause it is the Wassabi Brothers. We had Wassabi Brothers on. Yeah. And we actually, whenever we have a duo on, we talk about their– Creative dynamic, relational dynamic. All that stuff. And just, you know, from one duo to another, let’s talk about that and how you work through things. And when we started asking those questions about how you work through things and differences, et cetera, with the Wassabi Bros, it became very evident to us and you can go back and listen to the episode that this didn’t seem like something that was gonna last. And I would say that within, it was less than a year, might have been a few months. Right. They announced that they were separating. Roi and Alex. Roi’s gonna do a bunch of bathing and stuff. Yeah, they both gone on to be very successful individually. It didn’t seem like they had necessarily the commitment to be like this is us doing this together or bust and that usually is required and even when you do have that commitment sometimes it doesn’t work out. Yeah I think that was April 30th, 2018 when that finally came to an end. Like Link was saying, the majority of the episodes early on were these interviews because that was the, we probably have said this before but we were really influenced by Marc Maron, WTF Podcasts at the time and that he was interviewing these traditional celebrities and getting into very personal things and this wasn’t something we had any experience with. Also it’s a little bit odd, there’s an odd dynamic when two guys are interviewing one person typically on a personal level and so it’s kinda like, ah okay, this is an interesting dynamic. Probably don’t need two people to ask a question, interview somebody where 75 to 80% of the content is gonna be the answers that this person is giving. I mean, there was some cool things that happened with us, kinda bouncing things off of each other. There’s two different perspectives applied to it. But we both have a lot to say. You know what I’m saying? And so every once in awhile, even back then, we would work in one of these episodes where it was just, hey let’s just talk to each other. But when we decided to do the podcast, we immediately went to the interview thing because there were so many people doing that, especially in the comedy world like you said but no one was doing it in that deep, kinda introspective, analytical, raw way with YouTubers. YouTubers. So I was very excited about that in terms of, actually I felt like it was collecting YouTuber interviews as a time capsule and I’m very proud of the interviews that we did because I do think it represented everyone’s story up into that point, how they got to that point in being so successful on YouTube, and I do think it’s useful to still go back and see that YouTube has changed so much that a lot of the success paths that they took are no longer viable paths because YouTube is a different thing, it works differently. Everything’s different about everything. But I still think it’s a time capsule. I know for the Felix interview, it was very obvious to us that he had never really, to the level that we were trying to get him to analyze his own success, really grappled with that. And it was a combination of somebody who was willing to ask those kinds of questions but also had the insight into what they were doing because it was what we were doing. It’s the reason that Marc Maron’s podcast works so well is he’s talking to comedians and performers and he’s a comedian and performer. Yeah and I think it had to do with our age. I think we were already old in terms of the ecosystem of YouTube and so, and we had been doing it for awhile. We knew a lot of these people and they respected us enough to say yeah, we’ll come in and talk to you and it took on a life of its own because a guest-driven podcast works differently than a talent-driven, I’m using the term talent loosely, where it’s just two guys who are gonna talk to each other every single, host-driven, you know. It works differently and it draws people in in a different way so there are people who are coming into an Ear Biscuits podcast because of the guest and we kinda relied on that for, you know, basically the entire first and second season. Yeah but like you said, well, and I do wanna add one thing. I do think that, there was a question in our minds I think when we first came up with what Ear Biscuits was gonna be that, do people wanna hear us talk for an hour? Do we wanna talk for an hour? We moved to the interview thing so quickly that I just wonder if we questioned whether what we’re doing now where it’s just the two of us is something that would be viable. I think we thought that we needed the name recognition of the guests to drive interest. But like you said, we, even in the midst of interviews, we did pepper in some episodes that were just the two of us talking and this next one, episode 42, released July 25th, 2014 called Obsession, we talked about your layers. Mm-hmm. Let’s play a clip of that. Rhett goes through a series of obsessions like a fashion designer goes through new outfits. These are semi in chronological order. Ultralights, chiropractic, crow hunting, wine pairings, fossils and geology. Crowned Victorias, barbecue, hot yoga, juicing, paddle boarding, four-wheeling. Now that was edited. You don’t speak that quickly. No, I move at the speed of conversation. That was the speed of an edit and the list could have gone on and on. I think that was the list at the time and then we kind of unpacked the dynamic associated with it but what do you think when you hear that list? I think about, I’m like oh yeah. Mm, yeah. What do you mean mm? Yeah, that’s good, that’s good, ultralights. I gotta get back on that. Gotta get one of those. Fossils, yeah, I just looked at my fossils yesterday. I did, I was rearranging some things and I looked at some of my fossils and I was like hmm, yeah I gotta get more of these fossils. Now you’re adding onto the layers. I think that’s the other way, it’s like, we can add to this list now is the other way to look at it. Well you know, I think about, so the last two mentioned being paddle boarding and four-wheeling, off-roading, whatever you call that. Yeah. Are two that we did together and I think the fact that we haven’t done, we haven’t gone on an off-roading trip in at least two years I would say and we’ve paddle boarded once in the past six months maybe. Right. I think that it is indicative of a number of factors. I think it’s due to a number of factors. One, professionally, oh you going straight white t-shirt. I’ve taken my jacket off. Professionally and we were just talking about this yesterday. We’re always as busy as we’ve ever been. Right, now we’re not currently in the middle of shooting a half-hour comedy while trying to work GMM into it at the same time, that’s not currently happening. But there’s just so many little things that we’re kinda keeping up with that we’ve got less time when it comes to just, there’s so many professional responsibilities, but also our kids have gotten to an age where they always have stuff going on that you have to be a part of. Yeah let’s blame it on the kids. Are you saying, I agree with that. No I’m saying, I’m not blaming the kids. No I agree, it is– I’m saying there’s things like– They have so much to do and you got two of ’em, I got three of ’em and it’s like– I do not make weekend plans anymore. I’ll make weekend plans way in advance, like okay I’m gonna go someplace for my anniversary or whatever. But I know that it’s like well, Locke’s gonna have a basketball game or he’s gonna have some practice on the other side of town, Shepherd’s gonna have a birthday party or he’s gonna have to go to this golf practice or whatever and it’s just a given that at this stage in their lives that they are going to have these things that they have to do and you combine that with the fact that there’s just so much, and even when we do go do things like paddle boarding, the last time we went paddle boarding, we turned it into a day of brainstorming. It was like hey let’s go get out in the ocean and then let’s go and sit down and brainstorm a bunch of ideas, ideas that we’re actually currently working on in one form or another. But are you saying you don’t have any layers? Your life is such that you can no longer have an obsession? I think that– I mean the lights in the house were kind of an obsession but it’s– That, well– It’s more of an installation. I would say that that is a– I would say home stuff is an obsession for both of us. I would say the most recent layer is just reading horror novels. I think that– That’s one you can fit in. Getting, writing the novel, looking for some inspiration and then continuing to think about where we could go with that story. I’d say that’s the latest thing is I’m consuming a lot of thriller slash horror novels but in terms of things that require buying equipment and, I anticipate getting more back into the art of barbecue when we re-do the outside and I’ve got my eye on this grill that I want or whatever, but it’s not like, last time I smoked a pork butt for a large group of people, again, I gotta plan it, I gotta get ready the night before. I gotta spend six to eight hours on the day of like– But at least you’re home so that’s doable and you can still be a dad. No but I can’t sit there with a piece of pork if I gotta go to a basketball game or take somebody to a birthday party. Yeah that’s true. You know what I’m saying, you gotta plan these things. Those episodes where we would just talk the two of us and kind of share stories and talk about our songwriting process or specific dynamics of our friendship, I think were rays of light of shining away to where Ear Biscuits could ultimately evolve. And we were getting good feedback on those as well from you guys. And I think that you had a mounting frustration with the interviews, more so than me. Which is totally fine. I think it got to a point where it was like, I was a little later kinda making that transition but ultimately we both got to the point where we didn’t really have an appetite for these in-depth interviews. Especially when our appetite for having more conversations started to grow, we can get into that a little bit more later but I think as far as the waning interest in interviews, part of it was practical. You’re subject to these people, guests showing up, having to be booked, having to pick people. Are they the right kinda candidate, do we wanna talk with ’em, do we have things to say? It was a whole thing that was very– And for me personally, I was, there were some guests that I was personally less motivated to talk to. I was personally less interested in their career, just being frank about it. I respected everybody and I learned a lot. I would talk, we’d sometimes have people and I was like, I really don’t know anything about what you do, but I’m gonna take, we would have a research period so we wanted to ask informed questions and we wanted to know what we were talking about and so there would be time that would go into learning about them, watching their videos and then coming up with some semi-intelligent questions, and that process became a little more like homework to me about a subject that I wasn’t interested in. And I think that just for me, and I think you couple that with the fact that, like I said, we both have a lot to say. We can fill conversation very, very easily, both of us. Both of us individually have enough conversation in the tank to talk to one person. When all of a sudden you got the two of us and sometimes there was, there was this, and I think you had more of a tendency to do this to be like, you had this very specific, and we wouldn’t talk about it. You had a very specific way that you wanted to conduct the interview and a specific line of questioning and so there would be like maybe a 40 minute period in a podcast where I might just say like yeah. And you know me, that’s not my jam. And so, that was frustrating for me. Yeah. ‘Cause I was like, let’s just talk, man. We got plenty to say. Yeah, you know what I think I’m realizing or at least remembering, one of the things that really changed for me in terms of my appetite for wanting to switch the show and make it more about us, I had this mounting guilt, maybe guilt’s a strong word but I just, I had a mounting discomfort over the course of a couple of years of doing the interviews because I would make it a practice to push so hard to get to something juicy, to get to something meaningful and introspective and new. I took it as a personal challenge to get past what they would talk about on other interviews and really understand not only how they became successful but what made them tick. If they went through any hardship, it felt important to me to give them an opportunity to talk about that because I just felt like that’s an important aspect that a lot of people didn’t see. They see the success, they see the smiles in between, jump cut together. But they don’t see in between the jump cuts, and I really wanted to give people an opportunity to analyze that aspect of their own selves, and I did push kinda hard, I asked awkward questions. And that’s actually not what bothered me, but I think the mounting discomfort was– We weren’t doing it. We weren’t doing that. We weren’t sharing. I think we started talking about it, so I felt like, if someone would have done to me what I did to them in the line of questioning that I presented, I would have been very uncomfortable and I didn’t feel like that was fair. I still don’t feel like that was totally fair. But I’m glad that this venue and this table has evolved to be a space where we can process who we are in a way that I was trying to get other people to do. And I think that, I definitely recall people commenting about that, like you guys will get so, so much personal stuff from a guest but we don’t know a lot about you personally. Right, I’ll play a clip. I didn’t mean to cut you off, you can finish your thought. That was all I was gonna say. So episode 91, actually we called it Let’s Get Personal, released on April 24th, 2017. Speaking of Lily, we took her in for just an annual checkup. They had concerns, sent her to a specialist and then to make a very long story short, she was diagnosed with severe scoliosis. We get the x-ray, we look at this thing and her back is like an S. When we get in with the specialist, basically the first thing he told us was these are where her curves are. This is what this means, these are the facts, this is what research has taught us, therefore we are recommending spinal fusion surgery for Lily. We left the doctor’s office, we went out, we got in the van and it was the three of us and we talked about it some more and we cried, you know, all three of us cried. Of course it was and it is very scary. Yeah so that was I believe before she went in for surgery and then episode 95, The World’s Longest Treasure Hunt, where Kevin came on and told us about that. Totally different format we tried for a little bit. As part of the intro I gave an update on Lily’s recovery. We told her your back’s straight and she started crying. The surgery went exactly how we hoped. It went off without a hitch. It came full circle when we got in the mini van again, leaving the hospital for the first time and we all looked at each other and Lily was like, we did it, now she’s at home recovering. She’s doing great. But the fact that they went in there and they put two metal rods that they custom-bent. They smooshed her spine to be back no longer an S and then they attached those rods using titanium screws, huge screws into her vertebrae. You know how many people– And then six weeks after that she’s fully recovered basically. But here’s the thing. Here’s the thing what? You said here’s the thing. You got a little insight into, somebody do a montage of me trying to say something. Insert something into a Link story. Kiki, you do that. I thought you were talking to Kiko, I was like why’d you call Kiko Kiki? I understand now. Kiki. Not Kiko, Kiki. Maybe that goes both ways, I don’t know. That’s a good analysis. So that was after we had made the decision, this was well into us making the decision for the show to just be the two of us. Yeah, yeah. ‘Cause I don’t remember exactly when that was, but yeah, well we started saying that the thing that’s gonna drive the majority of– March of 2017 is when we started. Okay so this is very soon after that, ’cause we were like let’s use– No more interviews. The thing, the stuff that happens to us is going to be the majority of the fuel for the conversations that we have. Right. We’ve talked about this, many people have made the same observation that some of the personal stories that used to be the backbone, definitely the backbone of Good Morning Chia Lincoln, the predecessor to GMM and then the early stages of Good Mythical Morning, very much driven by us having conversations together. That’s where let’s talk about that and moving at the speed of conversation, a lot of that was actually originally GMM. Yeah. Mode. And of course, for reasons that most of you probably understand, GMM has necessarily taken on a different tone and a different angle and that’s why it’s in its 16th, it’s about to be in its 16th season. Because we made that change and then we took, we took that spirit and we moved it to Ear Biscuits. And I think that that was, even from a personal health standpoint, was a very important transition. Because GMM is like a playground for our personalities in which we do things that grown men probably shouldn’t do or if they’re gonna do it you might as well watch ’em do it. And we have fun but it’s not about being personal anymore than just hey, this is us realistically reacting to something in the moment and we kinda have, two best friends having a good time but it’s not two best friends pulling back the layers of their lives, that’s not what GMM is and GMM’s not ever gonna be that again. But we do have this, we have this place that– And GMM was never– It was never that. It was never a venue to be as introspective or everything we did was for the effect of entertainment. We would tell personal stories. Funny stories. We would tell the funny stories and I don’t know how much we talked about Ear Biscuits becoming a place where, I think the assumption was, hey we can share some funny stories when they happen, at least at the top of an episode before we get into something topical, which we still do on many of these episodes, we kinda use that format when we’re trying to figure out what we’re gonna make an episode about. But then we also expanded it to whatever’s going on, when the thing with Lily happened that might have been one of the first things that I was like, you know what, I think I wanna talk about this. And it was, at the beginning of that, the first Lily clip it was like, speaking of Lily, and then I talked about what was going on. But it wasn’t the entire episode and then for the Kevin thing, it was like hey since I talked about Lily I wanna give you an update on that subsequent clip we played. Right. But it was, it felt good to be able to share and for us to process as friends something that was such a big part of my life, you know, and that’s when I felt like that level of honesty and introspection was rewarding. Just for us to be able to talk about it, without even knowing how a listener would respond to it and maybe that’s part of what you’re saying, the more that we’re able to have those type of conversations, it’s difficult for us to find the time to have the conversations that, where we’re sharing things about our experience. When the, hits the fan, we absolutely talk about things, we don’t wait to do that on the podcast. That would be ridiculous. So I’m not saying that. For instance– In addition to that– It wasn’t like I didn’t know– Right. The update with Lily, but I might not know what you did on your vacation. The funny story that you’re gonna tell about your RV trying to get out of the driveway, well, you’re not gonna tell that to me. In the same way. Because you don’t need to. That can wait for the podcast. And that’s the Good Morning Chia Lincoln part of it was I’m gonna tell you this funny story about the RV, we should put that on the internet too. Two for one, but then we’re both gonna talk about what these vacations mean to us as humans, husbands, fathers, you know, pet owners, all of those things. So the show started to, it evolved, but it started to morph a little bit and I should just give a quick update on Lily since we’ve talked about her. It’s been over two years. We celebrated the two year anniversary of her surgery and she had been rollerskating recently and somebody came up and clipped her from behind and knocked her on her butt and then she fell on her back and it was the first time that we were actually scared. Did everything just pop out? Yeah, her whole spine– Like Mortal Kombat. No, she had some bruised ribs but nothing, it just so happened that her annual check-up with the spine doctor was within the week. So that put our minds at rest when they do the x-ray and say you know what, everything is totally fine. It’s all metal-infused. After two years– It’s stronger than a normal spine. Well the screws that they used to put the rods in, by this point in time, it’s like, it’s totally become one. Right, it’s all grown together. So actually in the first year or so, there is a chance– Of Mortal Kombat. No, of the screws getting loose. Right. And them having to do something, so we’ve passed that milestone. Her number are check-ups are going down to where they don’t have to be every year anymore, so it was a miraculous surgery and we’re grateful for it, she’s doing fabulous and she has no physical restrictions. And she has the scar that still, she wears as a badge of honor and it’s like, when she has one of the shorter shirts that these girls are wearing now where it’s like you can see the belt, I wouldn’t call it a midriff but if you bend over, you can see a little bit of the scar and it’s like I’m proud every time I see it and I’m proud that she’s fine with a bathing suit on, hanging out with her friends. It’s not anything she’s embarrassed about and she’s had many conversations over the past two years with other people who are faced with the same surgery or a similar condition and she’s able to see how she can, her experience can enrich the lives of other people and give them support, so it was scary, it was life-changing for all of us and it continues to be. I think, I have a… I have a personal… I’m annoyed by sentimentality porn. Okay, I’ll use, for lack of a better word. Meaning I’m going to say something sentimental or I’m gonna do something or I’m gonna share something sentimental because I know that it will affect the audience in a certain way, and it’s manipulation. It’s a manipulation thing and so I think that there are definitely, when you talk about vlogging, personal vlogs where people are like I’ve made a decision that I’m gonna share my life with you, I think you get into a place where you start hoping that you’re going to experience things that then will make deep, moving material that just grows your audience, right? And I just wanna be clear that that’s not what we do on Ear Biscuits. I think that’s probably clear but that’s one of the reasons that we don’t only format the show to be about personal things. Because if we said it’s always personal every single time, it’s gonna be about what’s going on in our lives, then you begin to script your life for the sake of the content that you’re creating. Yeah. I think that’s one of the reasons that and I don’t have anything against people who have daily vlogs or family vlogs but I would be lying to you if I didn’t say that almost all of them without exception annoy me. And sort of, I think one of the things that annoys me about it is it’s just like your family has become a show. And at that point, you begin to make decisions where the content is driving the way you live your life as opposed to the way you live your life just being the content. Listen, I understand, I can only imagine what it would feel like to be in that kind of cycle and I’m glad that I’m not in that cycle but with Ear Biscuits, it’s like if something happens, and I think that just statistically or circumstantially, whatever, I haven’t had this situation happen with, I haven’t had that happen with my kid. I haven’t had a medical situation with my kid. I haven’t had a close relative die like your grandfather died. I haven’t had my mom’s husband who incidentally is my dad. Hasn’t been through a difficult time in the hospital so Link has shared a lot of those things so I’m not saying Link is doing sentimentality porn, I’m just saying that as things happen, if we feel that they’re appropriate, we’re gonna talk about them and we’re gonna process them together because we’re purposely choosing to format the episodes in a way that gives us the ability to share personal things but doesn’t make the point– An obligation. Of the podcast to be sharing personal things at which point I feel like we would be hoping that things would happen or sensationalizing things that are happening to us for your entertainment. And again, this is a business. We do this in part so that we can get money from sponsors, that we can grow our business at Mythical Entertainment, that we would be dishonest if we weren’t transparent about that but I think more than that, it has become a place for us to process the things that we are experiencing and also, just be like hey, we’re gonna be open about our lives, we’re gonna be open about what it’s like to be, to run a business, to be a best friend, to be a husband, to be a father. As these things happen to us, we’re gonna try to accurately portray them and just share our experience. And I’ve really tried to understand what my personal boundaries are for sharing and what the objective of that is. And I will say, I will also acknowledge that yes, you haven’t had things happen in your life since we’ve been sharing this type of stuff on Ear Biscuits that have had this headline material sensational type thing like the stuff that you listed that I’ve shared about. But that’s not to say, I mean, I couldn’t have predicted that I would have been sharing those things. If you would have told me I would have said, “I can believe you but I don’t know how we’ll get there.” I don’t know that you would have predicted that you would be sharing openly about therapy and the things that you’re learning but I think that it’s to your credit, I think it’s… You’re also doing that. We’re honestly processing our lives and that’s what this show has become. It’s processing our lives and our perspectives but I 100% agree that it’s not with an obligation to over share especially to the point of sensationalizing things or hoping that something sensational happens. Right. But in terms of my boundary, even though we’ve done episodes where they were advice-themed, I never want to turn my personal experience back at the audience as advice. I just wanna honestly process and then, if I’m honest, then you as a listener can take whatever’s valuable to you, that’s up to you, but I try to be disciplined to not turn my experience into advice for somebody else even though I do like givin’ advice and I like feelin’ like I’m right about stuff. But I’m very grateful with the way that Ear Biscuits has expanded. I think that again, this is not the primary venue for us to have the deepest, deepest conversations that we have, but it’s that middle ground of conversation, being able to tell the story for comedic effect and us to experience that together is really fun, that’s really great for our relationship. Yeah. And also, when we get into the introspective aspects of, I told you the RV story, that was funny, but then we’re gonna talk about our vacations and I think we do get at things that, it’s that middle ground of conversation that’s kinda like, you find yourself being introspective at a point where we probably would have just moved onto working otherwise. Right. So I do think that I’m very happy with where Ear Biscuits is for that reason and then I’ll say, secondarily, I’ve been very encouraged, pleasantly surprised that the more that we have been honest about our perspectives and our experiences, that listeners have related to it and that it’s helped them in some way. Yeah, it’s been one of the most encouraging things from people that we meet on tour. Yeah. And of course there’s lots of people who are like the bright spot that GMM represents in my day has been transformative for me emotionally and again, we never intended that but the fact that that’s a reality is just something that blows us away, but I think that when somebody says Ear Biscuits has… This particular thing that you talked about changed the way that I approach this thing or thought about this thing in my life. Again, not from a hey we’re giving you advice. Usually the advice that we give is for some stupid situation and for the sake of entertainment. But just, when you hear somebody talk about something that there’s a touch point in your life and you’re seeing how they’re navigating it, that’s just how humans relate to each other, you know. It’s not like hey look at me and do what we did, but it’s just like, hey, I’m just gonna share honestly about this. Any relationship and I do think that it’s not just the relationship that we have with each other, it’s the relationship that we have with you listening, anytime that you’re just open about something that’s going on, that enhances, there’s the opportunity for that to enhance your life and that’s a responsibility I think that we didn’t design the show to ever have but I think it does now and so we think about that, when we’re sharing something that we’re going through, I think we’re very, very much aware that there are individuals out there who are going through something very similar potentially or will go through something similar and if that can improve their experience, then that alone makes this whole thing worth it. And from a content standpoint, just to get a little more practical, I’m very encouraged when I see, well my heart sinks a little bit when I look at, if I see the Good Mythical Morning or the Rhett and Link Reddit thread and a new entry will pop up where somebody says, I miss the old Good Mythical Morning or this is what I don’t like about Good Mythical Morning or I miss Good Morning Chia Lincoln and then inevitably, the conversation very quickly turns to, it sounds like Ear Biscuits is perfect for you. You know? Yeah. So I’m– Yeah. It’s funny that, I don’t know how much we talked about it and I don’t know how intentional it was but as Good Mythical Morning has evolved, then Ear Biscuits also evolved to fill a desire for something that no longer is the achieved dynamic of that show which is just unstructured conversation that gets to personal stories that are funny and as we’ve discussed, it goes a lot further than that. I’m just, I’m glad to be 200 episodes into something that we didn’t get complacent, but we continued to want to express ourselves creatively and to find a way to be engaged. ‘Cause I think that anything that– And then this is what happened. You anticipate going for an extended period of time. As a performer, if you’re creating a product that does require you to perform on some level, believe it or not, we are performing in one sense because we’re not just talking to each other, we’re having a conversation in this context where you’re listening. Anytime you can transform that into something that does not feel like a burden, I think you’re in a good place, and not only does this not feel like a burden, but this feels like an outlet for us. Yeah. And I gotta be honest, with the interviews, they began to feel like a burden. Yeah. When I looked at my schedule back in the day, it was like, oh you gotta do an Ear Biscuit and you’re not prepared for that person, it felt like ah, you got a test. But when I see you’ve got an Ear Biscuit today on the schedule and even if I haven’t prepared for it, I’m like ah, that’s something I look forward to doing. It’s a creative outlet and it’s a mental outlet, it’s an emotional outlet, it’s a lot of things for us and so yeah, I’m grateful for what it is for us and I’m grateful for what it is for you listening and I just wanna thank you for listening. At what point you started listening, that’s fine, maybe you don’t wanna go back and listen to all of ’em, that’s also fine. What’s most important is that you’re here and that you enjoy hanging out with us, puttin’ us in your ears. Thank you for sharing Ear Biscuits with other people and– Anybody that you know that what this show has become, if you think that they would connect with it, don’t be afraid to tell ’em about it. So what will the next 200 episodes hold? We don’t have time to get into that now. Maybe we will at another point unless you wanna make a quick Troye Sivan prediction. Episode 400, what will it look like? Well let me look at your palm. Oh. You sure you wanna know? Not if that means you really have to come up with something that’s gonna be underwhelming. Well– If you got something good, yes, if you don’t, let’s just keep it a mystery. We’ll keep it a mystery, but I do have a quick Rec in Effect I’m gonna leave you with. This is one that Link has a little insight into because I shared this rec with him yesterday. And I shared this rec not so much as a pure recommendation that I’m going all in on this because I have questions about this rec that I want you to explore with me, okay. Now you may know, we’ve talked about this before, Primitive Technology, one of our favorite YouTube channels, this guy somewhere in Australia who does all this stuff with stone-age tools, never talks, there’s no music, never looks at the camera and he just builds stuff and it’s amazing. Well as you might expect, he essentially created a genre of YouTube videos and now there are other people following suit and doing the same thing. There’s a guy, I’m gonna say this wrong, but his channel is Mr. Heang Update. And I believe it’s Mr. dot– H-A-U-N-G. No, H-E-A-N-G. There’s no U. Heang, I think, but there’s no space after the period in mister either. At least in the YouTube channel, Mr. Heang Update. And he’s got a bunch of videos. There’s two from the past couple months that he built this under, well, this is the confusing thing. Link and I watched both videos. Using a stick, he dug into a huge pit and it’s like this incredible dwelling. He made a submerged dwelling– That has a pool in it. In the bottom of it there is a pool. And he did one video, like a 15 minute long video where he does this and it’s awesome and then he did a second video which included footage from the same exact video, was released around the same time but then he put a roof on it. Yeah and made it where you couldn’t see it at all, it was like it wasn’t even there. Regardless of the nature of how this all happens, it is amazing and you should watch that. But the assignment and the question is what? The assignment is between those two videos, I don’t understand why he decided to do one with a roof and one without a roof, release them around the same time and include footage of both things but also, to go and look at other things, I feel like with Primitive Technology, every single thing that he does is documented and you know that he didn’t get any help. My question about Mr. Heang is, is he really doing all this himself? I want to believe, I want to believe he’s doing it all himself, but I have my suspicions because first of all, we know he has a cameraman because the camera moves when he’s in the– Don’t give ’em the answers. Let ’em look into it. Primitive Technology doesn’t seem to have a cameraman. But there’s also many steps in Mr. Heang’s process that you don’t see. That’s the Rec in Effect. I also highly recommend it and thank you for celebrating 200 episodes, y’all. Mm. #EarBiscuits. Let us know what you think of the evolution of Ear Biscuits. We’ll talk at ya next week. To watch more Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous episode of Ear Biscuits, click on the playlist to the left. And don’t forget to click on the circular icon to subscribe. If you prefer to listen to this podcast, it’s available on all your favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your Mythical best.