EB 225: Our Years As Missionaries

Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I’m Rhett. And I’m Link. This week at the Round Table of dim lighting. We’re picking up where we left off last week, and illuminating the dark years. The lost years. They’re not dark. The lost years, Yeah. Rhett and Link So this is part two of us filling in big gap in our lives that we have never really talked about and that is really, the breadth of our college experience. And then especially, which is what we’re gonna get into this week. What happened after we graduated, and how did we go from graduating working as engineers and then eventually becoming YouTubers, and it’s not the path that you would expect, or you have heard in interviews or articles that you have read about us. If you haven’t listened to last week’s podcast, then you definitely need to do that, before listening to this one. Yeah come on listen. Do not listen to this one without going back to part one, but I will just quickly sort of just up to where we’re at. And can I say before you– Yeah. That to reiterate that the plan is there’s so many… This is so logistical in terms of connecting the dots of our careers professionally but there’s an entire personal and spiritual aspect to the story, that we’re saving that side of the coin for each of us for the next two episodes, we’re each gonna take, we’ll both be there. But we’ll each take an episode to share our own stories of our spiritual journeys, which go through the times that we’re talking about here, as well as bringing us up to– Present day. Where we are now. Yeah. So that will be the next two episodes, hashtag Ear Biscuits with any thoughts, comments, questions you have about anything we’re talking about today. We’re accumulating those so that when we’re through those next two episodes, then we can be a part of that conversation at that point. Yeah. So to recap what we covered last week, we talked about the fact that, when we started our careers, we grew up as evangelical Christians. And that is not how we would describe ourselves now. And like Link said “Will talk about that whole process “and why we would not call ourselves that now “in subsequent individual podcasts.” But because it plays such a integral role in who we were, and then every decision that we made professionally, as you’re about to hear, we wanted to kind of fill in the gaps. Last week we got from high school through college, talked about our very, very heavy involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ. And how that was really the first opportunity we ever had to be comedians. That was when we started being Rhett and Link on stage in front of a group of people. Yeah, the weekly meeting at NC State and then every Christmas at the Christmas Conference slash Winter Conference where multiple states would come together, Crew students, and you and both of us will start emceeing that. So, when we graduated, it was a point of decision because, our lives for the past four plus years had been, so much of our life experience had been wrapped up in our involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ that not only was it daunting to just graduate and move into the real world, so to speak, but also to there was an implied that we were leaving behind such a big part of our experience, specifically being involved in Campus Crusade and being involved, visibly so much. And our passion is being so engaged there, to now it’s okay, I’ve been working at IBM for, in a co op… on and off. So while you were in school, you’re like taking semesters and working. But I got a job with IBM, you got a job as a civil engineer– Well, backup just a second because, while I was in college, in fact, I remember going into my senior year, our involvement in Campus Crusade, and then specifically, I took two summer project trips, I took one to New York City in 98 and then I took one to Slovakia in 99. And again, the way I’ve always described what I did in Slovakia, because it’s not untrue is teaching English. But the reality was, it was English camps, teaching English with the intention of teaching people about Christianity. That’s kinda how these organizations work. It’s like, you kind of go into a situation under a certain pretense, but ultimately what you’re after is communicating the gospel. Conversion. And converting people to Christianity. And that doesn’t mean that the experiences were not incredibly fruitful, at least for me, personally, and enriching and getting to travel and experience, people in other places that were different than me. Same for me going to Santa Cruz amusement park ride operator. Right? And so we told stories from those periods of times, but we never really explained why we were there. That was while we were there. But that experience, especially my experience in Slovakia, in getting to know people who had basically given their lives vocationally, like professionally, to Crew to work full-time, and seeing that these people are just like, man, they’re happy to wake up in the morning. They’re engaged very closely with what they’re doing. They’re continuing from our vantage point, the experience that we were having and so aligned with in college it professionally. Well, and I think the thing that ends up happening this isn’t just true of people who get involved in religious organizations but again, you’re so passionate and usually kind of find your cause and the thing that you’re into and your early 20s. And then what you begin to see is you begin to look around at the adults in your life and you’re like, what is wrong with you guys? You’re all dead. I remember going back to my local church, having been involved in Campus Crusade and gone to these weekly meetings and gone to these conferences where we were worshiping and we were, singing these the songs and I was being filled with the Spirit overwhelmed, emotional experiences, and then you go back to your church and you’re like, God, what is this matter to you guys? And you become sort of a disillusioned? You think that you got it figured out and you think that the adults have just lost it? But when you find these people who have decided to go on staff, they seem passionately engaged with exactly the stuff that you’re currently passionate engaged with. So at that point, I made the decision. This is what I want to do. I wanna go on staff. I want to be full time staff at Campus Crusade. I went home. Oh, you made the decision? Yeah, I went home, Okay. So, you may not remember this, but I went home after that trip. And I told my parents, I was like, I don’t wanna get an engineering degree. I wanna get a communications degree. I’d like to take these last two to three semesters. Okay, I remember that. And transfer into communications, because this is what I’m good at. I’m a good speaker. I wanna learn more about that. And also, I just kind of wanna get more involved in ministry. I’ll have more time if I’m in communications than engineering ’cause it’s let’s be honest, way easier. And then my dad actually said he was like, “You know what?” Because my brother had already gone on staff. My brother Cole was on staff at Campus Crusade at the time, Right. already. I think he started at UNC. I think that’s where he was at the time. And so it was already in the family. Again, we talked about Cole a lot like he will listen to our very first hip hop because of Cole and a lot of other things ’cause he’s, He blazed the trail. typical older brother We were comfortable following. But if he had never gotten involved Campus Crusade, we also would not be here, I believe, it’s with a domino effect. We have been in InterVarsity. Him hit right, you were sweet one they’re some we just suddenly skipped over, shout out to InterVarsity. We were flirting with y’all. We were in an inter varsity Bible study as well as a crusade Bible study, I remember two Bible studies. We need a pace I said. You can’t give us enough Bible studies y’all. So we ended up… I ended up thinking I was gonna go on staff ’cause Cole was already on staff. And but my dad was like, I think it will be great if you go on staff, but, you got one more year of engineering school. Yeah. To just have an engineering degree. And I think it would serve you better in the long run. You can do all the things that you want to do. With an engineering degree. But you’ll have an engineering. All you wanted was a little more fun. Yeah, I was playing with Twisted Metal with Greg all the time. I was having such a good time. So I thought that was reasonable and I’m actually glad that my dad told me that, because I feel a little bit cooler that I can say I have an engineering degree it just a bit better. That’s all of it is. But then when you did graduate, when I graduated, I immediately got married, and I took a job with IBM. I felt like I was much more pulled to that responsible decision and I had, the financial security of the job that they offered was something that, oh, gosh, I just I couldn’t walk away from that. But I did still have that pull, to all of the things that you described, and I would add to that, that the way that we were able to engage with an audience, and with Christmas Conference every year, like, as we talked about last week, our passions were so aligned to, like, pour so much of any of our free time into that was like, I didn’t want to give that up, or, I knew that I will miss that just as much as anything if not the most. It was a passion. It’s like entertaining a crowd. was also a hammering for us. The expectation was that we would continue emceeing the conference. I don’t remember what the conversation was, but it was an open invitation and we knew we wanted to do that Christmas Conference. But you decided to also take a job as an engineer. The reason being I fell in love with my wife, Jessie, who was still a student. That’s, right? We got married the summer after her sophomore year in college. You cradle robber. And you can’t go on staff with a wife that’s in college. With a child. And so, I was like, okay? I’m gonna use this engineering degree. I’ll try this out for a little bit. She’s actually finished school like, she got the double major in like three and a half years at Carolina, which somehow she did that while married to me. But anyway. You agreed to continue to be the host of the Christmas Conference every year. And at some point, maybe now maybe a year or so later. Like I would be like a co-MC but right from the beginning. I was there with you, us working together on a volunteer basis, not as official staff but as volunteers to show up to take our vacation to store up our vacation from my engineering jobs, and then blow most of it, December 26, through the but and then. So then I remember months leading up to the end of the year and the conference, we would get together, every single week I would drive from my house in Apex to the edge campus at Carolina where Jessie was still going to school and you guys had the house. And every week we get together and we plan for months and months leading up to this thing. It was our one, opportunity to still have that audience. Yeah. And to come up with stuff. We would write songs. We come up with video concepts, we figure out the sketches and stuff that we’re gonna do. Crowd interaction stuff on stage. Yes, it was all very, very meticulously planned. And also, there’s a lot of anxiety like, I was having a great time, but I just remember, it’s funny in light of how much content we put out there now, and how many things that we get ready for and all of a sudden do. I remember just being so stressed out about Christmas Conference, like enjoying it, but like so stressed out about how it was gonna go. And it’s funny how? The same way we are now. No, I’m saying yeah, right? But it seems so like, dude, that was so simple. It was such a small thing. It was five days of getting out there a few times, like, but everything it’s always relative, but it was it is always relative to whatever you were experiencing. It was over 1000 college students it was our only audience. We were also writing songs at that same time. So like, I got married in 2000. We started getting together then you and Jessie weren’t married until 2001. I would get together at your apartment. And we would write songs. We wrote enough songs by getting together every week that we also made a CD at that point. ‘Cause Jessie host the Grammy was 2001, right? Yeah. Right, yes. Yeah. So we were writing all the songs. The first album was 2001. So we made a CD of comedy songs, some of which one of those songs the Unibrow song. We performed on stage at Christmas Conference along with Tim playing harmonica. I think this is the thing that is gonna be news to everybody. So we talked about those early songs like the Unibrow song, the Facebook song. That which was a few years later, but yes. All those early songs and the Unibrow song was the first thing that was ever featured on the homepage of YouTube. Again, we told this story before about how my home video of Locke crying after the Carolina beat state was featured. And that was YouTube wanted to feature it and we were like, listen, that’s just a home video, will you feature the work that we actually care about? And that was The Unibrow Song. That was kind of the beginning of us getting traction on YouTube but anyway, that was many years later, that was 2006 or seven. But anyway, those are songs that we wrote at the time. We wrote them for Christmas conference. We wrote them to perform live To perform live period. Yeah, The Unibrow Song was I mean, in the first batch of songs that we wrote, but actually, we wrote a song because a friend Greg, who we talked about last week was getting married in December of 2000. Yeah. And at his rehearsal dinner, we were like, hold on. We’re in your wedding party. That means where your rehearsal dinner, your rehearsal dinner means that everybody sitting down and cheers eating and some people are gonna give a toast. That’s an audience. Greg, we’re gonna write a song and perform it for your family and Jen’s family at your rehearsal dinner. So we wrote a song and the chorus was. ♪ We’ve seen Greg naked ♪ ♪ Soon you will too ♪ ♪ Hope you enjoy it more than we do ♪ Right? And Tim played the harmonica and sing it with us. And then although we were his roommates. And then on the way home from that rehearsal dinner with Christy and Jessie. And again, we’ve told this story, this part of it. They said. I remember they were sitting in the car waiting for us to get back to the car and they had been talking. Yeah. And we got in the car. And they said, “We just think “that y’all need to do something with this “with your comedy thing that you just did in there. “Because you know what? “It really worked. “Those people were really into it. “And there’s something there and y’all need to pursue this.” It was a pivotal moment. The implication was. I mean we were 80 people in the room laughing at us making fun of the groom. they had the vision to say, there’s something here. But the implication was to pursue it beyond just doing Christmas Conference because we were already doing that. And I think that’s why when we started writing songs, we took that song that we wrote for Greg, we changed the lyrics and made it about The Unibrow. The Unibrow and performed it at Christmas Conference a month later, or whatever. Right? And then we started in early 2001 we started writing more songs, that then we made a CD, we’re like, well, we got all the songs will make a CD, we’re just trying stuff, and we would sell it at Christmas Conference the next year. Yeah, and so, I mean, again, we ended up in seeing the Christmas Conference for a total of 10 years, but just some of the stuff that we were doing again, this is like, we were figuring out what Rhett and Link comedy was. And it was a combination of, getting up there in front of a group of people. I think this is one of the reasons that we do things like this podcast, and we do Good Mythical Morning we do things the way that we do is just like the two of us talking to a group of people is because the foundation of it was getting out there at conference and doing routines together, loosely scripted things. Yeah. Interacting with people going out into the crowd, making these videos, singing the songs, all the things that basically are all the pieces of our carrier. We’re we did it, I’ll give some example. Yeah. One of the first videos we made, and none of the videos were religious. All the videos were just purely comedic. I think, I don’t know that we call ourselves comedians but over time, we started to think of ourselves as comedians, you start to make a musical comedy CD, and you start to think of yourself in this way, on this totally different track in this Christian world. But we were very self-conscious to never be Christian comedians, because just like way back in the days of the Wax Paper Dogs we were very self-conscious being a Christian band. It’s like there was a stigma associated with, okay? A second rate comedian. No, we just want to make things that we think are as funny as possible. And we can plug them into this context, in these conferences where it’s like, you find it funny here, you can find it funny anywhere, hopefully. Yeah. So everything we created was, more often than not, there was no religious undertones or there was no message. It was just, this is just to be funny. And we were on stage, we were introducing speakers and stuff like that. You might contextualize something like a video where you’re a dog, like life as a dog, but it’s just you crawling around on all fours and then having POV shots of you as a dog. I don’t even know why it was funny probably was. ‘Cause Who Let The Dogs Out was popular at the time. Okay, yeah, it all makes sense at this point. Sometime that’s all you need as a song and an idea. People at conference, you had to share a bed with like a roommate. It’d be like four people, two people to a bed. So we made this sketch called the invisible bed fence. If you got to share a bed with somebody that you don’t want to be romantically involved with. You just string up this invisible bed fence, kind of like a what you would have for a dog in a yard. Yeah. And it would shock you so we created a fake commercial for this product. And it was on YouTube for a while but it had copyrighted music because that was back in the day where no one thought about that so now it’s been taken down. We also filmed some videos. While at conference, we went over to the mall across the street from the conference in Greensboro and we took nose hair trimmers, and we trimmed strangers nose hairs and then tried to sell them this amazing new device they’ve never seen. And if that sounds like it’s funny, that one is still on YouTube because it’s got royalty free music. I don’t think it’s funny. I think it’s embarrassing. I think we should pull it down. But just for posterity, it’s still up there. It’s so bold that we did it. We would also do things on stage like bits on stage where we would invite students on stage. Where we got two guys to, we had an idea called y’all gain 12 pounds, which I think is probably would be a little bit more controversial 20 years later, but at the time, it seemed funny to get two guys who were in relatively good shape to try to gain 12 pounds over the course of five days. And you know what? They did. In less than five days, and I think four days, one of the guys gained 12 pounds and then we changed the name of it to y’all gained 14 pounds. Right, right? And it was just a dude who was drinking whole milk. Whole milk every day. Hey, can you believe that? Somebody could gain 12 pounds? I mean, is that something that wrestlers do? Wrestlers lose that weight really easily, but that we’ve now what if we get them to gain the weight? We did another one called the gradual haircut. We got two guys out there. And every day, a conference we would cut more of his hair off giving him a different hairstyle that so he looked like an idiot the entire conference. Right? This is just good, clean, fun, man. Yeah. We were loving it. I mean, and again, we were just volunteers. I worked at a cubicle. You worked at a cubicle and then we’d get together. We’d get together once a week and we come up with this stuff and ever all year long we’d be looking towards Christmas Conference where we could unleash these ideas we had. And I’ll say one thing before we take a break and talk about the sort of the pivotal thing that happened. But I think it’s important to acknowledge like I said, I think that the old video is not funny, right? We needed a cocoon to develop in. I’m just gonna be honest with you. Right? We were kind of late bloomers in a lot of ways. And like, there are really talented like teenagers who are like, really funny. You think about somebody like Bo Burnham? Yeah, exactly. Like that dude was doing next level, genius level content in comedy as a 15 year old. We were not doing that as 25 year olds. In fact, we were still in, and I’m not saying we’re like comedic geniuses at this point. We’ve got a lot of lucky breaks, but we’re a lot better than we were. But we needed sort of a sheltered environment we could not have succeeded in a place where comedy was what was expected. Right? We succeeded in a place where comedy was a surprise. It was like going to church and having a funny pastor. Right? We were funny pastors, let’s just be honest. And that’s how we got away with it. Because people were there for the meat which was what are we gonna learn about Jesus, y’all that’s why we’re all here. And we were like, well, right before you learn about Jesus, these two Nimrods are gonna get up there to use a biblical reference Nimrod. It is. These two Nimrods are gonna get up there and just cut the flu and some people are gonna like it Cut the flu at your nose hairs. And you know what, some people are gonna be annoyed by it. A lot of people were I’m sure ’cause we thought we were so great. Yeah. And we weren’t. But we needed that environment to develop and that’s why we just owe a lot to, again, Mike Mahaffey, giving us the opportunity to do this believing in us, letting us develop. He thought it was funny. And then Mark worked with us at the Christmas Conference. Right and Mark working directly with us for many, many years. For the main meeting. And Todd as well was involved. So I think that yeah, we got so lucky, like we would not our idea of full-time entertainment growing up was the guy who came to our dance. And in DJ, the dance. Yeah And just like, wore boots and had this like, speaker that he kind of came out with. We are like a magician. We didn’t understand what full-time entertainment was. We didn’t have any appreciation for what comedy was, besides just what we had seen on TV. And we didn’t have a plan that this was gonna lead to something beyond that but it was irresistible for us to stay involved in what it was. And that’s why nine years after you graduated from college, we were emceeing this conference, Still. still. There’s a pivotal moment, again involving my brother, shortly after we graduated, and we had emceed conference a few times, that I think sort of represents the next big evolution, the next big step. He could see that we were trying really hard. Yeah. And we’re gonna talk about that in just a second. But first, actually, Link is to the same T-shirt. I’m wearing the same shirt, you can still buy, go to mythical.com, get all types of goodies. There’s other T- shirts there. And you know what, and now we’re selling Bibles. No we’re not. Oh, guys I’m still on the fence about how much I can joke ’cause we haven’t fully unpacked everything. Yeah. But there it is. There’s a Bible joke. Mythical.com, rapid boys, let’s get back in it to this. Okay. So again, I don’t know exactly what year it was, but it had to be between 2000 and 2002. Yes, let’s say 2001. Just say 2001. Your brother was the? My brother was on staff at UNC. Yep. ‘Cause they had their own weekly meeting. Every campus has several ministries, but most major colleges have a division of crew chapter. I don’t know what the technical term is. So, Cole says, “Hey, I got an idea “for you guys to do a comedy show on campus.” That’s an outreach. That’s the term that we use was outreach. And the whole idea behind outreaches it is an event where the intention is you bring people who are not Christians to the event so you can reach out to them and share the gospel with them. So that hopefully they will become Christians, their lives will be changed that’s the premise and we always being super self-aware. One of the things we were very self-aware about, and actually very critical about when it came to the church is the idea of what we call bait and switch evangelism. So this is the idea where you tell somebody like, hey, there’s gonna be this cool debate like we’re debating creation and evolution, or there’s a guy coming and he’s an FBI profiler. And he’s gonna give a speech all about the fact that he’s, ’cause this is literally something that happened. And he’s an FBI profiler, and he’s gonna talk about his career in profiling people. And you get somebody who’s not interested in spiritual things to be interested in that thing, the bait, you bring them to the event, they hear about the thing, but then pretty early on, sometimes at the very end, all of a sudden, there’s a switch. It’s like, hold on, they’re talking about Jesus now, and they’re telling me that the most important thing in life is a relationship with Jesus. And that’s why all these people are here. And this FBI profiler is saying, “Listen, I’m an FBI profiler. “I’m really good at it I just demonstrated that, “but the real important thing in my life is Christ.” And maybe he did a better job of transitioning than you just did but there was– That’s a paraphrase. But it would switch up, and there will be an opportunity for you unsuspecting guests to make some sort of a decision. Some sort of indication, a lot of times it was just like, indicate on a sheet of paper and we’ll send you some information or whatever. We didn’t like that even when we were a part of it we didn’t like it. I was always like, this just doesn’t seem sincere. It’s like if you want people to understand that Jesus has made a life a difference in your life tell them that. Don’t tell them, hey, let’s talk about this other thing and I’m gonna suddenly. I just never liked it, you never liked it. Right? So when Cole said “Let’s do an outreach.” We knew that we weren’t gonna do that kind of outreach. But we knew we were gonna do something. Yeah. Because all this is an audience at Carolina and we believe in the cause. And saying no to an audience, it just felt so stupid to us. Never say no, to an audience. We got to find a way to do this. What we ended up doing I don’t— Did anybody video that I hope not? Oh gosh, well, the premise was it was just a comedy show, but we would bring up topics. It was a salty, the term that we would use in Christian circles is it was salty. So Christians see themselves as the salt of the earth. And so you’re the salt and you’re the light. And so sometimes you just wanna be salt you don’t wanna come all the way out and explicitly say something. You just wanna keep it kind of salty, and you’re sort of suggesting the message of Jesus. Our idea was we wanted– We wanted to dismantle some of the preconceived notions about Christianity, maybe hit some of those things head on, give the audience member… Give the the students who were involved in crew who brought a friend, something that then they could talk about afterwards. So like, there are multiple topics that we hit that, like, hey, if you’re gonna go and grab a taco afterward, when they were talking about this like that Christians were just. Well, we had an. How we would characterize. Well, look we had until the tuxedo story. Yeah. So. But that was the. That was the prominence. That was our version of like, the least version of bait and switch, we could do something that’s just. It was a conversation for conversation start. Part of our conversation. It was a conversation sorry. And then take it where you wanna take it afterward. So we had been really influenced by some people who talked about relational evangelism. It’s what the term that was being used at the time. Yeah. And so it was like you have a relationship with somebody and sometimes you need sort of prompts in that relationship in the context of that friendship to talk about things and maybe that will then get to a place where you can talk about Jesus and it still sounds very manipulative and sounds many and it can be and is often, but I we thought our version was less manipulative than the bait and switch evangelism. Now for the show, go ahead. When you’re convinced that your friends are going to hell, you got to come up with something. Right, yeah. Oh, yeah, exactly. Yeah, I mean, I remember Pendula said this at one point, years ago, when I still believe the way that I used to believe. And he just said that, like any Christian who actually believes that people are going to hell, if they don’t know Jesus hasn’t completely devoted almost every aspect of their life to telling people about Jesus. Something’s missing. And that seemed very logical and motivating to me. But from a personal standpoint. But we’re still embarrassed. They kind of nodded us up. We were still embarrassed about it. Because they’re so self-aware and it was just like, something. It still didn’t sit, right? But again, we had to find a way forward. And we did that and we felt like we needed to wear tuxedos. I don’t know why. But we had tuxedos. We ordered tuxedos and of course, I had to have mine tailored to fit me, but we picked it up on the night of the show like we picked it up and I tried it on literally like 30 minutes before. In backstage I’m putting my tuxedo on. Your wig on. Now let me just explain at the time I was about the same size 34 waist, 34 to 36 the length of pants. The waist was great. I believe these were 34 ways tuxedo pants, but they were approximately 28 length. No, maybe 26. You’re talking like you’re half off the chime. They gave me half-caff. Half-caff pants man. That really takes the confidence out of the comedian in his first ever comedy show. I mean this is over an hour. This is like an hour and 10 minutes of us singing songs, having monologue slash dialogues with each other, playing some games with the audience. I don’t think it mattered that, I think it probably only help that you’re not stupid. I mean we were still kind of on the tail end of the era of Steve Martin and Martin Short and I think that Okay. They often wore those those half-caff tuxedos anyway. So again, like Link said “The whole point of this thing “was to dismantle people’s perceptions about Christians.” We started the whole night with an acronym Christians are blank blank. And we went through each letter I remember R was like Republican, like we’re making fun of people’s perception that like, people think that all conservative, Republican, we knew that that was like a big turnoff. And a lot of people were like, why are your politics so tied to your faith? And so we were like trying to dismantle that. I think in the end, it was not a resounding success in much of any way. Except the fact that we did something that wasn’t a conference, we created something, we created the show. We created a show. Even if it sucked, we did it and people were simple. The audience was sympathetic. They laughed. They laughed. And it wasn’t a failure. It wasn’t a failure and then– It didn’t crush us And another pivotal moment in our careers. We were wrapping up, cleaning up walking out, and I remember sitting on the front steps of this auditorium at UNC I can’t remember the name of that Hill Hall. I think it may have been. Yeah. Sitting on the steps there. Shane Daiki, who was also on staff with Campus Crusade sits us down. He’s kind of a big way, he traveled the globe. He was a higher up leader. Yeah. And he’d also emceed some stuff that we had seen. He was very funny guy, like. Super funny, super nice, super. Like great MC, sort of, like, in the comedic style that we were going for. Yeah. And he said, “You know, guys, I think that what you did tonight, “could be a ministry. “I think you guys could be on staff with Campus Crusade “doing what you did tonight.” And we thought about that. And when you just have… When you’re going back to your cubicle, and you’re just thinking about okay, a few months, we got this now, when we done maybe we could do that again. And then we’ve got Christmas Conference that we do every year and I would love to do more. Yeah. I would love to do more. Well, again, so we get labeled, because we blazed a trail on YouTube. Sometimes we get called innovative or, again, listen. This is how this stuff just happened to us. Like, we haven’t blazed many trails. What we’ve done is just, we’ve been receptive and open at different points. And opportunistic. Opportunistic and listen when Shane Daiki said, “You guys, you could do this full-time.” It wasn’t like it was strategic for us, we were thinking about that. We were like, really? That sounds awesome. How do we do that and he said, “Well, what you need to do is you need to put together “a proposal for the regional team.” So this is the team of people at the in the mid South region who make decisions about who is gonna be on staff. And that ’cause basically the way Campus Crusade for Christ staff, works, and other ministries, college ministries like it is you get on staff by like going through like an application or approval process by the people who make these decisions. And then you just get assigned to a campus usually. Right? But there are other different roles that you can play within the organization but everybody gets paid the same way. And that is through something called raising support, meaning it isn’t like crusade has this big bank somewhere and they just pay people salaries. When you get hired, you then have to go out and ask individuals people for monthly donations to build up your salary. 100% of it. 100%. Is not backfill by like, a large fund. Right? So this opportunity it was daunting because that’s what it meant. You can’t do it halfway, you have to quit your job as engineers and you have to raise financial support. Once you’ve reached your goal of raising support, then you can move to your assignment. And my brother had already gone out and asked all the people that I was gonna ask. Yeah. Think about that. Yeah. And for me, we had well paying jobs as engineers. Yo, yo. And I had my first child on the way. My wife Christy, she taught school for one year then she got pregnant. She was on staff along with me as a full-time mom. So, it’s not like, she had a job, you came on staff as a family and raised all your financial support, and you couldn’t have any other jobs because you needed to be fully devoted to it or whatever. Right? So, this is a huge decision. And we were very motivated to find a way to make it work. I also knew that like it was gonna be a shock to my extended family. If I were to announce, hey, they were so proud of me being a working engineer. Right? And proud of the volunteer work that I was doing on the side. But it took a while for them to come around to the decision that Christy and I made and you and Jessie made and the four of us made. It was like the four of us are making a decision because Rhett and Link really want to do this thing because you guys gave us a speech in a car after Greg’s rehearsal dinner. It’s like, it was dicey man, because it was freaking scary to just say, oh, yeah, I’m just gonna quit my job and then I’m gonna start from scratch. And I’m just gonna get people to give me money every month through the organization, tax deductible. Now the thing is, true, my brother was already on staff and he was already getting supported by people. But that kind of cut both two ways. Not only did it mean that a lot of people that I was going to ask it already been asked by him, but I also understood that it could be done. I’d seen somebody do it who my parents have seen somebody do it. I don’t know exactly what they thought about it at the time. I think they were probably kind of excited that we were saying, hey, we want to go into full-time ministry but they were probably like, oh, we’re gonna have another son who’s going around asking people for money. Yeah, me and Christy side of the equation. It was foreign to almost everybody that we talked to, especially both of our families and talking about the decision and we had a baby on the way, I think I already said that. But as couples, we believed in the choice. And as a group, we supported each other in making the leap. I resigned from my job at IBM. You resigned, I think, as they were trying to lay you off. Yeah. So I want to tell that story, because that’s a new piece of the story. But let me back up just one second ’cause I want to talk about what our proposal was because we had to go ahead before we could do all this quit. We didn’t want to be assigned to a campus. Well, so specifically, we developed a proposal which, ironically, and coincidentally, one of our good friends Matt Harmon had, we had sent it to him 20 years ago for like his opinion. And he had it and he was like, I just found this and he sent it back to us last week. Yeah, I read it this morning. And we read the proposal, so again, we were super into this idea of moving away from this bait and switch evangelism idea that we had seen done on so many campuses. And we wanted to equip students. First of all, we didn’t want to go around doing outreaches. And so if you’re not gonna do outreaches, what’s the alternative? Well, you can train. The idea was that we were gonna create events that the Campus Crusade students would come to all these campuses in the mid South. And the whole point was, we’re gonna do this comedy show. But really what we’re doing is we’re trying to equip you and thinking about the way that you talk to people about Jesus, we want you to get to a place where you have friends, and you’re willing to talk to them about Jesus, and you learn ways to do that. And you’re not just thinking constantly about inviting them to events and stuff, but you make it a part of your lifestyle. That was the idea. We made the pitch and they said “Yes, do it.” And we said, we also want to continue to host the events that we’ve been hosting, and more if there’s opportunities, they said, “Sure,” so they were very supportive. They believed in the vision, and they also said, “Well you got original support. “So get to it.” It’s pretty easy to say, okay, when. The proof is really can you raise the money, Right. yourself. But they were supportive, and they gave us the go ahead. And then that once they give us the go ahead, that was the biggest single decision from a career, personal family standpoint that I made in this whole thing. I mean, there was another, there’s a second place that we’ll talk about when we left staff but joining staff quitting engineering, that was a huge moment, for the next year. Well, I gotta tell, Okay. my quitting story. Tell your quitting story. So again, the story that you’ve heard is that we quit our jobs and became YouTubers, you’re now learning that that’s not exactly what happened. What happened with me was, I guess it was 2002. So I basically it was my second year of working in engineering, like I’d worked a total of two years and it was the end of that year. Now, towards the second half of that year, probably like September, October of 2002, we had made the decision that we were gonna do this and we had gotten approval to be on staff. And so I was like, okay, I’m going to work at Black and Veatch, the engineering firm that I was working at, through the end of the year, and then I’ll tell them like, 30 days or whatever before the end of the year that hey, I’m quitting and I’m gonna go do a different job. Well, literally, like two weeks before I told them that I was gonna quit. This was back when the Enron thing was happening and all these ’cause we designed power plants and so a lot the firms were just having like rounds and rounds of layoffs. So like for weeks, people were getting laid off and laid off and laid off. And then one week, all the engineers that got hired on the same day as me, all the junior engineers, they started getting called into the office and they would come back and be escorted out. And so I was like, oh, no, I’m next and heard something like Rhett McLaughlin please come down to this so and so room. And everybody at that point knew that we were getting laid off. I go down there I had a conversation with my boss, he felt real bad. I said, hey, listen, man. Don’t worry, I was actually gonna quit. And it sounded like it was when a girl dumps you and you said I was gonna dump you anyway. But then I remember going back upstairs to get my belongings to being escorted out not by a cop, but by like another employee. And then everybody’s like, all the other engineers are like trying to be sad, and we know in pathetic and this one girl, I can’t remember her name, but she was like, I’m so sorry. And I said, you know what, don’t worry about me. I’m gonna go be a missionary. I’m sure that made her feel oh, that’s great. And then as soon as I said that, I was like, why did I phrase it like that, but I’m gonna just keep walking out. I knew he was moment. Biggest decision we ever made, scariest decision we ever made for the next year, your full-time job was meeting with individuals usually at their home and given them a presentation, which ended with what you make a pledge for annual or monthly support. So I can do this thing that I’ve told you about for an hour. Yeah. I did the same thing for a year. At the end of that year, you went to the office and started working because you had reached financial support. But you forgot, we also worked at the same time because you gotta have money doing something. I did not get done by the end of that year. It took me an additional year. And over the course of that time, we were both trying to work part time jobs in order to make ends meet while we’re meeting with people. And so for me, that was two years of meeting with people there was a whole section of months where we lived with Christy’s family in the room she grew up in. It’s like, it was extremely difficult. Well, I lived for a year above my in-law’s garage. And you did some odd jobs for him. That’s where I impregnated my wife with my first child. Okay, great. Above a garage. Yeah, Lily was born. Yeah, so and I my father in law had like a bunch of, he’s a dentist, but he had a bunch of properties and stuff. And so I was kind of like his gopher and just did a painted stuff and organize stuff and drove a truck around. And it was just like odd jobs, blue collar odd jobs for a full year. It was weird. There was a period where I had to ask my dad, it was very humbling. I asked my dad if he could hire me. And my dad paid me to just work for him laying tile. And like, he was like, I can pay you an apprentice rate because you don’t know what you’re doing. How about pay me the son rate? It’s like he did everything he could and it made all the difference in the world but it was tough. And then Lily was born. And we were still raising support. And we would take this newborn and try to time our appointments where she would sleep through the whole thing or Christy would have to leave. And I remember one, it would always be the same spiel. But I remember in one spiel, I looked up as I’m trying to be engaging and trying to like, get people motivated to give money. And this guy who was a friend of a friend of a friend of Christy’s dad, and I knew he had a lot of money. I looked up from like, my presentation notes or whatever. And the dude was asleep. He had fallen asleep. And it was just the three of us in a room talking about the ministry work we wanted to do. I woke him up with some grants. And he did make a pledge. So mission accomplished. Yeah. So two years of that. Then we finally start working, We can talk about on everything we were doing. the process of raising support forever. Yeah. I’ve got crazy stories, but essentially. We got too much of the stuff other to cover. It was awkward as you can imagine going around to people’s homes and asking them for money. But yeah, so eventually we get to the point where we raise support. We came on stuff while Jessie was pregnant. We started working in the regional office, which was a little office and like with cubicles, in Apex in North Carolina, and Jessie was pregnant at the time, and she worked for like two months before like January and February then Locke was born on January, February 24 of 2004. So Jessie was actually in the office for a little bit but then I was just left there by myself waiting for you, Waiting for me to get there. to finish. And I spent most of my time like, we knew what we were gonna do. Like we knew we were gonna do some kind of show. So I just kind of was thinking about Christmas Conference, of course, because always thinking about Christmas Conference, but kind of putting together the groundwork for the show that we would take around campuses. Yeah, and I eventually got there. And so we were sitting in a little cubicle environment and there wasn’t one back room where the door was shut, and you could edit videos. And that kind of became our default office. And we would make our plans for the tour, we would do around the mid South region with our training seminar and for conference, and then at some point in doing the tour… Doing the tour and then coming back and wanting to promote it. We were like, we need to have a website. So we created a website and we started putting our comedy videos up on our website rhettandlink.com. So 2003, we created rhettandlink.com. In order to promote our visits to campus like, hey, these guys are coming. You should come out, check out these videos and they were videos that we had debuted at Christmas Conference and stuff like that. But now all of a sudden, we had a portfolio on our website. And we were still making. We made Pimp My Stroller after Locke was born. And we debuted Pimp My Stroller at Christmas Conference, the end of that year, we showed the video and when the video is over, we rolled the stroller out on stage with Lily and Locke in the stroller and the crowd went crazy. And that same year, like another day, we pulled up Facebook profiles of students in the audience and made fun of their Facebook profiles. And then at the end of that comedy bit, we sing a new song that we had written called the Facebook song. Right? And that was the end of it. And then we did our tour. We put our videos on our website and then, Apple released this thing called iTunes. And they had this section called video podcast. I’m like, we already have videos. It’s like, hold on, this is different. These videos are made for this platform. And they’re like, their cereal. One of the biggest things was the a ninja who would answer questions, Ask a Ninja. Ask a Ninja. And so we said, well, what’s our version of that we can do, because we wanted to do stuff like that was, our rationale was, on one hand, we can create content for the internet first, and then the people who will see it will be the people who will want us to come to their campus. So it’s all a promotional tool for our live tour. And it was also the idea was, we did like the idea of people inviting other people, both Christians and non-Christians to our event, because it was friendly to whoever you were. It was about training, right? In conversations. But we weren’t trying to hide anything. But so it was like, if we can make these videos and like college students actually watch them and care about them, then maybe they’ll be excited about coming to the events. So we were making videos for the events. We were writing songs. I want to talk a little bit about what the event was, because it’s kind of a really interesting time in our lives, like. Yeah. It would basically be me and you, now there was a one time when we took Jessie and Christy and the kids in a big van, and it was not great. Yeah. We just even not tell it or talk about that. It was mostly me and you driving. We had a projector and a laptop. And your guitar And a guitar. And we would show up at whatever like facility we had been designated to do our show in, which is usually a classroom like a big college classroom, like we could hold like 100 or 200 students. And like you would meet somebody with Crew who was like, I’m the tech guy, we had a projector and then we had this like stand. We would set all this stuff up like the projector and it was all in PowerPoint, or keynote, maybe at the time. Keynote. And we had a little remote. And like, we just did the whole presentation we didn’t take anybody with us to do this. No. And it was like, and then we would like do it. And then we would like go eat somewhere, go watch a movie, like it was just me and you traveling the country together with this show. It was awesome. It was an interesting time. I mean, yeah, it was, the training part we believed in it but personally, we weren’t that great at it. It’s not like when I worked as an engineer, I was like, engaging all these people talking about my faith. It was like. We were great about talking about doing it. We were training other people but it was… So there was this dichotomy of like, on one hand, we believe in what we’re doing and what we’re saying. But we’re also very motivated to continue to create and engage an audience. And that really fueled everything we did to make and weren’t gonna do a half as, and we were gonna honor the people who were investing every single month in the vision that we laid out to them. Right? But we were also developing and maybe more so than we realized as entertainers. And I think, especially when we started doing the videos, we started doing more videos. Now, the timeline is a little bit, interesting, because, a lot of the videos that you can go, we didn’t join YouTube in 2006 and we’ll talk about how that happened. But a lot of the videos when we first joined, we just took this backlog of videos all the way from 2003 or earlier. Right? We just uploaded them to YouTube and some of those videos are still up there. So one of our earliest videos is we talked about Valco, and we’ve made fun of ourselves before because we’re sitting like we did this like podcast where. And here’s why, this is what I was getting at earlier. We didn’t care about YouTube, but Apple seemed legitimate. And when they were doing video podcast we were like. I sure like it lots of funny noises. Let me see if I can work them out. Okay. Apple seemed legitimate and when they they started platforming these video podcast and Ask a Ninja was the biggest one. We said, let’s develop something for that platform Right? We just can’t put the videos that we made over the past few years on and Apple’s not gonna do anything with that. We got to have a video podcast. That’s why it was called the Rhett and Link cast. And so we developed that and the rationale was that will be promotion for when we visit campuses for whatever we’re doing increase our awareness within the movement of Campus Crusade. But it was also exciting to develop a show that was for the internet first. And that’s the first time that we actually did that. And the first thing we did, we started doing debates like if a ninja can answer questions, then we can play characters who debate topics. And we did that maybe once. Twice maybe. Maybe twice. I think we did it twice. Well, but the thing I don’t wanna get into, some of these details are not gonna be interesting to people. But the one thing I want to just acknowledge is that, the first year that we worked, doing this, we worked at the regional office and we had a little room that we would go in, and this is where we would shoot our videos. And we shot the Rhett and Link cast. Right. And the Valco one was the first one that we did when we decided on the format of the two of us sitting behind a table with — With microphone. One microphone in front of us talking. Right? So that was the beginning of that format, which as you know, led to eventually Good Mythical Morning many years later. But the interesting thing is, we’ve made fun of ourselves and the way we talked in that video and how we were talking. Well, especially Link was talking really sad and really like . The reason that, so we were both talking so quietly, is because we were in an office with people working right outside this room. We’ve never talked about that. But it’s like, there’s people like doing their Campus Crusade regional office job in the cubicles and then we’re in there. Talking about Valco. We’re sketching Valcro pictures, and talking about them. And part of it was, what are you guys doing? I mean, we’re out here doing like legitimate work. You’re in here talking about Valco for an internet video on this thing that nobody understands. So it’s like now it probably be better if you didn’t hear us. So in 2000, I’m gonna guess that it was 2005. We knew that we needed our own space. And it was just because the ideas that we had and the way that we wanted to do them even just for what we were doing in the ministry was too big for this place that we were at. Too disruptive disrupt for the a cubicle environment. And I talked to my father-in-law. And then the office that I broke into, during one of the Elta episodes last year where it talks about how we went in there and we saw all the stuff that place that basement in Lillington, North Carolina, where we first did so many of our videos. That was the place he was like, sure, I’ve got a basement. I’ve got a basement and Lillington that I’m just storing stuff in there if you guys want to work out of there and no problem. And so that was the beginning, we went in there that was when we painted the wall green and blue we did the checkered, The black and white check floor. The black and white check floor. That are all these iconic things. And now I’ve made their way to the set of GMM. Like that was all because of that Lillington basement when we knew we needed a space and. So that we could create a video podcast to promote our tour as missionaries. Yeah. And shout out David Woodall. Yeah. Who was working with us at the time he was at the regional office and he started working closely with us kind of just like running camera and he helped us lay that tile in there and the carpet and paint and all this stuff, like basically getting our office into the state that it was for the number of years that we worked in. I loved it, I mean, we had our own little basement hideout, no one was looking over our shoulder. And questioning how does this directly relate to the ministry? It’s like, we were just going on instinct. And we were working really hard. But it really wasn’t clear if it was 100% aligned or if it was worth it, or if it was just stupid. Well, for instance, it was in that basement that we conceptualized the idea to make Looking For Miss Locklear, the documentary where we tried to find our first grade teacher. And again, we got approval for all this stuff. The vision was we were gonna take that documentary and then we were gonna use it we had already done two tours and so then instead of doing a third tour, we’re gonna shoot the documentary in 2000. That was to the summer 2006. And then we were gonna take that documentary and use it and screen it and use it for training purposes. Again, you watch a documentary, you won’t see any of that is there’s no overly– We were using it as an apt way to say you could take anything that has any sort of meaning to it and use it to get into a conversation about Jesus. That was the idea, but we never got to do that because some things changed. And I will say, this story may serve as like a classic example of why you can’t give people a lot of leeway. It’s like there’s probably like. I give credit to Don Knox. I remember him saying, “I don’t know,” he was our he was our supervisor. Yeah, gave us a lot of freedom. He was like, “I don’t know exactly what you guys are doing “but I believe in you guys and I trust you guys.” Yeah, and I think he did have good reason to trust us. I do think and we had great intentions, but some things ended up happening. I think that being independent, being down there making that documentary, taking it to film festivals, having people respond to it, it won some awards. It got screened on PBS as part of the whatever that. SCTV doc Carolina I guess. Documentary light lens thing. We began to get this idea that. We began to gain confidence. I think it was at that point in sort of those like, 05, 06 again, June of 06, is when we shot Looking For Miss Locklear. But it’s also when we started our YouTube channel. And the only reason we started our YouTube channel to tell a story we’ve told a million times is because somebody took that Pimp My Stroller video that we made for Christmas Conference and put on our website they put it on YouTube. Got more views a day than it had any year on our site. And so then we put everything on YouTube, but again. Well, there’s an audience there. But it really was hey. And all we got to do is press upload. It was not strategic it was like he was put things we didn’t know we were making a plan to get off staff at that point that’s what I’m saying. But these videos started develop a life of their own. I mean even the ones within that we were making specifically just for the podcast like we would sing a song about Valco or a fear of frogs and we will be talking and then we got an email one day from Phil Vischer. Creator of VeggieTales. Bob the tomato, Larry the cucumber. Way specifically the voice of it many of the characters but Bob the tomato, yeah. He created the whole world. He created the film. Well, I’m not gonna tell his story, but once. He told it in a book. After he was pretty much done working with VeggieTales he was starting a new thing called JellyTelly. And it was a website for a new type of kids program. I mean, it was Christian education for kids like a Christian Sesame Street with puppets and some live action. And he said, he thought we could work together. And we developed some characters. He said he wanted us to sing songs about the books of the Bible. He said that between him as one of his characters, and then us, they wanted to essentially sing a song about every book of the Bible. And they were gonna start from the beginning and he wanted to give us Genesis and then they I think, take every other book, and then was gonna go into this What’s In The Bible series. DVD series that will be sold in Christian bookstores and also a website called JellyTelly. And this is why you may and many of you have found them because they are on YouTube. You may find these guys the Fabulous Bentley Brothers, which is obviously me and Link and Wigs sitting on a stage looking like we’re out of the 50s singing this funny songs about the Bible. It was a part of that. And doing that, again, we got approval to do that because it’s like, oh, yeah, why should we let Rhett and Link do this? This is a great opportunity, is still a ministry. But we wrote two songs, we produced them under his supervision. We flew up to somewhere around Wheaton, Illinois, and then we recorded in his studio, met him it was kind of a thrill. He was super nice. He had some mentorship influence on us. We came back, we started to think, what if we worked with Phil on this thing? And we wrote up a proposal. Hey, the proposal work before we wrote up a long proposal, a business plan for how we could be full-time employees and maybe partners I don’t know working with Phil Vischer on his new endeavor. Well, and give some context of that. Like what led– We were just trying to make. Well, again, what started as, again, I think that we always were most passionate just to be completely honest, we were most passionate about the performance and the product and the audience and the growing it. We really believed in the mission at campus crusade. And I think yeah. But it was really easy. Those video podcast. It was really easy to take anything that we were doing and tie it back to the mission. But what we were really experiencing was like, we were growing as artists, and we were experiencing the satisfaction that is creating and creating for an audience. And when it seemed like that could become something that we could just get paid to do. It started to make sense to be like, why don’t we just do this as our job. If we can do exactly what we wanna do that’s. And that’s the whole thing about, we could have never, I don’t think that we could have ever succeeded in the traditional comedy space. I just don’t. No, no way. We needed to do it. We never even thought about it. We were too smart to know that we could try to go up on an open mic night at Charlie Good Nights in Raleigh, world renowned comedy club and try to get up there. And in when that crowd over, we just didn’t believe that we had it. Well, we didn’t we we never talked about that. Right? But we were trying to make something work. Phil Vischer, the response to our proposal was, I have no opportunity to like the one you’re describing it can’t work. But we can still work on like a piecemeal type thing and you guys can still be on staff but around the same time, we started getting emails from, people wanting to use the videos that we were putting online. In different shows like maybe a show and there’s that show in England on Channel, whatever it was that people used to. Yeah. Talk about. Our video started working in breaking out. We gave permission for our fear frog song to be used in a new clip show that was gonna be on The CW. That is the show that event that was became online nation that after a series of other events, we actually audition and got the job to host that TV show. And what missing anything before we get to that? I don’t think so, I mean, I’m sure we’re missing some stuff but I mean, the basic idea is that. I was gonna say the unicorn rap is one of those things that we made it Christmas Conference. If you’ll see that it makes a lot more sense if you know that this is just a video to introduce two MCs to come on stage. If you wanna see MCs then come see these MCs but it was like. Right, right? Well, maybe MC is just what you call a rapper. So then we call it the unicorn rap, and it got a lot of views on YouTube. Right? But it was like the fear frog song got the attention of the online nation producers at the same time, I just get a kick out of it. So I’m gonna go through really quickly. Okay. Because we had to make a video every week for our podcast, which the fear of frog song came from there was also an explosion at a chemical plant near my house, and that people were protesting it. We had to make a video that week. So we made a video called Apex chemical explosion, where we made fools of ourselves at a protest. It was funny. Oprah was somehow involved indirectly. We took that video, we entered it in a radio contest in Raleigh were the winner, which was us got to first class plane tickets to see the Grammys. And they wanted us to make a videos of the– Was it first class? I think it was just class. Yeah. It was coach man but you– I thought the seats lay back. I hadn’t been a lot. I don’t remember. We won the contest with our Apex chemical explosion they sent us to the Grammys and said make a video we’ll put it on our radio station website because that’ll get a lot of views. They didn’t give us credentials to get on the red carpet but that’s what we wanted to do. We made sneaking on the Grammy red carpet video which you can still watch on YouTube. When they flew us to LA to make that video the next morning, we we dropped off the paperwork with the online nation producers and met them in person and told them what we did at the Grammys. When we got back to North Carolina, we sent them that video. I think that, I was told by them that that’s the video that made them think that we could be hosts of the show. So they contacted us … Then we got the audition and then we got the job. Well they said can you just audition in a video like here’s some clips that would be on the show and can you just say some things introduced the clips. We sent that tape in and the next thing they said, “We’ve selected you to host the pilot.” We got permission from Campus Crusade to fly out in and film The Pilot. And if it got picked up, we would make a decision at that point. And then they decided to pick the show up. And I remember finding out that the show is a network show 2007 we’re still on staff. I came maybe as 2006 we’re still on staff, with Campus Crusade and we we had kind of the pump had been primed for us to be looking for opportunities to do entertainment full-time. That was we were on that page, we’d already made the proposal to Phil Vischer. And then we had both already decided if this show gets picked up. This doesn’t mean we’re moving to California but what it does mean is that hey, we made it. We’re in the entertainment biz man. Yeah. And that we got the word that the show have been picked up. In fact, they told us we didn’t have to move they would fly us out like every other week. To shoot eight episodes. One week out of the month to shoot a big group at a time. And you know the story there we shot eight episodes but only four got aired. But the decision to to leave staff in order to do that was that’s the kind of the answer to the question that people always ask is, how did you decide to quit your jobs in order to become entertainers? Well. We got another one. That’s when we quit our job. We quit being on staff not we didn’t quit being engineers in order to become hosts. This was literally three years, almost four years after we had quit. We had stopped being, well, I got fired and quit on the same day let’s say that but four years after being engineers, that’s when we finally had a job in the entertainment industry and it wasn’t to be YouTubers it was to be TV hosts. And also be YouTubers because that in our minds that legitimize us and that we would still be making YouTube videos that was the plan, ’cause we took the video remember like ghost ride the farm was we would make videos for all the nation and then we post them on YouTube channel. Of course we put them on the YouTube channel because it was a show about YouTube. But what I’m saying is I remember thinking and again, I feel like the producers of that show were also a part of this. I mean, I remember one of them, saying, “Yes, pretty soon you’re gonna be pushing that stroller down “the street in Malibu,” like selling the Hollywood dream. Dave Hurwitz. Yeah, who was also before that he was the producer of Fear Factor. Yeah. I’m sure Joe Rogan knew him well. And so I was like yeah, I’m gonna be in Malibu little did I know that like nobody lives in Malibu and except like I know like Sandra Bullock or something is like but I was bought into the idea that this is it, man. We made it we’ve transitioned, we’re gonna be entertainers and this is way bigger than YouTube. Yeah. Because at that time again, it was 2006. We weren’t making any money YouTube. You couldn’t make money on YouTube. We were making 10s of dollars on a website called a Rever. That was the only place that was doing any sort of rev share, hence the name Rever. But it was a much easier decision because we were looking for ways to do squarely what we were passionate about, and not have to work it around, being in a Christian ministry. It’s not that we didn’t believe in the Christian ministry anymore at this point. It was just that it. We were so passionate about what we wanted to do. It wasn’t an alignment, we started to see the hints and indications of it being disingenuous from a precritical stand point. I’ll get into this next week when I kind of tell my story but I will say in that year 2006, 2007. My perspective on my faith had big had begun to change I still was aligned with the mission. I was still an evangelical Christian that was not in question but my perspective on it had changed, and sort of the stage have been set for what would kind of unfold over the next 15 years. Okay. But I’ll get into that. But for now, I would just like to say that it was an easier decision for us to make, even though it was that it was the second biggest decision that we made to leave staff and to inform all of our supporters that, hey, we’re doing we’re doing this now you no longer need to support us. And, of course, with the support of our wives, we made that decision. To conclude this conversation, just to kind of look back, I just have a couple of observations. Well, just to finish the story really quick Okay. before you go back to connect it to what we’ve said before the show got canceled. After four episodes, we did get paid to do those four episodes, and we made more money probably in those four episodes than we had made in a year working for Campus Crusade. I don’t remember the exact numbers, but it was pretty close to the same. So we had a buffer ’cause we were living off a very little amount of money. As soon as they told us, the show was canceled, we had nothing, we had no job, and we had no prospects. But we made a video about it, which you can still watch. We made a video about it getting canceled. This was before YouTube Partner Program, you couldn’t make any money off YouTube videos. This is where the story picks up. And we’ve told before, that’s when we started doing the thing where we make cold calls to businesses to get them to sponsor our videos. And that was the beginning of our quote unquote YouTube career. But let me say it’s a very lean times. Yeah. For a couple of years. On and off for several years, but those first couple of years very lean, in terms of not making a lot of money off these videos and then splitting it between our two families. But like I said, we were very, very accustomed to living off a very little money. And so it wasn’t that big of a sacrifice but there was a couple of times there, where I was convinced that we were gonna have to stop and go back and ask some of those same people for money. Yeah. And thankfully, eventually, some things fell into place and we move past that stage. I think when I look back on it, there’s two ways that I like to think about it and one is like, how did this entire journey these like, lost year’s impact, like our style, our brand of comedy, and then the other thing is just from a logistic and historic standpoint. Is just even having the opportunity where everything was so pivotal. I’m always so fascinated in how, everybody, the vast majority of people who are so I’ll start with that. The vast majority of people who were making it on making careers out of YouTube, we’re just kids who were just doing YouTube for fun. And then as they got popular, they started to realize that there was money there. They figured out a way to like make it a career and people came on to help them from a business standpoint. But for us, we were grown as adults with children. When YouTube started our first video, like Pimp My Stroller had both of our kids in it and it was about a stroller for God’s sake. I mean, if it wasn’t for everything that we’ve stepped you through over the last episode in this one we would just be some old guys who had no clue we’re just engineers it’s like, we had to bide our time for YouTube to exist so that then our videos that we just had to go on it. The Fine Brothers are a good example someone who’s I like their IRA age, kinda, I think, when we interviewed them in this podcast, it’s reminiscent of their story that they were doing a bunch of videos that were just living in weird places, that then they just plopped on YouTube. They were somehow biding their time and creating for something that they knew not yet what it was. And Campus Crusade and the and being on staff and everything we did there and everything that we stepped through, gave us the time, so that we could be a part of this movement, even though we were like a generation too old for it and then because we were a generation too old for it in the same way that when we talked to Harley of Epic Meal Time he was a teacher. He had a level of maturity and drive, and a different, older perspective, I guess. So most of those people with that, To make it happen make a business out of it. Make a business out of it. ‘Cause we went and we like, incorporated well as an LLC, I think for the first in 2007 it was about that year 2007 we started what do we call it Rhett? Rhett and Link Creations. Rhett and Link creations, LLC. It almost feels like we knew there was something we didn’t know what it was. It was very reminiscent of when we are blood oath we promised to do something that we couldn’t articulate what it was. We had to find a way to any audience. We were gonna try to engage with and we were gonna try to to meet them, not knowing what will come up. And I would say that, there was at least a slight sense of desperation. Oh yeah. In a lot of the things that we were doing, which I think really led to a lot of the things that we did, especially it becoming a business, it had to work, and therefore we we made it work. But to answer your question about the tone of our comedy, which is something that people have speculated about for years, it’s one of the reasons that if you look at a lot of our early videos, it’s like, are they Mormon or Christian or what are they? You now kind of understand why so much of our comedy, especially in the early days was so it was clean as a whistle. Yeah. Except for like those videos that we made in college where we were naked, we would push the envelope within that circle of, the Christian circle, but the reality is, is that all these videos were made to be shown and experienced within the context of Christian events, those first few years of videos and therefore there’s a whole lot of lines that we couldn’t cross. There’s a whole lot of places that comedy goes that we couldn’t go. Now I do want to– But it’s also who we were, by and large, I mean, we did curse. I mean, it’s not like we didn’t curse, but we were never gonna put that in a video. Well, I was gonna say not exactly that, Okay. because I was gonna say that like, our personal comedy, the way that we would interact with each other the jokes that we would tell to each other when the camera wasn’t rolling. Always been pretty off color. There’s been cursing, it wasn’t like said, now you hear and see some of that stuff in our comedy now. I see it less as we’ve changed. We have changed everybody changes. But. Yeah. I think a lot of it is just we kind of let our guard down because it’s like the environment that we’re creating in is not that what it was, but because we initially attracted an audience that was like, oh, this is clean comedy, and clean comedy aficionados gathered around. And then that was where we got pushed back every time we pushed another limit, and we crossed another line. Slowly, usually on Facebook, everybody would complain and some people would be like, that’s the last video I’m ever watching. That’s the last video I’m ever letting my kids watch. But it helps you understand the context of why we started that way. I think it’s mostly because, the audience we were creating for. Yeah. In the context of these videos would be shown. That’s true. Then there’s also another aspect it’s like, sometimes I’ll watch our videos old and new. And I’m like, if I divorce myself from that I’m watching myself. Say man, we were weird. It’s like, what we do is I think, having developed in this Christian bubble and then in this like, other path that was completely untraditional has led to a certain type of we develop certain comedic instincts maybe because we couldn’t go to other things. I’ll just give it as an example like, if we can’t go to blue comedy, then we tried to push in other ways. Or I don’t like to pick apart what we do. But I want to acknowledge that it’s weird and that it feels weird that our instincts, I rewatch the first episode of the Mythical Show. And I was like, our instincts in the way that we did this the way that we talked at the top of that episode about what it was a strange combination of like, being informed by what was starting to bubble up on this thing called the internet, but also, all of our experiences in like, when it came to live comedy, we were just as informed by like the speakers who were the funniest at the start of their Christian talks, as we were with any stand up comedian. Yeah. And I don’t even know how it all shaped who we are, but I do know that it made us a weird brand of comedy because, Yeah. we grew in this alternate kind of like an alternate society like a bubble. If you can’t be offensive, you can at least be confusing. But no, and to wrap things up, I think that hopefully what we demonstrated and telling a story just like Link was saying it’s like so much of the way that we are. And the way that our work is, the stuff that we create is characterized by this very, a typical journey that started with sort of the first audience that we ever had, officially as when we started our band until we decided to start making YouTube videos. And you might also appreciate why we’ve never answered the question in an interview with well, we quit college, we raise support to do a ministry that was like training students and then we tried a couple of things. And then like. Yeah. We don’t tell that story because you can’t just tell that story in a sentence. It’s easy to just say, yeah, we got engineering degrees did that for a while, and then we became YouTubers. But hopefully– And also, maybe there’s a lot of questions that are popping up because of our association with, and being in full time Christian ministry. It’s had like, again, use hashtag EarBiscuits let us know. I think it whatever your take on those things are you might start to see what is Rhett and Link intersection with my take on evangelical Christianity. I think over the next two weeks when we share our Personal journeys will answer a lot of those questions, but log that stuff, hashtag EarBiscuits, let us know, communicate amongst yourselves, and we’ll get to it. Yeah. I would also ask you that I think that this series we’re calling it, of us talking about this stuff, both telling the story, the backstory of the Lost Years that we’ve done in the past too, but then also telling our personal stories. I know that there’s a certain cross section of the audience out there that is probably not interested in this and it’s like, this isn’t my thing. I don’t relate. So I’m gonna tune out. But I know that there’s a lot of people who are like, this kind of is my thing. This is my story, or I there’s a lot of points where I can relate, maybe you know someone who can relate to this who has a similar background. We just encourage you to share it with them. I think that this could also be the kind of thing there are probably a certain number of people, not a small number, who have kind of over the years as they have sensed sort of a change take place in us. And they kind of see that through the way we talk or they see that in our work, have had just speculated about what’s going on with us. Maybe they’ve tuned out maybe they’ve said, I’m not gonna be a part of this new Rhett and Link, whatever it is, this might be something that you want to share with them as well, so they could kind of at least just understand some of the context. So thanks for doing that. Yeah, thanks for doing that. Should I not give a wreck? Out of principle I’m gonna give my wreck. You can give a wreck, man. Wreck baby wreck. Not related anything. I just watched it and it was a great movie. I recommend watching Honey Boy. Shia LaBeouf, plays his own father. And it almost feels like a documentary of his tumultuous relationship with his father as a child actor and, it was tough to watch. I mean, so if you’ve got issues with your parents or something like that, maybe it’s not for you, but it was extremely well acted, and it’s like very, very compelling, heartbreaking, in a lot of ways. But I do recommend it. Honey Boy. Honey Boy. The hashtag EarBiscuits. Next week, we’ll get into the personal spiritual stuff. It’s gonna get real real. 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.