EB 318: Looking Back At A Decade Of GMM

Welcome to “Ear Biscuits,” the podcast for two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I’m Link. And I’m Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we are celebrating 10 years of “Good Mythical Morning.” It’s a show that we make other than this show. It’s on a platform called YouTube. Apparently we’ve been making it on that platform for 10 years, and last week we did a celebration week on the show, and we’re capping that off with a lengthy discussion. Of retrospective. Looking back on the length of “Good Mythical Morning.” Ten years. It’s not just length. Link. What? Could you not use length? However, we have established that your porn name would be Length Neal, right? Did we? I don’t know if we’ve ever said that publicly, but we discovered that at some point. Well, how did you discover this, Rhett? This is getting weird. It was a conversation. It was a conversation amongst friends, I believe. I don’t know, maybe it was, you probably know, it may have been on “Good Mythical More.” I think it happened at this table. Really? Length Neal was born at this table? I think so. So, my idea, I’ve done some homework here. I’ve looked back. Well, let me just give you my perspective on what you told me, because we were gonna do a retrospective episode, and, you know, we actually, over the summer, we did the retrospective episode of 2000 episodes of GMM, which happened over the summer. This is when we were like, we’re gonna do the same thing, so we were trying to figure out other ways to talk about this much GMM without dipping back into the same conversation. Yeah. It’s a lot of conversation about fan evolution in that episode. Right. And… So, we were talking like, “Okay, we’ll think about it over break.” And so then when we got back, you said, “Well, I kinda went back to the beginning, and started looking at titles and thumbnails.” Just to jog my memory. “And then I just went through all of them, all 10 years worth of them.” And you were like- Yeah. And it took off, and made notes. And you were like, “And it took a lot longer than I anticipated.” I was like, yeah, over two-thirds. I mean, you could have, like. I didn’t realize that I was signing myself in. Ten episodes in, you could’ve extrapolated and done the math length. Yeah. And figured out how much length this was gonna take. I feel like I really, you know, I owed it to us in reminiscing and celebrating what we’ve done, what we’ve gone through, and what we’ve created, and what’s evolved on “Good Mythical Morning.” Oh, I’m glad you did it. I’m glad you did it. Over the years, I just want- You can call me and say, “Could you start from the end and meet in the middle? You just let me worry about other things.” Well, it was just fascinating, because, I mean, with 10 years, at a certain point, the show is just, it’s a staple. It’s a part of our lives, it’s something that we go to the desk, we enter that zone, and we, you know… There’s a rhythm to it that it can kind of wash over you, like, I’m a little self-conscious when we talk about “Good Mythical Morning,” because I know that mythical beasts, when you experience it as a viewer, it’s different than how we experienced it creating it. And we got to a point where we don’t go back and watch it after the fact. But also, because we registered. Many, many years ago, we stopped doing that. And I think you probably have picked up on this as we’ve talked about the show over the years, the moments don’t register with us in the same way that they register with the audience. Yeah. Because… I don’t know. It’s kind of overwhelming for us in that it’s just like, “What’s the craziest thing you’ve ever eaten? What’s the craziest thing that ever happened on GM. Do you remember when you did this?” I was like, when you point it out- What’s your favorite episode? Yeah. But like, when I’m gonna bed at night, my mind is not filled with memories of the crazy stuff that we do on the show. It has to sort of be called out. So I have a feeling that when you go through these things, I’m gonna be like, “Oh man, we did that? Hell, we did that.” I wouldn’t have thought about that again if you didn’t point it out. And I was particularly fascinated with how the show has evolved, like remembering things that we tried, you know? Because we have this over simplified idea of what the show has been in certain, you know, there’s a Reddit post talking about the certain eras of “Good Mythical Morning,” and I think that they presented like five different eras. If you go on Reddit and just search GMM eras, it’ll come up. But yeah, I ended up- Don’t search GMM errors because that’s a different Reddit. We don’t want to get exposed in that way. So, I think it would be fun for me to go through episode, like, what’s the word I’m looking for? Notable episodes, like, so it’s not the most memorable or the most successful episodes, but it’s just notable episodes along the way that said, yeah, that’s part of the DNA of “Good Mythical Morning,” even if there’s stuff that we don’t do anymore. Okay. And it might jog your memory in other ways. I’m also a bit tired this morning. We had a little, we had a party with a friend last night. I stayed up past my bedtime. Yeah, yeah. 11:30. It ended at 11:30. We caught up with an old friend, the three of us, and that rarely happens. Well, and while we were together, there was a point, I believe it was 9:00 p.m. when your phone- Well, I was playing music at the creative house. We were playing music, but your phone at 9:00 p.m. began to play a Spotify playlist that was unbelievably soothing. And that we were like, “Whoa, this is a mood change.” It’s a hard turn. And Link was like, “This is my bedtime music.” And I’m not talking about like sexual music, I’m talking about sleepy time, like make you go to sleep bedtime music. Like meditation sleep music, yeah. Begins for this man at 9:00 PM, and he’s only 43. When you’re 73, you’re gonna eat at 3:30. You’re gonna eat at 3:30, and you’re gonna go to bed at 5:00 p.m. Well, there’s something- You’re gonna go to bed when the sun goes down. There’s so much emphasis about sleep. You know? Like I said last night. Our brains analyzing our entire sleep. You’re making the healthy choice. I envy you in many ways. I’m not proud of going to bed at 11. I think I get adequate sleep, but I think you get more sleep, and I think it’s probably, you’re gonna live longer because of it. But apparently my sleep is not of a quality. Oh, yeah, I totally forgot about this. Let’s save this for another episode. Let’s analyze our sleep patterns. Trust me, I’ve been through a lot of episodes- That’s a good idea, that’s a good idea. My point was, you know, we spent last night reminiscing with an old friend, and now it’s like we’re continuing that, two old friends reminiscin’ about what we did. Good segue. January, 2012. It’s hard to believe. Like, I mean, over the course of the week of celebration that we just did on “Good Mythical Morning,” a lot of special moments. If you haven’t seen all those episodes, hey, go back. It’s like, we were surprised by a number of those videos, and it makes me super grateful for what we’ve been through, but. Could I? One of the things I’m seeing right now is I actually see a video in December 13th, 2011. Yeah. That’s called “You” on “Good Mythical Morning,” and it’s us at our desks, and it’s a six minute video where we are basically, I think, fielding videos for the wheel of myth, for the… Yeah. Whatever we people say at the, let’s talk about that. Then we were asking people to tell us, let’s talk about that. So it was at least a month ahead of time where you already let the audience know that “Good Mythical Morning” was coming. I haven’t seen this video, I’ve never thought about it in 10 years, and here it is. Is it unlisted, actually? No. It’s not unlisted. Hmm. Is it? No. Because you’re logged in, that might happen. But yeah, when we started this thing, we’ve reacted on the society to the first episode, so I’m not gonna spend too much time on that. But like, the thing that I noticed was that my voice was still in a place where I was kind of talking like this. And I think it was because we were restarting something, I’d like to think that I got into more of a rhythm with good morning chia Lincoln, that I was speaking a little more confidently, but I didn’t- Did you go back and see it? I didn’t have the heart to go back and see, but I will say very quickly, as we were doing “Good Mythical Morning,” I changed. So I got to a point where it’s like, you know what, I’m saying something, and I’m speaking at volume. But it was, you know, I’m very self conscious of what I felt like was a rough start for me. Well, you know, we- Better to have a rough start than a great start, and then fizzle out. The reason that we both, at one point, talked very quietly when we did podcasts, it was because very first podcast we ever did was in this little office at the Campus Crusade Headquarters in Apex, North Carolina, where we couldn’t disturb anyone else as we were talking, and so we had to be very, very quiet. And I think that maybe that just stuck with you, and you forgot that there was no one around us, like when we started doing “Good Mythical Morning-” Well, there’s a difference when you speak at this volume, you’re speaking to an audience, versus you’re speaking to one person. And it’s like, you know, you’re trying to find… you’re trying to find the right zone. But you don’t speak that… I just wonder if you spoke that way in regular life, because you don’t speak quietly now. Yeah, that’s what it is. Different circumstances. It’s more of like, developing an on-camera persona behind that card table. Right. And I think getting, like I said, we had done the Rhett and Link cast, the live show for over a year, then we did the Tea and Lincoln thing, and, you know, I think it was more of getting reacquainted, but I’m glad that I quickly got up to speed. And then I’m also glad that we introduced puppets. Actually, that didn’t happen until season two. So with season one, it was like, we were doing best-evers. We also went to Texas, and we shot a couple of episodes. You talk about talking quietly, we did like 20 worst tattoos ever, which that video performed really well. We did it inside of a tattoo. Yeah, when we were making the… ’cause we were still making commercials for local businesses still. We went after Commercial Kings, we went back to doing that. What episode was that, what number? 108, “20 Worst Tattoos Ever.” We were both talking quietly, ’cause we were self-conscious. Yeah, if you put me in a situation where I feel like I might be offending someone, or making someone else feel uncomfortable, that’s when my personality changes. And then we did take a break, to our credit. We took a summer break, even after season one, and we did that thing called “Rhett and Link Vault,” where we were like, “Hey, we got some old videos. Maybe you haven’t seen them, we’re gonna contextualize them, and then you’re supposed to rewatch them.” We were thinking about taking breaks, but still keeping content coming over the summer. I mean, that was a smart move to say, “This is not gonna be every single day forever,” you know? As we talked to other creators now, we still very much say, if there’s a way for you to set up how you work on things so that you can look forward to your own creative breaks so you’re not obligated to keep churning stuff out with no breaks, that’s a smart move. I’m glad that we did that. And also, at the time, if I’m remembering this correctly, we had not yet developed any sort of block shooting schedule, which, you know,- Oh, hell no. We’ve revealed the secret about that, about how we don’t come in and shoot every single day. But at that time we were, so you were coming in and shooting every single day at season one, so if you didn’t take a break, there was no vacation. There was nothing, you know? And I definitely remember there were times when it’s like, and we would sit down to do an episode, and they were… The concepts were very loose, and it was like, okay, I assume you’re gonna bring something, I’m gonna bring something, and we’re gonna try to make this thing land around 10 minutes, and we’re not gonna edit it. So there’s a push and pull of creative tension between the two of us of, okay, I thought you were taken over at this point, I thought you were bringing this perspective. We had to work through that stuff- And there’s no saving it with another camera, or a jump cut. I don’t know when the first jump cut in GMM history was the first edit where something was hidden. It didn’t happen much, if any, in the first season. And I remember there were times when it was like, you know what? I don’t feel like doing this. Let’s just take a walk, or let’s not do it. Let’s get some lunch. We’ll shoot two in a row tomorrow. Yeah, we never lost- Or we would start it, and like, one of us would be like, you know what? We’d stop like five minutes in and be like, yeah, we’re not to the thing that we said we were actually gonna talk about, let’s start over, Yeah, every once in a while. And then they’d be this risk of it, the other person reacting as if they were being critiqued. And the dynamic there, it was touchy, right? ‘Cause it was like, you both have to bring your best and feel confident, and you got to feed off each other. And if anything goes a little wrong, I mean, we avoided as much as we could, but there were definitely times where it’s like, okay, abandon ship. It’s like, I can tell that you’re getting frustrated with me because I’ve done something, said something that just rubbed you the wrong way, or vice versa, you know? I remember that. It would happen, but it was pretty rare. Well, Jason was there. Without a third person there, like, we would have been sunk, because I think those moments would have happened even more. It’s like, you tend to be on a little better behavior. But we were committed to the concept of continuing the show. Oh yeah. So we would have figured it out, but the other thing that we were doing that I feel like is, you know… what has gotten us to this point in our career is just this combination of good fortune and timing, and great help and some good instincts. But one of the things that we did as a choice that I’m very happy that we made, is that even though we didn’t have a production schedule, per se, what most of our peers were doing at the time is they didn’t have regularly scheduled programming, right? So what happens is, because you don’t always feel like making things. And so when you’re talking about this scenario, if we were doing this hand to mouth thing where we were coming in and we were filming, and then we were posting when it was done, which is pretty much what everybody was doing at the time, and pretty much what everybody still does in a lot of ways. Yeah. A lot of people still do it. It gives you this out. Well, and then you’re just like- There’s a fear of like, if I commit to something, and then- But not only that, if you don’t feel like doing it, you say, “Okay, guys,” you go on Twitter and you say, “Guys, the video is gonna be late,” or, “So sorry, no video this week.” We’ve never done that in 10 years, that I can remember. Yeah, that’s right. It’s like, the season, this is when the season is is Monday through Friday. There’s been a couple of times where an episode either got pulled down for some reason, or whatever, and then we made another, and put it on the society. Or I actually saw early on in season one, like a few episodes in there was that, because of what was happening with some internet legislation, we did like a blackout, and we didn’t do an episode that day. Yeah. But I think because we didn’t give ourselves that out, that’s one of the reasons that, 10 years later, we’re looking back at 21 seasons. Yeah, season two, August of 2012, that’s when we introduced Time Rangerers. I mean, we still have the puppets sent by mythical beast in our likenesses, and then, so that would be within an episode, but it wouldn’t be, we talk about something for a little bit, and then we would- But we put it in the thumbnail. And there was no… the scripting was extremely loose for that, and I just remember the, you remember the catchphrase? Give me a second. I didn’t watch any of these videos, this has just come back to me We would say it together. Yeah, we were horrible at puppetaring. It was our version of like to infinity and beyond, or something. To the time machine, it was like, something about the time machine. To the gazebo. To the gazebo. The gazebo was the time machine. The gazebo was the time machine. And I think Time Rangerers- To the gazebo. Might have just been a mispronunciation of Time Rangers in the first episode, I don’t know. Well, based on the thumbnails, and the associated view counts, puppets, not a strong choice. We did “Best Ever Fridays.” Wow, people hate puppets. People hate puppets. Episode 37, “How to Make Someone Sound Like an Idiot.” So this was an early important episode for us, because we talked about the Darwin Awards, and so we talked about the thing that won, and then we talked about another thing, and then we talked about the speech jammer device that you could point it at somebody, it’s in the thumbnail, but like we said, “Hey, we can do this ourselves using the delay within ‘Garage Band.’” And you listen to yourself talking on a delay, and you sound like an idiot, and that was absolutely hilarious. But we waited until, I don’t know, seven, eight minutes into the episode. When the episode was over. Before we actually began demonstrating it, because the first half of the episode we were talking about those inventions, right? And like, the research side of things. And we’ve told this story at some point, I’m sure, but a good friend and manager of ours at the time was, we were talking about that episode, and he was like, “Hey,” and this was actually like a year after the fact. Yeah, this was Dan. We were talking about kind of making some, like, we were evaluating GMM. And he was like, you know. Yes, like we said we wanted to put sponsors in, we had a slot for sponsors from the beginning, but we were like, “Well, we need to be making more money doing this thing.” So like, that’s why we were having these conversations with Dan. And he said, “You know, my favorite episode is the speech jammer episode, and I sent it to people, but I always have to, when I send it to people, I say, ‘Fast forward to like seven or eight minutes in when I started doing this.’” Right. And then it was like, well, why don’t we make the episode about one thing? Which was typically what we did, but it was sort of a re-evaluation of what we were doing. It’s like, if people are clicking on this because of this expectation, we want to deliver on that expectation, and that was a pretty significant mind shift for us. Yeah, and I think there was a little bit of fear in it, ’cause we would plan an episode, we’d be like, we gotta make sure that we can fill the time. What if, you know, in real time? So we’re gonna save this thing that we know is gonna be funny for a little bit later, so that the episode is full. We didn’t have enough confidence that like, okay, you take one thing that people want to click on, and then you flesh it out. It’s like, no we’ve got to throw other things in first to make sure that we can break 10 minutes. And once we made that shift and said, no, you have a good concept, you lead with it and you flesh it out, that certainly helped the product drastically. I mean, one of the things I’m noticing just looking at these old thumbnails and the associated views is there’s an incredible range of how low it can be and how high it can be, right? There’s a psychopath smell test where we’re wearing blindfolds. Episode 38. Which has got 5.8 million views from nine years ago. And then there’s the puppet episode right next to it. Well, over the years people have gone back. Right. And cherry picked ones that I think resonate more with where the show ended up going. I feel like I can actually look at these thumbnails without view counts, and be pretty accurately predict which ones performed well now that 10 years of all this data of how people respond to titles and thumbnails. it was just so experimental at the time. And the feedback, we’re looking at 10 years of collective feedback on these videos, 9 or 10 years. Yeah. And so you see this cumulative effect of like, no one cares about gladiators versus puppets to the tune of 273,000 views next to a 6 million view video. And then we wrapped up season two with episode 86, which was a Christmas special, so- Oh, yeah. You know, even though it was the first year of the show, it was still a side project in a lot of ways. It was like, let’s do something, I mean, we’re gonna take a holiday break, let’s do a special. And we threw all this stuff at it, Julian Smith was in that. Yeah, 575,000 views, which is pretty low for that time. Which, again. It was a lot of work. How long is it? 28 minutes. But- It was special. I think that the decision to make that special, and make it 28 minutes, and make it a variety show was what led directly to “The Mythical Show”. “The Mythical Show”. You’re exactly right. That’s why we decided to do “The Mythical Show”. Until we were on our own, we had done this, and it was like, well, if we can do it, we can do it again, and people liked it. I’m gonna put my phone on non-buzz. Let’s do an ad. Non-buzz. You know something else people like? Getting stuff from our store. We really appreciate that. We have a lot of stuff over at mythical.com for sale. But it’s a rotating menagerie. But it gets gone. I mean, people like it, they like the stuff that’s happening. Our team is creating incredible merchandise, and people are buying it. It goes away. And also, we like to keep it fresh. I mean, this isn’t like your grandma’s house where you’re gonna show up, and she’s gonna make exactly the same, fried chicken or country-style steak. We’re not your grandma, right? Okay? We’ve got things we don’t change, but the thing we do change is we change the merch. We love your grandma. We know we could never be your grandma, that’s why we changed things up, TBF. But if you’re like, okay, I understand your philosophy, but I don’t want to miss out on anything. Well, that’s why we created the last chance section. Yeah. It’s your last chance to go get something that’s never gonna come back. Yeah, and we put it in a section. Tell your grandma about it. So you can go there. Season three. Well, January, 2013, episode 13, do you remember we tried something called newsicals? Yes. Where we would take a story, we had taken funny news stories, like somebody getting arrested over, like, complaining about their fries at McDonald’s, and stuff like that, and we would use those news stories just for conversation. But then we were like, let’s toy with the format. Let’s actually sing these things. To some royalty-free music? Sure. It wasn’t like, us playing guitar. No, so it was a kind of operatic, talky, singy-type thing. Yeah, yeah. It was fun, everybody liked it, but it didn’t really work. But it just goes to show you, I mean, from an early point, we were like, trying to develop formats. Well, and again, when you look at, okay, so episode 13, “Pizza Thief: The Musical.” Just get a picture of you holding a pizza and singing, 464,000 views. The next day, episode 14, “Nutella vs Peanut Butter Taste Test,” 1.8 million views. Now again, at the time, it wasn’t like we were getting this incredible feedback. It wasn’t like- No. You know, this is quite an operation at this point. We do AB testing on titles and thumbnails, that’s why they change early in the day, you know? And it’s become much more of a science, at the time, it was more of an art. It was throwing things out onto the internet, and also, I would say a week after that episode goes up, we weren’t learning like, “Hey, people are loving than the Nutella versus peanut butter taste test.” This view discrepancy is something that is registering over the course of a decade, not the course of us then making decision about our content. I mean, I will say six episodes later, “Walmart Brand vs Name Brand Taste Test,” and then episode 29, “Rhett and Link Eat Insects,” which still hasn’t broken a million views, which is interesting. Which, in the “Walmart Brand vs Brand Name Taste Test” has got almost 7 million views, which I, you know, and again, we talk about this quite a bit, but it just kind of illustrates this thing that there’s this… What we don’t do, what we try not to do is just follow is just like, oh, people like this, and so that’s the only thing that we’re gonna make. So, we still have to do some stuff that’s just for us and for the folks who’ve been around forever. Right. So, I’m not saying we wouldn’t do another musical. It’s just now, 10 years later there’s this mentality that like, okay, if we’re gonna do a musical episode, we already know it’s gonna be a lot of work, a lot of fun. It’s gonna be very rewarding for us, and the people who watch, but it’s not gonna make any money, and no one’s gonna watch it. And you just have to be like, “And that’s okay, and we’re gonna go for it,” you know? Yeah. That’s what looking back on this is sort of just a reminder of the way this system works. And you know, we were still sharing personal stories. I mean, our experiences of getting acclimated with living full-time in Los Angeles, having moved across country, our kids, our wives, making the transition, we would share funny stories. But even over the course of season two, that started to diminish more, because- We’re running out of stuff. ‘Cause we know that like, our personal stories couldn’t support an entire show forever. Yeah. Right. It’s not like we’re now doing that on another show that’s even longer. Episode 31, “Rhett and Link are Moving,” episode 32, “New Studio Tour.” So by that point, the beginning of season three in 2013 is when we moved into the new studio. We knew at that point we were making “The Mythical Show”, because that’s what gave us the confidence to start renting a space, and the necessity to rent a space, ’cause we were hiring people. Hired Stevie, we hired Ben, we hired Jen, and we moved into that new studio, episode 32, and we kept ma… and then we had a makeshift, they were building the set downstairs, which ultimately became the “Good Mythical Morning” set, but it was built as “The Mythical Show” set. And then upstairs, we would just set up the card table, and working with Jason, we would still make “Good Mythical Morning” while everybody that we were hiring was working towards “The Mythical Show”. Was that the whole season in that space, was all of season three in that upstairs space at the old studio? From episode 32 to episode 60. So, and when we were up there in that space, our energy started to be diverted into preparating for “The Mythical Show”, so it’s like we couldn’t prepare as much for an episode. So I remember telling Jason, like this is a problem. Episode 35, “Best Movie Theme Songs.” But instead of us alternating and saying what we think are the best movie theme songs, we turned it into a game. I’m not saying this is the first game we ever played, but it could have been, but it was in this era that we started to game-ify things because it took the pressure off of us to prepare a lot when we had to devote that type of energy to “The Mythical Show”. Yeah, that’s a good point. Episode 46, “Most Amazing Optical Illusions” got 22 million views, but episode 55 and 56 were both games, cartoon theme songs games, greatest April fool’s game, you know, where one of us will quiz the other, or Jason would quiz both of us. And it was, yeah, it was- So games kind of came out of this- It was an efficiency thing. It was like, yeah, again, we’re gonna digest all this information and have to spit it back out, or just perform and react. But it wasn’t that we were thinking, “Games will be fun.” It was like, no, “We need something that takes the pressure off, games can do that.” It moves the prep, the writing, if you will. It kind of started to convince us, because Jason was an editor, and maybe he would have done some research, but we never allowed ourselves to think that like, we could ever hire writers. But then you’re like, “Hey, Jason, write this game.” We didn’t think of the show- And all of the sudden, we have a writer, we just didn’t know it. We didn’t think of the show as a show that needed writing, because when we thought about writing, we thought about scripted stuff. Exactly. In fact, that’s still often a misconception when people find out that there’s writers for “Good Mythical Morning,” they interpret that as, “So what you’re saying is scripted?” It’s just, no, what we’re doing, what we’re learning about, the game that we’re playing, the question that was being asked, that script. Yeah, the name of the game on the title screen. There’s so many details, there’s so much to be written when you actually start thinking about it. But yeah, as creators, it’s like, it’s one thing to entrust someone else to edit you, that’s a journey a lot of creators get hung up on, but then moving to a point where you can get somebody to write for you, it’s like, oh, you can think of it differently. It’s not putting words in somebody’s mouth necessarily. So all of that up into episode 60 was leading up to “The Mythical Show”, which was 12 episodes. And even now, looking back at “The Mythical Show,” and very, haven’t watched it in a long time, but I’m sure I’d be proud of it, and I’d be very endeared by it. And I’m sure there’s a lot of things embedded in these half hours that we carried forward creatively. Oh, yeah. We’d would have to sit down and watch them all, I’m sure people could that out. But only 2 of the 12 to this day have broken a million views. Again, it’s just the longer form thing is not what were gone through. 10 of them, and, you know, that was YouTube giving us a chunk of money to hire people to make this show to experiment with longer format. And then, you know, there’s parallels between that and when we did the expanded version of GMM that comes later, GMM 22, that like, okay, even though it didn’t work, there was an infusion of create, like trying so many things at such an increased rate, and figuring out how to work with a team that is growing in the process is something that then has ripple effects, because we kept Stevie on. And then it was like, okay, we’re going back to “Good Mythical Morning,” and it needs to be part of your focus, “The Mythical Show”, which was your focus, is going away. But I kinda, I remember the mindset going into “The Mythical Show”, at least as I was thinking, I was very excited about “The Mythical Show”, and there was a big part of me that was thinking if this works, this could be what we do instead of “Good Mythical Morning.” Oh, yeah. Right? Because again, I was more excited about- There was no plan to go back to “Good Mythical Morning” that I can recall. I was super excited about this high level of, there’s so much creativity just put into one particular episode, and there’s a music video, and there’s a sketch, and then there’s a game. So it was a little bit of everything that we could do, but pretty early on, it became clear that like, wow, again, there’s this weird thing that the feedback that we’re getting, and I’m not talking about the quality of the feedback, I’m talking about the quantity of the feedback. Like, some people who love what we do, and love all the creativity are like, so excited about something like “The Mythical Show”, but you can’t like, we couldn’t have kept, like we couldn’t have, first of all, YouTube wasn’t gonna give us any more money for that. But even the money they gave us to do that show wasn’t sustainable, like the business would have just like, completely gone under if we were like, “Let’s just keep making that show with that money that we’re getting from YouTube.” Like, it wasn’t a sustainable business model, but there was a little bit of this, ah, man, we put this thing out there that felt like it was creatively innovative and oh, okay, well I guess we’ll go back to talking to each other at a desk every single day. To me there was a little bit of like, ah, really? Okay, okay. This is what you want from us? You don’t want us to do this incredibly creative stuff? But also the thing that was happening, and listen, I don’t want to… My mind has shifted a lot over the years on this, because I didn’t appreciate at this stage eight years ago. I still had not accepted the fact that this medium was very different than traditional media in that it was much more about connecting with people. And one of the things that people were appreciating was not that we could write a great song or do something funny as a sketch, it was that they’re like, “I like being with those guys, and being a part of their friendship, and seeing them crack each other up, and seeing them laugh.” Yeah. That was the experience that was comforting people and entertaining people. And it’s just a mind shift. It doesn’t mean that we don’t have all these creative aspirations, it’s just now we kind of understand that there’s a certain place for those that’s probably not gonna be a half hour YouTube video on our “Good Mythical Morning” channel. But that was the first sort of like, throwing this thing out there thinking that maybe this will change everything, maybe we’ll have the first ever really popular half-hour comedy show. It’ll be like “The Carol Burnett Show,” but it’ll be on YouTube, and it’ll go for 10 years. No, that’s not what happened. So we went back in fall of 2013, leading up to season four of “Good Mythical Morning.” We made that weekend sucks ad, you know? When “Good Mythical Morning” is not around, the weekend sucked. Episode one, which is the 275th episode overall, we were on the new set, we had altered “The Mythical Show” set to be the “Good Mythical Morning” set. We started saying let’s talk about that, and we moved the fan videos to be for the wheel, spin the wheel. That was all part of a really focused evaluation that involves Stevie, of like, okay, we’re changing the way we’re producing it, we’re applying this team, but that was also in Stevie began to, she turned her attention where she had not really been involved at all creatively with GMM. That after “The Mythical Show”, she turned her creative instincts and producer instincts onto GMM, and so the three of us were sort of attacking this thing. And we had a few writers at the time. Yeah, yeah, and we kept our writers on board. Actually, that’s not true. We didn’t have any writers yet besides… I’m pretty sure we didn’t, because this was also when- I don’t remember this time. We started Good Mythical More with season three, but it was on our website. So we were still doing, we started at season three, but we had it at RhettandLink.com. Yep, we were trying to get people to go to our website, and that’s the only way you could watch “Good Mythical More.” Episode four was a spicy pepper challenge. And Ben, Stevie, and Jason and Jen all came on during “Good Mythical More,” and I was like, this is the whole team bonding experience. Where we impromptu brought them on camera and made them eat the peppers. Yeah. And so it was just kinda like something that happened, and that’s why I think that was the extent of our team at the beginning of season three. Episode 27, “6 Legal Things That Should Be Illegal.” So we were doing these list episodes like, okay, if Buzzfeed can do all these click-baity stuff, and there’s all these click-baity listicle titles out there all over the internet, we’re basically capitalizing on that. Yeah, and it was really working. You got 8 million views for six legal things that should be illegal. I just can’t resist clicking on that. It’s like, no one gives a shit about that now. It’s like, you know? It’s so- Yeah. But I mean, we learned that over time, that’s why those lists went away. Everyone learned every list. Yeah, it’s like they’re tired of this. Everyone was like, “I’ve been through every list, there’s no more list.” Yeah, they were clicked baited so much, there’s only, you know, I was burned one too many times with a list that didn’t come through. And the thumbnail strategy at this point, I’m noticing, with that episode, it just has like a stock photo of a woman sneezing into blackness. That’s a a good thumbnail. What I don’t see is I don’t see your face going. No. Or my face going. No. I don’t see that. Yeah, it was like this. I remember I would work closely with Jason to figure out some sort of eye-catching Photoshop thing that was like, okay, here’s a sneeze. There was a completely isolated, self-contained strategy for every single thumbnail, as opposed to a thumbnail strategy, which is- That got exhausting. That’s a function of what YouTube has changed. We also started “Ear Biscuits,” episode 25. We announced “Ear Biscuits” on season four, and we started doing Saturday “Ear Biscuit” promos. We’d put a video up on Saturday where we would talk about the “Ear Biscuit,” because there was a video, and we would tell a story. But it wasn’t a clip, it was related to the “Ear Biscuit” that you could go and listen to. Yeah, so like we taught- I forgot all about this. Like, yeah. In October we had Di Franco on the show, and we were talking about that, and he talked about a friend of his. And so then on our Sunday episode, we spend a few minutes talking about Ben, back then in 2013, you know what ended up being an entire episode that like is the most viewed on the “Ear Biscuits” YouTube channel. Yeah, by a long shot. Yeah, I just, I totally forgot that we did that. Episode 36 is when we did the hashtag war. Remember hashtag war? Still one of my favorite things. Hashtag GMM, we took it from good morning Memphis and good- Good Morning, Maryland. Good Morning, Maryland. Two morning shows, like two morning news shows that were using the hashtag GMM, and we basically did a full on coordinated assault to try to claim GMM for ourselves, but it was obviously a publicity stunt. And we did end up getting featured, at least on Good Morning Memphis. I think that good morning Maryland at the time, like- Somebody didn’t follow through. They were a little cold towards the idea. We made some jingles for them, but I don’t- I’m glad you brought this up, because I was actually thinking about this this morning, that there is a GMM out there that is really popular now. I told you a little bit about this. It seems to be more popular than us. You’re talking about a new hashtag. Yeah, if you just put GMM on Twitter. Put GMM on Twitter. Sounds like such a dad. Look, GMM actresses. There is a show, GMM25Thailand is tweeting about this. I don’t know where this show is. I don’t know what country this show is in, but it is incredibly popular, and there’s a huge cast of characters that are on this GMM show. And. We have to do something about this. I mean, I don’t think we can take the hashtag back, but I feel like a collaboration is at least in order. Again, I have no idea what the show is. I don’t endorse it. I don’t know anything about it. So just, let me be clear about that, but I just assume it’s- It’s not a band? No, it’s a show. GMM actresses, it’s a show. I’m a hundred percent sure that it’s the show, but there’s all kinds of people associated with it. I mean, this is an after party, a GMM after party. We weren’t there. Oh, yeah. It has nothing to do with us. That must be fixed. Like, we need to be involved with. So here’s a clip from the show right here. I swear if GMM won’t give us another do to. Oh. I still blame time for Ringoria, not in-game. GMM got no manager to drive is it? What? I don’t know. We’re gonna figure this out. We’ll figure that out. In the meantime, I’m gonna continue to my stroll down memory lane. If you know more about GMM, the other GMM, and you’re a fan, #EarBiscuits. Ironically, not #GMM. Oh, so rounding out that fall of 2013, episode 76, “Never Wet Our Pants.” 17 Million views on “Never Wet Our Pants.” Yeah, episode 79, 13 million views when we got waxed. We got waxed. So, I mean, we were starting to get some momentum here, season five, January of 2014. That’s when we moved “Good Mythical More” to YouTube. So the putting it on RhettandLink.com was a short lived experience. Yeah, that didn’t last. Episode 18, exotic meat taste test, that’s when we broke a million subscribers. Well, one of the things that I’m seeing in the numbers here is that, season five. So they’re seeing like, towards the end of season four, okay, we’re getting… Some stuff is really taking off. Some stuff is really getting traction. Season five, so seven years ago. Yeah. That’s when… That has to be, based on the numbers that I’m seeing, that has to be the beginning of what we called the YouTube algorithm change that we’ve benefited from, where they started rewarding watch time. Yeah. Doesn’t that sound about like the beginning of that, seven years ago? So like, 2015? Yeah, ’cause we got a million view, a million subscribers around that time. And then at the end of 2015, we were about to break 10 million subscribers. So for the next- At the end of 2015? Yeah, at the end of 2015, so we went from 1 million. So that was like the course of a year, man. How’s that possible? No, it was two years. So for those two years, still that’s the- January, 2014, we had a million subs. January 20… Yeah, January of 2016 is when we had 10 million subscribers. So yeah, that’s when it really started to pick up. I mean, I remember the thing that I was thinking at this time is that I had always seen GMM as what I called the side project, right? I mean, that’s why we put it on the second channel. Yeah. To this time, we’re still doing like, sketches, music videos, and that kind of thing. But… This was the year that, that two year period, 2014 to 2015, it was where GMM surpassed in anything that we were doing on the Rhett and Link channel, on the main channel in terms of just the level of engagement and the number, at least the number of subscribers, and just a fan base that was building around it. Yeah. And I think both of us were thinking like, oh man, this is becoming our thing. This is not a side project. Yeah, so a lot more focus, so much so that we were like, let’s make a Hawkman trailer for a Hawkman movie that doesn’t exist in hopes that like, people will care about that. They didn’t really. They did not. Episode 82, “Will it Taco?” Episode 88, sensory deprivation tank. So it’s like we, we had just hatched the will it series, and the sensory deprivation tank was, so okay, we’re gonna go out into the world and do some stuff. We didn’t do it that often, but it was a really good episode. Well, before moving past “Will it Taco?” It’s got 20 million views now. Was this the… Up until this point I don’t know if we had done, like the next time we did will it after this was when, because up to this point, we didn’t see things as series. Yeah. Right? I don’t see any evidence. It was always like, kind of, okay, maybe this is a slight twist on something that we did, or we’re playing a game, but we didn’t have a title that just changed out one word. Like, “Will it Taco?” Oh, now let’s do, “Will it Burrito?” or whatever. And so that was Cinco de Mayo. In July, we did “Will it Ice Cream Sandwich?” Which was in the next season six. Okay, so it took us a full season to come back to… That’s interesting. Again, we weren’t seeing, like- It took us two months, yeah. But we weren’t… And we’re just way different these days where we’re constantly trying to come up with an idea that then can be a series, because we just found that that’s what people like. I mean, obviously there’s production considerations for that. You get something that works, you want to do it again because the team knows how to produce that, but also it develops a life of it’s own, like the international dart game has, at this point, which I’m sure you’ll talk about the first time we did that, eventually. But we weren’t thinking about the show in that way, at this time. Yeah, at the end, over the course of season five, the other thing we did was wheel of mythicality animations, we started releasing those. And then season six, July of 2014, that’s when we got our new intro with the column where it starts at night, and like, it’s going up the column. We still had some more animations coming out. Episode nine of season six, that’s when we did the vacay gone cray-cay. Cray-cay. Cray-cay. Cray-cray, where we would re-enact stories of people’s vacations gone wrong, which was sponsored by the same people that sponsored “I’m on Vacation,” the music video. Post someone at a hotel? Choice hotels? Yeah. But yeah, in that episode nine, it was also on a Thursday, that’s when we would also do mail. So we started having variety episodes where we would do a little something, usually a prompt from a fan, and then we would go into the Vacay Gone Cray-Cray segment, because we wanted to be able to sell to a sponsor a segment within an episode, but then do other things that we could use to market the episode with title and thumbnail, and we would add mail to it. And then, so Jen would bring out the mail, but she wasn’t on camera, and it was in the main episode. She wasn’t on camera? She wasn’t on camera. And we did sing the song. Yeah, Thursday means mail. And you’re talking season six? Yeah. Episode nine? Episode nine. Episode 17- Okay, because we still called that, “Outrageous Camping Gear You Must Own.” And yeah, because the first thing we talked about was- Which got 5.6 million views. Outrageous camping gear. Again, the lists were working for us. No one was gonna click on watch us re-enact somebodies bad vacation, but once we got the click with the crazy looking tents. So we were figuring out those things. It’s like, if we can do a variety episode every week, we can learn more, we can do more creative things, and we can connect with the mythical beasts by reading their mail. Episodes 17 is when we went to the YouTube space, and we had Daniel Radcliffe on the show. Up until this point, we really hadn’t had guests on the show. We had had guests appear on “The Mythical Show,” but then we didn’t add any guests when we went back to “Good Mythical Morning,” but we couldn’t turn down Daniel Radcliffe, and I just remember being so freaking nervous. Like, I still can’t. I wouldn’t watch that episode back. Well, it’s not only that, we wanted it to, first of all, we had this hang up, and we still do have it where we were like, okay, when a celebrity comes to the YouTube space, and other YouTubers go to it, it’s almost like a press junket, and they’re just do making videos. For us, it felt a little cheap, right? Because we were like, “Man, we want our show to feel like a place that celebrities want to come and actually be on, because that’s what a legitimate show is.” Jimmy Fallon doesn’t go and go somewhere, you come to his show. That had never happened, but we said that’s how we would want it to happen. But the compromise was, we’re going to print out our set. No, Paisley actually built it. He built it like. Oh, yeah. Paper mache, it was like- Yes. Paper mosaic. Yes. It was really amazing what he did, and I don’t even think it came across on camera, but your eyes forget that we’re not in front of our own set. Yeah, so we did basically a portable set, which was a whole lot of work. Later when we had to do the same thing another time, we printed it out. But yeah, I forgot the first one was a literal. He unrolled the thing. It was crazy. It unrolled. Yeah, it’s crazy. And then we had to sit around for hours for Daniel Radcliffe to show up. And he was a joy. He was a joy. He was a joy. Episode 56. That was the Carolina Reaper. That’s still the thing that is more often than anything the thing that people talk about if they see us out on the street. Episode 110 was our first weirdest E-bay, where Stevie was- Oh, really? The host. Well, okay, so Stevie, yeah. Wrapping up 2014. At what point did Stevie start becoming the voice of the goddess off camera? I don’t know. ‘Cause I know that season four, episode 64, we did the movie setting game, which was the first time that we had… We’re like, let’s put a title screen on this. We still didn’t say, “It’s time for,” but we called it something impromptu, and like Jason made a title screen. Jason was the off-screen voice for those games, so I don’t know exactly when that switched, but by this point, Stevie was not only, she did that on camera what was doing stuff off camera, I’m sure, by that point. So then let’s go to season seven. All right. January 2015, we had a new wheel with 24 spaces. That was a big moment. Yeah. We would have variety episodes that were, they were so question-based, so I remember that we would take questions from mythical beast and we would use those, the writers would then pitch us comedy bits to do. Like someone gave feedback on how I was, like, we took a comment about how I made Eddie eat something that he didn’t want to eat, and I was kind of being a jerk to him. And so they were like, you were like, yeah, it actually happens a lot, and we cut to a sketch of hidden camera footage of me being a tyrant around the studio. So we were still trying to all different types of things in like these many variety episodes. It got 5 million views, or it does at this point. ‘Cause we called it “Link Is A Tyrant.” We also started “Song Biscuits.” So this was a new thing. It was like, all right, not just doing an “Ear Biscuit,” and having them come on the show. But that was a weekend series. Yeah, but we got… I mean, that was ambitious. That was kind of a, “Hey, you’re gonna come on a podcast, and then you’re gonna write a song with us.” I wouldn’t have said yes to that. We made it easy for people, man. They didn’t have to do much. Yeah, but, I was like, man, that was asking a lot of people. But, okay. Yeah, and like you said before that, there was the wheel of mythicality animations again. So, I’m thinking about where this decision leads. That’s one of the fascinating things for me is that we make a decision for whatever reason we were making it at the time, and then just making the decision then leads to something else. So I would say that decisions like this to do song biscuits on the weekend… Okay, maybe what we were thinking, I dunno, one of the things we were thinking was man, like we’ve gotten to this point where we’re putting so much time into “Good Mythical Morning.” It doesn’t really justify itself to put all this time into a music video on our main channel, unless it’s sponsored. And even then sometimes it would be weeks or months of work for one piece of content, right? Whereas we can do as well with GMM. So we were like, okay, well we’re still really good at writing songs. Let’s make it something that’s more interactive, and quicker, and that’s what led to doing Song Biscuits, and hey, why didn’t we put that on the Rhett and Link channel? Well, again, at this point in season seven there’s all this traction on “Good Mythical Morning,” so it’s like, this is the place that people’s eyeballs are, so let’s put it on the weekend, on the GMM channel. That decision led to things like mythical kitchen, right? Because mythical kitchen, before it was mythical kitchen, it was a weekend show, you know, where Josh would make something on the weekend, and I don’t know how long that went. Yeah, I can get into some of that, but yeah, for this, and it was also we’re trying to promote this podcast through- Yeah, right. Our channel that’s- ‘Cause it was still guest-based. “Ear Biscuits” was guest based at the time. 2015, we go into the fall for season eight. We were done with “Song Biscuits,” and we started them releasing the animated versions of those as a music video. We used to do that. The backup plan continued. We did the cereal bowl bath on episode five. We really weren’t having a lot of guests, but episode 55 was when we had Shay Mitchell come on, because… there was some sort of connection that like, she actually wanted to come on our show, and I had to eat, I ate a live beetle. I’m not proud of that. And we had, episode 45 we had Smosh on the show. Yes, so we started to- Ian and Anthony, at the time. I think we had them on “Ear Biscuits,” and that was like a cross-promotion instead of doing a song biscuit, ’cause I guess we were done with those. It’s like, maybe we can double up. We had already gone to “Pirates vs. Ninjas” for debatarama. Yeah, that- That was the beginning of the end for the debates, if I recall correctly. Didn’t work that well. Episode 91, we did “Will it Pie?” which is the only will it on location. Yeah, out in front of the pie hole. Nobody really cared that… It was interesting, but it wasn’t anything to continue. It didn’t add anything. No, it didn’t add anything. So then- Which I think is an important point to register, because it’s just like, oh, well this episode required traveling to a place, setting up, and it’s like, oh, this will be cool. Breath of fresh air, literally, but also makes the show feel like it could go anywhere. And you’re like, oh, it didn’t translate into anything else. We could have just been at the desk. Let’s just be at the desk. January of 2016, season nine. That’s when we got that new desert intro, and it was my new haircut. 2016. Wow, it’s been that long. It’s been that long. Will it’s we’re still the biggest thing, but we were doing games, we were doing ranking stuff, we were still doing lists. Episode 43, “Can You Hear Colors?” So we’re doing experiments. I mean, we were trying a bunch of different taste test stuff, like the flavored oxygen taste test, physical challenges. Like, we were doing these weird, like we would invent our own physical challenges, and that, like magnetized mullets, magnified mazes, like all these weird physical challenges. That didn’t last too long. But episode 62, I think is still our most viewed video ever, “Game Show Cheaters.” “Amazing Game Show Cheaters.” Which was just an anomaly. That thing blew up way after the fact. Something happened with the YouTube system that kept sending this video as a suggested video. You can see where the views came from, and it was always a suggested video that was popping up for people. And people want to click on that. And they just like, we always have- Cheater during the showcase showdown. Yeah, we put a arrow at the cheater. We had an extras channel that we were doing “Good Mythical Crew,” but then we moved that show, “Good Mythical Crew” to Saturdays where we would have like, Mike or Alex or Chase, like showing them how they would, what now is behind the mythicality on the mythical society, basically, is something that we started in 2016, starting to feature the crew, and show behind the scenes content. But also there was, you’ve sort of skipped over the middle thing, because that was, again, it was a Saturday launch for something that then became it’s own channel for a certain amount of time. Well, there was an extra channel, and then we were, it wasn’t called this is mythical yet, and we were moving some, so that was the main thing, the good medical crew. Right, yeah. This is when we broke 10 million subscribers, and had our 900th episode. Episode 105, “Will It Burger?” That was the first mythical chef Josh appearance. This is when we broke 10 million, because earlier you said we broke 10 million at the end of 2015. Yeah, it was episode 70, so at the beginning of 2016. Okay. So it was still like, basically two years. I saw a picture two years ago. Two years, almost two years exactly. So then Josh showed up, but then he went away again for like a while. He only helped us in that one episode. And then episode 120, that’s when we announced “Buddy System” season one. So like all of this stuff was happening back then, around this time, season 9, going into season 10. Season 10… episode 54, we released “Buddy System,” we did the conjoined twin challenge, and we celebrated the 1000th episode. We also did, it looks like our first ever retrospective episodes around the holidays. Right. Very different thumbnail strategy, like top 10 Link gags, ridiculous Rhett reactions, Rhett and Link can’t stop laughing. They were shorter, but this was sort of the precursor to what we do now, which is like the top five moments. Yeah, we ended that right before we did those retrospectives, we released episode 102, which was the international Christmas food. So we were throwing darts at the end of 2016. So the very, very beginning, the first time we did that, we were already throwing darts. All right, so now we’re in January, 2017 for season 11. This is when we had mythical channel, throwing things over there, but we were still doing the good medical crew episodes, I think on Saturday, on GMM. But we weren’t having guests unless we had a connection to them, like Myam on “What’s on My Head?” for episode 33. I was the human nacho in episode 65, episode 69. That became a thing. Yeah, that became a thing. Discontinued snack taste test, started back then in episode 69. And then after around episode 83 is when we announced “Buddy System” season two, and that’s when we started doing good mythical summer for the first time. Yeah, so a couple of things were happening there. So with buddy system going into season two, at this point, again, we were putting it on the Good Mythical Morning channel. Even though we didn’t want to. And that was just because, by that time, again, there was so much focus on GMM, and it’s so difficult to like, keep this level of content up, and also make a scripted show, do the podcast, do the weekend series that it was like, okay, there’s not a lot happening on the main channel. Now we just call it Rhett and Link channel, ’cause it’s definitely not the main channel. So yeah, it was like, this is a little bit weird to put this on GMM, but it probably will get more views. I don’t know if that was true, if it would’ve gotten more views if we put it on the Rhett and Link channel. We had to announce it during this season so we could explain why we were doing good mythical summer, and we were having guest hosts. It’s like, “Why are you guys going away? What is it you’re doing?” So we would start teasing it, but then it wasn’t until season 12, that fall, when it actually started coming out. A lot of things happened in season 12. I mean, we had our new stop motion animation, episode three was our brosectomies. Oh, wow. We released our “Book of Mythicality” in episode 37, and announced a tour for that. Episode 44, it was our first leaving things in Coke. Episode 52 was our last episode before we switched over to GMM 22 in the middle of the season. Wow, so there was so much stuff happening at this point. I’m thinking about, I’m trying to like think beyond just what was, there’s so much happening with “Good Mythical Morning.” Yeah, It was now, I mean, just getting vasectomies would have been enough for that. Now, one thing I will say by season 12, which was what year? 2017. So 2017, like if you go in the back end, and you look at the engagement and the views and all that stuff. So again, there was this sort of incredible time of like 2014, 2015, 2016, like this three-year period in which there was this incredible amount of views and incredible amount of audience growth. Like you said, like breaking 10 million subscribers. 2017 sort of represented a little bit of a slow, things were beginning to slow down. Now this wasn’t- I would say level out. You know? Yeah, yeah. Well, the growth was the growth was slowing down. Like, this explosive growth was slowing down. And then if you just look at the numbers, what you won’t see is you won’t see an episode that has 12, 15, 18, 20 million views like some of those ones that had broken out during that time. Now, again, that’s not a function of a strategy change on our part, it’s just a function of the change of audience tastes and also the YouTube platform. So we’re kind of like, okay, this is maybe the new normal for where this thing’s just shaking out. In the meantime, doing all this other stuff, like you mentioned the book, the tour, the show, and then YouTube knocks on our door and says, “Hey, do you want to,” they actually said, “Do you want to do a good mythical night, or good mythical evening? Like a daily nightly show in addition to your daily show?” We were like, “Do you? I mean, there’s only two of us. We have a lot of help, but there’s still only to see these two guys.” That turned into well, let’s apply those changes to “Good Mythical Morning” itself, and hence GMM 22. We call it 22 because it was, you know, a half hour of television is actually just 22 minutes of content. So we were trying to make four videos that totaled up to roughly 22 minutes of content, because- There was a little bit of potential hope, and actually, this was discussed is, would maybe that show in its entirety end up on linear television at some point, like there was a discussion about that. It was crazy that that was a discussion, but that was a discussion. Most of the discussions were about click the green border. Yeah, oh yeah. We’re not gonna talk negatively about GMM 22. We’ve done enough of that. I’ll present the positive sides of it. You know, this was the first, like we accelerated how big our team was, how big our set was. There was an injection of creativity that, where we had to make all these different videos. We had to make four videos a day instead of one. So we were willing to try things and say, okay, one of these or two of these segments are gonna be the things you expect, and they’re gonna perform well. Like episode 59, freezing our bodies. This is gonna work, we’re gonna go to a cryogenic therapy place. Then we’re gonna come back to the set and do Big Mac versus Whopper, and that’s gonna perform really well, and then we’re gonna do this silly invention thing where we wear sauna pants, which we just made, and then we’re gonna do this very quick thing called censored kissing game, which the writers, we really had to push the writers to come up with comedy bits that then where we can play fun games, or quick improv type things. So we were reapplying our efforts and lessons from way back with this is “The Mythical Show”, which was a half hour and saying, well, you know, we’re not gonna make a 30 minute video, we’re gonna make each of these internet videos, and then there’s room for experimentation. And because of that, we did learn a lot, but we had to do things like we have to have a teleprompter. This was the beginning of that. This is when we started having a teleprompter instead of like, trying to commit stuff to memory for just a few seconds, and then say it in twice as much time as it needs to take, and declare it with a lot more prep than we have time to give to it. And to clarify, okay, so when we talk about what’s scripted and what’s not scripted on “Good Mythical Morning,” so for a very, very long time, maybe not from the very beginning, but definitely their early seasons, what we had scripted was, okay, at the beginning of this thing, when the camera turns on and we say good mythical morning, the things that we’re going to say right at the top are essentially scripted. It started loose, and it was like, okay, I’ve got a little thing I’m gonna say, and then you’re like, okay, here’s how I’m gonna react to it. Then it slowly evolved to a place where it was, I think literally written down, and you would look at it and be like, okay, I think I could say that. Again, this is just the intro, just like the first minute or so of the show, ’cause we wanted to quickly and efficiently get into the good stuff, and set it up in the right way, orient people, maybe there were rules or whatever. So yeah, so that was the existing system. And then, but what would happen sometimes is we would have this sheet of paper, and we’d be trying to get it, and we’d go through 2, 3, 4 takes sometimes just getting the takeoff of the show done. Which is very frustrating. And it’s taking a bunch of time, and I think, all along… I can’t remember who it was if it was Stevie, or whoever it was was like, what about a teleprompter? We were very anti-teleprompter because if you know what it looks like when somebody is reading a teleprompter, you know what it looks like when somebody is reading a teleprompter, right? Yeah. And then that makes the show feel less authentic. And plus, we were self-conscious about it, but we basically knew we had to figure it out. We had to utilize it for the show openings, and so it was just one of those things that made GMM 22 feel off at the beginning. It wasn’t just about the fact that it was the wrong color, and that we’re using different cameras. There was a lot of transitions that shouldn’t have impacted the audience experience that did, because there were so many things that we were changing in our experience behind the scenes. So like, using a teleprompter, and the specifics of how we were using it. But that ended up being a good thing, it’s like forcing us to figure out what are our terms for using this tool. We learned when not to use it, ’cause I think we overdid it in certain times. Yeah. And we also got better at, you know, if you want to look and you want to follow our eyes and get really specific you, I mean, you probably, if you watched a show enough, you know when it’s happening, but we got better at it. So somebody who’s coming into the show for the first time doesn’t feel like, “I’m walking into this stiff newscaster situation.” We also had writers writing more comedy bits that we were figuring out, is this for us? Are we… Do we want, do we enjoy this? Are we good at it? Can we take someone else’s joke and say it as our own? There was a lot of… or work within an improv bit where it’s like, we’re gonna be sucking helium and saying… and then ranting about things that are, again, on a teleprompter. And a lot of things didn’t work, but- Yeah. It was great to have to force ourselves to try these things, and at least have these segments that were like our bread and butter and that we knew were gonna work. We also had guests come in, we had a dedicated effort to book guests like through traditional means, like… A booking agent. That’s how you get “Weird Al” Yankovic to come on the show. That’s how you get in touch with Jack Black to come on and sing “Silent Night” for episode 85. We also, at the end of that year, episode 84, we made the “Christmas Booty” music video. Decided to re-engage then. All we had done was announced buddy system season two, none of it came out until season 13, January of 2018. We reduced our number of videos from four to three per episode, but we were continuing to do the segmented GMM 22. At the end of 2017, it was during this season that we were releasing “Buddy System” season two. It was all happening at the same time. Yeah, it’s also when I started gonna therapy. Yeah, that was freaking crazy. Well, you know, there’s a couple of other elements too, that this is not the kind of thing that we typically think about or talk about, but I’m sure that if we were to talk to some of the folks who work more on the production side of GMM, a lot of the things that we do now in terms of the way thumbnails are created, the way that graphics are created, the way the editing workflow, the audio workflow, all this back-end stuff that enables the show to happen every single day, those efficiencies were developed during GMM 22. That’s not something that we often think about, but anything that worked, we kept. What didn’t work, which namely was doing three or four or five videos every single day didn’t work on a number of levels, but there’s so many things that we took forward. Yeah, we learn how to work with guests, and so then, well, I won’t get ahead of myself, because that’s the second half of GMM 22 in January, 2018. That’s episode 12 is when we did fancy fast food, big Mac. So it’s like, that is a staple of the mythical kitchen channel now. We did our first munch madness tournament, which we ultimately… That was pretty pivotal. Yeah. Was it a multi-day thing? Oh yeah. And then episode 116, “Will It Churro?” was the last GMM 22, but then the things we continued from there were having guests on the show, being able to use the teleprompter for the stuff that we just needed to get through, like how a game works. Right. And the intros. So it was, there was, like you said, there was a lot of efficiencies that like, when we said okay, in season 14, we’re going back to one video a day, and then good mythical more, and that’s it. And it’ll forever be that way. We now have this capability. We were like, wait, if we can make three or four times this amount of content in an episode, then we can shoot things more efficiently. We can start shooting more episodes in a day. We can have more time to work on other things, and still keep “Good Mythical Morning,” at the caliber we had. ‘Cause one of the things that was happening with the book and the tour and “Buddy System,” which represented things that we really want to do, they become more difficult to enjoy when you just can’t really devote time to them, right? And then everything begins to feel a little bit like a burden, like, okay, GMM, when you want to work on this, GMM feels like, oh, that feels like a burden. Or it’s like when you’ve got GMM scheduled to shoot, and, “Well, I need to work on this book,” that begins to feel like a burden. Yeah. We knew that wasn’t sustainable, we also knew the thing that we didn’t want to do was stop doing anything. Right? That’s the one thing that we’ve never really considered is stopping doing anything. Right. It’s just finding a more efficient way to do it. But the beautiful thing about this is that it solved a lot of problems for us, but then nobody, like, I mean, I’m sure there’s somebody out there who’s like, “I was disappointed when you guys went back to one episode a day.” I know that that group of people exist, and you know what, I love you for that. But I think the vast majority of people were happy to get their good old traditional GMM back, but we were able to be like, “Hey, we can actually write this thing or do this thing.” “Oh, no, we didn’t do a buddy system season three, and we probably never will, but hey, we’re trying to do other things.” And we wouldn’t be able to do those if we hadn’t transitioned back. Season 14, episode 13 is when we did shuffleboard. So, you know we had confidence to do these bigger set pieces, like shuffleboard. Also that’s when we released the GMM billboards with the body paint. Well, and another thing that is beginning to happen here pretty consistently, I would say that it started, it started during season, it started a little bit during the GMM 22, and then it settles into itself a little bit more in season 14 is there’s a thumbnail strategy. There is a face, might be your face, might be my face, filling about half the screen, there’s words on the thumbnail itself, like big bold words. That’s happening more and more often, right? And we had it, yep. And then we had a long streak of high performers from episode 29 to episode 36, MRE taste tests, six and a half million, leaving things in nail polish, six and a half million, president foods. You remember Jordan was talking for the- Now we’re bringing the, I think we’re trying to bring that format back. Yeah. And this was the season that we launched LTAT. So GMM 22 went away, and then LTAT, we started that. Let’s keep going into season 15. Okay. I mean, this is start getting quicker, ’cause they’re getting closer to things that are just new news. January, 2019, we had that new collagey intro, and we were like, we’re doing the Rhett and Link live shows that we started in London. Right. So it was like the concert. Yeah, we got hypnotized. Yeah, you talked about Finland doesn’t exist. Like, what’s my superhero mask? Like episode 91 was “Hot Food Cold Vs Cold Food Hot.” It’s like getting into some of those things that we’re still doing now in 2019. Well, by the time season 15 rolled around, we were definitely getting this very clear message that was, “Hey, when you guys eat weird stuff, or when you guys just eat stuff, or when you guys talk about food, it’s gonna get more views.” And so the game began, or became finding ways to incorporate food into an episode while it’s still doing something completely original that doesn’t feel derivative. It’s still the name of the game in a lot of ways, but, as you can see, we continue to, and as we continue to continue to try to find things that aren’t eating food that people will get excited about. Yeah. And you know, it’s like once you get into 2019 where you got 16 million subscribers, we’re talking about the lost causes of bleak creek, we’ve got Josh doing a show on Sundays after LTAT, we’re launching alternate universe snacks with wheat fix. And then we did the buoys creek series, episode 1,630. And then by the end of that year we had done our bleak creek mini tour, and that was when we wrapped up LTAT. And then we’re all the way to season 17, 2020. Oh, dang. Launching gut-check, eating every Ben and Jerry’s flavor, not knowing that COVID’s right around the corner. So then we had the home split-screen episodes, then like slowly ramping up our ability to produce back in the studio to the point where by episode 1789, we’ve got this huge putt putt course, talking about the most expensive item at 7/11. Yeah, so just in bringing us closer to, bringing us to last year. Yeah, it’s funny as I think about- And present. You know, okay going from GMM 22, well, again, you think about the era’s, and the early GMM of figuring a bunch of stuff out, then that early middle era that we talked about with the incredible growth and the incredible engagement. Yeah, the takeoff. And then the thing that I think I wouldn’t have been able to process is, ’cause you could believe, like if you could think, and I think maybe some people do think this is just like, “Oh, you guys, you really screwed up when you did the GMM 22 thing, and that’s why their videos aren’t getting 20 million views,” or whatever. But looking at what actually happened is there’s this incredible growth, and then things sort of settled into a place just because that’s just what YouTube works, there’s changes that take place. And we kind of settled into something, and then when we did GMM 22, the views actually were, and the engagement sort of went up just because there were so many videos, but we abandoned that for all the reasons that we’ve covered, and those things, and if the efficiencies- It wasn’t refining, then it moved into a refining phase, which that Reddit thread called a Renaissance, where it was, yeah, it was a reinvigoration of what we do best, and doubling down on those things, you know? So you might start to get more homogeneity, but to capitalize on the success, and that was really working in that Renaissance phase. You know, this is the thing that we are always up against, and I’d like to spend a little bit of time just talking about the future of GMM, like what are the next 10 years of GMM, if that’s, you know, I don’t know how long we’re gonna do the show, but let’s just say that as we move into the second decade of GMM. Yeah. One of the things that you definitely see, and of course, listen, we are very in touch with what longtime mythical beasts think, and all the opinions that float around, and we value all that. We’re making this show for you. You know, we are also frustrated by some of the changes that have taken place on YouTube to reward that homogeneity, is that the word? Of a product and a predictability, and things that have led us to, yeah, the thumbnails pretty much feel the same, because whenever we divert from that, we get less clicks, right? And that’s something that, you know, you look at the most engaging YouTuber on the platform and Mr. Beast and look at his thumbnails, well, he’s doing the same thing, and he’s doing something different, but he’s doing it in the same way. He knows that that that’s the system, right? He’s not doing the old strategy, which is constantly trying something new. He’s like, “This is what works, I’m gonna keep doing it for as long as I can.” Yeah. It’s interesting when you’re making a video that’s a show that’s coming out five times a week, and we’re getting this feedback that this is what people are clicking on. Obviously they continue to click on things that are food related, but… we don’t just do this show to just fill a gap in our business strategy, right? Every day we think about “Good Mythical Morning” as this is still our bread and butter. Yeah, we want to do other things. We are doing other things, but this is still our bread and butter. This is still something that people depend on in a lot of ways, and enjoy. It’s not just some fluffy product that we want people to just, you know? It’s meaningful in people’s lives. It’s meaningful in our lives. But the thing that we’ve been talking about recently is as we find ourselves in this platform where consistency and predictability and homogeneity are rewarded, right? The more you can kind of center on a strategy on a channel and be like, this is the very specific thing that you’re getting from this channel, and this is the very specific thing that you’re getting from this channel. We’ve had this sort of existential crisis that we’ve been dealing with, which is, well, we’re trying to do a variety show. We’re trying to do a show that comes out every single day, and covers a lot of different ground, but we’re doing it in a place where specificity and focus has been rewarded more and more. You know, when people try a bunch of different things, they’re not necessarily getting rewarded. They tried a bunch of… we were actually, we were watching some TikTok videos last night, as a matter of fact. I’m talking about this phenomenon on TikTok where you can look at somebody’s channel and be like, oh, this is this guy. And he was trying, he’s doing like seven different characters. And all of a sudden, something clicked with one character, and then he finds him as that character. Now, every single video is that guy. And my question was, are we moving into a place on the internet when it comes to internet content where everyone just zeros in on the particular thing that is working, and then it’s like, you’ve got this, forgive the analogy, you’ve got this cow that’s got udders, and then you’re like, “Oh, everything’s coming out of this teat. Let’s just focus on this teat.” And you just, and this is what the internet does. The internet sends you to a particular teat, and you keep going back to that teat. Sucks the life out of a teat, and people suck that teat clean off. And what we are committed to doing, both as a company, as a brand, with our whole suite of content and everything we’re doing, and including GMM is we want you to suck on every teat, you know? We don’t want to just suck, we don’t want to just give you, we don’t want to just keep putting one teat out there for you to suck on. It sounds embarrassing, but I have to agree. We’ve got lots of teats, and we want you to suck on all of them to equal degrees. I think there’s a focus- When I think about the future, I’m just thinking about continuing to make sure the udder has got lots of teats, and it’s not just a one teat. We have a loyal viewership of mythical beasts that are gonna watch no matter what. And what we’re realizing is that this presents an opportunity for us and the team to say, “Okay, we are gonna determine to continue to experiment to assert that we are more than just people who shove food in our face.” Yeah. And we need to take risks creatively, and we need to try different things, and continue the story. You know, there’s ebbs and flows. There’s like, okay, we tried this thing, and then it, maybe you say the whole thing didn’t work. It’s like, that’s not true. There’s always things that carry on from everything you try. Yeah. And yeah, even the things that don’t work lead, they help direct you into the future. So, if you know we’re gonna run interference on this, but I think that’s where we’re at with GMM is saying, okay, how does it continue to evolve, you know? And how do we earmark a certain number of episodes where we’re gonna continue to push innovation and experimentation within the parameters of us being able to show up and do it within the construct of the show. Yeah, and this has been, you know, frankly, with the pandemic… we’ve had a great, great time during the pandemic as a company. Our team has been incredible being able to produce the show that we’ve been able to produce. It’s just phenomenal what we’ve been able to do, but it’s been tough. It’s been tough on our team, it’s been tough on our writers, especially who are isolated, you know, it’s like we have a production crew that comes in, but it’s still less than what we had pre-pandemic, right? And we don’t just bring in all the writers all the time, because it’s just unnecessary risk at this point, but believe that we’re getting towards the end of this thing, and we’re gonna get back to whatever our new normal is. One of the things that, I’m just saying this because there’s a level of excitement around the show. Yeah. And I think that as we think about not having the restrictions of a pandemic, getting our crew back here in this building, not yet, as soon as it’s safe. I mean, not talking about everybody back, and really doubling down. I’m just saying this to say that when I think about the future of GMM, even already this year, like me and you have been thinking about it and been engaging with it in a way that because we do so many other creative things, and we have such a great team, there are times where I kind of like, I don’t really have to think about GMM right now. I can just show up and be a part of the episodes in the way that I am, but I don’t have to think about… the future of it and like, where are we going with this? But right now there’s this focus on, this is something special, and it’s not gonna just fade off slowly and be this thing that is just a relic of the internet. Like the focus right now is like, hey, you know, this is incredible that we’ve been doing this for a decade and there’s been ups and there’s been downs. We’ve learned a whole lot, but we’re not just trying to settle into a comfortable thing. Like, we’re still trying to innovate. We still will innovate. We’re gonna be trying newer, bolder things this year than we did last year, you know? We’ve never been more focused on that. And the appreciation that I have with this process that I went through of looking back through all of this is that like, it’s a continuation of what we’ve done. It’s like the reason why the show has gone on so long, and will continue to go on, is that it’s constantly changing. It’s never just one thing. It’s most usually changes are not drastic, but they’re over the course, you know, you discover things, you realize we discovered things, and then you apply those things, and so that’s gonna continue to happen. So I don’t anticipate a drastic change in “Good Mythical Morning,” but I fully expect a continued evolution of the show, and I do sense that we’re at a juncture where over the course of this year, it’s going to, as we spend our time looking backwards over 10 years, we’ve done our celebration, and now it’s, all right, we’re continuing to push forward, creatively, and so that we can define what the show is gonna look like 10 years from now. Yeah. Over time. And like you said, you know, and this is actually one of the things that’s given us this sort of, I think, a newfound sense of… We tend to, like lots of people in this business, and lots of people in entertainment in general, and probably just lots of people around the world, sometimes you begin to let a little too much fear creep into the way that you think about things, right? Yeah. So I think when you’ve been doing something like this for as long as we have, and you’ve kind of experienced the level of success that we have, and you’ve seen ups and downs, anytime there’s a down, fear creeps in. It’s like, oh, well, okay, what? And then fear doesn’t lead to innovation. A lot of times, a lot of times for people fear leads to taking less risks. You get scared and you’re like, “I don’t want to go, I don’t want to go into the deep end. I don’t want to try that.” And we kind of recognize that, and of course, we’ve had the restrictions of the pandemic, which restricted the ability to really innovate in big ways. But because we have that, I don’t know what the number of people specifically is, but there are a number of you out there who, like Link said, you watch every single day, like you’re just a GMM watcher. It’s part of your daily routine, or maybe you watch it all on Saturday, but through the ups and downs and the changes, you’ve watched the show. And you actually give us the ability to take risks, because what we found is, regardless of what we do, there’s a certain number of people who are like, “Hey, I’m showing up. This is what I do. I support you guys.” Knowing that and embracing that has really given us this confidence to be like, man, you really can’t, we’ve got nothing to lose by really getting experimental. Yeah, it’s a great place to be in to have 10 years under our belt, and to know that we’ve got that loyal connection with those mythical beasts, and it’s extremely comforting, and it makes this exciting. And you know what? As much as we talk about clicks and views, and the reason we talk and think about that is because we’re trying to support a business here with a lot of staff. But when we think about GMM, I think I speak for both of us when I say this, when we think about GMM, and we think about what we’re doing, and we think about the person that we’re talking to, I’m not thinking about that person who just clicks on a video every once in a while. I’m thinking about the person who, I’m thinking about a mythical beasts. Yeah. I’m thinking about a mythical beast who is coming back, you know? And when we continue a dumb bit, I don’t re-explain the bit like this is your first time, I just take it for granted that this bit is for you who’ve been watching, you know? And if you are watching for the first time, well, you’ll catch up, you’ll catch on, you know? It’s like stepping into a game after everybody started playing it. You’ll figure it out. I think I anticipated that I would be a lot more sentimental at celebrating 10 years of GMM. Well why don’t you cry? I think the reason why is because it’s not over, you know? We’re already looking forward, and I don’t think we’ve ever stopped looking forward. So yeah, it’s nice to look back and celebrate on GMM over this past week, to do that, and it has been special, but having this overwhelming sense of, I’m not gonna say we’re just getting started, because that’s cheesy. We’re not. We’ve done this for 10 years. Actually, we’re saying that at the beginning of every episode this season. We’re just getting to started, but you know what I’m saying? Yeah. It ain’t over. So… I’m not prone to get too sentimental about something that I’m in the middle of and very excited about, and as we look forward. So, I’ll just leave it at that, no tears. Yeah, I mean, if the show ends at some point, which for whatever reason it will, I mean, there’s gonna be some circumstances that lead to it ending at some point, I’ll cry then. Shit-right. Shit-right. Shit. You shit-right, man. Okay. I got a quick rec. I’ve been listening to the audible version of the book “Will,” Will Smith’s autobiography. Oh, that’s cool. Seen the cover. You know, being a huge fan of… Like, being our age, like growing up and experiencing like the DJ Jazzy Jeff and the “Fresh Prince” era as a middle schooler, and really loving music documentaries. Like, I loved the first third of his, book because it was about that. And so if you’re my age and you’re into that stuff, you’ll be into hearing the stories behind the making of everything that led to those first two albums. And then the stories of him, the story of him getting to be “The Fresh Prince of Bel-Air.” There’s some shorter stories out there on YouTube that are absolutely amazing, but hearing him perform his book, he doesn’t just read his book, he performs his book. Like, he does impressions of every single, of so many people, and you can tell it’s like, these are like his grandma, and Jeff, and Quincy Jones. And so it’s really great stories. And then, I got to say, I wasn’t a huge fan of Will Smith, the actor, I was just, you know, more of the musician, and “Fresh Prince,” but I actually couldn’t have told you that, like, yeah, he was pretty much, for a long time, the biggest star on the planet, like- Yeah, It seems very obvious, but like, I wasn’t a fan of his movies, but then seeing that, and like, so as a business owner and leader, I enjoyed the second half of the book in terms of like, him saying, okay, as an artist, this is what I’m going after, and this is the team I’m surrounding myself with, and this is how we’re gonna go about it. And there’s also the partner aspect of like, you know, being a husband, being a dad, like all that stuff was pretty cool too. It’s pretty inspiring. A lot of fun to listen to, some really good stories in there. So if that floats your boat, I highly recommend. “Will.” “Will,” the Audible book. Well, thanks for joining us. Thanks for joining us for 10 years, if you’re one of those. Here’s to 10 more. Yeah. Hashtag “Ear Biscuits.” 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.