EB 326: How We Became a Duo – Middle School Years

Welcome to “Ear Biscuits”, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I’m Link. And I’m Rhett. This week here at the round table of dim lighting, we are continuing our friendship series, friendship throughout the years with moving into the middle school year. So we started last time talking about elementary school. Now we’re moving on to middle school, which for us was seventh and eighth grade. Just a two-year period, but a very substantial two-year period in our lives and in our friendship. Developmentally, and yeah, the fact that we’re- Did you get pubes during that time? Looking at things… Oh, that’s a teaser. Sure, I’ll weigh in on that one. I entered with pubes. Looking. Just so you know. Looking at it through. Came right through the seventh grade door with pubes. I’m making a point. Oh, sorry, sorry, sorry, I’m making pube jokes. Yeah, I really don’t wanna talk about… Okay. I’ll save this for later. Pubes at this point That’s why I like graciously said, oh, it’s a teaser. Meaning, we’ll talk about that later and maybe he’ll forget. Oh no, I won’t now . But it seems that you wanna talk about it now. I like having this series because it re-contextualizes some stories we’ve already told, helps us access experiences maybe we haven’t talked about ever, because we’re looking at time periods we’ve talked about before, now middle school, but through the lens of, well, what was our friendship like and how was it developing? What was the dynamic at that stage, you know? So it kinda gets at new things through that. So I’m looking forward to it. It’s like therapy without a therapist. Ah, yeah, I just think that we tend, as we said with the elementary school, when you tend to have this blanket statement about being best friends and like, oh, they were always so close and they always had this dynamic, but there was… I mean. A development. Yeah, it was an evolution and everything’s changing in middle school. And I’m wondering how our perspectives differ on how that impacted our friendship positively and negatively. So I wanna get into that. But we should get into something else first. It’s been a couple of weeks since we launched the new Mythical logo and we thought this was the best forum for us to talk to each other, and to you, about the response that we got and clarify a couple of things. So kind of by design, it’s been a few weeks, it’s been three weeks-ish, or maybe a little bit more, since a lot of chattering conversation amongst the Mythical Beasts has happened. So having kind of this delayed conversation is also something we can talk about, ’cause that’s the decision we made that we just didn’t wanna jump into the fray, but I guess we should set the stage a little bit. Well, yeah, I mean, for those of you who don’t know, we changed the official Mythical logo a few weeks ago and the first sort of indication that that was happening, I think, is one of the things that we got wrong. So the way that it works if you’re a member the Mythical Society, is you get a preview email of what’s to come. Whether that’s new merch or whatever, in this case it was new merch. So you’re the first to know of any big announcement in the world of Mythicality. And so, that- Mythical society members are the first to know via this email. And on GMM on the following Monday, what we were gonna announce the logo and announce the new merch collection with the logo. So on Friday before a holiday weekend, essentially, which is just typical, if we’re gonna announce something on Monday, that email usually goes out the week before. An email was sent out, and the thing that was emphasized in the email, wasn’t just that we were getting a new logo, but that if you wanted to get Randler merch, Randler being the mascot, the little mouse with antlers and wings, it’s been a mascot of Mythicality for a very long time. If you wanted to get Randler merch, you needed to act on it right now because that was going away. Now- It may have said forever, I don’t know. No it said. I hope not. The implication was that it was going away forever. It was an unfortunately worded thing. Right, so it seemed, it was an email about merch that seemed like it was an announcement about the new logo, which doesn’t have the Randler in it, being an announcement that the Randler was going away forever. Yeah, and so. And in a livestream. In the livestream on the society… We did clarify this the very next week. Which was on Tuesday of that week, we did clarify that Randler is not going away because that was one of the things that people were really responding to. And it was just something that it was, we’re blaming ourselves for accidentally seeming to imply that that was happening. When what we were trying to say is that that line, that iteration of the Randler as it exists as part of the company-wide logo is going away. So get it while you can get it in the same way that we always say about last chance stuff. And I think there was a bit of a marketing spin to it. Yeah. That, of course, we don’t write these emails, we can get into this a little bit later. But yeah, there was a bit of a marketing spin that was like, hey, this is going away, you emphasize the scarcity of it. If you want this particular hoodie with this particular Randler logo on it, we’re not making it anymore. But it got conflated with an announcement about the logo in general. And it really, the conversation unfortunately became about the Randler going away. Yeah. And that was never the plan. So honestly it wasn’t even an adjustment to fan reaction. It’s like, oh my gosh, they really love the Randler, so we gotta backtrack and say, we’re not taking it away. That was never the plan to take it away, so it wasn’t an adjustment. But we are taking responsibility for the communication that seemed to imply that, that caused a lot of consternation. Yeah, so it’s a bit unfortunate. I wanna come back to, maybe a little bit more a conversation about why we decided to change the logo and what we were thinking and how we’re feeling about that. But while we’re talking about miscommunication, I think it’s probably a good time to talk about a previous tweet that went out a week and a half before the logo, or a couple weeks before the logo was announced. Yes, and now we’re talking five or six weeks ago, but. Yeah, I mean, why not, right? So there was a tweet that went out that essentially said something along the lines of; I mean, if you wanna read it just so we can get it exactly right what was said, and then we can tell you what we were trying to say and then again what we, unfortunately, miscommunicated. I think the big note here for us- I don’t think we miscommunicated as much here, I think it was just left… Too open to interpretation. I’m on Twitter, but I’m. Mythical is art. I’m searching Twitter on Twitter. “Dear beasts, we value your enthusiasm and hearing your feedback on all things Mythical. However, lately we’ve seen a few of you directing questions, frustration and even anger at members of the crew, both on their personal social accounts and indirectly on public forums, which is unfair and not in the spirit of Mythicality. Please don’t cross those lines and always use the appropriate company channels to raise your concerns and constructive feedback.” And apparently this wasn’t as clear as we thought it was when we read it and said, yeah, this works because… The way that a lot of people interpreted this and it is your right to interpret it in any way you want to, but we’re going to clarify what we were trying to say, to try to clear it up. The way that a lot of people interpret it, is as if we were saying that you cannot criticize the things that we produce as a company. As a media company who puts media out in the world that we were trying to police what you say. Of course not. I don’t, that’s never been our intention. We understand that the whole idea is when you make something for an audience, that audience has an opinion and that the audience’s opinion matters. And if it’s negative, that matters, and we take that into account. I kinda think that’s wrapped up in, we value your enthusiasm and hearing your feedback on all things Mythical. Yeah, yeah. Which is kind of exactly what we said, ’cause I just read it again. Yeah. The line that we were talking about is maybe when it comes to you didn’t get, something customer service related. Yeah. Or like, I have a question about my merch showing up or a stipulation about something else regarding any of the stuff that we do from a customer service standpoint. Yeah, let’s be let specific, we were talking about the stuff that we sell, the merch. That’s what we were talking about. People get upset about getting the wrong size, not getting something on time. And being delayed, And then reaching out to the members of the Mythical crew, who that is their job, they work in that department. But tracking them down on their personal socials or talking about them personally. Just because you know that’s somebody’s job, that doesn’t mean you go to the, you cross the line to their personal socials. I don’t even care if they talk about their work and stuff on that. It’s like everybody talks about their lives on their social. That doesn’t mean that you can make it a- It’s not a valid place for customer support. Well, we have provided. Feedback or complaints. We have provided official company avenues that you can go through to lodge those complaints and those complaints get heard and those complaints get considered and answered. Absolutely. So we wanna, we’re sticking up for the Mythical crew here, our team, so that they can have a healthy work-life balance so that fans aren’t coming into their personal timelines and in their personal space online and… And these are specifically people who aren’t public personalities. Making complaints. So, there’s a distinction between someone who has a show, what we would call talent, for lack of a better word. I hate that word because it makes it seem like only people on camera have talent. But that’s just the industry term for people who have a show. We’re not saying you can’t criticize the shows that we make. We’re just saying that if somebody works for Mythical in a non-public capacity, and then you’re reaching out to them on their socials, or you’re talking about them publicly, we’re standing up for them and saying, they didn’t sign up for that. And we don’t want them to be harassed, especially because we’ve provided avenues and channels for you to file your complaints. It’s not just harassment, it’s even. Engagement. Even polite engagement on your personal side is crossing a line that we wanna help preserve their work-life balance and boundaries. So when it starts to intrude, it’s like we wanna stand up for our employees. And again, there were some things in that, in the way that it’s worded, I completely get it. You could think that what we were saying is that we don’t wanna be criticized. So if you took it that way, we’re again, we’re blaming ourselves for miscommunication. The thing that we’re learning- I’m not being too hard on ourselves, but you know, it’s always hard to know how things. But I am. I am, okay. Okay. So I am being hard on ourselves because this communication is incredibly delicate, right? And also, I think one of the things that’s hitting me is it is a really cool thing to have a brand, to have something that people care about enough to have an opinion about. That’s a privileged position. For people to care enough to have an opinion about the decisions that you make is something that ultimately that’s the positive that I take away from this is that, well, if you didn’t care, you wouldn’t say anything. So you do care, and so you are passionately engaging and we appreciate that. Our end of the bargain needs to be that we communicate things as clearly as possible, but it also is a little bit daunting. And it is the reason that we did not immediately respond to all of the comments about that tweet and all of the comments about the logo and the lack of the Randler and all that because 99 times out of 100. 99 times out of 100, when you try to clarify and say something else you end up saying something else that you didn’t mean to say, we’re doing, I’m sure, I am 100,000% sure that I am saying something within this 15 minute span that will be then misinterpreted by someone else. It is the nature of communication. We waited so that all the energy would die down a little bit, as opposed to getting into a back and forth and trying to clarify, then, oh, well what about this? And then you have to clarify, and it becomes this endless thing. It’s not an easy thing. So it’s just like, we’ll just wait a little bit and just talk about it naturally, the way that we’ve processed it, but not try to get into this back and forth where we’re trying to clarify and just end up digging a bigger hole than we’ve already dug by miscommunicating in the first place now. Now, so back to the logo. Well, first of all, as a side note about the tweet about team members and boundaries. I was feeling bad for Trevor, ’cause all these people were, it was all this conjecture about, well Trevor just launched his podcast and people are being hard on him. It’s like, I’m ecstatic. And my conversation is with Trevor, he’s off to the races, man. It’s like. Yeah. And he’s a public persona that he can take criticism, publicly. That’s the other side of the boundary, the appropriate side. But that’s not what it was about at all. It made it seem like we were saying, we just launched something and you’re not happy with it. We did not make it seem that way, but it was open enough to interpretation that people took in and ran with it that way. So it’s like, we, I just wish we would been more specific, but again, we didn’t want, well, we’re being more specific now. And again, and I think we haven’t really talked about this that much, but my application, my lesson learned is just don’t say anything. Honestly. My application moving forward, is that if I go back and do that again, I would try to speak directly with the people who were being singled out on Twitter and help them develop tools to deal with it rather than bring and making it a public thing, which just stirs up a bunch of stuff and misinterpretation. I don’t know, cause I. It’s difficult to know what to do. It is, and I think the other way to look at it is, it’s been confusing, it hasn’t been perfect. An expectation of perfection in communication is stupid. But that is what the expectation is. Okay. Today, to clarify. But we can’t live up to that standard. But I think this process maybe is helpful for everybody, ’cause I think you would agree that we’re proud that we took up for our team members and that we’re valuing, even if we’re misinterpreted or people start to think the wrong thing about us, that we don’t want criticism, I’d rather have that than have our employees be put in a compromising position. And that’s why we did it. And having it, so I do think we made the right decision. And that’s why I retweeted it because I don’t do a lot of Twitter, but the reason I retweeted that was just like, I want those team members to know that I care and that I wanna defend them. Yeah, so I don’t wish we didn’t do it. I just think that even though But I don’t wanna make it worse accidentally. What we’re talking about right now, I don’t think makes it worse. I do think you can clarify and make things better, and I think that’s what’s happened. Back to the logo. And well, would you agree with that? Because the last thing you said was if I had to do it over again, I wouldn’t do it. But I’m counterpointing that. I agree with the spirit of what you’re saying, but I don’t. It depends on how people respond to this conversation? It’s one of those things that I’m just, I’m not smart enough and I don’t think that anyone at our company is smart enough to communicate in a way that will be completely, perfectly received by everyone. And so my tendency is just to be like, just do the things that you want to do as a company. Don’t explain the decisions, don’t defend the decisions because it just feels like a lose-lose. But you know me, I love to try to explain myself. I’m trying to learn how to explain myself less. Well, and to me, I think the thing that I value is an understanding with the Mythical Beasts. And if there’s confusion, if we’re not on the same page or if we’re misunderstood, or if we’re misunderstanding them or individuals in the community, I wanna resolve that. It is a relationship. Which again, to come back to the logo, we’re excited about the logo, we like the new logo. It’s very calculated in a lot of ways. It was never our intention to, with taking the Randler out of the logo, there was a rationale associated with that, but it was never our intention to get rid of the Randler entirely. It never even crossed our minds. That was not a conversation we had that we were eradicating the Randler. We were just trying to take the Randler out of the broadest and most outward facing expression of Mythical, which represents us and everything else that we produce and everything else that we’re going to produce as a company. We wanted something that was broader and less specific just for the broadest company logo. And from an outward facing perspective, your logo communicates not to everybody on the inside, it communicates a lot to the people on the outside who are being introduced. And the fact of the matter is, the Randler in that context of an outward facing logo, it was confusing to people because it sent- Who’ve never heard of Mythical. Who’ve never heard of Mythical because it sent this visual cue that this is a fantasy brand. This might be a sci-fi brand, this might be a- Well, it reinforces the misconception that we’re trying to use the word Mythical in the traditional sense. When in reality, for all these years, we’ve been trying to redefine the word Mythical. Mythical doesn’t mean the traditional, make-believe, Mythical creatures. Yes, we use that imagery as a fandom because it just makes sense and it’s cool and Mythical Beasts is cool. But our content has zero to do with that! And so it’s really confusing to people when you’re saying this is who we are, this is where we stand for. So this is a change, it’s actually been a long time coming in terms of thinking about, we’ve recognized it both internally and also as we’ve gone through like brand exploration processes, we’ve learned that a lot of people, when they just see Mythical and they see this little magical creature there, they think, oh, these people must do some sort of fantasy thing. And so we’re like, okay, well that’s not what we do, we’re a lighthearted brand but that mascot’s important that mascot. Well, let me. I wanna get to the mascot thing, but just to sit a second with the squiggly M. Yeah. And this new thing. So we were excited about that because it would provide clarification. And I’ll go further to clarify, Mythical is a place that you can come to. It is where curiosity and comedy create. Laughter and curiosity. We can say it that way. It is where laughter and curiosity create meaningful community. Yeah. That’s what Mythical means to us. Right. So unfortunately, by making this headline in this one email about the Randler going away, parenthetically, just within the new merch line, we confused things and we sent the absolute backwards message to some Mythical Beasts who say, and I fully acknowledge that the Randler to many Mythical Beasts, maybe you, means… It means that community, it means that connection. Coming up with the concept of the Randler as a logo, naming it, designing it, designed by a fan and then redesigned for one of our logo, for a couple of our logos over the years and incorporating it into that. Incorporating it into a lot of other iconography as well said, this is a community. This is something that we’re doing and experiencing together. And it’s very important to all of us. The Randler is one of many representations of that. It’s not the only one. Yeah. But it is one, and you know what, we’re very sentimental when it comes to things. We’re still celebrating 10 years of Good Mythical Morning. Even months later it’s like, and we know that it all hinges on the strength of our community. Yeah. So we fully agree with the sentiment behind the feelings of the Randler, but when you take it- But we can also have a new logo that doesn’t have it in it and it doesn’t mean that community is not extremely important, a central part of what we’re doing. The relationship that we have with Mythical Beasts. Well, and to be specific. Is just as important as it’s ever been. And ironically, taking the Randler out of the largest, broadest, company-wide expression, is intended to be a step towards inclusivity, as opposed to you see it and it’s a barrier to entry. It backfired in the way we communicated that. Now, that does not mean that you have to like the logo. If you don’t like the logo, you don’t like the logo. I totally get that. We can kind of explain what we do like about the logo. We like the fact that the M itself in the Mythical becomes the logo that stands alone, which that’s not something we ever had before. We had to use the whole word or we had to just use the Randler. Now we can use a part of the word that actually stands for Mythical. We like the way it looks, we think it communicates that this is like sort of a winding road. And we’re kinda just going at this by the seat of our pants and we’re on this. That’s definitely how we always feel. And we’re very on this very long winding journey. That whole journey not the destination thing is our experience. Some people have noticed that there is seemingly a height difference in the M that’s relative to me and Link- That’s an illusion, it’s the same height. Both bumps. But that it’s backwards. Well, when we first saw this logo, we were like, oh, one of the cool things about this is it’s got like our height difference in it, but it’s technically backwards from the way that fans experienced it. We talked about this. So we tried it the other way. Everybody hated the way that it looked. Including us. But here’s the thing that it flipped a switch in my mind. I was like, you know the cool thing about keeping it this way, is that this is the perspective that you would have on our height difference if you were standing next to us, looking in the same direction. Not us over here and you over here looking at us, but if we all get on the same side of the line, we all get a line on the same perspective. When we all start moving together in the same direction, the Rhett and Link height difference would be the way that it is reflected in the Mythical logo. To me again, that was another like, aha! This is actually, if you really stop and think about it, even cooler. Now that may sound like I’m just trying to justify something, that’s a part of it, but also when I saw it that way and I was like, this actually becomes more meaningful to me when I’m like, well, I’m embracing it because I think it looks better but then when I see that it has this other really cool element, that’s just like when you’re reading a poem and you’re coming to your own interpretation. Sure. That’s how I’m seeing it now. I love that. And for me it’s cooler that way. I love that. And it’s, yeah, it’s a symbol of community. Yeah, and we’re all together facing the same way. And the Randler’s not dead, you don’t have to, he’s not retired. He’s gonna be around and we’re definitely not ruling out that he will come back in a new iteration or on his own shirt or what, you know, whatever. It’s like, that was never the intention. So if you love the Randler, the Randler’s not going away. Randler ain’t going away, he’s very special. But yeah, I don’t wanna keep getting into it, but like you think about Belvedere and how that mascot is incorporated into Good Mythical Morning intros and how that’s changed over the years. And, you know, if he went away for an intro, then he might come back for an intro. It doesn’t, you know, let’s not be so precious about this that we can’t change, especially when we’re excited about the evolution of the brand. And we wanted a new logo and we like it. But there’s so many things that we’re continuing to learn about communication and having a growing team. And I’m just being honest, I’m not trying to throw anybody under the bus, I’m actually saying what we have to learn in this and the responsibility that we have to take is that when you have a team, we got over 100 people working for us across Mythical and Smosh, and… Sometimes there’s sensitivities might get missed, or you might be looking at something through a certain lens of like, okay, I’m marketing these new line of sweatshirts and people need to know that the other ones are going away. So you kind of turn up the marketing in the subject line that we don’t see or approve, honestly. Yeah. Because we can’t, because we would literally sleep less than we already do if we were to do that. Yeah, we can’t do that. And so, it was a mistake and mistakes are made. It’s not the end of the world. It’s part of the, it’s something that we expect. And as leaders, I think is something that we have to learn that it’s part of the equation, but also say, what are our lessons learned here that we can convey, Hey, you may be newer to the team and the team’s growing, but this is what the Randler means to Mythical Beasts. Yeah. So there’s a level of sensitivity that we could have communicated. Yeah, so it’s a lesson- We could have done a better job. It’s a lesson learned for us. We don’t blame anybody for misinterpreting it, it was open to misinterpretation. We don’t blame anybody, we don’t have an issue with you if you have an issue with this decision. We don’t have an issue if you are mad that the Randler’s not a part of that company logo, we don’t have an issue if you don’t like the new logo. I will say that we are super excited about all of that and our team is super excited about it. So this is how we’re moving forward. But that doesn’t mean that you have to agree and we wouldn’t expect you to agree, and it doesn’t make you any less of a Mythical Beast. Nope. Because you don’t agree. I mean, that’s one of the things that I see some comments where people are like, you’re not a Mythical Beast if you don’t agree with them. Well, no, we’re not looking for everybody to fall in line. We want you to be genuinely and generally happy and excited about the things that we’re doing, but we know that the only people that we can please all the time, is us, and it’s not even that easy for us to do that. But that’s the only barometer that we have, is our own personal interest and desire, and our team as well, right? So that’s how we decide what we’re gonna do. And we usually have a really good barometer of how Mythical Beasts are gonna respond to something. Yeah, yeah. But it’s a bit of a shake up that these two things were misses in terms of our sixth sense of knowing how they’re gonna respond for different reasons. But again, it’s lessons learned for us and I’m just super excited about where, about the future of musically, I’m, ah, I mean Mythical. I just get so confused lately. I don’t know. It’s late, yeah, yeah. I mean, it’s very confusing. So thanks for hearing us out and thanks for being patient and for trusting us over the past three weeks, if you didn’t hear the little announcement in our livestream on the society. If this is the first you’re hearing of this, thanks for trusting us for the time it’s taken for this to come out. I think that’s something we wanna do, slow the pacing down here. No need to be as reactive. Yeah. We have an established relationship. Just because something shakes things up, I had to resist the urge, I know you did too, to like… Oh yeah. To like step in at the moment and let’s make a video right now, let’s clarify! That weekend when we were seeing all the comments, trust me, we were together, actually. When Link got back from his weekend outta town, he came straight over to the creative house on Presidents’ Day when no one was really supposed to be working. And we started figuring out what we were gonna say in a response video. And then we stopped because we said, listen, we don’t need to get, if we do this, we’re in an emotional place right now and we’re gonna end up saying something that we regret. And we’re gonna say something else that’s gonna be misinterpreted. So let’s just hold, clarify this one thing on the livestream and then let’s just talk about it on “Ear Biscuits”. And we’re gonna trust the Mythical Beasts, and then we’re going to trust that they’re gonna trust us in the meantime. So I think this is more relationship building and a little bit of boundary setting too. Okay, I feel good about it. Sorry that took all the time that it took. It was like a, was that like a business meeting? It was a mini podcast. All right. Okay, we’re gonna talk about middle school Rhett and Link. But first we wanna just… I don’t know if this. Oh, why don’t you read? This won’t be the… I wanna promote Stevie’s new podcast, which we want you to check out. But let’s just go full ad read on this thing ’cause I like the description of her podcast. Every good coming of age story finds excet- I’m sorry, brother. Dang it, man, you messed it up. Every good coming of age story finds its setting in high school. In hallways filled with lockers and anxiety, school dances with awkward poses, first relationships and heartbreaks, drivers licenses and drama club, lunchtime clicks and part-time jobs. There’s something unifying about the high school experience, whether good or bad, in the people you spend it with. For some people, those adolescent friends become lifelong companions, but for others, graduation day marks the end, and it did mark the end for Stevie and her high school best friend Naegheen, until now. Every week, host Stevie Wynne Levine, from Good Mythical Morning, and Naegheen Homaif- I can’t, see, I’m supposed to be the announcer and no one told me how to pronounce her last name. Okay, thanks for putting me in this situation. You’re welcome. Nageen H… Will unpack universal high school themes and topics, recounting their own personal experiences and individual perspectives in an effort to rekindle an old best friendship 15 years after they parted ways in robes and mortar boards. What’s a mortar board? I think that’s the graduation cap, brother. Can they bring their friendship back to life? Premiers Friday, March 18th. Friday, March 18th in the year 2022, Stevie. Oh, it’s called “Best Friends Back, Alright!” I didn’t even say the title. Stevie and Naegheen premier “Best Friends Back, Alright!” So it’s like one of those TikTok trends where it’s like, could you be a voiceover artist? And then you have to like do something. I completely failed that TikTok trend. This is not about you, this is about checking out her show. I’m excited about it, I like that dynamic of… What am I gonna learn about their friendship? It’s friendship based. And is it a new friend, is the friendship gonna work now? I mean, and is doing a podcast gonna make it easier or harder? Well, we’ll find out. I don’t know. All right, “Best Friends Back, Alright!” Let’s get into middle school. So for us, middle school was kind of a continuation of elementary school, Buies Creek Elementary, went from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade, but there was the middle school hallway. The whole thing was shaped like a Z. Well, a very straight Z. Like steps. And then you- What is that? That should be a letter. Why is that not a letter? So like the bottom right It’s like an L with a… of your Z is the… It’s like an H with the, if you look at a H and you just grab the top end on the left and the bottom end on the right and you tear ’em off. Yeah. That should be a letter. I guess knowing that layout of the school is not really the thing I wanted to, that was that important to No, no, I’m really interested in this. spend that much time on it. But over the years you would move up the elementary school hallway, and then you would start going to the next hallway, but that was like fifth grade, maybe sixth grade. But you weren’t considered, definitely sixth grade, but you weren’t considered middle school there until seventh grade. And the reason is because that’s when your class schedule changed from one teacher all day to multiple classes where you went to three different teachers. Yep, and we were in the same class for all of those. So we moved around together. Both years. Both years. All of the… Yeah, once you were in a class together, you stayed in that lump. Yeah. But you got a locker. Yeah, you got a locker. Locker for the first time. You could play sports because that was when you could get on the basketball team. Before that it was just- We both played on the soccer team. Before that we did done recreation soccer, but this was like school soccer. Yeah. School baseball. School basketball. So it was kinda cool that like your whole school career, you kinda saw this whole trajectory and you could see the middle schoolers. You could see those eighth graders coming into the lunch room and stuff. So it was like, you really had something to aspire to ’cause it was right there in front of you. And it wasn’t a huge, scary deal to go to the middle school because it was just going farther down the hall. It was one of the more easy, it was the easier transition that I can think of for most people having to go to a new whole new place and new friends. It’s everybody I was in school with before with the one new person from Nebraska that shows up. To me, this is all wrapped up in the talent show, which we have talked about before, but at the end of the year, it was those three teachers were in charge of putting the talent show on, so any student could sign up for what they wanted to do. And then there’d be that assembly during school hours where everybody would come in and sit in the auditorium and the seventh and eighth graders would perform their talents. And I had been thinking about this from, just intently from first grade. Oh yeah, ’cause it’s like, these are celebrities. The first time I ever saw. I was like, what in the world. In school celebrities getting up there. How do I get up there? Performing a song and there would always be this big grand finale, the biggest act would be at the end. And you’d go in there and you’d look forward to it, and then they would do it again that night for the parents who would come in, so you’d have two performances. So by the time- I didn’t even remember that. Yeah, by the time we were in seventh grade- And we had practiced in sixth grade because the fall festival, we did OPP and made it, are you down with Halloween, that was sixth grade. And we talked our way into that. Yep. There was not supposed to be a performance of any kind at that thing. And we were like, we gotta get ready for this talent show, we gotta know what it’s like to be up on the stage of this auditorium and perform for a full house. Yeah, so by the time, as seventh graders, we formed our posse and picked out our rap song that we were gonna perform. We did, um… We had a big posse. We did “Digital Underground”, same song, which had Tupac in it, and then we added on, and then our friend Ben Greenwood, he came out with his drum machine. Not on, though. And he didn’t turn it on? No, ’cause we played the track. That’s right. And we played a second song. But he had drum machine. We added a second song onto the end of it, maybe that was eighth grade. Seventh grade was huge because it was our first year doing it, and they didn’t put us last, but they put us close to last. And we really showed up the final act. I don’t even remember what the eighth graders did. Everybody forgot them. By the time we were eighth grade, we knew we were gonna do, “So What, So What, So What’s The Scenario” by A Tribe Called Quest. And we had more people in our posse, but it was a big deal. And one of the reasons we chose- That was like a victory lap, the seventh grade talent show was the really coming of age. We chose songs that had different parts, different rappers in it. ‘Cause you can represent, these people can each be represented by someone. And so the “Scenario” had what, like four, five people rapping in it? Maybe six. Man, those were the good old days. So yeah, just a picture. Oh gosh. That’s who we were at the time, we were just thinking about being on stage and performing and getting attention. But also, I was in a place where my sixth grade year had ended with my first ever girlfriend. A one month long relationship with Leslie, there’s a video on YouTube. ‘Cause she happens to be Link’s first girlfriend too, where we called her and reminisced. Yeah, on the vlog channel. ‘Cause yeah, seventh grade. Yeah, I found out, we were in different sixth grade classes, I find out you were dating her. And then I was like, first of all, this is how I find out. You didn’t tell me. That’s an indication of sixth grade being in different classes. You start going with Leslie and I didn’t know ahead of time. That’s an indicator about… That was just something that we didn’t talk about. Maybe we weren’t that close. Maybe it was just something you don’t talk about. No, I was only talking to the people that I felt were necessary to pull it off, which was her best friend, Amber, who then became my girlfriend in eighth grade. Right. But talking to you about it wouldn’t have caused it to happen so there was no reason to consult with you about it. Unless we were like really good friends, Rhett. I didn’t talk to anybody other than Tate. I talked to Tate, because Tate was also interested in her. Oh you were still trying to box him out. I did box him out. By telling him, “Dude, I’m going for Leslie.” Well, no, I think I said something like, “May the best man win, but just so you know, I’m also interested.” I’m sure you didn’t say, “May the best man win.” But my mentality, now, first of all, that relationship lasted one month. There was no hanky-panky, there was nothing, not even a holding, there was a holding of a hand at one dance, that was it. No kissing. I wanted to, I didn’t have the nerve. But I’m bringing the possibility of what it’s like to have finally been in a relationship, and I already made it very clear that from very early on I was girl crazy. But the thing that I had was the girl craziness without any game whatsoever. I had no idea how to talk to girls. My go-to move was just staring and waiting to see if they stare back. Like I was so not good and it’s like, thing is that I was actually a pretty sociable person and I was, oh, I wanted to get up in front of the school, and I wanted to give a speech in front of class. I wasn’t awkward in those settings, but when it came to women, I just didn’t know how to proceed at all. I just had this really high level of desire and then no game at all. But that did give you an edge because I think a lot of kids were still like me. I was very timid and I was like frozen. But you weren’t frozen, you took action. Yeah, but my actions were sort of characterized by timidity in one sense though. Like I don’t know what I’m supposed to do, I’m gonna talk to the friend. I did not talk to friends, I did not. You didn’t do anything. I didn’t do anything, so I’ll give you credit for that. I mean, I was having a conversation with Amber in history class and she kept talking to me about the boy she liked. That happened to be you. And I kept trying to guess who it was, and I was guessing all these people. And then I think I probably guessed everybody except me until I realized it was me, and then we started going together. Right. It was never that easy for me, just so you know. If it had to have been that easy made for me- It was so easy, yet, I made it so difficult. If I had to had the desire that I had, but then the level of interest from girls that you had, you know what? I would be the father of a lot of children right now or something would, it would be bad. You know what I’m saying? That’s not necessarily bad, having a lot of kids? A full quiver? I mean, okay, yeah, you’re right, Proverbs does say something like that. But so in seventh grade, me and Amber started going together. That’s when I had my first kiss at the Lillington, Ruritan club. Ruritan building for somebody’s birthday. But who were you, so seventh grade? Seventh grade was a dry spell for me. You weren’t even at that party. I was primed and ready and pubed up and everything. Shit. Just, I was, lemme say there was- Primed and ready and pubed up. There were things happening. There were things happening. The plumbing was working and the plumbing was working often. I mean, I tested it constantly. Great, great. I was so ready, so ready. Great. You weren’t even testing your plumbing at that time, were you? No. Golly, so much missed opportunity. No, well, I mean one tends to catch up. You won’t ever catch up with me. I mean, you could… You’d have to… I’d have to die! You’d have to quit your job. Wow. You’d have to quit your job to catch up with me. What do you do for a living? I’m just masturbating all the time to try to catch up with Rhett. You know what, I’m not gonna do that. I don’t advise it. I’ve slowed down quite a bit. I don’t want it to fall off. Well, no, it’s like lifting weights, man. It’s like a bicep, yeah. The more you use it. Is it though? Well, definitely, if you don’t wanna go- That’s your rationale all these years. Your justification. If you don’t have a semi-regular release, now, first of all, nocturnal emissions will kind of take care of it in one sense, but it’s actually bad for your prostate health to hold it in, man, you gotta let it flow. I let it flow. Yeah, I know you let it flow. Thank you. I’m talking if you’re like, oh, you’re not currently in a relationship and you don’t, I’m just saying, let it flow, keep the hose going. Keep it going. Okay. But I mean, you got a girlfriend in eighth grade? Amber . Yeah, the same one you had in seventh grade. That’s right. Yeah, and that’s when I started dating. So we are using first names now, huh? ‘Cause we’ve talked about these relationships so much the names already out there, Anna. We got whole songs about this. Oh, wait, yeah, yeah, yeah. So Anna became my eighth grade girlfriend and I’m proud of her, she’s was always smart, and I think now she’s as smart as ever. She’s the smartest of all of us. Some sort of a lawyer situation. I think she’s at Harvard. Yeah, she’s very smart. I mean, which is indicated by her long term relationship with me. It never made sense to me. It never made sense to me. But she was also very sweet. So that’s who we were at the time. You were coming around a little bit. I was thinking about girls nonstop, but our friendship was reaching a new level because a couple of things: Number one, we were- Especially when you weren’t dating anybody. We were- So I think seventh grade was an acceleration for us. Yeah, number one, we were in all the same classes together, which isn’t something that had happened consistently, ’cause it was like every other year we’d be in the same class as we established on the last podcast. But another thing that was happening, jumping off of what we talked about last time, is our level of sort of enthusiasm and seriousness about our faith was taking off. To kinda, just a little story to put this into perspective. I don’t think I’ve ever talked, maybe I’ve talked about this but around that time, and I think it was the summer between my seventh and eighth grade year, I suddenly became obsessed with whether or not I was actually saved. This is a very common thing in like evangelical circles, especially Baptist circles, where, because you hear things from adults, like if you’re not completely sure that you’re saved and you’re lost, you’re saying these really damaging things to kids about their certainty. You’re making their eternal salvation be based on a one time event that they had to get just right. And I had prayed the Sinner’s Prayer and done the whole, I want Jesus in my heart and forgive me of my sins when I was like five years old. So for a lot of times in the back of my mind, I was like, did I really understand it? And I remember being at a Christian concert, NewSong, who came to the D. Rich Auditorium at Campbell University where we saw many concerts, also saw a hypnotist one time, and I also heavy-petted my girlfriend in the balcony of this same place, just to put things in context. But not in the same night that you were dedicated. Not the same night. Not the same night. I was not at this NewSong concert. Oh boy, you missed a show, you missed a show. My mom actually was- Five white guys with goatees singing in harmony? Yeah, and they’re still around. NewSong is this, they’re like Menudo, they just replace the members. Oh, well, it’s gotta stay new. So you went for a rededication? No I didn’t, again, I’ve always been, I’m more timid than you might think, okay? I’m more timid than you might think. It takes a lot of, you gotta check your pride to go forward. Well, the thing is, is that what happened was they were like, raise your hand and come forward. It’s a classic invitation where at the end of a concert, you haven’t really done the concert if you don’t invite everybody to make a personal decision for Jesus right then and there. And I’ve got this overwhelming feeling that now is the time, I gotta just make sure, I gotta make sure that I’m saved. I couldn’t go forward because I was like, I knew so many people there and I was like, I don’t wanna confuse them. What are they gonna think about me? So on the way home with my parents in the car is when I said, I started crying and I was like, I don’t think, I don’t know if I’m saved and I really wanted to go forward. Well, this is like seventh grade? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Damn, you’re like crying in the car? Yeah. ‘Cause maybe we talked about it, but I don’t think we talked about it. You might have said I rededicated my life. Before that night, I remember that summer ’cause I think that that concert was, it was either the beginning of seventh or beginning of eighth grade, I can’t remember the exact. I just remember that summer, I couldn’t go, and this is where I have sympathy with people who have obsessive compulsive disorder and get obsessed about one particular thing that maybe they think they got wrong or they need. Having this thing that I kept going back to that the moment that my mind would move off of whatever I was directly engaged in; playing a video game, shooting a basketball, boom, I would be hit with this. Oh man, I might die and go to hell and I’ve gotta get this right. Wow. And it was overwhelming. It was really, again, I know I don’t have obsessive compulsive disorder, but it was this one time where I was like, now that I’ve grown up and I understand, I know people like my wife who have it, it’s like, oh man. But for you there was a buildup to it, and did that NewSong night give you the relief you desired? Yeah, I never thought about it again. Sealed the deal. ‘Cause then I was like, I don’t know when I got saved, if it was five or 14. And then as I got older, I began to understand more about grace and understand that like it’s, do you think God was sitting, and if I was that worried about it, it means I was probably saved. Now, of course, I don’t believe any of that framework anymore. But at the time I very much believed it, and it was the most important thing. Well, it does go to show you, I mean yeah. In our involvement at church and in the youth group and in the choir, they were Sunday morning for Sunday school and church, Wednesday night was youth night, Thursday night was like the choir night. It’s like, we were still involved in all these things, and Tim was our youth pastor. He was bubbling over with joy for all this. He was like a super sweet, nice, sincere guy. He was enthusiastically in love with Jesus. And enthusiastically, all-systems-go on evangelism. And between him and Benny Endsor who was involved, he was our choir director back then. Yeah, yeah, yeah. Like middle school. Right. And you know, we were like, so this is after “The Bible Tells Me So Show” stuff, which basically, update on that, we have the- You found it. We have the church play digitized and we’re gonna find the right time for us to do like a participant commentary. We didn’t direct it, on the Mythical Society, ’cause I think with the rights that’s the best, maybe the only, place we can do it. So we’ll let you know when that happens. Do you think you’re gonna get sued by “The Bible Tells Me So Show” people? Boy, they are. You think they’re still doing that show? Boy, they are. They’re very litigious? Yeah, they might be, I don’t know. So this was the age of, by the time you get in seventh and eighth grade, you can start to go on mission trips, baby! Oh yeah. That was huge for us because not only were we, all the stuff that we had been doing at church and like how tight-knit our group of friends was that had come up through all of the indoctrination. Now we were going out, we’re taking trips in the summer and you didn’t wanna feel too guilty about that last day where it felt like a vacation because we were going there for the Lord’s work. After all, it’s called a mission trip. You’re on a mission to bring the love of Jesus and salvation to the people of the mountains of North Carolina or the mountains of West Virginia or Trinidad. That’s an island. I’ve never been out of the continental United States, and here I am in- That was the first time, yeah. I think that was after our eighth grade year. But all of these mission trips were like, especially Trinidad, these are like big moments of all of us taking this huge risk where it’s like, what is Tim gonna ask us to do? He’s gonna ask us to like- He was throwing accelerant on the spark of your faith, right? The honest perspective on this, and every youth pastor knows this, is that these mission trips are not really about the work that you’re doing, and they’re not really about the people that you’re reaching ’cause most of the time you’re just talking to people who already know. And sure, I mean, yes, there was a little boy who I used a bracelet to bring to a personal saving knowledge of Jesus Christ in Trinidad. You used a bracelet? Like you bribed, you said, “I’ll give you this bracelet if you accept Jesus.” No, no, no, no, we had the bracelet with the beads on it and each bead represented a point in the gospel. Do you remember what was, the first bead was black, for sin. The second bead was red for blood of Jesus. The next bead was white for Jesus cleanses your sins. Pretty racist, by the way. And then there’s- Black before sin, white after sin, but you know, we didn’t pick up on that. We were also talking to kids in Trinidad. I think there was a- But still worked! I think there was a green one for growth? Yeah, there was a blue one for baptism. Because blue is baptism. That was after the white was, ’cause you get saved and then you make a decision for Jesus. You make a public decision with baptism and then green, you grow. I think there was a yellow at some point. I think yellow was the rededication. The inevitable rededication. The point I’m making is that it’s really about the way it solidifies and accelerates your own faith. It’s those milestones that if you want your youth group to like suddenly be on fire, you go somewhere together and you basically have a trauma bond experience together and then you’re all in! Yeah, you’re going on this trip to like this Christian camps do foreign island. the same thing. But Christian camp is, you’re not doing as much ministry. This was all, it was all outward oriented so like you were put in these like outta your comfort zone. Every day you would go and let’s paint this woman’s house. And I have a scar on my knee where I stepped through a barbed wire fence and like ripped out a chunk of my knee. I always remember that trip to the mountains of North Carolina, painting that woman’s house. And I remember some of us was like, we gotta go up to the door and talk to her, like, we gotta make sure that she knows Jesus. And just kind of having this sense of mission and obligation and you know, you’re serving people, but you’re also trying to seal the deal. And yeah, you either had a bracelet or you would be taught to, you could use the five fingers on your hand. Yeah, that’s cool. So it’s like, put your thumb up, thumbs up. Good news. I’ve got good news. Point your index finger. You are gonna die! You’re going to hell. And then middle finger. I guess middle finger would be going to hell. Going to hell. I think you it’s like, so I don’t know, those first two are like, you’re going to hell. See? Bird. Yeah, right. And the ring finger’s you gotta make a commitment to Jesus. And then the pinky is like, you got a little, now your faith begins to grow. It’s a little faith. That’s probably not what it is. It’s basically taking people down the Romans road. But you see these tools that we were given that then we had to put into practice and every night we would come back and we’d have these- Gospel in a hand is what we called it. Circles where we would do popcorn prayer. We would share our experiences and pray for one another. And I was a seventh grader. It was very meaningful because we didn’t, there wasn’t a lot that we had to care about that deeply. Again, I think that’s one of the reasons- Taking huge risks with your friends. That’s why religion is so effective is that there is this deep longing for meaning. I mean, I’m sitting there just whacking off every day and thinking is this all there is? It’s just whacking off? I mean, it’s okay, it’s pretty cool. But you’re feeling horrible about it. I was feeling horrible. I wasn’t feeling as horrible about it as I would in high school, it got worse and worse. But what I’m getting at, is I was like, there’s something lasting and there’s something deeper and more meaningful, and there’s something eternal that I can be a part of. The work that we’re doing is eternal. And we were, you and I, there was a group of friends, but like there were more girls than guys in our youth group. Holly, Holly was a part of all these trips. Well, you’re making a point that there were older girls, there were high school girls and a few guys on these trips too. But that was the other thing, is that you’re sitting there praying for, and hearing this high school girl pray and maybe she’ll pray for me or maybe I can pray for her. It was intimate. It was like, it was awesome. But you and I were the most committed of our friend group, and we were like the only guys who were as committed as we were. So it very much resonated with us and became even more of a center point of our friendship. Right, to bring it back to us, the way that we were connecting with each other. And I think this is when a certain dynamic, from my perspective, this is a dynamic that was developing. And I wanna hear what you think about this. Okay. My parents were together, still are together, and my dad, the way I saw my dad was that he had… He had the knowledge about everything, right? You wanna know what to think about politics, you wanna know what to think about religion, he’s got it figured out. And he was smart, but he was also very assertive in how he talked about it. Yeah. And confident. And so I would sort of take the things that he said, and yes, the things that our youth pastor said, but it’s just, you really wanna know what’s the real deal you gotta talk to my dad. And then I would sort of assimilate that into the Rhett version, which whatever. And then I would be like, well, I’ve gotta get Link straightened out about, he’s gotta know what to think about politics. ‘Cause that relates to your faith and the role and what God is trying to do through politics in the world. And this is what you need to think about predestination. This is what you need to think about Baptism. I’ve got this information, now I’ve gotta give it to you because well, you don’t have a dad at home who’s telling you these things. Now, this was not a calculated thing and I never thought about it that way, but that dynamic existed. Like I was getting this information and I had a willing recipient of that information in you. Oh yeah, I mean, we did talk about beliefs a lot and yes, whatever the dinner table conversation was at your house about politics or religion, we would talk about the next day and I would just, I’d be like, okay, yeah, yeah, yeah. It’s like, just, you know, I was just looking for youth pastor and I guess your dad through you to just tell me what to believe, give me the right answers. I’ll ace this test, you know, this feels good. So yeah, that was my predisposition. And neither one of us- So to kinda lock in. Neither one of us had a contrarian or questioning aspect to our personality. Now, I kinda developed that over time, I mean, obviously, by deconstructing and there’s a little bit of that in me that came out. But at the time it was- That wasn’t until late college and afterwards. There were kids who were already being like, well, hold up now, really? This is what y’all, this is what we believe? We were just primed for, this is what we believe. Yes, how do I believe it really, really hard? How do I align my life completely with it in every way? It was like, this is the most important thing. Never crossed my mind that it might not be true. Yeah. It was just like, this is it, man. And by you, what I was getting from you if I would bring something like that was, oh, he’s just as serious about this as I am. And so we began to separate a little bit, especially from our guy friends. Right. As these guys who we would, we took this seriously. We began to bond more aggressively because of the way that we were separating and kind of gravitating towards this view of our faith. Yeah, and seventh grade was the last year that Ben was in school before he went to homeschool. I think. That was another big factor. He was easing out into homeschool because of his chronic fatigue syndrome, and so by eighth grade he was basically not there. He didn’t go to church with us, but we would still, he still participated in the talent show with us. We’d still go to his house and like do dance routines and learn like rap songs and stuff. So, I mean, y’all were still very tight. But the amount of time- It was this point where we became more of a threesome Well, I would say, Friendship. I think we were more of a threesome earlier, and then I think this is when, with Ben’s chronic fatigue, there were days when I would call over there and Ms. Greenwood would answer the phone and she’d be like, “Ben can’t do anything right now.” Yeah. And as a seventh grader, especially me, I just was not, I’ve never been, I’m still having problems… Right. Talking to people. Which we’ve already talked about that. So that ended up being this thing where, okay, I’m not spending this time with Ben, I’m not doing this thing. Every day during the summer between fifth grade and sixth grade, I was gonna be at Ben’s house doing something and you would be there a lot. But the default was, we’re going to Keith Hills to do something. And that was changing. Now it became, this is when in the “Book of Mythicality”, we’re talking about you and I Riding the bikes. riding our bikes, and meeting at the midpoint at the middle of town. Yeah. And I had enough confidence as a seventh grader to start riding my bike everywhere and spending the night at your house more often. And that’s when we would start doing the flashlight wars and we would go to the Keith Hills gate. I would come along for the things that you’d been doing for years with your neighborhood friends. Setting off fireworks at the gate and having the security guards show up, or like the campus police for Campbell University. And they would get on the loud speaker and say, “Boys, we know you’re in the woods, come out.” I loved it. And then I would start to come out and realize I was the only one walking out and then I wouldn’t walk out. And then we would sprint back to your house, and I was so much slower that me and your neighbor, Heather, weren’t fast enough to keep up, and we got caught in the headlights of the security car. And then we had to go talk to the security guard. But he gave us a really strong lecture and let us go ’cause you ditched us! Yeah, man, I mean, every man for himself. So yeah, I was kinda getting in the mix there and having more sleepovers, and starting to gain confidence. And none of that was registering with me by the way. Things didn’t register, I don’t think things registered. Things registered with me in terms of, ’cause I remember basketball was the another thing where, I mean, we were definitely best friends by this point. And church was the engine and then school was just icing on the cake. But like you were on the basketball team as a seventh grader and eighth grader, of course. I find it wild that we did play soccer together. That’s something that I tend to forget, I wanna come back to the basketball, but like you were the goalie, right? Yeah, much to my, I did not like it. They’re like, you’re so big. ‘Cause you were so tall. I was like, man, I should be up there scoring goals, man. And I played, I liked soccer. I was pretty good at it, at defense. You know, I couldn’t run a lot, I didn’t have a lot of stamina, hence the security guard thing. But I could play some good defense. Yeah, ’cause sports were becoming a really big part of my life. And, of course, I was gonna play everything that we were allowed to play, which those were the three sports, soccer, baseball and basketball. And I was just hanging on by the soccer thread. Other than that- And again, I didn’t know that you, ’cause we didn’t talk about these things. Now, as a parent of teenage boys, I get the fact that you’re just not, there’s a whole part of your brain that you’re not really using and you really look back on these things reflectively. But I’m thinking of things like, he’s playing basketball, and he practices basketball so much, this really infringes on us being able to hang out. I believe, I’m pretty positive, that the reason why I started keeping score for the girls basketball team was because it gave me something to do that I was attached, I traveled with the basketball team with the boys and girls. So I could- You get to go on a bus. I got to go on the bus and I could keep score for the girls and then just watch the boys game. ‘Cause I thought it was cooler to be able to watch the boys game. Versus keep up with it. Yeah. Pandora though, she was tough to keep up with. She was tough to keep up with as I recall. She was a stat machine. Yeah, just a layup tyrant. But that was part of my equation. It’s like, I wanna be in the mix, I wanna, what’s my middle school identity? I’m okay with being the scorekeeper if I can be on the bus, if I can be in the mix. And you were, so you were processing things on that level? I remember that, yeah. Yeah, to me- But I also knew that I would never talk about it ’cause it’s like talking about your feelings and being needy is just a real sign of weakness. Like what am I supposed to say? It’s like, well, do you think I can be a scorekeeper so that we can spend time together? But just to clarify, our kids talk about that stuff. It is very much a generational and also a geographical thing. There was probably kids in certain places in the world that were, and in our community that just wasn’t how you process life as a kid. Right. So for me, it was just like, oh, there’s a sport, I can play it. I can be good at it, okay. It never crossed my mind do I want? Am I having fun? It wasn’t about having fun, it was about winning. It never crossed my mind. It was just, you have to be as good as you possibly can at this. And of course you have to be as good as you possibly can at this, and you have to be as good as you possibly can at this. And it wasn’t just sports. It was, oh, you also have to be as good as you possibly can at academics. You have to be as good as you possibly can at the talent show, at giving a speech for the class. But it didn’t feel like pressure. It just felt like a way of being. Yeah, this is the plan. I mean, and it was such a tight-knit community. In our middle school classes, seventh and eighth grade, we had the same three teachers; Ms. Wakus, Ms. McClam and Mr. Royal, who was also the basketball coach, PE coach, health teacher. Our group of friends, whenever something would happen or there’d be like strife, there will be drama with the girls and sometimes it would involve guys and dating, and sometimes it would be us doing like stupid stuff. But regardless of what happened, that there was drama or trouble, all three teachers would take it upon themselves to hold a tribunal to resolve it. They wouldn’t send anybody to the principal’s office. They were sparing him ’cause he had the rest of the school and I think that they liked to be more heavy-handed than he was. You remember, you’d be in one class and all of a sudden a knock on the door and another teacher would call the teacher out and then we just, we’ll be back in a minute student. And then instead of coming back in, she would say, “Rhett, Link, can you step out into the hall?” And then we’d step out into the hall, and all three teachers would be there laying into us, questioning us about something we did. And sometimes it would be like calling the girls out into the hall and there’d be like six girls out in the hall with the three teachers just trying to have a, it’s a tribunal, they were put on trial. And it was kind of amazing! I remember this in general. I don’t remember it as specifically as you do. I knew I remember when the six girls would go, okay, well I know why these are the six girls who are going out because they had a sleepover, but that one girl wasn’t invited and now her feelings are hurt. So that level of drama, that middle school drama. The teachers were, one of ’em was a parent of one of our friends. Right, one of the girls in the group, yeah. But they were all like very involved. I never thought about that being one of the dynamics. It was like street justice. Yeah. I don’t remember what the punishments were? We never really got much of a- It wasn’t really punishments as much as it was the tribunal and the lecture was the punishment. You know? Yeah. ‘Cause we never got suspended. No, because everything we were doing, we were all really, we all made really good grades. And we were good kids, We were good students. but we were mischievous. Yeah, which we definitely carried on in high school. But that middle school drama thing, they were, it’s just so fascinating that they were so in the weeds, and we were scared of ’em. And that’s when I was told, when you get to high school next year, they’re gonna stuff you in a locker. Well, as it relates to me and you, I mean, I’m surprised that that didn’t happen, but as it relates to me and you, Never happened. I think that middle school is when people began to think of us as a duo. Yeah. Right? Yeah. The teachers. Yep. That’s why if you got called into something, I would get called and vice versa. Our friends, it’s like, oh, Rhett and Link, they’re a duo. And again, this was not like an intentional thing, but it was like, oh, there’s a school dance, there’s the lip sync contest. It was like, oh, well we’re gonna do DJ Jazzy Jeff & The Fresh Prince because they’re the ultimate duo, we’re the ultimate duo. We started performing together, we started seeing ourselves as a team. If we could work together on a project, if there was a way to be like, hey, we’re gonna do this Oedipus video. That’s right and we used Anna’s video camera and we did our first video project. And it was like we were kind of thinking about it in that way, and then we did a whole different one over at Heather’s house. Yeah. The next year. There was a cornfield and a scarecrow. Yeah. But we just naturally fell into this creative partnership. That’s right. That really hadn’t happened up until that point, right? It happened through the talent shows, through video projects, that was when we began to work together creatively. And I think that, now we had done things like the stupid little radio shows and stuff at the house, right? Yeah, the pause tapes. But what I found and, of course, I’m going around, I’m sampling every friendship. You know what I was doing, I was going to every single house, I was spending the night at everybody’s house. And I had in mind, not an agenda, but I sort of just naturally carried with me an agenda without thinking about it. It was just my personality. To what? I wanna have fun in a particular way. Okay. I am interested in having fun in this way. Okay, now we’ve got this radio. I think that we should do this radio show and we should do characters, we should do voices and that kinda thing. There was no one else who was receptive to that, besides you. I was all in. You know what I’m saying? No one was receptive to that way of thinking about amusing themselves. Ben was! Ben was. Well, as we discussed, Ben was even more of an ideas guy. Yeah, right. And he was more out there. I mean, again, when you go over to his house and he’s like, “Let me show you the new dance that I invented”, and it’s kinda like “Riverdance”. I mean, he was a wild card, he was amazing. But yeah, I was very much like, yes! I had a sense of… Yeah, we’re gonna hang out, we’re gonna make stuff, we’re gonna do stuff. This is it, this is it, this is amazing. And regardless of what it was- This is precursor to the blood oath thing. I definitely had that sense at that point. If we’re gonna hang out for an afternoon, whether it was me and you or Ben was there or not, it might be like, all right, we’re not just getting together, we’re getting together and today’s mission is, fill in the blank. Go out and cut down a tree. Try to make a raft that we’re gonna float in the backyard. Take some stuff off of this tree and to make a tea that Ben said we should make, because we found it in a book in the library. Yeah. We had missions, we had agendas. Go into that sewer! Right, it carried with it a sense of mission. And then that was, we filled our time with that way of thinking, and then we also filmed any creative endeavor with the same sense of mission. Like this is gonna be good and this has gotta be the best thing that we’ve ever done. Again, we never talked about it. There was no, let’s have a meeting and figure this out. It was in a natural thing where, and then with Ben sort of checking out because of the health problems that he was having. I mean, I still believe to this day that if Ben had not had those issues, the three of us would’ve grown up and started something together. Yeah, I believe that. Something creative together. But what ended up happening- It was a sense of identity. The two of us were kinda left. And then people started to group us together. That’s when people would say, it would be Rhett and Link, Rhett and Link this, that, and the other. A lot of weekends we would hang out, we’d spend the night at one person’s house or the other, I think it started to happen a whole lot at this phase. And so, it was this identity of, oh, these guys are a duo. Yeah, I definitely think that people thought of it that way. Yeah. And there’s another dynamic that started to develop at this point. That I think is a dynamic that has characterized a lot of our friendship since that point. And we wrote this into “The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek” in the way that we described the Rex character talking to the leaf character about something, about the film school thing. And I remember, the first time I can remember that this happened was it was between eighth grade and ninth grade, so we graduated from eighth grade and we were getting ready to go to high school. We were swimming in the river like we did so often, and so often that summer it was just me and you swimming in the river, no Ben. Right. I was casting vision. Right? For high school. For high school. This is what high school’s gonna be, get ready. And I was doing it through the lens of the women that we were going to get to meet because now it wasn’t just all the girls that we’ve known for eight years. It was the girls from Lillington and the girls from Anger. The girls that we’ve seen And the girls from Lafayette. when you played ’em in basketball. The cheerleaders. You saw the cheerleaders and you saw the girls in the stands and you saw, and hey, I met a few score-keeping girls Right. from other schools. Smarty pants with glasses on. Now- Good with a pencil. And so, I remember sort of trying to cast this vision, and again, that was when it kind of began. And then I feel like, I kinda carried this role forward. Oh yeah. To be like, I remember the specifics. here’s the vision and this is the way you should be thinking about it. This is how you should be getting excited about it. And again, you were this incredibly receptive person that responded in a way that no one else would respond to me. Yeah. No one else would listen to me in the same way. Yeah, and I was like, I didn’t just soak it up, I did give it back. It was this like, okay. You were on board. You were like, you know that cheerleader from Anger, Melissa, like, oh man, she’s- Yeah, she’s at the top of the pyramid. She’s, yeah. Mm-hm. And then, I remember we were talking about her, I remember two other girls we were talking about, specifically. They were both in relationships. That didn’t matter. It didn’t matter. I said those would not last over the summer. Right. I was right. Melissa stayed in a relationship, that did not pan out for me. Well- ‘Cause your vision, I think my vision too, was that I was gonna date her. We had two girls that we were gonna date together. Yeah. Mine didn’t work just because she wasn’t receptive to me, because I couldn’t convince everyone of everything at all times. Right. Once they saw my face , they’d be like, okay, well you better be something, there better be some other things going on. Stephanie’s a smart girl. Yeah, right. We’ve already said these names, so it might as well go on record. But yeah, I do think that that’s when it really, when it really started to come together. You talk about the accelerant of a mission trip, and we just took that mentality into our friendship. Like we totally got each other and we were going in the same direction. We wanted the same things, a lot of it being attention. And I was scared as hell of girls, but every day I was getting more ready to overcome that. It would take until 10th grade to do so, but we can talk about that next time. ‘Cause I think this is a good place to stop. The next time we pick up this series, of course, we’ll be in high school, and that’s an interesting phase because our friendship, our friend group grew a lot. And then the things that we were devoting our time to, you no longer played soccer and I didn’t have anything to do with keeping score for basketball. There was more, I’ll say threats to our closeness in a lot of ways. But then there were some key things that counteracted that. So we can walk through all that and see what we can remember next time we pick this up in, I don’t know, in a month and a half. We’ll keep going at like that cadence, but- Okay. Yeah, middle school was big for us, man. So I mean, I think that the thing that I had not, the thing I wanna remember is the thing that I had forgotten until talking about it, which I think that middle school is the beginning of the duo. Yeah. That was the beginning of us being seen as a duo. Right. That other people would have perceived us in that way. And specifically creative, not just a friend duo but a creative duo. That middle school is formative. Yeah. All right, what’s your rec? My rec is a rec that you recommended to me that I finally watched over the weekend. Oh? “Chillin’ Island”. HBO Max is, they got some good stuff. So when I see something on HBO Max, I might give that a shot, especially if it’s featuring Lil Yachty or Young Thug. And I started with, because you told me to, I started with the Lil Yachty episode, which is what I’m gonna recommend to you. I don’t even know what the first episode is, and I don’t know, and I didn’t go back and watch it yet. Did you watch the Lil Tecca episode? I watched Lil Yachty, then Lil Tecca, and I was like, I felt bad for Lil Tecca. Yes. But Lil Yachty is, listen, I don’t know anything about Lil Yachty. I do. Other than what I’ve seen That’s enough. in this one episode. Oh, yeah. And it’s like, what an incredible dude! I love him. I’ve met him at The Game Awards show. At that video game awards. But we gotta have him on the show. Yeah, yeah, for sure. I mean talk about a dude who just embraces his weird. Yeah, he’s great. I mean, he’s living on his own plane. But the show is so- Interesting, right? They’re just not trying to do any, they’re trying to do something that is innovative and… There’s three hosts. It’s like a mixed media thing because there’s a narrative that is unfolding that usually has a make-believe element to it, right? Like the Lil Yachty episode is sort of centered around the Yeti, the Sasquatch. But then, what they’re doing is unscripted. What they’re talking about is unscripted, and I don’t know who these guys are. Do you know who the hosts are? What’s their background, who they are? I think they’re like podcast guys, they’re like hip-hop community. They’re in that mix. But either they’re radio or podcast guys. I just found myself thinking, man, I really think I want us to be on an episode of this. And then I was just like, if we go through the trouble of reaching out, they wouldn’t even let us on because We’re not cool enough? we’re just too square. We’re too square. You know, they’d be like, what those dudes from that show on YouTube? But I just, I want them to know that we’re weird too. And we like being weird as much as we possibly can, it’s just sometimes we are constrained and can’t be. But HBO Max is a place. So you got a really self conscious watching this thing HBO Max is a place where you could, I would just love the fact that they were talking about the kinds of stuff that we talk about when we’re with our friends, and the conversations go to these places, these super philosophical and ridiculous places where we just all end up making ourselves laugh a whole lot. But sometimes it feels like it’s a prank on the guest ’cause Lil Yachty or whoever it is, they’re clearly unprepared for what’s about to happen, and everybody else kind of knows the itinerary. And I think Lil Yachty and Lil Tecca represent two different ways to approach it. But here’s the thing, Lil Tecca’s 19 years old. It’s a whole lot to ask, and also, to go on a fishing boat? Oh god. Which I think they were next to Catalina is probably where they were. Yeah, they didn’t say. It’s not very narratively cohesive. Deep sea fishing, deep sea fishing is really difficult to do and he got sick, and I was like, I would’ve gotten sick too. But the Lil Yachty, just because he’s older and he’s a little bit more comfortable in his own skin. Yeah, that’s why I wanted you watch those two back-to-back, ’cause once you appreciate Lil Yachty, then you really understand how much out on a limb they’re going with what they did to Lil Tecca. Oh, and then the guy from Vampire Weekend shows up. Yeah. I just didn’t pay attention for a moment. And then I was like, who is this guy? Yeah, Ezra Koenig. And then once he started trying to explain his one song, I was like, oh that’s the dude from Vampire Weekend? Yes. He showed up? It’s pretty funny. It’s the kinda thing that we would envision. I watched it, I did one of those things where I watch it and I was self-conscious about two things. One, how I wanted to be on the show, and two, how I wanna make a show like that. But then, depending on who you’re trying to make a show for, they will tell you that this is too weird for us. I love what HBO’s doing because they’re just willing to just make something that, first of all, this isn’t going to appeal to many of, many of you are gonna watch this show, you’d be like, why did he recommend this? But some of you will be like, this is my jam. And so this is for those who will make that decision and feel that way. Yeah, all right, #EarBiscuits, let us know, I don’t know, what stood out to you from our middle school tales. And I know we’re gonna be talking about the first part of this as well. So we’ll get into that too on some #EarBiscuits. 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.