EB 95: Inspiration vs Plagiarism

(upbeat music) – Welcome to Ear Biscuits. I’m Link. – And I’m Rhett. This week at the Round Table of Dim Lighting, it’s just ya boys. Ya boys are back. Ya boys are back in town, and by ya boys I mean Rhett, that’s me, and Link, that’s him. We’re gonna be talking to each other. This is a good one. – Wait, wait, we like rappers or something? – Yeah. – Where it’s like we go to constantly say our names. – Ya boys are back, Rhett, Link. – Link speaking. – Just this week, I wanted to do that. I’ve been in that kind of mood lately. But this is a good one. I’m excited about this conversation, because– – I’m a little, I’m a little nervous, ’cause I might say the wrong thing. – Right, and we’ll edit that out, if you say it wrong. – I might get upset. We don’t edit stuff out. – But we’re gonna dip our toe into something that is potentially controversial, which we don’t always do. Basically, we’re gonna be talking about plagiarism and inspiration. What is the line between the two, and have we navigated that, in light of some recent events? But also just like it kind of opened up this whole world of, as we think back on our career, we have all these examples of how we’ve navigated this space from that perspective. – Yeah, and what our priorities are, and where do we place that line. In general, I think we’re interested in having this conversation about our creativity, our approach to creativity and how it relates to this, but maybe on other podcasts, we’ll hit on other topics. And you can let us know, #earbiscuits, what from a creative perspective are you interested in hearing from us as one of the many buckets that we can discuss. – Buckets. – But before we get into that, we should bring you up to speed on some other things that we’ve talked about. – You got the camera up your butthole. – Yeah, so we should talk about that. – And they learned some things about that, and so you were gonna, roll that video now. – No, but also the tour. So let’s bring them up to speed on the tour. – Before the camera butt. – Not the tour of my anal canal. – Okay. – By a doctor, which I will give you more than you want to know in just a second. – Incidentally, that is the subtitle of the Tour of Mythicality, Tour of Link’s Anal Canal. (both laugh) No, it’s not, but we might show some footage there. – Are you even gonna be there? (Rhett laughs) You don’t need to be there for that. – We don’t even know, actually, here’s what we do know about the tour. The tour is, we’re bringing the Book of Mythicality to life in a big way. This is not going to bookstores and reading the book. This is doing a stage show in a theater with music, and we’re putting on a show. We’re putting on a show that you want to see. – It’s bringing the book to life, but it’s also doing other things that we want to do to connect with you in person. – And there probably won’t be any footage from Link’s colon video. I just thought about that just now, but now the more I think about what that would look like, it’d just look like anybody else’s colon really. – Go to tourofmythicality.com to find out where we’re going, and then you know what, you risk seeing that footage. No, you don’t, I don’t have the footage. I do have pictures. But tourofmythicality.com. We’re going across the US, so don’t miss it. – We’re coming to a place near you. Pre-order your tickets now. – And if you can’t make it to the tour, you can at least get the book at bookofmythicality.com, available for pre-order right now. – Want to see some, you want to see the inside of my colon? (woman giggles) These black things are the medical– – [Woman] Scope. – Scope, that’s the scope itself. That’s not something black comin’ out. It’s not like a leach comin’ out of my colon. Best booty-scopin’ I’ve experienced. And then I’m jus gonna be, like, fartin’ up a storm. – [Woman] You might be. – Was there some sort of, like, device that pulled the cheeks apart? – [Woman] No. – [Man] Can you put a clean sheet on there? – Can you tell him to shut up? We’re trying to make a movie over here. He gave me some medicine in my IV. – Who’s he, just a man off the street? – A nurse. – A janitor? – A nurse. – Okay, a nurse. – So they wheeled me into the, I mean, it’s like an operating room, and they just, you know, they put a camera up there. They search all around. How far up did he go? – [Woman] Five to six feet. – Five to six feet. The results were all clear. – Did he show it to you before he put it in there? – I just gave the most important part, and you weren’t even listening. (Rhett laughs) I’m fine. – I already know you’re fine. – Okay, I’m fine, totally clear. They found nothing, not even a hint of anything. – No dookie or nothin’? – My results were clean. – Yeah. – They found nothing? – [Woman] Nothing. – Not like a penny? What else can you put up there? What if I found out that I didn’t know it, but I was being a drug mule. – [Woman] I think you’d know it. – Did he have to chip anything away? – [Woman] No. – I had evacuated the whole building. – [Woman] Oh wow, good. – All that had been cleaned out, ’cause I was drinkin’ that stuff, while we were recording that particular podcast. He had an IV, and he said, “I’m gonna start the medicine.” That’s the last thing I remember. Next thing I remember, I was back here working. They say don’t come back to work. – Yeah. – But we were working, and I just remember talking to you and members of the Mythical crew, and I remember the look on their face was like, they were kind of smiling and at some points laughing at what I thought was just normal conversation. – Well, it wasn’t that you were saying weird things by the time you got back here. It was that you were obviously forgetting that you had just said something. So we were like having a, we were having like a Buddy System conversation about songs. I can’t remember exactly what it was, but we were trying to lay out a plan for what we were going to do. And I would say something, and then you would say something back to me, and you would say what I had just said like it was your idea – Yeah. – [Rhett] Like you were telling me something for the first time. – Is that anything new? – And I was like, “That’s exactly, I just told you that,” which is incidentally is kind of what this whole podcast is about. It’s about where do ideas come from. – Ooh! They come from me. I think is the point. – (laughs) In your mind. – In my mind (laughs). – That day, all the good ideas were coming from you. – But I feel like I could have a creative breakthrough. Maybe I’m thinking about things in a different way. – [Woman] Mm hmm. (Link grunts) – But it wasn’t even an idea. It was just like the plan. I would be like, “So I think we could divide “the songs up like this, and then we could do this. “And we should be doing this with Google Doc.” And you’d be like, “What if we divided “the songs up like this, and we did this “with the Google Doc?” And I was like, “Yeah, that sounds like a great idea.” After a while, I just, but then– – I thought your voice was my own thoughts, and then I had to speak them. – An hour or two into that, early afternoon, I could tell that you were basically back to normal. – Yeah, but all throughout that afternoon, I was like hold on, I remember eating lunch at Pollo Loco with Hadeel, our assistant, because she had to drive me back, ’cause, you know, and they say– – Can’t drive yourself. – Don’t go back to work and have somebody drive you. Well, I had somebody drive me, but I had her drive me back to work, but we went to Pollo Loco first. I was gonna go to In-N-Out. – Crazy Chicken! – I remember calling Christy, and I’m like, “Everything’s clear, I’m totally good, “and I’m goin’ to In-N-Out.” She’s like, “That’s gonna be greasy. “You don’t want to do that.” And I looked up, and there was the Pollo Loco. I remember that. – That’s not gonna be greasy. – Next thing I remember is sitting down, and I was asking Hadeel questions that I don’t know if they were appropriate. – I’m sure they were. – ‘Cause I don’t remember what they were, but I remember I asked her for extra gravy. – Gravy, they don’t have gravy. – I got extra, and they had a, I got a whole vat of it. I was dippin’ everything in that gravy. – Hold on, because they have mashed potatoes there? – Yes, and I’d never ordered mashed potatoes in there, but I had a whole bunch of that. – And you got extra gravy. – And it was like I was in an alternate dimension where Pollo Loco had like vats of gravy, and I was asking her questions, ’cause later I was like, “Hadeel, did I ask you, like, “some probing questions?” – Probing, probably the wrong word. – I had just been probed. I’m sorry. And she was like, “Yeah, but it’s okay, I understand.” “I didn’t really answer ’em.” (Link laughs) – She told you that! Oh, I got to talk to her and see what you asked her. – I don’t know what I asked. – Well, I’m gonna find out. I’m gonna ask her what you asked her. – You looking for something? What absorbs the farts? ‘Cause you know you can feel like a fart packet waiting to come out, but it’s not appropriate, so you’re like (whines), and then it goes back in. – [Woman] You kind of lost me there. – But you’re okay. – [Link] I’m great. – We’re happy, you know. – I’m clear. – We’re all relieved. – I’m good to go. – And you got a good story to tell out of it. – Well, I have the story I just told. – Yeah, but you don’t really remember it. – I don’t know how good that was. – Yeah, it was okay. – It was just fine, right? I need my glasses. – But let’s talk about the recent events that is the reason that we’re doing this podcast and kind of got us thinking about this. – Yeah, as of the airing of this episode, I think we’re– – A couple of weeks out from this. – We’re a couple of weeks out from this happening, so it’s not totally fresh, but it’s not something that otherwise we would talk about. And it’s not about airing any dirty laundry or like venting about anything. To us, talking about and analyzing this thing that happened and that was resolved and that we’re cool with is fascinating. – It’s a fascinating conversation. – It’s a way into talking about a creative process. So let’s get into it. – Here’s the highlights. And most of you who watch stuff on our This Is Mythical channel or just watch in general may already know about what happened, but a couple of weeks ago, we uploaded to the This Is Mythical channel a video, was it called Shake Weight and Paint? Or what was the name? Was that the title of the video? Shake Weight and Paint. And basically, it featured John, who works for us, who is one of our editors, who has been making lately a lot of these totally weird edit videos. He’s done a lot of stuff with the GMM footage that we just thought is hilarious, kind of in like the Vic Berger, Tim and Eric style. We don’t know who came up with the style originally, but Tim and Eric are who we know as the first guys that kind of did this bad on purpose, bad editing thing. – Yeah, and the Vic Berger thing of like zoom in and then doing edit pans over to other things and like reconstituting footage in a new juxtaposition that makes it bizarre and funny. Him doing that– – Like with the Jim Baker bucket stuff, which is some of my favorites, which I talked about in the Mythical Monthly newsletter, was, like, one of my favorite things on the internet right now. – Right, so John emulates that. – And that’s on Super Deluxe. So Vic Berger, I think Super Deluxe hired Vic Berger to come and do those, anyway. – I don’t even know if that’s a pseudonym. – I mean, on Twitter, it just says Vic Berger the Fourth, or whatever his actual, I mean, it could be made up. – It sounds like a pseudonym. – It does sound like a pseudonym. – I don’t know, we’ll have to look into that. Maybe we’ll get him on Ear Biscuits. – Yeah, I’d love to get him here. – We should do that. Vic, we want you. – But anyway, so with the way this went down is, okay, we’ll tell you how the video was conceptualized. But we put this video up. Honestly, the two of us had not even seen the video. I saw them editing, I kind of saw John editing it over his shoulder, but a lot of this is, we’re worrying about a lot of stuff, mostly Buddy System right now, and so we’re not looking at every single video that’s on. We’re not previewing every video that’s coming out on This Is Mythical. We watch the stuff when you see it, a lot of times. And what we saw is a lot of people commenting on the video. First of all, a lot of dislikes, and so we’re like, “Hmm, okay.” Whenever we see a lot of dislikes, we’re like, “Okay, what happened? “What went wrong?” And then we see all these comments that are like, “This is a total rip-off of Dayvin Ross, “of Steve Zaragoza’s Dayvin Ross.” And I’m like uh oh, we know Steve. He’s been here. He’s signed this table. He’s a friend, a fellow creator. So we were like, “Okay, whoa, whoa, what is this?” So we immediately went and looked at Steve’s Dayvin Ross character, and then we see that he, I guess it started on SourceFedNERD, but then it was Nuclear Family. I don’t know exactly how it all went down, but he had a lot of videos as this character, Dayvin Ross, which was obviously a parody of Bob Ross, which is kind of what our thing was, was a parody of Bob Ross. – It was, yeah, definitely. – But he was doing it in this sort of Tim and Eric, Steve Brule, you know, the Steve Brule character from Tim and Eric, kind of this weird dude, weird edits, VHS things. First of all, incredibly funny. Like, I loved it. I wish I had seen this before. – Just because you liked it. – Just because it’s really, really funny. But then all these people are like, “This is obviously a rip-off.” Now we did not know. We’ve been very clear to the staff here and people who are developing videos that we don’t copy people. We don’t do things, we don’t take videos and then make them exactly the way somebody else made them, and just as a philosophy at Mythical Entertainment– – Which I think will become more clear as we talk about more, there’s other case studies that we’ll walk you through, in terms of our own experience with this. – So we knew that this had to be unintentional, but we wanted to confirm. So we confirmed with everybody who was involved in the development of the video. And what ended up happening was is the way our video got planned is John had been doing these weird edits, which– – A style in post. – Which is a style that has been established by someone else, so he is editing in a style that is very much inspired by somebody else. But the specific video concept was they had made other videos with the Shake Weight. Like, we made a Shake Weight and Bake, where Eddie was using the Shake Weight to bake. And so they wanted to do a Shake Weight and Paint video. – Well, no, they came up with both of those in the same brainstorm session. They said, “Let’s do things with props “from Good Mythical Morning,” which we had used the Shake Weight– – That you shouldn’t do. – In the sports bra episode. And I was shaking with the Shake Weights. And then they said, “All right, but let’s use that prop “in some other This Is Mythical video.” – And one of the ideas was to paint. – Yeah, one of them was Shake Weight and Bake with Eddie, and the other one was Shake Weight and Paint with John. – And then that was John’s video, and John wanted to do that video, and so John has been doing those style videos with these weird edits. That’s every video that he’s been doing on a Sunday has been in that, and he’s done other ones, too, has been like that. – And of course, we have an obsession with Bob Ross, with the T-shirts, like– – So those three things came together. – So then he impersonated Bob Ross, but he was painting with a Shake Weight. – And he did some very specific things. He used weird paint names. He was acting super weird. He painted some inappropriate things, which was a complete coincidence. None of that was scripted. The way that they did it wasn’t scripted. But there were a number of similarities that if you had just seen Dayvin, and then you saw that, you could come to a reasonable conclusion that we had completely ripped off Dayvin Ross. – And Steve’s fans felt this way, understandably. – And the whole SourceFed thing happening, with the SourceFed being changed, because of the whole brouhaha that happened with, I don’t even know, I don’t know any of the details, so I’m not gonna comment on it. – Well, it’s unfortunate timing that SourceFedNERD, as a channel– – Had been rebranded. – Was then rebranded, so it’s like, “Hey, guys, “totally new people and a totally new name, “but the same channel, speaking to the same subscribers “who are still around.” And that doesn’t feel good to anybody. – And that character, specifically part of that transition, would necessarily mean that any characters that Steve had come up with, while he was at SourceFed, would be owned by that group. So he can’t be Dayvin anymore. So it seemed like, you could think, that we’re like, “Oh, he can’t be Dayvin anymore. “Let’s do this character that’s just like Dayvin, “and then we’ll take ownership for this idea “and move it forward.” You could have come to that conclusion if you just didn’t think about it. – Especially if you’re a passionate fan of Steve’s who is gonna want to take up for him and defend him and even go on the offensive in our comment section for his sake. With that kind of recipe, I think fans, it’s easy to believe not the best, maybe the worst. – Yeah, of course. – It’s easier to believe the worst about someone else if you feel like you’re offended, or you’ve offended someone that you’re a big fan of. – It’s also very easy, because I’ve done it myself, to see two things and think, “Well, I don’t think “that these four or five things that these videos have “in common can be coincidental.” What today is gonna be about is how that’s actually something that happens all the time. It’s happened in our careers countless times, and we’ve had to pull the plug on videos. We’ve had to completely change ideas when we found out the similarities between what we were doing and what somebody else was doing. And so it’s a subject that we’re incredibly sensitive to. It’s kind of one of the hallmarks of the way that we conduct our business as creators, is to be very concerned about originality and not copying people. – We’re gonna flesh that out. – Yeah, but all that to say that we took it seriously when all these people were accusing us of plagiarism. So what we did is we took the video down. And that was not an admission of guilt. That was a we care about this issue so much that in order to avoid even the perception that we would plagiarize, we’re gonna take it down, because it’s not worth it. It’s not worth people believing that about us. We reached out to Steve. Steve’s a friend. We talked about it. – We explained all this to him in an email. And then we replied, ’cause he had commented on the video. He was barraged by his fans with “You got to say something.” And he didn’t know exactly what to believe about it, because we hadn’t talked about it. And so we replied to his comment. We set the record straight, publicly. We went into much more detail privately, just to tell him, you know, we would never do that to him, because we’re friends. We would never do that to anybody. – We don’t do that. – [Link] We don’t do that. – As a company policy, we don’t do that. So long story short, we’re cool with Steve. That’s completely been worked out. The video is down. And we’ve kind of given our side of the story, which is it was a complete coincidence. It happens, and today, we’re gonna talk about how it’s happened multiple times to us and how we kind of navigate this whole space and what our philosophy and approach is as creators who create a lot of stuff in a space where a lot of people are creating a lot of other stuff. But first, we’re gonna take a short break to let everybody know that they can get these amazing– – Ear Biscuit jars. – Ceramic mason jars. – Now look at this. You said ceramic, but you could easily think that this is dipped in biscuit. – Or it’s just made out of butter. It’s just frozen butter. – No, man, what do you call the stuff you make a biscuit out of? – Bisquick? – No, that– – Flour? – That’s what a loser makes biscuits out of. – Flour? Cornmeal? – Once you mix it up, and you got the dough. – Dough? – Like that, if you water down the dough. – I just named pretty much every ingredient in a biscuit. – That’s right. – Salt, flour, water. – Yeah, when you mix all that together. – Butter (laughs). – And you make a, when you’re about to make a biscuit, and you got that biscuit dough. – Yeah. – But what if you shaped it into a jar? – Well, it probably wouldn’t hold water. And these hold water very well, because they’re ceramic, and they’re not made out of biscuits. – But you just want to, look at it, you just want to take a bite out of it. It’s got the three-dimensional Ear Biscuit logo. – But don’t. But do not take a bit out of it. That’s heavily advised against, because it is ceramic, and unless you’re one of those people that has pica and have somehow built up a tolerance to eating things made out of ceramic material, it’s a really bad idea. – It does look like butter, too. It’s like a jar made out of butter. – Yeah, that’s kind of what I was saying. – And you would sit it on top of the biscuit. – Yeah, but it won’t melt, because it’s ceramic, but you shouldn’t eat it, because it’s not made out of butter. But it is available at rhettandlink.com/store. And you can enjoy any beverage in it. It holds any beverage. That’s the thing I’ve learned. This is just water, but it will hold any beverage. – There are fans of Steve’s from that whole situation that I don’t think we could’ve told them anything to convince them that– – No, in fact, right now, they don’t believe what we just said. There are people who will listen to what we just said and say, “That’s BS. “You guys are lying.” – But it’s too uncanny. And they could point out very specific things. Tig Notaro came out a couple of weeks ago and said that– – More than a couple of weeks ago. – [Link] Yeah, this was– – A couple of months ago. – There was an issue with a Louis CK sketch on SNL about a– – Birthday clown. – A birthday clown being ordered by a guy, just one guy. So it’s like a clown showing up for a party, but then it’s just Louis CK sittin’ on the couch. Now it turns out that Tig has had, I don’t know all the facts, but for a longstanding sketch that went to film festivals and is a part of, like, a touring show where it’s the same concept. She orders a clown to cheer her up, and it’s really awkward, because it’s just one clown. Now the specifics are a little bit different after that, but hers has a happy ending. – And hers is a short film that’s sort of the heart of the film is that she’s lonely and calls. – It’s like 10 minutes, but the Louis CK thing on SNL was– – A three-minute sketch. – Maybe two-and-a-half minutes, something like that. I mean, there was a big controversy over that, because it was so similar. I think just for a normal viewer, it’s just very easy to believe that okay– – How can you come up with those two ideas? – They ripped that off. How could you come up with that? My point is you could. I mean, I don’t know exactly what happened. I have nothing to do with any of the situation, but I know based on our own experience, even if you look at the thing with the Bob Ross thing, it’s like all right, you have an idea, which for us was the Shake Weight and Bob Ross, and then you end up making comedic choices, which are very interchangeable, are very comparable to choices that another comedian made, which started with Bob Ross. – Another way to say that is if you put two comedians in an environment, and you give them something to riff on, you give them something to parody, and they’re two people who are of the same era in the same culture and are comedians, a lot of the jokes present themselves. – Are gonna, yeah, so– – The same kinds of jokes present themselves. – When you have that initial idea of– – Happens all the time. – The initial idea of what if a birthday clown showed up, and it was an adult who just ordered them as if they were a stripper. – Yeah, just one person. – Or just for personal entertainment, leave the stripper part out. It’s like that’s just a funny thought, because birthday clowns are funny, and comedians like to think about how to subvert that or explore that in a sketch form. – And once we first heard about it– – No, once you have that idea, as a comedian, and then you start pitching ideas in your brain, it’s like, it very quickly gets to specific jokes, I think, in terms of, like, okay, at what point does the clown realize that he has been ordered by an audience of one, and what would that clown say? Well, it turns out– – “I guess I’m here early.” They both said– – They both said– – “Am I here early?” Some of the same specific things. Now when we saw that, before we got the other side of the story, or the rest of the story, we both were like okay, this is easily could be explained as a complete coincidence. Now Tig Notaro came out and stated that a person who was involved in the development of that sketch on SNL had very clear knowledge of what she had done, had definitely seen it. I don’t know the extent, ’cause she didn’t call any names. She was careful not to call out names, at least at the time. I’m not exactly sure. I looked before we started this, and I couldn’t get an update, but it turns out that there probably is a creative connection. There’s somebody involved in the development of the SNL thing that had clear knowledge of what she had done. – Yeah, there was certainly an overlap in creative, in professional spheres, even though the two of them, Louis CK and Tig hadn’t talked for a year-and-a-half. – Right, and how involved was Louis in that? I mean, I don’t know. When you go to host, I don’t know. – I don’t know. – It’s probably more on the SNL writers than it is Louis, but– – But it’s like we’re in such a similar circle as Steve, and I mean, YouTube, it’s a big place, but it’s kind of a small place in the same way. It’s like we haven’t seen him in a long time, or talked to him, but the video’s are floating around. It’s so hard to believe that we wouldn’t have seen his character, but I hadn’t, you know. It’s like the guys who conceptualize on our team had not seen it. And so, I can very easily, and I think I’m in the minority in feelin’ this way, believe that the Tig and Louis CK things could have happened 100% independent, even with an overlap. Now when she says now I know of at least one specific person who this could go through, then all of a sudden, all right, if there is a specific connection, it’s hard to prove that any of that happened, but I’m saying, whether you could prove it or not, if there was someone who was inspired, maybe they forgot, if they knew, if they forgot, that’s unfortunate. But if they knew about her sketch, and then started pitching in an SNL environment– – That’s crossing a line. – Yeah, that is definitely crossing a line. You can’t do that. You can’t say well, we’re gonna take this idea. About a million people have come up with this idea. I just know of Tig’s. But we’re gonna take it, and we’re gonna make some different choices. Well, it wasn’t different enough, you know. And that’s wrong, but again, it’s like did you know? And what did you do with that knowledge? Did you try to steer clear of it, or did you take the best parts and then make different choices? I think that’s not gonna work. – Right, so in that case, if there was that knowledge, then we think that a line was crossed. I mean, both of them were funny, but– – And if you made the thing, and she’s put it in film festivals, and she’s toured with it, and all of her fans, she said, were barraging her with, “Look at what they did to you.” And it’s like there’s a groundswell of people. It makes it really difficult to not feel taken advantage of and ripped off, you know. Even though, it’s crazy how these things happen. – Well, let’s talk about a specific example with us, and how we were able to catch it before it happened. – The Get Off the Phone song? – Yeah, so we have a song that’s from a number of years ago called Get Off the Phone, which was actually back when we were doing a lot of sponsored music videos, and this was in partnership with Buick. We’ve had a lot of sponsors. Yes, we worked with Buick. We created a song. It was actually anti-texting and, it wasn’t even anti-texting and driving. It was just about people– – Being in the moment. – Being in the moment. – That was their tagline, be in the moment. So we were like– – Be in the moment in a Buick. – Well, we wanted to make fun of people being on their phones. Everyone can relate to that. And, you know, we very quickly came up with, well, what ended up being, ♫ Get off the phone now ♫ Gonna be okay – But the name of our song before that was Put Your Phone Down, and we had a chorus, which was put your phone down. – It was– ♫ Put the phone down We had the melody. – It think it was put your phone down. Put your phone down, just like that. ♫ Put your phone down And then– – And we had conceptualized the whole video, right. We hadn’t written all of the lyrics, but we had conceptualized the jokes. We write songs in different ways, but this one was we had a chorus that was put your phone down, and then we had a few lyrics, but we had kind of mapped out where we wanted to go. We knew we wanted a coffee shop scene. – Yeah, we were going into situations where people were on their phones when they should’ve been in the moment, and we were gonna take the phone and destroy it in front of them, and that was gonna be funny. – Right, so we had a coffee shop scene where somebody was gonna be, instead of ordering, you know, you’ve got somebody who’s on their phone, and they’re supposed to be ordering when they get to the front of the line. So we were gonna take that person’s phone and, like, put it in coffee. We had a scene where, oh, no, we had a urinal scene, where we were coming up next to somebody and peeing on a side of a dude. – Pullin’ up. – Pullin’ out, right next to a guy, flanking a dude who was at a urinal on his phone, and we were gonna sing about, this is so stupid, and take his phone and throw it in the urinal. And then we actually had an idea for a whole montage scene set to dubstep music, where we were gonna be going around and knocking people’s phones out of the hands to dubstep music. – Like, violently. – Now you’re not gonna believe what I’m about to tell you. Somehow, we had got– – Matter of fact, you’re not allowed to believe it. – We got this far, to put this into perspective about how coincidences can work creatively, we got that far. We had that much planned, and then one of us was looking up something on the internet. – I remember this being a couple of days worth of work for us. – Oh easy! We found a song called Put Your Phone Down. It was a rap, and it was by the guy who did the Whole Foods rap, which you can find this song on the FogandSmogFilms channel on YouTube, Put Your Phone Down. ♫ It’s gettin’ real in the Whole Foods parking lot We knew about this guy. – Yeah. ♫ And something something in the Whole Foods parking lot – So that was his thing that went really big, and this was his other song, which was actually that, Put Your Phone Down. Let me tell you some things that happened in his video. First of all, it was called Put Your Phone Down, and that was the name of our song, the exact name of our song. – Even though we knew about the guy, and we knew his other song– – We had never seen the video. – We had never seen this song or seen the video. – It was a lot smaller. There was a coffee shop scene in which he was in line with somebody who was waiting, who was on their phone instead of ordering. There was a urinal scene in which he comes up next to a guy who’s on the phone at the urinal, and then there was a montage, at the end of the music video, where to dubstep music, he was knocking people’s phones out of their hands. I’m not making this up. We had those exact same three ideas, including the song title, and we had never seen this dude’s video. I swear on my life, we had never seen this video, and we came– – You sound so defensive, though. You need to pull back. – No, because I think people don’t believe that this kind of stuff happens, and I’m saying no, it’s happened too many times to us. – Oh yeah. – We come up with ideas. Okay, so if you’re gonna do something where you talk about people being on the phone in annoying places, in awkward places, oh, coffee shop ordering, urinal, I mean, these are things that people end up thinking about, but specifically, the dubstep thing. So we completely undid everything. We changed the name of the song to Get Off the Phone. – We didn’t change the melody. – Well, because the melody was ours. The song was completely different. – And I didn’t want to have to redo that, so we just came up with words that would fit. – And we changed the end– ♫ Get off the phone now Why is now? Why would you say now at the end of that? – Because we had to, because we needed another syllable. ♫ Put the phone down is better. – [Rhett] Yeah, but he had the same name. – Like put the phone down. That’s what people say. Get off the phone now sucks. – Right, but we had to do it because of this guy. – And we were mad. I was mad. – And we took those scenes out. – Not at him, not at us. – We took those scenes out. There’s no urinal scene. There’s no dubstep montage of us knocking people’s phones out. We’re still very proud of what we did, but then it took us a couple of days to rework everything. – And it didn’t matter. It didn’t matter how successful his music video was. – No. – To us, at that point, it was just like, first of all, we may see this guy in the Whole Foods parking lot. – Yeah, that’s where he hangs out. – And it’ll get real. It’ll get real there. We’ve actually never met the guy, since then, but I don’t want to walk around almost meetin’ him somewhere and then have to be like, yeah, like, explainin’ myself. – Well, out of principle, if his video had one view, if his video was private and had one view, and I got the password to his Vimeo video from my cousin, it doesn’t matter how many people have seen it, ’cause out of principle, we don’t do that. But the thing is is that if your video has been seen by a couple of thousand people at least, which this one was, you know, tens of thousands, maybe hundreds of thousands, you can’t get away with that. We would have never done the Dayvin Ross rip-off, if we knew about it, not only out of principle, but also because we’re not stupid. You can’t do that kind of thing and get away with it. – And I think that’s why when Steve’s fans came after us, that that made me mad, because it was like, who do you think we are? You think we would do this on purpose? – People don’t know. People don’t know what we would do. They don’t know how we feel about this. That’s one of the reasons that we’re doing this podcast. – I know, but that was the emotional reaction I had, is just like– – You don’t know how we feel about this. You don’t know how this is such a precious thing to us– – Yeah, and we think about it all the time. – We’ve been doing this job for, you know, we’ve been on YouTube for 11 years. And this is something that we’ve encountered so many times. We’re very sensitive about it. – Well, let’s stay on the music thing. As musical comedians, I remember the first time we saw Flight of the Conchords, their HBO special. – And we had a sinking feeling. – And it was like I felt nauseous, like I wanted to vomit, because it was hilarious. – It was so good. – It was two guys who had better accents than us, being a lot funnier than we could’ve hoped to have been. – And doing a lot better music, too. – Singing songs, and that was the one thing that we were really placing our hopes in. – And then Jermaine’s herring glasses kind of looked like you. That was just insult to injury right there. – So then for years, whenever we would write a song, a lot of our instincts that they nailed, ’cause we have similar musical tastes. Their album was a parody of Seals and Crofts’ Summer Breeze, which is very specific. But I knew it, because I love Seals and Crofts, you know. But then all of a sudden now we had to run interference on every melody we chose. – And specifically what we would do is we would be, if I’m playing a song on the guitar– – Because we didn’t want to be seen as a rip-off of them. – Yeah, and a lot, so– – And you can’t say whoa, whoa, we just have the same musical tastes, and trust me, we were doing this in– – Well, specifically, what would happen, though, is we would be singing, and when you want to get a lot of jokes into a song, a lot of times, you’ll start singing like this and start saying some things. And then when our voices got kind of low, and we got kind of like this and started moving our heads like this– – It would make us laugh. – We would realize we’re doing this, because we’re fans of Flight of the Conchords, and then we would have to completely go away from that. And so I don’t know if there’s any songs that, I think a lot of our songs moved the complete opposite direction musically, because we were so sensitive about not ever seeming like them, because that’s what people recognized as musical comedy at the time. – We did a lot of, I think we leaned more into doing rap music, because we were also fans of rap, and when you think of rap, you think of a rap battle. And then when you start titling a rap battle on the internet, you title it, or you title anything on the internet, at least at this point in time, you put epic in it, so therefore we said let’s do an epic rap battle. – Yeah, so we did our first Epic Rap Battle, which was just the two of us dressed up, which incidentally, just a weird, little thing is that in the Epic Rap Battle song, I said, “Look at this turtleneck and a necklace, “you’ll be wearing this next year.” And then a year later, Lonely Island came out with Turtleneck & Chain which– – Was the name of their album. – Had nothing to do with what we did, trust me. They didn’t see it. It was a complete coincidence. – We saw fans telling us Lonely Island ripped you off. It’s like no. – No, they didn’t rip us off. We know they didn’t rip us off. We know how this works. – We made a fashion joke, and we’re flattered that they thought the same thing was funny, 100% independently of that. – ‘Cause they had come up with that before we did, but specifically, we did the Epic Rap Battle, and then literally, just a couple of months later, Nice Peter and Epic Lloyd come out with Epic Rap Battles of History. – The first one, yeah. – The first one was after our Epic Rap Battle. – And we’ve had both of them on the show. We had Pete on the show first, and we talked to him about it. We had talked to him about it off-mic, but on-mic, he repeated the story, which was, “I knew you guys, “’cause I had met you, “but I hadn’t seen your Epic Rap Battle. “We came up with Epic Rap Battles of History.” Again, you’re a musical comedian on YouTube. You’re gonna put epic in a title with rap battle. He loved rap. He added a brilliant thing that we didn’t, which was historical characters. And he deserves every, they deserve every bit of accolade that they’ve gotten, and I don’t know if they drew any comparisons early on, or if the fans went after ’em, but then it got so big that thank goodness that our Epic Rap Battle came out first, because we would’ve seemed like, we would not have done Epic Rap Battle of Manliness or Epic Rap Battle: Nerd vs. Geek, our most viewed video ever, if our first Epic Rap Battle was not released before that, because I would have just felt like, we couldn’t prove, our fans wouldn’t have been able to take up for us. – And even then, when we did Epic Rap Battle of Manliness, we had Pete and Lloyd make a cameo in it, because we wanted to make sure that the viewers would know that the dudes who do Epic Rap Battles of History are cool with the dudes who do Epic Rap Battles of Manliness, because technically the guys who did Epic Rap Battle of Manliness did Epic Rap Battle first, that’s us. We did it first, but it’s not about who did it first. The whole point of what we’re saying is that these things happen independently. And we’re gonna get into talking about things where plenty of examples where there has been inspiration, like the way that we kind of approach this. Like, we don’t ever cross the line into plagiarism, but we are inspired, and our work is completely and totally inspired by other people all the time. But these specific examples are more to explain that there’s all kinds of examples from what we’ve done, where people do things. We do things. It seems like people are completely ripping you off, and it’s not– – But they’re 100% independent. – Independent, it’s all a coincidence. – So here’s another example of us not realizing it, that we were doing it, that we were creating something that was converging on someone else’s property, intellectual property. I remember we were sitting in that mountain cabin, coming up with ideas. – Mountain cabin. – And we were writing things on a whiteboard, and you just had this, I’m gonna give you this idea. I don’t remember who’s idea was it, probably mine. – You had recently been probed. – We’re talking about show and tell, and we were like, “What if kids did show and tell, but it was-“- – [Both] “Show and yell?” – And that just made us laugh. And so we just kept going with that. We were like, yeah, let’s, like, give kids things to tell about, but they’re talking to a camera, but they’re not talking. They’re yelling. It’s show and tell with yelling from kids. That just seems crazy. So then we did it. – And we brought them in, and we told them to bring some of their toys. So they brought some toys they could legitimately do show and tell about, show and yell. – And we set up this whole thing. We were like okay, we want the kids to feel like they’re talking to the audience directly. We really thought that it was important that the audience member felt like the kids were just staring right into their soul and yelling at them about their favorite teddy bear or whatever the case may be. – That’s when we did the whole Errol Morris thing, right? – Which we didn’t know existed. – Ben told us that it existed. – Yeah, it was a technique that we thought we invented, because we wanted people to look into the camera, but we wanted to be able to give them direction, so we set up a teleprompter, which had, we were being shot, video of us as the director was being shot and being put on a teleprompter in front of a camera filming a kid so that the kid could look straight into the lens, but there was the screen in front of them– – [Rhett] Would be our faces. – Would be our faces, so whenever we would give direction like, “Okay, Roger, tell me about your teddy bear,” he would look at me, and I would, like, nod my head and give a response. – And we were in a different room. – A kid can’t look at a camera and give, you know, give a natural response. – The kid will look naturally to the person who’s talking, so we had to have the person talking in the camera basically, and we went to a different room. – So we had hours of conversations with Ben about how to pull this off, and he came up with the teleprompter thing, and we worked it all out, and we were really excited about this technical thing that we invented, which we didn’t. And in order to do this thing– – Well, that’s interesting. – It was totally original. – Well, because what we’re finding is that even in telling the stories, which this isn’t even what the story’s about, you find out that you independently came up with something, ’cause Errol Morris, great documentarian. Vernon, Florida is a great documentary that you should watch, that he made, but he kind of created this technique of interviewing people, so people would be looking into the camera. And we didn’t even realize that we had independently replicated that technique and done it for these kids. But that’s not even what the story is about. – And we had cast all these kids, and we had to bring ’em in. And we had our friends bring their kids in, and they were all excited about being in a Rhett and Link video. And then we’re like, we get all this footage– – But we also gave them, besides them bringing their toys in, we gave them old technology, like old phones and old stuff. – Stuff they would not have a clue what it was. – Old calculators. – Them talking about things they didn’t have a clue what it was would be very funny, and hopefully, we’d be right that if they were yelling, it wouldn’t be annoying, and that’s a big question mark, if we were even right about the whole thing. – And while we were in the process, we were in post-production. We had filmed these kids for two days straight, like 10 hour days. We were sitting there in the edit bay, putting this stuff together, and we happened to see that the Fine Brothers, good friends of ours, had released on their, it wasn’t even their React channel, at the time. It may have just been Fine Brothers before they came out with their React channel. I can’t remember. – They had Kids React on their channel. So they did have kids. – But they specifically they had moved to a place where instead of kids reacting to videos, kids were reacting to thing that they were being handed, and it was specifically old technology, like old phones and stuff like that. And we were like you know what? We have to scrap this entire project. Call the parents, tell them that we’re not gonna use the footage. We’re sorry. We pay them whatever appearance fee that we had given them, but that was it. We own the footage. We still have it, but we’ve never released it, because we found out that the Fine Brothers did something that, it wasn’t Show and Yell. Kids weren’t yelling. And we were like if we’re gonna expand this series and do the things that we want to do with it and then go into the natural places that we would want to go, it’s gonna very quickly become this thing that is comparable to Kids React, and we can’t do that, because we don’t do that. – By no means, even if they weren’t friends of ours. – Right, yeah, yeah, yeah. – But especially because they were. And you might say, well, in hindsight, it’s like guys, you were so close to that. You’re talking about doing videos with kids reacting to something you hand them. Well, first of all, we didn’t look at it that way. We didn’t realize that at the time. That’s how I can say it now. And how I realize a viewer would see it. But it was like okay, they had kids reacting to videos, period. That was it. They hadn’t placed anything in their hand, and they didn’t have them talking directly to the audience. But again, you know– – No, but they did. That’s specifically what I just said. That’s what– – No, when we conceptualized our idea– – Oh. – That didn’t exist. – Yeah, when we conceptualized the idea– – We had all the stuff in the can, and then they released that, and it was just like, what we didn’t realize was that a natural expansion of kids reacting to videos is very specifically– – Is kids reacting to stuff. – Is kids reacting to stuff that you would hand them. And then what’s the first thing you’re gonna hand them? They handed them the same stuff we did, because they’re smart– – Like a Walkman. – Producers. – Yeah. – They handed them the same stuff. – And it’s not because they got the, we were, like they got into our Google Doc, or we got into their Google Doc. – No (laughs). – It’s just because once you– – Google Doc. – Once you put people in, it’s kind of like when somebody has a concussion. It’s like the old story that we’ve told a million times about Link’s concussion in college when he hit his head. – Or the colonoscopy, I guess. – And I’ve told this story a million times, and I tell this story in detail in our book, bookofmythicality.com, available for pre-order. – Don’t make it sexy. – (laughs) No, when I sell something, I make it sexy, ’cause sex sells, man. ♫ When he says somethin’ ♫ I’ma make it sexy It’s kind of that. – So you said– – I’ma make it look sexy. – Hold on, I’m just coming to evidently, I hurt my left hip. And you said it a hundred times that night, which is a very specific phrase, but it was because you were put in the same situation. You were constantly coming to, and you were trying to figure out, and so your brain resets and says the exact same thing. You put a comedian or a producer or somebody who’s in the same environment, and who’s constantly trying to make internet videos that people like, you put them in the same scenario. You tell them to come up with an idea that riffs on something. They’re going to come up with similar things. And that’s why we’ve gotten to a point where now, we don’t go to the trouble of bringing a bunch of kids in and filming something. We don’t make the video. We don’t write the song. We don’t come up with the melody. As soon as we have an idea, we go on this Google dive. And sometimes we get very, and sometimes it’s hard to do it, ’cause you get super excited about the idea, and you want to develop the idea, and you want to move it along, but you got to stop, and you got to Google it. You got to see if it’s been done before. You got to see if something’s been done that’s like it. And then once you see it, you have to make a decision. Are we gonna just scrap this? Or are we gonna change this? Like, how are we gonna react? Which I think GMM is a perfect– – Yeah. – We run stuff through this all the time, having over 1,000 episodes of GMM, we have to answer this question all the time. – Yeah, there’s so many videos. And a lot of them, we’re not even developing videos, but we’re developing formats. We’re not talking about what other people have done. I do feel like we develop formats on GMM, and then they show up on other places. – All the time. – The knee-jerk reaction is to take it personally, or to see it as a rip-off. Sometimes that could be the case. Sometimes it’s not. But it’s like, we can’t control what other people do. – [Rhett] No. – So again, we’re still focusing on what we do and what our approach is, I think, at this point. But I mean, there was an example just a few hours ago. We were talking about a GMM episode called Food Court. You know, we do so much food related stuff, and it’s like all right, let’s develop something with three people, either three guest hosts or the two of us and another person, because food court is a thing in the mall. And a court is the thing where you’ve got a judge, and then you’ve got two lawyers. That’s three people. – It seems like a good idea. And as soon as, Micah said it. When Micah said food court, I was like I don’t even know the specific idea, but I love it already, because I can see exactly where you’re going with this. And then we get excited about it, and about three minutes into this exciting conversation, Eddie says, “Tastemade did it. “Tastemade did it already. “Food Court, here it is.” – And it’s like, you talk about, like, pricking the balloon. – ‘Cause it’s hard to come up with ideas. (Link sputters) It’s hard to come up with good ideas. – I wanted to kill Eddie right then. It was like why would I want to kill Eddie. Eddie’s not only the messenger, thank goodness he’s bringing this up. – Because we would have gone another 15 minutes. – But it’s so emotional. – We would’ve gone another half hour. We would have developed the whole episode. We would have developed the creative, and then he would have found it. – But in that moment, you sense that frustration. It’s like, “Don’t tell me that!” – Okay, and so this is how we decided to proceed. We bring the videos up. We watch them, and we see that okay, well this is actually a little bit more like our old series Debate-O-Rama, where they were debating between two foods, and it’s also scripted, so it’s more of a sketch thing. – It’s a sketch thing. – They haven’t done it in a year, not that it matters how old it is. But it’s like okay, well, we want to do something– – It’s not a current, in-production series that is a direct competitor. – But that doesn’t really matter, because it’s out there, and like we said, out of principle, we don’t copy people. – That’s true. – But we came up with the idea independently, and so we were like okay– – But if, the only reason I said if it’s happening right now is that I might just back away totally. But it’s like okay, this is not an active property. It seems like it didn’t work out for them. So let’s continue the conversation. – ‘Cause we have to answer the question. – Let’s not shut this down yet. – Do you shut it down, or do you change it? And if you change it, how do you change it? So the way that, and we haven’t fully developed the idea, but we were like, you know, the thing that we really like about this idea is that there are three people. – Our idea, not– – Our idea, yeah. – Just to clarify, not what we like about their idea, but what we like about our idea that wasn’t their idea that they had independently. – Yeah, and what we like about our idea is the fact that it’s three people, something that we can do with a guest. It is food related, which we know that people love food related videos. And we love the idea of two people having to make a case about some kind of food, but it involves the people having to eat it. – The consequence is the winner of the argument doesn’t have to eat. The judge eats it, and the loser has to eat their own thing. And that was, as far as we can tell– – And that’s completely different than their idea. – Totally different. – Their idea is just a debate. There’s no eating. It’s a sketch. It’s scripted, whatever. So we decided to move forward. We don’t know when the idea’s gonna be on GMM. – So then I’m like, but we can’t call it Food Court, which is an amazing idea. We can’t call it that. So why not Judge Foodie? (Rhett laughs) You know, so, it’s like– – Right. – I don’t know what we’re gonna call it, but that’s the working idea now. – And this is fresh. That literally happened right before we came in here. We were having that brainstorming meeting. – And if this comes out on the internet, before we make it, and someone does Judge Foodie, I swear I’m coming after you. – Well, we have agents for that kind of thing, you know. – Do not steal. It would be so ironic. And I know you think it’s funny– – Agents of death. – To steal the thing that we talk about in the podcast about not stealing people’s stuff. Don’t you do it. – [Rhett] Yeah. – Don’t you do it. – We actually won’t send anybody to kill you. We wouldn’t do that either. And I just said agent of death, because– – Will bring you to us to kill you. – Really just kind of just to, I was just being sensational. I don’t think anybody should die because of it. – Roi in Guava Juice, having tremendous success with doing lots of things that are the kind of things that we do on Good Mythical Morning. – Yeah, this is a very weird thing how this came down. – So it’s like we want to, you know, well, there’s the bath thing, which I’ll get to but then there’s the, okay, it’s like we want to do something on fidget toys, and then– – Well, we’re literally, we have the whole thing planned. – So then we plan the whole thing about what we want to do, but then we look, we just search fidget toys, and we see what’s out there. – Well, it was like we had planned what we were gonna do, and then like two days before we were gonna shoot our fidget toys episode– – Yeah, we had ordered and acquired, like, we literally had all of our fidget toys. – He came out with his fidget toys video, which was kind of a typical Guava Juice video, where he’s just kind of being crazy with a bunch of fidget toys. – On his second channel. – And we were like, well, that’s kind of what we were gonna do. I mean, of course, with a totally different style than what Roi does but similar in a lot of ways in that what’s the Rhett and Link take on fidget toys. So what we decided to do, because we had planned the whole this, and we were like well, lots of people are talking about fidget toys. They’re kind of in the news. We’re gonna talk about fidget toys. We’re gonna play with fidget toys. We’re gonna play with different fidget toys that he played with, and then our angle is gonna be how we think there’s like a poor man’s, everyday version of a fidget toy. So you would hold up something that was a real fidget toy, and I’d be like well, what about this? So like you had the thing with all the little buttons on it. I held up a universal remote, and I was like I think this is just as good. So that was our comedic angle on it, and we moved forward with it. – There was a comedic take, but there was also a scientific take, which allowed us to title the video Are Fidget Toys Bad for You? Or whatever we called it. – [Rhett] Right. – So we wanted to have a legitimate scientific conversation about it, ’cause that’s what people cared about. – Legitimate science is what we’re all about, Link. – I’m gonna have a legitimate conversation about science, which may or may not have been accurate. – But the bath thing is even more interesting. So back in the day, when Roi and Alex were together as the Wassabi Brothers, before they were doing their things independently, they did an ice bath challenge. Now I don’t think that they were the first people to do an ice bath challenge, and a lot of people have done ice bath challenges since, but the challenge, whole area genre of YouTube is a little bit different, because the whole idea of like an ice bucket challenge or the baby food challenge is that well, everybody’s supposed to do it. When you come up with that idea, the expectation is that millions of people will end up doing this idea. And so we like to get in on those challenge videos, but we like to do our little spin on them, right. – Well, require that of ourselves. It’s not just that we like to do it. It’s like we never want to just seem like we’re jumpin’ on a bandwagon. We always go to great length to, from a production standpoint, a planning standpoint and a comedy standpoint, do it on our own terms so that it feels different. – Yeah, so with that one in particular, we had like, again, we talked about the science behind it a little bit, like what the actual purpose of this was, and then We got ridiculous, and we sang the Frozen song, and then you found the Sprite. We did all the, sort of, the comedic beats that we wanted to do, but then, not too long after that, we had the idea for us to bathe in cereal during one of our backup plan Geico videos when we were at the cereal factory, so we had this giant cereal bowl created. This is the inspiration for the cover of the Book of Mythicality, available at bookofmythicality.com for pre-order. ♫ I’ma make it look sexy – But that’s where that whole thing comes from, and so we started taking baths in weird things, like the cereal and then ranch dress and chicken noodle soup. At the same time, Roi had– – Was bathin’ in all types of stuff. – Roi and Alex had decided they were gonna do their own thing, and so they each had their own channel. And now Roi’s got Guava Juice. And they both continued to do bath challenges beyond ice. And now Roi is bathin’ in somethin’ every week, or it seems like. I always see him in a different bathtub. – He’s so clean. – So now it’s got this like well, you guys did the ice bath challenge when you were together. We kind of did our own take on it. Now we’re bathing in other stuff. But now you’re bathing in stuff, and you’re doing it a whole lot more. And now people on YouTube would associate you with weird bathtubs filled with things. And so now if you bathe in something, we can’t bathe in it. And you’re bathing in things all the time. This is the world that we live in. – And it’s frustrating. Like, we’re not mad at Roi, by any means. But it’s like– – He found something that’s working, and he’s doing it. – But in the strictest definition of frustration, when your plans are thwarted or made more difficult, it’s our own creative problem with the parameter that we put up. It’s like all right, maybe we’re not gonna get in tubs as much, but– – And we haven’t because of that. – But maybe we can make a human nacho. – No bath there. – As long as Roi hadn’t done it. It matters that much to us that we have to do things that are different, and we have to do ’em on our own terms. – And even, with all that said, we’re still going to end up doing things that something falls through the cracks, somebody releases something, a lot of times it happens with BuzzFeed, where they will release something between the time that we’ve planned and shot something, because we shoot things ahead of time at times when have to based on our schedule. And sometimes we’ve got something completely edited and ready to go, and then BuzzFeed will do something that’s so much like what we’ve come up with that we just have to be like well, we don’t have time to replace that. We’ve just got to throw it out there. – And I hate it if it’s seems like okay, BuzzFeed much? It’s like, you know, those commenters who don’t understand how much we care about this, and that it was just a coincidence that we both had this idea, and it came out within days of each other, but we were on the wrong side of those days. – And the thing is is that because there are a lot of people out there, and we’re not gonna name specific names. There are a lot of organizations and companies out there and some people who don’t approach this in the way that we do, and if they see something that works, they just take it, and they do it exactly the same way. They may have a slightly different voice, but they do videos that are titled in exactly the same way. I see this all the time. BuzzFeed has the Worth It series. So it’s like $500 pie versus $5 pie, or whatever the different things are, and then you see that that has become a genre video that now lots of people do. This amount of thing, this dollar amount versus this dollar amount, and it might be somebody who’s like, “I’m gonna do a tech version of that.” Or I’m gonna do this version of that. Well, we’re not gonna do that. We don’t do that as a principle. It happens accidentally sometimes, but because there are so many people out there who are willing to do it and just see it a oh, this is how the internet works. You just take inspiration from people, because that exists, it’s natural for us to then be accused of that if we do something that appears that way, and it’s gonna happen, because we make so much content. – And we’re people. – We’re people, man. – We’re not an organization that the accountability kind of gets lost. It’s like if people start hatin’ on, in comments, on an organization that makes videos– – Companies can get away with it, though. – Well, even if they don’t get away with it, just by the sheer quantity of the work that’s coming out, it gets lost in the mix. – But we take it personally. Like, the whole– – ‘Cause we’re people. – Yeah, but we may not have been involved in the development of that specific video on This Is Mythical, because this is how we run our business. We can’t be involved in every single thing. And This Is Mythical is something that we kind of guide and offer creative direction for, but we’re not involved in every detail, but when that accusation is levied at us, we take it personally, because well, ultimately, we are personally responsible, and people in This Is Mythical is us, I mean, ultimately. Mythical Entertainment is us. And the buck stops with us. And so that’s why we do take it seriously. And if all of a sudden, people think, “Oh, Rhett and Link are up to that now, huh? “Rhett and Link are willing to copy now. “That’s where they’re going.” We’re just like, “No, you don’t understand. “This means a lot to us.” – And there’s many creators that we’ve talked to. Well, I take that back. I believe that there are many creators out there, and we’ve talked to a handful of them that we know share our conviction and that they take it very seriously. But the thing that, the place that the conversation goes is that doesn’t make it easy. It’s a difficult thing. And when you’re pumpin’ out a whole lot of videos, boy, it gets difficult. That Show and Yell thing blindsided us. And that was a difficult thing to let go of. – Well, it takes so much time. – But I’m so glad we did. – Oh yeah. – It was our own fault. We should have caught that a lot earlier. I think that’s ultimately what we try to do in terms of our habits. – And let’s talk a little bit about Buddy System, because this is happening right now. – Yeah, different genre, you got, like, scripting things, conceptualizing stuff. It’s a totally different world, but all the same stuff applies. – And the risk in doing something like Buddy System is so much greater, right, because we’re developing season two right now and the creative is pretty much locked into place, but we’re coming up with specific dialogue and that kind of thing. But we’re gonna shoot that, and then it’s gonna take months to edit. I don’t know exactly when it’s gonna come out. But between right now and the time that Buddy System goes live, Buddy System season two goes live, any one of the jokes that we come up with in this time frame could be done. Somebody could come up with the exact same idea for what our season is or whatever, and we’re screwed. You can’t reshoot any of that. And then you just have to be like you know what? Guys, I’m sorry that this joke ended up being the same. That’s one thing that’s worse scripted, because it moves more slowly is really interesting. – Yeah, when I look at Flixster, I was looking, I always look on reviews after I watch a movie to see if my opinion’s right. – Yeah, I just look at them to see what I’m supposed to think about ’em. – If everyone else’s opinion is right. And you can go down to upcoming movies and like scroll to like what’s coming out in the future, and you get to a certain point when it’s like 2018, and the only thing on there is like Avatar Two, Three, Four, Five and Six. – And you’re like, “Oh no, we’ve already planned “Avatar Two, Three, Four, Five and Six, as well.” – Yeah (laughs). No, but I scroll all the way to the bottom, and there’s a Bureau of Otherworldly Investigation or something. It’s BOO, I don’t know what the third O stands for. But it’s Ghostbusters starring Seth Rogan and somebody else. And it was gonna come out the same time as Ghostbusters with Kristen Wiig, around the same time, and then they shelved it for a while, and I was like dang, you all need to take this thing off Flixster, ’cause it looks like it’s hanging out there forever. I don’t know, I have no clue what the story is. But I just infer that it’s one of those situation where it’s like oh man, we were working on our ghost movie, but then it got shelved for like two years because of somebody else’s Ghostbusters movie. – And we can’t, our sized company, we can’t afford that. If we make something, it’s like oh crap, this is going out, guys, sorry. – So our goal, and I think we’ve succeeded is to make Buddy System, as we talked about, so out of left field and every choice be the unexpected choice, from a foundational level in how it’s structured, how episodes works, how the whole series works. – But that doesn’t mean– – It’s an insurance policy against it seeming like we’re biting anybody else’s ideas. – But I don’t want to, and we kind of waited a while to get into this, but– – Get into it. – The honest truth is that we’re not saying that we’re not inspired by people. – No. – You know, and specifically, I think about Buddy System season one, and we were watching, we had been introduced to The Mighty Boosh just a couple of months before we started writing season one of Buddy System. – Yeah, because people said that our Sketchtober video, the puzzle where we started singing impromptu– – Crimping. – Was crimping, which is what they call the thing that The Mighty Boosh does when they start singing a song like it’s an inside joke acapella. – And we had never seen The Mighty Boosh. – We had never seen them, but we were doing the exact same thing. – And people were like, oh, so you, oh, and people didn’t say that we were biting ’em. People were like, “Oh, it’s cool. “You guys are crimping. “You guys are doing what The Might Boosh does.” And we were like– – [Both] “Who’s The Mighty Boosh?” – Then we watched their stuff, which if you have not watched it, its all available on Amazon and probably other places. It’s incredible British comedy, two guys, musical comedy. It’s so weird in a wonderful way. We absolutely love it. You should watch it. Do yourself a favor and watch it. – Once we started going down that rabbit hole, we couldn’t resist watching the whole thing, like watching it with my boys, ’cause there’s a bunch of balls jokes, and I knew the would get that. – Balls jokes, your kids love that. – There’s like mirror ball testicles in one scene. – Old Gregg, right? – Pretty amazing. – No, that’s different, that’s Swamp Man. – I can’t remember right now. – But then there’s the Old Gregg scene where he– – It was a kangaroo type creature. – Old Gregg has a light that emits from his crotch in a really amazing way. – They’re very crotch-centric. – But there’s a couple of things that happened– – I applaud them for that. – In Buddy System, I didn’t even think about this until right now, but you know how the light comes out of my mouth and goes into your mouth during that scene in the second episode of Buddy System season one. – Yeah. – That whole light thing, and I’m in the robe, you know that permeated into our minds through the whole Old Gregg thing. – Yeah, and then we realized it later, and we were like, ’cause we conceptualized it, that the light comes from your mouth into my mouth, and then it– – Comes out of your crotch. – It comes out of my crotch and goes into your crotch. – ‘Cause it was gonna be a big loop of light. – It was gonna be a circle. – Yeah, but then we were like you know what? I think we can do without the crotch. First of all, it doesn’t make a lot of sense. Second of all, it’s twice as expensive from an effects standpoint. If we just go for mouth-to-mouth, it’s half as expensive. – And there’s a lot of light that comes from crotch in Mighty Boosh. So we shouldn’t wear that on our sleeve. It starts to seem like we’re doing something specific. – But then in episode, the episode, the Soul-Searching episode, episode six of season one, I think it is, there is this scene where I run into your character, Peter, who is a dude that lives out in the wilderness and wears only dirt shorts, dorts, and we have this weird interaction. And you only want to dance with me. It’s one of my favorite scenes of the whole series. And that guy is heavily inspired, not directly, but now looking back on it, I know indirectly, by Old Gregg, because the whole Old Gregg scene in The Mighty Boosh, he meets this weird dude who kind of wants to connect with him in a weird way, almost a romantic way, and he’s just strange, and you can’t really explain why he is where he is, and why he wants to be who he is. And so we had a similar exchange where you wanted to dance with me, and you’re trying to find all these ways. And your name is Peter, and you insist on it being no, it’s Peder, Peder with a D, Peder, not Peter, Peder. And all that is the same kind of humor that they do in The Mighty Boosh, and I don’t see that as plagiarism at all. I see that as inspiration. By no means am I saying we’re not inspired by other people all the time. But it is a little bit of a dangerous thing to be watching something while you’re writing something else, which is interesting. Sturgill Simpson talked about how when he listened to Jason Isbell’s album, Southeastern, he listened to the first song, and he stopped, and he said, “I’m not gonna listen “to anymore of this, because it’s so good, “I’m gonna be overly influenced by it.” And he didn’t even listen to Jason’s last album, because he’s like, “He’s too good.” So they’re friends, and he hasn’t even listened to his albums, because he doesn’t want to be influenced by them. So some people are so protective of that. They want to be original, that they won’t even listen to another artist when they’re writing an album. – Yeah, I think that’s just a byproduct of, I think that’s a coincidental benefit of how limited I am in the stuff that I see. Like, you name any movie in the ’80s, I never saw it. – Right, you weren’t allowed around screens. – It’s kind of, no, that’s not the reason. It was weirder than that. It was like we didn’t go to the video store. – You watched game shows. – I watched game shows. I wasn’t interested in watching movies. Your mom would rent all these movies. You’d watch them with her. You’d watch all types of stuff. I didn’t watch Back to the Future until I was an adult with my kids. – Right. – I haven’t seen Top Gun. I haven’t seen oh, gosh, let’s not get going on this. – You don’t even have to do it. – But it’s an advantage. Like, you know, we were talking to somebody that, I think it was Steve, who’s directing Buddy System season two, and he was like, “You guys watch a lot “of Monty Python, didn’t you?” And I was like, “Well, I’m familiar with it. “And I take that as a compliment, but not really.” But it’s like, and it’s a great thing to inadvertently stumble on something that people start to think that you were inspired by, something great, comedically, when the honest truth in that instance was no, we just kind of came up with some stuff. – It cuts both ways, because if you’re, a lot of writers, they’re supposed to, you know, it’s prescribed by a lot of writers and filmmakers, that you should be watching and ingesting a lot of different things. And one of the ways that that helps is make sure that you don’t replicate exactly. You know, you’re not copying anybody, but you’re just being inspired by them. So we actually stand the chance kind of coming full circle of accidentally doing exactly the same idea, because nothing is actually new. No, there’s no original ideas. Everything’s a remix, and so we have to rely on other people. You know, we’ve got, for season two of Buddy System, we actually have some writers that we’re working with, as opposed to us just taking the whole first season like we did, and we trust that they’re more informed, and they’ve seen more stuff than we have, and they can be like no, that is, and this hasn’t happened yet, but no, you can’t do that. Speaking of Steve Pink who’s directing this second season, an incredible guy, super excited to work with him, and he’s made some incredible films. But in our first meeting with him, he specifically brought up The Discreet Charm of the Bourgeoisie, this crazy French Film from the ’70s that– – Which newsflash, I had not seen (laughs). – And I, having seen a lot of things, I had never even heard of it. – I cannot pronounce or spell bourgeoisie. – Yeah, so he had this, he was like, I don’t know how this came up, but he was like– – No, he was talking about left-turn choices that we like to make. – Yeah, and he was talking about this scene where a person comes up to the main character in this movie, and they’re like, “I have a story.” And they begin to tell their story, and then that story becomes this very, I don’t know how long it is, but very long scene, and then the story’s over, and that’s it. And we were like, “We love that idea. “We love that kind of idea.” So we’re actually doing something similar in an episode of Buddy System. And I don’t want to give away the details, but we’re taking something that you might think would just be– – A moment. – A moment, and we’re turning it into the entire episode. And we’re doing that because of, we didn’t even see the movie. He just told us about this concept of taking a story, and so we don’t know what the story is, but the concept– – Was inspired, we were inspired by the bold choice, but if we watched the thing, and then it’s like, and then the specifics of that choice, we’re gonna do the same thing. Well, then that starts to get dicey, and you can get in trouble. – And I’m not even gonna watch the movie. Well, we’ve already come up with the whole story and what happens, and it’s the most ridiculous thing we’ve ever come up with, by the way, I think. – It is. – I think it’s the dumbest thing we’ve ever come up with, and I’m so proud of it. (both laugh) – Yeah, it’s gonna be crazy. It’s not gonna be easy to shoot. – No, yeah. – ‘Cause a lot of it’s outdoors. – I don’t know how we’re gonna do it. But you know what? You know you’re in the right place when you look in front of you, and task seems impossible. You’re like, “Oh, we must be doing the right thing.” – Or you’re about to die, I mean. – Right, then you just curse. – So, and I think in this instance, Steve’s seen the movie. We can cross-reference with him. There’s no way we could’ve made the same choices. It’s just so crazy. – No, it’s just the same kind of choice. – But again, we’ve proven that it is possible, but again, he’s seen it. We’re gonna ask him. In general, I think, what’s our approach in terms of a summary? This is an interesting thing, ’cause it’s like when you get really excited about something, and you’re conceptualizing it, when it’s still very early on, you got to Google it. But it’s such a, it’s so throwing, what’s it called, when you throw water on something? – Cold water? – It’s like throwing cold water on a hot and bothered person. – Hot person. Yeah, and I mean hot as in temperature, not like a good-looking person. I don’t really know what your analogy means. – It’s a downer, man. It’s like when you’re on this– – Pulling the rug out from underneath you. – When you’re on a creative catapult, and you’ve just fwing! You just pull it, and you’re like fwoosh! You’re flying through the air at a million miles-an-hour– – It’s a brick wall. – I can’t write it down quick enough. You don’t want to raise a brick wall. It’s like thwunk! – Google! – I wrote– – This has been done. – Yeah, so you know it’s like, ’cause you want to ride the wave of creativity, but then if that wave is ultimately gonna crash into a barren apocalyptic beach– – There are so many parts to this analogy. – I’d rather hit a wall. I’d rather hit a wall in a minute. – You’re mixing a lot of metaphors, but I love it. – Than hit an apocalyptic beach in two days. And we’ve don’t it all, brother. – On the other side of the coin, which is also an analogy– – And the sunburn, don’t even get me started, if you hang out on that beach long enough to get a sunburn, ’cause you’re naked. – And if you’ve got a coin, and you look at the other side of the coin, and the coin is not sunburned, it’s a little bit colder, because it was under the shade, you’ll see the other side of the coin– – Yeah. – Just trying to run with your analogy here, is that at the same time, we are going to continue to be inspired. Sometimes, I’ll just go to a magazine stand, and I’ll get one of those art magazines that’s just got weird, like, design things in it, not because I design anything, and I’m not even particularly a visual artist. I’m much more conceptual and let DPs and directors think about the visual side of things, but– – Pick one of those up. You’ll pay $30 for that magazine, by the way. – Yeah, it’ll be like a quarterly art digest, and I’ll just look at it just to see what creative people are doing now, and how they’re thinking about their art. And then without fail, that somehow by osmosis, if I sit and look at that, goes into me, and then impacts whatever we’re working on. You have to get that input to get the output that you need. That’s not plagiarism. – I actually think you’re on to something. When you look for inspiration in a place that doesn’t have a lot of overlap, in terms of a Venn diagram of what you’re creating. So it’s not like oh, we’re gonna go to other buddy comedies and look at those movies or television shows to be inspired, but it’s I’m gonna buy this graphic novel, which I talked about in The Mythical Monthly, American Barbarian, which is, it rocked my world, creatively. I was, like, gushing to you about it. – And then you gave me the book, the graphic novel, and I read it in an afternoon. And the funny thing is I thought it was amazing, but the way you described it– – I built it up too much for you. – You gave me all the spoilers, so you got to learn to just give me a little bit, whet my appetite. – Yeah, I can’t do that to you, because I do it rarely. Most of the time, you get excited about something and give it to me, but in this instance, I think finding inspiration, maybe we’re on to something here, that’s like you find inspiration in a sunset– – [Rhett] In a sunset. – Unless you’re a weatherman. – Because they’re tired of them. – You find, well, then you might just be copyin’ the sunset all the time. – Oh, yeah, yeah, it’s got to be something different. – You find inspiration in a moving, tear-jerking song, unless you’re a musician. I don’t know, this is a working theory here. (Rhett laughs) You can’t find too much inspiration in something that has a direct overlap. – I think when there’s a direct overlap, you’re looking at it for a couple of reasons, and one of them is to make sure that you’re not just replicating what somebody is doing. I don’t know, it’s a fine line, and I think we’re continuing to navigate it and figure it out as we go. But it’s so much different when it comes to something long-term like Buddy System, and then when you come back to this machine of Mythical Entertainment between Good Mythical Morning, Good Mythical MORE, This Is Mythical, so many videos coming coming out, so much content, in an environment where everyone else is doing the same thing, everyone else is tapping into the same stuff, it becomes increasingly difficult to navigate this landscape in a way that you can actually say we’re creating something innovative and original, but that’s the challenge. You got to keep, you gotta keep on pushin’? – Gotta keep pushin’. – You gotta keep pushin’ it, man. – Guys, let us know what you think, in terms of your creative process, #earbiscuits. If you enjoyed this conversation about this aspect of creativity, I’m sure there’s other aspects that maybe we could talk about in subsequent episodes. That’s an idea, let us know, #earbiscuits. What on that front maybe you’d like to hear from us? We’re still open to different themes for episodes, and in general, just getting your feedback and continuing the conversation. – And as always, we appreciate your feedback about Ear Biscuits, continue to leave comments at places where you can leave comments, and ratings in places you can leave ratings. Share the clips with your friends to introduce them to Ear Biscuits. Let’s continue to expand this Mythical universe and just bring more Mythical Beasts into the fold. – Rip us off if you have to. We’ll talk at you next week. (upbeat music) To watch more Ear Biscuits, click the video on the left. – [Rhett] To watch more from This Is Mythical, click the video on the right. – [Link] And don’t forget to subscribe by clicking the circular icon. – [Rhett] Thanks for being your Mythical best.