ramble before we get into today’s episode we want to encourage you to go ahead and get your tickets to mythicon while you can we have secured this location outside of austin which is essentially an old west town and every single building is going to be turned into an experience that you can only experience in mythicon but we’re going to be doing some things that you’ve never seen us do before a lot of the mythical crew is going to be there so get your tickets now mythicontickets.com uh it’s october 28th through the 30th in austin texas for that weekend only you don’t want to miss it mythicontickets.com [Music] welcome to this special additional episode of ear biscuits the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time i’m rhett and i’m link this week at the round table of dim lighting we’re talking about how as a business we have navigated i’ll even say weathered the storm of covid over the past 14 months or so yes and we’re going to start by taking you back all the way back to march 2020 to an email that our ceo brian flanagan sent out to our employees hello mythical and smosh folks as you’ve seen from the news coven 19 now poses a significant risk to anyone in los angeles i’ve spoken with rhett and link and ian and with all your senior leaders and we’ve determined that while nobody in our organization has been infected or exposed as far as we know the safest path to protecting each other is to work from our homes for the next few weeks preventing the inadvertent spread of disease through the workplace our plan is below please read carefully and then you know i’m not going to read the whole thing but please treat today wednesday march 11th as a prep day to wind up what work you absolutely need to complete in office and from thursday 3 12 through friday march 27th plan to do your jobs remotely from home in la if those dates change that was that’s a big if they did we will of course be in touch via every method possible regardless of timing of our return to the building you will hear from me often during this admittedly strange period of remote work with whatever updates i can share and so we it was so it was so admittedly strange but you know we didn’t we didn’t know what was going on but we were trying to do right by our employees and and be as smart as possible and not create panic but a sense of safety when every single second we were glued to the television trying to figure out well i mean should i be ordering toilet paper soup and the the supplies to make hand sanitizer myself well it was this very interesting time where we started hearing more and more companies at least in los angeles were basically saying hey we’re going to start working from home and we and we were just doing what everybody else is doing which is just watching the news and there’s all this speculation about you know this looks like it’s going to be pretty serious but i think what we’re going to have to do is just kind of you know lock down for a couple of weeks and it’s probably gonna pass like you know there was just this there was this hopeful that this was gonna be this temporary thing that if everybody works from home to kind of get a little bit of a handle now the interesting thing is that there were epidemiologists at this time who were essentially saying guys no this is a pandemic and this is going to turn life upside down as we know it but i don’t think that anyone wanted to deal with that potential fact and we definitely didn’t want to think about it from a business standpoint at the time i definitely remember and we discussed it on this podcast like after we had come to grips with the fact that we were going to be working from home and we’ll step through a lot of this stuff i do remember talking about how there was that moment very early on that like the newscasters were saying hey this this is you’re going to remember this the rest of your life this is life altering yeah this is going to be the new normal and it was you know it was helpful to hear that someone who was a little bit more authoritative now there was all types of authorities saying all types of things at the time but but we were being as safe and health-conscious conservative as possible i mean it really started to strike us that as leaders of a company well all of a sudden we were making decisions that held people’s lives in our hands it was i mean i felt a little blindsided by that and it was it was scary it was scary well and we wanted to do what was right by our employees we wanted to keep them safe uh and luckily we were and this is this is a really interesting thing to watch unfold on the internet as people began to you know we were very clear that we were no longer shooting gmm in the same way but as you know we shoot gmm ahead of time and sometimes we’re more ahead than others and we just happened to be at this perfect place where we were literally a month ahead of time we had four weeks of good mythical morning well we were as we were filming as kovitz started all that stuff started to fall apart started to happen so you know we were reacting to it from set and this email that went out we were also having this communication in person that everybody was that everyone that was there i mean later in the email brian says the good news is that mythical and smosh are well configured for remote work via and then he lists out all the tools that we use anyway in the office whether it’s you know gmail slack etc um so they we were ready to replace large meetings or any in which face-to-face conversation is helpful with google hangouts meet tool which was like we that’s the thing we had never used that much i you know the google version of zoom we’d use it a lot now but you know he’s kind of educating people which makes it easy to create a new video chat meeting via google calendar complete with telephonic dialing for the camera shot telephonic leave it to brian to use the term telephonic but yeah it was like early on it was like if you don’t want to be on camera you don’t have to be but then it’s like hey get with the program now it’s just part of that part of things but things were moving so quickly so it moved so quickly that by this announcement on the 11th and then talking to the entire crew on set on the thursday the 12th by monday the 15th again news everything was being processed in output so quickly that we were gaining all this information and it became very very clear over that weekend that this was going to be longer than two weeks and so we immediately made the decision we’re like we have four weeks worth of gmm but we honestly have no idea when we’re going to be able to be back in the studio so uh let’s spread this content out and that’s when we we went immediately to monday wednesday friday releases on good mythical morning which i can’t do the math on that in my head but i think that gave us six weeks of content so it gave us a six week buffer to figure out what we was going to do a week or so later is when we realized we needed an even longer term solution that we were going to have to start shooting additional episodes at home separate from each other yeah you know honestly there were there were these discussions about us just getting together and filming but with so much uncertainty and because we were we were telling the mythical crew to to be as aggressively safe as possible we decided yeah it was important that we each filmed from our own homes and we worked out the ability to like to frame everything so that we could split-screen the two of us together and you know it was it was kind of a fun challenge i was at first that’s how i was trying to look at it but we wanted to make that decision to say yeah we’re maybe we could talk ourselves into being together like we’re in some pot or in the same family but we’re going to take this as seriously as possible we want to send that message that was the main thing that was behind the split screen episodes of gmm that we would film and then let’s see we had the camera that was filming but then we had other cameras that were broadcasting to google chat where all of our crew could could watch us and communicate with us as if they were in the room with each of us it was it was very complicated from a technical standpoint and yeah we were doing it all ourselves and it was but we had to figure that out and it was at that point i would say like day two of having to do that in my own living room where the frustration began to to set in and having to coordinate the chat and to turn the camera on to make sure it was in focus having the props and setting it all up and of course we both made the decision i think for lighting reasons and aesthetic reasons to like do it out in open areas in our house like you were in your dining room which is open to the rest of your house and i was in my living room which is open to the rest of my house so there was a whole lot of like shut up kids like telling your kids to be quiet which everybody’s that they weren’t at school so everybody’s stuck at home and dad’s saying he’s going to go and set up in the living room and shoot his show and you got to be quiet and it was at that moment that i began to not that i didn’t already but had a just this additional force causing me to appreciate our team and all the different pieces of the puzzle that they bring to the table where we can just sit down and just be ourselves and and make good mythical morning but not have to worry about being the producer and the cameraman and all these other things and i just dp i tried i was like i don’t want to get bitter about this because me being in a good mood and me being excited you know we’re still wanting to provide us what we see you know it is our business but we’re in the service industry right and we’ve kind of come to the to the understanding over the past few years that this show that we bring into people’s homes monday through friday almost year-round it’s something that people kind of end up depending on and they look forward to it and it’s something that is a part of their daily routine i mean all these years we’ve said thanks for making us a part of your daily routine and we feel this sense of i mean it’s a great privilege but it’s also there’s a bit of an obligation i think to continue to bring the show and to bring a show that’s engaging and fun and we’re being fun and we’re engaged and all of a sudden we’re doing it less we’re doing it monday wednesday and friday and now we’re doing this version where we’re not really together the timing’s a little bit off i if there’s a little bit of a half second delay that changes the nature of comedy between two people and i i started to panic a little bit because not only that our you know we were releasing less content but people weren’t watching it as much either like we had broken their routine by not doing it every day and we were giving them a show that let’s just be honest it wasn’t as good as what we can do in the studio i mean the only you couldn’t acquire anything to prepare if you wanted to like make a dish and then it would be us like whoever’s in my house would have to do it we were lit i mean you couldn’t get it you couldn’t get stuff off the shelves you couldn’t get stuff mailed to you it was i mean you could but it was very limited and you couldn’t count on delivery times and that’s a big part of our show is not just the eating but the stuff that we order and that we interact with and our producers do all of that you know instead we were just coming up with creative and our team was pulling together ideas um from their homes that we could execute just with what we had in our homes just rating our own pantries i think the first episode was this it was some sort of challenge when i ate all the fish all the condiments that were in your own fridge and it was a punishment yeah it was literally this is the stuff that we everybody’s got condiments in their fridge so yeah we’re like it was the first time we got rid of the wheel of mythicality but you know hey you know it’s like we can learn new things we can try new things maybe something will catch on this coin of mythicality thing maybe that’ll catch on it didn’t well but we had to we had to and that’s always the workflow that’s always been our mentality is that innovation you know uh well what is it uh necessity is the mother of innovation whatever that is of invention invention and and we were like okay maybe there’ll be some innovations and we’ll get into that a little bit how some of the things that the pandemic has done to us as a business are things that we will carry forward but i can safely say that nothing about that at-home version of us not being in the same place version of gmm we’re not taking any we didn’t take any of that into the future you know we asked stevie to kind of give us an outline of everything that was happening behind the scenes and all the adjustments that were made things that we didn’t you know we’re talking about our pain points but everybody had to make adjustments i mean just one example our team is used to working off of a server with everybody having access to the same media files so they can work simultaneously but with everybody working from home they had to stagger their schedules so that each person could finish their job before they passed a project to the next person so assistant editors editors post sound mixers quality control all of it was happening in different places and it was a totally different sequence that took so much longer that yeah so stevie jacob all of the producers and everybody had to they had to come up with a new system and just to reiterate you just mentioned all those people but just i mean this might be of interest to those of you who are you know kind of interested in production again the way gmm works at this point it isn’t hey we shoot it and then you take the card that has the footage on it and you give it to somebody and then they just bring you this fully fledged episode no like link said there’s an assistant editor who’s the first person to take that footage and and to put it together then there is an editor who is going to take it a little bit further there’s there’s somebody who’s working on the graphics package which is also an additional layer there’s somebody who’s only worried about the audio the post sound mixer and then after all that is taking place it goes to you know a producer who will watch it and approve it and then even after that there’s a quality control of qc where somebody’s making sure that like graphics are right and things are spelled right so there’s like five or six steps and it’s one thing when everybody’s in one facility but we were literally having to take that step send it through the internet to dropbox and somebody was having to and everybody’s got different kinds of internet speeds i mean i i recognized this something that i learned is that my home internet speed upload speed was like 1 20th of your home upload speed because you had a different service right i had a great download speed but now i’m having to take this stuff that i’m filming at my house and i’m having to wait literally overnight for a couple of episodes to upload to the internet so i ended up having to go to the creative house which has good internet and if they can do it every day if the upload failed i mean you’re talking 25 people just sitting on their hands waiting for it but like in succession right yeah there were all these challenges and we’ll keep going through how we pivoted as a team and as a company but two things first like you said we we knew that we could we could help people that people still wanted to watch our show and it could be a bright spot in their day and that was that meant a lot to us to just keep us motivated and engaged and to want to make it but also we knew of so many businesses that they were not allowed to conduct business i mean you you couldn’t if you were a local restaurant owner you know you were trying to you were trying to figure out if you were going to be able to do delivery or pick up did you have any apps that you were connected to that must have been a nightmare and it was i mean for us we were just making internet content you know and the you know the demand was still there and as long as we could as long as we could make it people could still watch it they could they still have their internet it changed a lot but it didn’t completely compromise our ability to deliver the same product right which is one of the reasons we got through like if like if youtube went down for a year or the that would be a problem like the internet infrastructure of los angeles went down we’d have to use a river then we would we would be dead in the water like a lot of small businesses and so we’re like listen we this is an opportunity we can still do this it’s not going to be pretty and it and it’s not going to be as fun but i was extremely grateful that we could still do it so we were able to tell the team hey don’t worry about your job we see a way forward we’re in a fortunate industry where people want this and i think we can give it to them it may be different and it may be less often but we can do this i think from a business standpoint we’re gonna be okay and we gave them a reassurance that like well you okay that you may be remembering it with slightly more rose-colored glasses and i think is the reality because i think that leads into the next point which is in early may when we made the decision for the two of us and stevie just the three of us stevie was not in first she was in but there was a point when like we showed up and morgan had labeled everything and stevie wasn’t even there she wasn’t there from the beginning maybe we just showed up a few hours before her that one day i i think in early may is when we went back and it was just the three of us okay but the point i’m making is that that’s you’re right uh it was this monday wednesday friday release with home recorded episodes mixed in was not performed it was performing at a fraction of how well the show was performing up until that point now we’ve been through a lot of ups and downs in making this show for you know since 2012 and we usually are able to you know weather it but there there’s always this fear for everybody who makes a living on youtube that you’re going to lose you’re finally going to lose the momentum and you’re not going to be able to get it back because something’s going to happen with the algorithm suddenly people aren’t going to be interested and you’re not gonna be able to call those people back into your audience sure you’ve got 17 million subscribers but how many of them are engaged how many of them are watching and if all of a sudden half as many people are watching what is that going to do for you long term so we were like we’ve got to get back to making something that approximates this version of the virtual show and by that time you know a few months had passed by may we knew we understood more about covid and we were confident that if we kept the crew incredibly small and literally just me and link and stevie who had not been out who had not been inside any place who you know we were basically completely quarantined completely locked down and so we were like okay well the three of us are being incredibly safe and this is before we were doing testing by the way this is before testing testing didn’t happen for much later yeah can we do something that feels like gmm and is as often is weekly i mean it’s daily again monday through friday and that’s what happened in may yeah so we came in there we were we did will it sandwich uh went back to the will it roots without mythical kitchen um chase chase came in and left ingredients instructions and photos for stevie and then he left and then stevie came in and like made all the sandwiches like putting butter between two pieces of red yes i don’t know if you need a picture for that but uh they did a great job on willett sandwich and it was just like me you and then was stevie even in the room when we were filming she was she was way over there she wasn’t close to us we didn’t get close to her we never got close we got close to each other we we basically made the decision we had we felt like we wanted to we were like we’re gonna have to treat our two families as if they are one family yeah right because we just can’t do this thing and that was a small risk that we decided to take but again nobody in either one of our families was doing anything that would that would expose anybody to the to the virus and so we felt confident to do that and we’re making good mythical morning in an abandoned studio like it felt it’s you know it smelled weird it smelled like no one had been there right no humans but then in mid-may la county finally released some guidelines about film and tv production right because i mean the film industry had been essentially completely locked down for months by that point and of course this is a town where we got to make our tv we got to make our films and so you know we’re a production studio we decided to use the guidelines that they had come up with and apply it to our production and it was at that point that we started to bring some people into the studio but it was still i mean it was a handful it was it was just making it where it didn’t have to just be the two of us and stevie but it was literally the bare minimum that you could bring into the studio and pull off the show and we were asking every single one of those people to basically do exactly what we were doing which is you’re either here at the studio shooting the show or you’re at home and you’re not anywhere else and shout out to the crew who throughout this entire uh we could not have gotten through any of this we couldn’t do anything that we do without our crew we definitely couldn’t have gotten through this entire process without our crew but to be specific we couldn’t have gotten through this without them all making a lot of sacrifices and understanding that they couldn’t just do everything that they wanted to do they had to take into account the collective safety of everybody who was a part of this thing and of course everybody besides the two of us was wearing masks and we were everybody’s washing their hands and doing everything that we were being told to do at the time but it required a lot of sacrifice for them yeah because the the official guidance was okay you can if you need to go out and do this we’ll do it in this way if you need to go in the store do it in this way and we were saying to our crew don’t do those things at all yeah like we’ll give you gift cards to order more stuff so you don’t have to physically go into places even though the general guidelines may be stringent the ones that we’re we asked them to follow were more strict and then yeah so they were definitely making sacrifices and having to come up with systems along the way i mean at this point chase was the only producer in there there was no art so none of the none of the props are set builds or anything like that you couldn’t you couldn’t see any of that there was no culinary team mythical kitcheners were not coming in by the way the mythical kitchen channel had their own deal they had just they had launched at the top of the year and then kovit hit and they were they were just getting going with their own channel and it was like oh just you know just do stuff from your house as as much difficulty as we had it was it may have it was probably more difficult for them because they weren’t they the things they were doing had to cook they had to cook and they were she just sit there they were shooting in different ways and it wasn’t it wasn’t as simplified as as the way we produce the split screen version of gmm and they stepped up in that way but so so they weren’t involved and then it was chasing stevie handling props some crew members would come in individually through the week totally alone do something alone do something alone and then fill this like they had this like plastic container system for each episode so then they would like put stuff in a bin it’s kind of like the mailman shows up at night or like an elf shows up at the elf at the cobbler’s house and starts making shoes and then the next morning oh look there’s shoes there’s something in this container that i’m supposed to use i gotta put laces in them so throughout the summer these type of processes were being refined and the team was stepping up to bring back what felt like to a viewer it looked and sounded and the subject matters were more what would be a normal gmm but behind the scenes everything stripped down and very simple and i and i can say and a number of people said this in the comments when this happened that you could kind of see the sense of relief that we were back in the studio right and we were more relaxed and i think we made some great content but yeah i feel very limited look at putting weird things in a hot glue gun that’s when only stevie was there and i mean there’s a little innovation that that’s when jump cutting the chaotic jump cut within a good mythical episode that let’s talk about something that was completely unexpected june 30th 2020. so we’re just starting to kind of get all this together and to be able to produce this show in a limited fashion but it’s pretty much the same show jacob uh gets a call by the way he’s in his car he he’s like he’s driving somewhere i think to you 7 pm 7 pm call he gets a call from the fire department and he had to go out of town and he gets this call oh yeah he was getting ready to go on vacation yeah not vacation what is vacation meaning like just to go out of town and be alone in another house i don’t know i don’t know where he was but but the fire department calls and says your studio is flooding rapidly because a car has knocked off a fire hydrant in front of the building and it’s just like okay when i when i hear that this has happened i’m like okay actually what i heard the first thing that i heard was that somebody hit this was because it went in the general slack somebody saw a video of it and put it in the general slack they’re like somebody hit a hit a uh a fire hydrant right in front of our studio and it’s shooting water straight up in the air and some of it’s getting on the roof it’s like a geyser but what we did not know and and just so you understand water is very very heavy and water is so heavy that it has the ability to break through a roof and here’s what happened so we actually saw this on video later do you talk about the minivan okay so well i’m talking about the vid let’s start outside okay we see footage security footage of a minivan swerve off the road onto the sidewalk go run over the fire hydrant just knocks it away like it said just just just like it’s like like somebody just sweeping like sweeping a turd off the street and so and then the minivan and the fire hydrant keep going and then all of a sudden it leaves just a a hole like a geyser immediately just going straight up into the air i mean like it could have been 100 feet in the air i mean it was probably it was probably 40 or 50 feet second video this video comes from our internal security cameras right and because jacob is trying to hear him tell the story he’s trying to figure out what it looks like inside the building hey we have cameras inside of our building he pulls up the live feed the first thing he sees is this is the foyer right so this is the lobby basically the the lobby and you’ve got our front desk there he sees water flowing through the lobby but then he’s like how deep is that water well he sees a chair that is from the stage where smosh shoots um try not to laugh like that stage a chair has floated all the way through the lobby and just floats right past the camera and goes down to the rest of the studio we’re talking a river we’re talking like three feet of water just flowing not just standing flowing and what was happening is is the roof in one part of the studio right at that right on that stage through completely collapsed all the water from the fire hydrant was going up and coming down in one spot on our relatively flat roof and to the point where it pelted a hole that then turned into a gash which turned into a chasm the whole roof just completed which turned into a whole the whole roof caving in and then the water flowed to every square foot so our office like our personal office we’re talking 8 000 square feet of the building yeah so this whole one side now our office is actually right on the other side of this wall when we’re recording in air biscuits is the complete opposite side of the building now when we show up i mean because it was like i i we were talking on the phone and we were like i guess we i mean we no one knew the extent of the damage except maybe jacob and brian at that point we were like it was late ignite but it was like nine o’clock at night we’re like we need to drive down to the studio and see what’s going on we walk into our office and there’s like they’ve already the water has been shut off for a long time by this point but there’s still like two inches of water just in our office every single wall was saturated every single piece of furniture that could that was touching the ground had soaked up all this water this studio right here ear biscuits um this wooden floor right here that we’re on which is a little bit elevated it was covered in water the moment of me driving up into the parking lot to then see what was happening is is a moment i never want to forget because it was it was an awesome moment as i drove up trying to find a place to park first of all i hadn’t seen any anybody it seemed so few people you and stevie and then it’s people on video chat right none of us have gotten out but in the in the parking lot i was noticing there was stuff out there and there were people there were mythical crew members who had heard about what was happening and they showed up long before we did and they were rescuing things pulling things out so that they wouldn’t sit and be flooded and damaged uh beyond repair so the whole parking lot was being filled with all the equipment from the good mythical morning set like the desk was outside all of the cameras all of the all of the furniture all of the computers all of all of this stuff was being taken out like i was seeing people were like people were pulling stuff out of our office these weren’t like workers that were hired to to fix flooding stuff they those people didn’t come until later these were employees who said i know i’m not allowed to be out and i know i’m not allowed to have a contact with anybody but i’m going to mask up and i’m going to keep my distance and i’m going to go rescue our facility and we didn’t ask anybody to do that they were just there and it was just a it was a it was like i said it was a defining moment for mythical when and i you know to see these familiar faces to see morgan coming out to see uh dave and carrying some stuff and like you know jake was there and he was in like flip-flops in pajamas in pajamas yeah because he just got he just came over there and was like hey i was watching netflix and now i’m here didn’t even take time to get fully dressed and basically these people were were trying to uh i’m not saying they were sacrificing themselves but i mean they were putting themselves in more danger than we were normally doing just to just to rescue what we could and it it meant a lot and they did such an incredible job and i shouted out two of them but you know i’m sorry i can’t shout out everybody and i know that everybody who showed up i know that all like even tell them even more people wanted to show we actually had to tell people don’t show up right because we were getting too many people in the studio because our crew was so helpful but it was a catastrophe it was absolutely ridiculous okay so so many things ruined so many things saved but literally a week later now the building was a catastrophe and there was they were you know we brought in a professional company that basically cut the whole like bottom two feet of every single wall off so many things were ruined but the focus was can we get the gmm studio back to a place where we can record because we got to keep making this show less than a week later we had gotten the studio back to a place where we could come in and shoot the show and no one knew that we missed a beat now yeah the rest of the studio took i don’t know how many weeks it happened incredibly quickly it was a matter of weeks before they had like completely replaced all this stuff and like repaired the walls replaced the floors in a number of places it turns out that the crew worked so quickly that most of the equipment that got like the server we were worried about the server because it got into the server room but the server of course is elevated so the server was okay most of what they got ruined was like connections and cables but the cameras and the bigger pieces of equipment and the computers and everything that we used to make the show was all intact but we we kind of ended up not really missing a beat when it came to production very miraculous crazy big credit to jacob for you know for seeing that project through just being blindsided by that on top of everything uh to get that done was was just amazing um and then if you’ve so then if you get to august that’s when the team had implemented weekly pcr testing you know shoving the swab up your nose we had a system do that on site for everyone who who just the skeleton crews for us for mythical kitchen and by the way i mean smosh is its own thing that all the decisions we were making of what you can and can’t do and who can and can’t come in they had to figure out how to make that work for them as well so that’s when and it still continues to this day every wednesday morning everybody’s lined up and getting their nose swabbed i mean at this point we’ve had over 3 500 temperature checks over 1500 covid tests administered here at mythical in order to make this what still is to this day as we’re recording this podcast still is what we would consider a skeleton or a reduced crew yeah we’re still trying to minimize risk now things are looking so much better people are getting vaccinated the numbers are down so we expect to return to a somewhat normal approach to the show but it’s absolutely mind-boggling that our crew has been able to essentially create the same show that we were creating before the pandemic in the midst of all these restrictions and all these sacrifices that we’re asking them to make the fact that we’re doing that the episodes that we’re able to put out now i mean yes we don’t have any guests but you’re hard-pressed to point to anything else i think to the credit to our team that feels that much different but we still do not have our crew back in the office the majority of the crew is on google hangout during filming including the showrunner of goodwill matt carney’s not even physically there none of the writers feels like allowed to be there yet either and i know how much they want to be there and like being on chat is different and really challenging but the way that they’ve made it work i mean all of this is just a celebration of like hiring the right people that believe in what you’re doing so that when the [ __ ] hits the fan you know by the time you show up the fans already half clean right you know because they care about that fan as much as we do and and it isn’t just we’ve talked a lot about good mythical morning like link’s uh mythical kitchen was doing their thing smosh was doing their thing uh our store you know our crew that makes the products that you buy at mythical.com they had like the best year that they’ve had in the midst of all this and they encountered their a whole set of covet complications because the way covet impacted shipping alone and production of all these things they navigated all that the mythical society team did an incredible job continuing to grow the society during a time where i think that the society became that much more important than it has ever been because people wanted to have some kind of connection when they were were isolated so our team and and not to mention that they were able to do all these things in a way that the direct impact of our team being so excellent and being able to continue to deliver these products in an excellent way enabled us to be able to continue to grow in a year where a lot of media companies were shrinking we actually hired since the beginning of work from home which we mentioned was march of 2020 we’ve added 14 new staff members to mythical and these people many of them i’ve never met them in person and because it’s all been overzoom and they don’t even know what they’ve never met anybody they don’t even know what life in mythical is like because they’ve been working from home and working through their computers now eventually we’ll all be able to get together and see what we look like in three dimensions but again the credit goes to i i mean i think there to me there are there’s sort of two two main reasons why we were able to pull this off so to speak in a time when a lot of businesses really struggled and it’s really a testament to the industry that we’re in and the people that we’ve got working here i mean the first piece of it is like you said we’re not a restaurant that had to completely change our business we don’t have a storefront we’re not retail those people really really suffered because their entire business model changed we all we had to do was figure out a way to get these videos onto these platforms that we post on and it was not an easy process and it was a very difficult and time consuming and challenging and the standards were changing and all these things are constantly moving as a moving target but we were pretty much able to continue to deliver the same project so that’s sort of the first piece of success but i think that the second piece is just the nature of the team i mean we have an incredibly scrappy team just because of the business that we’re in making digital entertainment we’ve got people wearing multiple hats so you can take a crew and you can bring in like a fourth or a third of your typical crew and you’ve got people who can do five different things because that’s what you do in digital entertainment it’s not like traditional entertainment where this is the person who does this particular thing and you really can’t scale that down so we got people you know kiko who’s recording this podcast right now who produces this podcast uh is filming gmm right is also running a camera on on gmm when he’s not working on air biscuits as an example there’s we have so many people who are multi-talented so we’re in the right business at the right time and we have the right people to help us pull it off and that’s the only reason that we can look back at this time and say it was a success and i wonder what we will take forward i think you know a lot of gratitude certainly as we talked about i think work for home work from home and work for home yeah for and from uh is now a part of the dynamic of what we’re going to be doing moving forward i mean we’re talking about when we come back into the office there being added flexibility people discovering that with certain aspects of their job having that having that space or or being at home allows them to focus or you know it’s different reasons for different people but we’re we’re listening and we’re open and you could be more yeah you can be more productive so we’re given the circumstances looking for a little hybrid there i think virtual meetings i i hope that i mean i’m thinking about like whenever we have to travel across town and it literally takes an hour and a half to get to a meeting and then it takes two hours to get back i that’s three and a half hours of of just being in a car yeah for like a 20-minute meeting i’m really hoping that people are on board with this with the video chats for that type of scenario i think that the yeah the external meetings and some and some internal meetings will be moving to basically just virtual and i think that surely everyone is thinking that that is going to is going to be the norm because not only does it eliminate this transportation and time that you’re going across town but it also enables you like you remember how it used to work like if we were if we had an idea that we were pitching and they were like oh well they’re in new york city do you guys have a trip planned in new york anytime soon because when you go to new york we can set up the pitch meeting it’s like what we have to wait until we have a trip planned and we have to plan a specific trip to fly across the country to make this happen when we can just stay in our office maybe not have pants on have this meeting and by the way on the other side do you think about the people you know we’ve been having some meetings lately where uh whether it’s an interview or somebody is pitching us something right and if they were to come into the studio there’s a number of things that would be different first of all there’s like you got to like greet somebody and there’s a whole like oh we got to bring them in here and oh do you want a coffee you’ve added like and listen i’m not saying i don’t want to see people but you’ve added 20 minutes on the front end of that thing when if it’s just a zoom meeting it’s just like boom you’re in you have the meeting you’re out and you move on to the next thing i think another thing we’ll take forward is the just valuing our communication to the team i mean this is really a test of of leadership and i think for as much as we upped our communication a lot of times we didn’t have a lot more information so it but we thought that it was important to remain more connected to be seen and heard from and just to help us have a collective experience even though we’re all in our homes behind our own screens so i think we developed in that way and also began to value just be being even more open as a leader there were lots of times when we were like we don’t know the answers but we’re making decisions based on these particular details and based on this guidance and this is how we arrived at this and this is what this is what we’re doing it may change everything’s changing sometimes minute by minute but this is the heart behind it and our thinking behind the things that we’re doing just trying to have an that open level of communication where they understand hey we’re trying our best we believe the best in terms of how you’re going to respond let’s move forward and i think it i think it kind of created a bonding experience i i hope that it built some trust both ways i think so i mean when you go through something with somebody yeah it increases the bond but even more specifically i think that the nature of the conversations that we were having bled so much more into people’s personal lives than they ever would before the pandemic right so not only are you working from home so not only has your has your job coincided with your personal life at home because that’s where you’re doing it from but you’re being asked to make these sacrifices especially if you’re somebody who is i mean the people working in post are making their own kind of sacrifice because they’re working this new system at their home but the people who are coming in and actually being a part of the production again like we said they’re being asked to take these extra precautions not just get this you know sort of unpleasant test every single week but say hey here’s a gift card don’t go into the grocery store get this stuff delivered to you we’re having these conversations as we all go through this thing and we’re making these adjustments to our day-to-day lives that then directly translates into the conversations about work so the lines got kind of blurred between just having a conversation about how people can protect themselves with how you can do a better you know how you’re doing your job and it just got it just got more personal and i do think that as we get back to a normal studio whenever this is going to be but like when we can get back to what it is quote unquote normal everybody’s in the studio and people aren’t constantly worried about how close they are to people etc i think having communicated in that way with the transparency and honesty and the urgency that you’re talking about it’s going to change the way that we talk to each other going forward and i think it’s actually going to make us much better prepared as a team for the next catastrophe and i really hope that the next catastrophe is not anywhere on the level of covid or even really anywhere on the level of the flood but having been through those things i just feel like our team is so resilient definitely i want to invite you into this conversation if you got any thoughts or perspectives on it uh maybe you got your own small business that you’re that you’ve been adjusting this entire time enter the conversation using ear biscuits and we do want to thank dell technologies for you know for giving us this prompt and this opportunity to talk about this because i feel like uh as part of this podcast it’s been nice for us to step back through all of this and to realize what we’ve been through together and how it’s impacted who we are as business leaders and um wow and thanks i’m exhausted and thanks to all of you who who stuck with us again you know we we talk about our team but we none of this is possible if if you don’t continue to watch if you don’t continue to listen you don’t continue to you know participate and try all the things that mythical is putting out into the world and you guys came through i mean you supported us again we try to create a product that you don’t have to watch out of charity we’re trying to but if it comes to it we’re trying to give you something that you want that you want to keep watching and you want to keep coming back to but you know what you still have the choice there was your lives were turned upside down too your routines were turned upside down you decided to watch something new or watch something else but you know what many of you most of you kept enjoying the things that we’ve been creating and so we’re eternally grateful to you as well thank you you