Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - 115: Did We Actually Write Our Book? | Ear Biscuits Ep. 115

Episode Date: October 9, 2017

On the eve of their book release, Rhett & Link sit down to discuss their creative process, share some stories found between its covers, and earnestly address the question of "Did we write our book?" in this week's Ear Biscuits. Listen to Ear Biscuits at:  Apple Podcasts: http://apple.co/29PTWTM Spotify: http://spoti.fi/2oIaAwp Art19: https://art19.com/shows/ear-biscuits SoundCloud: https://soundcloud.com/earbiscuits Follow This Is Mythical: Facebook: http://facebook.com/ThisIsMythical Instagram: http://instagram.com/ThisIsMythical Twitter: http://twitter.com/ThisIsMythical Other Mythical Channels: Good Mythical Morning: https://www.youtube.com/user/rhettandlink2 Good Mythical MORE: https://youtube.com/user/rhettandlink3 Rhett & Link: https://youtube.com/rhettandlink Hosted By: Rhett & Link Executive Producer: Stevie Wynne Levine Managing Producer: Cody D'Ambrosio Production Manager: Jacob Moncrief Technical Director: Meggie Malloy Editor: Meggie Malloy & Ty Schmieder Graphics: Matthew Dwyer Set Design/Construction: Cassie Cobb Content Manager: Becca Canote Logo Design: Carra Sykes To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is Mythical. Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I'm Rhett. And I'm Link. Today at the round table of them lighting. With them lighting. We are going to be taking you on a journey associated with our book. Listen, we've been talking a lot about our book

because we excited about the book and we're not going to. And now it's out. Well, I mean, if you listen to this very early in its release, it's available tomorrow. But for all intents and purposes, the Book of Mythicality is out. Get it at bookofmythicality.com.

Yeah, so we're gonna be talking about, nothing that, you know, we talk, this week, on the day of the release on GMM, we talk about the book extensively and everything that's in the book and lots of secrets that are revealed in the book. So we're not gonna do that on Ear Biscuits. What we're gonna talk about is a little bit more

in-depth, behind-the-scenes process, like how did we get to this point? Like initial idea, how it evolved over time. We always thought it would be a great idea to write a book. We don't have to get into it right now. But I'm just setting the premise that I had no clue and you didn't either. We had no clue what it took to write a book.

I knew the whole time I was just playing along. What goes into it. And so what we would like to do today is just take you on a guided tour. We'll be your tour guides on what it's really like to write a book and make a book. It's a lot more than just writing. At least for us.

At least for us. At least for us, yeah. I don't know if it's normal. We're not trying to normalize the book writing process to what our experience has been. Probably very abnormal, but let us guide you through it. Extremely. We were surprised, maybe you will be too.

But speaking of tour guides, I have a little personal update. It sounds like I'm about to say, I'm going off to be a tour guide, no. I recently, and if you follow me on the Instagram, RedMC, shout out to RedMC, that's me. You can't give a shout out, that's just so distasteful. I shout out to myself all the time.

You cannot shout yourself out. I just did twice, do it again. Shout out to RedMC on Instagram. I know you're physically capable of doing it, but it's not a good look. I have an active, growing audience on Instagram that I interact with. Doesn't mean you have to just get up in arms.

You don't have to have that. I'm fine. I am totally secure in my lack of Instagramming. I'm just saying, as a friend, I just don't like being friends with people of Instagramming, I'm just saying as a friend, I just don't like being friends with people who shout themselves out. Well, you don't have a choice, sucker. Shout out to RedMC Instagram, what I did on that.

Stop doing it. Yeah, I don't do a lot of Instagramming over on the RedMC Instagram account, but. It's like me coming home and it's like, hey family, shout out to Link. He's home. It's kinda like. We can do anything we want, that's the beautiful thing.

We don't have some corporate overlords that we report to. We are the corporate overlords. Well I'm overlording you right now. No, no, no, no, no. Do you walk into your house and you're like, daddy's home. Every day. Shout out to daddy's home. Every day. Shout out to dad's home.

That's so weird. And not true. I'm just trying to get, I want people to know that it's just another facet. If they want a little insight into my life, they can go over to RedMC on Instagram. I think that you should look into becoming a tour guide. Okay. That might be a good

new thing for you. That is where this started. If you follow the Red Empty on Instagram account, you do know that I posted, for the first time ever, I did multiple pictures in a post. It's one of those things, this is typically how I am. There's some sort of innovation in social media and then like 36 months later,

I'm like, I think I'm gonna try that. And then weeks later, you tell me about it. I'm like, okay. Yeah, and so I went on a hike with my boy, my youngest boy, Shep, and I was like, I'm gonna take some pictures on this hike for posterity, but then when I got through and I started looking through them, I was like, I should post these.

I'm gonna post four of them, how about that? Give people a look. Forget about posterity, this needs to be about popularity. Exactly. One of the most liked posts ever on the RedMC Instagram account is the one with me and Shep and then some other oddities I found on my camping trip, no, hiking trip up at Switzer Falls.

Incidentally, the place that we shot the did you get me anything scene where we fought the snake. The knuckleback monkey snake. And I found the exact spot, took a picture, it's changed a little bit. It's a little bit of overgrowth and maybe some rocks have moved a little bit or maybe I didn't find exactly the same spot.

Oh really? No, I think I did. I actually looked at it later and said yep, that's it. But anyway, what I did is I got this book. I tend to go into gift shops that have like a little book section and I always just feel very compelled to walk out with a book.

At like nature centers? Yeah, and so I actually found one that said 100 hikes in the Angeles Crest or whatever. So basically our Angeles National Forest. Right on the edge of LA, you can just drive there and 20 minutes or less, you're in the wilderness. And one of the things I've learned about myself is if I have something that I want to do,

like I would like to hike more, I would like to be more intentional about hiking, right? I've said that too. It helps me if I take it. Shout out to me, I've said that. Yeah, yeah, yeah, you're not gonna learn anything on your Instagram though. But I have found that if I take a tangible step,

like getting a book about the hikes, I'm so much more likely to then go and do the hike. Hmm, that may be helpful for me. And so I got the book, oh, it would be super helpful for you because if you took the time to spend money on something, you would back it up with action in a heartbeat. I mean, I also have like 20 other books that I've taken

no action on, but you would take immediate action on it. So I definitely recommend this. Do you think it would count if I borrowed the book from you? It wouldn't be, no, because you don't attach value to borrowing, borrowing. But then there's like a social guilt of like, have you read my book, have you done any of the hikes? I don't do that, I'm not that kind of friend.

If you wanna do shout outs to yourself, you can do it all day. What kind of friend are you, Rhett? I'm an accommodating friend. I'm an encourager, I'm an encourager. You're a great friend. So what I did is I- Everything you say is-

Is I got this book and it has a map in the back, a fold out map, waterproof. Oh really? And shout out to waterproof maps. And then it also has 100 hikes that you can take in the Angeles National Forest. And so I get really, I'm like- How many have you done?

One. I was like, Shepard, I'm like. How many have you done? One. I was like, Shepard, let's go and do a hike today because Jesse was with Locke and I was like, I wanna have some father-son time. We can, you know, half an hour up into the Angeles Crest. You can be at some awesome hiking. And I like read about this place and got super excited about it.

I was like, this is gonna be a great hike and maybe we'll find like a place that one day we can camp. And then I go there and I read about this place and got super excited about it. I was like, this is gonna be a great hike and maybe we'll find a place that one day we can camp. And then I go there and I'm like, oh, this is the same place that A, we filmed that video at, and B, me and Jessie have been on a hike before. But I was already there. Switzer Falls, Switzer Falls. You didn't have the book before.

I didn't have the book. Now that I had the book, I was even, I was more oriented to someplace that I was already oriented to. But this is where the tour guide part comes in because I read all about this. This is another cool thing is that I was able to appreciate the location in a different way because.

Like what? Well, it's a super cool place. You remember how cool it is and there's this like, you know, it's very like wooded and there's like a cool like creek that comes through there. Yeah, because we shot there because we wanted it, the script said jungle. Like we're ever gonna shoot in a jungle in LA.

Yeah, and it doesn't look like a jungle, but it's the most jungle-like place that you can find. There's a lot of green and that's hard to find. It doesn't look like that, like a lot of stuff, like if you watch a lot of Power Rangers, every time they're in the woods, it's very specifically like Griffith Park desert sort of scrubby, and it's like,

oh, I know where they shot that, right? Well, it was all shot in Japan, but I get your point. Right, and the American version. Yeah, they shot the American kids outside of the suits. Yeah, so anyway, but there's a whole lot, first of all, the hike that continues down and goes up into this ridge and goes back into the canyon, highly recommended, I told you this,

you should do it with your family. But I started reading about it and it was like, this place was home to this incredible wilderness camp that all these celebrities like Ava Gardner and Clark Gable, like back in the 20s and 30s would come up and this was like the who's who of Hollywood with only people who can make it up because Angelus Crest Highway didn't exist at the time.

There were other ways to get to this area. Oh yeah. And this family opened up this incredible wilderness camp. They built like a castle up there. So it's kind of like what Ojai is now. When you hear like these highfalutin celebrities like, I'm going to Ojai for the weekend. But it's different in that it's totally in the wilderness.

Ojai is just a beautiful town that has a bunch of great houses and stuff. This was like you had to take, you had to get somebody to take you up there. It was very difficult to access, and then once you were up there, it was just this like nature's paradise. And of course, as happens with most things like that, eventually it's no longer privatized

and becomes part of like a public park or whatever. Now anybody can get to it and the roads were built. But anyway, I like read all this cool information, interesting information. Like there was a bell that you could ring when you were a mile from the end of the trail where the waterfall was, and when you got to the end of the waterfall,

there would be a man who had caught some trout for you and had cooked it up fresh. Because you rang the bell. Little tidbits like that. So, I'm walking along with Shepherd and I see these, this other, like two guys, two girls, kind of like this group of people walking together and they're like stopping

and they're like talking to each other and you know I'm not like this. I don't typically, I'm an introvert, I don't typically engage with people just for nothing. Yeah, you just silently judge them. Right, and so I would typically just walk by but I was like walking and I was like, hey guys, you know that.

What? Yeah, I was like hey guys, you know that there used to be a bell that you could ring, and right around here, and you'd ring it and then there would be a guy that cooked you fresh trout when you got up to the waterfall. And they were like, really? I was like yeah, and there was a road that came down here

and they were like yeah, there's an old car engine right here and I was like, yeah, but that was, probably fell down from the road. This was like an incredible wilderness camp started by a family in 1884 and was frequented by celebrities like Clark Gable and Ava Gardner. So they pointed out the motor. Yeah.

And then you quickly redirected to what you knew. No, but I gave them, they were like, how did this car get here? And I was like, I'll tell you how the car got here. Oh, you knew how the car got there as part of this? Yeah, because there was a road that came all the way in alongside the canyon. And it's like, it's probably, you know,

a hundred years old or whatever. So they're like, oh, cool. And then they were like- This is surprising that you did this. Yeah, and then they were like, thanks for the information. And then I had a choice. At that point, I could have just said.

Ask for a tip or not. I could have just said, you're welcome. But what I said was, I just read it in a book about 20 minutes before I got here. Oh no! I caved! You folded. And I was thinking, as I was talking about it

and they seemed engaged, I was like, I could have been a tour guide and I would have been a great tour guide. I was like throwing in little tidbits. I was making stuff up and embellishing things. That's what I was. A little joke here and there. Oh, you're saying that's what you would do. That's what I kind of started to do.

Cause that's, once you, you did a very unexpected thing and initiated a conversation with strangers that could enrich their lives. But then I immediately started thinking as you were telling me what you said that like, I bet even though he would never do this, once he did, he'd be very tempted to start making up stuff. Oh yeah.

So by the end of it, you like have trapeze artists hanging from the canopy and you've got like, oh the first space shuttle was built here. But I make things up for the intention of entertainment and usually the crowd knows that I'm making it up on purpose. But Shepard would have been the crowd. Yeah, I tell my kids lies all the time but then I tell them that I'm not lying. You would have lied to the couple and then you would have told Shepard would have been the crowd. Yeah, I tell my kids lies all the time,

but then I tell them that I'm not lying. You would have lied to the couple and then you would have told Shep later, I made all that up. Right, but I think the bigger point- You could be like me one day, son. The bigger point here is that- A pathological know-it-all liar.

I had an opportunity to really establish myself, like to just leave those people thinking that, you know what, that guy really knew his stuff. Maybe he's a tour guide, maybe he's a nature expert. myself, like to just leave those people thinking that, you know what, that guy really knew his stuff. Maybe he's a tour guide, maybe he's a nature expert. Yeah, it was your big chance. And then I totally bailed and was just like, I'm just a doofus who read a book 20 minutes ago.

It's not too late. And then I added, and the only reason I remember it is because it was 20 minutes ago. Like I even gave myself demerits for reading comprehension. You could have just given them the book. Say, hey guys, I'm done with this. Were you wearing all khaki? No.

Man, strike two. Yeah, I look totally normal. You know what, don't be discouraged. You can do this again. You can die in all khaki, just like you've always wanted. You can go back out and just wait for another couple to come up. There's a hundred different hikes.

I could read up on each one and then just go hang out and wait for people to walk by. Hey guys, wanna know some information about this hike you're on? Yeah, you could probably get tips. You know what I should have done? When they said thanks for the information, I should have just stood there silent.

Put your hand out. Or throw a hat on the ground. Have a hat on the ground. Or have like a violin case that I just like, sort of just open up. That's more, that's really, really, you know, it's a strong cue. That'd be good for Shepard to learn too.

They're like, where's the violin? Oh, there's no violin. Proper panhandling learned from my father in the wilderness above Los Angeles. Now we're gonna pause to show some love to our sponsors. Ear Biscuits is brought to you by Bombfell. I hate shopping for clothes. I absolutely hate it.

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That's B-O-M-B-F-E-L-L.com slash ear. Bombfell.com slash ear for $25 off your first purchase. Now on with the biscuit. Okay, let's get into this, the process of writing our book of mythicality. First of all, we gotta go back, it's probably, I mean, this represents a two year process.

And I knew that writing a book would be a lot of work and that it takes a lot of time and that even once you finish it, then for them to actually put it together and make it into something physical requires a lot more time but I still severely underestimated how much of ourselves it was going to require. Well and every time.

Which is why it's so meaningful to us now. And every time. Which is why it's so meaningful to us now. And every time we received another book from one of our friends in the mail, this is the way the YouTube community works, right? One of your friends, whether that's Grace or Hannah or Mamrie or Tyler Oakley or whoever it might be, they write a book and they send it to you, a friend, who's also a YouTuber.

And of course, you know, as a community, you're helping to get the word out about everybody's books. You're like, hey, I'm reading this book. I love them, go buy their book. We're a community that supports one another. And we're very happy to do that. Every time we had one of those books in our hands, I think we didn't even talk about it,

but there was this sense of like, we know we need to do this at some point. But I think the reason that we didn't is because we know the way that we end up tossing ourselves in, throwing ourselves into things. Launching. And let's say, we let things, once we sort of commit to them, consume us,

and we knew that a book would take a certain level of commitment. And so we always kind of just push it off and said, not yet, not yet, because we don't wanna just fart a book out. Right. And that was the mindset that we were in. And a book of this size, especially hardback,

that is gonna be painful. Right. Whenever we was the mindset that we were in. And a book of this size, especially hardback, that is gonna be painful. Right. Whenever we do fart it out. But then ironically, when we finally started talking about in earnest, the business side of let's get going with the book, the thing that got us off the dime was a much more- It's not ironic at all.

Encapsulated idea. It's not ironic at all. Well that's precisely why we were willing to do it. That was the whole point of what I was saying is that because we thought that a book would take all this time and energy and personal commitment, when Jen, who works for us, said, have you guys thought about writing, I think there would be a demand for like a mythical,

I mean a Will It Cookbook. We were like, great idea. Even right there, it's like as a title, Will It Cookbook. Right. Is, yeah, there's some humor in the title and then it's like, yeah, we've invented and we will continue to invent certain dishes within our Will It episodes

that people will actually wanna make. And it's one of the things that very sort of, certain dishes within our Will It episodes that people will actually wanna make. And it's one of the things that very sort of, you know, not true Mythical Beasts, but just people who kinda just have some, the people who know that we have a show but don't know who's Rhett and who's Link, those people know us because of Will It, right?

So there's, and that's a large, there's a large contingent of people out there. Now, we were like, this would appeal to so many people, great idea, and it won't take much work from us because we're not the ones who cook the stuff anyway, so what do we know? We just gonna lend our faces and our brand to this thing and sort of oversee it from a high creative standpoint.

And we started to get very excited. It wasn't first, this is gonna be easy for us. First it was, we were very excited about the concept and we knew that we could write things around the recipes that would ultimately be the value of the book. That like, oh, that's a funny commentary on the different uses for cereal or the dynamic, an cereal or the dynamic,

an essay on the dynamic of covering something in chocolate and the magical qualities of that. You may have been thinking that, but I definitely wasn't thinking that. I was thinking this, I'm just being completely honest, this is a way to write a book without writing a book. That's what I was excited about. But we knew you would write some stuff.

Yeah, but I was like, we don't have any time to write a book, so let's come up with a version that requires the least writing. And this is probably the first argument we would have. And either one of us could have been in the other position. It's like, well, we can do this with it, we can do this with it. And again, it would explode out of control.

But we limited it, we just said, okay, this is the concept. And then we started talking to our people that then make things happen, because there's a business side of this stuff, just like, okay, well, you gotta talk to the people who make the books and you gotta, there's a way to go about this. And it's not just, you just don't start farting it out.

You gotta set up how you're gonna fart it out. And- You gotta find a book publisher. So we started going out to different book publishers with this idea, like pitching this idea. And we talked to several different people, several different publishers, and everyone was, anytime anybody's got some sort of following online

and there seems like there's some traction there, book publishers are gonna get excited about it, obviously. But then we talked to a guy named Matt Emmen at Crown, which is a division of Random House, right? Is that correct? Yeah, well it'll say it on the back. Crown Archtype or Archtype. Yeah, let's get that right.

Crown Archtype. I always just say crown. And we had this conversation with him and he and Matt said, I don't wanna do it. We got rejected. What he essentially said was, guys, I feel like,

All I remember is the rejection. You have, what would get us excited about this is if we could find a way to translate sort of the world that you have built, and he actually just said the world that you have built in Good Mythical Morning and translate that into a book because I feel like what you guys have is so much bigger

than the fact that you eat weird stuff. And that, I mean, the funny thing is, is that he was the only person who didn't just say, yes, exactly what you guys want to do is a great idea and here's why and we're gonna support you. It was like, I actually think that there's a bigger and better idea somewhere in here. And then I remember that phone call and this happens a lot.

I was just like, I know he's right, I know he's right, but I don't want him to be right because if he's right, then we're gonna take the next year of our lives putting this book together. And we were wrong because it's two years. Right. Yeah, but he was, I mean, he was not flattering us, but it was flattering

that he understood the breadth of what we were creating and what we were about as artists. I mean, I really appreciated the fact that he rejected our small idea because there was a much better, bigger idea that we didn't come out and say on the call, but we were like, well, yeah, we kind of knew. Maybe we did, but I don't think we did.

It's like, yeah, because after the phone call, I remember the debrief between us was like, he's right, but we'll do that eventually. But let's just do it, but we're not gonna do it right now. So let's do this smaller idea, this fun idea. It could be very successful idea. Well, to put it in the context of what was going on at the time,

because this was fall of 2015. So we were, we knew that we wanted to, we already were thinking about buddy system. We didn't know specifically, but we knew that like 2017 was gonna be the year where we did our first big, large scale narrative project. And Buddy System specifically being on YouTube,

that wasn't in place at the time, but we basically knew that was going to happen. We knew that was gonna take a lot of time because we had to write that and we had to produce that. Of course, GMM is sort of a constantly moving train that requires constant attention from us. So that takes up a lot of our time. But we were also, you know, we had moved into this new space

and continued to expand as a company. There's just a lot of moving parts that we were ultimately responsible for. And it just didn't seem like the wisest thing to add a book that would take a lot of our time because there's only so many hours in the day. And so I think that was what we were resistant to. And I don't even really remember,

well, I know what it was. We talked ourselves into a process that we thought would be doable. And before that, I think there were a number of trusted voices in our lives that said, you never get a second chance to write a first book. And it matters a whole lot.

If your rationale is, I'm gonna write this, I'm gonna do a little fart, and then we'll do a bigger fart later. Let's drop the fart thing. Yeah, yeah, yeah. It's not sustainable. Yeah, the fart analogy really comparing a book to a fart is-

Right, not cool at all. Yeah, no, does it a disservice? What was I saying? First book, one chance on your first book. Right, and so our whole rationale of we'll get this out of the way and then we'll get to the big daddy later. Actually, by doing it that way, we may never get to it

because we may never earn the right to be able to do it based on the success of the first thing. So you should throw, and then I know as we, we'll talk about Jake more in a little bit, but I think he echoed that through the process in terms of like what we hold back from this book and what we decided to put into it. And he did a great thing in coaxing out of us

just the mentality of when in doubt, throw it out there, throw it into the book, pour more of ourselves into it. And don't worry, if you wanna do a second book later, worry about that later. You'll find plenty to write about. You will find, yeah, and he's definitely right about that. And in those initial conversations with Matt, he kind of explained, again, this is one of those things

that I know that we're gonna be totally honest about exactly the way the book came together, because I know that there was that whole controversy with a YouTuber that I'm not going to name, you can look it up if you want to, where it like kind of came out that like, her book was ghostwritten. Or his book.

Or his book was completely ghostwritten, and then I don't even know if that was true, but that person had to defend themselves and I think the impression is with a lot of people who have any kind of following online, if you're not known for being a writer, the assumption a lot of people have is that, okay, if this is an athlete or an actor

or something like that, well, they probably got somebody else to write the book. We were very, very sensitive to that because that's not how we do things and out of a sense of pride and also just the way that we tend to work is that we've got a lot. We throw a lot at what we do and so the idea that somebody else would come in and write something

that represented us wasn't anything that we were interested in. But we were talked into having somebody come in and facilitate the process by Matt and that person is interested in. But we were talked into having somebody come in and facilitate the process by Matt, and that person is Jake Green. And so if you open up the book, you see it says, With Jake Green, and that is very much because we wrote this book

with Jake Green. And what we mean by that is that, and we can talk about that process, because the first thing that, we didn't know how much of our personal stories were gonna go into the book. When we sat down to talk about this and we're like, well, let's break out this concept of mythicality,

let's define what it is because it seems to be the thing that characterizes everything that we do. And you remember the first idea we had was, well, the working title before we had an idea based on our conversations with Inman was the Good Mythical Book as a play on Good Mythical Morning. And it was just a companion to the show. But then once we tried to figure out

what the format would be, we talked about it being an encyclopedia of mythicality. And that was the actual title. And it was gonna be a- And I think once, yeah, we had the original, we got rejected by Matt, he gave us all of his good reasons, we had a great conversation. We decided, okay, we're gonna do this.

We pitched this idea back to him. Which was even, which was still, it was broader in its subject matter, but it was still not committing all the way personally. So it was an alphabetized compendium of information that for P, it could be, you could have an entry that would be very heady like, Parallel universes. Parallel universes.

And then right underneath it, it could say, and it could be a long essay that we've written about parallel universes that could be comedic in nature and it could have some learnings in it. And then right underneath it, it could say, have the next P entry and it would be poot. And then to continue the fart stuff. Yeah, because we love farts.

And then right beside it, it would just say, the only word Link's mom is comfortable referring to a fart as. And that would be the whole, and it would have a picture of my mom. Yeah, and so the idea was to take, it was to answer the question, what is Good Mythical, really it was more, what is Good Mythical Morning as a book?

Well, on the show we explore things that are fascinating to us, but we also talk about personal things. So it was like, this is sort of a scaled down, alphabetized, organized way of exploring those things. But then. And we were even talking to Jake as we were interviewing who we were gonna get to work with us on this thing.

And, you know, we were bouncing. So part of us hiring him and choosing to work with him was his take on the encyclopedia idea and like his thoughtful response to it. And he had some skills that would help with that. But then he also had some input that I remember led us away from actually doing it. What it was is that we were protective

because we always thought that one day we were gonna write the sort of the memoir-ish type thing, right? Which is pretentious all on its own. I know just a couple of guys who met YouTube videos. Why do I need to, why do you not need to have a memoir, but whatever. We knew that with this shared friendship and 30 plus years of history together, there's something there, there's a lot to talk about,

but I think we always saw that being in more of just a straight, text-heavy memoir presentation. And so we were trying to keep some of the stories and keep some of the history, hold it back. And when he was like, guys, what you have in Good Mythical Morning and Mythical Entertainment and all this, it flows out of who you guys are personally and your personal history, so you really can't start

talking about this unless you break it open and just let yourselves be in this book. And again, it was one of those things where it's just like, I know he's right, but I don't want him to be right. I know he's right, but I don't want him to be right. And so then- And just as a side note here, I'm so appreciative to everyone who helped with the book,

but you already see how important it is to choose the right people to trust and to invite input, you know, with, sometimes when people like Edmund or Jake, or in your case, Mythical Beast, I'm talking directly to you now, if you trust someone and then they tell you something that is not exactly what you wanna hear, well, your ears should perk up a little bit.

And that's the type of people that you need in your life, not only on a creative front. Right, and so when he was talking about that, I remember thinking, well, how are we gonna do this in a way that won't require, oh, and let me just say, by this point, this was spring of 2016, we were in the middle of writing Buddy System, getting ready to produce it,

the schedule had been put together, and we're still meeting with Jake to develop this idea and talk about it. And of course, we're always neck deep in Good Mythical Morning. Right, oh yeah, and not to mention, GMM is happening constantly five days a week. And we were doing Ear Biscuits.

No, I think we- No, we had taken a break from, Ear Biscuits had gone by the wayside. You understand why we took a long break from Ear Biscuits. No, I think we- No, we had taken a break from, Ear Biscuits had gone by the wayside. You understand why we took a long break from Ear Biscuits now. I mean, that was the one thing that we made an executive decision not to do. It wasn't because we go to the beach

in Disney World every other day. It's because we don't have any time. So we had to figure out a system to contribute to our book and how much? And Jake suggested, well, why don't we sit down in this room that we're sitting in right now at the round table of dim lighting, and he says, why don't we just have conversations

about mythicality and some of the stories that you guys have had and I'm just gonna take notes. And I didn't know exactly what that meant because I think there was a part of us, you guys have had and I'm just gonna take notes. And I didn't know exactly what that meant because I think there was a part of us, even though we really wanted to have a lot of control over this, because we were so busy and stressed out at the time that all these conversations happened and they would happen and he'd be like,

I'm gonna be here today for three hours, we gotta get this done and it was in between a lot of other things. I think I was secretly hoping that we could just sit down and have these conversations and these anecdotes and that he would take it and basically write it down and then we would just edit it. I was secretly hoping that that's what would happen

and I know that's how a lot of like celebrity books are written. Yeah and so. I was very self-conscious about that but we were so busy I was thinking that that might be how it came together. If that was the only way to make it happen, we became more open to it, which then I think to double back on what you're saying about the indictment

of books that are ghostwritten, it's not, it seems horrible from the outside, but there's a scenario where you can, where it's totally your story, but then somebody's just literally typing it on a page and making it make sense in a written form. And so it's not as ugly as I think people make it out to be. Yeah, yeah, yeah.

Because we became open to it. That's collaboration, that's not, ghostwriting is more just like, I'm just gonna, you know, I've done some research about you and I can write your book. That's the perfect ghostwriting situation, the ideal ghostwriting situation. And that maybe is a little ugly.

But that didn't happen with us. No. And what ended up happening as it was us talking through these stories and then when we sat back down and looked at the notes, he had made notes, he had not written paragraphs, he had made notes of like, you guys talked about this, you talked about this, you talked about this.

Having spit it out there and then having it presented back to us was when we began to see it materialize in a way that's like, okay, well now we've got to take those notes and those stories and we've got to pick the one that we think best illustrates this aspect of mythicality. And so it was a little bit of a mix and match.

Some things really presented themselves. We were like, well, we know we wanna have something about our wives in there. Our wives, we feel like there was some very mythical things that we did in the process of convincing our wives to marry us, and wouldn't it be cool if we kind of told those stories, but then let them have their perspective

and their really honest say, and actually write in that chapter what they thought. And so some of the things kind of presented themselves and eventually, we just found ourselves sitting down and, so all the, there's two different parts of the book. There's every chapter has- Well, hold on, before you get to that. Okay.

Because I find it interesting in that process, I mean, the first meeting we had with Jake and we were talking about what we wanted our book to be, at that point, I believe we knew we wanted to describe mythicality. Like we started talking about that as a term. Yeah. And so then it was, okay,

so then there's different aspects of that that are different chapters, but let's just have a preliminary discussion about what those different things may be. Good example being our love lives. And then the wild hair idea to let our wives actually contribute and say it from their perspective. That was very exciting because it was a great way

to involve our wives when we've all collectively said, well, they don't wanna be in videos and that's fine. So this was like really exciting. I remember we talked about a chapter called Eat Something That Scares You very early because the whole food will it thing was still on the forefront of our minds from the very first seed of the book.

But then it's, you know, conceivably, you and I could have sat down here like we're doing right now and just talk to each other. But I don't think it would ever have happened. I mean, we have lots of conversations, just the two of us, but there's something about there being an audience, there being you listening right now

that motivates, I mean, the quality of our conversation and a lot of other things. But so with Jake being there and him being very skilled at, as a listener and being able to synthesize everything we were saying, it was extremely valuable, but he was also very valuable as an audience. We recorded all of it because I felt like, okay, this may turn out to be something special,

so I wanna record this whole thing. But he also asked to record it, so instead of just taking notes, he could listen back to it. So it was like a podcast for one person, and Ear Biscuit just for Jake Green. I think some of them were six hours long. Yeah. But there's no way you and I would have,

we would have got any, you know, we got frustrated, we got off topic, you know, as a conversation project manager, he did something that I didn't appreciate, I couldn't have appreciated ahead of time. And he also took a look at everything that we've done in our content and came back and pitched chapter ideas. And he's like, this seems like an aspect of mythicality

that you guys have just naturally manifested and sometimes it takes people, kind of a third party looking at that. And he's like, you know, talk to me about that. Are there stories that contribute to that? Now, for example, this isn't exactly perfect. They all came together different, but you take the second chapter, which is called Get Lost.

So we had this thing that we did all the time when we were kids, which is we would just get on our bikes and we would ride in one direction. And we would just go until we found something and there was this sense of exploration and this sense of risk and this sense of open-endedness to the things that we were doing. And it was kind of a game formatting to it.

And then we started realizing that this tendency that we actually started to do together as kids was something that applied to our career and we didn't even know it. That our entire career has been characterized not by having a very specific plan or specific goals, but has been characterized by heading in a certain direction with intention

and then sort of figuring it out as we go along and taking and being ready to discover things and to take risks. Embrace the unknown, structure that into your life. So the whole chapter became about that concept and the stories that support it. Yeah, kind of backing into some principles that led to the success we've experienced

is something that we discovered. And then we said, oh, okay. So getting lost is an aspect of mythicality and calling it get lost is a fun title for a chapter. We knew we didn't wanna format it as an advice book. We ended up calling it a field guide. That was as advice-ish as we were willing to get, which is still as pretty advice-ish.

I mean, there's a self-help nature to our book, but we didn't want it to be like totally self-help. We want it to be just as entertaining. But yeah, I mean, a lot of that came out of us just telling stories and not knowing exactly what the application was. So I think we learned what we learned. We like relearned it by telling the stories

and then saying, okay. And then at other times, Jake would say, that's it, I love the story you told about, remember that one, I'm trying to remember the thing he came back that one time and he was like, the story, I think it was Chris Barefoot. We told a story about hitchhiking. No, it was in this chapter.

Yeah, it's in Get Lost. And hitchhiking after discovering Chris Barefoot's house. And he got such a kick out of the guy's name being Chris Barefoot that he was like, this has to be in your book. Right. And so it like really motivated us to make that work. And there are some stories,

a bunch of stories that didn't make it in but sometimes the stories are so good that we build a chapter around it. I think that may have been one of those cases. Trying to think of another example. Well you've got, you know, Conduct a Weird Experiment which is based on a- There's a story there we've never told.

Yeah that's a pretty. The smoke story? Well, and that also, in that same chapter, we talk about the laws that we broke, some of the only laws that we broke in high school. Right. And because it was the result of an experiment that we did together, so.

Science can justify lots of things. And then of course, because this is a first and foremost, it's a book that's supposed to, it's supposed to make you laugh, right? We want you to read this book and to be entertained by it and to laugh, we want you to learn at the same time and be challenged to add more mythicality to your life. But because we wanted it to be funny,

there are some chapters that are very much exclusively funny, I would say. Chapter 13, Visit the Future, the chapter that was written from the year 2075, where we imagined ourselves. No, we didn't imagine. Yeah, well, these are the Ear Biscuitiers, man. We can, you know.

You're gonna admit that we didn't actually travel from the future. I'm gonna admit that we didn't actually travel from the future. I'm gonna admit that we didn't really travel from the future, that that was a comedic device. I hope that doesn't disappoint you. We really haven't figured out time travel. But as if we did figure out time travel and come from the year 2075, we wrote that entire chapter.

And that chapter and us coming up with the, what was gonna go down in our friendship in the next 50 years and the different ups and downs of the show and our friendship and the different diversions. It's crazy. It's this craziest, it's like the most Rick and Morty-ish that we've gotten in terms of how random, and I mean that chapter, to this day,

when we read that chapter for the Audible book, we both had laugh attacks reading it, because it was. Shout out to us, that was funny. No, it's just one of those things that like, Yeah, yeah. Especially when you separate yourself from it, like when you've written it and then you've stepped back.

But I do want to talk about, so Jake did more than that. Jake did more than help organize the ideas and he was more than a sounding board because, the book has two parts to it. First of all, a lot of it is memoir and archive. So you've got these stories that, from our shared experience, our shared friendship, and then all the archival photos and different tidbits.

We broke open so much archival stuff, from yearbooks to photos to notes to book reports, and all that goes in there to help support the stories. But then the other part of the book is, the unsexy term that we used as we were developing the book was supplemental material. And that was, because we want this book to be super entertaining, what can we do when we,

okay, say the Get Lost chapter as an example, if we're gonna tell this story about getting lost when we were kids, and then we're gonna talk about how that applies to our career, then what can we do to add to that, to supplement that, to give you some just content that you can just, hey, just turn to a page and enjoy this. And I think that-

Yeah, let's step through those. I mean, first of all, there's an entire spread dedicated to an inspirational poster that we wrote in the, that we just, it was just an offhanded phrase that we said in the chapter, and then you made a joke about it being an inspirational poster, so then, we decided to actually make that.

But then, after that is when you get into these supplemental sections. Yeah, and so, you know, I don't know exactly what the breakdown is, I'm sure we could go back into the notes and figure out who pitched what, but Jake did pitch a lot of these things, like the best and worst places to get lost, and so. Without a car or a bike, which is how we would get lost.

Right, and so you've got these different environments, or these different modes of transportation. If you're on this particular mode of transportation, this would be a great place to get lost, this would be a horrible place to get lost. Right, like the best and worst place to get lost on rollerblades, scooter, a jet pack, a Segway, a yak, and a motorcycle sidecar.

So Jake was very instrumental in pitching some of those things and then helping to develop some of them. Like, let's come up with the perfect amalgamation of beasts to create the perfect mythical beast that never gets lost. Yeah, so basically taking every animal that has some form of echolocation or a super sense of smell that helps them know exactly where they're at. that has some form of echolocation or some,

or a super sense of smell that helps them know exactly where they're at, could we, if CRISPR was available to us to use, could we create an animal, and so we've got that animal, that animal's created and broken down and drawn in the book of mythicality. And it is called the Wellifigenol. Yes it is.

And there's other things just in that chapter, but I mean, and you go back to chapter one, laugh with a friend. So we collaboratively came up with, hey, let's highlight the biggest laughs we ever had together on Good Mythical Morning. And then we created like a shrine to those moments. But then we said, okay, let's make a test,

a laughter compatibility test to see if you have any business being friends with somebody. Yeah, so you and a friend can take this test and see how many of your answers match to see if you've got the same sense of humor, which we think is a pretty important part of friendship. So it was, again, it was very important for us to use our stories as a jumping off point

for us to have engaging content at the end of the chapters. I thought we came up with a better word than supplemental, but it doesn't matter. But all that, let me just say that all that was completed months and months ago. Like the writing for all those particular pieces. I don't know, like months and months ago. Like the writing for all those particular pieces. I don't know, like months and months ago, that was done. And then we were like, well, how are we gonna make this?

You're talking about the writing, the words for the whole book, not just supplemental. You're talking about now, the writing was done and then the next phase. This has to be on a physical page. This has to look like something. And we know how particular we are about aesthetics and how we want things to look

and how we want this to be unique and we want every page to have character. And so that began the very long and arduous process of coming up with a physical aesthetic presentation of every concept, especially the supplemental things, which were all totally unique. And it was like reinventing the wheel and starting from scratch on every single concept.

Yeah, from a visual conceptual standpoint. So, I mean, yeah, we had piles of archival stuff, notebooks, pictures, all this stuff that like Allie went through and scanned and then goes into the book, but then in the supplemental section, it's like, well, what does the Well-O-Fig-I-No look like? We need to illustrate that.

We need an illustrator. We need to pick the right illustrator that does wild- Anatomical drawings. Anatomical wildlife drawings. And we want it to look like, you know, when Darwin went off in the Beagle, and he came back and he had drawings of plants and stuff, and he had taken these notes,

can we make that drawing of the Well of Fijinal look like a biologist had just gone off and found it and drawn it and then made notes about it? So that's what that page looks like. So we didn't draw any of this. Oh no. Well I drew the map of our hometown. You did, you did.

And like where we lived and our secret meeting places. So there's a hand drawn map of Buies Creek and like we hand wrote some stuff. But there's a, I wanna like. But there is a whole bunch of, I mean, we might have used, between handwriting artists and illustrators, we might have used 10 different ones and the whole team at Crown that oversaw

the visual aspect of this and Feldman here on our team helping to conceptualize everything, it was such a team effort to achieve the goal of you turn to any page and what it looks like is a surprise. And very purposeful. Because what I'll say is, okay, I'm looking at the embrace immaturity chapter where we talk about there needs to be a part of you

that never completely grows up. And so we've got 20 ways to embrace Immaturity chapter where we talk about, you know, there needs to be a part of you that never completely grows up. And so we've got 20 Ways to Embrace Immaturity, like a checklist, and it literally has a cutout and is based very much on the Garbage Pail Kids cards, right, so like if you look at the back of like a Garbage Pail Kids card, it has like a certain kind of text and we tried to, obviously it's not completely ripped off,

but it's like it's inspired by the feeling that you got when you looked at a Garbage Pail Kids card. On the next page we have an idea for a ridiculous television show which is based on a story that we tell, my dad's favorite show when we were telling this story being Matlock. We talk about Matlock quite a lot. You're gonna learn a lot about Matlock. But then we talk about what is a modern day version

of Matlock. So we have like a TV Guys, which is like a parody of a TV Guide write up for a show. And that page looks like the old school TV Guide. And then the very next page is just an ad that you would see in a magazine, but it's like an old school ad Guide. And then the very next page is just an ad that you would see in a magazine, but it's like an old school ad that would have been around at the time

where we actually played this ridiculous game that we talked about in the chapter. And so I don't know how many man hours went into each one of these things, but I don't know, we're just- I hope we sell some books. I'm gonna say I'll put it to you that way. I don't know. But I think we both have this sense that like,

with the things that we like to consume, like, the idea that like, this page was not an afterthought. This page was not an afterthought. This page is very purposeful in everything the way that it came together. There's so few experiences, well there's, for me, being the age I am, this may not be true for everybody, but for me,

I feel like there's a lot fewer experiences like that where I can buy something. Physical. And it's a physical experience. I remember the Pearl Jam album, Vitalogy. I think that's how you say it, Vitalogy. And it was, do you remember the liner notes? It was, you would take it out and it was a whole book.

And it looked like, you're talking about Darwin's drawings and this was, it was so detailed. It was like a mini booklet that had, I don't know, it could have had 30 pages in it and it was all like anatomical sketches and like phrenology and all these different, I didn't know anything about phrenology and all of a sudden it's like what is, what are they mapping to the brain here

and it was just so weird and so detailed. And it had, I mean, it seemed like it had nothing to do with their music to me. I was like, man, their music's okay, but this book is awesome. Right. And it was, you know, for- And you could sit with it.

You could sit with it. And read it and experience it. While listening to the music and it became a palpable experience for you. That, I mean, doesn't happen with music that much anymore. Right, I mean, like this, we talked about this on the GMM episode where we talk about the book, like the creative confrontation.

So we've got a whole chapter called Pick a Fight where we talk about the fight that we had, that some of you know about, the physical fight that we got into that was captured on GMM. We talk about the cause and the aftermath of that, but then we talk about some fights that we've had with other people

and like the way that we approach conflict and how we wanna change the way we do that. And so then one of the supplemental sections in that chapter is called Creative Confrontations and it is outlining ways to basically settle a dispute, have a dispute, have a confrontation, have a conflict with somebody that isn't fighting. And so all these are formatted like old school Nintendo games

and every single, it's just like, and Feldman was very helpful with this too. Mike Feldman, our brand strategist, he's really into all this retro stuff too and is near our age and so we kind of pull in a lot of like 80s and 90s references. But like every one of these video games was thought to the degree that you would design a video game cover.

This is just two pages, but there are 10 different video games that were designed and described. Again, just trying to paint the whole mythical picture of how every single thing came together for this. And rounds and rounds of notes and conversations to get it to this final point where, I don't know, if you list it out in this one Nintendo spread, the people involved, some way, it would probably be

almost everybody we acknowledged in the back of the book. You know, it's kind of crazy how that works. And then we got to a point where, okay, it always comes down to the wire, but we got the words, now we've got the visuals, it's all there, we've done the photo shoot for the cover and the places inside where we needed new photos. And then you're just waiting.

You're waiting for it to come in a box. Right. And it's interesting because I wasn't here when it came in a box. And I walked into the office and our office and I was, I think I came from buddy system post and I was kind of worked up about something or overwhelmed about something.

And so then I come in and like I immediately trying to get your input on something that I'm concerned about. And we're in the middle of this heated creative conversation and then I happen to glance down and I see the book. I'm like. And you had seen the, we've had what we call bound galley which is a paperback version of the book that is,

you know, the cover looks exactly the same but the inside is black and white and it has typos in it. It's uncorrected proof. And it's soft. Right, and so you got a soft cover and then this, of course, is the hard cover. And so, you thought that was the same thing because I've had it on my desk for weeks.

And then in like mid rant, I'm like, that's a hard cover. It's hard. And I pick it up, I'm like, it just changed everything. And it became the moment that you can only have once, which is the first moment you hold your little baby in your arms. And you could have prepared me a little better.

You were like, yeah, I've already seen it. I'm like, come on. I've been sitting with it all day, man. The final chapter, you could have texted me a picture. You could have given me a shout out to your Instagram. Yeah, I should have done that. One of the final chapters is called Stop and Celebrate where we come clean about the fact that we have difficulty stopping at any point

and celebrating life's little victories or moments of success. The huge things we've kind of institutionalized, well, I'm not gonna tell you the chapter, you can read it. Marriage, death, things we also talk about in the book. Death, yeah, we do talk about death. You know, it's like this is what you do when you die. Right. You have a funeral.

You commemorate, you stop and you celebrate a life. You do that when you get married. You remember birthdays. Right. But there's no specific established thing that you do to celebrate when you have a book. Now, we talk about what that is for us in the book, so I'm not gonna give that away. Right.

And we talk about our habit of falling short of being appreciative of those little moments which should be celebrated. But I think that in one sense, this conversation is part of that for us. It's like reflecting on what a huge process this has been and all the people that we've mentioned and haven't mentioned that made this thing a reality

and it's like, you know what? And now here it is and we wanna share it with you and but it's done, you can't edit it anymore but you can physically hold it, it's different than a lot of most everything else that we do. But I guess I'm just making the point that this is part of our moment of stopping and celebrating and saying, you know what?

It's done, I'm glad we did it. Yeah, and now let's go do the thing that we said we were gonna do in the book. And we probably need to video ourselves doing that as proof. That's a good point. So we'll do that. need to video ourselves doing that as proof. That's a good point. So we'll do that. We have our special way that we're gonna stop and celebrate. You can read it in the book.

We'll probably share it with you in a video form afterward. But for now, we invite you to be a part of the experience. And thank you to those of you who are actually in the book. You know, there are a number of collections of things, not things, some things that you guys have sent us, but also we specifically reached out. A lot of people didn't even know why we were doing this. And we couldn't say it was for the book

because it was so long ago, but we wanted stories about your pets and we wanted stories about your... Inventions. Inventions and then some of your fan art and that kind of thing. And so there were some very special mythical beasts out there who contributed to the book and there are spreads exist in the book.

And I would say beyond that, there are many of you and collectively all of you made this book possible you know this i mean so uh but it but it it shouldn't go without saying again that like we could never make this book without your support and um you being a part of this community that that watches and engages in the stuff that we create and but it goes further than that. I think it's clear, it will be clear when you read the book that you, you know, you shaped our lives to the point

that the stories that we tell and the perspectives that we have and share in the book are shaped by the conversations that we have with you through our content. The concept of mythicality itself Absolutely. Is something that not only did you guys name yourselves the Mythical Beasts,

which was based on a story that we had, but it was you guys taking the ball across the finish line and naming yourself the Mythical Beasts, which then turned into this whole mythical enterprise and naming everything mythical and calling this the book of mythicality. But the very definition of mythicality, while it's rooted in something that existed in our

friendship and in the way that we created things, the whole time we were doing all that stuff, A, for an audience, and B, in the context of the greater community of Mythical Beasts. So this book is just as much what you guys have contributed to us as it is something that we wanna contribute to you. Yeah, your fingerprints are all over it.

So we're gonna give each of you a book. If you pay for it. Oh no, that's correct. If you pay for it, we will give it to you. Yeah, bookofmythicality.com, all bookstores, places you can physically buy it. Remember the audio version, audible.com, and then mythicalmonthly.com where you can see

the book-related merch that's gonna come out around this. And if you've listened this far, you've already ordered a book, right? So I do wanna encourage you to think about the people in your life that you might wanna gift a book, right? So I do wanna encourage you to think about the people in your life that you might wanna gift a book to because I don't think they need to know who we are in order to really appreciate and a lot of this to resonate with them.

This is actually, it serve as a good introduction. You're like, you know those stupid idiots that I send you their videos sometimes? Well, they're more than just stupid idiots who eat weird stuff on the internet. Take a look at this book, I think you connect with it. If you're a parent, I would definitely say buy it for your kid.

I look forward to our children reading it and discussing it in like an Oprah group setting together. The Oprah book club? Yeah. And if Oprah, if you're listening, boy, what we wouldn't get. I mean, we would probably give a lot, maybe a body part for you to make this

your book club book of the month, but. Lots of pictures. Probably asking too much. I don't know if that's a requirement, but there's lots of good illustrations and pictures in it. Lots of pictures, Oprah. Book clubs love that. We know you like pictures.

All right, and get the audio version too because it's for your ears. Yes. Not unlike this. I hope you've enjoyed it. Thank you for letting us weasel into it and share this experience of making a book. Ultimately, we were concerned about talking about our book for this whole time and we literally discussed

should we do this because we didn't want it to seem like a big sales podcast. Right. But hopefully, you see our heart behind just sharing the experience of doing this thing and you don't hold it against us. Yes, we will talk with you next week.