Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - 224: Our Lost Years | Ear Biscuits Ep. 224

Episode Date: January 20, 2020

The veil is finally lifted on the never-before discussed gap of time between R&L quitting engineering but before becoming YouTubers that they refer to as "The Lost Years." Listen to R&L reveal their entire story on how they actually came to be the Internetainers they are now, in the first video of this mind-boggling 4-part series of Ear Biscuits. Time Stamps: (00:54) - The Lost Years (6:14) - The reason for not sharing this earlier (13:05) - The true story (18:20) - Growing up in the church (22:10) - The whole story behind the Wax Paper Dogz (30:20) - NC State and Campus Crusade (34:20) - Our roles in Campus Crusade (40:27) - Making videos (47:41) - MC'ing at the Christmas conferences (53:08) - Link's growing involvement and becoming Rhett & Link (58:09) - Meeting our wives (59:03) - An aknowledgement (1:02:56) - A teaser to part 2 (1:06:32) - Rhett's Rec 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

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Welcome to Ear Biscuits, I'm Link. And I'm Rhett. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we are going to be filling in a large gap, not like a construction project. Kinda. A large. It's got that magnitude to it.

Gap in our past that we're calling the lost years. Yeah and I say it's a large magnitude. I really don't know if to the listener, how they're gonna process this or how much they're gonna be interested, but for us, this is a really big deal. You know, there's many parts of our journey of how we got to where we are right now

that we've told many times. I mean, we've told a lot of stories a lot of times. How we met on the first day of first grade, blah, blah, blah, blah, blah, we told that story a lot. We told the story about how we first got on YouTube, that we had a website so we didn't think we needed YouTube, somebody stole a video we made called Pimp My Stroller, put it on YouTube and that's how that started.

Well and the question that we get, the story that has been told repeatedly in multiple interviews, multiple articles, is okay, Rhett and Link, you guys were engineers and then you stopped being engineers and you became full-time YouTubers. And that is a very simple story that is not exactly true.

I wouldn't say that it's a lie, it's just not the whole truth. And I would think that's surprising because over more than a decade of us talking to you about us and so many stories about our shared past, you'd think we would've shared everything there is to share, but there is a big part and there's a lot of details that we've never shared before.

And I would go as far. Today we are going to share. And I would go as far as to say is that these details and you'll understand in a second why they haven't been shared and why we're sharing them now, I think they constitute, ironically, the most significant reason that we are who we are today and we're doing what we do today.

And the true story of how we got to be doing this weird job full time, the two of us from North Carolina, small town North Carolina, got to where we're doing this job right now. This aspect of the story is really the reason that we're doing it. It is the how we got to be Rhett and Link. Yeah. How we got to be professional entertainers, yeah.

And we've never connected those dots. Okay, so the glaring question at this point is, well why haven't you talked about this before? Why haven't you shared this? If this is such a big deal, this is why you're doing what you're doing right now, why have you never talked about it? Because you talked about everything else

multiple, multiple times. And there's a complica, well, I'm gonna start with why we're talking about it now and then we'll talk about why we haven't talked about it up until now. Okay. The overwhelming momentum of this podcast, this podcast I think is the main reason. The overwhelming momentum has been a move

towards the personal. You know, I've been sharing about going to therapy and the stuff that I've been dealing with in therapy. Link's been sharing about the stuff he's been going through with relatives illnesses and grandfathers dying. I've been crying on this, y'all. Daughters getting surgery. Yeah.

And it's gotten so increasingly personal, which isn't something that we ever really intended, just kinda just happened once you sit down and talk to each other for a few years, that it became, it started to become almost uncomfortable that we had not really delved into what we're gonna talk about. Because you start to dance around those things

and it's, I mean, it's not that we feel like we owe this story to anybody, but I feel like it's been a rewarding experience to use, as we've talked before, to use the Ear Biscuits as a venue for us to process our friendship and our lives with each other and if people find benefit in that, then that's great as an added, as a side effect of this being something that we enjoy

and that's rewarding for us. I will also say that I do remember when we were doing the interview part of Ear Biscuits and we would like really drill into people's personal lives. Felt a little imbalanced. Because we knew that there was a part, there was a section of our lives that we just weren't ready to talk about.

Right. But we always approached talking to other people with the assumption that, well, maybe they're not ready, but we can get them ready to talk about it. And that just didn't, in retrospect, I don't think it was fair. I agree with that. And I do think that's a small contributing factor to this.

So. I'm excited, I'm a little nervous, I think my heart rate's a little higher than a normal year. Well look at your watch and tell me. I took my watch off. What, I thought we did. I have no heart rate, it's over there.

You're dead. So the reason that we haven't shared this, these lost years is because they are very much tied to our past in terms of our spiritual and religious history. Yeah, I'd say our religious upbringing, our spiritual past. And so you might immediately start to guess, okay, I have my guesses. I can get why they wouldn't have talked about this.

It's a personal topic. And it's not that we've never shared any, you can find, you can search on the internet and come to some conclusions and find some information about this, it's not that we've been completely locked down about this but I think in general, we've just avoided talking about religion in general because it's a super divisive topic just like politics happen to be and that isn't,

this isn't the space that we typically discuss those kinds of things. Our brand, so to speak, is super inclusive and there's so much opportunity for people to get divided as soon as you start talking about anything as personal as religion or politics. And we value the opposite of division. Right.

Unity, I guess. Yeah, yeah, yeah. But I mean, it's also, we felt that it hasn't been necessary to share it. I mean, we thought it could have been taken the wrong way. It could serve as a distraction from, potentially from what we were trying to do, which is be entertainers, you know, to be comedians,

to connect with an audience in a way that just brings light into their lives. But we thought it might be a distraction from that. It's also, those are some of the reasons. Also, it's in interviews, whenever we would kinda sidestep the question, because we'd always get the question of like, what was it like to quit engineering and become YouTubers?

Or how did you decide to go all in on entertainment in this fledgling platform where nobody knew what was going on or if you'd ever make it? You had kids? And it wasn't practical to answer that question with, well, let me tell you the very non circuitous or circuitous path that we took. Yeah, it's not a sound bite.

It's not a sound bite, it's not an easy answer. In fact, the answer itself, when given in whole, kind of becomes a story in and of itself. And that wasn't the story that we were being interviewed about. That may sound a little complicated but it's just because the story isn't clean, it's not clean. It kind of goes in a lot of different places

and that's the story that we're gonna tell today. We're gonna share that dirty story today but I think another reason, which opens up a whole other can of worms, which we will also get into and that's over time, our personal beliefs have been evolving. We've been in process. So as we've had the inklings of wanting to talk about things

and share about them, it's like, well, everything's in flux. And I don't know if that's an exaggeration to say everything because I think that's probably pretty accurate. Everything's been in flux. Well stated simply, when we started YouTube in 2006, we would have described ourselves as evangelical Christians and I'll explain what we mean by that in a second. And that is not how we would describe ourselves now in 2020.

Right, so I mean at certain points when we describe ourselves that way, we also knew that if you label yourself, it attracts people putting their expectations and their assumptions on that label then onto you and then good, bad, or indifferent, in the least, we feared it would be a distraction from just how we were simply trying

to be entertainers and to connect with an audience. But we perceived that it could have been even more troublesome than that. And then as our personal beliefs evolved, it became even more complicated and it was okay, I don't want, there's certain aspects of what certain people might associate with a label that I don't wanna be associated with.

So let's continue to not talk about this. Yeah. So that, now because we're talking about it today, does that mean that we've arrived at some personal spiritual journey and therefore we're ready to share all the conclusions and wisdom that we've come to? We've come out the other side of something

and now we're ready to talk about it. No, that's also not the case, right? No, I think that, I do think that there has been a certain process that has taken place that has, we now have kind of come to some conclusions about who we were at the time that I think does make it kind of easier to talk about

and kind of, and also just kind of understanding and becoming more comfortable with our past and the process that we've been through. And it's something that we talk about a lot personally, the two of us, it's something we talk about with our friends a lot. We have not, and also comfortable enough with where we are right now,

and I'm talking about from a spiritual faith perspective, not that we've arrived at anything, but that we're comfortable having not arrived, speaking about it here, in a way where we can foster some sort of conversation, not only between the two of us, but with you as you listen. Yeah.

So, okay, so what is this gonna look like? So today, we're gonna talk about the lost years. We're gonna fill in that gap between basically starting in high school and coming all the way up to 2006 when we started our YouTube channel. Really getting into what especially did it look like in college and after college and engineering and all the other stuff that happened.

Yeah, I would say for that part, it's the story. And by the way, we have notes. If you hear those, if you're listening, or if you're watching us on the video version, you see these. Yeah, we usually don't have any notes. We have an outline. There's so much to cover. We've got dates and the order

and we wanted to get the details right so that's why we're gonna be referencing some of this stuff. So what we're trying to do is we're trying to outline a multiple episode plan of attack for how we're gonna roll out the things we wanna talk about. So like Rhett said in this episode, we're gonna roll out the things we wanna talk about. So like Rhett said in this episode, we're gonna connect all the dots on how we actually got

to where we are now and I think that's the story of how two boys who made a blood oath to create something together gave up that dream, studied engineering instead, but then gave up those careers to become Christian missionaries instead and then somehow achieve their boyhood dream anyways. That's the journey that we wanna take you through today.

And then in the next couple of weeks, because we're gonna talk about this for a while, again, I don't know how you're gonna take this. Some of you are gonna be like, oh, I've been waiting for know how you're gonna take this. Some of you are gonna be like, oh, I've been waiting for you guys to talk about this forever. Some of you are gonna be like, why are you talking about this forever?

But we're gonna talk about it. And so this week we fill in the gaps. And then the next couple of weeks, we're actually gonna tell our individual personal stories of kind of how we got to where we're at. You know, we share a lot in common, but the stories are very personal and individual at the same time, so we thought we should talk about it

from a personal and individual perspective. So we're each gonna do that. So that's gonna be more of the like spiritual, religious belief. Yeah. Personal journey evolution type stuff. And then we're gonna just see where it goes after that. When we invite you guys to get involved in the conversation,

you know, using hashtag Ear Biscuits, if you have questions that come up, comments, thoughts, opinions, as we tell our story, we wanna hear from you, we want you to be a part of the conversation, and then, you know, we're not saying that the podcast is changing and now it's all about this. No.

But for a few episodes, this is what it's gonna be about as we kind of dig into this and explore it. Yeah, these three and then I think we'll be looking at where the conversation goes on the hashtag Ear Biscuits and I anticipate later down the road, we might skip a few episodes and then come back to responding to the conversations that are being had around these three episodes. So hashtag Ear Biscuits for that.

What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic? Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anno Bay! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. And I'm Leah President. And welcome to Crunchyroll Presents The Anime Effect. It's a weekly news show.

With the best celebrity guests. And hot takes galore. So join us every Friday wherever you get your podcasts and watch full video episodes on Crunchyroll or on the Crunchyroll YouTube channel. All right, where do we wanna start? Well, I said a second ago that I thought that it was important to define what we mean by evangelical Christian because I think that that may mean a lot of different things

to a lot of different people, but I just want you all to understand exactly who we were and what we thought, what we believe, because I think that's a good starting point. Do it. So to us, being an evangelical Christian meant that we believed that the Bible was the word of God, meaning the creator of the universe chose to communicate

the breath of his wisdom through a book that he inspired people to write. It's called the Bible, the Old Testament and the New Testament. And in the Bible, you learn about Jesus, who is the son of God, and he is the only way that you can have a right relationship with God and then one day end up being in heaven.

And what that essentially means is that if you don't go to Jesus, if you don't believe in Jesus, if Jesus has not forgiven you of your sins, then you basically face judgment of your sins and when you die, you're going to face God's judgment. That's called hell and so everybody on earth who does not put their faith in Jesus, so if you come from a different religion, too bad.

You're not gonna be with God in the end. That is essentially the sort of the theological view that we had and a lot of people do have. And the word evangelical to me brings to mind the component of wanting to then convert people. Right because if you believe that, then you want people to be there with you. If you truly believe that, you should be motivated

by that to persuade, to inform people and if not persuade them to put their faith in Jesus so that they can be saved. Because evangelism is basically sharing the good news, sharing the gospel, sharing that truth that without Jesus, people are gonna be judged. And so you wanna tell as many people about Jesus as you can and you want your life to be representative of that truth.

So we grew up in an environment, in a church, that wholeheartedly believed this. I mean, we actually took you back in the Buies Creek documentary that's on Good Mythical Morning. We showed you Buies Creek First Baptist Church where we both grew up. When you moved there in first grade and we met at school,

we were both going to that church and it was a big part of our lives. And a big, like all of our closest friends went there. Even our closest friends. Closest friends, yeah. Right. So. It was our world.

It was what oriented everything that we thought and did and of course as we got older and kinda became teenagers, I think that when you're in that environment as you become a teenager, people kinda take a couple of different paths. Some people are like, oh, if this is true, then this is the most important thing that there is. If there really is this spiritual reality

and there really is this eternity that people need to make a decision about, this is way more important than girls, than sports, than academics, than where I'm gonna go to college and what I'm gonna do. This is the preeminent truth that affects every single decision that I make and that is something that started to permeate

us very deeply in high school. Yeah and I think it'd be good to skip to the wax paper dogs at this point. That's a good example of that. When we were in high school, you know, there was a church split. So like we, there was actually, we started, a group of family started a brand new church from scratch.

Right. My mom and I came over basically because like, like we trusted you and your family and what, you know, the fact that they were instrumental in that. And then from that church, there was an outreach created where it was called the Maranatha Cafe. It was like a coffee shop on the edge of Campbell University so that Campbell University college students

could come over and hang out in a Christian coffee environment. I don't know that Christian coffee tasted any different and I actually don't remember there being much coffee but it was like a hangout spot. It was the idea of coffee. And it was Benny Inzor's brainchild who his sons, Matt and John were like, we grew up with them.

They were like good friends of ours from like kindergarten. Yeah, yeah, I've known since first grade, yeah. And his vision was that it was a performance space. There was a stage in the back and they had an open mic night and so people from the college could come and play at the open mic night. You know, you got the whole hippie vibe

and the coffee shop vibe coming in. And just the idea that there was a stage, there was an opportunity to get on that stage and perform for an audience. You know, we had just kinda, you know, dipped our toes into performing, doing simple things like just doing a class in speech or doing a video in front of the class

and being the class clowns and so the idea of- Or singing you down with Halloween at the fall festival. Exactly. You know, fall festival, talent show, that kinda thing. So this was already in our blood. And so when they were like, we're gonna have this cafe, college students are gonna show up. Yeah.

We were like, well, psh, of course, we gotta start a band. And I think just, this is a theme that's gonna be throughout all of these dots that we're connecting is whenever we see that there's an audience, we try to find a way to get in front of that audience. Right. So yeah, we were like, let's form a band.

Can we play any instruments? No. No. Benny's son, John, was learning the bass. I think he started it from a musical perspective. Benny's son Matt was into like the soundboard. Eric was learning the guitar. Me and you couldn't play anything. Right. And we didn't have a drummer.

And then Benny said, oh y'all wanna start a band? I'll help you out. He was multi-instrumentalist. Right. He played the piano at the church actually. Yes. So he started playing keyboards in our band, which we called the Wax Paper Dogs.

We called it the Wax Paper Dogs because the previous summer, it just so happened, everybody that was in the band was in a whitewater raft that was going down some river. At the end of a mission trip, you know when you go on a church mission trip, at the end of the mission trip, you gotta have some fun. We went whitewater rafting and we called our raft,

the, we were gonna call them the paper dogs. We said well if paper gets wet, it disintegrates. And this is a raft. In the river, right. So we gotta make it wax paper. So we called our group the Wax Paper Dogs. We were just a rafting boat. A rafting group.

Just so happened everybody was in that boat, including Benny, the dad, was in this band. So we called the band the Wax Paper Dogs and we started practicing. We spent so much time going to the Maranatha Cafe when it was closed, because Benny basically was the proprietor of the place and had the key. We'd go in there and just, we'd play and learn songs

and practice for hours and hours. It became the thing that we were most passionate about. Yeah, well, I would say that Benny is a huge, and we're gonna be basically pointing out a number of really instrumental people who kind of played these really, really pivotal roles in getting us to where we're at now. And I think Benny is one of the very first. Because not only was the Maranatha Cafe his idea,

his brainchild, and he was the one that put all the work into it, but we would have never had a band without him. I would have never learned to play the guitar without him. We would have never understood songwriting without him. And so many of the things that became sort of the foundational elements of our career, even once we got to YouTube, we were doing mostly music,

it all started with Benny's vision and his influence. It was weird because he's an old dude, but in our eyes, he wasn't that old at the time, but he was a dad. What cool kids who wanna like shoegaze and guitar playing. This was, grunge was, it was just about to happen. Right. And it started to happen. It was like, how can we be cool like that

if we got a dad in our band? But like he was all for it and you know, we were all for it. But he was also the coolest dad. Yeah, he was. I mean, he wasn't a typical dad. He had a Fu Manchu. I think it's, you know, we were so into it

that it started to, it started to threaten your passion for basketball. I would say that being involved in the band and then sort of drinking our own Kool-Aid and believing that we could be rock stars was one of the main reasons I ended up going to State and not pursuing a college basketball career, which would have not been at state by the way,

would have been at a small school. But yeah, that was one of the, I was like, I kinda just tired of basketball. We're gonna be rock stars. And we wanted to be close. So we're like, we're gonna go to state because it's in Raleigh, we can continue being a part of the band, we can still play gigs.

He was the thing though. In order to start the band and play at the Maranatha Cafe, it had to be a Christian band. Now, did we really want to be in a Christian band even though we were like all in Christians? I'd say the answer's no. I'd say we never listened to Christian music. We were very self, we were very self-aware.

We've always been very self-aware, but we had this, we felt like. We thought Christian music sucked. It was second rate. We're like, it's not as good. I don't listen to, I mean, I don't listen to, I listen to the Red Hot Chili Peppers. Christian music seemed like a.

And I was told that I shouldn't listen to them because it was sexualized. But Christian music seemed like sort of a bad imitation of good secular music. It was. And so we were just like, no. And so we were a little bit hesitant to call ourselves Christian music,

but it was very much Christian music. Oh yeah. Let me tell you how Christian it was. It had to be. Every single. In order to get on that stage. Every single song had a Christian message and then we would close many of our concerts with doing something which is called an invitation

which is where you invite the people who are at your concert to make a decision to invite Jesus into their hearts to become Christians at the end of the concert and you get everybody to pray. This would happen at a Wax Paper Dogs concert. And a lot of times it would be up to me because I was the lead singer and I mean just imagine me and like the circuitous way that I communicate

and take the long way around everything and like. You led a lot of people astray. When I give a speech, when I give a speech. Your analogies, your analogies were choice. It's, whenever I give a speech, ooh. Your analogies were choice. It's, whenever I give a speech, I'm hanging on by a thread. Yeah. And I can only imagine how everybody felt.

Now, I mean, while we're on the topic of the embarrassing aspects of this, I remember the first song that we tried to write before we asked Benny to officially help us. We were at Eric Woodruff's house. Organic Soup. Organic Soup. I actually still have the lyrics that we wrote

because I wrote them on a paper plate, a white paper plate that was like in Eric's bonus room. It was soup, organic soup. Creation is the story of our God's amazing glory. Creation tells the truth that leaves all men without excuse, to explain is what they try. No, it's something. Creation tells the story of our God's amazing glory.

Creation tells the truth that leaves all men without excuse. God's existence they deny, to explain is what they try. Will they ever, why can't they just believe? And it was a song against the evolution. Yeah, yeah, it was a creation song. Evolution versus God. Why can't they just believe in God?

Right. Don't believe in evolution. That was the first thing we chose to write a song about. Now, let me, I will say. It was horrible. In our defense. We never performed it for anybody. We never performed it because we realized how,

it wasn't just, we weren't embarrassed about the message. The song was bad musically. Like, Benny listened to that song, he was like, I've got some songs that I wrote in the 70s that y'all can play and why don't we do some covers? He was the first guy who was like, why don't we just do like I Can See Clearly Now the Rain is Gone.

Like let's sing some cover, let's sing Country Roads, Change West Virginia to North Carolina, how about that? And that was the first, that was, oh this is how a song is structured and then a few months later we started writing our own songs. We're gonna have to move at a faster pace. We're spending a lot of time on Wax Paper Dolls.

There's a lot of elements to this story. Yeah. I don't want this to be a seven hour podcast. Yeah. But, so that's the frame of mind that we're in. We, the band, we got better musically. We started having this weird sort of like, sort of a 311 pop punk kind of, it wasn't great.

We would play at Christian festivals and even into as we graduated high school into our freshman year in college, we still had gigs with the band. We'd go back home and we'd play those gigs. By our sophomore year, we had broken up. And there's a reason for that. So we go to NC State.

Now my brother had been involved with a campus ministry called Campus Crusade for Christ while he was at UNC. And he was actually going into his senior year when we were going into our freshman year. And he had been really involved with them and had gone on trips with them and was in Bible studies and this was a huge part of his life when he was in college and it was a very fruitful experience. It had kind of like, it was, again,

it was the most important part of his college experience. We visited him in a few different places and we kind of got a glimpse of how cool it seemed. It was, it was, it was. It was really cool. Exciting. To see a group of people who were older than you, college students, who were like passionately engaged

with something that was bigger than themselves. That was inspirational. And it was like, oh, these people aren't just going off and you know, partying on the weekends, they're going to getting together and trying to change their lives and change other people's lives. This seems meaningful, this seems good. So we were like, they're going to getting together and trying to change their lives and change other people's lives. This seems meaningful, this seems good.

So we were like, we're gonna be involved in Campus Crusade for Christ when we get to NC State. Now Campus Crusade for Christ as an organization had been around since 1951. Yeah. It was a global organization, it still is. It's now called CRU because I think the association with the crusade is.

There are some negative connotations historically. Negative connotations. But for us, freshman year at NC State, we knew that first week we were gonna go to the weekly meeting. Yeah, and we go to the weekly meeting, about 100, 150 students gathered into, just packed into a classroom.

And a guy gets up there, actually he wasn't even up there yet, a video starts playing at the very beginning of this thing and it's like a comedic video of a guy trying to get to the meeting. Yeah. And it was just blowing our minds. It was ridiculous. We were like, this is so awesome, this is so funny,

and then all of a sudden. He was on the roof, he was on the roof, and then he jumped off the roof, but then they threw a mannequin off the roof. The mannequin hits the parking lot. And then they jump cut to he's not a mannequin anymore and he's wrestling with an inflatable alligator. This is 1996, you gotta understand

how impressive these video skills were. So he went through this series of obstacles and then you see the front of the building and you see him finally running in the same door that we just walked in and sat down. He's got the same clothes on that he had in the videos. As if he just came out of the video. He comes in the room!

And he's the MC of the meeting. And his name was Garrett, I don't remember his last name, but he was so funny, he had the crowd just buy a string or whatever the saying that I'm looking for is right there. He was, again, I wanna, it wasn't that we didn't think that the whole spiritual Christian aspect of what was going on there was important, but we did not expect there to be this guy

who basically came up there and was like David Letterman all of a sudden with a group of 100 kids. Over the next few weeks, they would do different things. Like Garrett and another guy would sit down behind a table and they would do announcements and they would do them like Saturday Night Live's Weekend Update, which we grew up worshiping Weekend Update. And let me explain, it wasn't just that

that was what the meeting was. The meeting was also what we called praise and worship music where somebody would get up there with a guitar and lead you through Christian music that everybody would sing together passionately. Then there would be some announcements. Then there would be a speaker who was usually like a local pastor

or somebody else who worked on staff with Campus Crusade for Christ who would get up there and do essentially a talk slash sermon that was inspirational and then you sing some more music and you'd go home and it was the best part of our week by a long shot. Now I specifically remember thinking when Garrett was up there the very first time,

I wanna do that. All I was thinking was I wanna be that guy. I want to do this. Now we got involved, we got to know a guy named Mark Valentine who's still a good friend who was a Bible study leader. He was on staff with Campus Crusade. He worked, and by staff, he worked full time. His full time job was on campus working with students

leading Bible studies of which we eventually joined his weekly Bible study. And we loved Mark and still do. And he was cool, laid back, funny, super relatable to us and our experience. Yeah. And he was also at the time in charge of the weekly meeting or at least had it.

I don't know if it was because at some point Todd became in charge of it but I think Mark was maybe exclusively in charge at that point. Anyway, Mark was the guy to talk to if you wanted to be Garrett. And Garrett was a senior, we found that out. And I remember sometime that freshman year, I just told Mark, I was like,

you know, and for context, at this point, it wasn't like me and you were like a comedy duo. We were best friends who were both funny, but we were in a band, but it wasn't like, hey, the two of us are gonna go to him. It wasn't like that, that wasn't the dynamic. I just was like, I wanna be this guy. And the thing that I did at the same time in parallel,

because we weren't talking, I remember remember I was aware of what you were doing and I was in full support of it. I thought it was a great idea. I was very hopeful. At the same time, at the same meetings, I was like, there's people up there leading music. You know, I'm a lead singer of a band. I look weird, but I could probably get up there

because I had like bleached hair and I didn't quite fit in but I kinda liked that and I was like, look at, I mean there's all these people out here. I can get up there, I'm comfortable singing in front of people so I'll join that music, I'll join the music team. Right.

So I did that at the exact same time. So and I, did I believe in everything that was happening? Yes, but was I also attracted to being in front of that audience? Absolutely. Yeah, well, and the thing is is that Mark responded to this and I don't think there was a lot of people in line coming up to him and saying,

No, probably not. Hey, I wanna do this. And I don't remember exactly what I said, but it was probably something along the lines of, I wanna do this and I will be really good at it. It's that, yeah, it's the blind delusion that we had that led us to start a band, even though we were horrible, and that led you to start playing guitar and writing songs immediately.

It's just like, just a blind confidence. So fast forward to sophomore year. We, that very first meeting, were you already in the band at that point? Yeah. Okay, so very first meeting, I'm the emcee, Link's leading worship Yeah. In the band at that point? Yeah. Okay. So very first meeting, I'm the emcee, Link's leading worship, and I have to assume that we went ahead

and made a video for that first meeting because we had seen that precedent set by Garrett. I don't remember exactly, but I know that I have all of the videos. So we can unearth these videos and take a look at them and we'll find a way to share them with you over time. But what we did was, sophomore year is when we moved into an apartment with Greg.

No, no, that was junior year. That was junior year? Yeah, we got to know Greg freshman year and then we became good friends sophomore year because we were still in the same dorm sophomore year. So did he start out as like the sidekick? Yeah, I don't know if that started from day one but essentially, I had a very specific plan

for what I wanted the sort of the openings to be like. And again, this had been sort of outlined by the previous MC, but I was like, the more that this can be like a late night show and a monologue, the better, right? And so there was a couple of different conventions that kind of evolved over that first year, including Greg. We've talked about Greg a lot,

our college roommate in junior year, but he was just a really good friend in our sophomore year, became like the Andy Richter to Conan or, you know, just, he was like a sidekick character and he would get up there and he would have a deep thought every single week. Yeah, he would say,

after much deep thought and great meditation, I've come to the realization that, and then he would say something that was really, Really dumb. Really dumb. Really, really stupid. And realization that, and then he would say something that was really, Really dumb. Really dumb. Really, really stupid. And everybody would laugh, and then he would sit up there and just kind of respond to you for the rest of your monologue

or whenever you were introducing. And this is, listen, I was studying a lot. I was in engineering school. I was studying a lot, but I was putting a lot of time into that monologue and what it would be. And like, okay, I'm gonna tell this story about into that monologue and what it would be and like okay, I'm gonna tell this story about something that happened or I've got this interesting scenario

that I'm gonna talk about and then I introduced the word of the day which was okay, tonight during the monologue, if I say the word dog, I want everybody to respond with uh. And so then I would have my monologue and I would have that word sort of teed up a few different times and so there would be this like call and response for all these people were going,

uh, and I just, I lived for this. I also lived for it as well as Greg. The three of us, I remember, I would be working with Greg on his deep thought and like helping him practice it because that was his moment and you know, helping him write it. All three of us would do that.

And we tried more often than not to also have a video and I had taken an intro to film course. Right. And we had that video camera that we had used some in high school. I guess it was the same one. I think it was still the one that it was my dad's camera that we basically just commandeered, yeah.

And I was basically the cameraman slash director of all of these videos that we would make that would feature you and Greg and I usually wouldn't be in them because I would be filming the whole thing and then you would edit all of these videos on two VCRs. Yeah, you would film it and again, this is back when, this is before there was any sort of software editing that we knew of, so I'd take those mini DV tapes,

I'd go to my dad's office at Campbell University because he was a law professor at Campbell, and hook two VCRs up and edit them together and then put popular music, edit popular music in, usually Led Zeppelin. Yeah, yeah. Just for context. Sometimes they're only songs.

Which that's the problem with sharing it, we can't put it on YouTube because it has so much Led Zeppelin on it, I don't know if we can do that. We'll try to figure it out. Just a couple of notes. First of all, this is gonna be a two-parter, I can already tell. Unless you want this to be a two-hour thing.

Yeah. We're 40 minutes in and we haven't even gotten out of college yet. That's fine. And I think that's okay. So let's just keep going at the pace that we're going. Hopefully you'll appreciate that. I'm having fun. The second thing is, again,

I wanna shout out Mark Valentine and Mike Mahaffey, and Mike Mahaffey, who was the director of Campus Crusade, still is at NC State, both of them, we'll talk more about Mike in a second, but both of them letting us do this. They took a chance, and listen, we pushed the limits. I mean, I remember there was one video. You know what I'm talking about.

Where we had conceptualized this thing. They didn't even review the videos ahead of time, I don't think. And this one, you and Greg, the story was you had forgotten about the weekly meeting. Right. And so you, and instead you were playing video games in Greg's dorm room.

Which is something we often did. But. Twisted Metal was our game. But we thought it would be funnier if the story was whenever you guys would play video games, you were always completely naked. Right. So for this scene, you were playing Twisted Metal in his dorm room completely naked.

Yeah. And of course we didn't give a shit. You were completely naked. No, no I wasn't. You think you yanked up, did you yank up your briefs? I yanked up my briefs. I love how in your memory I was completely naked. I know we wouldn't have cared.

But there was like controllers or different things like Austin Powers style. I remember like a backpack being given and it would always. Always strategically placed to cover the junk. This may seem incongruous with a Christian ministry, a relatively conservative Christian ministry, but I just wanna say, and again, this is to credit the guys involved,

it's like it was all in good fun. It was all lighthearted, there was no actual nakedness. It was just the idea of nakedness. And nakedness and we didn't cross the line. I'm sure there were some people there. The line was a little too close to the pubes, I will say that. Well, what I'll say, it was also the late 90s and it was a little bit different.

I think now, I actually think it would be less likely that that kind of video would, but it was a different time in comedy and that was influencing us and also, they just let us learn. Like, you know, again, we were growing in our faith in big ways, it was very serious to us and we were very involved and we were going on trips,

we were going on these things called summer projects. Well, yeah, I'll impact that a little bit. But at the same time, because this continued for the next three years, sophomore year, junior year, and senior year, emceeing this meeting and putting more and more work into making it something that people had to go to. And I think there's a lot of different reasons for,

it wasn't just because of what we were doing at the weekly meeting. The weekly meeting began to grow though. And that audience of 100, 150, turned into an audience of 1,000. And it was like, this is, all of a sudden, this just became such a big part, getting up in front of that group and entertaining them became something that I just began to fall in love with.

It was so rewarding and I mean, I was so invested in it as well. I remember considering myself the chief laugher. Like whenever I'd sit down from like singing the music, whenever it was time for like what we had planned to be funny, it's like I was laughing louder than anybody. You know, and we didn't sing many songs then but I remember the first song we sang

was when the seniors were graduating and it was, so we wrote a song for the graduating seniors and we wrote this like mysterious mythological song about a guy called Mr. Senior. It was even by, well, even by late 90s standards, politically incorrect. Yeah, because, well, so you sang the song, you play your guitar, but then you had backup singer,

I had a backup singer who was a guy with three heads. Right. And it was me, Greg, and our other good friend who became our roommate, Tim, all in one T-shirt together with our heads sticking out of it singing backup. And it was like, kinda had like a Spanish theme, like get it Mr. Senior, Mr. Senior, Mr. Senior, Mr. Senior. We wouldn't do it today.

We didn't understand the sensitivities at the time and people just thought it was funny. But it was, I mean, we lived for that meeting because this audience was growing. It was the largest meeting on campus. Yeah. Over 1,000 people were showing up and it was, again, for a variety of reasons,

but it was so much fun, it was so rewarding to have that audience. So you can start to see how you developed a style and a tone. And I think that because video became such a big part of our careers moving forward, this really was the beginning of us figuring out how to make an audience laugh with video

because you can have an idea that something's gonna be funny when you sit and watch it and just the two of us, but creating something and then having a thousand people watch it, we cut our teeth, man, on figuring out what makes, and first of all, it probably wasn't even that funny. If we went back and watched some of these videos, we'd be like, why in the world did we think this was funny?

But we were learning and very much comedically developing. Now, one of the things that happened, senior year, Mike Mahaffey, the director of the whole ministry, who again is another, just one of the best guys we've ever known, who was getting a kick out of what we were doing at the weekly meeting,

he was the director of the Christmas Conference, we called it at the time. I think they call it Winter Conference now. It's a regional conference where it's not only NC State students along with Meredith and Peace students, but it was all the surrounding states, Campus Crusade movements would all come together after Christmas for a week.

I think it was North Carolina, South Carolina, Tennessee, Kentucky, and West Virginia. Does that sound right? Yeah. Or at least part of, yeah. Yeah and so there would be over 1,000 students that would show up at that every year so he directed the main stage of that

and chose who was gonna be the emcee. Right, so we've been going to Christmas Conference, again, every single year, a significant portion of our Christmas break was going to this conference and they had people who were full-time staff with Campus Crusade were the only people who were emceeing the meetings. So I remember a guy, Shane Dyke,

I don't know, was he Big Break or was he Christmas? Somebody, I can't remember who, there was a few different people who emceed, but they were like doing what I was doing at the weekly meeting, but doing it on a whole different level. And it was just like, this is awesome. But I didn't think, it wasn't even on the radar

to try to emcee that because I'm not on staff, I'm a student. Right. Mike Mahaffey comes to me my senior year and says, what do you think about emceeing Christmas Conference? I mean, I probably almost crapped my pants when he asked me that. Of course I was like, yes sir.

Right. I never say no, always say yes to the opportunity. We come to find out later that Mike really had to go to bat for you to do this. He took a big risk. And I think there was a lot of criticism and for him, for the decision he made and he had to convince a lot of people

to give you the opportunity to do that. And if it wasn't for that moment, we would not be here right now. No, not, I mean, I would say if it wasn't for every moment that we've talked about. Yeah, that's true. But this. Such a pivotal one. But this one, this one thing where Mike Mahaffey asked me to emcee the Christmas conference

set in motion a course of events that very directly led to what we're doing today that we'll continue to unpack. So. I remember hearing about it and I was just floored. I was like, oh crap, this is it. And so. We gotta get a better camera.

And so while the weekly meeting is, the weekly meeting every week was just like, okay, you're gonna get up there, you're gonna talk for five to 10 minutes, and then you're gonna basically introduce the speaker and that kind of thing, and then maybe give some announcements. This was like, no, no, no, no.

There's a morning session, there's an afternoon session, it lasts like five days. You're gonna be up there. You're not just introducing, you're like introducing like this big time pastor all of a sudden, you know, Tom Nelson, Al Mohler. Right. You know what I'm saying?

And we just all of a sudden, we knew that this was a different level of responsibility and the preparation went into overdrive. We had multiple videos, this is the first time that we, this is when we really started writing songs, funny songs for an audience. The first year, I think the only thing we did was, I wrote the Christmas conference song,

basically the conference song. And I don't even know, you helped with the videos, I don't know if you got up there for the Christmas conference song that first year. I don't. know, you helped with the videos, I don't know if you got up there for the Christmas conference song that first year. I don't. I think I did. I can't remember all the videos.

I think I sang Harmony. Okay. Because we were writing those songs together. It's not like we had written songs even in high school together. So yeah, it was like the end of the week, we wrote the song kinda summarized everything that happened that week.

It was like a series of inside jokes. That was the first song that we ever performed at a conference and we both did it. Right and the crowd loved it. And then proceeded to emcee this conference for 10 years in a row, just to give you an example of how big of a swath this was. Because that year, the first one was 99.

I remember we had to stop the conference. Usually the conference would go through New Year's. Right. We stopped the conference short and sent everybody home on the 31st because it was Y2K and everyone thought the world was going to end. Well no, it wasn't like it was some religious belief.

There was a practical belief that you didn't know if utilities were gonna go down because of the way the computers worked. So you didn't wanna have all these college students stranded in a neighboring state. There was a lot of fear about Y2K, not from a religious standpoint. Right. It was from a technical standpoint,

but it was like we gotta get these students home. So the conference was a year shorter. But then, just to kind of truncate this a little bit, over the next couple of years, your involvement began to increase. You were always involved with the music and you're always involved with the videos. But you started getting up on stage.

And I would say, I don't remember exactly what year it was, but this is just a little bit of the evolution of how we became Rhett and Link. I'd say three to four conferences in, you were just up there from the beginning and we were doing it together. Yeah. We probably have to stop talking about that

and talk about like okay, well what's happening vocationally at this time, like professionally, what are we choosing to do? Because the Christmas conference thing continued on. So it's probably best to talk about what we did after we graduated. Yeah and you know, we've talked about how much of an outlet Campus Crusade provided for us to engage an audience And we've talked about how much of an outlet

Campus Crusade provided for us to engage an audience and also develop, especially you at this point, develop as a comedian and for us to develop as creators. But personally, so much of our college experience was wrapped up in our involvement in Campus Crusade. But personally, so much of our college experience was wrapped up in our involvement in Campus Crusade. If it wasn't friends that we had or acquaintances we had through our studies in our engineering curriculum, basically all of our friends, definitely all of our closest friends

were just as involved in Campus Crusade as we were and that meant we were involved in every single aspect of it. Yeah. You know, there was a Bible study every week. You talk about Mark Valentine and the impact he had on our lives, like he would meet with us and talk about like, you know, going through breakup

with my high school girlfriend and like all the heart wrenching stuff that you try to stuff that you have to go through when you're discovering who you are in college and all of the potential pitfalls associated with that. It's like, I can't thank him and the organization enough for providing an environment for us to develop who we were in every way possible. Yeah.

That was extremely positive. It was a, and we've alluded to our college experience in general terms, and you can filter that through everything we're saying today that like it was, it was an amazing, thrilling time in our lives where we were a part of something bigger than ourselves and also really looking at ourselves and how we can develop as people that do things that matter.

And more specifically, because again, we've established that, okay, we're not in the same place as we were at the time, like the way we think about the world is not the same that it was as when we were in college. But that does not change the fact that our involvement with crew and guys like Mike Mahaffey, Mark Valentine, Todd Smith,

it was incredibly instrumental in us sort of understanding what it meant to be a person of integrity. You know what I'm saying? Oh yeah. Not that you can't have integrity or character outside of a system like that. But it was like, we were growing as people like in an accelerated rate.

And honestly, when we looked around at a lot of our peers in college, there was a lot of them that wasn't happening. It just kind of felt like I'm just here for fun. And we were like, I'm here for purpose, you know? And this is something that is so much bigger than me and it's bigger than just my life and it's bigger than just this group

and it's bigger than just the earth. This was like a universal purpose and having all these people, because when you're that age, like 18 to 21, you are at, your potential for being passionate about things is as high as it ever will be. Trust me. I think so, yeah. It's gonna go down.

It's gonna go down. But 18 to 21, boy, it is on fire. but 18 to 21, boy, it is on fire. And it was just being associated with an organization like that at that time, it was just super instrumental in kind of forming us into who we are. Yeah, I mean, we would go to the fall retreat. We would go to the Christmas conference and from the Christmas conference, they would say, you can spend your entire summer on a thing

called Summer Project. We both responded to that. I spent an entire summer as a student in Santa Cruz, California, which is where I participated in the 70s dance contest that's on this T-shirt that we're selling at mythical.com right now. It's crazy. And that's why you went to Slovakia.

You talked about being in Slovakia and like writing letters to Jessie because you had just started almost dating. Yeah. Christy went on Summer Project to Santa Cruz the year after me and we were corresponding. When she got back, the night she got back is when we got engaged.

Christy and I met. Well, you and Jessie met a little bit differently, but we met at church. Christy and I met through Campus Crusade. She was a student at Meredith. She came to those weekly meetings. She saw me helping lead the music. She was interested.

She joined the music team, partially because she was, kinda wanted to get to know me. You know, it was, every, so many, the majority of the aspects of who we were, who we were being built to be and who we were becoming was through the context of Campus Crusade. So it was such a meaningful thing that when we were becoming was through the context of Campus Crusade. So it was such a meaningful thing that when we were graduating.

Well, I feel it's necessary to acknowledge there's another side of it too for other people. Yeah. If you're listening to us talk about this and you were involved in the campus ministry, whether it was Campus Crusade or another one, you may think very differently about your time there, right? Right.

It may have been a time of spiritual trauma for you. That's the case with a lot of people, especially a lot of women, because even to this day, there tend to be very particular roles that are expected of men and women in conservative Christian circles, like the ones that we were involved with.

And so it may seem sort of like insensitive for us to talk about like even though we don't really, we're not there anymore and this isn't the way we think about the world, to talk about it as if it was these glory days and everything was great and we were growing and all this stuff. It really was like that for us because it was an environment that was really, really set up well for people like us

to sort of flourish and succeed. But there was a lot that we didn't know. And I'm sure there were people who were suffering and I'm sure that there were people, especially a lot of women who might look back and be like, I actually look back at that time and I feel very differently about it. So just want to acknowledge that.

And I'm glad you did. I say all that really to just set the stage for what our mindset, not what it is now, but what it was when we graduated. Not to mention, I'll add one more thing, not to mention people, LGBT people, which was not on our radar at all coming from where we came from. But we know that there, LGBT people, which was not on our radar at all coming from where we came from.

But we know that there were LGBT people in Crusade who were, you know, if they were going in and they were really getting involved, then that was something that was not being supported in any way. And I think that- But it wasn't something that was on our radar. And you're hinting at topics that we do want to,

that we will talk about in over the next few episodes. So, but I'm glad that you're saying it now because it's important that we're not painting this picture of something that there's not a flip side to it and that we haven't had evolved views on since that point. And we will get into that more.'t had evolved views on since that point. And we will get into that more. We're gonna get into all that in a subsequent episode.

I'm really, we're really trying to keep this more like the logistics connecting the dots from a career standpoint, but from a belief standpoint and like personal impact, good and bad, I think those are things that we can talk about, we will talk about later. But a lot of people have a tendency to, when they kind of come out of a deeply religious environment,

they just talk a bunch of shit about it. And you know, we'll talk our fair share of shit about it at some point, but I think that the reality is is that it really is, it contributed so much to who we are and the way that we move in the world and especially the way that we kind of have carried out our careers. So that's why we talk about it with the level of fondness

because I still have a lot of love and respect for a lot of the people who were and are involved. So when we graduated, you know, I graduated, I immediately got married. I technically had another semester, but I'll make that another lost, lost year podcast years from now. No, it's not really anything there, but basically,

Where do you wanna end this one? Because we're at an hour right now. I kind of feel like we just got through college. And then we've got, we basically got a lot of details to fill in from graduating and then getting to YouTube. Yeah, I think this is a good place to put a pin in it until next week. I will say that the big question that people who see

where we are now, like journalists or whatnot, wanna ask is, or just the most obvious question that people wanna ask is, how did you make a decision to go from, to quit your jobs as engineers to then go into full-time entertainment. Like to make that risk, to make that leap, that had to be scary. How did you make that jump?

And actually the bigger issue with us was at this juncture in our lives. It was, you know, given our involvement here and there's some opportunity and there's a pull to us continue to wanna to be a part of this organization and to also develop and to have an audience versus just being engineers. And so there was a few years of working through that,

which I think will be the starting point of the next episode. That was some of the biggest decisions that we ever made in our lives, in our careers, as families, as friends, were made in that juncture. Because you gotta remember, this is the year, this is happening in 2000. If you think about YouTube didn't even exist

until late 2005, practically for like, for people to be aware of it 2006. You know, it's like, so we're graduating college, and YouTube doesn't even exist for five or six years. What did we do in order to bridge that gap in order to position ourselves so that we could take advantage of this thing we didn't even know was gonna be there.

You know, we weren't just engineers and then we just quit. Yeah. And became internetainers. It was a little more complicated than that. At all, there's five years. And the things that we did may blow your mind. And we're gonna talk about them next week. So I'm trying to figure out how I feel at this point.

I've got a little bit of a charge out of this. I feel weird. I feel that way, I feel like, I just don't. It's not all out. I'll feel good when it's all out. This is such a, I don't know, it's just there's, a lot of the things that we're talking about are pretty explosive for people, you know?

And it's just like, that's just the reality. This is as personal as it gets for a lot of people is, you know, what you think about the bigger, deeper things in life and your opinions about those and who you associate with and the groups you're involved in. My only regret is that we haven't incorporated more politics into this first episode. No, so yeah, I have this, I wanna keep going

and maybe we'll keep recording but I know. We will keep recording, we're gonna be in the same outfits because we're just gonna start another episode in a second. I'm sorry you gotta wait a week but this will give you an opportunity to use hashtag Ear Biscuits to be a part of the conversation. Log your thoughts, any questions that are popping up for you and again, we're gonna be logging those

and it'll be a while before we have an opportunity to address them in a way that you can hear it, but go ahead and do that now and we'll talk at you next week. Well, I still have a wreck. Oh, give us the wreck. We can't skip the wreck because I'm very excited. You're beholden to it, okay.

No, I've been excited about this for a while and I'm gonna read about it because I wanna get it right. So I found a podcast called the 1619 Podcast. This is a limited audio series from the New York Times observing the 400th anniversary of the beginning of American slavery. Here's a little description. In August of 1619, a ship carrying more than

20 enslaved Africans arrived in the English colony of Virginia. America was not yet America, but this was the moment it began. No aspect of the country that would be formed here has been untouched by the 250 years of slavery that followed. On the 400th anniversary of this fateful moment, it is time to tell the story.

1619 is a New York Times audio series hosted by Nicole Hannah Jones. You can find more information about it at newyorktimes.com or nytimes.com slash 1619 podcast. Now, I just think you ought to listen to this. I believe it should be required listening for every American and anybody else in the world who just wants to kind of understand the reality of the history of slavery

and then racism towards black people in America. It's just, there's a lot of things you don't hear in your history books. There's a lot of things that the way that things were framed and frankly whitewashed to go down easy for the majority of people, that's what we learn and that's the way that we learned about a lot of these things.

But, and you know, as somebody who grew up in the South and kind of went into adulthood thinking that like, oh yeah, I mean, racism and like, that stuff's kind of, that was in the past. I mean, America used to be that way. It's pretty eye-opening and enlightening. Of course, I didn't think that before I listened to this podcast.

I changed my ideas about that a long time ago, but I think that this is super illuminating, very, very well done, and it's only about five or six episodes, and you can be completely done with it. So 1619 Podcast, check it out. All right, we'll speak at you next week.