Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - 225: Our Years As Missionaries | Ear Biscuits Ep. 225

Episode Date: January 27, 2020

R&L reveal more never-before-heard aspects of their lives as they dive even deeper into their Lost Years. Listen to them reminisce about their post-graduate missionary lives that shaped them into the Internetainers you know them as today in this episode of Ear Biscuits! Time Stamps: (2:58) - Recap of last week's episode (4:08) - Graduating college (14:32) - Writing comedy songs (18:52) - Making r&l videos (29:19) - A pivotal moment - our first show (35:08) - Our first show mishap (37:21) - Another pivotal moment - getting invited to be on staff (46:07) - The real story of r quitting engineering (52:57) - The birth of rhettandlink.com (55:39) - The birth of RhettandLinKast (59:32) - Getting our own office/filming space (1:04:33) - Starting a YT channel (1:05:21) - The Bentley Bros. (1:14:02) - Online Nation gig (1:19:26) - How the Lost Years impacted our style of comedy (1:23:19) - How our comedy has changed (1:30:27) - Link's rec - Honey Boy 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 Rhett. And I'm Link. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we're picking up where we left off last week and illuminating the dark years. The lost years. They're not dark. The lost years of Rhett and Link.

Part two of us filling in a big gap in our lives that we have never really talked about and that is really the breadth of our college experience and then especially, which is what we're gonna get into this week, what happened after we graduated and how did we go from graduating working as engineers and then eventually becoming YouTubers and it's not the path that you would expect

or you have heard in interviews or articles that you have read about us. If you haven't listened to last week's podcast then you definitely need to do that before listening to this. Yeah, come on, listen, do not listen to this one without going back to part one. But I will just quickly sort of catch us up to where we're at.

And can I say before you do that, that to reiterate that the plan is, there's so many, this is so logistical in terms of connecting the dots of our careers professionally, but there's an entire personal and spiritual aspect to the story that we're saving that side of the coin for each of us for the next two episodes.

We're each gonna take, we'll both be there, but we'll each take an episode to share our own stories of our spiritual journeys, which go through the times that we're talking about here, as well as bringing us up to where we are now. So that will be the next two episodes. Hashtag Ear Biscuits with any thoughts, comments, questions you have about anything we're talking about today.

We're accumulating those so that when we're through those next two episodes, then we can be a part of that conversation at that point. Yeah. So to recap what we covered last week, we talked about the fact that when we started our careers, we grew up as evangelical Christians, and that is not how we would describe ourselves now.

And like Link said, we'll talk about that whole process and why we would not call ourselves that now in subsequent individual podcasts. But because it played such a integral role in who we were and then every decision that we made professionally, as you're about to hear, we wanted to kind of fill in the gaps. So last week we got from high school

through college, talked about our very, very heavy involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ and how that was really the first opportunity we ever had to be comedians. That was when we started being Rhett and Link on stage in front of a group of people. Yeah, the weekly meeting in NC State and then every Christmas at the Christmas conference

slash winter conference where multiple states would come together, crew students and you and then both of us would start emceeing that. So when we graduated, it was a pointed decision because our lives for the past four plus years had been so much of our life experience had been wrapped up in our involvement in Campus Crusade for Christ

that not only was it daunting to just graduate and move into the real world, so to speak, but also to, there was an implied that we were leaving behind such a big part of our experience specifically being involved in Campus Crusade and being involved visibly so much and our passions being so engaged there to now it's like, okay, I'd been working at IBM

for in a co-op on and off. So while you were in school, you were like taking semesters and working. But I got a job with IBM, you got a job as a civil engineer. Well, back up just a second because while I was in college, in fact, I remember going into my senior year, our involvement in Campus Crusade and then specifically,

I took two summer project trips. I took one to New York City in 98 and then I took one to Slovakia in 99. And again, the way I've always described what I did in Slovakia, because it's not untrue, is teaching English. But the reality was it was English camps, teaching English with the intention of teaching people about Christianity.

That's kinda how these organizations work. It's like you kinda of go into a situation under a certain pretense, but ultimately what you're after is communicating the gospel. Conversion. And converting people to Christianity. And that doesn't mean that the experiences were not incredibly fruitful, at least for me personally, in enriching and getting to travel and experience people

in other places that were different than me. Same for me going to Santa Cruz and being an amusement park ride operator. Right. And so we told stories from those periods of times, but we never really explained why we were there. That was why we were there. But that experience, especially my experience in Slovakia,

and getting to know people who had basically given their lives vocationally, like professionally, to crew, to work full time, and seeing that these people are just like, man, they're happy to wake up in the morning. This is, they're engaged. They're engaged very closely with what they're doing. They're continuing the, from our vantage point,

the experience that we were having and so aligned with in college professionally. Well, and I think the thing that ends up happening, and this isn't just true of people who get involved in religious organizations, but again, you're so passionate and you usually kind of find your cause and the thing that you're into in your early 20s. And then what you begin to see is you begin to look around

at the adults in your life and you're like, what is wrong with you guys? You're all dead. I remember going back to my local church, having been involved in Campus Crusade and gone to these weekly meetings and gone to these conferences where we were worshiping and we were singing these songs

and I was being filled with the spirit, overwhelmed, emotional experiences and then you go back to your church and you're like, does this matter to you guys? And you become sort of a disillusioned, you think that you've got it figured out and you think that the adults have just lost it. But when you find these people who have decided to go on staff,

they seem passionately engaged with exactly the stuff that you're currently passionately engaged with. So at that point, I made the decision, this is what I wanna do. I wanna go on staff. I wanna be full-time staff of Campus Crusade. I went home. Oh, you made the decision, this is what I wanna do. I wanna go on staff. I wanna be full-time staff of Campus Crusade. I went home. Oh, you made the decision. Yeah, I went home.

I told, so you may not remember this, but I went home after that trip and I told my parents, I was like, I don't wanna get an engineering degree. I just don't, I wanna get a communications degree. I'd like to take these last two to three semesters. Okay, I remember that. And transfer into communications because this is what I'm good at.

You know, I'm a good speaker. I wanna learn more about that. And also I just kind of wanna get more involved in ministry. I'll have more time if I'm in communications than engineering, because let's be honest, it's way easier. And then my dad actually said, he was like, you know what? Because my brother had already gone on staff. So my brother Cole was on staff

with Campus Crusade at the time already. I think he started at UNC. I think that's where he was at the time. And so it was already in the family. Again, Cole played, we talk about Cole a lot. Like we listened to our very first hip hop because of Cole and a lot of other things. He blazed a trail that we were comfortable following.

But if he had never gotten involved with Campus Crusade, we also would not be here, I believe. It's with a domino effect. Yeah, we'd have been in InterVarsity. Him, right, that's something we skipped over. Shout out to InterVarsity. We flirted with y'all. We were in an InterVarsity. Him, right, that's something we skipped over. Shout out to InterVarsity. We were in an- We flirted with y'all. We were in an InterVarsity Bible study

as well as a Crusade Bible study. Dang, yikes. We were two Bible studies. We need to pace ourselves. You can't give us enough Bible studies, y'all. So we ended up, I ended up thinking I was gonna go on staff because Cole was already on staff. But my dad was like, you know, I think it would be great if you go on staff because Cole was already on staff. But my dad was like, you know, I think it would be great if you go on staff, but you've got two more,

you got one more year of engineering school to just have an engineering degree. And I think it would be, it would serve you better in the long run. You can do all the things that you want to do with an engineering degree. But you'll have an engineering degree. All you wanted was a little more fun.

Yeah, I was playing Twisted Metal with Greg all the time. I was having such a good time. So I thought that was reasonable and I'm actually glad that my dad told me that because I feel a little bit cooler that I can say I have an engineering degree. It's just better. That's all it is? But then when you did graduate,

when I graduated, I immediately got married and I took a job with IBM. You know, I felt like I was much more pulled to that responsible decision and I had a, the financial security of the job that they offered was something that, oh gosh, I just couldn't, I couldn't walk away from that. But I did still have that pull

to all of the things that you described. And I would add to that, that the way that we were able to engage with an audience and with Christmas conference every year, like as we talked about last week, our passions were so aligned to pour so much of any of our free time into that, it was like, I just also didn't wanna give that up

or I knew that I would miss that just as much as anything, if not the most. It was a passion. It's like entertaining a crowd was enamoring for us. And the expectation was that we would continue emceeing the conference. I don't remember what the conversation was, but it was an open invitation

and we knew we wanted to do that. So, but we, but you. Christmas conference. But you decided to also take a job as an engineer. The reason being I fell in love with my wife, Jessie, who was still a student. That's right. We got married the summer

after her sophomore year in college. You cradle robber. And you can't go on staff with a wife that's in college. With a child. And so I was like, okay, I'm gonna use this engineering degree. I'll try this out for a little bit. She's actually finished school,

she got the double major in like three and a half years at Carolina, which somehow she did that while married to me. But anyway. But we agreed to, you agreed to continue to be the host of the Christmas conference every year. And at some point, maybe now, maybe a year or so later, like I would be like a co-MC, but right from the beginning, I was there with you,

us working together on a volunteer basis, not as official staff, but as volunteers to show up, to take our vacation, to store up our vacation from our engineering jobs and then blow most of it, December 26th through then. So then I remember months leading up to the end of the year and the conference. We would get together every single week. I would drive from my house in Apex

to the edge of campus at Carolina where Jesse was still going to school and you guys had the house. And every week we'd get together and we'd plan for months and months leading up to this thing. It was our one opportunity to still have that audience. Yeah. And to come up with stuff.

So we'd write songs, we'd come up with video concepts, we'd figure out the sketches and stuff that we were gonna do. Crowd interaction stuff on stage. Yeah, so it was all very, very, very meticulously planned. And also, there was a lot of anxiety. I was having a great time, but I just remember, it's funny in light of how much content

we put out there now and how many things that we get ready for and all of a sudden do. I remember just being so stressed out about Christmas conference, like enjoying it, but like so stressed out about how it was gonna go. And it's funny how- The same way we are now? No, I'm saying, yeah, we're right,

but it seems so like, dude, that was so simple. It was such a small thing. It was five days of getting out there a few times. But everything's always, it's always relative. Your anxiety is always relative to whatever you're experiencing. It was over 1,000 college students who, it was our only audience.

We were also writing songs at the same time. So like I got married in 2000. Well we started getting together then. You and Jessie weren't married until 2001. I would get together at your apartment and we would write songs. We wrote enough songs by getting together every week that we also made a CD at that point.

Because Just Malice the Grammy was 2001, right? Yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah, so we were writing all those Just Malice the Grammy was 2001, right? Yeah. Right, yeah. Yeah, so we were writing all those songs. Our first album was 2001. So we made a CD of comedy songs, some of which, one of those songs, the Unibrow song, we got, we performed on stage at Christmas Conference

along with Tim playing the harmonica. I think this is the thing that is gonna be news to everybody, so we talk about those early songs like the Unibrow song, the Facebook song. That which was a few years later, but yes. All those early songs, and the Unibrow song was the first thing that was ever featured on the homepage of YouTube.

Again, we told this story before about how my home video of Locke crying after Carolina beat State was featured and that YouTube wanted to feature it and we were like, listen, that's just a home video where you feature the work that we actually care about and that was the Unibrow song. That was kind of the beginning of us getting traction on YouTube.

But anyway, we'll get into, that was many years later, that was 2006 or seven. But anyway, those are songs that we wrote at the time. We wrote them for Christmas conference. We wrote them to perform live. To perform live. Period. Yeah, the Unibrow song was, I mean, in the first batch of songs that we wrote,

but actually we wrote a song because a friend Greg, who we talked about last week, was getting married in December of 2000. Yeah. And at his rehearsal dinner, we were like, hold on, we're in your wedding party, that means we're at your rehearsal dinner. Your rehearsal dinner means that everybody's sitting down

in chairs eating and some people are gonna give a toast. That's an audience. Greg, we're gonna write a song and perform it for your family and Jen's family at your rehearsal dinner. So we wrote a song and the chorus was, we've seen Greg naked, soon you will too, hope you enjoy it more than we do. And Tim played the harmonica and sang it with us.

And then on the way- We were his roommates. And then on the way home from that rehearsal dinner with Christy and Jesse, and again, we've told this story, this part of it, they said. I remember they were sitting in the car waiting for us to get back to the car and they had been talking.

Yeah, and we got in the car. We got in the car. And they said, we just think that y'all need to do something with this, with your comedy thing that you just did in there, because you know what? It really worked, those people were really into it and there's something there and y'all need to pursue this. And you know, it was a pivotal moment.

The implication was- I mean, there were 80 people in the room laughing at us making fun of the groom. You know, they had the vision to say, there's something here. But the implication was to pursue it beyond just doing Christmas Conference. And I think we were already doing that.

And I think that's why when we started writing songs, we took that song that we wrote for Greg, we changed the lyrics and made it about a unibrow and performed it at Christmas Conference a month later or whatever. Right. And then we started in early 2001, we started writing more songs that then we made a CD.

We're like, well, we got all these songs, we'll make a CD. We were just trying stuff, you know? And we would sell it at Christmas Conference the next year. Yeah, and so, I mean, again, we ended up in seeing the Christmas Conference for a total of 10 years. So this is gonna, we're gonna kind of, but just some of the stuff that we were doing, again, this is like we were figuring out

what Rhett and Link comedy was, and it was a combination of getting up there in front of a group of people, I think this is one of the reasons that we do things like this podcast and we do Good Mythical Morning and we do things the way that we do, it's just like the two of us talking to a group of people is because the foundation of it was getting up there at conference

and doing routines together, loosely scripted things, interacting with people, going out into the crowd, making these videos, singing these songs, all the things that basically are all the pieces of our career. We did, I'll give some examples. We, one of the first videos we made, and none of the videos were religious.

All the videos were just purely comedic. I think, we didn't, I don't know that we called ourselves comedians, but over time we started to think of ourselves as comedians, you know, you start to make a musical comedy CD and you start to think of yourself in this way, on this totally different track in this Christian world. But we were very self-conscious to never be Christian comedians

because just like way back in the days of the Wax Paper Dogs, we were very self-conscious being the Christian band. It's like there was a stigma associated with, okay, a second-rate comedian? No, we just wanna make things that we think are as funny as possible and we can plug them into this context in these conferences where it's like,

you can find it funny here, you can find it funny anywhere, hopefully. So everything we created was, more often than not, was, there was no religious undertones or there was no message. It was just, this is just to be funny. Now when we were on stage, we were introducing speakers and stuff like that. You might contextualize something like a video

where you're a dog, like life is a dog, but it's just you crawling around on all fours and then having POV shots of you as a dog. I don't even know why it was funny. Probably wasn't. Well, because who let the dogs out? It was popular at the time. Okay, yeah, that makes, it all makes sense at this point.

Sometimes that's all you need is a song and an idea. We, people at conference, you had to share a bed with like a roommate, it would be like four people, two people to a bed, so we made this sketch called the invisible bed fence. If you gotta share a bed with somebody that you don't wanna be romantically involved with, you just string up this invisible bed fence. If you gotta share a bed with somebody that you don't wanna be romantically involved with, you just string up this invisible bed fence,

kinda like what you would have for a dog in a yard, and it would shock you. So we created a fake commercial for this product. And that was on YouTube for a while, but it had copyrighted music because that was back in the day where no one thought about that, so now it's been taken down.

We had also filmed some videos while at conference. We went over to the mall across the street from the conference in Greensboro, and we took nose hair trimmers, and we trimmed strangers' nose hairs, and then tried to sell them this amazing new device they'd never seen. And if that sounds like it's funny,

just that one is still on YouTube because it's got royalty-free music. I don't like it's funny, just that one is still on YouTube because it's got royalty free music. It's, I don't think it's funny. I think it's embarrassing. I think we should pull it down. But just for posterity, it's still up there. It's so bold that we did it. We also, we would also do things on stage,

like bits on stage where we would invite students on stage. Well, we got two guys to, we had an idea called Y'all Gain 12 Pounds, which I think is probably, it would be a little more controversial 20 years later, but at the time it seemed funny to get two guys who were in relatively good shape to try to gain 12 pounds over the course of five days. And you know what?

They did. In less than five, and I think four days, one of the guys gained 12 pounds and then we changed the name of five days. And you know what? They did. In less than five, and I think four days, one of the guys gained 12 pounds and then we changed the name of it to, y'all gained 14 pounds. Right, right, right. And it was just a dude who was drinking whole milk. Whole milk every day.

Can you believe that? Somebody could gain 12 pounds? I mean, is that something that wrestlers do? Wrestlers lose that much weight really easily. But that, what if we get them to gain the weight? We did another one called the progressive haircut, gradual haircut. We got two guys out there.

And every day of conference, we would cut more of his hair off, giving him a different hairstyle of it so he looked like an idiot the entire conference. Right. This is just good, clean fun, man. Yeah. We were loving it. I mean This is just good clean fun, man. Yeah. We were loving it.

I mean, and again, we were just volunteers. I worked at a cubicle. You worked at a cubicle and then we'd get together, we'd get together once a week and we'd come up with this stuff and all year long we'd be looking towards Christmas conference where we could unleash these ideas we had. And I wanna say one thing before we talk about,

before we take a break and talk about the sort of the pivotal thing that happened. But I think it's important to acknowledge, like I said, I think that the old video's not funny, right? We needed a cocoon to develop in. I'm just gonna be honest with you. Right. We're kinda late bloomers in a lot of ways.

And like, you know, there are really talented teenagers who are really funny. You think about somebody like Bo Burnham. Yeah, exactly. You know, like that dude was doing next level, genius level content in comedy as a 15 year old. We were not, we were not doing that as 25 year olds. In fact, we were still in, and I'm not saying

we're like comedic geniuses at this point. We've got a lot of lucky breaks, but we're a lot better than we were. But we needed sort of a sheltered environment. We could not have succeeded in a place where comedy was what was expected. Right. We succeeded in a place where comedy was what was expected. We succeeded in a place where comedy was a surprise. It was like going to church and having a funny pastor.

We were funny pastors, let's just be honest. And that's how we got away with it. Because people were there for the meat, which was what are we gonna learn about Jesus, y'all? That's why we're all here. And we were like, was what are we gonna learn about Jesus, y'all? That's why we're all here. And we were like, well, right before you learn about Jesus, these two Nimrods are gonna get up there, to use a biblical reference, Nimrod.

It is. These two Nimrods are gonna get up there and just cut the fool. And some people are gonna like it. Cut strangers' nose hairs. And you know what? Some people are gonna be annoyed by it. A lot of people were, I'm sure,

because we thought we were so great and we weren't. But we needed that environment to develop and that's why we just owe a lot to, again, Mike Mahaffey giving us the opportunity to do this, believing in us, letting us develop. He thought it was funny. And then Mark worked with us at the Christmas conference. Right, and Mark worked directly with us

for many, many years. For the main meeting. And Todd as well was involved. So I think that, yeah, we just, we got so lucky. Like we would not, our idea of full-time entertainment growing up was the guy who came to our dance and DJ the dance, you know, and just like wore boots and had this like speaker that he kind of came out with. Or like a magician.

We didn't understand what full-time entertainment was. We didn't have any appreciation for what comedy was besides just what we had seen on television. We did, and we didn't have a plan that this was gonna lead to something beyond it but it was irresistible for us to stay involved in what it was and that's why nine years after you graduated from college, we were emceeing this conference.

Still. Still. Now the pivotal moment, there's a pivotal moment, again involving my brother, shortly after we graduated and we had MC'd a conference a few times that I think sort of represents the next big evolution, the next big step.

He could see that we were trying really hard. Yeah, and we're gonna talk about that in just a second. 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... Anime! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray.

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Okay, so again, I don't know exactly what year it was, but it had to be between 2000 and 2002. Yes, let's say 2001. Let's say 2001. Let's say 2001. Your brother was the. My brother was on staff at UNC. Yep. Because they had their own weekly meetings.

Every campus has several ministries, but most major colleges have a division of crew, chapter, I don't know what the technical term is. So Cole says, hey, got an idea for you guys to do a comedy show on campus that's an outreach. That's the term that we use was outreach. And the whole idea behind outreach is it is an event where the intention is

you bring people who are not Christians to the event so you can reach out to them and share the gospel with them so that hopefully they will become Christians, their lives will be changed. That's the premise. And we always being super self-aware, one of the things we were super self-aware, one of the things we were very self-aware about

and actually very critical about when it came to the church is the idea of what we call bait and switch evangelism. So this is the idea where you tell somebody like, hey, there's gonna be this cool debate. Like we're debating creation and evolution or there's a guy coming and he's an FBI profiler. And he's gonna give a speech all about the fact that he's,

because this is literally something that happened. And he's an FBI profiler and he's gonna talk about his career in profiling people. And you get somebody who's not interested in spiritual things to be interested in that thing, the bait, you bring them to the event, they hear about the thing, but then pretty early on, sometimes at the very end, all of a sudden there's a switch and it's like,

hold on, they're talking about Jesus now. And they're telling me that the most important thing in life is a relationship with Jesus and that's why all these people are here. And this FBI profiler is saying that listen, I'm an FBI profiler, I'm really good at it, I just demonstrated that, but the real important thing in my life is Christ.

And maybe he did a better job of transitioning than you just did, but there was a- That's a paraphrase. But it would switch up and there will be an opportunity for you unsuspecting guests to make some sort of a decision. Some sort of indication. A lot of times it was just like indicate on a sheet of paper and we'll send you some information or whatever.

We didn't like that. Even when we were a part of it, we didn't like it. I was always like, this just doesn't seem sincere. It's like, if you want people to understand that Jesus has made a life, a difference in your life, tell them that. Don't tell them, hey, let's talk about this other thing and I'm gonna suddenly, I just never liked it,

you never liked it, so when Cole said let's do an outreach, we knew that we weren't gonna do that kind of outreach. But we knew we were gonna do something. Yeah. Because all of a sudden, this is an audience at Carolina and we believe in the cause and we can't, we, saying no to an audience is, it just felt so stupid to us. Never say no to an audience is, it just felt so stupid to us.

Never say no to an audience. We got to find a way to do this. What we ended up doing, I don't. Boy, did anybody video that? I hope not. Oh gosh. Well, the premise was it was just a comedy show, but we would bring up topics. It was a salty.

The term that we would use in topics. It was a salty, the term that we would use in Christian circles is it was salty. So Christians see themselves as the salt of the earth and so you're the salt and you're the light. And so sometimes you just wanna be salt. You don't wanna come all the way out and explicitly say something. You just wanna keep it kinda salty

and you're sort of suggesting the message of Jesus. Our idea was we wanted to- We wanted to dismantle some of the preconceived notions about Christianity, maybe hit some of those things head on, give the audience member, give the students who were involved in crew who brought a friend something that then they could talk about afterwards. So like there were multiple topics that we hit

that like hey if you're gonna go and grab a taco afterward you can say when he said, when they were talking about this like that Christians were just how we would characterize them. We had to tell the tuxedo story. Yeah. So. But that was the premise. That was the premise.

That was our version of like the least version of bait and switch we could do. Something that's just. It was a conversation starter. Thought of a conversation. It was a conversation starter. And then take it where you wanna take it afterward. So, well we had been really influenced by some people

who talked about relational evangelism. It's what the term that was being used at the time. Yeah. And so it was like, you have a relationship with somebody and sometimes you need sort of prompts in that relationship in the context of that friendship to talk about things and maybe that will then get to a place where you can talk about Jesus.

It still sounds very manipulative in salesman-y and it can be and it is often, but we thought our version was less manipulative than the bait and switch evangelism. Now for the show. When you think, when you're convinced that your friends are going to hell, you gotta come up with something.

Right, yeah, yeah, oh yeah, exactly, yeah. I mean, I remember Penn Jillette said this at one point years ago when I still believe the way that I used to believe. And he just said that like any Christian who actually believes that people are going to hell if they don't know Jesus, hasn't completely devoted almost every aspect of their life

to telling people about Jesus, something's missing. And that seemed very logical and motivating to me. But from a personal standpoint, But we were still embarrassed. It kind of knotted us up. We were still embarrassed about it. Because it's like we're so self-aware and it was just like something,

it still didn't sit right, but again, we had to find a way forward and we did that and we felt like we needed to wear tuxedos. I don't know why, but we had tuxedos. We ordered tuxedos and of course, I had to have mine tailored to fit me but we picked it up on the night of the show. Like we picked it up and I tried it on

literally like 30 minutes before, backstage, I'm putting my tuxedo on. You're wigging out. Now let me just explain, you know, at the time, I was about the same size, 34 waist, 34 to 36 length of pants. The waist was great. I believe these were 34 waist tuxedo pants,

but they were approximately 28 length. No, maybe 26. You're talking like halfway up the shin. Half calf. Half calf pants, man. That really takes the confidence out of a comedian in his comedy show, his first ever comedy show. Wait, I mean this was over an hour.

This was like an hour and 10 minutes of us singing songs, having monologue slash dialogues with each other, playing some games with the audience. I don't think it mattered that, I think it probably only helped that you looked stupid. We were still kind of on the tail end of the era of Steve Martin and Martin Short. And I think that they often wore those half-calf tuxedos.

Anyway, so again, like Link said, the whole point of this thing was to dismantle people's perceptions about Christians. We started the whole night with an acronym. Christians are blank, blank. And when you went through each letter, I remember R was like Republican. Like we were making fun of people's perception

that like people think that all, conservative Republican. We knew that that was like a big turn off and a lot of people were like why are your politics so tied to your faith and so we were like trying to dismantle that. I think in the end, it was not a resounding success in much of any way except the fact that we did something that wasn't a conference.

We created something, we created a show. Created a show. And even if it sucked, we did it. And people were, the audience was sympathetic. The audience laughed. They laughed and it wasn't a failure. It wasn't a failure and then. It didn't crush us.

In another pivotal moment in our careers, we were wrapping up, cleaning up, walking out and I remember sitting on the front steps of this auditorium at UNC, I can't remember the name of that, Hill Hall, I think it may have been. Yeah. Sitting on the steps there,

Shane Dycky, who was also on staff with Campus Crusade, sits us down. He was kind of a bigwig. He had traveled the globe. He was a higher up leader. Yeah, and he'd also MC'd some stuff that we had seen. He was a very funny guy. Super funny, super nice, super.

Like great MC, sort of like, you know, in that, the comedic style that we were going for. Yeah. And he said, you know guys, I think that what you did tonight could be a ministry. I think you guys could be on staff with Campus Crusade doing what you did tonight. And we thought about that.

And you know, when you just have, when you're going back to your cubicle and then you're just thinking about, okay, a few months, we got this now, what we've done, maybe we could do that again. And then we've got Christmas conference that we do every year. And I would love to do more.

Yeah. I would love to do more. Yeah. I would love to do more. Well, again, so we get labeled because we blazed a trail on YouTube. Sometimes we get called innovative or, again, listen, how this stuff just happened to us. Like we haven't blazed many trails. What we've done is just we've been receptive and open at different points.

And opportunistic. Opportunistic and listen, when Shane Dyche said, you guys could do this full time, it wasn't like it was strategic for us. We weren't thinking about that. We were like, really? That sounds awesome. How do we do that?

And he said, well, what you need to do is you need to put together a proposal for the regional team. So this is the team of people in the Mid-South region who make decisions about who is gonna be on staff. Because basically the way Campus Crusade for Christ staff works in other ministries, college ministries like it, is you get on staff by going through an application

or approval process by the people who make these decisions. And then you just get assigned to a campus usually. Right, but there are other different roles that you can play within the organization, but everybody gets paid the same way, and that is through something called raising support. Meaning it isn't like crusade has this big bank somewhere and they just pay people salaries.

When you get hired, you then have to go out and ask individual people for monthly donations to build up your salary. 100% of it. 100%. It's not backfilled by like a large fund. Right. So this opportunity,

it was daunting because that's what it meant. You can't do it halfway. You have to quit your job as engineers and you have to raise financial support. Once you've reached your goal of raising support, then you can move to your assignment. And my brother had already gone out and asked all the people that I was gonna ask.

Yeah. Think about that. Yeah. And for me, we had well paying jobs as engineers. And I had my first child on the way. My wife, Christy, she taught school for one year, then she got pregnant and she was on staff along with me as a full-time mom. So it's not like she had a job,

you came on staff as a family and raised all your financial support and you couldn't have any other jobs because you needed to be fully devoted to it or whatever. Right. So this was a huge decision and we were very motivated to find a way to make it work. Also knew that like it was gonna be a shock

to my extended family if I were to announce, hey, you know, they were so proud of me being a working engineer. Right. And proud of the volunteer work that I was doing on the side. But it took a while for them to come around to the decision that Christine and I made

and that you and Jesse made and then the four of us made. You know, it was like the four of us are making a decision because Rhett and Link really wanna do this thing because you guys gave us a speech in a car after Greg's rehearsal dinner. You know, it's like it was dicey, man, because it was freaking scary to just say, oh, yeah, I'm just gonna quit my job

and then I'm gonna start from scratch and I'm just gonna get people to give me money every month through the organization, tax deductible. Now the thing is, true, my brother was already on staff and he was already getting supported by people. But that kind of cut two ways. Not only did it mean that a lot of people that I was going to ask had already been asked by him,

but I also understood that it could be done. I'd seen somebody do it, who my parents had seen somebody do it. I don't know exactly what they thought about it at the time. I think they were probably kind of excited that we were saying, hey, we want to go into full time ministry but they were probably like oh,

we're gonna have another son who's going around and asking people for money. Yeah, on me and Christy's side of the equation, it was foreign to almost everybody that we talked to, especially both of our families in talking about the decision. And we had a baby on the way. I think I already said that.

But as couples, we believed in the choice and as a group, we supported each other in making the leap. I resigned from my job at IBM. You resigned, I think, as they were trying to lay you off. Yeah, so I wanna tell that story because that's a new piece of the story. But back up just one second because I wanna talk about what our proposal was

because we had to go ahead before we could do all this quitting. We didn't wanna be assigned to a campus. Well, so specifically, we developed a proposal which ironically and coincidentally, one of our good friends, Matt Harmon, we had sent it to him 20 years ago for his opinion and he had it and he was like, I just found this

and he sent it back to us last week. Yeah, I read it this morning. And we read the proposal. So again, we were super into this idea of moving away from this bait and switch evangelism idea that we had seen done on so many campuses. And we wanted to equip students, first of all, we didn't wanna go around doing outreaches.

And so if you're not gonna do outreaches, what's the alternative? Well, you can train. So we actually create, the idea was that we were gonna create events that the Campus Crusade students would come to, all these campuses in the Mid-South. And the whole point was, we're gonna do this comedy show,

but really what we're doing is we're trying to equip you in thinking about the way that you talk to people about Jesus. We want you to get to a place where you have friends and you're willing to talk to them about Jesus and you learn ways to do that and you're not just thinking constantly about inviting them to events and stuff but you make it a part of your lifestyle.

That was the idea. We made the pitch and they said yes, do it. And we said we also wanna continue to host the events that we've been hosting and more if there's opportunities. They said, sure. So they were very supportive. They believed in the vision and they also said, well, you gotta raise your own support, so get to it.

It's pretty easy to say okay when, you know. The proof is really in can you raise the money yourself. But they were supportive and they gave us the go ahead. And then that, and they gave us the go ahead. And then that, once they gave us the go ahead, that's where, that was the biggest single decision from a career, personal, family standpoint that I made in this whole thing. I mean, there was another, there's a second place

that we'll talk about when we left staff, but joining staff, quitting engineering, that was a huge moment. For the next year. Well, I gotta tell my quitting story. Tell your quitting story. So again, the story that you've heard is that we quit our jobs and became YouTubers. You're now learning that that's not exactly what happened.

What happened with me was, is it was, I guess it was 2002. So I basically, it was my second year of working in engineering. Like I had worked a total of two years and it was the end of that year. Now, towards the second half of that year, probably like September, October of 2002, we had made the decision that we were gonna do this

and we had gotten approval to be on staff. And so I was like, okay, I'm going to work at Black & Veatch, the engineering firm that I was working at, through the end of the year and then I'll tell them like 30 days or whatever before the end of the year that hey, I'm quitting and I'm gonna go do a different job. Well literally like two weeks before I told them

that I was gonna quit, this was back when the Enron thing was happening and they were, all these, we design power plants and so a lot of the firms were just having like rounds and rounds of layoffs. So like for weeks people were getting laid off and laid off and laid off and then one week, all the engineers that got hired on the same day as me, all the junior engineers, they started getting called into the office

and they would come back and be escorted out. And so I was like, oh no, I'm next. And I was listening like, Rett McLaughlin, please come down to the so-and-so room. And everybody at that point knew that we were getting laid off. I go down there, I had a conversation with my boss. He felt real bad.

I said, hey, listen, man, don't worry. I was actually gonna quit. And it sounded like it was when a girl dumps you and you say, I was gonna dump you anyway. But then I remember going back upstairs to get my belongings and being escorted out, not by a cop, but by like another employee. And then everybody's like, all the other engineers

are like trying to be sad and empathetic. And this one girl, I can't remember her name, but she was like, I'm so sorry. And I said, you know what, don't worry about me. I'm gonna go be a missionary. I'm sure that made her feel, oh, that's great. And then as soon as I said that, I was like, why did I phrase it like that?

But I'm gonna just keep walking out. Oh, I knew he was Mormon. Biggest decision we ever made, scariest decision we ever made, for the next year, your full-time job was meeting with individuals, usually at their home, and giving them a presentation which ended with, will you make a pledge for annual or monthly support

so I can do this thing that I've told you about for an hour? Yeah. I did the same thing for a year. At the end of that year, you went to the office and started working because you had reached your financial support. But you forgot, we also worked at the same time because you gotta have money doing something.

I did not get done by the end of that year. It took me an additional year. And over the course of that time, we were both trying to work part-time jobs in order to make ends meet while we're meeting with people. And so for me, that was two years of meeting with people. There was a whole section of months where we lived with Christy's family

in the room she grew up in. It was extremely difficult. I lived for a year above my in-law's garage. And you did some odd jobs for him. That's where I impregnated my wife with my first child. Okay, great. Above a garage. Yeah Lily was born.

Yeah so and my father-in-law had like a bunch of, he's a dentist but he had a bunch of properties and stuff and so I was kinda like his gopher and just did a painted stuff and organized stuff and drove a truck around and it was just like odd jobs, blue collar odd jobs for a full year. It was weird, I went, there was a period where I had to ask my dad, it was very humbling,

I asked my dad if he could hire me and my dad paid me to just work for him, laying tile. And like, he was like, I can pay you an apprentice rate because you don't know what you're doing. And you know, it was- How about pay me the son rate? I know, it was, you know, it's like, he did everything he could

and it made all the difference in the world, but it was tough. And then Lily was born and we were still raising support and we would take this newborn and try to time our appointments where she would sleep through the whole thing or Christy would have to leave. And I remember one, it would always be the same spiel, but I remember in one spiel, I looked up

as I'm trying to be engaging and trying to like get people motivated to give money. And this guy who was a friend of a friend of a friend of Christie's dad, and I knew he had a lot of money. I looked up from like my presentation notes or whatever, and the dude was asleep. He had fallen asleep and it was just the three of us in a room talking about the ministry work we wanted to do.

He still, I woke him up with some grunts and he did make a pledge, so mission accomplished. So two years of that, then we finally start working on. We could talk about the process of raising support forever. I've got a bunch of crazy stories, but essentially it's. We got too much other stuff to cover. It was as awkward as you can imagine going around to people's homes and asking them for money.

But yeah, so eventually we get to the point where we've raised support. We came on staff while Jessie was pregnant. We started working in the regional office, which was a little office with cubicles in Apex, North Carolina. And Jessie was pregnant at the time and we worked, she worked for like two months before,

like January and February, then Locke was born on February 24th of 2004. So Jessie was actually in the office for a little bit but then I was just left there by myself waiting for you to finish. And I spent most of my time like kind of planning, we knew what we were gonna do, like we knew we were gonna do some kind of show,

so I just kind of was thinking about Christmas conference, of course, because I was always thinking about Christmas conference, but kind of putting together the groundwork for the show that we would take around campuses. Yeah, and I eventually got there, and so we were sitting in a little cubicle environment, and there was one back room where the door would shut

and you could edit videos and that kind of became our default office and we would make our plans for the tour we would do around the Mid-South region with our training seminar and for conference and then at some point in doing the tour, in doing the tour and then coming back and wanting to promote it, we were like, we need to have a website.

So we created a website and we started putting our comedy videos up on our website, RhettandLink.com. So 2003 we created RhettandLink.com. In order to promote our visits to campus. Like hey, these guys are coming, you should come out. Check out these videos. And they were videos that we had debuted at Christmas conferences, stuff like that.

But now all of a sudden, we had a portfolio on our website. And we were still making, we made Pimp My Stroller after Locke was born. And we debuted Pimp My Stroller at Christmas conference the end of that year. We showed the video and then when the video was over, we rolled the stroller out on stage with Lily and Locke in the stroller

and the crowd went crazy. And that same year, like another day, we pulled up Facebook profiles of students in the audience and made fun of their Facebook profiles and then at the end of that comedy bit, we sang a new song that we had written called the Facebook song. Right.

And that was the end of it. And then we did our tour, we put our videos on our website and then Apple released this part of this thing called iTunes and they had this section called video podcast. I'm like, we already have videos. It's like, hold on, this is different. These videos are made for this platform

and they're like, they're serial. One of the biggest things was a ninja who would answer questions called Ask a Ninja. And so we said, well, what's our version of that? We can do, because we wanted to do stuff like that. Our rationale was, we can do, because we wanted to do stuff like that, you know, we can, our rationale was, on one hand, we can create content for the internet first and then the people who will see it will be the people who will want us to come to their campus.

So it's all a promotional tool for our live tour. Well and it was also, the idea was, we did like the idea of people inviting other people, both Christians and non-Christians to our event, because it was friendly to whoever you were. It was about training, right, and conversations. But we weren't trying to hide anything. But so it was like, if we can make these videos

and like college students actually watch them and care about them, then maybe they'll be excited about coming to the events. So we were making videos for the events, we were writing songs for the events. I wanna talk a little bit about what the event was because it's kind of a really interesting time in our lives. Like, you know, it would basically be me and you.

Now there was one time when we took Jesse and Christy and the kids in a big van and it was not great. Yeah. We just won't even talk about that. It was mostly me and you driving and we had a projector and a laptop. And your guitar. And a guitar and we would show up

at whatever like facility we had been designated to do our show in, which is usually a classroom, like a big college classroom you know, that could hold like 100 or 200 students. And we would meet somebody with crew who was like, oh I'm the tech guy who can get your, we had a projector and then we had this stand. We would set all this stuff up, like the projector and then the stand and then we had, it was all in PowerPoint

or Keynote maybe at the time. Yeah, Keynote. And we had a little remote. And we just did the whole presentation. We didn't take anybody with us to do this. No. And it was like, and then we would do it, and then we would go eat somewhere, go watch a movie.

It was just me and you traveling the country together with this show. It was awesome. It was an interesting time. Yeah, it was, the training part, we believed in it, but personally, we weren't that great at it. It's not like when I worked as an engineer, I was engaging all these people talking about my faith.

It was like, you know, there was. We were great about talking about doing it. We were good at training other people, but it was, so there was this dichotomy of like, on one hand, we believe in what we're doing and what we're saying, but we're also very motivated to continue to create and engage an audience and I think it was, and that really fueled everything we did to make,

I mean, we weren't gonna do it half ass and we weren't gonna, we were gonna honor the people who were investing every single month in the vision that we laid out to them. Right. But we were also developing and maybe more so than we realized as entertainers. And I think, especially when we started doing the videos,

we started doing more videos. Now, the timeline is a little bit interesting because a lot of the videos that you can go, you know, we didn't join YouTube in 2006 and we'll talk about how that happened. But a lot of the videos when we first joined, we just took this backlog of videos all the way from 2003 or earlier,

we just uploaded them to YouTube and some of those videos are still up there. So one of our earliest videos is when we talked about Velcro and we've made fun of ourselves before because we're sitting, we did this like podcast where- Well and here's why, this is what I was getting at earlier. We didn't care about YouTube but Apple seemed legitimate

and when they were doing video podcast, I'm sure you're liking lots of farting noises. Let me just see if I can work them out. Okay. Apple seemed legitimate and when they started platforming these video podcasts and Ask a Ninja was the biggest one, we said, let's develop something for that platform.

We just can't put the videos that we've made over the past few years on and Apple's not gonna do anything with that. We gotta have a video podcast. That's why it was called the Rhett and Link cast. And so we developed that and the rationale was that will be promotion for when we visit campuses for whatever we're doing, increase our awareness within the movement

of Campus Crusade, but it was also exciting to develop a show that was for the internet first and that's the first time that we actually did that and the first thing we did, we started doing debates. Like if a ninja can answer questions, then we can play characters who debate topics. And we did that maybe once. Twice maybe. Maybe twice.

I think we did it twice. Well, but the thing I don't wanna get into, some of these details are not gonna be interesting to people, but one thing I wanna just acknowledge is that the first year that we worked doing this, we worked at the regional office and we had a little room that we would go in and this is where we would shoot our videos.

And we would shoot the Rhett and Link cast and the Velcro one was the first one that we did when we decided on that, on the format of the two of us sitting behind a table with one microphone in front of us talking. Right, so that was the beginning of that format, which as you know, led to eventually Good Mythical Morning many years later.

But the interesting thing is we've made fun of ourselves in the way we talked in that video and how we were talking, well, especially Link was talking really southern and really high. The reason that he was talking so, we were both talking so quietly is because we were in an office with people working right outside this room.

We've never talked about that, but it's like, there's people like doing their Campus Crusade regional office job in the cubicles, and then we're in there. Talking about Velcro. We're sketching Velcro pictures and talking about them. And part of it was, what are you guys doing? I mean, we're out here doing like legitimate work.

You're in here talking about Velcro for an internet video on this thing that nobody understands. So it's like, well, it'd probably be better if you didn't hear us. So in 2000, I'm gonna guess that it was 2005. We knew that we needed our own space. And it was just because the ideas that we had and the way that we wanted to do them,

even just for what we were doing in the ministry, was too big for this place that we were at. Too disruptive for the cubicle environment. And I talked to my father-in-law, and then the office that I broke into during one of the LTAT episodes last year where it talks about how we went in there and we saw all this stuff, that place,

that basement in Lillington, North Carolina, where we first did so many of our videos, that was the place, he was like, "'Sure, I've got a basement in Lillington "'that I'm just storing stuff in there. "'If you guys wanna work out of there, no problem.'" And so that was the beginning. We went in there, that was when we painted the wall

green and blue, we did the checkered, the black and white check floor. That are all these iconic things that now have made their way to the set of GMM. Like that was all because of that Lillington basement when we knew we needed a space. So that we could create the video podcast to promote our tour as missionaries.

Yeah, and shout out to David Woodall, who was working with us at the time. He was at the regional office and he started working closely with us, kind of just like running camera and he helped us lay that tile in there and the carpet and paint and all this stuff, like basically getting our office into the state

that it was for a number of years that we worked in. I loved it. I mean, we had our own little basement hideout. No one was looking over our shoulder and questioning, how does this directly relate to the ministry? It's like we were just going on instinct and we were working really hard, but it really wasn't clear if it was 100% aligned

or if it was worth it or if it was just stupid. Well, for instance, it was in that basement that we conceptualized the idea to make Looking for Ms. Locklear, the documentary where we tried to find our first grade teacher. And again, we got approval for all this stuff. The vision was we were gonna take that documentary

and then we were gonna use it, we had already done two tours. And so then instead of doing a third tour, we were gonna shoot the documentary in 2000, that was summer 2006. And then we were gonna take that documentary and use it and screen it and use it for training purposes. Again, you watch a documentary, you won't see any of that.

There's no overtly spiritual tie on it. We were using it as a way to say you could take anything that has any sort of meaning to it and use it to get into a conversation about Jesus. That was the idea, but we never got to do that because some things changed. And I will say, this story may serve as like a classic example of why you can't give people

a lot of leeway, you know, is like there's probably, it'd be like. Well, you know, I give credit to Don Knox. I remember him saying, I don't know, he was our supervisor. Yeah, gave us a lot of freedom. He was like, I don't know exactly what you guys are doing,

but I believe in you guys and I trust you guys. Yeah, and I think he did have good reason to trust us. I do think, we had great intentions, but some things ended up happening. I think that being independent, being down there, making that documentary, taking it to film festivals, having people respond to it, it won some awards. It got screened on PBS as part of the whatever that's-

SCTV South Carolina PBS. Documentary like lens thing. We began to get this idea that, we began to gain confidence. I think it was at that point in sort of those like 05, 06, again, June of 06 is when we shot looking for Ms. Locklear, but it's also when we started our YouTube channel, and the only reason we started

our YouTube channel, to tell a story we've told a million times, is because somebody took that Pimp My Stroller video that we had made for Christmas Conference and put it on our website, they put it on YouTube. Got more views in a day than it had in a year on our website. And so then we put everything on YouTube, but again, it was.

Well, there's an audience there. But it really was, hey. And all we gotta do is press upload. It, but again, it was. Well, there's an audience there. But it really was, hey. All we gotta do is press upload. It was not strategic, it was like, let's put things on the, we didn't know, we weren't making a plan to get off staff at that point, is what I'm saying. No. But these videos started to develop a life of their own.

I mean, even the ones within the, that we were making specifically just for the podcast. Like we would sing a song about Velcro or Fear of Frogs and we would be talking. And then we got an email one day from Phil Vischer. Creator of VeggieTales. And you know, Bob the Tomato, Larry the Cucumber. Well he's specifically the voice of many of the characters

but Bob the Tomato. Yeah he created them. And he created the whole world. Well I'm not gonna tell his story but once. Well he told it in a book. After he was pretty much done working with VeggieTales, he was starting a new thing called Jelly Telly and it was a website for a new type called Jelly Telly and it was a website

for a new type of kids programming that was Christian education for kids, like a Christian Sesame Street with puppets and some live action and he said he wanted to give us, he thought we could work together and we developed some characters. He said he wanted us to sing songs about the books of the Bible.

He said that between him as one of his characters and then us, they wanted to essentially sing a song about every book of the Bible. And they were gonna start from the beginning. And he wanted to give us Genesis and then I think take every other book. And this was gonna go into this What's in the Bible series. DVD series that will be sold in Christian bookstores

and also a website called Jelly Telly. And this is why you may, and many of you have found them because they are on YouTube, you may find these guys, the fabulous Bentley brothers, which is obviously me and Link in wigs sitting on a stage looking like we're out of the 50s, singing these songs about, these funny songs about the Bible.

It was a part of that. And doing that, again, we got approval to do that because it's like, oh yeah, why shouldn't we let Rhett and Link do this? This is a great opportunity. It's still within the, it's still a ministry. But we wrote the songs, we produced them under his supervision, we flew up to somewhere

around Wheaton, Illinois and then we recorded in his studio, met him, it was kind of a thrill, he was super nice, he had some mentorship influence on us. We came back, we started to think, what if we worked with Phil on this thing? And we wrote up a proposal. Hey, the proposal worked before, we wrote up a long proposal, a business plan

for how we could be full-time employees and maybe partners, I don't know, working with Phil Vischer on his new endeavor. Well, and to give some context to that, it was like what led- We were just trying to make- Well, again, what started as this, again, I think that we always were most passionate,

just to be completely honest, we were most passionate about the performance and the product and the audience and the growing it. We believed in the mission of Campus Crusade. And I think, yeah. But it was really easy. Those video podcasts. It was really easy to take anything that we were doing and tie it back to the mission.

But what we were really experiencing was, like we were growing as artists and we were experiencing the satisfaction that is creating and creating for an audience and when it seemed like that could become something that we could just get paid to do, it started to make sense to be like, why don't we just do this as our job?

If we can do exactly what we wanna do, that's. And that's the whole thing about, we could have never, I don't think that we could have ever succeeded in the traditional comedy space. I just don't. There's no, no, no way. We needed to do it. We never even thought about it.

No, we needed to. We were too smart to know that we could try to go up on an open mic night at Charlie Goodnight's in Raleigh, World Renowned Comedy Club, and try to get up there and win that crowd over. We just didn't believe that we had it but we, well, we never talked about that. Right. But we were trying

to make something work. Phil Vischer's response to our proposal was, I have no opportunity like the one you're describing. Can't work. But we can still work on like a piecemeal type thing and you guys can still be on staff. But around the same time we started getting emails from people wanting to use the videos

that we were putting online. Different shows like maybe a show in, you know, there's that show in England on Channel whatever it was that people used to talk about. Did yeah, people wanted, our videos started working and breaking out. We gave permission for our Fear Frog song to be used in a new clip show that was gonna be on the CW, you know?

That is the show that became Online Nation that after a series of other events, we actually auditioned and got the job to host that television show. Am I missing anything before we get to that? I don't think so. I mean, I'm sure we're missing some stuff, but I mean, the basic idea is that. I was gonna say the unicorn wrap is one of those things

that we made at Christmas conference. If you'll see that, it makes a lot more sense if you know that this is just a video to introduce two MCs to come on stage. If you wanna see MCs, then come see these MCs. But it was like, well maybe MC is just what you call a rapper, so then we call it the unicorn rap and it got a lot of views on YouTube.

But it was like, the Fear Frog song got the attention of the Online Nation producers, at the same time, I just get a kick out of it so I'm gonna go through it really quickly. We made, because we had to make a video every week for our podcast, which the Fear Frog song came from, there was also an explosion at a chemical plant near my house and that people were protesting it. We had to make a video that week so we made a video

called Apex Chemical Explosion where we made fools of ourselves at a protest. It was funny. Oprah was somehow involved indirectly. We took that video, we entered it in a radio contest in Raleigh where the winner, which was us, got two first class plane tickets to see the Grammys. And they wanted us to make a video.

Was it first class? I think it was just class. Yeah. It was coach, man. I thought the seats laid back. I hadn't been on a lot of planes at that point. I don't remember. We won the contest with our Apex chemical explosion.

They sent us to the Grammys and said, make a video, we'll put it on our radio station website because you know, that'll get a lot of views. They didn't give us credentials to get on the red carpet, but that's what we wanted to do. We made sneaking on the Grammy red carpet video, which you can still watch on YouTube. When they flew us to LA to make that video,

the next morning, we dropped off the paperwork with the Online Nation producers and met them in person and told them what we did at the Grammys. When we got back to North Carolina, we sent them that video. I think that I was told by them that that's the video that made them think that we could be hosts of the show. So they contacted us. Then we got the audition and then we got the job.

Well, they said, can you just audition in a video? Like here's some clips that would be on the show and can you just say some things to introduce the clips? We sent that tape in and the next thing you know, they said, we've selected you to host the pilot. We got permission from Campus Crusade to fly out and film the pilot. And if it got picked up,

we would make a decision at that point. And then they decided to pick the show up. And I remember finding out that the show, a network show, 2007, we're still on staff, well, I can't remember, maybe it was 2006, we're still on staff with Campus Crusade and we had kind of, the pump had been primed for us to be looking for opportunities to do entertainment full time.

That was, we were on that page. We'd already made the proposal to Phil Vischer. And then we had both already decided if this show gets picked up, this doesn't mean we're moving to California, but what it does mean is that hey, we made it, we're in the entertainment biz, man. Yeah.

And we got the word that the show had been picked up. In fact, they told us we didn't have to move. They would fly us out like every other weekend, every other week. To shoot eight episodes. Or one week out of the month to shoot a big group at a time. And you know the story there, we shot eight episodes,

only four got aired. But the decision to leave staff in order to do that was, that's the answer, kind of the answer to the question that people always ask is how did you decide to quit your jobs in order to become entertainers? Well, that's when we quit our job. We quit being on staff, we didn't quit being engineers

in order to become hosts. This was literally three years, almost four years after we had quit, we had stopped being, well, I got fired and quit on the same day, let's say that. But four years after being engineers, that's when we finally had a job in the entertainment industry.

And it wasn't to be YouTubers, it was to be television hosts. But, and also be YouTubers because that, in our minds, that legitimized us and it gave us the, we would still be making YouTube videos. But. That was the plan. Well. Because we took the videos.

I remember. Like Ghost Ride the Farm was, we would make videos for our online nation and then we would post them on our YouTube channel. Of course we put them on the YouTube channel because it was a show about YouTube. But what I'm saying is I remember thinking, and again, I feel like the producers of that show

were also a part of this. I mean, I remember one of them saying, yes, pretty soon you're gonna be pushing that stroller down the street in Malibu. Like selling the Hollywood dream to us. Dave Hurwitz. Yeah, yeah. Who was also, before that, he was the producer of Fear Factor.

Yeah. I'm sure Joe Rogan knew him well. And so I was like, yeah, I'm gonna be in Malibu. Little did I know that like nobody lives in Malibu except like Sandra Bullock or something. But I was bought into the idea that this is it, man. We made it, we've transitioned, we're gonna be entertainers,

and this is way bigger than YouTube. Because at the time, again, it was 2006. We weren't making any money on YouTube. You couldn't make money on YouTube. We were making tens of dollars on a website called Revver. That was the only place that was doing any sort of Rev share, hence the name Revver.

But it was a much easier decision because we were looking for ways to do squarely what we were passionate about and not have to work it around being in a Christian ministry. It's not that we didn't believe in the Christian ministry anymore at this point. It was just that we were so passionate

about what we wanted to do, it wasn't an alignment and we started to see the hints and indications of it being disingenuous on that front from a practical standpoint. I'll get into this next week when I kinda tell my story. But I will say in that year, 2006, 2007, my perspective on my faith had begun to change. But it was not, I still was aligned with the mission, I was still an evangelical Christian.

That was not in question but my perspective on it had changed and sort of the stage had been set for what would kind of unfold over the next 15 years. Okay. But I'll get into that. But for now, I would just like to say that it was an easier decision for us to make even though it was the second biggest

decision that we made to leave staff and to inform all of our supporters that, hey, we're doing this now, you no longer need to support us. And of course, with the support of our wives, we made that decision. And to conclude this conversation, just to kind of look back, I just have a couple of observations.

Well, just to finish the story really quick before you go back, to connect it to what we've said before. The show got canceled after four episodes. We did get paid to do those four episodes and we made more money probably in those four episodes than we had made in a year working for Campus Crusade. I don't remember the exact numbers

but it was pretty close to the same. So we had a buffer because we were living off a very little amount of money. But as soon as that money, as soon as they told us the show was canceled, we had nothing. We had no job and we had no prospects. But we made a video about it, which you can still watch.

I made a video about it getting canceled. This was before YouTube partner program. You couldn't make any money off YouTube videos. And that was, this is where the story picks up and we've told before, that's when we started doing the thing where we made cold calls to businesses to get them to sponsor our videos. And that was the beginning of our quote unquote

YouTube career but let me say, it's a very lean times for a couple of years, on and off for several years but those first couple of years very lean in terms of not making a lot of money off these videos and then splitting it between our two families. But like I said, we were very, very accustomed to living off of very little money.

And so it wasn't that big of a sacrifice, but there was a couple of times there where I was convinced that we were gonna have to stop and go back and ask some of those same people for money. Yeah. You know, and thankfully, eventually some things fell into place and we moved past that stage.

I think there's, when I look back on it, there's two ways that I like to think about it. And one is like, how did this entire journey, these like lost years impact like our style, our brand of comedy? these like lost years impact like our style, our brand of comedy. And then the other thing is just from a logistic and historic standpoint, it's just even having the opportunity

where everything was so pivotal. You know, I'm always so fascinated in how everybody, the vast majority of people who are, so I'll start with that. The vast majority of people who were making it on, making careers out of YouTube were just, kids who were just doing YouTube for fun and then as they got popular, they started to realize that there was money there

and then they got people, they figured out a way to like make it a career and people came on to help them from a business standpoint. But for us, we were grown ass adults with children when YouTube started. Our first video, like Pimp My Stroller had both of our kids in it. It was about a stroller, for God's sake.

I mean, if it wasn't for everything that we've gone, we've stepped you through over the last episode and this one, we would just be some old guys who had no clue, who were just engineers. You know, it's like we had to bide our time for YouTube to exist so that then our videos that we just had could go on it. The Fine Brothers are a good example of someone

who they're like their age, kinda, I think. You know, they, when we interviewed them in this podcast, it's reminiscent of their story that they were doing a bunch of videos that were just living in weird places that then they just plopped on YouTube. They were somehow biding their time and creating for something that they knew not yet what it was.

And Campus Crusade and being on staff and everything we did there and everything that we stepped through gave us the time so that we could be a part of this movement even though we were like a generation too old for it. And then because we were a generation too old for it, in the same way that when we talked to Harley of Epic Meal Time, he was a teacher.

He had a level of maturity and drive and a different older perspective, I guess. So most of those people would that- To make it happen. Make a business out of it. Make a business out of it. Because we incorporated, well as an LLC, I think the first in 2007, it was that year, 2007,

we started, what do we call it? We call it Rhett. Rhett and Link Creations. Rhett and Link Creations LLC. It almost feels like we knew there was something, we didn't know what it was. It was very reminiscent of when we wrote, our blood oath, we promised to do something that we couldn't articulate what it was.

We were just, we had to find a way to get any audience we were gonna try to engage with and we were gonna try to meet them, not knowing what will come of it. And I would say that there was at least a slight sense of desperation in a lot of the things that we were doing which I think really led to a lot of the things that we did, especially it becoming a business.

It had to work and therefore we made it work. But to answer your question about the tone of our comedy, which is something that people have speculated about for years, and it's one of the reasons that we, if you look at a lot of our early videos, it's like, are they Mormon or Christian or what are they? You now kind of understand why so much of our comedy, especially in the early days was so,

it was clean as a whistle. Yeah. Except for the, you know, like those videos that we made in college where we were naked, we would push the envelope within that circle of, you know, the Christian circle. But the reality is is that all these videos were made to be shown and experienced

within the context of Christian events, those first few years of videos. And therefore, there's a whole lot of lines that we couldn't cross. There's a whole lot of places that comedy goes that we couldn't go. Now, I do wanna clear. It was also who we were, by and large.

I mean, we did curse. I mean, it's not like we didn't curse, but we were never gonna put that in a video. Well, I was gonna say not exactly that. Okay. Because I was gonna say that like our personal comedy, the way that we would interact with each other, the jokes that we would tell to each other

when the camera wasn't rolling, always been pretty off color. There's been cursing. It wasn't like, now you hear and see some of that stuff in our comedy now, I see it less as we've changed. We have changed, everybody changes, but I think a lot of it is just, we kind of let our guard down because it's like

the environment that we're creating in is not what it was. But because we initially attracted an audience that was like, oh, this is clean comedy. And clean comedy aficionados gathered around. And then that was where we got pushback every time we pushed another limit, and we crossed another line, slowly, usually on Facebook,

everybody would complain and some people would be like, that's the last video I'm ever watching. That's the last video I'm ever letting my kids watch. But it helps you understand the context of why we started that way. I think it's mostly because the audience we were creating for in the context of where these videos would be shown. That's true.

Then there's also another aspect that's like, sometimes I'll watch our videos old and new and I'm like, if I divorce myself from that I'm watching myself, it's like, man, we're weird. It's like, what we do is, I think having developed in this Christian bubble and then in this like other path that is completely untraditional has led to a certain type of we develop certain comedic instincts,

maybe because we couldn't go to other things. I'll just give it as an example. Like if we can't go to blue comedy, then we tried to push in other ways. Or I don't know, I don't like to pick apart what we do, but I wanna acknowledge that it's weird and that it feels weird that our instincts, I rewatched the first episode of the Mythical Show

and I was like, our instincts in the way that we did this, the way that we talked at the top of that episode about what it was and it was a strange combination of like being informed by what was starting to bubble up on this thing called the internet, but also all of our experiences and like, we were just, when it came to live comedy, we were just as informed by like the speakers

who were the funniest at the start of their Christian talks as we were with any standup comedian. And I don't even know how it all shaped who we are, but I do know that it made us a weird brand of comedy because we grew in this alternate, kind of like an alternate society, like a bubble. If you can't be offensive, you can at least be confusing. But no, and to wrap things up,

I think that hopefully what we've demonstrated in telling this story, just like Link was saying, it's like so much of the way that we are and the way that our work is, the stuff that we create is characterized by this very atypical journey that started with sort of the first audience that we ever had officially when we started our band

until we decided to start making YouTube videos. And you might also appreciate why we've never answered the question in an interview with, well, we quit college, we raised support to do a ministry that was like training students and then we tried a couple other things and then like, you know, we don't tell that story because you can't just tell that story in a sentence.

It's easier to just say, yeah, we got engineering degrees, did that for a while and then we became YouTubers. But hopefully. And also, as maybe there's a lot of questions that are popping up because of our association with, and being in full-time Christian ministry, that like, again, use hashtag Ear Biscuits, let us know. I think it's, whatever your take on those things are,

you might start to say, what is Rhett and Link's intersection with my take on evangelical Christianity? I think over the next two weeks when we share our personal journeys, we'll answer a lot of those questions but log that stuff, hashtag your biscuits, let us know, communicate amongst yourselves and we'll get to it. Yeah, and you know, I would also ask you that, I think that this series, we're calling it,

of us talking about this stuff, both telling the story, the backstory of the last years that we've done in the past too, but then also telling our personal stories. I know that there's a certain cross section of the audience out there that is probably not interested in this and it's like, this isn't my thing,

I don't relate so I'm gonna tune out. But I know that there's a lot of people who are like, this kinda is my thing, this is my story, or there's a lot of points where I can relate. Maybe you know someone who can relate to this who has a similar background. We just encourage you to share it with them. I think that this could also be the kind of thing,

there are probably a certain number of people, not a small number, who have kind of over the years as they have sensed sort of a change take place in us and they kind of see that through the way we talk or they see that in our work, have had just speculated about what's going on with us. Maybe they've tuned out, maybe they've said, I'm not gonna be a part of this new Rhett and Link,

whatever it is. This might be something that you wanna share with them as well so they could kind of at least just understand some of the context. So thanks for doing that. Yeah, thanks for doing that. Should I not give a rec? I'm out of principle, I'm gonna give my rec.

You gotta give a rec, man. Rec baby, rec. Not related to anything. I just watched it and it was a great movie. I recommend watching Honey Boy. Shia LaBeouf plays his own father. And it's the the it almost feels like a documentary of his relationship,

tumultuous relationship with his father as a child actor. And it was tough to watch. I mean, so if you've got issues with your parents or something like that, maybe it's not for you, but it was extremely well acted and it's very compelling, heartbreaking in a lot of ways. But I do recommend it, honey boy. Honey boy.

Hashtag Ear Biscuits. Next week, we'll get into the personal, spiritual stuff. It's gonna get real real.