Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - Behind The Horrific World Of Hazel | Ear Biscuits Ep.307

Episode Date: October 18, 2021

Horror, uncertainty, sheer creative curiosity. Listen to R&L unfold their experience shooting the new Hazel Tiktok on this episode of Ear Biscuits! To learn more about listener data and our privacy practices visit: https://www.audacyinc.com/privacy-policy Learn more about your ad choices. Visit https://podcastchoices.com/adchoices

This, this, this, this is mythical. Shop Best Buy's ultimate smartphone sale today. Get a Best Buy gift card of up to $200 on select phone activations with major carriers. Visit your nearest Best Buy store today. Terms and conditions apply. Welcome to Ear Biscuits, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I'm Rhett. And I'm Link.

This week at the brown table of dim lighting, we're taking you on a journey that we've been on for many months that's culminated in this, I was gonna say huge TikTok project, but basically in our minds, we've put a lot of energy into this thing that's just come out. Don't oversell it, we don't know how it went.

This past Friday, but yeah, as of the recording of this, we haven't experienced what you have now experienced, which is watching our, we've been calling it Hazel. That's what we call the project. Our Hazel TikTok project. Our multi-part one night scripted horror comedy series. Dealing with these new mediums, don't know exactly how to describe it.

But what we will say, if you are listening right now, and you did not already watch what we're talking about, because you're like, you didn't know about it, or you're like, I don't do the TikTok thing, it will be more of an enjoyable experience for you if you drop what you're doing and take the time to watch it, even if you're not a TikTok person. Now, at some point, we are gonna post it on, depending on when you're doing and take the time to watch it. Even if you're not a TikTok person. Now, at some point we are gonna post it on,

depending on when you're listening to this, it will be on the Rhett and Link YouTube channel at some point just in its full form, which will make it easier if you don't wanna use the TikTok app. But anyway, we just suggest that you go over and watch it. I don't know, it's a little- We're gonna be talking about it,

so you need to have a point of reference. it's a little- We're gonna be talking about it, so you need to have a point of reference. It's a little over like 20 minutes of your time that you would have to devote to the full experience. And it would just be helpful to then come back and be able to hear the discussion about it. I use the term ambitious in the creative realm. It's something that we can get into all the reasons

why we decided to do it. There's a number of itches that we wanted to scratch and boy, I really wanna know what people think. We can talk about the anticipation. That's another part of this has been so fun. But another thing we wanna talk about kind of a larger conversation than just the Hazel Project is our relationship with TikTok.

And having come up on YouTube, having 15 years of figuring out how to take what we wanna do and translate it into the particular platforms where we can get traction and where there's audience, and then the advent of TikTok and figuring out, well, what does mythical on TikTok mean? What are the opportunities there?

We've been through a lot of challenges as we tried to figure that out. So I think that in and of itself can be a fun conversation. So if you're an avid TikToker or watcher of TikTok, or if you have nothing to do with it, I think there's gonna be touch points for all of us to figure out how we interface with that platform. Because you may find yourself, you might be,

I think this is our tendency, maybe just because of our age, it's just like when a new social media platform comes along, you're just like, uh, really? Like, this is the thing now? Like, am I gonna have to get an account? And then at some point, based on your personality, your disposition, and the way that you divide your time,

there's a point, there's a threshold for most people in which they either decide to swear it off and never join, or they finally give in and join. And I think that as middle-aged creators, there's an interesting, and with kids who enjoy this medium, sort of an interesting conversation around how do you make a decision to actually go for it? Why do you do it?

What's your approach? What are you learning? What are you trying to accomplish? Right. But let's start with just the idea for Hazel and kind of what was behind it? What set the stage in your recollection? Because it was many months ago.

Yeah, well- It wasn't first, let's do something scary, let's do something for Halloween. There was a conversation that was going on in the background, which is, as we've established, and we actually did a whole episode about it earlier this year, where we talked about all the other things that we have worked on that you've never seen,

because it's, they're ideas that are developed for television or movies, that it's a whole different process outside of the digital media that we kind of own and control, which is the thing that you're watching right now, which we don't have to ask permission to make this podcast. No one has to approve it. Yeah, those things where you're writing scripts

and trying to get traditional stuff out the ground, it's a long time coming and then it may never show up. No one may ever see it. And that's very frustrating for us. Even right now, like even, just so you know, right now we're in the midst of working on a couple of very exciting projects. I'll just go ahead and say,

I mean, we've got multiple TV shows that we've tried to get off the ground and continue to try to get off the ground, but there's another pilot that we have completed, and now there's a feature script, a whole movie that we are beginning to write. And so these are things that we are passionate about and it's a fun process and we throw ourselves creatively

at them and hopefully one or multiple of them will be able to be made. And I think when you look at the sort of the pie chart of our time, when you wonder like, what do Rhett and Link do? Like, what do they do besides the things that I see them do? There's a big piece of the pie that's like, doesn't result in things that you see. So because that's, it's frustrating, right?

It's frustrating to kind of pour yourself into something. So then, so the conversation sort of shifted to a place where it's like, okay, yes, we've got all this stuff we're trying to do that may never get seen. We've got all this stuff that we already do that does get seen on a regular basis. But is there an in-between?

Can we put one more thing on our plate, which is the in-between, which is stuff that has a high sort of creative, experimental quotient, trying something new that is more narrative, maybe in its description. Is there another, is there a place for us to do that? Because we're developing this narrative content. Yeah.

How do we do some of that that people can actually see? And also do it in a very self-contained, frankly cheap way that doesn't take a lot of our time and doesn't take a lot of money. So, and also then is structured so that it makes us part of a different conversation. You know, if you're an avid listener of Ear Biscuits, if you're a dedicated viewer of Good Mythical Morning,

if you're a fan of Mythical Kitchen, you can get involved in those worlds and just kind of stay there. We're grappling with the challenge of continuing to find ways to reach out and introduce more people to the world of Mythical and the things that we're doing. People have an idea of what,

and an awareness of Good Mythical Morning, and they may dip in and out of it. But we also wanna do things that continue to remind people, hey, we've still got ideas and we wanna make things that express ourselves and also make us part of new conversations and introduce us to new mythical beasts. And I think above all, for both of us, it's, there's a creative passion to,

that we don't want to, because again, You don't want to sit on your hands. You could just be like, okay. You don't want to sit on your laurel, rest on your laurel. Yes, we're the guys who eat weird things on the internet and do things and you kind of see us

in the context of our friendship. Maybe that could be enough for a lot of people. You know, for us, I don't think it is because it's like, we got things that we want to create. We got worlds that we want to bring out. of our friendship, maybe that could be enough for a lot of people. For us, I don't think it is because it's like, we got things that we wanna create. We got worlds that we wanna bring out. So then the discussion started like, what does that look like?

Because we've had a number of people, including like TV executives who say things like, if you have an idea for something, why don't you just make it and put it on YouTube, right? And I think there's a number of reasons why we've been hesitant to do that when it comes to narrative stuff, besides just like an occasional sketch or whatever,

which we're not really doing that much on YouTube anymore. The reason being- But we are doing it on TikTok and we'll talk about that later. The reason being is that with few exceptions, people are not really interacting with narrative content on YouTube in a meaningful way, right? And you can be like, well, you guys could change that,

but it's like, that's a tough hill to climb. What we were seeing is that, you know what? Kind of in an early sort of YouTube way, this early stage of TikTok, one of the things that's happening is sketch comedy, just to use a broad term, has sort of found a resurgence in this place. Like scripted comedy has found a home on TikTok

and all of a sudden people are, our kids are engaging with it in a way that they are not engaging with YouTube. In a way that's much more broad than if you were to apply that same statement of sketch comedy to Vine back in the day. I never observed, maybe I missed it because we never got on the Vine bandwagon.

I never observed a type of sketch that I wanted to do. It was very short and very tonally specific. And there's a broad range of content. I mean, there's all niches now seem to exist on TikTok. I mean, spiritual deconstruction TikTok as an example. And Christian TikTok. Oh yeah, I mean, you name it TikTok as an example. And Christian TikTok. Oh yeah, I mean, you name it, it's all happening there. And so there's like, it can melt into the world of podcast

and it can melt into the world of sketch comedy. It can melt into the, of course, the world of dance. Well, and I was doing some- Avant-garde shit, all types of stuff. I don't remember, so I was kind of thinking, I was sitting there trying to figure out like, okay, is there a way in for us that kind of makes it, I mean, honestly, it was from a strategy standpoint

in terms of, yeah, we could do something that was, is just like, just straight up comedy, like classic Rhett and Link sketch in a narrative fashion. As you see, and we'll talk about later, we are doing classic Rhett and Link sketch in a narrative fashion, as you see, and we'll talk about later, we are doing classic Rhett and Link sketch sort of individually on TikTok and learning a lot over there. But like, we wanna do something that's more eventized

and get people to kind of drawn in. I think kind of separately from that, I just happen to, because I tend, I'm personally interested in horror, right? I'm a horror fan and I kind of keep up with what's happening in that world. But typically it's just movies. I watched horror movies and then I watched

some horror TV shows, but mostly horror movies. And I saw this article about horror TikTok, but it was also like horror TikTok, horror Instagram. And what I saw is that, okay, first of all, there's also like, there's that, I don't know if you remember a couple of years ago, there was maybe just a year ago, there was a Twitter thread where it was a writer

who has said that they were going to a cabin in the woods to write a movie. And they were like, oh, there's something making noise outside. And it was a Twitter thread. Turns out that the whole thing from the beginning was designed to be, it was designed to become a movie or designed to be a story.

It was all made up to begin with. And it was narrative. It was a narrative. And I don't know if that one- But they kinda tricked you. I don't know if that one ended up becoming something, but there's been multiple Twitter threads, not just horror Twitter threads, but Instagram things,

and now TikTok stuff that is either, it's intended to live there first and then become something bigger. But then on TikTok, what I was seeing is that a lot of people were doing, there's like this one kid who did, I use kid like a teenager, did a thing last year where they were acting like something was going on

in their neighborhood, like their neighborhood was abandoned or there was something, and it was like, oh, once a day, he would kind of do like an update. And it was like kind of creepy, but it was like a once a day thing for a while. And you're like, is this real? Is this not real? Kind of walking that line.

But the thing that no one had done is something that's more like a series. Like some people have done like, here's one really creepy video and this is what I do on my channel. But it was like, oh, is there like a self-contained multi-part series that happens over the course of a shorter time span that actually feels like it's happening in the platform?

Like it feels like, oh, this is not taking something that was made for something else and putting it on TikTok, but it's if someone were to do a horror, something were to happen to somebody that was a horrific on TikTok and they were to post it, what would that look like? And that's what kind of opened up the conversation about the specifics of Hazel.

You just said, what if something were to happen like a horrific, like you just made horrific a noun. Like a horrific thing. That's what, no, I think that's what this is. It's a horrific. This is a horrific. It's a terrific horror TikTok. Well, it's a horrific talk. Horrific talk. Oh, that's what we're- It's a horrific. It's a terrific horror TikTok. Well, it's a horrific talk.

Oh, that's what we're- It's a horrific talk. That we're contributing to that genre. That's the genre that we've helped pioneer. Horrific talk. Horrific talk. Because it's fiction, TikTok, horror, and fantastic. No. No, I'm just putting together horrific and TikTok.

Horrific talk, yeah, yeah, that's good. That works. Well, let's coin it. We gotta get better at saying it. I've got it, horrific talk. Horrific talk. It's just horrific and then talk. Horrific and then talk.

Horrific talk. Horrific talk, you can say it that way. Horrific TikTok. Horrific talk. Horrific talk. You can say it that way. Horrific talk. Horrific talk. Horrific talk. Horrific talk. Horrific talk. We'll do that on our own. Horrific talk.

Okay, I think I have it. And so, yeah, we're like, okay, if we do this, we can have fun with our audience. We can do something to where we're gonna trick them, we're gonna set up this conceit of it being, we're gonna write, record and produce a song. This is something that like, I remember back when live streaming first started

and Ustream was the platform that we picked and we started doing the Rhett and Link cast live every Thursday night. Another thing that we would do, cause we just wanted to experiment with the new tool was we would do office hours where on, I think it was on Friday afternoons, we would just broadcast and whatever we were working on,

we would explain to whoever wanted to peep into it. And then sometimes we would write songs and we would get input from people in the chat room and it would impact what we're writing on, this is 2008. So that kind of fed into this idea of we're gonna set the groundwork of it being something that's interactive and unscripted and we're just pulling an all-nighter.

Yeah. That will be fun to experiment with and then it will go into this place and unscripted and we're just pulling an all nighter. That will be fun to experiment with and then it will go into this place where we're taking people by surprise and things are getting scary and it's a scripted horrific TikTok. It's a horrific talk. A horrific, horrific talk.

Horrific talk. Yeah. And we're like- You'll get it. And I think people will talk about this. Well, hopefully people will talk about it. We're gonna get into talking about sort of the process, but that's the really interesting thing about recording this podcast right now.

We're recording it before it gets released. There's been so much conversation around, I mean, are we doing something, is this stupid? Like, are we completely missing the point? Is this gonna flop? I think it's 11 parts. I can't remember exactly what we massaged. It was 13 at one point and it was 12.

I think it's now 11. I think we, doing that many videos over the course of a couple of hours on TikTok, like, are we like just directly violating some principle of the platform, shooting ourselves in the foot? Are people gonna be like, what are these guys thinking? I don't know where to start. Like, is it technically going to work?

It could be a total disaster talk. Yeah, this could be- Disaster talk. This could be, I'm not gonna say it's gonna be a mistake. I mean, what do we really have to lose? But like, while we're talking about this, or while you're listening to this, it could be that like, yeah, it didn't work and no one cared, which we're prepared for.

Are we? Or it could be- I'm not prepared for it emotionally. No, of course not. It was like, oh, I get what you guys were going for and I appreciate it and like it and I want more stuff like this or it will lead to something else in this world or beyond. Who knows?

We're talking about it in complete ignorance at this point. We've done enough things to know that once you put something out there, sometimes it immediately becomes clear that there's one thing that seems blatantly obvious now that we didn't think of. Yeah. And I do think we've thought enough about it

to know that this could just not work on TikTok. Logistically, experientially, like from a user standpoint. And my main concern, I'll just speak out loud at this point, is that as you'll see when you watch it, as you have already seen because you stopped and you went and watched it, and hopefully we've made it easy for you to,

I think we've put the- It's too late to even say that. We've already done it, right? We've put the series- Why are you saying you can't say this? You can click on the, so you can watch it all in order. That's important. We've labeled the parts anyway. See, you're still actually trying to plan it.

It's done. And we also, I have a lot of trauma over this whole like multi-part thing and getting people to watch things in order with the whole GMM 22 thing, because of the complete flop, so anyway. Anyway, if you start at part one, part one in and of itself is not this giant clickable,

optimized TikTok, right? Yeah. Like we're putting all this stuff on TikTok. Some stuff works, some doesn't. It's designed to be unassuming. So there's not this huge funnel. It's designed so that once shit gets weird and you know, crows start dive bombing the glass door

and then you find yourself passing through a door in our creative house into the woods in a very realistic transition, like a totally hidden transition that we can talk about. When it gets real, then people start to care, and then we're counting on them figuring out how to go back to the beginning and figure out, whoa, what have I missed? How did this start happening?

Yeah. Why is this backwards walking, backwards singing, creepy woman abducting Link and taking him into a forest? So the one thing, if this didn't work, and I'm gonna pin it on something, one of the things I could pin it on would be, oh, you know what, the first part should have had the trappings of a viral TikTok,

which is actually something that when we wrote this months ago, we actually did not know TikTok nearly as well as we do now, having thrown so much stuff up there and learned all these lessons. Right. So I'm like, oh man, so we started with the, we're sitting down to write a song, write it with us.

That's not something that people are gonna be like, hey, tune into Rhett and Link's channel, they're writing a song with us. Yeah, that's just, I mean- The entry point. For Mythical Beasts, they'll be a song with us. Yeah, that's just, I mean. The entry point. For Mythical Beasts, they'll be excited. Yeah. But it's not gonna be something

that I think will get the attention of anybody else. But what could that have been? Because the other thing we wanted to do is we wanted to make sure that it, we needed to bring you into a real place. So it didn't need to start as a sketch. It was important that it started as a, oh, Rhett and Link are actually doing this.

The Rhett and Link that I know are doing something in real life that is believable. So when we began to introduce the unbelievable elements, we've sort of brought you along and we've got you in this place where you can be emotionally manipulated for entertainment purposes. And this is one of the things

that I immediately got super excited about that I think fueled our energy through the entire project. So let's get into that. Wherever you're going, you better believe American Express will be right there with you. Heading for adventure? We'll help you breeze through security.

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that there's a point in every, I get goosebumps now thinking about it. You get this, I always look for the spark at the genesis of a creative idea. A lot of times you're bringing something to the table, you're a take, make something out of nothing. And I'm more of take that something and shape it into even more of a thing

that's really gonna work. So I find that my interactions a lot of times are learning how to not filter your pitches, but champion the things that I think are working, like where we get this synergy. And for this one, it really was the, you know, we were on the same page about what we wanted to accomplish,

but when we started talking about the experience that we could give to our audience and it be this special surprise that we could, you know, we pre-taped it, we've made it seem like we're doing it basically live, filming a little something, posting it, and making it happen in real time. Of course, you know, we filmed it frigging months in advance.

So we have the luxury and the privilege of having a front row seat to what happens on TikTok. Seeing the comments come in, seeing over the course of that second and third post, fourth post, people starting to realize, hold on, this is not what I thought it was. We're not gonna be writing a song. This is crazy.

This is scripted. This is a horror comedy thing. And I just have been very excited about observing that experience and observing it kind of as an experiment. In real time. How are people gonna respond? How are Mythical Beasts gonna band together

and be commenting on the Mythical Society Discord, on Twitter, obviously on TikTok, but forming these ad hoc viewing parties where you're waiting for the next post because it's a special experience for people who are watching in real time and we had this challenge of promoting it and saying this is something we're excited about,

it should be fun but also downplaying it as something that's just an interactive song writer. Having to say, you're gonna write a song with us. And so it's like, if that didn't appeal to you, you may be out. I'm not gonna get a TikTok account for that if I don't already have one. But there's this real time experience

with the people that wanna be there and are able to be there as it's unfolding. And they're making sense of it was very exciting to me. And then there's this TikTok experiment of getting TikTok viewers who are not first Mythical Beasts coming into it and seeing if we're right, that they'll figure it out and they'll be into it, even if they don't care about us.

And then- Who knows, man. Putting it somewhere else and seeing if it can and seeing if people will enjoy it off platform and on the Rhett and Link YouTube channel. I'll say again, one of the theories from the marketing side of this thing, and did this work, I don't know, is that, okay, it's one thing to just make another horror movie, right?

When you make another horror movie, you are competing with everyone who's ever made horror movies and everyone who is currently making horror movies, right? When you make another horror movie, you are competing with everyone who's ever made horror movies and everyone who is currently making horror movies and releasing horror movies. You're subject to critical response, et cetera, marketing budget. Now, when you do something-

And the expectations that everyone approaches any horror movie with. But when you do something on a platform like TikTok, I mean, I always talk about how I feel like the only reason that we're actual successful, in quotes, comedians, you define that how you will, we make a living doing it. We make a living.

Is because we came up through the Christian comedy world. I'm just gonna be frank about it. Like if you had a- We were funny in settings where people didn't require or expect or demand you to be hilarious. We kind of gamed- The bar was lower. We gamed the system a little bit by developing in this bubble

and a place where we weren't competing against any other comedians. We were competing against like maybe a funny worship leader, which is an easy target. And because we know that that's one of the reasons, maybe the root reason why we have a chip on our shoulder. There's other reasons now and how people view YouTubers and creators versus traditional celebrities,

but we don't have to get in that. And so there is this belief that if you do something like this on a platform like TikTok at a time in the evolution of the platform like right now, there's a possibility that just having made the decision to do something that is this ambitious and involved in this genre that people care about, maybe, okay, did we make, did we make Get Out?

Hell no, we did something that we shot in two nights, right? We didn't make, we wouldn't be capable, I'm not saying we would, you could give us all the money in the world, I'm not saying we're gonna make a Jordan Peele movie, but we don't have to. We need to make something that people are like, that's cool.

I was scared when I needed to be scared, I laughed when you guys wanted me to laugh and you did something in a place that I wasn't expecting it and so now I'm actually talking about it because you made the decision to put it here. There's a secret hope that that will be part of the strategy. Yeah. Now the specifics of the idea, I mean,

we were having a conversation at some point where it was like, hey, what if it had something to do with an album, you know? Oh, then we could make it where we're starting the night singing and then, the specifics, it's not like this is some groundbreaking plot, right? This is a, if you wanna be honest about it, the specifics of the way that this plot sort of unfolds

is like, yes, it's an intact, interesting way of getting your antagonist, your monster into your house. This is a monster in the house movie to use that genre. We needed a way to do it. Like the ring where the girl climbs out through the television when you play a certain, whatever it was.

That was like a VHS tape. You made me watch it and I've tried to wipe it from my memory ever since. So it had that sort of like, there's a vehicle in which this person can get brought into your world. And that's where the whole Hazel thing came from. And the Hazel making of it all.

Like we talked before about how we're, and I especially since I watched a lot of horror movies, very scared of, especially like a little girl in a dress. Like the poltergeist deal, it's just something that is always kind of freaking me out because you've got this mix of what you perceive to be innocent now, there's this sinister side to it

and that's the classic horror trope. So it was like, okay, could we make this like a woman in a dress and then how do you go, what kind of music would you, oh, maybe something like Appalachian and it just began to- Something that's haunting but not, that doesn't read as horror immediately. It's like horror adjacent.

Like if you have the right album cover and you have the right song, which we tried to create, yeah, we were leveraging the fact that like, I have a record collection at the Creative House. It's true to us. We've made records in the past, so we knew that we had a, our team knew how to make a record

and like actually making a record that plays and that has high quality packaging is a great way to suck people into the story when they still don't know it's a story. So we had those elements that we felt like were working for us and we started meeting with Derek Furman who produced our Lionel covers and works very closely with my cousin Britton,

great guy that we vibe with that, you know, we started talking to him about the project and he was really excited about the experimental nature of it. And so we went in there for a recording session. Of course we knew we had to cast the, we need to have a female voice and then we needed to cast somebody to play that female. And then Jenna suggested Paige,

who she knew from what theater? Kentucky theater. From college. Right after college, yeah, Kentucky Shakespeare. Kentucky Shakespeare. Yeah, so Jenna was recommending Paige because Paige is in a band, Paige is a vocalist, and we had worked with Paige before we even had met and started working with Jenna, which is so strange.

So we brought Paige in, she recorded the part for Hazel, nailed it, and she's also an actor and can come in and play the part. So it was like a win-win and like she was already in the mythical world because what we had worked with her on before is Buddy System season one, what we had worked with her on before is Buddy System season one,

when, let's see, there's the commercial for the drain weaver. Yeah. Which is, you know, our co-ex girlfriends, who's now became the media mogul with Billy Mays type products, including all the hair that goes into your shower drain. If you put the right mold down in there, you can then after an X number of showers,

you can pull that out and it will have an article of clothing that has been magically woven from your body hair, in your head hair, all of your hair. And we needed a model for that commercial and the audition process was one of the more awkward audition processes that I've ever been a part of because it was bringing in women into our office. Where me, you, Stevie, the casting director,

and it linked probably a couple of other people. But still, when you bring a bunch of women one at a time into your office and the thing that they're doing for their audition is acting like they're showering. And they don't have any lines. That is. We did not anticipate how awkward that could get.

To watch women in our office pantomime showering. And then just kinda sit there and nod with a notepad, like, oh yeah, she touches herself in a. What? It's like, what do you do when you shower? You're like touching, you're bathing, and you're reacting to the. Say scrub yourself.

Okay, well, I mean, they were touching themselves, not in that way, but like in a shower way. Bathing themselves. Anyway, Paige did a great job at that. Paige seemed to understand. She understood the assignment. Because there was a voiceover like, have you ever thought about all the hair

that you send down the drain and never make it to close? And then you're like, yes. So there's, obviously it was very comedic, so you've gotta like respond to this voiceover artist. She was doing the I'm in an infomercial. I will say, it's been a long time, so I mean. Let's tell this story again. I don't think there's any way

that anyone's gonna be able to trace this back to this particular person because there was no record of who auditioned that day, but there was someone who did not understand the assignment in two ways. Yeah. The first way that they did not understand the assignment is that this particular woman thought

that she was auditioning for the role of Amy Brells, which had already been given to Leslie. Talking about the lead role in the entire series. To Leslie Bibb. And the way we found out was because when she came in, she started showering. She did start showering. She did.

I don't know how she put these two things together. I don't know what script she got a hold of, but then she launches into a monologue while showering, which of course no one has done because they don't have any lines. And then we realized she has memorized- Leslie's line. An Amy Brell's monologue.

And we, I mean, again, we're nice guys. We're good Southern boys. So we let her go. Through the whole thing. We were like, well, she's gonna do it. Let's just see how well she's memorized it. Maybe we recast the lead role. I don't know who spoke first to say,

ah, great job on that, that was really good. But actually, this role is just the shower girl. So can you do that all again without all the stuff you memorized? It felt so bad for her. No one else did it. I mean, I don't think it was on us. I have to also say that her wardrobe choice that day.

Well, I'll call it a catsuit. It was what you might expect if you thought like, oh, this is a shower scene in like a different genre, maybe. Yeah, like if you were gonna be nude in the shower and you wanted to show that- You didn't want your audition to be nude, but you wanted it to be like, but just so you will know what I look like

without clothes on, I'm wearing clothes that will allow you to come to those conclusions. There's a suit for that. Yeah, there is an article of clothing and she had that on. It was just very tight in every single place and it gave the, I guess it's what- We did learn a lot.

You would wear if you were gonna be naked, I don't know. And the more I think about it, it was a strategic choice, not knowing where it could go. Yeah, that's true. She didn't get the part, Paige did. Long story, Paige got the part. It's wild that like Jenna knew Paige from way back when, then we met Paige, then we met Jenna,

and then Jenna reminded us of Paige, and then Paige comes in and had a great time. Yeah. Again, it was weird because it's Paige's vocals as Hazel, but then we never see her face. It's like we're giving her this limitation. Like whenever we cast you into something, you're not gonna talk at all or you're gonna sing,

but we're never gonna see your face, but it is Paige. It is. It's the back of her head. And she did an excellent job. And if, you know- One day we might put it together, she might have lines and a face. We're not making choices about not giving her lines or giving her face time because of anything about her. It's just she happens to be involved in the projects where that happens to be the case. Your teen requested a ride,

but this time not from you. It's through their Uber teen account. It's an Uber account that allows your teen to request a ride under your supervision with live trip tracking and highly rated drivers. Add your teen to your Uber account today. One interesting thing about that and about Paige is that, of course, she was the focal point of a lot of the horror. And we knew that we had this idea about the back masking of playing the record backwards is the way that sort of the portal opens up and that plays into these sort of childhood fears and some of the stuff that we said.

I don't actually remember a guy coming to our church to talk about it, but I think there was maybe something at Campbell at one point. He came to Campbell, yeah. And he talked about back masking and of course, we believed everything that anybody said to us when we were kids, especially in a Christian context. So we were like, yeah,

I guess the devil is influencing Led Zeppelin to send messages through the records backwards. It was a seminar that I think he'd been doing for over a decade by that point. And it's like, but we were still like mesmerized by it. So, and that tends to be, and first of all, backwards singing and talking is unsettling for deep biological reasons, I guess.

And so it is a very scary thing. So we're like, how do you take this back? Deep biological reasons. I'm just saying that you're intrinsically scared of backwards talking. It's just weird and you put it in the context of this dark house with this woman singing. And then we knew, oh-

It's a threat. She's singing backwards. Let's have her walking backwards. And then I think this is a good time to talk about Ben's involvement in it. So Ben Eck, who works for us, has worked for us for a very long time. The only person that has worked here longer is Stevie,

because this is the first person that Stevie helped us hire back for the Mythical show. But Ben only worked for us like a week less than Stevie. Yeah, yeah, very, very soon after. Stevie and Ben had worked together at a previous job. So then she was like, this is the guy I'm bringing in. Yeah. And yeah, he's been, I mean, he's instrumental

on the Mythical kitchen side now. You'll hear Josh and the team talking to Ben. But when we have ideas like this, because Ben was there for all those classic sketches, music videos, he was there for Buddy System. He understands what we're trying to get across creatively and narratively, which again, we don't do a whole lot of that except writing and pitching at this point.

So the making of the narrative stuff, it was like, all right, well, let's bring Ben back into this process and get him really involved. He's gonna be essentially directing this because we're gonna be in it the whole time. And he was essential. Yeah. As the director.

And then I think the thing about Ben, because he does have a lot of filmmaking experience, is that when he took a look at the script, it was like, hey, here's my ideas for the places that we could up the, this is my idea for how we could capture this to make it even scarier. This is, you know, and so-

Were there even crows hitting the window before you got ahold of it? Yeah. There was, but there was a lot of, he had a lot of thought on how to do that and how to achieve it. Ben's biggest thing that he brings to the table that we don't typically think about is the,

until we get into it, is the, you've got this idea and you've written it, how do you capture it visually in a way that will communicate what you actually want to communicate to your audience? And especially in the horror genre, which again, I've watched a lot of horror movies and have a sense of the types of themes and visuals

and ideas that make people scared, but translating that into, and this is how, so in other words, so one of the ideas we had was we want her to always be walking backwards, but Ben was able to literally do a test shoot where he's like, the way to make this super creepy is to put her dress on backwards and to have her long stringy hair,

which is not her hair, it's a wig, in front of her face so she looks like she's facing away, but her arms are, it's a little off, and then when she moves towards you, it's even freakier because her legs are moving in a way as if she was walking normally, but she's facing backwards. Whereas if you try the thing that we were first thinking

about, which is like, let's just have her literally walk backwards, it kind of just looks like a normal person walking backwards and all of a sudden you're taken out of it. Horror is difficult to do, as is comedy. That's why there should be more Oscar categories for each of those because it is challenging art form to elicit those type of responses.

You know, it's a lot easier to make somebody cry than it is to scare the shit out of somebody or to make them pee their pants laughing, in my opinion, speaking generally, not specifically. So Ben had to translate the script in a way that would, okay, these are the moments where you've gotta get the scares and here's how we're gonna go for that. There's an added challenge of working

within the rules of TikTok and it being one phone. Yeah, literally shooting with a phone. We could have talked ourselves into each having a phone, but that's not really how we would conduct like the writing a song all night on TikTok. The thing that we said we were doing, we had to keep the conceit true, right? So we had one phone filming vertically

and then there's handoffs and there's places where you would stop filming and there's places where you'd keep filming and there's places where you'd keep filming, there's places where you'd miraculously keep filming while you were freaking out. It's like, you gotta take all these things into account to make it as real as possible. Getting into those details was so much fun.

As with Derek talking about the way that he's gonna export the songs so that we can play them in the room versus having to add them in post so that there's proximity when you're moving the phone around. So if you listen with headphones on, that's a great way to rewatch Hazel

because of the amount of sound design, because proximity and sound location is a big part of the amount of sound design, because proximity and sound location is a big part of the story. Yeah. As is things like, and you knew this when you wrote it in the second scene is that we've got to establish the layout of the house within the context of us writing a song on TikTok

so that later, the viewer understands where Hazel is coming from and where she's taking me and taking you. You have to understand spatially what's going on so that you can, to set you up to be scared so that you have expectations. When you're walking towards this door, you should be the most scared. Yeah. As an example.

There's a lot of logistics and details that go into getting a certain response from an audience. And again, that's what I can't wait to see because in between clips, hopefully people will be talking about it and making sense of what's happening and waiting for the next clip minutes or 10 minutes later. Well, and my hope is, again,

it's very difficult to be genuinely frightened by something that you wrote. Yeah. So my process is always, okay, I don't like to see the first couple of passes of the edit, right? Like you were working with Ben on that and I like to see it once it's kind of like,

cause I was like, I'm very intimately sort of like thinking about all this during the writing process. And then I kind of want to separate myself from it so I can be as much of an audience member when I watch it. But that was really hard to do. I mean, when I watched the first cut, there were moments where I began to feel the sort of frightened emotion

that I knew we were trying to go for, but it's just gonna be so much different for somebody who doesn't know what's gonna happen. Yeah. And so I'm interested in that because- That's the beauty of the conceit is that it, we've set the stage for you to be the most freaked out because it's not at all what you're expecting.

It's kind of like when I took Christy to see Get Out and like right before the movie started, she leaned over and she was like, is this movie scary or is this a drama? Like she did not. That's the perfect way to go into a movie. I was like, I don't think you should know. You should just watch it.

Yeah, you didn't want her to get scared preemptively. Interesting dynamic. You know, when we were filming this thing, like you said, we filmed over two nights. The first night we filmed in the woods and then the second night we filmed in the woods and then the second night we filmed in the creative house and we never do night shoots. Even, I think on Buddy System season one,

we did- We did a night shoot. We did one night shoot. Maybe a couple. Maybe a couple and it's difficult for us. Like I was kind of nervous to like really, like, okay. You know, the whole Red Bull and that whole scene at the beginning. We were really drinking the energy drink. I was drinking that hippo piss or hippo, whatever it was.

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 gonna guess for some of you, that thing is. Anubay!, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Anime! 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. But you get into the, you're out of there in the woods

and it's hard to shoot at night in the woods when you're like having to trudge a bunch of stuff a quarter mile down there. Of course, the team did most of the trudging, I'll be honest. It was a lot of fun to be out there in the woods at night and to take a doorframe and set that up. Like literally that doorframe was there.

We didn't computer generate anything. Most of the magic in the cuts happened in swish pans. But the biggest point of where you walk down the hallway and go through that middle doorway and when you open it, it's not the recording room like we showed earlier, but it's the forest. Ben felt and we agreed that like, we wanna take a door out there

and we wanna do this practically and we don't wanna, you know, we frame the door close enough so that it's already in the woods, but you don't know it because of the way that he's lit it. You open it up and then there's the forest floor and it's all real. Yeah. Like there was no chicanery in post to make that happen

because we built, like Paisley came out there and they built the door frame out in the woods. Quick note about that, like everybody who worked on this thing with the exception of Paige was just a team member here at Mythical that was kind of stepping into something that they don't always do. I mean Jenna was involved on the production side.

Paisley built that door, which he's always building stuff for GMM, but it was, and then of course, Ben's kind of taking time out of what he was doing on Mythical Kitchen. So I think it was fun for us all to kind of like get to do something. I mean, it's fun.

It's always fun for us to be like, hey, this is something that's different and it's not this giant thing that we're throwing ourselves into for months and completely turning our schedule upside down. It's like, hey, this is gonna be a couple of fun nights of working together as a very small group. I mean, I think we maximum had what,

like six people there at one time? I think so, yeah. Yeah, I mean just super. Mission accomplished on that front. Okay. Maybe eight people, it was fun. There was, someone was attacked by a bat. Is that right?

Who was that? It just kept flying down. It was like when Paige and I were, when you all were filming without Paige. Yeah, we left Paige and Jenna back at the, at the porta potty in the parking lot. Well, we shot this at the same location. They were attacked by a bat. we shot this at the same location.

We shot this at the same location that we shot the- Monkey Snake. Which I don't remember the name of that sketch. Did you get me anything? Did you get me anything? So it was the woods up in the Angeles National Forest. If you're into the behind the scenes stuff, Greg shot a bunch of behind the scenes

that's on the Mythical Society. So you can see that visually. But there was a Bobcat sighting. And I think we wrapped, I think I got in bed that night at- That morning. 5 a.m. Yeah.

Like in, maybe I got home a little earlier than you guys. But then the next night is when we shot in the Creative House. We shot until sunup. We shot everything else. Yeah, we shot past sunup. That was literally, yeah, we actually, the last couple of shots, we had to make sure that the windows were not letting light in because we were getting into the daylight.

Stevie also being there was very helpful. I remember one instance when we were shooting at the Creative House, the first few scenes of like setting up the farce of it being an interactive songwriting thing. Like the first few scenes where we're like supposed to be totally ourselves and we don't want to give any inkling

that we're acting like the actor versions of ourselves. There's this weird thing that happens that we had to face, which was, we've gotta be ourselves. I mean, we've gotta be like really in like vlog GMM mode. And at some point, we're gonna be going off of a script and we're gonna be making that transition to still acting like ourselves, but in this- But now we're gonna be going off of a script and we're gonna be making that transition to still acting like ourselves, but in this-

But now we're really acting, we're doing something that wouldn't happen to us. Yeah, in this real world. We're reacting to things that wouldn't happen to us. So it's great to have like Stevie and Ben there who are like, you need to play this scene like Rhett, you would respond to Lincoln this way behind the desk at GMM and I don't feel like you're doing that

or you're giving me similar direction where it was. And I think that's a big test is if people watch the first few clips and they're like, why are they acting weird? Then we're a bit stuck. I'm pretty confident that that, I feel good about it. My main concern is that they're just,

most people are gonna be like, I don't really care about you guys bringing me along the ride to write a song. But I'm saying that from a performance standpoint, it was a fun challenge to think of it that way, that we're making this performance transition from completely or very loosely scripted to pretty tightly scripted. Yeah, yeah.

So every aspect of it was challenging in its own way that was part of why we wanted to do it, just to like scratch those itches and get the creative juices flowing. And we do think, I mean, I'll say that I also have a secret hope that in the way that some of these Twitter threads and whatever they might be, things that start kind of small on the internet,

like there is a world here to explore, not necessarily the exact thing that we explored, but the concept of the album and being trapped in an album and it's been there forever. Like what's the origin story of that? Like I would love to be able to tell that story, not necessarily as a buddy comedy with the two of us, who knows, but so I really hope people love it.

Now, one thing that happened that, to speak to the nature of doing this on TikTok in a platform that we're learning is, you know, we had this idea for this scene with the crow, where the crow hits the door and then we go outside and we see it and it's dead and there's a moment that we have with it that ends with me throwing it away and Link accusing me of littering.

And then by the way, if you look at the album closely, like rewatch it and look at the album. The album, anytime the album is shown, it's very intentional and yeah, it will change maybe in ways that you did not anticipate or see the first time. But we were out there- We had this replica crow.

And we're out there- It seemed like it was the weight of a crow. It was very good. And I'm out there, so putting this towel over, and that's when Greg, who was doing the behind the scenes and also works on our social media and knows more about TikTok than we do, was he just kind of says in the moment, he's like,

"'Yeah, I hope that this part of it is not misinterpreted because sometimes on TikTok, if people think that you're doing something with the, it's conceivable that if people thought you were doing something with an actual dead animal, that people could get upset and they could pull that video down. Yeah, is Rhett really throwing a dead crow in the woods?

There was actually a scene. So at that point we were like, okay, Yeah, is Rhett really throwing a dead crow in the woods? There was actually a scene, so at that point we were like, okay, well what is scripted, what you've planned to do, and even what we shot test footage of, was you picking up the crow and you making fun of me for saying, I think it'll come to, just give it a minute, and you pick it up and I'm like, what are you doing? You're like, well, I'm gonna give it a toss

and see if it'll- Give it a little head start. Give it a head start on flying. Give it a jump I'm like, what are you doing? And you're like, well, I'm gonna give it a toss and see if it'll- Give it a little headstart. Give it a headstart on flying. Give it a jumpstart like a paper airplane. And you throw it and it just plops down on the concrete and it's hilarious. It's very funny. And then you pick it up again

and that's when we talk about the rotisserie chicken and you throw it in the woods. You say test footage, I mean, we shot that as a scene. We have that intact, which we are probably showing to you right now. And then we just, if you're watching. We're having a debate in the moment of, is that too much? Is throwing the crow and having it plop down,

the risk of people thinking it's a real crow and getting upset, TikTok may be flagging it. And like, if you remove this one clip from the whole thing, is that thing confusing and frustrating? Yes, yes. And it's like, so we, you know, we're like, well, let's just shoot another version of this particular scene where you don't plop it on the ground, you just throw it in the woods

and maybe that'll mitigate it and we'll decide later. So, yeah, because it's so experimental, you get in your own head of like, what is the thing that we're forgetting that's gonna bring this whole thing down? And I remember at that moment, there was a bit of a crisis. If that becomes the reason that this doesn't work.

That sucks. And so, yeah, so the toned down version is in there. So we're not concerned about it at this point. It's not, again, it's not as funny. It's not as funny as me throwing the crow up in the air and having it hit the ground. But again, that could be- It's dead animal humor.

Maybe people don't like that anyway. Yeah, right. It wasn't necessary. So, you know, it's a matter of taste. Yeah. If not a matter of like content restrictions and flagging, which we got a reasonable certainty that it wasn't. But let's skip to TikTok at large.

I think that this is obviously a strategy, but in parallel, because we've been developing Hazel for many months, we're also trying to figure out what's our general TikTok strategy. Because the audience that's over there is undeniable. And so we made a decision, was it pre-pandemic? Yeah, because we were in the boardroom.

I remember the moment we were all sitting together. Are we gonna do TikTok? Is Mythical gonna be, are we really gonna try this? Are we gonna allocate resources to this where there's- There's no money in it. There's no direct revenue sharing. So it's hard to justify from a financial business standpoint.

But from a strategic standpoint, we said, I mean, this is not a flash in the pan. This is happening. Well, I specifically remember thinking and saying, I think, in that moment when we were considering it, like, I don't want this to be, there are these moments in the birth of social media platforms

in which your ability to get traction, like right in the beginning, like you remember all those people like Ashton Kutcher, how does he have so many Twitter followers? Well, he got in and he took it seriously from the beginning. Now if you're just like, I think I'm gonna get on Twitter, like getting a Twitter follower these days and keeping it

as someone who's been pretty much the same number for a really, really long time, it's so hard at this stage in the platform. But I was like, if we get in now, even if the only thing we're doing, because I think what we said is, let's just get on there and let's just put some GMM clips on there, like let's just have a presence.

Because getting on there and letting people know that you're there, even if you're not yet doing anything strategic, you're gonna get followers. And that worked and we got to a million followers pretty quickly and it was like, okay, good, all right. We have a foothold here on this thing that seems like it's gonna be important in the larger sort of conversation.

But then it was like, what are we actually going to do? And me and you, in the beginning of the pandemic, because I remember us talking about this when we were doing our vlogs, we actually started to record for a potential vlog on the Rhett and Link channel when we were doing those, the process that we were coming up with, because a lot of people were like,

what is happening on the Mythical TikTok? Like what are Rhett and Link doing? Who's writing these TikToks? So we wanted to do a Rhett and Link vlog where we talked about our experimentation on TikTok and documenting that process. But then it became a lot to figure out what we wanted to try on TikTok personally,

and then to have to document it ourselves, it just became a bit much. But the thing that we were doing that you may have noticed, if you've been watching us for a really long time, you may have picked up on this. Now, yes, there are a lot of things that we sort of do as a company that Link and I lend ourselves to and kind of throw ourselves into,

and you might be like, I don't know if that's something that Rhett and Link would have come up with, but I can see why they did it or whatever. We threw ourselves into TikTok on a very personal level and kind of went back to that initial mentality of the early days of YouTube in which we were creators trying to figure out a new platform, throwing things out there,

experimenting, throwing a lot of things at the wall, getting reaction. Now, that's not a full-time thing for us because of all the other stuff that we do, but when we engaged with it over the past year and a half or so, that's how we would do it. We would like, let's learn all we can. And then the team was also developing things

that we could that Mythical could try on our TikTok. But what we were doing at the Creative House was like, we were getting down on all fours and filming each other as dogs. Or as these like strange superheroes having a video conference. Yeah, we were just trying some character based stuff. I can't remember what else we tried, but then we-

Also just some straight up sketch stuff. And a lot of this still is on, some of it was taken down because it just didn't do well. A lot of it is still on there from over a year ago. That kind of fizzled out. I think we got distracted or pulled into other things and it didn't take off. So it got a little, it didn't really work,

got disheartening. Yeah. And there were other things that were working. And then when we came back to it, many months later, we started doing some sketch-based stuff, but we wanted to hone, and we're still in the process of honing what mythical sketches, what Rhett and Link sketches on TikTok look and feel like.

And so we're like, all right, we want them to be conversational. We don't want them to, you know, we learned we didn't want to go too conversational. We don't want them to, you know, we learned we didn't wanna go too prop heavy or we didn't want to, we wanted to be able to turn these things out quickly. We have to be super, the engineer in us, but also just the very busy people in us,

we have to be super efficient with everything we do. So we really need to be able to shoot one of these TikTok sketches in about, you know, 15 or 20 minutes. But it's shocking how you can upload something and it will get like thousands of views and then you can upload something else and it can get millions, if not tens of millions of views.

And they can be right next to each other and have no influence on one another. So right now we're doing sketches, we're doing trends, TikTok trends, and we're doing like GMM clips that can be TikTok-ized. Yeah. So where they actually work for that platform

and don't feel just like an exported clip. And as we record this right now, like we've actually, again, our team is great. I don't wanna miscarry. When I say that we've thrown ourselves into this, I'm just saying that like we've really gotten involved on the creative side, but that doesn't mean we're doing it all.

Our team is doing so much good work. And at this point, the creative process is like, we've got our internal team pitching and writing. We've got, we actually have some outside writers who make their own TikToks that we like that are pitching and writing, we've got, we actually have some outside writers who make their own TikToks that we like that are pitching and writing sketches. We're pitching and writing sketches ourselves. And it's just become this sort of like old school,

collaborative, let's see what people respond to. But as of like right now, as we record this, we're getting some reaction. Like it feels like some people are literally saying things like you guys are kind of finally getting the hang of this platform when it was clear that you were just kind of trying a million different things just a few months ago.

It's cool to read that. I mean, it stings a little because it's like, hey, you're reading our mail, you know, that like, but of course, yeah, we're trying to figure this out. But that's what we do as individuals, as a duo, as a company, what we do is we say, all right, what is the next thing? How do we figure it out? And we gotta be willing to get some egg on our face.

By the way, write that down. I bet you there's something in that, like a little egg on the face. Ha, that'll be hilarious. Right, right. In order to learn something. And, but yeah, there was lots of, I mean, the things that we would try

and when it doesn't work and you can't understand why, it's much easier to understand why, to figure out why something does work than to figure out why something didn't work, you know? And this is a platform- Even if you're wrong about the thing, that why it worked, you feel really certain why it worked because it just, the most plausible explanation,

I don't know, it tends to fall into place, but then you're, with the negative, it's much harder to pinpoint it. But it's so interesting to be working in a platform that you don't know. Like we've learned YouTube over the course of the time being on there. So we know in general, like, okay,

you can pitch us an idea for a YouTube video and we can tell you, that's probably not gonna work and here's why, or that has a chance, a good chance of working and here's why. The principles that go into a TikTok video, title and thumbnail are so strategic when it comes to a YouTube video

because people are making a decision in an environment where their decision for the next video is based exclusively on title and thumbnail. That's not how TikTok works, right? TikTok works on people's reaction to the beginning of the video. Whatever happens in the first one, two, three seconds of the video is how they determine

if they're going to keep watching that or swipe. And then of course that data spread across the bunches of people who are watching that tells something to TikTok, which then tells something to the system and the For You page, which determines if that video is gonna get shown to more people.

And that's why you can have a video that literally has 11 million views next to one that's got 100,000 views. On the same channel. Or 50,000 views. Yeah. Right next to each other, which does not typically happen on YouTube because people's habits are different. It's a subconscious manipulation.

You're not, typically when you're scrolling, you're not making an active decision. It's a passive decision that you're hooked. So you find yourself breaking your scroll because something piqued your interest. It was something you read. It was something that you heard that gripped you that was irresistible.

And then is that enough to keep you? Is the hook set deep enough? And are we retaining your experience? Keeping you from like, oh, this isn't what, this is not worthy of me stopping scrolling, I'm gonna keep going. All of that data is scarily insightful. But the way that we have to interpret it is just,

did it work or not? Did it halfway work? There's a lot of speculation about the algorithm, but it does, the more that it's about human behavior, the more that we feel like we can do something about it. Right? And that's what the algorithm is trying to do too. Decipher human behavior.

We're coming at it from different angles. That's a fun challenge, but when things don't work and then they keep not working and maybe you've pre-shot a whole bunch of these, that starts to get disheartening. And there's also- Oh, we've made an investment that now is it, do we know it's like the next five that we've already shot,

do we know that none of those are gonna work or is there a pivot we can do with text or with something else within the tool to make this still work or to prove our theory wrong now that like we're going down the wrong path. to make this still work or to prove our theory wrong now that like we're going down the wrong path. Well, and there's the challenge of not wanting to fall into the trap, which is a very difficult thing not to do when you've turned your creativity

into a business and that is to just become reactive and try to find, and then your only measure of success is if people are watching it, right? Now, people have to watch it in order for us to continue to feel like it's worth doing, even though there isn't really any money, like occasionally there'll be like a sponsorship deal or whatever, but there's not a lot of money in it.

Maybe there will be at some point. But what that means is, and I think to come back to the Hazel thing for a second, is it makes the Hazel project for me that much more special because it really isn't a reaction to, oh, people are definitely gonna click on this. People are gonna care about this because of what we've learned about the way TikTok

takes people's behavior into account. It's more like, hey, here's a cool platform that seems to be at a stage where you can still experiment and it's not just you have to just do this cookie cutter thing in order to succeed. Is this a place where we can throw something up there that nobody else is doing in exactly this way and see what happens?

Again, the platform isn't really made for 11 part series that launch all in one night. The platform isn't really made for 11 part series that launch all in one night. But is there something there in this environment where it can work to the degree where it leads to something else within that platform? Could it be part of the platform even evolving and changing and growing and what it's capable of? Could it be that this idea and this project

and just our moving forward with it leads us to something else that may or may not be on TikTok? I don't know, but that's why we do things like that so that it's fun to do it and it's fun in the moment and we're proud of it and happy to do it, but maybe it leads to something even more interesting. And when it comes to our general TikTok strategy at this point, if we just wanted to do the stuff

that got the most views, we would just chase the trends. And we, you know, Greg would just be pitching those things and every day we'd be like, let's do the next thing. You know, Greg would just be pitching those things and every day we'd be like, let's do the next thing. But we wanna do other things as well. Like that's undeniably successful and it's fun and it's engaging and it works. And so that's exciting and rewarding. But we also want to express ourselves as comedians

and it is the place where we can very quickly stay in scripted and work on our character work and our acting and our comedic timing and that craft. Yeah. And assert ourselves on that front and say, okay, part of Mythical's brand is this style of comedy. Something that maybe you didn't know we used to do,

but here's a reminder or an education that we still have this type of comedic work up our sleeves. And now there's a place for us to do it strategically. I think that's sort of the stars aligning moment. But we have to make it work though. And it didn't, and the jury's still out on how we're making our sketches work. We don't know exactly what we're gonna land on.

But we do know. We have gotten some that do work. But we do know with maybe a few exceptions, but no real big exceptions. Like, you know, we started the Mythical Bits channel, which is taking the short form stuff that we're doing for TikTok and Instagram and putting it on YouTube.

And, you know, thank you to those of you who are subscribed to that and are enjoying the videos over there. But I think it's plain to see that YouTube is not the place currently for that type of content. Like it's not- Or maybe- Maybe it will become that.

Maybe it will be. I mean, with Mythical Kitchen, they were having similar conversations and then all of a sudden one of their shorts from months earlier started to blow up. I can't remember off the top of my head which one it was. Yeah, I don't either. But yeah, that's the whole short strategy for YouTube.

YouTube is like, okay, listen, this genre of video, this vertical short video is obviously working, is what the kids are into. It's amazing. They wanna capture that audience as well. It's amazing how you can think you're coming to a conclusion. This isn't working.

Do we need to scrap it? And then when we were talking specifically about our scripted sketches on TikTok, I mean, on one day in the afternoon, we were having the conversation about like the amount of resources we were putting into it and the amount of our time and the lackluster performance. And then as we were having the business conversation,

a few hours later, we look on TikTok and the latest sketch that we put up about the favor economy and the hot sauce, like that one took off. And it changed our conversation entirely because we were like, hold on, we made a little tweak to the text at the beginning of this and maybe that unlocks it.

To be specific, we put text on screen at the beginning of the sketch and we had not been doing that in the previous ones. And I'm not saying that the sketch itself, it doesn't stand on its own and isn't relatable and that's why people like it, but I bet every dollar I've ever seen that the decision to put the text at the beginning

was the key to getting it to break out unlike the previous ones. It was a discovery. And it's like, is that really what it comes down to? Like the people scrolling through TikTok need to know what the sketch is about. It needs a title. But well, not a title, it needs, this is-

It needs context. This is making fun of this. If you're into that, stop scrolling, is basically the message we're sending. So it's like, this is what the joke is going to be, which is kind of a hard thing to swallow. No, I would say this is the framework through which you can enjoy the joke.

Yeah, and if you're into the subject matter or what you think the subject matter is, and now you know the framework, you're on board. You are now hooked. Because I shared with you and some of our friends, Dane, Dane Lind something. He's the guy who does all the Southern dad stuff on TikTok. And this dude is, I think he's in Louisiana.

He's super funny and his voice is perfect and his mannerisms. And he has found this success in playing this Southern dad character. Yes. And some other Southern characters. But he's always just like Southern dads meeting the neighbors, right?

Like he's got that context through which you can be like, oh, this is the context. These are the jokes within that context. And that's just a, that's how TikTok is working for a lot of people. Now there are some people like PD USA, who we talked about in our very early episode about TikTok, who he's doing something that's just so specific

and so weird to who he is, that you begin to come to expect this is what a PDUSA TikTok is. It's not relatable. The relatable nature of it is not why you're, so you don't need that contextualization. It's just, you want to kind of have a mind trip with this guy whose mind is gonna go anywhere

but where you think it's gonna go. But for the most part, and so we've tried some of that, just like, this is just plain weird. But we just haven't found as much success. I think for that to work, that has to kind of be the only thing. You gotta keep going to the same exact well. And we know we already have three categories

of things we're doing. Right, if all of a sudden PD started doing trends, you would be like, dude, that's not cool. You shouldn't do trends. You're cooler than the trends. Yeah. You have superseded the, transcended the trends because of who you are.

It's amazing how precarious the path forward is for these things. And that's the world that we've lived and breathed for years. I mean, but it's fresh with TikTok in that we're about to make that decision to not do sketches anymore. We didn't quite say that, but we were about to. And then the next day it's like, oh, maybe we cracked it.

And then we're shooting more and we have energy and we believe in it again. So it's a rollercoaster ride. And that's part of what we signed up for. And then seeing in the comments when something works, where a lot of people say, I started watching you when I was X age and now I'm Y age. And it's like a five, seven or 10 year gap

between those two numbers. That's tremendously encouraging that we're reminding and recapturing an audience that, hey, we're still here and we're here for you. We're ready for you to come back if you'd fallen off the mythical wagon. Yeah. So we remain very excited and engaged in TikTok

from day to day, but hopefully it's just onward and upward. And hopefully this Hazel experience, I will always learn something and it will always be worthwhile, but hopefully that's not in the context of it just kind of flopping and being kind of a speed bump in the story of Mythical. Yeah, hopefully we don't look at our TikTok channel grid

and see, oh man, we've got these 11 videos in a row that all happened in this one night. And we completely, like what if the story of this is that we completely killed our TikTok and that we sent a message to the algorithm by sending so many videos up in one night that they decided that no one cares anymore about you guys and we never ever again break a million views on TikTok.

And this is gonna be this super ironic episode of Ear Biscuits in which Rhett and Link's ambitions completely backfired and undid everything they had built on TikTok and then they just shut down their channel and were never seen again. It could happen. And you know what? That's why we did this.

It's a time capsule episode. Yeah. So let us know what you think, hashtag Ear Biscuits. I'm gonna keep the wreck on topic here. You just mentioned him. Follow him on TikTok, Dane the Great with an extra T on the end.

He's only got 1.7 million followers as of, you know, me reading this, but the Southern Dad stuff he does is so great. And then he expands out to like Southern Mechanic, AC Repairman, but the Southern Mechanic, if you drill back into that, oh, that's great too. But the dad is just amazing. Southern school bus drivers be like.

If you grew up where we grow up. 6.8 million views. Where we grow up, the moment he goes into his characteristics, it's like, man, I knew so many people. This is an amalgamation of so many people that we knew and I can't even explain how relatable it is. Yeah, Dane the Great with an extra T.

Hey Dane, we're big fans, let's hang out. You and your tattoos up your neck and down your arms. Maybe we'll get some neck tattoos with you. Putting that wig on and still becoming the Southern dad with the neck tattoos. I love it. Let's get a neck tattoo together, Dane. Okay, well maybe you two can.

All right, well. Dane the Great. We'll talk next week.