Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - How Mythical Entertainment Navigated The Pandemic

Episode Date: May 13, 2021

How do you shoot the Internet’s most-watched daily show without a studio and without a crew? With COVID-19 came a slew of production challenges that required some major production changes within Mythical Entertainment that has ultimately led to growth even during this pandemic. Listen to R&L discuss how Mythical navigated through these unprecedented times and not only managed to maintain but also grow their team on this very special episode of Ear Biscuits, part of Dell's Small Business PodFerence 2.0. 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. Ramble. 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 this special additional episode of Ear Biscuits, the podcast where two lifelong friends talk about life for a long time. I'm Rhett. And I'm Link. This week at the round table of dim lighting, we're talking about how as a business we have navigated, I'll even say weathered the storm of COVID

over the past 14 months or so. Yes, and we're gonna start by taking you back all the way back to March 2020 to an email that our COO, Brian Flanagan, sent out to our employees. Hello, Mythical and Smosh folks. As you've seen from the news, COVID-19 now poses a significant risk

to anyone in Los Angeles. I've spoken with Rhett and Link and Ian and with all your senior leaders, and we've determined that while nobody in our organization has been infected or exposed, as far as we know, the safest path to protecting each other is to work from our homes for the next few weeks, preventing the inadvertent spread of disease

through the workplace. Our plan is below, please read carefully. And then, you know, I'm not gonna read the whole thing, but please treat today, Wednesday, March 11th, as a prep day to wind up what work you absolutely need to complete in office. And from Thursday 312th through Friday, March 27th, plan to do your jobs remotely from home in LA. If those dates change, that's a big if.

They did. We will of course be in touch via every method possible, regardless of timing of our return to the building, you will hear from me often during this admittedly strange period of remote work with whatever updates I can share. And so it was so admittedly strange, but we didn't know what was going on,

but we were trying to do right by our employees and be as smart as possible and not create panic, but a sense of safety when every single second we were glued to the television trying to figure out, well, I mean, should I be ordering toilet paper, soup, and the supplies to make hand sanitizer myself? Well, it was this very interesting time where we started hearing more and more companies,

at least in Los Angeles, were basically saying, "'Hey, we're gonna start working from home.'" And we were just doing what everybody else is doing, which is just watching the news. And there's all this speculation about, you know, this looks like it's gonna be pretty serious, but I think what we're gonna have to do is just kind of, you know, lock down for a couple of weeks

and it's probably gonna pass. Like, you know, there was just this, there was this hope that this was gonna be this temporary thing that if everybody works from home, kind of get a little bit of a handle. Now, the interesting thing is that there were epidemiologists at this time who were essentially saying,

guys, no, this is a pandemic and this is going to turn life upside down as we know it. But I don't think that anyone wanted to deal with that potential fact. And we definitely didn't want to think about it from a business standpoint at the time. I definitely remember, and we discussed it on this podcast, like after we had come to grips with the fact

that we were gonna be working from home, and we'll step through a lot of this stuff, I do remember talking about how there was that moment very early on that like the newscasters were saying, hey, this, this is, you're gonna remember this the rest of your life. This is life altering. Yeah.

This is gonna be the new normal. And it was, you know, it was helpful to hear that. Someone who was a little bit more authoritative, now there was all types of authorities saying all types of things at the time, but we were being as safe and health conscious conservative as possible. I mean, it really started to strike us

that as leaders of a company, well, all of a sudden we were making decisions that held people's lives in our hands. It was, I mean, I felt a little blindsided by that and it was scary. It was scary. Well, and we wanted to do what was right by our employees. We wanted to keep them safe.

And luckily we were, and this is a really interesting thing to watch unfold on the internet as people began to, you know, we were very clear that we were no longer shooting GMM in the same way. But as you know, we shoot GMM ahead of time and sometimes we're more ahead than others. And we just happened to be at this perfect place where we were literally a month ahead of time.

We had four weeks of Good Mythical Morning. Well, we were filming as COVID started to- All that stuff started to fall apart. Started to happen. So, you know, we were reacting to it from set and this email that went out, we were also having this communication in person that everybody was, that everyone that was there.

I mean, later in the email, Brian says, "'The good news is that Mythical and Smosh "'are well configured for remote work via,' and then he lists out all the tools that we use anyway in the office, whether it's, you know, Gmail, Slack, et cetera. So we were ready to replace large meetings or any in which face-to-face conversation is helpful

with Google Hangouts Meet tool, which was like, that's the thing we had never used that much, the Google version of Zoom. We use it a lot now. But he's kind of educating people, which makes it easy to create a new video chat meeting via Google Calendar, complete with telephonic dial-in for the camera shot.

Telephonic dial-in. Leave it to Brian to use the term telephonic. But yeah, it was like early on, it was like, if you don't wanna be on camera, you don't have to be, but then it's like, hey, get with the program. And now it's just part of it. This is part of it. But things were moving so quickly.

So it moved so quickly that by this announcement on the 11th and then talking to the entire crew on set on Thursday the 12th, by Monday the 15th, again, news, everything was being processed and output so quickly that we were gaining all this information and it became very, very clear over that weekend that this was going to be longer than two weeks. And so we immediately made the decision.

We were like, we have four weeks worth of GMM, but we honestly have no idea when we're gonna be able to be back in the studio. So let's spread this content out. And that's when we went immediately to Monday, Wednesday, Friday releases on Good Mythical Morning, which I can't do the math on that in my head, but I think that gave us six weeks of content.

So it gave us a six week buffer to figure out what we was gonna do. A week or so later is when we realized we needed an even longer term solution, that we were gonna have to start shooting additional episodes at home, separate from each other. Yeah. You know, honestly, there were these discussions

about us just getting together and filming, but with so much uncertainty, and because we were telling the Mythical crew to be as aggressively safe as possible. We decided, yeah, it was important that we each film from our own homes and we worked out the ability to frame everything so that we could split screen the two of us together.

And it was kind of a fun challenge. I was at first. That's how I was trying to look at it. But we wanted to make that decision to say, yeah, maybe we could talk ourselves into being together. Like we're in some pod or in the same family, but we're gonna take this as seriously as possible. We wanna send that message.

That was the main thing that was behind the split screen episodes of GMM that we would film. And then let's see, we had the camera that was filming, but then we had other cameras that were broadcasting to Google chat where all of our crew could watch us and communicate with us as if they were in the room with each of us. It was very complicated from a technical standpoint.

And yeah, we were doing it all ourselves. And it was- But we had to figure that out. And it was at that point, I would say like day two of having to do that in my own living room, where the frustration began to set in and having to coordinate the chat and to turn the camera on to make sure it was in focus, having the props

and setting it all up. And of course we both made the decision, I think for lighting reasons and aesthetic reasons to like do it out in open areas in our house. Like you were in your dining room, which is open to the rest of your house. And I was in my living room, which is open to the rest of my house.

So there was a whole lot of like, shut up kids, like telling your kids to be quiet, which everybody open to the rest of my house. So there was a whole lot of like, shut up kids, like telling your kids to be quiet, which everybody's, they weren't at school. So everybody's stuck at home and dad's saying, he's gonna go and set up in the living room and shoot his show and you gotta be quiet. And it was at that moment that I began to,

not that I didn't already, but had a, just this additional force causing me to appreciate our team and all the different pieces of the puzzle that they bring to the table where we can just sit down and just be ourselves and make Good Mythical Morning, but not have to worry about being the producer

and the cameraman and all these other things. And I just- DP, all that stuff. I tried, I was like, I don't want to get bitter about this because me being in a good mood and me being excited, you know, we were still wanting to provide what we see, you know, it is our business, but we're in the service industry, right?

And we've kind of come to the understanding over the past few years that this show that we bring into people's homes Monday through Friday, almost year round, it's something that people kind of end up depending on and they look forward to it. And it's something that is a part of their daily routine. I mean, all these years we've said, thanks for making us a part of your daily routine. And we feel this sense of, I mean, it's a part of their daily routine. I mean, all these years we've said, thanks for making us a part of your daily routine.

And we feel this sense of, I mean, it's a great privilege, but it's also, there's a bit of an obligation, I think, to continue to bring the show and to bring a show that's engaging and fun and we're being fun and we're engaged. And all of a sudden we're doing it less, we're doing it Monday, Wednesday, and Friday. And now we're doing this version

where we're not really together, the timing's a little bit off. If there's a little bit of a half second delay, that changes the nature of comedy between two people. And I started to panic a little bit because not only that, we were releasing less content, but people weren't watching it as much either. Like we had broken their routine by not doing it every day.

And we were giving them a show that let's just be honest, it wasn't as good as what we can do in the studio. I mean, the only, you couldn't acquire anything to prepare if you wanted to like make a dish and then it would be us, like whoever's in my house would have to do it. We were, I mean, you couldn't get it. You couldn't get stuff off the shelves. You couldn't get stuff mailed to you.

It was, I mean, you could, but it was very limited and you couldn't count on delivery times. And that's a big part of our show is not just the eating, but the stuff that we order and that we interact with. And our producers do all of that, you know? Instead, we were just coming up with creative and our team was pulling together ideas from their homes that we could execute just with what we had in our homes.

Just raiding our own pantries. I think the first episode was this, it was some sort of challenge when I ate all the fish oil. The condiments that were in your own fridge and it was a punishment kind of game. Yeah, yeah. It was literally, this is the stuff that we, everybody's got condiments in their fridge. Yeah, we're like, it was a punishment kind of game. It was literally, this is the stuff that we, everybody's got condiments in their fridge.

Yeah, we're like, it was the first time we got rid of the Wheel of Mythicality, but you know, hey, we can learn new things. We can try new things. Maybe something will catch on. This coin of mythicality thing, maybe that'll catch on. It didn't, but we had to change the workflow. That's always been our mentality is that innovation,

you know, well, what is it? Necessity is the mother of innovation, whatever that is. Of invention. Invention. And we were like, okay, maybe there'll be some innovations. And we'll get into that a little bit, how some of the things that the pandemic has done to us as a business are things that we will carry forward. But I can safely say that nothing about

that at home version of us not being in the same place version of GMM, we're not taking any, we didn't take any of that into the future. You know, we asked Stevie to kind of give us an outline of everything that was happening behind the scenes and all the adjustments that were made. Things that we didn't, you know, we're talking about our pain points,

but everybody had to make adjustments. I mean, just one example, our team is used to working off of a server with everybody having access to the same media files so they can work simultaneously, but with everybody working from home, they had to stagger their schedules so that each person could finish their job

before they passed a project to the next person. So assistant editors, editors, post sound mixers, quality control, all of it was happening in different places and it was a totally different sequence that took so much longer that, yeah, so Stevie, Jacob, all of the producers and everybody had to, they had to come up with a new system. And just to reiterate, you just mentioned all those people,

but just, I mean, this might be of interest to those of you who are, you know, kind of interested in production. Again, the way GMM works at this point, it isn't, hey, we shoot it and then you take the card that has the footage on it and you give it to somebody and then they just bring you this fully fledged episode. No, like Link said, there's an assistant editor

who's the first person to take that footage and to put it together. Then there is an editor who is going to take it a little bit further. There's somebody who's working on the graphics package, which is also an additional layer. There's somebody who's only worried about the audio, the post sound mixer.

And then after all that has taken place, it goes to a producer who will watch it and approve it, and then even after that, there's a quality control, a QC, where somebody's making sure that graphics are right and things are spelled right. So there's like five or six steps, and it's one thing when everybody's in one facility, but we were literally having to take that step,

send it through the internet to Dropbox, we were literally having to take that step, send it through the internet to Dropbox and somebody was having to, and everybody's got different kinds of internet speeds. I mean, I recognized, this is something that I learned, is that my home internet speed, upload speed, was like 1 20th of your home upload speed because you had a different service, right? You had a great download speed,

but now I'm having to take this stuff that I'm filming at my house and I'm having to wait literally overnight for a couple of episodes to upload to the internet. So I ended up having to go to the creative house, which has good internet and do it every night. If the upload failed, I mean, you're talking 25 people just sitting on their hands waiting for it,

but like in succession, right? Yeah. There were all these challenges and we'll keep going through how we pivoted as a team and as a company. But two things, first, like you said, we knew that we could help people, that people still wanted to watch our show

and it could be a bright spot in their day. And that meant a lot to us to just keep us motivated and engaged and to wanna make it. But also we knew of so many businesses that they were not allowed to conduct business. I mean, if you were a local restaurant owner, you were trying to figure out if you were gonna be able to do delivery or pickup.

Did you have any apps that you were connected to? That must have been a nightmare. And it was, I mean, for us, we were just making internet content, you know? And the demand was still there. And as long as we could make it, people could still watch it. They still had their internet connection. It changed a lot, but it didn't completely compromise

our ability to deliver the same product. Right. Which is one of the reasons we got through this. Like if YouTube went down for a year or the- That would be a problem. Like the internet infrastructure of Los Angeles went down. We'd have to use Revver. Then we would be dead in the water,

like a lot of small businesses. And so we were like, listen, this is an opportunity. We can still do this. It's not gonna be pretty and it's not gonna be as fun, but I was extremely grateful that we could still do it. So we were able to tell the team, hey, don't worry about your job. We see a way forward.

We're in a fortunate industry where people want this and I think we can give it to them. It may be different and it may be less often, but we can do this. I think from a business standpoint, we're gonna be okay. And we gave them a reassurance that like- Well, okay, you may be remembering it with slightly more rose colored glasses

than I think was the reality, because I think that leads into the next point, which is in early May, when we made the decision for the two of us and Stevie, just the three of us to come back- No, Stevie was not in first. She was in, but there was a point when like we showed up and Morgan had labeled everything

and Stevie wasn't even there. She wasn't there from the beginning? Maybe we just showed up a few hours before her that one day. I think in early May is when we went back and it was just the three of us. Okay, okay. But the point I'm making is that-

You're right. This Monday, Wednesday, Friday release with home recorded episodes mixed in was not performed, it was performing at a fraction of how well the show was performing up until that point. Now we've been through a lot of ups and downs in making this show for, you know, since 2012. And we usually are able to weather it,

but there's always this fear for everybody who makes a living on YouTube that you're going to lose, you're finally gonna lose the momentum and you're not gonna be able to get it back because something's gonna happen with the algorithm, suddenly people aren't gonna be interested and you're not gonna be able to claw those people back into your audience.

Sure, you got 17 million subscribers, but how many of them are engaged? How many of them are watching? And if all of a sudden half as many people are watching, what is that gonna do for you long-term? So we were like, we've got to get back to making something that approximates this version of the show. The actual show.

And by that time, a few months had passed. By May, we knew, we understood more about COVID. And we were confident that if we kept the crew incredibly small and literally just me and Link and Stevie, who had not been out, who had not been inside any place, who, you know, we were basically completely quarantined, completely locked down. And so we were like, okay, well,

the three of us are being incredibly safe. And this is before we were doing testing, by the way. This is before testing. Testing didn't happen for much later. Can we do something that feels like GMM and is as often as weekly, I mean, as daily again, Monday through Friday, and that's what happened in May.

Yeah, so we came in there, we did Will It Sandwich, went back to the Will It roots without Mythical Kitchen. Chase came in and left ingredients, instructions and photos for Stevie, and then he left. And then Stevie came in and like made all the sandwiches, like putting butter between two pieces of bread. Yes. I don't know if you need a picture for that,

but they did a great job on Will It Sandwich and it was just like me, you, and then, was Stevie even in the room when we were filming? She was. She was way over there. She wasn't close to us, We didn't get close to her. We never got close to her. We got close to each other. We basically made the decision.

We had, we felt like we wanted to. At that point, we were like, we're gonna have to treat our two families as if they are one family. Yeah. Right? Because we just can't do this thing. And that was a small risk that we decided to take. But again, nobody in either one of our families

was doing anything that would expose anybody to the virus. And so we felt confident to do that. And we're making Good Mythical Morning in an abandoned studio. Like it felt, it smelled weird. It smelled like no one had been there. Right. No humans. But then in mid-May,

LA County finally released some guidelines about film and TV production, right? Because I mean, the film industry had been essentially completely locked down for months by that point. And of course, this is a town where we got to make our TV, we got to make our films. And so, you know, we're a production studio, we decided to use the guidelines that they had come up with

and apply it to our production. And it was at that point that we started to bring some people into the studio, but it was still, I mean, it was a handful. It was just making it where it didn't have to just be the two of us and Stevie, but it was literally the bare minimum that you could bring into the studio and pull off the show.

And we were asking every single one of those people to basically do exactly what we were doing, which is you're either here at the studio shooting the show or you're at home and you're not anywhere else. And shout out to the crew who throughout this entire, we could not have gotten through any of this. We couldn't do anything that we do without our crew. We definitely couldn't have gotten through this entire

process without our crew, but to be specific, we couldn't have gotten through this without them all making a lot of sacrifices and understanding that they couldn't just do everything that they wanted to do. They had to take into account the collective safety of everybody who was a part of this thing. And of course, everybody besides the two of us was wearing masks and everybody's washing their hands

and doing everything that we were being told to do at the time, but it required a lot of sacrifice for them. Yeah, because the official guidance was, okay, you can, if you need to go out and do this, we'll do it in this way. If you need to go in the store, do it in this way. And we were saying to our crew, don't do those things at all.

Like we'll give you gift cards to order more stuff. So you don't have to physically go into places, even though the general guidelines may be stringent, the ones that we asked them to follow were more strict. And then, yeah, so they were definitely making sacrifices and having to come up with systems along the way. I mean, at this point, Chase was the only producer in there. There was no art.

So none of the props or set builds or anything like that. You couldn't see any of that. There was no art. So none of the props or set builds or anything like that. You couldn't see any of that. There was no culinary team. Mythical Kitchen-eers were not coming in. By the way, the Mythical Kitchen channel- Had their own deal. They had just, they had launched at the top of the year and then COVID hit and they were just getting going

with their own channel. And it was like, oh, just do stuff from your house. As much difficulty as we had, it was probably more difficult for them because they weren't, the things they were doing- They had to cook. They had to cook and they were shooting- We had to sit there.

They were shooting in different ways and it wasn't as simplified as the way we produced the split screen version of GMM. And they stepped up in that way. it wasn't as simplified as the way we produced the split screen version of GMM. And they stepped up in that way. But so they weren't involved. And then it was Chase and Stevie handling props. Some crew members would come in individually through the week, totally alone.

Do something alone. Do something alone. And then fill this like, they had this like plastic container system for each episode so then they would like put stuff in a bin. It's kind of like the mailman shows up at night or like an elf shows up at the cobbler's house and starts making shoes and then the next morning,

oh look, there's shoes, there's something in this container that I'm supposed to use in this episode. I gotta put laces in them. So throughout the summer, these type of processes were being refined and the team was stepping up to bring back what felt like to a viewer, it looked and sounded and the subject matters were more what would be

a normal GMM, but behind the scenes, everything- But it was very stripped down and very simplified. And I can say, and a number of people said this in the comments when this happened, that you could kind of see the sense of relief that we were back in the studio and we were more relaxed. And I think we made some great content, but we were still very limited.

Look at putting weird things in a hot glue gun. That's when only Stevie was there. And I mean, there's a little innovation that that's when- Jump cutting. The chaotic jump cut within a Good Mythical Morning episode. That's a good point that that's when- Jump cutting. The chaotic jump cut within a Good Mythical Morning episode. That's a good point. That was something we are doing now.

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Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card, terms apply. So we're just starting to kind of get all this together and to be able to produce this show in a limited fashion, but it's pretty much the same show. Jacob gets a call. By the way, he's in his car. He's like, he's driving somewhere.

I think to meet family or something. It was a 7 p.m. 7 p.m. call. He gets a call from the fire department. He had to go out of town and he gets this call. Oh yeah, he was getting ready to go on vacation. Yeah, of course. Not vacation.

What is vacation? Meaning like just to go out of town and be alone in another house. I don't know where he was. But the fire department calls and says, your studio is flooding rapidly because a car has knocked off a fire hydrant in front of the building.

And it's just like, okay. When I hear that this has happened, I'm like, okay. Actually, what I heard, the first thing that I heard was that somebody hit, this was because it went in the general slack. Somebody saw a video of it and put it in the general slack. They were like, somebody hit a fire hydrant right in front of our studio

and it's shooting water straight up in the air and some of it's getting on the roof. It's like a geyser. But what we did not know, and just so you understand, water is very, very heavy and water is so heavy that it has the ability to break through a roof. And here's what happened. So we actually saw this on video later.

You're talking about the minivan? Okay, so first of all- Well, I'm talking about the- Well, let's start outside. Okay. We see footage, security footage of a minivan swerve off the road onto the sidewalk, go run over the fire hydrant.

Just knocks it away like it's a- Just like it's- Nothing. Like somebody just sweeping, like sweeping a turd off the street. And so, and then the minivan and the fire hydrant keep going and then all of a sudden it leaves just a hole, like a geyser immediately just going straight up into the air.

I mean, like it could have been a hundred feet in the air. I mean, it was probably, it was probably 40 or 50 feet. Second video, this video comes from our internal security cameras, right? And because Jacob is trying, to hear him tell the story, he's trying to figure out what it looks like inside the building. Hey, we have cameras inside of our building. He pulls up the live feed.

The first thing he sees is- This is the foyer, right? So this is- The lobby. Basically the lobby and you've got our front desk there. He sees water flowing through the lobby, but then he's like, how deep is that water? Well, he sees a chair that is from the stage where Smosh shoots, Try Not to Laugh, like that stage.

A chair has floated all the way through the lobby and just floats right past the camera and goes down to the rest of the studio. We're talking a river. We're talking like three feet of water just flowing, not just standing, flowing. And what was happening is the roof in one part of the studio, right on that stage, broke through, completely collapsed.

All the water from the fire hydrant was going up and coming down in one spot on our relatively flat roof, and to the point where it pelted a hole that then turned into a gash, which turned into a chasm. The whole roof just completely fell in. Which turned into a whole, the whole roof caving in. And then the water flowed to every square foot. So our office, like our personal office.

We're talking 8,000 square feet of the building had water. Yeah, so this whole one side. Now our office is actually right on the other side of this wall when we're recording in Ear Biscuits, is the complete opposite side of the building. Now, when we show up, I mean, cause it was like, we were talking on the phone and we were like, I guess, I mean,

no one knew the extent of the damage except maybe Jacob and Brian at that point. We were like, it was late at night, it was like nine o'clock at night, we're like, well, we need to drive down to the studio and see what's going on. We walk into our office and there's like, they've already, the water has been shut off

for a long time by this point, but there's still like two inches of water just in our office. Every single wall was saturated. Every single piece of furniture that was touching the ground had soaked up all this water. This studio right here, Ear Biscuits, this wooden floor right here that we're on,

which is a little bit elevated, it was covered in water. The moment of me driving up into the parking lot to then see what was happening is a moment I never wanna forget because it was an awesome moment. As I drove up trying to find a place to park, first of all, I hadn't seen anybody. It seemed so few people, you and Stevie,

and then there's people on video chat. None of us had gotten out. But in the parking lot, I was noticing there was stuff out there and there were people. There were Mythical crew members who had heard about what was happening and they showed up long before we did and they were rescuing things, pulling things out

so that they wouldn't sit and be flooded and damaged beyond repair. So the whole parking lot was being filled with all the equipment from the Good Mythical Morning set. The desk. The desk was outside. All of the cameras, all of the furniture, all of the computers, all of this stuff was being taken out. Like I was seeing people were,

like people were pulling stuff out of our office. These weren't like workers that were hired to fix flooding stuff. Those people didn't come until later. These were employees who said, I know I'm not allowed to be out and I know I'm not allowed to have a contact with anybody, but I'm gonna mask up and I'm gonna keep my distance

and I'm gonna go rescue our facility. And we didn't ask anybody to do that. They were just there. And it was just, like was, like I said, it was a defining moment for Mythical when, and I, you know, to see these familiar faces, to see Morgan coming out, to see Davin carrying some stuff and like, you know,

Jake was there and he was in like flip-flops. In pajamas. In pajamas. Yeah, because he just got out of, yeah. Because he just came over there and was like, hey, I was watching Netflix and now I'm here. Didn't even take time to get fully dressed. And basically these people were trying to, I'm not saying they were sacrificing themselves,

but I mean, they were putting themselves in more danger than we were normally doing just to rescue what we could and it meant a lot. And they did such an incredible job. And I shouted out two of them, but you know, I'm sorry I can't shout out everybody. And I know that- Everybody who showed up.

I know that all, like even more people wanted to show up. But we actually had to tell people don't show up because we were getting too many people in the studio because our crew was so helpful. But it was a catastrophe. It was absolutely ridiculous, okay? So, so many things ruined, so many things saved, but literally a week later,

now the building was a catastrophe and we brought in a professional company that basically cut the whole bottom two feet of every single wall off. So many things were ruined. But the focus was can we get the GMM studio back to a place where we can record because we gotta keep making this show.

Less than a week later, we had gotten the studio back to a place where we could come in and shoot the show and no one knew that we missed a beat. Now, the rest of the studio took, I don't know how many weeks. It happened incredibly quickly. It was a matter of weeks before they had like

completely replaced all this stuff and like repaired the walls, replaced the floors in a number of places. It turns out that the crew worked so quickly that most of the equipment that got, like the server, we were worried about the server because it got into the server room, but the server of course is elevated,

so the server was okay. Most of what they got ruined was like connections and cables, but the cameras and the bigger pieces of equipment and the computers and everything that we used to make the show was all intact. But we kind of ended up not really missing a beat when it came to production. Very miraculous. Crazy.

Big credit to Jacob for seeing that project through. Just being blindsided by that on top of everything to get that done was just amazing. So then if you get to August, that's when the team had implemented weekly PCR testing, shoving the swab up your nose. We had a system do that onsite for everyone, just the skeleton crews, for us, for Mythical Kitchen.

And by the way, I mean, Smosh is its own thing that all the decisions we were making of what you can and can't do and who can and can't come in, they had to figure out how to make that work for them as well. So that's when, and it still continues to this day, every Wednesday morning, everybody's lined up and getting their nose swabbed.

I mean, at this point we've had over 3,500 temperature checks, over 1,500 COVID tests administered here at Mythical in order to make this, what still is to this day, as we're recording this podcast, still is what we would consider a skeleton or a reduced crew. Yeah. We're still trying to minimize risk.

Now things are looking so much better. People are getting vaccinated, the numbers are down. So we expect to return to a somewhat normal approach to the show, but it's absolutely mind boggling that our crew has been able to essentially create the same show that we were creating before the pandemic in the midst of all these restrictions and all these sacrifices that we're asking them to make.

The fact that we're doing the episodes that we're able to put out now, I mean, yes, we don't have any guests, but you're hard pressed to point to anything else, I think, to the credit to our team that feels that much different. But we still do not have our crew back in the office. The majority of the crew is on Google Hangout

during filming, including the show runner of Good Mythical More. Matt Carney's not even physically there. None of the writers are ever there. But he feels like he's there. And most- Because I can hear him speak. And I know he's watching. Most of the producers aren't allowed to be there yet either.

And I know how much they wanna be there and like being on chat is different and really challenging, but the way that they've made it work, I mean, all of this is just a celebration of like hiring the right people that believe in what you're doing so that when the shit hits the fan, you know, by the time you show up,

the fan's already half clean. Right. You know, because they care about that fan as much as we do. And it isn't just, we've talked a lot about Good Mythical Morning, like Link said, Mythical Kitchen was doing their thing, Smosh was doing their thing.

Our store, you know, our crew that makes the products that you buy at mythical.com, they had like the best year that they've had in the midst of all this. And they encountered their whole set of COVID complications because the way COVID impacted shipping alone and production of all these things. They navigated all that.

The Mythical Society team did an incredible job continuing to grow the society during a time where I think that the society became that much more important than it has ever been because people wanted to have some kind of connection when they were isolated. So our team, and not to mention that, they were able to do all these things in a way

that the direct impact of our team being so excellent and being able to continue to deliver these products in an excellent way enabled us to be able to continue to grow in a year where a lot of media companies were shrinking. We actually hired, since the beginning of work from home, which we mentioned was March of 2020, we've added 14 new staff members to Mythical. And these people, many of them,

I've never met them in person and because it's all been over Zoom and they don't even know what- They've never met anybody in person. They don't even know what life at Mythical is like because they've been working from home and working through their computers. Now, eventually we'll all be able to get together

and see what we look like in three dimensions. But again, the credit goes to, I mean, I think there, to me, there are sort of two main reasons why we were able to pull this off, so to speak, in a time when a lot of businesses really struggled. And it's really a testament to the industry that we're in and the people that we've got working here. I mean, the first piece of it is, like you said,

we're not a restaurant that had to completely change our business, we don't have a storefront, we're not retail. Those people really, really suffered because their entire business model changed. We, all we had to do was figure out a way to get these videos onto these platforms that we post on. And it was not an easy process and it was a very difficult and time consuming

and challenging and the standards were changing and all these things are constantly moving as a moving target, but we were pretty much able to continue to deliver the same project. So that's sort of the first piece of success. But I think that the second piece is just the nature of the team.

I mean, we have an incredibly scrappy team just because of the business that we're in and making digital entertainment. We've got people wearing multiple hats. So you can take a crew and you can bring in like a fourth or a third of your typical crew. And you've got people who can do five different things because that's what you do in digital entertainment.

It's not like traditional entertainment where this is the person who does this particular thing and you really can't scale that down. So we got people, you know, Kiko, who's recording this podcast right now, produces this podcast, is filming GMM, right? Is also running a camera on GMM when he's not working on Ear Biscuits.

As an example, we have so many people who are multi-talented. So we're in the right business at the right time and we had the right people to help us pull it off. And that's the only reason that we can look back at this time and say, it was a success. And I wonder what we will take forward. I think, you know, a lot of gratitude, certainly,

as we talked about. I think work for home, work from home. And work for home. Yeah, for and from home, is now a part of the dynamic of what we're gonna be doing moving forward. I mean, we're talking about when we come back into the office, there being added flexibility, people discovering that with certain aspects of their job,

having that space or being at home allows them to focus or it's different reasons for different people, but we're listening and we're open. And you can be more productive given the circumstances. Looking for a little hybrid there. I think virtual meetings, I hope that, I mean, I'm thinking about like whenever we have to travel across town

and it literally takes an hour and a half to get to a meeting and then it takes two hours to get back, that's three and a half hours of just being in a car for like a 20 minute meeting. I'm really hoping that people are on board with the video chats for that type of scenario. I think that the external meetings and some internal meetings will be moving

to basically just virtual. And I think that surely everyone is thinking that that is gonna be the norm because not only does it eliminate this transportation and time that you're going across town, but it also enables you, like you remember how it used to work? Like if we had an idea that we were pitching

and they were like, oh, well, they're in New York City. Do you guys have a trip planned in New York anytime soon? Because when you go to New York, we can set up the pitch meeting. It's like, what? We have to wait until we have a trip plan and we have to plan a specific trip to fly across the country to make this happen?

When we can just stay in our office, maybe not have pants on, have this meeting, and by the way, on the other side, you think about the people, you know, we've been having some meetings lately where whether it's an interview or somebody is pitching us something, right? And if they were to come into the studio,

there's a number of things that would be different. First of all, there's like, you gotta like greet somebody and there's a whole like, oh, we gotta bring them in here. And oh, do you want a coffee? You've added like, and listen, not saying I don't wanna see people, but you've added 20 minutes on the front end of that thing. When if it's just a Zoom meeting, it's just like, boom,

you're in, you have the meeting, you're out and you move on to the next thing. I think another thing we'll take forward is just valuing our communication to the team. I mean, this is really a test of leadership. And I think for as much as we upped our communication, a lot of times we didn't have a lot more information. So, but we thought that it was important

to remain more connected, to be seen and heard from, and just to help us have a collective experience, even though we're all in our homes behind our own screens. So I think we developed in that way and also began to value just being even more open as a leader. There were lots of times when we were like, we don't know the answers, but we're making decisions based on these particular details

and based on this guidance, and this is how we arrived at this and this is what we're doing. It may change, everything's changing, sometimes minute by minute, but this is the we're doing. It may change, everything's changing, sometimes minute by minute, but this is the heart behind it and our thinking behind the things that we're doing. Just trying to have that open level of communication

where they understand, hey, we're trying our best, we believe the best in terms of how you're gonna respond, let's move forward. And I think it kind of created a bonding experience. I hope that it built some trust both ways. I think so. I mean, when you go through something with somebody, it increases the bond, but even more specifically,

I think that the nature of the conversations that we were having bled so much more into people's personal lives than they ever would before the pandemic, right? So not only are you working from home, so not only has your job coincided with your personal life at home, because that's where you're doing it from,

but you're being asked to make these sacrifices, especially if you're somebody who is, I mean, the people working in post are making their own kind of sacrifice because they're working this new system at their home. But the people who are coming in and actually being a part of the production, again, like we said, they're being asked

to take these extra precautions, not just get this sort of unpleasant test every single week, but say, hey, here's a gift card. Don't go into the grocery store, get this stuff delivered to you. We're having these conversations as we all go through this thing and we're making these adjustments to our day-to-day lives

that then directly translates into the conversations about work. So the lines got kind of blurred between just having a conversation about how people can protect themselves with how you can do a better, you know, how you're doing your job. And it just got more personal.

And I do think that as we get back to a normal studio, whenever this is gonna be, but like when we can get back to what is quote unquote, normal, everybody's in the studio and people aren't constantly worried about how close they are to people, et cetera. I think having communicated in that way with the studio and people aren't constantly worried about how close they are to people, et cetera. I think having communicated in that way with the transparency and honesty

in the urgency that you're talking about, it's gonna change the way that we talk to each other going forward. And I think it's actually gonna make us much better prepared as a team for the next catastrophe. And I really hope that the next catastrophe is not anywhere on the level of COVID or even really anywhere on the level of the flood.

But having been through those things, I just feel like our team is so resilient. Definitely. I wanna invite you into this conversation. If you got any thoughts or perspectives on it, maybe you've got your own small business that you've been adjusting this entire time, enter the conversation using hashtag Ear Biscuits.

And we do want to thank Dell Technologies for giving us this prompt and this opportunity to talk about this, because I feel like as part of this podference, it's been nice for us to step back through all of this and to realize what we've been through together and how it's impacted who we are as business leaders.

And wow, I'm exhausted. And thanks to all of you who stuck with us. Again, we talk about our team, but none of this is possible if you don't continue to watch, if you don't continue to listen, you don't continue to participate and try all the things that Mythical is putting out

into the world and you guys came through. I mean, you supported us. Again, we try to create a product that you don't have to watch out of charity. We're trying to give you- But if it comes to watch out of charity. We're trying to give you- But if it comes to it, thank you. We're trying to give you something that you want, that you wanna keep watching

and you wanna keep coming back to. But you know what? You still had the choice. Your lives were turned upside down too. Your routines were turned upside down. You decided to watch something new or watch something else. But you know what? Many of you, most of you kept enjoying the things

that we've been creating, and so we're eternally grateful to you as well. Thank you.