Ear Biscuits with Rhett & Link - Our Rejected Creative Ideas | Ear Biscuits Ep.289

Episode Date: May 24, 2021

From scripted TV shows, features, animation, and unscripted shows, R&L reveal all of their project ideas that have never reached the public eye 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

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Let's go seize the night. That's the powerful backing of American Express. Visit amex.ca slash yamx. Benefits vary by card. Other 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 round table of dim lighting. We're gonna pull back the curtain on all of the ideas that we've had for traditional projects. I'm talking about scripted television, movies,

non-scripted television, animated projects. We have so many ideas that we've come up with over the years and we've pursued a lot of them. And some of them went a long ways. Well, but a lot of the, basically everything we're gonna talk about has never seen the light of day.

Until today. And I just thought it would be fun for us to share with you all of these specific ideas we've had that encapsulate a percentage of what our collective creative dreams are, you know? Well, I would say a significant percentage of time and also of aspiration. Yeah. You know, and we might, I don't know,

this may end up being a two part thing where we talk a little bit more about like the personal, like dealing with rejection. We'll see how far we get into that. This is, I think there's a whole conversation to be had around dealing with rejection and failure. I agree, because I was actually wondering like, is this actually gonna be depressing

to revisit all these ideas that just died on the vine or fizzled out? And I wanna keep this fun, but I do think there is a reality to weathering a ton of rejection. Yeah, well, and I think that we say this a lot that, you know, you may wonder sometimes, I mean, there is a lot of things that you see, right?

You see this podcast, you see Good Mythical Morning, Good Mythical More, you see all the other stuff that Mythical Entertainment puts out and we're involved in a lot of things. And then some things you do see, like when, you know, the Lost Cause of Bleak Creek or the Book of Mythicality or Buddy System. There are other things throughout the years

that have seen the light of day, have gone through the full birth of the creative process and birthed out into the world. But when you ask yourself, what do you guys, what exactly do you do? Well, besides the things that you see, we do spend a very significant portion of our time trying to make things happen through other avenues.

And I'll just set it up just quickly to not get too much into this, but like, okay, yeah, you have this YouTube channel, you have this audience, you have people who are willing to watch and listen to the things that you create. So why are you spending your time trying to make, say a television show, a movie or whatever when there's-

Not make but sell. Yeah, when there's no guarantee that anybody's ever gonna see it. And is it, do you feel inferior because you're only making stuff for a digital audience and you're not being able to do the traditional thing? I mean, there's definitely, for me, a sort of a chip on my shoulder

of not being able to work on those things that are the things that kind of I personally enjoy a little bit more. Like I enjoy traditional TV and movies more than I enjoy watching YouTube videos. That's just me personally and how I spend most of my time being entertained. But it's less, that's a, for me,

that's kind of a small portion of it. And it's really more that we're limited in the kinds of stories that we can tell and the kinds of things that we can explore through the YouTube medium just because, you have to create content that can make a business, can run a business and can be a profitable thing. It's like we talked about for years with Buddy Systems, like we were glad we had the opportunity

to make Buddy System because we finally got paid. People would complain about why it was on YouTube Red. Yeah. Everybody couldn't see it. Now everybody can see it, but. Yeah, it's free now for anyone. Years later. But at the time, our response was, we couldn't make a more ambitious scripted project

with the budgets we were working with without getting funding from an outlet that then you'd have to, you gotta pay for. And when you go through those, when you go through that process of developing an idea and taking it out in the traditional way, taking it to somebody, pitching it to a network or a streamer or whatever,

you run up against something that's very unusual for us. Like we have an idea to make this podcast, we just do it. We have an idea to make this episode of this podcast, we just do it, we just make the decision and we just do it and there it is distributed to everyone, right? Ad supported most of the time. Every decision associated with Good Mythical Morning, the buck stops with us.

And there's no gate. We're in charge. There's really no gatekeeper, right? I mean, sure there's rules and regulations that you have to abide by if you want your video to get served up to everybody on YouTube, right? You cannot eat a mattress anymore on YouTube. If you eat a mattress, that will get banned and you have to just give it to the Mythical Society.

But with everything in the traditional space, they're still the gatekeepers because this stuff costs so much more money to make. They've got the money, they're holding the purse strings and they control the gate and they control who gets in the gate. And we, you know, I don't know. I don't even know how I feel about some of these ideas

because we're going back at least a decade and covering a lot of things that, it's not like, here, I'll be very clear before we get into these. It's not like you're gonna be blown away with the innovative and original nature of these ideas and be like, I can't believe nobody. The thing is that-

You be the, let them be the judge. But I'm saying that there are so many talented people in the world trying to get things made. And I'm not saying that we've gotten a raw end of the deal. I'm just saying, it's a difficult thing when you go through the gatekeepers, it's a difficult process and you gotta develop, you gotta develop a thick skin.

And you gotta develop a lot of ideas. I have a working list in front of me of what might be 20. And so I'm gonna throw out just some working titles and see if you can remember these. I don't think you're gonna remember all these ideas. I certainly didn't. I just had to dig them up in our Google vault. But let's start with talking about today

on Good Mythical More, we made a decision for Damiel to come in. He hadn't come in in a long time. So you stepped away. Yeah. Damiel stepped in. And he ended up showing this sizzle reel for- It's quite a bit he had. An animated series that he says that he developed that,

okay, yet we developed an animated series. And this is one of the most recent ideas that fizzled out. You know, Damiel said that, you know, there was a lot of interest, especially from one network. And then as we were talking about how like the budget and like getting into details on how they would fund it and how much, then the entire team that we've been talking to, like, I don't know,

they got fired, they got restructured. That happens all the time. It was done away with. So everyone that we were talking to no longer worked at the network. Yeah. Which kind of means the idea is dead. I mean, cause we had taken it out to other places and this was the one place that was most interested.

So we were like, you know what, screw it. We made this sizzle reel. It's a freaking animated thing in partnership with a- Cartuna. Cartuna. Shout out to Cartuna. Sorry, I almost forgot. I didn't, I didn't forget. I won't forget you Cartuna. Cartuna. Shout out to Cartuna, sorry, I almost forgot. I didn't, I didn't forget. I won't forget you, Cartuna.

We'll work with you again, but we were like, they put a lot of good work into this. It was all speculative. Everybody spent a little money, nobody made anything. Like, let's at least show it to you guys. So that's what, then we were like, screw it, let's do it. And now let's talk about it. It's called Unattended Baggage.

We were like, let's put Cotton Candy Randy, Daniel in an environment. Let's put them in an airport where they work. We just thought it would be funny to like, even though you could go anywhere in the world of cartoon animation, we just thought it was ironic to like- Yeah, it was the built-in irony.

Pin them down in the one place that everybody wants to escape from, and that's an airport. There's lots of different places you can work. There's lots of like workplace dynamics there. So we started to build out what that might look like. It was based on the one time that I think Damiel and Cotton Candy Randy got together

in either a GMM or a GM More episode, and we were like, you know, these guys are so otherworldly, I mean, literally in some ways, that this seems like the perfect thing to put them together an animated show. And, you know, but the idea was, okay, so you got me as Damiel, you got Jordan as Cotton Candy Randy,

and then, well- I should be in it too. You know, this needs to be a trio. And so the original idea basically just had you as kind of a grounded character. I don't know exactly, your name may have already been Leroy, but you were essentially Link

and you were using your regular voice. And we actually did a whole, like that, in fact, the animation and everything was originally just you talking in your normal voice. Then we got, we gotta get a funnier voice. And then we're like, ah, this character needs to be funny. Too much opportunity for this character to be funny and so then you basically ended up

kind of doing your forest patrol voice. Right. It's essentially the same guy. Because as much as people want Forest Patrol to come back, like, it costs a lot of money to animate. And we just can't justify or support that just online. Again, you make a certain- So I was like, I'll just take that characterization,

I'll bake it into this character, and we'll see what happens. I thought it was a big improvement. I gotta say, I mean, are we, listen, I don't want this to be a downer, but I am gonna just be honest with you as we revisit these ideas. And I still think that,

I still think that Unattended Baggage could be a great show, especially in the way that we kind of developed the pitch, even after we developed the scissor reel. Yeah. But I gotta say. And we should talk about, I wanna say what that is, because I think that's the strength of the show is actually not in the scissor reel,

because we got going, we wrote something, it was animated, and then we were like, you know what? And it was called Fairview, because Fairview International was the name of the airport. But then we started to really dig into the characters and we were like, I think there's something about dealing with masculinity, toxic masculinity, stereotypical masculinity,

and guys getting in touch with their feelings and their trauma potentially. Well, and every one of the characters ended up, it was very clear, every one of the characters had some baggage, had some psychological things, some trauma in their background that really contributed to who they were and actually contributed to who they were

and what made them funny. So let's play with that. Yeah. And like within their world, let's actually grapple with therapy and what it, like their need for therapy. Informally. Informally through other characters.

And let's, then we change the title to Unattended Baggage. And every episode was going to be, or not necessarily every episode, but in many different episodes, if it was gonna be often, a device that we were gonna use was gonna be a flashback to the childhoods of each one of our main three characters, so that you kind of explore the relationship with them

and their parents and then how they're as adults, having never properly dealt with all their unattended baggage as kids are kind of working that out in two hilarious ends as adults. So that's what the show became. It doesn't really, it's not really captured in the reel. The sizzle reel was like a section of the pilot. That's what we were excited about though

was when we got into the exploring the guys and therapy of it all. Yeah, I have absolutely no idea. I'm sure we'll see in the comments how people will respond to us showing that to them. I think people- We did it in a way that was a bit confusing because it's like, is this real?

Was this real? I thought that was fun. Have they really committed this much to this bit for him to show this? I don't know. Now you know. I think the show would be much better than the sizzle reel indicates, but you know, you'd be the judge of what you think this is.

Listen, if those people weren't laid off, we'd be making the show right now. Cause I also think that they understood what we were doing and how it had kind of updated. I have mixed feelings about that one because I still feel like there's a viable show there. I just don't feel like we executed the pitch that great and then of course, things outside of our control

caused it to fall through. Okay, so that was like one of the more recent ideas. I wanna go back to one of the first ideas that we came up with. Now, we're going back to the online nation days. So we were coming out here, we were hosting the show, you know, basically beginning to host it as it was already beginning to be canceled.

One of the producers on the show, Paul, was basically he became our de facto manager because every time we came out here, we were like, okay, we got ideas. We gotta get something else going. We got stuff we wanna do. Paul Cockrell, he was basically the guy who discovered Pauly Shore.

The reason why Pauly Shore was the VJ personality that he was on MTV was because of Paul. And he was instrumental in basically establishing Los Angeles as a home for MTV as well from New York because it had basically been a New York thing. Yeah, he was the first LA guy. And then the other producer of Online Nation was David Hurwitz, who was an executive producer

on Fear Factor back in the day, years earlier. Who famously said to us while we were hosting Online Nation, more energy. More energy, that's all he would say. More energy. But Paul was more hands on. We say that as an inside joke. So Paul became our defacto manager,

so he was the one that we were talking to about all these ideas, scripted and non-scripted, and he was like, well, yeah, we got a scripted idea, we can write a pilot. And we went back home and we wrote what eventually became, we called, legitimate. So that was before the reality ideas or separate? I think at the same time because-

Because I've got the script on my computer and it says copyright 2012. I think at the same time we were also developing non-scripted ideas. We had two of those. But we shot- We shot sizzle reels for those. Those were before because we still lived in North Carolina

because I remember being in the Lillington, going around Lillington shooting some of that stuff. That's where we were when we wrote, we started writing legitimate too. So they were happening at the same time. Okay, so I guess it was just 2012 is when. We can talk about the non-scripted stuff. We had this idea for a reality show,

kind of like Dirty Jobs, but instead of micro, it's the two of us going around to like redneck, I mean, what I call redneck hobbies. Longmore racing. Redneck pastimes. Yeah, lawnmower racing, noodling. That's where you like, you put your, you dig your hand down into a river and you get a catfish to eat your hand.

Like we were gonna go do these things. And we were like, hey, we know enough of these people. We can put something on tape, so to speak, that can sell this idea. Cause it's like, hey, we still can tap into that good old boy nature. You know, we still live here in Harnett County. And my dad knew all of these guys

who participated in competitive lawnmower racing. Right. And so we went out there, we got permission to film the whole thing. And then we started interviewing guys and like, I mean, there's some funny moments when we were in. We participated in the lawnmower race. These are not normal lawnmowers.

They're like drag racing versions of lawnmowers. And they pull a sled in a straight line and whoever can get the furthest, the fastest wins. And yeah, we talked a guy into letting us ride his lawnmower in the competition and we made complete fools out of ourselves and it was perfect. It was funny. In our mind. It was funny, I mean, again, I can't-

We called it good old boys. Good old boys, I can't help but be the, you know, the 10 year later producer and be like, oh, the fatal flaw with this idea was that we assumed that we had the right. In other words, like, okay, Dirty Jobs of Mike Rowe kind of makes sense a little bit. Like it started as like he was like this guy

doing this bit on the radio and he's this older guy that's like highlighting these people in America. We were just like two dumb asses who were like a little bit country, a little bit rock and roll. We thought we could go and just hang out with rednecks and have fun and while I do think it would have been a funny show, people at the time were looking for like,

what's your in, like why you guys for this thing? And so it just kind of died on the vine. Like maybe it should be Larry the Cable Guy. Right. It's kind of what you're saying. But I mean, for the video version of this thing, we can show you a clip, we'll dig up the archive. At the same time, we developed another pitch because we told Paul,

well, you know, we also have engineering degrees. We can, you know, we developed another pitch because we told Paul, well, you know, we also have engineering degrees. We can, you know, we're smart guys. We developed a pitch called This or That. Now this was a good idea. We couldn't call it Would You Rather because Would You Rather was a trademarked or whatever it is as a game.

We looked into licensing it, like Paul looked into that, but like they wouldn't have any part of it. So we just changed it to this or that. But it was a, as far as I can remember, we would pick two things. Well, it was a would you rather scenario. It was would you rather. That could actually be carried out.

And we would both do one side of the thing and come to the decision of which one was the actual correct answer. We would actually definitively know because we've experienced both sides of it. It's like- We shot a reel for that too. Would you rather-

There was a fire hose involved in one scene. I think it was, would you rather be pelted with a full blast of a fire hose for X number of minutes or have to walk around town a full blast of a fire hose for X number of minutes, or have to walk around town an entire day completely soaked. And so then we cut to a shot of one of us dousing ourselves completely with water from head to toe, like boots filling up with water in the Walmart parking lot

and then walking into Walmart. So you get an idea of, okay, Cameron's gonna follow around one of us who is like constantly soaking himself and trying to conduct normal life, maybe get a mortgage. I don't know. So it's a bit bitty, kind of sketchy, but then we also cut to the other person who was standing in front of a fireman with a hose

and he started blasting us with water. It was Joey Smith. Yeah, because I mean, back in Harding County, you got these connects. He was serving with the Lillington Volunteer Fire Department and had access to a fire hose. And did we actually get sprayed with a fire hose that day? Or did we just make it look like it was about to happen?

I can't remember. I'll have to look at the footage. I'm pretty sure that we were just far enough away. That it wasn't crazy. That it wasn't that crazy, but I might just be making it up in my mind. The footage will tell. That particular example that we used

for the pitch is not great, but the show still- There were other examples too. Still makes sense. I think we had two more sets of examples, but the show still makes sense. There were other examples too. I think we had two more sets of examples, but that's a fun idea. Yeah. I think we revisited it a few times. Maybe as a web series. As a web series.

I'm surprised we didn't pull the trigger on it because it's almost something that we could do now. Well, we ended up doing Would You Rather as a GMM segment and that's when a baby birded things into your mouth. Yeah. So it just made it the smaller, more producible version of that.

The last thing I remember we did with Paul was instead of us coming out to LA one time, he said that he was coming out to Maryland for something. And he said, you boys need to drive up because the Discovery Channel headquarters- Silver Springs, Maryland. Is in Silver Springs, Maryland, right on the edge of Washington, DC.

That's where you had to meet with the development for, if you wanted to have a show on the Discovery Channel. And we really thought because we had engineering degrees, we should be able to come up with an idea. Did we take this or that to them? I think we took a couple of other ideas, but I remember it being- I can't remember all the ideas.

It was more of a meet and greet meeting too, where it was like, yeah, we should work together. Sometimes it's just, it's not about the pitches, it's just about getting to know like- I remember an idea that we pitched to them and I'm afraid to, I still think this is a great idea for a show. It was our answer to a man on the street show.

It was our answer to Cash Cap and it was called Guestimators. Oh, well, yeah, because we brought that back as a magic number. We'll talk about it later. But do you remember, so the Guestimators idea, which yes, we brought back as a different idea

that was more contained, but the original idea for guesstimators was that we would be, and this is sort of based on the thing that we do on GMM sometimes, which is we try to guess a number of something, but this was like, you're on the street and let's say one episode takes place in New York City and so we walk up to somebody on the street and we say,

sir, right there, you see the Empire State Building? How many windows, individual windows do you think are on the Empire State Building? If you can get within 10, you're gonna win $1,000 right now or something like that. And so then it would be like the dude would guess and he would be wrong or he'd be right. But then there would be this like graphical

sort of like animated thing where it would be like, here's the Empire State Building and all of a sudden, like animated like overlay on it would show you like, there's this many windows and they're made out of this and they're this big and they attach in this way. Yes, you'd learn all this stuff through the animation. Right. And, but you would also get this stuff through the animation. Right. And, but you would also get it

if you're one of those people like you that really loves to guesstimate things and is actually really good at it. We thought that was another part of it. It was like, you've always done that. You've always made me guess things just so I could look like an idiot. Right.

So it's like that foil, and this is part of our pitch. It's like, hey, you're really good at estimating and I suck at it, so maybe there's a way to play into that for some comedy. Right. So yeah, that was a fun idea. I mean, you have to believe in the ideas to really pitch them.

Yeah. In the moment, especially. But then it's like, it's- You can question them later. 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.

Legitimate is the pilot that we conceptualized and wrote at the same time. And I swear, I mean, the first working title of Legitimate was- Musical therapy. Musical therapy. Because we were like, hey, we're musical comedians. We can write funny songs. I bet you we can bake that into a television show. And then Paul was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, do that.

It's like, we'll call it musical therapy. Paul was like, yeah, yeah, yeah, do that. It's like, we'll call it musical therapy. He was like, yeah. And you were like, let's write it. So we went back to our cave and then we conceptualized this thing and eventually we changed the name of it. Because the name of the town was legitimate. And so we're like, oh, that's a cool name for,

and also, so you know, the premise of the show is that you've got two guys, it usually starts with two guys for obvious reasons, who have been in Los Angeles doing the musical therapy thing like actually operating a musical therapy business and then there was an accident, someone accidentally passed away when they were participating in the musical therapy

in the hospital. That's the opening scene. The funny thing is, is it's not the opening scene in this version that I've got, I've got a few versions that I found on Dropbox. This is what is called a legitimate pilot draft three. Okay. And it starts with us in our office in Legitimate,

which you're right that in my recollection, the first opening scene was in the hospital in Los Angeles and we had this dream for Jack Black to play the patient who dies in the very opening scene. Yeah, because we were meeting with production companies to partner with somebody and we met with Jack Black's production company. Jack Black was not there.

No, he probably never heard about it. His development person was there and we, you know, we gave the whole pitch and we were like, all right, opening scene, you got this guy who, he's in his hospital bed, and then his musical therapists come in and they start playing him a song. And we actually wrote the song.

Because we sang the song in the pitch. And then, because we sang the song in the pitch. Like you brought your guitar and we started singing the song and it sounded good. And he gets so into it that he's in the hospital because of a heart condition. And then he gets so into it that he's in the hospital because of a heart condition. And then he gets so into the performance in the opening scene that he has a heart attack and dies.

And so we get sued for malpractice. We lose our Los Angeles practice and we have to go back to our hometown of legitimate North Carolina, which is not a real town, but is basically a Buies Creek type, well, a little bit bigger than Buies Creek, maybe a Fuquay situation. And then the show is about these two guys

who've kind of gone off to LA and become a little bit LA-ified. But then failed. And failed and then had to kind of come back home with their tail between their legs. And no one understands what musical therapy is. Yeah, and then try to do something that's very, very LA in a place that's very, very not LA.

So they still try to be musical therapists. But the real story, oh man, it's been so long. The real story is more about like me reconnecting with my ex girl or my character reconnecting with his ex girlfriend who's now pregnant by his father. Well, that's a spoiler alert. Yeah, that's the very last. So, well, so you get introduced.

I'm sorry, don't spoil it. You get introduced to your ex-girlfriend and she's pregnant and it's awkward and you're kind of like, you're still single, but you're kind of interested. You were interested in her and kind of this long lost love kind of thing. And then when you come back, she's pregnant

and this is news to you. And then the final scene of the pilot that it reveals that she's pregnant with your father's baby. Which then sets up the rest of the season and there's- I still love that. There's another character, Tee Birch. Tee Birch, yeah. That a version of Tee Birch made his way

into the Lost Causes of Bleak Creek. Yeah, Travis is a T-Birch character. Yeah, that kind of, so these things come back to us, but there's this whole thing about raiding a sperm bank. I mean, I think we should take this script. And I think that's my dad in the thing. He has been, he's been donating his, he's been getting a lot of money for donating sperm

and T-Birch helps us break into a sperm bank. So we, I don't remember why, but I think we should take this script and we should post it on the Mythical Society. Well, let me read it one more time. Don't you think? All right. Let me read it one more time. Let me.

I'm sure that the writing is not great. Just between you and us, I'm sure the writing is not, not like all of a sudden our writing is good now, I'm just saying, it's been 10 years is a long time. All right, so I'm gonna, do you wanna go with some scripted ideas? Let's go with some scripted ideas and come back to non-scripted.

Do you remember any of these? Cause I'm moving on. So, all right. And these will kind of be out of order. These are from 2018. We kind of set, we go through these like- Sort of development periods. We go through periods where we have a little bit of time

and we sit down and we come up with like four, six, 10 ideas, we bounce them off Stevie, sometimes some other people, we figure out what we're most excited about and then we're like, our agents set up meetings. So you're jumping all the way to 2018, did you skip a bunch of stuff? I'm gonna go back, I'm gonna skip around, yeah.

Okay. Do you remember T-minus-Mars? Very well, yeah. All right, what do you remember about it? This was a community of people who were preparing to be the first colony on Mars and in preparation to become the colony on Mars, they had to live in this basically,

this replica biosphere on Earth for an indefinite amount of time as sort of a test, like a psychological test and a sort of a how well can they get along with each other in this space on earth. And it was paid for by an eccentric billionaire, a woman who had gotten all her money by inventing some ridiculous, like some kind of weird shoe. What was it that she had invented?

She'd invented a weird shoe, which incidentally, I think- The flip. Oh, it's a flip flop that doesn't make a flip sound. Doesn't make a flop sound. And yeah, and so she's a billionaire because of that. And anyway, it's essentially an ensemble cast, sort of like your typical half hour comedy, like The Office or whatever,

but they're all inside this thing. It's like that Mars show that came out that had Tim Heidecker and- I never watched that. I watched the pilot and it was similar. It's like there was, basically it was a lot of people thinking about like Mars colonization and coming up with TV ideas and-

But were they on Mars in the show or were they on Earth? They were on Earth and they were trying to get there, but they were a bunch of misfits. Yeah, I mean, similar idea. Same idea. And to be clear, I'm not saying, it was, what do you call it? Multiple discovery is what they call that in science.

It happens all the time in entertainment where- Oh yeah. two people come up with similar ideas at the same time. It was a bit too obvious and we were a bit too late. What was the last thing that filled you with wonder that took you away from your desk or your car in traffic? Well, for us, and I'm going to guess for some of you, that thing is... Animate! Hi, I'm Nick Friedman. I'm Lee Alec Murray. 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. At the same time, we put that one out there, we also put Beef Queen out there. Beef Queen is the- Remember Beef Queen.

Is the story of a family, fast food owned franchise, sort of like an in and out situation. And the father is basically suffering from dementia. The guy who founded, sort of like a Ray Kroc kind of thing, he founded this incredibly successful restaurant and he's on the way out and his two daughters, he's handing the business over to his two daughters

and he's got one daughter who's like the older daughter and she's like totally committed to the vision and has been on board the entire time. And you've got the flaky younger sister who's sort of like this new age hippie who kind of stands for all this stuff that is diametrically opposed to selling hamburgers to everyone and what that does to the world.

Yeah. And the husbands of each one of these. So I played, I was going to play the husband. Maize Hendrix. Maize Hendrix who was sort of the hippie husband of the younger sister. An unaccomplished abstract artist who married Denise several years ago. Given his obsession with social and environmental justice,

he convinced the sisters to start Love Queen shortly after joining the family. He's the polar opposite of the typical Beef Queen customer. And to be clear, Love Queen is the philanthropic arm of Beef Queen, which is basically designed to offset all the harm that Beef Queen does to the world. Love Queen is kind of trying to like minimize the carbon footprint or offset the carbon footprint, right?

So that's the thing that Mays is in charge of. Yeah. But then your character. Kevin Pekarkarski. Pekarkarski. Two cars. Read his description. Is Danielle's brand new husband. He's a small town guy who was up until recently,

just a manager of a Beef Queen in Ohio. Now to be clear, we're talking about the daughter, the super ambitious daughter, who's the real sort of business mind. She's so focused on Beef Queen that she doesn't have time for someone who's gonna like challenge her. So she needs somebody who's gonna do exactly what she says. Yeah.

So it just gets this simple dude. Danielle fell in love with him on an episode of Undercover Boss. She also became an unintentional meme for complimenting Kevin on how he handled his meat while on the show. Right. Kevin is remarkably naive about everything outside

of the small town where he grew up and worked until marrying Danielle. He is continuously amazed by life in the big city. He hasn't seen the escalator before. Everything is new to him. Yeah, yeah. He's incredibly ignorant of all things that maize holds sacred, which infuriates maize.

Danielle thought it would be a good idea to have Kevin run Love Queen along with Mays, hoping that his Beef Queen loyalty and apolitical nature would help take some of the edge off of Love Queen's more questionable operations. Right, so you've got this basically sort of conservative guy that hasn't experienced a lot of the world, and then you've got this over the top hippie left winger,

and they have to work together kind of in the context of this sub organization that's in the bigger context, it's this giant fast food chain. I still like this idea. This is a fun idea. We pitched this idea to Adam McKay's company. I mean- Oh yeah, we did.

You know, we go into Adam McKay's office. He wasn't there though. He wasn't there. He wasn't there, but his business partner and development guy, I'm sorry, I can't remember his name, but was there and we had a good conversation. Just to be clear, because I don't want people to be, just real quick, let me just, I want to say this real quick, okay?

Sometimes we go out on a limb and we talk about sort of things like this, not private, but things that you didn't know about before. Like a prime example is several years ago when I auditioned to be Taserface for Guardians of the Galaxy, right? And I told the story of the audition and all I said was that the audition went well

and that there was like a second level of interest. Like it wasn't like they just, you know, I heard through the grapevine that they, and the director, James Gunn, liked the audition. And that's all I said, right? And we thought it would be cool to tell you that. And that got turned into someone, one of you, going on to James Gunn's Instagram page

and commenting on a completely unrelated post and asking him the question and saying- He was answering questions on Twitter. Now we don't know who made the post so- I think it was on Instagram that he did this. If you're starting to get embarrassed right now, we do not know who you are, we didn't pay attention and we're not holding it against you

and we don't remember your name so don't sweat it. But what you said was, is it true that Rhett McLaughlin was the first choice for Taserface? At which point James Gunn literally responds to that in the comments and says, no, Chris Sullivan was always our first choice, although I like that guy or whatever. So he acknowledged that.

So it seemed like you were going, you were like saying publicly that like you turned down the role. So now James Gunn thinks that I think that I was the first choice for Taserface. That's not what I said. And I regret even saying anything about it. But now you're talking about us going into.

So don't tweet at Adam McKay thinking you're doing us any favors by saying you should really do that beef queen idea. He won't know what the hell you're talking about and it'll embarrass us. So listen. Just keep it to yourself. Okay.

And if you wanna know what it feels like to be our children, this is how we talk to them sometimes. Don't embarrass me in public, okay? And if you wanna know how my kids have to treat me sometimes, they also tell me, hey, don't embarrass me in public sometimes. Yeah, I still like that idea. I still like, yeah, it was a fun idea.

I mean, we, you know, you go around, you meet with people who you think can produce this thing. I'm not gonna mention the other people because now I'm regretting it. And also we didn't, we just did a write up for this. We didn't write the pilot. And also, and this is something, you know, this is something that we continue to

debate amongst ourselves. And that is, are we just writing this and making this or producing this? Are we doing that and also starring in it? Obviously with Buddy System, we did all that. But I don't know, the more time that passes, the more convinced we become that like,

you kind of have to, I don't know, you kind of have to make a choice. So I don't know if you're gonna get into any ideas. It's more recent that we've developed ideas that don't have us being the two, it doesn't start with two guys. Here's some you won't remember. I'll just read the one.

Do you remember a show called SOS? That was just a log line. Just begin to read it and then I'll remember it. Two brothers-in-law who happened to deeply hate one another find themselves- Stranded on an island. Marooned on an island after going overboard during a flight on a family cruise vacation.

They need to overcome their differences to survive on this island full of secrets. Think Lost meets Last Man on Earth. That was it. Yeah, and it was gonna be like a surreal comedy. Sunshine Ranch. Ooh, you gotta give me the first bit. People come to Sunshine Ranch,

Sunshine, to deal with addiction, but not the typical vices of drugs, sex, and alcohol, no. The staff of Sunshine Ranch specialize in, oh gosh, I can't remember this, strange addictions. There's a woman who's attracted to inflatable furniture. There's even a dude who's addicted to staring at his legs in a mirror.

Kurt finds himself sent to Sunshine Ranch after a family intervention over his addiction to new car smell, which has left him deeply in debt. This is a dumb idea. He insists he's normal. Ensemble cast, Rhett and Link are patients or potentially patient slash staff. That's a dumb idea.

Maybe that could actually- Potentially offensive. Yeah, it's also like insensitive. Wrong minded. Yeah. Yep, not proud of that. Making fun of people's addictions. I didn't read it to myself before I read it. No, it's fine, it's good.

We go into places and you just, you gotta just let the ideas flow sometimes. Opinionated. This one starts off Rhett and Link Bond. I don't even know if this is scripted. Rhett and Link bond over pointing out what's annoying about other people. I think that's just a statement.

That's a backstory statement. This gives them the idea to start a business which offers a very simple yet specialized service. I remember this. This spend one hour with someone and then tell them everything about them that's annoying. Can their friendship and business partnership withstand one another's razor sharp criticism?

So the premise for this, and again, this is not a developed show idea, but it is based on the idea that sometimes, and this may make us look like assholes, and we're not assholes to people directly. Let me just be honest about that or be, just get that out there. But especially back before the pandemic,

when we actually would go to social functions and meet new people, sometimes you'll like go to a party and you'll meet somebody and then we'll begin to have a conversation after the party and be like, did you meet that guy? Did you meet Kurt? Right. And it's like, oh yeah. And did you notice the thing he did with, did you notice that guy? Did you meet Kurt? Right. And it's like, oh yeah.

And did you notice the thing he did with, did you notice the thing that he did with his so and so? It's more observational humor, but yeah, it's like, we like picking people apart. And we also knew that like, if you took people who did that to an extreme, they will be assholes and they probably couldn't live with each other.

That's a good point. And let me be clear. I'm not, so Kurt Sutter is a friend. I'm not talking about Kurt Sutter. I just use the name Kurt. I think Kurt was in the last pitch. There's nothing annoying about Kurt. All right, let me go to feature ideas.

Okay, The Beast is Real. Okay, I remember this one. I definitely remember this one. I definitely remember this one. I mean, this one says 2018. Two friends are deep in the wilderness, dead set on locating a fabled forest beast, think Bigfoot, but cooler. But it turns out that they're escapees

from a mental hospital, what? We can't do that. But hold on, it's just to be clear, like this is one of those, and I do question whether or not you can do this anymore, and I realize it was only 2018 that we came up with this idea, but the idea was that you've got someone

that is wrongfully, has been wrongfully committed. Yeah, I mean, we've both been watching The Leftovers. Exactly. And there's a lot of that going on there. There's a guy and a dad in a mental institution. You question, it's sort of blurring the idea between reality and fantasy and are like, is this person like certifiable?

Yes. Or do, you know, because right now. It raises the question, yeah. If you say that you've had an experience with a Sasquatch, you know, most people think that you're not, there's something not quite right with you. Yeah. And so, but these guys have this commitment to finding this thing.

And there's a- Their resident psychiatrist, Julie, who has played along with the guy's imaginative ideas for years, joins their journey in an effort to bring them home safely and unharmed. When Julie is accidentally shot by one of them, they must abandon their journey and bring her to safety. Things are complicated when they actually encounter

the beast itself. Boom, spoiler alert. Tone is comedic, but gripping and real. Kinda like Swiss Army Man meets Oh Brother Where Art Thou meets Deliverance. I mean, again, this was what not- It's just an idea. It's just an idea.

Just throw ideas against the board. It hasn't been developed. We didn't pitch that to anybody. No, and I don't think we, yeah, this was what not- It's just an idea. It's just an idea. Just throw ideas against the board. It hasn't been developed. We didn't pitch that to anybody. No, and I don't think we, yeah, it's got some flaws. Charlie Horse saves the world. This was 2018, but this is something that was percolating for many years. The way I remember this idea starting,

and I'll let you share the idea as much as you remember it, or I can read it. We had these meetings with production companies and I think Paul set this up way back then where we would go and we would just have meet and greet meetings and say, yeah, we've got a bunch of ideas, but this is more about just knowing that we're here now.

Look at us, Rhett and Link, we're in LA. General meetings. Generals, they call it. Yeah. You go in, you sit in the lobby, and somebody behind a desk would like say, would you like some coffee or tea while you wait up to 40 minutes to go back for this general meeting

that is no one's priority. And we'd say, sure, the best thing about it is getting the drinks and sitting there and like looking at the posters on the wall of all the stuff they've made. And we didn't like, we still don't like general meetings, right? Because we're like, why are we talking about

things in general when we can talk about a specific idea? And so we just kind of lost our appetite because we were like, if we were having a general meeting with somebody, we'd be, it's like, well, okay, well, what are we gonna do together? We had a few and people would say, do you have any ideas? And we'd be like, yeah, we're working on a bunch of stuff.

We can come back to you. And it felt like we were like keeping things secret, but we really didn't have any ideas. So what we ended up doing that day is we were looking at the posters in the lobby, which signified the movies that this particular outfit had worked on. And we began to pick up on a theme

from some of the movies they worked on and we were like, let's take- Comedy, sci-fi. Let's take some of the genres that we're seeing represented in their repertoire and let's develop an idea. I still- Right now sitting on this couch and then when we went into the room

and they asked us, do you have any ideas? We pitched it like we had come up with it a long time ago. We developed this idea five minutes before the meeting then we go into the meeting and when they say, you got any ideas, we pitched the idea and they liked it. And they were like, okay, once you start writing that, come back to us, which is, you know, now we know is code for, I'll believe it when I see it.

Okay, I'll see what I can remember about this idea, but I gotta tell you, I still feel like this is a viable idea. I do too. It's just a little bit too big budget for us at this point. This might be if we actually make a movie and people like it. But Charlie Horse is a band, a band that was popular in the 70s or 80s.

Southern rock band of the 80s. I mean, we were thinking Alabama- Meets Allman Brothers. Meets Allman Brothers in the 80s. I mean, we were thinking Alabama country meets Allman Brothers in the 80s. And Charlie Horse is a really good name for a band. Yeah, because if you punch somebody in the leg, they get a Charlie Horse. But the premise was that NASA had been,

you know how NASA will broadcast, or at least the SETI Institute will broadcast radio signals into the universe to try to say, hey, here we are and presumably there's music. I know for a fact that in some instances, there's been music that's been broadcast. And so the premise of Charlie Horse Saves the World is that their music has been broadcast

since the 70s into space. 80s. Since the 80s into space and then now almost- In the 80s, the president chose to include their double platinum album, Black Snake Fever in a radio broadcast that was transmitted into deep space. It turns out the broadcast created some extraterrestrial super fans.

Yeah. You remember anything else? I remember that the aliens come to Earth. Over 30 years later. And their mission is to find Charlie Horse, which incidentally, it has disbanded by this point. And so Charlie or whoever's in charge of Charlie Horse. Probably Horse.

Has to go and try to assemble the band and get them back together so they can save the world. Yeah, it's not an easy task, but once the boys get back together, their new songs are so bad that they offend their alien visitors who vowed to destroy the planet. Can Charlie Horse pull off one last explosive performance

and save Earth? I love this idea. Yeah, yeah. There's definitely something to this one. Because if you look at 80s era Alabama, they're just such ridiculous characters. You can see Will Ferrell playing all of them. Well, and we were like,

we can confidently play these characters, but we can also get some more seasoned comedic actors to sort of take the lead on this one and be part of an ensemble. What about Catch and Release? That is a mockumentary about a famous fisherman about a famous fisherman who runs a, like a fishing channel. And there's a new like hotshot,

I can't remember exactly what happens, but it's basically a documentary about professional bass fishermen. Early 90s, Skeet Nixon, and hey, it's good, you got a good memory for this stuff. I mean, when you come up with it, it's easy to remember. Set in the early 90s, Skeet Nixon and Dale Dance are the most popular professional anglers in the world.

Yeah, they are. Which doesn't mean much. They each have primetime shows on Fish TV and their mortal enemies that have been locked in a bitter competition for over a decade. When fish TV's ratings plummet due to the lack of interest in professional fishing, a smooth talking reality TV producer talks Skeet and Dale into moving into a house together

to start a reality TV show. That's so good, this is still a good idea. We could make this with no money. This is a low budget idea, for real. This is not Charlie Horse saves the world. This is something that we could make for, you know, it costs a lot of money to make movies. So when we say something like $1 million,

you just need to understand that that's not a lot of money in the movie world, but you can, that's a sub $1 million movie right there. All right, I definitely remember when we came up with the idea to come up with an idea for a Christmas movie. I still believe in this. We were surfing, and then we went to that restaurant that overlooked the surf and I had on a winter coat and my swim trunks

and we sat out there and we were like, we can sit here and come up with a Christmas movie idea. Yeah. And we came up with the perfect gift. At a loss as to what to get his wife for Christmas, a man takes the advice of his 12 year old stepdaughter and uses a service that claims to select the perfect gift for someone by analyzing their DNA.

Hey, I'm hooked. When it turns out that the gift is in fact too perfect, the man finds himself going to extremes to get his wife back. Yeah. That one got a little fuzzy for me. Well, if I recall this one correctly, because I actually spent,

I actually spent way too much time on a write up on this one that I remember then, you know. Stevie ripped to shreds, I think. No, see now you're gonna throw Stevie under the bus. Hey, I agreed with her. Yeah, this is not, let me just, this is not a- Sorry, I didn't hear what you said. That scared the crap out of me.

I thought it was Stevie under the table, but it was your freaking... I have no problems with being told that something is not a great idea, and just because we can make it sound like it's a good idea to some of you guys, doesn't mean that it's a good idea. Because let me just go on and tell you that what ended up happening in this movie was

he gets his wife a power drill. Oh yeah, it got really weird. And it's like, well, he got his wife a power drill? And it's like, she's never been into like anything related to like fixing things up. She, you know, this is totally out of- Not because she's a woman or any sexist reason, just because of who she is as an individual.

But there was irony in the fact that she was a woman who was suddenly into a power drill, which I understand. Oh, she was into it, that's right. No, she was so into it that she becomes obsessed with the power drill and basically, it's kind of a phall was so into it that she becomes obsessed with the power drill and basically, it's kind of a phallic symbol. She doesn't have sex with the power drill but she becomes so in love with the power drill

and using it that she's screwing everything with this power drill and drilling everything. And it's kind of like a Bean John Malkovich kind of movie. Yeah and she becomes so obsessed with this power drill that then he has to go and meet with, now, we would never get Jeff Goldblum to play this particular part, but we had said, like Jeff Goldblum,

is this guy who's like a fixer, he's like a problem solver. Now, this- No, he also sold, he's the one who told him to buy her the power drill at first, but then it works so well that he has to go back to him. Yeah, it's the same guy. So it's not double mumbo jumbo, which I thought it was that we had just made the mistake.

He goes back to Jeff. He goes back to the source. To fix it. And so he gives him a recipe for how you undo someone's love for something and try to get them back. And it involves playing a song at a certain time. Like there's a weird, like a scene where they're on the beach

and he brings a jam box and he plays, Take On Me or something like that. I don't know, it was a weird one. It did not remain cohesive. No, but sometimes you just gotta keep following, you gotta keep following this thing. St. Rick. This is a lot easier to follow.

This is basic. Isn't this essentially what the Santa Claus is? Who cares? When Santa decides to delegate his Christmas Eve present delivery to a collection of regional managers. Yeah, yeah, yeah, yeah. And unemployed. You should, this one's gonna get made, man.

If you say this, somebody's gonna make this one. This is a good idea. Well, you know what, we're on record. Okay. An unemployed family man named Rick finds himself with the responsibility of delivering presence to children across the southern US. So he's like, again, we're going like redneck Rick humor.

Well, yeah. Yeah. It's a redneck Santa. Yeah, Santa has delegated the delivery of all his presents to multiple Santas. Southern Santa Rick. And Rick has been given the Southeastern United States. That's pretty great, man.

I still like that one, man. Saint Rick. That's a good one, that's a good one. All right, I gotta. Let's make that, let's make Saint Rick. See, here's the thing, you think that when we say that, then we can just, no, you can't just go make it. You gotta get somebody who's like,

yes, I think St. Rick is a great idea for a Christmas movie and I believe that you guys can write a great script and I'm gonna give you this money to do it. Yeah, I'm trying to find out. Let's see. And I will say, while Link is looking for more ideas, I will say. I found them.

That we are actually currently, just so you know, we are writing a script for a feature. We actually, we haven't, we haven't. Well, we're not currently writing it because. We haven't broken the story out completely, but we have a premise and we're not gonna tell you anything about the movie. But so we are actively working on a feature

that we are excited about, but we're also working on 19 other things. The television pilot's getting in the way of the movie script. And an unscripted television idea as well, but. Yeah. So, and everything else that you see. So it's, these things take time. We gotta, we're still trying.

We're throwing a lot of things at the wall and we always have. All right, this one's kind of like Charlie Horse, but totally different, an animated comedy called Glondor. Okay. In 1998, the then president of the United States commissioned NASA to have a one hour long Earth TV special

broadcast into deep space. Sound familiar? Well, no, this was our lower hanging fruit idea that worked on the same principle as Charlie Horse Saves the World. But it's animated. It was be a message to any alien civilizations out there, a window to life on Earth, as the president called it.

Of course, the special included a very narrow swath of American pop culture, including music videos from the most popular band at the time, like the Backstreet Boys, highlights featuring the current NBA MVP, thank Michael Jordan, clips from movies starring the blockbuster action hero, like a Bruce Willis type,

pictures of the 1998 Sports Illustrated swimsuit cover model. Okay, so stop. So I remember now. So they send this compilation of all this 1998 stuff, like you just said, popular athlete, popular supermodel, popular musician, et cetera. And the same exact thing that happens in Charlie Horse happens.

An alien civilization becomes obsessed with these people and comes to Earth, but in this version, because this is an animated show that needs a story engine, he kidnaps this alien civilization. The ruler of Glandor, Dale, his Glandorian name is unpronounceable in Earth languages, sent a team of Glandorians to kidnap the Earthlings featured on the broadcast.

Yeah. Of course, they're much older now. The American celebrities more than a decade past their prime are essentially prisoners on Glandor, living in a small earth-like village. The Glandorians did the best they could, but they messed up a bunch of details. And they're forced to hang out with Dale whenever he wants.

Yeah, I love this. They also make appearances at important Glandorian events. They're basically like the royal family. The royal family, but they're old and they can't do any of the stuff that they used to do. Like, you know. Washed up. Washed up.

Pop culture icons. Yeah, you know. Washed up pop culture icons. Yeah, celebrities in. The next one in the write-up is Fairview International, which became unattended baggage. And so in this particular document, that was the second thing that we put on here with much less fanfare is the thing that we ended up developing.

We also had Norman Normal on here. much less fanfare is the thing that we ended up developing. We also had Norman Normal on here. Norman Normal. That was a really old animated idea we had. Norman Normal actually made, actually went really far down the rabbit hole with that because we were working. Some producers out of New Zealand or Australia contacted us in our basement in Lillington.

This was back- This is a long time ago. This was like before Online Nation, just based on our videos, they were like, you guys are musical, you're comedians, let's develop something together. And we were like, well, we have an idea. Anybody contacts us from Australia or New Zealand,

we're like, we have an idea. Norman Normal. Norman is totally normal, except for one detail. He owns a briefcase, and this is kind of a kids animated show. We were thinking more kids back then. Norman owns a briefcase that contains two pint-sized superheroes, Rhett and Link.

Hey guys, that's us. This might seem useful until you learn that Rhett and Link each have a different superpower every single time Norman opens the briefcase. So Norman would be dealing with the everyday problems. He was a landlord of an apartment building. And so he had like normal, not sensational, but just normal problems.

You know, like, oh, there's a flooded pipe in this apartment complex. And so he would open up the briefcase and Rhett would have one superpower and Link would have another superpower. But it might be something stupid like, well, Rhett can grow, can shoot spaghetti out of his butthole and Link is invisible.

So it's like, okay, what can I do with spaghetti and somebody I can't see? And then he would close it and open it immediately and it would be two completely new novel superpowers. And he would do that until it got to superpowers that would help him with his mundane normal problem. Right, and the cool thing was we pitched this and they were like, we like it.

Let's do something with it. And they said, if you don't mind, I could take a stab at writing, starting the pilot. And remember, because they had written some stuff. They had produced some stuff. I think it was on like Australian television. Yeah, I don't remember many details about this. So we kind of trusted them and the dude wrote a pilot

and it was, we were kind of blown away. We were like, this is crazy. Do you have a copy of that? I'll look for it. And why didn't anything happen with that? Because I think we got cold feet. Let's see if there's crazy. Do you have a copy of that? I'll look for it. And why didn't anything happen with that? Because I think we got cold feet. Let's see if there's anything. Nope, don't have anything earlier

because I wasn't using, I didn't move it to my Google Drive. I could probably find it somewhere. It might be on my Dropbox. I mean, we've got some unscripted ideas. I don't wanna go through those because they're more recent. They're based off of like spinning off ideas from Good Mythical Morning into their own shows

that we would host. That's when Guestimators came back as a show we were calling The Magic Number. Norman Normal Draft 1.6 Doc. Oh, you found it. Pilot episode beat sheet draft 1.6. I remember he was on the- 2009. 2009.

It's crazy. Okay, opening title montage. Montage would be shot as an action hero show open from the 70s but slowly anticlimactic, showing anticlimactic events. That's great. Norman is doing very mundane everyday activities from brushing his teeth to minor repairs

around the apartment block. Rhett and Link are singing the opening theme. Each of Norman's mundane tasks ends with a superpower moment, mostly bringing a smile to the situation and a quick cut to Rhett and Link performing to acknowledge the origin of the superpowers. This seems like, oh yeah. Written by Andrew Horn.

Shout out to Andrew. Thanks for believing us in us back in the day. I mean, there's other stuff we can unearth. Maybe we'll do that at another time, but like that's pretty much everything that I had unearthed that I wanted to talk about. I mean, I definitely remember going in for the pitches and I do think, like you said, we can talk more about like,

what's the psychological impact on people who have all these creative aspirations, like in being rejected so many times. I mean, and sometimes things get really far, like with Legitimate, we were sitting in a room at ABC Network. Singing a song for them. Singing this song and they like all clapped afterward.

It was like, we were like, that was amazing. We nailed this song. We were talking about how Jack Black was gonna die and they were eating it up and then nothing. Well, okay. So I propose that we pick up, that we talk more about the existential crisis of rejection. Yeah, I think, you know.

In the next episode. So we'll take the next episode to talk about what experiencing that level and that amount of rejection has done and how that might relate to you and the things that you're trying to do, I will say that we live in a weird, we kind of have a unique situation because again, everything that we just talked to you about

is something that a very small, until now, a very small group of people knew about and they all had mostly said, no, we're not interested in this. But at the same time, we've been able to have enough things work to be able to make a living in the entertainment industry in a very sort of non-traditional,

sort of figure it out as you go a long way through the digital media and YouTube. And so it creates this lots of success that's sort of fueling the growth of our company and being able to have the margin to develop these traditional ideas and to get like what you might call rewarded and to be sort of accepted by this group of people

who've decided that they like the things that we create that have made it into the world. But at the same time to have this very long string of these things that we're super passionate about, that we're very excited about, that we're always thinking about and always trying to develop, repeatedly told no about those things.

There's a, I mean, again, what I'm saying is that some people are just getting told no all the time. Your classic starving artist who hasn't had anything work and is just being told no, and they may be super talented and may have great ideas. We have the privilege of having had success in this one area that gives us the margin to be able to develop these things

and then actually have somebody listen to them and then be told no. But it is an interesting thing that like, what has it done to be told no that many times? And why do we keep going right back to the drawing board and believing that we are gonna be able to make something like one of these things that we talked about? We'll talk about that next week.

But for now, hashtag your biscuits if any, I mean, if you love any of those and you wanna buy them, if you're a network executive, hey, hashtag your biscuits if any, I mean, if you love any of those and you wanna buy them, if you're a network executive, hey, hashtag your biscuits. And I've got a quick rec that ties directly into this conversation and especially begins to bleed over into the conversation that we'll have next week, which is something I've been thinking about a lot. It's a book that's a very quick read, very easy read,

called Big Magic by Elizabeth Gilbert. Now Elizabeth Gilbert is the novelist who wrote Eat, Pray, Love, which I have to say, I have not read the book or seen the movie. Me neither. And, but my wife was listening to or reading this book and then she was like, I think you might enjoy this book. It's like, it's all about, it's a nonfiction book

and it's all about the creative process and sort of the approach to creativity. I mean, one of the most helpful books that I ever read in terms of creativity was The Artist's Way, right? Which I recommend to any creative people. And I think that Big Magic is similar in that it is super inspirational and encouraging to you

as a creative person. And I think one of the points that she makes is that everyone is creative. You don't have to be a professional creative person to be creative and you don't have to be a professional creative person to create things and to live a creative life as she says. Anyway, there's a few things in there that we're like,

okay, I don't know if I believe fully all the things that you're saying in some of the things that, you know, there's sort of a super spiritual side to the whole thing. But I think regardless of where you kind of come down on that particular aspect of it, it's one of the most encouraging books. And it's interesting that, you know,

we just went through all these projects and we're talking about failure in the next episode because she tells so many stories about how to get through that rejection and people not believing in you and how so easily you can let those external expectations that you tie to your work bring you down and keep you from getting through to the next idea

and just the nature of ideas. Anyway, highly recommend it for anybody who even considers themselves even possibly a little bit creative, Big Magic. We'll talk at you next week. Until then, a little magic.