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Hey, it's Guy here. And before we start the show, I want to tell you about a super exciting thing.
We are launching on how I built this.
So if you own your own business or trying to get one off the ground, we might put you on the show.
Yes, on the show! And when you come on, you won't just be joining me, but you'll be speaking with some of our favorite former guests, who also happen to be some of the greatest entrepreneurs on earth.
And together, we'll answer your most pressing questions about launching and growing your business.
Imagine getting real-time branding advice from Sunbums, Tom Rinks, or marketing tips from Vaughn Weaver of Uncle Nearest Whiskey.
If you'd like to be considered, send us a one-minute message that tells us about your business and the issues or questions that you'd like help with.
And make sure to tell us how to reach you.
Each week, we'll pick a few callers to join us on this show.
You can send us a voice memo at hibt.id.wondery.com, or you can call 1-800-433-1298 and leave a message there.
That's 1-800-433-1298.
And that's it! Hope to hear from you soon, and we are so excited to have you come on the show.
And now, on to the show! I think your first just massive, massive video, and now has more than 30 million views, was eating a Carolina Reaper pepper.
Yeah, at the time it was the certified hottest pepper on the planet.
Is that like one of the most painful experiences of your life?
Uh, yes, I think so. Physically.
And a little bit emotionally.
I don't know why you did this.
I'll tell you why we did it so we get 30 million views.
Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.
I'm Guy Razz, and on the show today, how two boyhood friends turned a talent for making people laugh into one of the most successful YouTube partnerships ever, Rhett and Link.
When I got out of college, all I wanted to do was to become a reporter, to travel around the world to dangerous places and exotic locations, and tell stories.
Now, to be clear, I did do that though it wasn't nearly as glamorous as I imagined.
But for much of my early career, I worked for big media organizations, NPR and then CNN.
And for most of recent history, that was the only way to reach big audiences.
You had to figure out how to get inside a media company, usually an internship, work really hard to capture the attention of influential editors, and maybe just maybe you'd get a shot.
In many ways, it seemed nearly impossible for most people.
Because now, there are people on YouTube, several in fact, with tens and even hundreds of millions of subscribers, a bigger reach than even NPR or CNN or the New York Times.
It would have been inconceivable just ten years ago that a single person could build a media empire through YouTube.
But that is exactly what happened.
Ask any American kid under, say, 20 to name an anchor of a nightly news program on TV?
I'd be willing to bet fewer than a quarter could name one.
But ask them who Mr. Beast is, or Mark Rober, and again, I'm willing to bet that the majority would be able to answer that.
Because YouTube and also TikTok, of course, are where a growing number of people get their information, for better or for worse.
But what's remarkable about all of this is that, well, it's created some really significant businesses.
Now, we've done a few content creator stories on this show in the past, Casey Neistat, Dude Perfect, Hank and John Green, among others.
But we decided that this month, we're going to dig even deeper.
And take a look at a few really prominent creators to find out more about the mechanics of building a media company on YouTube.
And today, the story of Rhett and Link.
It's been estimated that their production company, Mythical Entertainment, brings in tens of millions of dollars a year in revenue.
Much of that money comes from advertising and brand endorsements, but also from live shows, merchandise sales, and other projects.
And not that long ago, both Rhett and Link were struggling to make a living from their videos.
Now, if you're not familiar with them, basically, they're best known for a daily YouTube show called Good Mythical Morning.
And on it, they talk about interesting stories in the news, or they try weird food, or do different stunts.
Across their channels, they've amassed over 75 million subscribers.
And judging by their financials, they built a pretty impressive business.
Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal have known each other since first grade.
They are best friends. They played in a band together in high school.
And by then, they had forged their friendship in a literal blood pact.
You know, it was such an important moment.
And yeah, it's so surreal.
It's very cinematic, right?
We were both just on board for, yeah, let's find a Sharper's Rock and shed some blood and sign a document.
Yeah, there actually was no shaking of hands.
It was taking the bleeding hands and pressing them on the document.
Right. It seemed more legally binding, which is why I carried it around in my wallet for a year and a half before I lost the entire wallet.
I mean, it's just, I think like there's this implausibility about the story because, I mean, you meet in first grade, you're friends, and you're really close friends.
You're almost like brothers.
And to the point where by the time you're in high school, you're both saying, like, we've got to keep this going.
We have something here.
There is some charisma, some dynamic that we both, like, you aren't articulating it that way.
But intuitively, you knew that there was something that two of you together could do more powerfully than you could do on your own.
And I also think that there was a sense that, and I don't mean this in a derogatory sense.
I mean, we felt different than the people around us, right?
We felt like we wanted to have a different kind of life.
We wouldn't have necessarily articulated it in that way.
But we were like, it feels like the way that we see things and the way that we, the things that we're passionate about, we don't have anyone else that we can point to besides each other that's sort of validating this tendency, right?
And so you have, I think if we were isolated, there would be this sense that, like, there's something wrong with me.
But when you have this other person that will kind of mirror it for you, you're like, okay, well, something's wrong with everybody else.
So you guys, I mean, I know you grew up, both of you, in, you know, it was a small town and probably a lot of most kids went to church on Sundays.
Were you guys involved and active in church in the same church as kids?
Yeah, that was a huge part of our lives and our friendship.
At church, we went to Bowie's Creek First Baptist Church.
And, you know, we, there were three times a week that we were there and the youth group that we were involved in, like that group of friends that we had was pretty tight knit and was, was a group that went all the way from young grades all the way through high school.
Right. And had like a close, true relationship with God that we really gravitated towards.
I mean, I for one just sort of really latched onto that.
And I was like, this is the most important thing.
Like if this is true, this trumps everything else in our lives.
This is the thing that we should be thinking about.
This is the thing that we should be living for.
All our decisions should be, you know, run through this matrix.
Yeah. I know that both of you went on to, to North Carolina State to go to college.
And I guess while you were there, you both joined Campus Crusade for Christ.
It's a national Christian organization on college campuses all over the country.
I don't know if they're as influential today as they were at the time.
Maybe they are, but you, you joined this group.
Yeah. We went to that first weekly meeting and it was like a hundred kids and the meeting starts with a video.
And it was the classic video that if you were in college at this time, whether you were a Christian or not, you saw this type of video is when people started getting access to be able to edit their own videos.
And it was this classic thing that you would see at the beginning of a conference where the speaker is late and he's got to go through all this stuff to just to make it into the meeting just on time.
Right. And, you know, there was a mannequin that was a him jumping off of something and landing awkwardly way.
It was horrible, but it was incredible to us.
And we were like, this is, this is wonderful.
This is so funny. And everybody's laughing and they're starting not in this solemn way.
He ran off screen and then he runs in the back of the building.
And he's got the same clothes on.
He's got the same clothes on.
So you're watching a video of this guy like running to get to the meeting and jumping off a building and then this actual guy in the same clothes runs into the room.
So it makes it seem like you were watching this whole thing in real time.
And he was a lot more hilarious than we expected.
Yeah. And we had been making some videos, you know, in high school as well and had a video camera that, you know, my dad originally bought.
Mostly for like school projects and stuff.
But then, you know, we get to college and go to the crew meeting.
It's like, oh, we could do that.
We can do that in our sleep.
We didn't just think, oh, this is a cool place we want to be.
We thought, oh, how do you get to be that guy?
How do you get to make the videos and make people laugh?
Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. And I guess you actually pulled it off, right?
Because as it turned out, when the emcee of those meetings graduated, you guys, you kind of asked to take over, right?
Is that right, Red? Yeah.
Like, I guess you became the emcee at the meetings and you'd play like videos that you guys made, like describe what kind of videos.
Well, they would vary, but like, Rhett would handle his own monologue, basically.
And there wouldn't be a video every single week, but one of them was, you know, at fall break, we went to a retreat center.
So we brought the camera and we started shooting all of this footage that we would later edit into one of those Rhett running around in the woods and jumping in the water and having like a fight scene with a moss man.
It was basically just me covered in algae.
Yeah. And we would score it to Led Zeppelin.
Yeah. And then we would show it at the next weekly meeting.
Yeah. All the music, like all the music that we put under all these, ACDC, Led Zeppelin, all this really subversive music that the Christian culture at Lard saw as Satanic.
We were just like, guys, this is the best music.
We're going to put it under these videos.
And they just kept letting us get away with it.
So this was, I mean, this was basically like two years of college where you could just experiment in front of an audience that probably just thought it was funny and hilarious.
And you could just, I mean, you could just try a bunch of things.
Yeah. When we think about it like these days though, it's funny because we definitely spiritualized the entire thing at the time, right?
So there was this, hey, this is all for Jesus.
And like, and let me tell you, it was working.
I mean, there was about 100 people coming to the meeting, 150 max, maybe the beginning of sophomore year.
And by the time we graduated, there was over a thousand.
Wow. And I'm not saying the meeting went to a thousand just because of us making the meeting fun.
This was happening on a lot of campuses where it was just, it was just time and place.
Things were kind of exploding.
We were kind of right place, right time.
But we were creating this thing that was the most fun place to be on a Thursday night on the campus of NC State.
Wow. And I guess it was just so that people could come here about Jesus, but we were trying really, really hard.
Oh yeah. And I guess what started to happen is that the leadership of Campus Crucified for Christ noticed that you guys were attracting huge numbers of people, right?
And I guess you guys started to get invited to host other events like this big Christmas conference that they would do in North Carolina every year.
Yeah. Yep. So you were assuming this was like the same type of comedy, like really loose sketches and that type of thing?
Yeah. It was somewhat polarizing because we brought that irreverent, really silly comedy that had nothing at all to do.
We didn't make sketches.
We didn't do any comedy that was trying to make a point about Jesus.
It was all very separated from that.
It was like, this is something that if you saw it completely divorced from the setting, you would just be like, this is clean comedy.
Maybe these guys are Christians or Mormon or something because they're not cursing, but you wouldn't be like, they're trying to make some spiritual point with it.
I mean, to be a Christian comedian, like to actually use the term, that's a hard thing to do.
Right. If you want to judge it based on its comedy alone.
Yeah. Well, in that calculation, which was kind of accidental, is honestly the reason that we're sitting here talking to you today because it was the fact that we were making comedy that could be divorced from that Christian setting.
Right. And just some of those sketches and songs and videos that we made for those conferences are the first videos that ever got uploaded to YouTube.
Hmm. And meanwhile, a lot of other things are going on in your lives at that point, like you both graduate and you both get pretty good jobs in engineering.
I think, Link, you went to IBM and Rhett, you went to go work for a company called Black and Veatch.
But you were still on the side doing these events for Campus Crusade for Christ.
Yeah. And I think pretty early on in both of your careers, you both started to think about leaving, right?
Yeah, there was a guy who was on staff at Campus Crusade, Shane was his name, and he sat down with us and was like, I really think there's something here.
I think you guys can bring this to Campus Crusade full time.
Find a way to make this a full time thing where you guys can basically be comedians for Christ.
Yeah. At the time, just to put it in context, this is I think 2001 or two.
And I think both of you were newly married.
Both of you got married at a pretty young age, right?
Right. Yeah, as soon as we graduated.
Yeah. And they are still your wives.
These were your girlfriends at the time.
And presumably, by the way, as an aside, they had to, they were marrying into this friendship too.
I mean, they had to accept that their husbands were going to be spending a lot of time together.
So, presumably, the wives had to get along too.
Yeah, and they were actually instrumental in that same timeframe of when we were making the decision to do this full time.
Our other best friend, Greg, for his wedding, we, for his rehearsal dinner, we wrote a song about him and about how his wife was about to see him naked for the first time, because that was true, because that's the way we did things, right?
You waited until the wedding night for that.
I think the lyric was actually, we've seen Greg naked soon you will too.
Right. Hopefully, you enjoy it more than we do.
Yeah. And so, we sang that song.
To all of his family and her family at the rehearsal dinner.
How did they respond to that?
They loved it. Okay. We'd like to think that they loved it.
They did love it because, that's just not me, you know, revisionist history in this thing, because on the way home, Jesse and Christie, Jesse, my wife, Christie, Link's wife, they said, we don't know what it is, but y'all need to do, this doesn't just need to be something that you do occasionally, or you just do for a Christmas conference.
Like, y'all need to do something with this.
So, it felt like, and again, this is the way that we thought at the time, this was the Lord orchestrating through his sovereignty all these different life events to bleed us to the next stage.
So, this really prompts you guys to leave your jobs, to go full time for Campus Crusade for Christ, and I think you had to raise money to pay yourselves.
Part of your job was to get the money, to raise the money that would pay for your salaries.
First of all, I'm assuming your parents were also supportive of, you know, your devotion to your faith, but was any part of them like, you know, guys, really important to support the church and Christian your faith, but like engineering is a really stable job, and I don't know about this.
Like, did either of your parents kind of express that?
I mean, there was definitely trepidation that rippled its way through my extended family, you know, to leave my engineering job.
Which is a big deal because you're, you know, you were one of the first in your family to go to college.
Yeah. And by the way, our goal was $41,500 a year all in family salary.
This is what you get. This is the salary, but you have to go out and raise it.
And did you guys have a, one or both of you also had a child at this point, right?
Yes, Lily was just born.
And Jesse was pregnant with Locke.
So you guys, when you decide to do this, to pursue this full time, essentially you were going around basically doing a comedy tour of, you know, of college campuses and, you know, meeting with campus crusades for Christ members, basically.
Yeah. The thing that we had talked the local leadership into is evangelism training, right?
So, you know, the 80s and the 90s were really characterized by a method of Christian evangelism, you know, telling people about Jesus that revolved around big flashy events that would gather a lot of people into one place.
A lot of times for another reason and then share the gospel with them and we, you know, the classic bait and switch.
And we were really, really conscious of that.
Like we talked about how this bait and switch evangelism seems really insincere.
It doesn't seem to really respect people very well.
And so why not just through natural sort of relational connection, let them know about Jesus and what Jesus can do for them.
And so that's what our ministry was.
It wasn't creating big flashy events for non-Christians.
It was creating weirdly specific comedic seminars for Christians.
But we also cared about entertaining and can we construct a job where we can have our cake and eat it too?
All right, so you're going around basically performing and presumably becoming kind of, you know, sort of celebrities on the on the crew circuit, right?
Like people started to know in that community, know about you guys.
Yeah, it was starting. And it's funny, even today, occasionally, if we meet somebody who's a fan, they'll be like, how is that the 2002 Greensboro Christmas conference?
Dude, don't talk to anybody about it.
If you have footage, destroy it.
But yeah, in order to promote our appearance and to kind of build into like the, okay, you can, you'll want to show up for our training.
We made a website. Redlink.com.
Rhett and link.com. Well, we had all of these videos that we had made at Christmas conferences and now for this seminar.
And this was, of course, pre-YouTube right at the time of YouTube being invented.
And people were asking us at the time, in 2005, early 2006, people would say, why don't you guys have a YouTube?
And we'd be like, because we have a website.
You know, YouTube is for people who can't make their own server.
And we saw the Apple launched, not only a thing called podcasts, but video podcasts at the exact same time.
Yeah. So for us, we were like, okay, we can make a video every week to put on not only our website now, but we can put it on Apple video podcast.
Hopefully we can get noticed there.
We can grow our audience on our website by having a weekly show.
Yeah. Welcome to the Rhett and Linkcast.
This podcast is about...
And you would sit behind a desk, a table in your, in the office of the campus crusade, right?
It was the campus crusade conference room and we went in there and we set up a microphone on the table and we sat shoulder to shoulder.
And we talked very quietly because people were working in the office.
And talk about what? What did you talk about?
Velcro. Just dumb stuff.
The Swiss guy in George, he called it Velcro because of the French words velour and crochet.
So we like formatted the show and then at a certain point we introduced a song that we are written about Velcro.
One side is fuzzy, one side is prickly, separately useless, but together so sticky.
And it featured a music video and all of this was in like a 12 minute to 15 minute video we called a podcast.
It's amazing because you were doing this in like 2004, right?
And there was no, there was just like a minuscule audience for this and there was no way to make money off of it.
It was just, it was like a creative outlet to give your existing audience or the people that you were going to go perform for a chance to see you, to see who you were before you got there.
And that's the only reason that we did that format.
We weren't trying to make money with the creative experimentation.
It was more about what are the ways that you could reach an audience.
And so that freedom of not having to worry about the money, let us to be like, there's no money in podcasting.
But this is a great way for us to stay in touch with the audience that we're building.
And when we're talking about reach, I have to assume you're talking about hundreds or a few, maybe thousand people who would see these videos.
At most, yeah. Hundreds or thousands of people at most.
I think 2006 is when you launched a YouTube channel.
And YouTube, this is early YouTube.
YouTube is like for weirdos.
Yeah. It's basically just a server.
It's another server for us that we don't have to pay for.
Yeah. But we saw it, we only did it because people started taking our videos from our website and uploading them to YouTube and they were getting thousands of views versus hundreds of views.
And we were like, oh, we should do this on purpose.
So at what point did you leave Campus Crusade for Christ?
Did you leave that job? I mean, because I know you were, I mean, you're still, you're making videos.
I saw a video from this time as it's a hugely popular video you guys did called the Facebook song where you are sort of parroting Facebook.
And it's the two of you in a Facebook window.
I mean, you're kind of just singing about the weirdness of Facebook at the time.
I'm hooked on Facebook.
I used to meet girls hanging out at the mall.
But now I just wait for them to ride on my wall.
Take a look. We were having the success of individual videos like the Facebook song.
To the point where we got noticed by some producers who were putting together a show for the CW called Online Nation, which was going to be a internet clip show.
Wow. And so they reached out and said, we want to feature some of your videos on the show.
And by the way, we would love some of the hosts to be internet personalities.
Well, we got the offer to be two of the four hosts.
And at that point it was like, hold on, the CW?
That's a real TV network.
The network is asking us to be hosts of a show that's going to be like on TV that you could get with an antenna?
At that point, we said, OK, we forget this because there's a lot of things that have happened over the past 20 years.
But that moment felt, I remember waking up one morning and thinking, I'm going to host a network television show.
This doesn't feel real.
That was the first moment there was something that just didn't feel real.
At that point, it was like, you can't say yes to this without officially saying you're not going to be on staff with Campus Crusade.
Yeah. But we kind of felt like it was God, right?
Oh, yeah. We certainly had to have felt that.
Well, that's a wonderful way that that worldview worked for us was that, oh, this opportunity is obviously from God.
So it was easy to say yes to it.
So they essentially offered you the job to be the host of the show called Online Nation in 2007.
Actually, pretty sort of maybe ahead of its time kind of an idea because YouTube was still so new.
But the idea was you guys were going to host a show that was going to show clips, like funny clips from the internet.
We recorded eight episodes.
They showed four of them before they decided.
We were going to do it forever.
This was going to be our lifestyle.
Probably big money, I mean, comparatively big money to what you were making more than 41,000 a year.
I actually think that if I recall correctly, we each got paid $8,000 per episode.
So by doing eight episodes, we each increased our annual salary by 50% from what we were getting.
So this felt like earth-shattering levels of money.
Now, we were so excited about this, right?
And so we were like, we're going to make a big event of this premiere.
We had not seen the show.
They didn't let us preview the show, give any notes.
That was not our role. And we gather everybody that we know.
Every family and friend.
In Harnett County and the surrounding counties.
I mean, we had a few hundred people.
It was like a wedding. We were in the paper.
I'd only been in the paper once when I called a 55-pound amberjack when I was in middle school.
So this was a big frickin' deal.
And we invite everybody over to watch a 22-minute show.
Yeah. And then the show starts.
It was a big buildup. We sit there and I began to realize that there's a lot of courtesy laughing happening.
And then the other thing that was dawning on us at the time is that they did not use anything that we wrote.
And the reason that we wrote our own stuff is because we thought that everything that we were saying that they had written was just the cheesiest possible.
I remember the point where we were filming and they were like, now we're just gonna get some wild lines as if you are reacting to videos we've not yet found or cleared.
And then the teleprompter would just scroll and it would be like, that was unbelievable.
Zoinks, you know. How do you come up with this stuff?
None of our rewrites made the cut.
So that airs. And did you feel like maybe this was not gonna be a long-term play?
I mean, what was your sense?
Did you think that, I mean, I guess I'm bearing the lead here.
The show was canceled after four episodes.
It was canceled after four episodes.
Hey, that's a full month guy.
And what we saw to use the Christian metaphor, you know, we got to close one door and open up another.
And the door felt like it was now closing very quickly.
But we thought, listen, one of the producers of the show, Paul Cockrell, agreed to be our manager.
And so the idea was, hey, regardless of where this online nation thing is going, maybe we can use this to secure another opportunity.
We had been painted this vivid picture of what our future in Hollywood was gonna be like by the other producer of online nation.
Remember what David said?
I remember him saying, before you know it, your wife's gonna be pushing that stroller down the streets of Malibu.
And I was like, yeah, that's right.
I had no idea that no one actually lives in Malibu unless you're like somebody, a household name.
There's not many places to actually push a stroller in Malibu.
You get to drive to the shopping center and get in your car.
Yeah, you wouldn't really push the stroller in Malibu, but yes, I can understand what he's trying to get at there.
Yeah, so he did sell this idea.
And I think we've always had this inflated sense of confidence.
And even when we see something failing, we're like, well, the reason that's failing is because we didn't get to do what we wanted to do.
We didn't get to say the things that we wanted to say.
So if we can just find somebody that we can talk into letting us do what we want to do.
So at that point, we went around having what we were told were general meetings with production companies, producers.
And we didn't really understand what that meant.
It meant just get to know you.
But what we saw that was, this is a meeting that's currently about nothing, so we need to make it about something.
So we would do things like sit in the lobby of a production company, look at the posters representing the properties that they had made, and then come up with a pitch based on how these different properties meet.
This is the stuff that they're into.
Oh, they have like an alien movie and they did like a music documentary.
And then they call us back, Rhett and Link.
So-and-so executive will see you and we go in there and we just start pitching the idea that we've just hatched as if it's the reason we're there.
We got this idea for this movie where...
It's a good idea. I still want to make this movie by the way.
This washed up country music group, like back in their heyday, they sent their music to space, you know, like when they did that with the Voyager spacecraft.
And then aliens intercepted the music and an alien civilization has fallen in love with this particular band and now they're invading Earth and they want to get the band back together.
And that band basically has to get back together to save Earth's population.
It's great. And so we're just, we're like, this is how it's done, right?
We have plenty of ideas.
And he was like, well, I just want to hear the ones you're most excited about.
Yeah. And we're like, oh, you mean the one we just came up with in the lobby?
Because we just thought this is the game and this is how it works.
And so we did a lot of those actually.
Yeah. I mean, the show is canceled.
You're hoping maybe there might be a lifeline, but nothing.
Right. But the thing that was working was we were continuing to make YouTube videos that were getting more and more views.
And we were trying to invent a business model and what we ended up doing was we would construct a sketch or a song and then we would reach out to somebody to sponsor it because this is before the partner program.
You didn't make any money just by getting views on YouTube.
Putting videos on YouTube, that was it.
There was no business model in 2007.
So right around that same time, like 2007, like in that era where we're trying to make something happen in Hollywood.
So we wrote a song about Cornhole.
Yes. Which I've seen and it's like you're wearing mustaches and you're tailgating outside of the stadium.
Yeah. It's kind of like a country song about...
Yeah. And you're playing Cornhole.
And Olympic Sport by 2024, by the way.
Exactly. That was what we were claiming the song.
It reminded me a little bit of like the Flight of the Concords kind of approach.
They were definitely influences.
Big influences. I'm sure.
Yeah. We were like the down home North Carolina boy version of Flight of the Concords.
Yeah. The sort of the PG version.
Yeah. So you make this Cornhole video.
So we would literally write the song and then we would cold call companies that sold Cornhole equipment.
With the help of my dad, I put together a little contract where it was, hey, you give us $2,000 upfront to make this music video.
And then we have a $20 CPM.
You know, you just sort of started hearing about what that was.
So you'd say for every thousand views, we get 20 bucks from you.
Yeah. Okay. And we end up calling some guys from a company in Ohio, AJJ Cornhole.
And they're like, this is exactly the kind of thing that we want to do.
We love the idea of getting the word out.
We see what you guys have done.
And so we put their Cornhole equipment in the song and then at the end of the video, you see there's a little ad that pops up and says, hey, get your Cornhole equipment at AJJCornhole.com.
Yeah. We probably ended up making like 25 grand off that video.
Yeah. I mean, that video has like 1.8 million views as of.
Yeah. So they stopped paying us at some point.
Yeah. We put a cap on it. But at that point, we were like, okay, this is how we control our destiny.
But at that time, I mean, 2007, man, I mean, most mainstream media organizations just thought of YouTube as like nothing, as a joke, right?
And so how, I mean, even to convince small companies that this was a viable place to advertise must have been really hard.
Yeah. It was a lonely landscape.
Yeah. We had to make it financially viable.
And it, but you know, the interesting thing is our whole, we were so much older than everybody else.
So we had to do the responsible thing and figure out a business plan.
Yeah. You know, we weren't really connecting with other YouTubers because they were substantially younger than we were and they were just expressing themselves and not, they didn't have kids.
You know, they didn't have failed careers in television hosting.
They were, they didn't need the money.
They were still in their bedrooms.
But it, it was all those years between graduating from college and this point in the story, it bought us the time we needed to create enough content to then have a brand on YouTube.
Once YouTube became a thing.
Yeah. And now it was like, we're starting to be some money coming in if we could just tap into it.
Tell me a little bit about your lives at this moment in time.
I mean, you had this great, you know, Hollywood, you know, network contract that, that kind of fell apart.
And now you are both in your early thirties.
You've got young families.
Were you stressed out about your situation, about money, about health insurance, about any of that?
It was definitely very stressful for me, you know, having this month to month experience.
Every dotted line that was signed at the bottom of a contract that we kind of invented ourselves, reset a ticking clock in my brain.
Oh, well, you know, you're still running out of money.
You're still running out of money.
When we come back in just a moment, how Rhett and Link get a gig with Alka Seltzer and why Rhett puts on a lobster costume to make the worst commercial ever.
Stay with us. I'm Guy Raws, and you're listening to How I Built This.
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