Welcome to Ear Biscuits.
I'm Link.
And I'm Rhett.
This week at the Round
Table of dim lighting,
we're going to be filling in large gap,
not like a construction project,
Kinda.
A large,
It's got that magnitude.
gap in our past
that we're calling the Lost Years.
Yeah, and I say it's a large magnitude,
I really don't know if to the listener
how they're gonna process this
or how much they're gonna be interested
but for us, this is a really big deal.
There's many parts of our journey of
how we got to where we are right now
that we've told many times I mean,
we've told a lot of stories a lot of times
how we met on the first day of
first grade blah, blah, blah.
We told that story a lot.
We told the story about
how we first got on YouTube
that we had a website.
So we didn't think we need a YouTube,
somebody stole a video we
made called Pimp My Stroller,
put it on YouTube and
that's how that started.
Well, and the question that we get,
the story that has been told repeatedly
Yeah.
in multiple interviews,
multiple articles is, okay.
Rhett and Link, you guys were engineers,
and then you stop being engineers
and you became full-time YouTubers.
And that is a very simple story
that is not exactly true.
Yeah.
I wouldn't say that it's a lie.
It's just not the whole truth.
And I would think that's
surprising because,
more than a decade of us,
talking to you about us
and so many stories about our shared past,
you'd think we would
have shared everything
there is to share
but there's a big part
and there's a lot of details
that we've never shared before.
And today we are going to share.
And I would go as far as to
say is that these details
and you'll understand in a second
why they haven't been shared
and why we're sharing them now.
I think they constitute,
ironically, the most significant reason
that we are who we are today,
and we're doing what we do today
and the true story of how we
got to be doing this weird job
full-time the two of
us from North Carolina,
small town on got to where
we're doing this job right now.
This aspect of the story
is really the reason
that we're doing it.
It is the how we got to be Rhett and Link.
Yeah.
How we got to be
professional entertainers.
Yeah, and we've never
connected those dots.
Okay, so the glaring
question at this point is,
why haven't you talked about this before?
Why haven't you shared this?
If this is such a big deal,
this is why you're doing
what you're doing right now.
Why have you never talked about it?
Because you talked about
everything else multiple,
multiple times.
And there's a conflict.
Well, look, I'm gonna start with
why we're talking about it
now and then we'll talk about
why we haven't talked about up until now.
Okay.
The overwhelming momentum of this podcast.
Yeah.
This podcast, I think, is the main reason.
The overwhelming momentum
has been a move towards the personal.
I've been sharing about going to therapy
and the stuff that I've been
dealing with in therapy,
Link have been sharing about the stuff
he's been going through
with relatives illnesses
and grandfathers dying.
I've been crying on this.
Your daughter's getting surgery.
Yeah.
And it's gotten so increasingly personal,
which isn't something that
we ever really intended
just kind of just
happened when you sit down
and talk to each other for a few years,
it start to become almost uncomfortable,
that we had not really delved into,
what we're going to talk about.
Because you start to
dance around those things.
I mean,
it's not that we feel like
we owe this story to anybody.
But I feel like it's been
a rewarding experience
to use, as we taught it
before to use Ear Biscuits
as a venue for us to
process our friendship
and our lives with each other.
And if people find benefit
in that, then that's great.
As a side effect of
this being something that we enjoy,
and this rewarding for us.
Yeah.
I will also say that I do remember
when we're doing the interview,
part of Ear Biscuits,
and we would like really drill
into people's personal lives.
Felt a little, imbalanced.
Because we knew that there
was a section of our lives
that we just weren't ready to talk about.
Right.
But we always approach
talking to other people
with the assumption that,
well, maybe they're not ready,
but we can get them
ready to talk about it.
And that just didn't,
in retrospect it I
don't think it was fair.
I agree with that.
And I do think that's a small
contributing factor to this,
but I'm excited.
I'm a little nervous think my heart rates
a little higher than a normal rate.
Look at your watch and tell me.
I took my watch off.
I had no heart rate, its over there.
You're dead.
So the reason that we haven't shared this
these Lost Years is because
they are very much tied
to our past in terms of our
spiritual and religious history.
Yeah, I'd say our religious upbringing,
our spiritual past,
and so you might immediately
start to guess okay,
I have my guesses
I can get why they wouldn't
have talked about this.
It's a personal topic.
And it's not that we've never shared any,
if you you can find,
Right.
you can search on the internet
and come to some conclusions
and find some information about this.
It's not that we've been
completely locked down about this.
But I think in general, we've
just avoided talking about
religion in general, because
it's a super divisive topic,
just like politics happened to be and,
this isn't the space
that we typically discuss
those kinds of things
Right.
our brand,
so to speak, is super inclusive,
and there's so much opportunity
for people to get divided
as soon as you start
talking about anything
as personal as religion or politics.
And we value the opposite of division.
Right?
Unity, I guess.
Yeah, yeah.
But I mean, it's also we felt that
it hasn't been necessary to share it.
I mean, we thought
it could have been taken the wrong way.
It could serve as a
distraction from potentially
from what we were trying to do,
which is be entertainers,
to be comedians, to
connect with an audience
in a way that just brings
light into their lives
but we thought it might be
a distraction from that,
those are some of the reasons also,
it's in interviews
whenever we would kind of
sidestep the question,
'cause we always get the question of like,
what was it like to quit
engineering and become YouTubers?
How did you decide to go
all in on entertainment
in this fledgling
platform where nobody knew
what was going on or
if you'd ever make it,
you had kids?
And it wasn't practical to
answer that question with
well, let me tell you
the very non-circuitous
or circuitous path that we took to get.
Yeah, it's not a soundbite.
It's not a soundbite.
It's not an easy answer.
In fact, the answer itself,
when given in whole
kind of becomes a story
in and of itself.
And that wasn't the story that
we were being interviewed about.
That may sound a little complicated,
but it's just because
the story isn't clean.
It's not clean, it kind goes
in a lot of different places
and that's the story
that we're gonna tell it.
Yes we're going to share
that dirty story today.
But I think another reason,
which is opens up a
whole other can of worms,
which we will also get into.
And that's over time
our personal beliefs have been evolving.
We've been in process.
So as we've had inklings and
wanting to talk about things
and share about them, it's like,
well, everything's in flux.
Right?
And I don't know if that's an exaggeration
to say everything
because I think that's
probably pretty accurate.
Yeah.
Everything's been in flux.
Well stated simply, when we
started YouTube, in 2006,
we would have described ourselves
as evangelical Christians,
and I'll explain what we
mean by that in a second.
And that is not how we would
describe ourselves now in 2020.
Right?
So, I mean, at certain points
when we describe ourselves that way,
we also knew that,
if you label yourself it attracts
people putting their expectations
and their assumptions on
that label then on to you,
and then good, bad or indifferent
in the least we feared
it would be a distraction
from just how we are simply
trying to be entertainers
and to connect with an audience.
Right?
We perceive that it could have been
even more troublesome than that.
And then as our personal beliefs evolved,
it became even more complicated.
And it was okay.
There's certain aspects of
what certain people might
associate with a label
that I don't wanna be associated with.
Yeah.
So let's continue to not talk about this.
Yeah.
Now, because we're talking about it today,
does that mean that we've
arrived at some personal
spiritual journey and therefore,
we're ready to share all the conclusions
and wisdom that we've come to.
We've come out the
other side of something,
and now we're ready to talk about it.
No, that's also not the case, right?
No,
I do think that there has been a certain
process that has taken place that has,
we now have kind of cutting
some conclusions about
who we were at the time.
Yeah.
That I think does make it
kind of easier to talk about
and also just kind of understanding
and becoming more
comfortable with our past
and the process that we've been through.
And it's something that we
talk about a lot personally,
the two of us, it's
something we talked about
with our friends a lot.
We have not and also comfortable enough
with where we are right now.
And I'm talking about from a
spiritual faith perspective.
Not that we've arrived at anything
but that we're comfortable
having not arrived.
Speaking about it here,
in a way where we can foster
some sort of conversation.
Yeah.
Not only between the two of us,
but with you as you listen.
Yeah.
So, okay.
So what is this gonna look like?
So, today,
we're gonna talk about the Lost Years,
we're gonna fill in that gap
between basically starting in high school
and coming all the way up to 2006
when we started our YouTube channel,
really getting into what
especially did it look
like in college and after college
and engineering and all the
other stuff that happened.
Yeah, I would say, for that part,
it's the story.
And by the way we have notes
that if you hear those,
if you're listening,
or if you're watching
us on the video version,
you see this.
We usually don't have any notes.
We have an outline.
There's so much to cover.
We've got dates and the order
and we wanted to get the details, right.
So that's why we're gonna be
referencing some of this stuff.
So what we're trying to do
is we're trying to outline
a multiple episode, plan of attack
for how we're gonna roll out
the things that we want to talk about.
So, like Rhett said, in this episode,
we're gonna connect all the
dots on how we actually got
to where we are now.
And I think that's the
story of how two boys
who made a blood oath to
create something together,
gave up that dream, studied
engineering instead,
but then gave up those careers
to become Christian missionaries instead,
and then somehow achieve
their boyhood dream anyways,
that's the journey that we
wanna take you through today.
And then in the next couple of weeks,
'cause we're gonna talk
about this for a while again,
I don't know how you're gonna take this
some of you are gonna be like,
oh, I've been waiting for
you guys to talk about
this forever.
So you mean, why are you
talking about it this
Right.
forever.
But we're going to talk about it.
And so this week, we fill in the gaps.
And then the next couple of weeks,
we're actually gonna tell our
individual personal stories
of kind of how we got to where we're at.
We share a lot in common,
but the stories are very
personal and individually
the same time, so we thought
we should talk about it
from a personal individual perspective.
So we're each gonna do that.
So that's gonna be more of the like,
spiritual religious belief.
Yeah.
Personal journey, evolution type stuff.
And then we're gonna just
see where it goes after that
when we invite you guys to get
involved in the conversation
using hashtag EarBiscuits.
If you have questions that come up,
comments, thoughts, opinions,
as we tell our story,
we wanna hear from you.
We want you to be a
part of the conversation
and then, we're not saying
that the podcast is changing,
and now it's all about this.
No.
But for a few episode, this
is what it's gonna be about
as we kind of dig into
this and explore it.
Yeah, these three,
and then I think we'll be looking at
where the conversation goes
on hashtag EarBiscuits.
And I anticipate later down the road,
we might skip a few episodes
and then come back to
responding to the conversations
that are being had around
these three episodes.
So hashtag EarBiscuits for that, but.
We're gonna get into the Lost Years,
but first, we're gonna let
you know that you can buy Link
T-shirt because that's what we do.
Well, it's interesting.
That's how we pay for this.
It's interesting because this T-shirt,
like what we're gonna
talk about today is gonna
make sense of this T-shirt.
This is me in college dancing,
Right.
in a 70s outfit.
I Remember, I wasn't there
but I know where you were
and I know why you were there.
Dance like no one's watching.
I know all the context
that led up to that moment.
And I felt weird when just
like they dug up this photo
and they wanted to put it on a shirt.
I thought it was funny
but then I was also like,
yah, but I've never talked about
why I was dancing like this.
Well, 'cause you were dancing.
I was just dancing,
you're dancing.
But a lot of people were watching.
You can get that shirt that Link
is a little bit embarrassed
about for reasons
I guess we'll go into at mythical.com
along with all kinds of
other cool mythical things.
Wrap your boys mythical.com.
All right, where do we wanna start?
Well, I said a second ago that I thought
that it was important to define
what we mean by evangelical Christian
because I think that may mean
a lot of different things
to a lot of different people.
But I just want you all
to understand exactly
who we were and what we
thought what we believe
because I think that's
a good starting point.
Do it.
So to us,
being an evangelical Christian, meant that
we believe that the
Bible was the word of God
meaning the Creator of the universe,
chose to communicate
the breath of his wisdom
through a book that he
inspired people to write.
It's called the Bible, the Old Testament
and the New Testament.
And in the Bible, you learn about Jesus
who is the Son of God.
And he is the only way that you can have
a right relationship with God,
and then one day end up being in heaven.
And what that essentially means is that
if you don't go to Jesus,
if you don't believe in Jesus,
if Jesus has not forgiven
you of your sins,
then you basically face
judgment of your sins,
when you die, you're going
to face God's judgment,
that's called hell.
And so everybody on Earth,
who does not put their faith in Jesus,
so if you come from a different religion,
too bad, you're not gonna
be with God in the end.
That essentially the sort
of the theological view
that we had and a lot of people do have.
Yeah.
And the word evangelical
to me brings to mind
the component of wanting
to then convert people,
Right, because.
If you believe that, then.
You want people to be there with you.
If you truly believe that you
should be motivated by that
to inform people, and if not persuade them
to put their faith in Jesus so that
Right.
they can be saved.
Because evangelism is basically
sharing the good news,
sharing the gospel, sharing that truth,
that without Jesus, people
are gonna be judged.
And so you want to tell
as many people about Jesus
as you can, and you want your life
to be representative of that truth.
So we grew up in a church
that wholeheartedly believe this.
I mean, we actually took you back in
the Buies Creek Documentary
that's on Good Mythical Morning.
We showed you Buies Creek
First Baptist Church
where we both grew up.
When you move there in first grade,
and we met at school, we were
both going to that church.
And it was a big part of our lives.
And a big like, all of our
closest friends were there.
When our closest friends.
Closest friends, yeah.
Right.
It was our world.
It was what oriented
everything that we thought
in did and of course,
as we got older and kind
of became teenagers.
I think that when you're
in that environment,
as you become a teenager,
people kind of take a
couple of different paths.
Some people are like, oh, if this is true,
then this is the most
important thing that there is,
if there really is the spiritual reality,
and there really is this eternity
that people need to make a decision about.
This is way more important than girls,
than sports, than academics
and where I'm gonna go to college
and what I'm gonna do, this
is the pre-eminent truth
that affects every single
decision that I make.
And that is something
that started to permeate us
very deeply in high school.
Yeah.
I think be good to skipped
to the Wax Paper Dog,
Yeah.
at this point.
That's a good example of.
When we were in high school
there was there was a
church split. So like,
a group of family started a
brand new church from scratch.
Right?
My mom and I came over basically because,
like, we trusted you and
your family and what,
the fact that they were
instrumental in that.
And then from that church,
there was an outreach
created where it was called
the Maranatha Cafe.
It was like a coffee shop on
the edge of Campbell University
so that Campbell
University College students
could come over and hang out
in a Christian coffee environment.
I don't know that Christian
coffee tasted any different.
And I actually don't remember
there being much coffee,
but it was like a hangout sport.
It was the idea of coffee.
And it was it was Benny
ends or his brainchild,
who his sons, Matt and John were like,
we grew up with them.
Yeah.
They're like,
good friends of ours
from like, kindergarten.
Yeah I met them first grade, yeah.
And his vision was that it
was a performance space,
there was a stage in the back,
and they had an open mic night.
And so people from the college could come
and play at the open mic night.
You got you got the whole hippie vibe
and the coffee shop vibe.
Well and just the idea
that there was a stage,
there was an opportunity
to get on that stage
and perform for an audience.
We had just kind of,
dipped our toes into performing,
doing simple things like
just doing a class and speech
or doing a video in front of the class
and being the class clowns.
And so the idea of.
Or singing mean you down with Halloween
Exactly.
at the Fall Festival.
Fall Festival, Talent
Show, that kind of thing.
So this was already in our blood.
And so when they were like,
we were gonna have this cafe
college students are gonna show up.
Yeah.
We were like, well, of course
we got to start a band.
And I think just this is a theme
that's gonna be throughout all these dots
that we're connecting is,
whenever we see that there's an audience.
We try to find a way to get
in front of that audience.
Right?
So yeah, we were like, let's form a band.
Can we play any instruments?
No.
No.
Benny's son, John was learning the bass.
I think he started it from
a musical perspective.
Benny's son Matt was
into like the soundboard.
Eric was learning the guitar,
me and you couldn't play anything.
Right.
And we didn't have a drummer.
And then Benny said, "Oh,
y'all wanna start a band,
"I'll help you out."
He was multi-instrumentalist.
Right?
He played the piano at
the church, actually.
Yes.
So he started playing
keyboards in our band,
which we call the Wax Paper Dogs.
We called it the Wax Paper Dogs
because the previous summer,
it just so happened everybody
that was in the band
was in a whitewater raft that
was going down some river
at the end of a mission trip,
when you're going to church mission trip.
At the end of the mission
trip, you got to have some fun.
We went whitewater rafting
and we call our raft.
Wax Paper Dogs.
We're gonna call them the paper dogs.
Yeah.
We said well, paper gets
wet, it disintegrates
'cause this is a raft.
'Cause we're in the river right?
So we got to make it wax paper.
So we call it our group,
the Wax Paper Dogs.
We were just a rafting.
A rafting group.
It just so happened
everybody was in that boat,
including Benny,
Yeah.
the dad was in this band.
So we called the band the Wax Paper Dogs.
And we started practicing.
We spent so much time
going into Maranatha Cafe
when it was closed 'cause was Benny
basically was the prior to
the place and had the key.
We'd go in there and just we would we play
and learn songs and practice
for hours and hours,
it became the thing that we
were most passionate about.
Yeah, well, I would say
that, Benny is a huge...
And we gonna be basically
pointing out a number
of really instrumental people
who kind of played these
really, really pivotal roles
in getting us to where we're at now.
And I think Benny is one of the very first
because not only was the Maranatha Cafe,
his idea, his brainchild,
and he was the one that
put all the work into it.
But we would have never
had a band without him.
I would have never learned to
play the guitar without him.
We would have never understood
songwriting without him,
and so many of the things that became
sort of the foundational
elements of our career
even when we got to YouTube,
we were doing mostly music.
It all started with Benny's
vision and his influence.
It was weird because he's an old dude
but like in our eyes he
wasn't that all the time
but he was a dad and what
what cool kids you wonder
like shoe gazing and guitar playing like
this is grunge was it
was just about to happen.
Right.
And it started to happen.
And it was like how can
we be cool like that
if we got a dad in our band,
but like he was all for
it, and we were all for it.
But he was also the coolest Dad?
Yeah, he was.
I mean, he wasn't a typical
dad, he had a full man shoe.
I think, we were so into it that,
it started to threaten your
passion for basketball.
I would say that being
involved in the band,
and then sort of drinking
our own Kool-Aid.
Yeah.
And believing that we could be rock stars
was one of the main reasons
I ended up going to state
and not pursuing a
college basketball career
which would have not
been a state by the way
would have been in a small school.
But yeah, that was one of the reason,
I was like I kind of
just tired a basketball,
we're gonna be rock stars.
And we wanted to be close.
So we like we're gonna go to
state because it's in Raleigh,
we can continue being a part of the band
Here was the thing though.
The stuff like gigs.
In order to start the band and
play at the Maranatha Cafe.
It had to be a Christian band.
Now, do we really want
to be in a Christian band
even though we were
like, all in Christians?
I'd say the answer's no,
I'd say we we never
listen to Christian music.
We we're very self-aware.
We've always been very self-aware.
But we had this, we felt like.
We thought Christian music suck.
It was sucking, right?
We're like, is not as good.
I mean,
I listened to the Red Hot Chili Peppers.
Christian music sing like a.
And I was told that I
shouldn't listen to them
because it was sexualized.
But Christian music seemed
like sort of a bad imitation
of good secular music.
It was.
And so we were just like, what no,
and so we were a little bit hesitant
to call ourselves Christian music,
but it was very much Christian music.
Eh, oh yeah.
Let me tell you how Chrisitan was.
It had to be,
in order to get on that stage.
Every single song had a Christian message.
And then we would close
many of our concerts
with doing something which
is called an invitation,
which is where you invite the people
who are at your concert to make a decision
to invite Jesus into their hearts
to become Christians at
the end of the concert,
and you get everybody to pray.
This would happen in a
Wax Paper Dogs concert.
And a lot of times it would be up to me
because I was the lead singer
and I mean, just imagine me
and like the circuitous way
that I communicate and take
the long way around everything
and like.
You lead a lot of people astray.
When I give a speech.
Your analogies were choice.
Whenever I give speeches,
is just I'm hanging on by a thread.
Yeah.
And I can only imagine how everybody felt.
Now, I mean, while we're on the topic of
like the embarrassing aspects of this,
I remember the first song
that we tried to write
before we ask Benny to officially help us.
We were at Eric Witch's house,
Organic soup.
organic soup.
I actually still have
the lyrics that we wrote
because I wrote them on a paper plate,
a white paper plate that was
like an Eric's bonus room.
It was organic soup.
Creation is the story of
our gods amazing glory.
Creation tells the truth
that leaves all men
without excuse, to
explain is what they try.
No.
♪ Creation tells the story
of God's amazing glory ♪
♪ Creation tells the truth
that leaves out man ♪
♪ Except without excuse ♪
♪ God's existence they deny ♪
♪ To explain is what they try ♪
♪ When they ever ♪
♪ Why can't they just believe ♪
And it was a song against the evolution.
Yeah, it was a creation song.
Evolution verses God.
Yeah.
Why can't they just believe in God?
Right?
Don't believe in evolution.
That was the first thing we
chose to write a song about.
It was horrible.
In our defense.
We never performed for anybody.
We never performed it because we realize
how it wasn't just we weren't
embarrassed about the message.
The song was bad musically.
Like Benny listen to that song.
He was like I've got some
songs that I wrote in the 70s.
Yes.
That y'all can play and
why don't we do some covers
it was the first guy who was
like why don't we just do like
I can see clearly now the rain is gone.
Like let's sing some cover.
Lets sing country roads
change West Virginia
to North Carolina, how about that?
And that was like, oh, this
is how a song is structured.
And then a few months later,
we started writing our own songs.
We're gonna have to move at a faster pace
we're spending a lot of
times on Wax Pepper Dogs
there's a lot of elements to the story.
Yeah.
I don't want this to be
a seven hour podcast.
Yeah.
But so that's the frame of mind
that we're in, the band,
we got better musically.
We started having this weird sort of like,
sort of a 311 pop punk kind of
it wasn't great.
We play at Christian festivals
and even into as we
graduated high school into,
our freshman year in college,
we still had gigs with the band,
we go back home and we play those gigs.
By our sophomore year we broken up.
There's a reason for that.
So we go to NC State.
Now my brother had been
involved with campus ministry
called Campus Crusade for
Christ while he was at UNC.
And he was actually going
into his senior year
and we were going into our freshman year
and he I had been really
involved with them
and had gone on trips with them
and was in Bible studies.
And this was a huge part of his
life when he was in college.
And it was a very fruitful experience.
It had kind of like,
again, it was the most important part of
his college experience.
We visited him in a few different places
and we kind of got a glimpse
of how cool it seemed,
It was really cool,
it was exciting.
to see a group of people
who were older than you
college students, who were like,
passionately engaged with something
that was bigger than themselves
that was inspirational.
And it was like, oh, these
people aren't just going off
and partying on the weekends,
they're going to getting together
and trying to change their lives
and change other people's lives.
This seems meaningful.
This seems good.
So we were like, we're gonna be involved
in Campus Crusade for Christ
when we get to NC State.
Now Campus Crusade for Christ,
as an organization had
been around since 1951.
Yeah.
It was a global organization, it still is.
It's now called Crew.
Because I think the association
with the crusade is--
There are some negative comment
connotations historical.
Negative connotations.
But for us freshman year at NC State,
we knew that first week we were gonna go
to the weekly meeting.
Yeah.
And we go to the weekly meeting,
about 100, 150 students gathered into,
just packed into a classroom.
And a guy gets up there.
Actually, he didn't he
wasn't even up there yet.
A video starts playing
Yeah.
is the very beginning of this thing.
And it's like a comedic video of a guy
trying to get to the meeting.
Yeah.
And it was just blowing our minds.
It was ridiculous.
We were like, this is so awesome.
This is so funny.
And then all of a sudden--
He was on the roof and then
he jumped off the roof,
but then they threw a
mannequin off the roof.
The mannequin in a parking lot.
And then they jump cut to
he's not a mannequin anymore.
And he's wrestling with
an inflatable alligator.
This is 1996 you got to understand
how impressive this
these video skills were.
And so he went through
this series of obstacles.
Yeah.
And then you see the the
front of the building.
And you see him finally
running in the same door
that we just walked in and sat down.
He's got the same clothes on the videos.
Same clothes on.
As he just came out of the video.
He comes in the room.
And he's the emcee of the meet.
And his name is Garrett.
I don't remember his last name,
but he was so funny.
He had the crowd, just by a string,
or whatever the thing that I'm
looking for is right there.
Again, it wasn't that we didn't think that
the whole spiritual Christian aspect of
what was going on there was important.
But we did not expect there to be this guy
who basically came up there
and was like David Letterman,
all of a sudden with a group of 100 kids.
Over the next few weeks,
they would do different things.
Like Garrett and another
guy with would sit down
behind a table and they would do,
they would do announcements.
And they would do them
like Saturday Night Live.
Weekend Update.
Weekend Update,
which we grew up
worshiping Weekend Update.
And let me explain.
It wasn't just that that
was what the meeting was.
The meeting was also what we
call praise and worship music
where somebody would get
up there with a guitar
and lead you through Christian music.
Everybody would sing
together passionately.
Then there would be some announcements.
Then there would be a speaker
who was usually like a local pastor
or somebody else who worked on staff
with Campus Crusade for Christ,
who would get up there
and do essentially a talk slash sermon.
That was an inspirational
and then you sing some more music
and you go home and it was
the best part of our week
by long shot.
Now I specifically remember thinking
when Garrett was up there
the very first time,
I wanna do that.
All I was thinking was,
I want to be that guy.
I want to do this.
Now, some we got involved.
We got to know a guy named Mark Valentine,
who's still a good friend,
who was a Bible study leader.
And he's also he was on
staff with Campus Crusade.
He worked in by staff,
he worked full-time.
His full-time job
Yeah right.
was on campus working
with students leading Bible studies,
of which we eventually joined
his weekly Bible study.
Yeah, and we loved Mark, and still do.
And he was cool, laid back, funny,
super relatable to us in our experience.
Yeah.
And he was also at the time
in charge of the weekly meeting.
Or at least had it I don't
know 'cause at some point,
Todd became in charge of it,
but I think Mark was maybe
exclusively in charge
at that point.
Anyway,
Mark was the guy to talk to
if you want it to be Garrett.
Garrett was a senior we found that out.
And I remember sometime that freshman
I just told Mark I was like,
in for context at this point,
it wasn't like me and you
were like a comedy duo.
We were best friends who were both funny,
but we were in a band.
But it wasn't like, hey, the
two of us are gonna go to him.
It wasn't like that.
That wasn't the dynamic.
I just was like, I want to be this guy.
And the thing that I did at
the same time in parallel
because we weren't talking.
I remember, I was aware
of what you were doing.
And I was in full support I
thought it was a great idea.
I was very helpful.
At the same time,
at the same meetings, I was like,
there's people up there leading music,
I'm a lead singer of a band.
I look weird, but I could
probably get up there
'cause I had like bleached hair.
And I didn't quite fit in,
but I kind of liked that.
And I was like, I mean, there's
all these people out here.
I can get up there.
I'm comfortable singing
in front of people.
I'll join the music team.
Right?
So I did that at the exact same time.
Did I believe in everything
that was happening?
Yes.
But I was also attracted to
being in front of that audience.
Absolutely.
Yeah, well, and the thing is,
is that Mark responded to this.
And I don't think there
was a lot of people in line
coming up to him and saying.
No, they don't.
Hey, I want to do this.
And I don't remember exactly what I said.
But there's probably
something along the lines of
I want to do this and I
will be really good at it.
Is that, yes,
the blind delusion that we had
that led us to start a band
even though we were horrible,
and that led you to start playing guitar
and writing songs immediately.
Right?
It just like,
just a blind confidence.
So fast forward to sophomore year.
The very first meeting where you already--
Yeah.
In the band at that point.
Yeah.
Okay.
Yeah.
So very first meeting.
I'm the emcee, Link is leading worship.
And I have to assume that we went ahead
and made a video for that first meeting
because we had seen that
precedent set by Garrett.
Yeah,
I don't remember exactly,
but I know that I have all of the videos.
So we'll need we can unearth these videos
and take a look at them and
we'll find a way to share them
with you over time but what we did was
our sophomore year is when
we moved into an apartment
with Greg.
No, that was Junior.
That was junior year?
Yeah, we just we got to know Greg,
freshman year and then we became
good friends sophomore year
because was still in
the same dorm sophomore.
So did he start out as like the sidekick?
Yeah, I don't know if
that started from day one
but essentially,
I had a very specific
plan for what I wanted
the sort of the openings be like,
and again, it was the this
had been sort of outline
by the previous emcee.
But I was like, the more that
this can be like a late
night show and a monologue,
the better, right?
And so there's a couple
of different conventions
that kind of evolved over that first year,
including Greg, we've
talked about Greg a lot.
Our college roommate in junior year
but he was just a really good friend.
And our sophomore year became like,
the Andy Richter to Conan or.
Yeah.
He was like a sidekick character.
And he would get up there and
he would have one deep thought
every single week.
Yeah, he would say,
"After much deep thought
and great meditation,
"I've come to the realization that"
and then he would say
something that was really--
Really dumb.
Really dumb.
Really, really stupid.
And everybody would laugh and
then he would sit up there
and just kind of respond to you
for the rest of your monologue
or whenever you were introducing.
This is listen, I was studying a lot.
I was in engineering school.
I was studying a lot,
but I was putting a lot of
time into that monologue
and what it would be in, like, okay?
I'm gonna tell this story
about something that happened
or I've got this, this
interesting scenario that
I'm gonna talk about.
And then I introduced the word
of the day, which was, okay.
Tonight during the monologue,
if I say the word dog,
I want everybody to respond with a.
Ah.
Ah.
And so then I would have my monologue
and I would have that word sort of teed up
a few different times.
And we said, there would be this like call
and response where all
these people were going, ah,
and I lived for this.
I also lived for it, as well
as Greg, the three of us.
I remember,
I will be working with Greg
on his deep sought and like
helping him practice it
because that was his moment.
And helping him write it.
All three of us would do that.
And we tried more often than
not to also have a video
and I taken an intro to film course.
Right?
And we had that video camera
that we had us some in high school,
I guess it was the same one.
I think it was still the
one that was my dad's camera
that we basically just commandeered, yeah.
And I was basically the
cameraman slash director
of all of these videos that we would make
that would feature you
and Greg and I basically,
I usually wouldn't be in them
because I'll be filming the whole thing.
And then you would edit all
these videos on two VCR.
Yeah, you would film it.
And again, this is back when,
this is before there was
any sort of software editing
that we knew of.
So I'd take those mini DV tapes.
I'd go to my dad's office
at Campbell University
'cause he was a law professor at Campbell.
And decode VCR up and edit them together
and then, edit popular music
and usually Led Zeppelin.
Yeah.
Just for content.
Sometimes around the songs.
Which that's the problem with sharing it.
We can't put it on YouTube
because it has so much Led Zeppelin on it.
I don't know if we can do that
but we'll try to figure it out.
Just a couple of notes.
First of all, this is
gonna be a two prater,
I can already tell.
Unless you want this
to be a two hour thing.
Yeah.
And we're at 40 minutes in
and we haven't even
gotten out of college yet.
That's fine.
And I think that's okay.
So let's just keep going at
the paste that we're going.
Okay.
Hopefully, you'll appreciate that.
I'm having fun.
The second thing is,
again, I want to shout out
to Mark Valentine and Mike Mahaffey.
And Mike Mahaffey,
who was the director of Campus
Crusade still is at NC State.
We'll talk more about Mike in a second,
but both of them letting us do this.
They took a chance and listen,
we push the limits I mean.
I remember there was one video.
You know what I'm talking about.
Where we could conceptualize this thing.
They didn't even review
the videos ahead of time,
I don't think and this one you and Greg,
the story was you had forgotten
about the weekly meeting.
Right?
And instead you were playing video games
in Greg's dorm room.
Which is something we often did,
the Twisted Metal was our game.
But we thought it would be funnier
if the story was whenever you
guys would play video games.
You were always completely naked.
Right?
So for this scene, you
were playing Twisted Metal
in his dorm room completely naked.
Yeah.
And of cause we didn't give a shit
you were completely naked.
No, no, I wasn't.
You think you yanked out?
Did you yank out your briefs?
I yanked up my briefs.
I love how in your memory.
I was completely naked.
I know we wouldn't have cared.
But there was like controllers
or different things
like Austin Power style.
I remember like a backpack being given
and it would--
Always strategically
placed to cover the job.
This may seem in Congress
with a Christian ministry,
a relatively conservative
Christian ministry,
but I just want to say
again, this is to credit
the guys involved.
It's like, it was all in good fun.
It was all light hearted,
there were was no actual nakedness.
It was just--
Okay, there wasn't.
It was the idea of nakedness.
And we didn't cross the line.
I'm sure there were some
people there that properly--
The line was a little
too close to the pubes
I will say that.
Well, what I'll it was also the late 90s
and it was a little bit different.
I think now, I actually
think it would be less likely
that that kind of video would,
but it was a different time and comedy.
Yeah.
And that was influencing us.
And also,
they let us learn, like,
again, we were growing
in our faith in big ways.
It was very serious to us
and we were very involved.
And we were going on trips,
we were going on these things
called summer projects.
Well, yeah, I'll unpack that a little bit.
But at the same time,
because this continued
for the next three years,
sophomore year, junior
year and senior year,
emceeing this meeting,
and putting more and
more work into making it
something that people had to go to.
And I think there's a lot
of different reasons for,
it wasn't just because
of what we were doing
at the weekly meeting,
the weekly meeting began to grow, though.
And that audience of 100, 150,
turned into an audience of 1000.
And it was like, this is.
Yeah.
All of a sudden, this just
became such a big part,
getting up in front of that group
and entertaining them
became something that
I just began to fall in love with.
It was so rewarding.
And I mean,
I was so invested in as well.
I remember, consider
myself the chief laugher.
Like whenever I'd sit down
from like, singing the music.
Whenever it was time for like,
what we plan to be funny.
It's like, I was laughing
louder than anybody.
And we didn't sing many songs then
but I remember the first song we sing
was when the seniors were graduating.
So we wrote a song for
the graduating seniors.
And we wrote this like,
mysterious mythological song
about a guy called Mr. Senor.
Well, even by late 90s
standards, politically incorrect.
Yeah.
Well.
So you sing the song, you play guitar,
but then you had backup singer.
I had a backup singer,
who was a guy with three hits.
Right?
And it was me, Greg, and
our other good friend
who became my roommate, Tim.
Yeah.
All in one T-shirt together
with our head sticking
out of it singing backup.
And it was like kind of
like a Spanish theme.
Like get it Mr. Senior.
Mr. Senor.
Mr. Senor.
Mr. Senior, Mr. Senor.
We wouldn't do it today
we didn't understand
the sensitivities at the time,
and people just thought it was funny.
I mean, we live for that meeting
because this audience was growing,
it was the largest meeting on campus.
Yeah.
Over 1000 people were
showing up and it was,
again for a variety of reasons,
but it was so much fun.
It was so rewarding to have that audience
and so you can start to see how,
you developed a style and a tone
and I think that because video
became such a big part of
our careers moving forward.
This really was the
beginning of us figuring out
how to make an audience laugh with video
because you can have an idea
that something's gonna be funny
when you sit and watch
it and just the two of us
but creating something and then
having 1000 people watch it.
We cut our teeth man on figuring out
what makes, well, first of all,
it probably wasn't even that funny.
If we went back and watch these videos
would be like why in the world
did we think this was funny?
But we were learning
and very much comedically developing.
Now one of the things
that happened senior year,
Mike Mahaffey, the director
of the whole ministry,
who again is another,
just one of the best guys
we've ever known.
Who was getting a kick
out of what we were doing
at the weekly meeting.
He was the director of
the Christmas Conference.
We called it at the time
I think they call it
Winter Conference now.
So regional conference
where it's not only NC State students
along with Meredith and Peace students,
but it was all the surrounding states
Campus Crusade movements
would all come together
after Christmas for a
week for the conference.
I think it was North Carolina,
South Carolina, Tennessee,
Kentucky and West Virginia.
Does that sound right?
Yeah.
Well, at least part of, yeah.
Yeah.
And so there would be over 1000 students
that would show up at that every year
so he directed the main stage of that
and chose who was going to be the emcee.
Right.
So we've been going to
Christmas conference again,
every single year,
a significant portion
of our Christmas break
was going to this conference.
And they had people who
were full-time staff
with Campus Crusade, were the only people
who were emceeing the meetings.
So I remember a guy Shane Dyke.
Yeah, I don't know if was he big breaker,
or was he Christmas comedic?
Somebody, I can't remember who.
There was a few different
people who emceed
but they were like, doing what
I was doing at the weekly meeting,
but doing it on a whole different level.
And it was just like, this is awesome,
but I didn't think it
wasn't even on the radar
to try to emcee that
because I'm not on staff,
I'm a student.
Right.
Mike Mahaffey comes to me
my senior year and says,
"What do you think about
emceeing Christmas conference?"
I mean, I probably almost crapped my pants
when he asked me that.
Of course, I was like, yes, sir.
Right.
I never say no, always say
yes to the opportunity.
Okay, we come to find out later that
Mike really had to go to
bat for you to do this.
He took a big risk.
And I think there was a lot of criticism,
for the decision he made,
and he had to convince a lot of people
to give you the opportunity to do that.
And if it wasn't for that moment,
we would not be here right now.
No, not.
I mean, I would say if it
wasn't for every moment
that we talked about.
Yeah that's true is such a pivotal one.
But this one, this one thing
where Mike Mahaffey asked me to emcee
the Christmas conference, set in motion,
of course of events that
very directly led to,
what we're doing today.
That will continue to unpack so.
I remember hearing and I was
just floored as I oh crap,
this is it, we got it, we
got to get a better camera.
And so while the weekly meeting is...
The weekly meeting every
week was just like, okay?
You're gonna get up there,
you're gonna talk for five to 10 minutes.
And then you're gonna
basically introduce the speaker
and that kind of thing,
and then maybe get some announcements.
This was like, no, no, no, no, like,
there's a morning session and
there's an afternoon session,
it lasts like five days.
You're gonna be up there.
You're like, introducing,
like, this big time pastor,
all of a sudden, Tom Nelson, Al Mohler.
Right.
You know what I'm saying?
And we just all of a sudden,
we knew that this was a different
level of responsibility.
And the preparation went into overdrive.
We had multiple videos.
This is when we really
started writing songs.
Funny songs for an
audience the first year,
I think the only thing we did was
I wrote the Christmas
conference on basically
the conference song and I don't even know.
You help with the videos
I don't know if you got up there
for the Christmas conference
song at that first year.
I think I did.
I can't remember that all the details.
I think I sung harmony.
Okay.
Because like we were writing
those songs together.
It's not like we hadn't written songs,
even in high school together.
So, yeah, it was like the end of the week,
we wrote the song kind
of summarized everything
that happened that week was
like a series of inside jokes.
That was the first song
that we ever performed at,
a conference and we both did it.
Right, and the crowd, loved it.
And then,
proceeded to emcee this
conference for 10 years in a row.
Just to give you an example
of how big of a swap this was
'cause of that year, the first one was 99.
I remember we had to stop the conference.
Usually the conference
would go through New Year's.
Right.
We stopped the conference
short and sent everybody home
on the 31st because it was Y2K
and everyone thought the
world was going to end.
Well, no, it wasn't like,
it was like some religious belief.
There was a practical belief
that like you didn't know
if like, utilities were gonna go down,
Yeah, yeah.
because of the way
computers work.
So you didn't want to have all these
college students stranded
in a neighboring state.
There was a lot of fear about Y2K
not from a religious standpoint.
Right?
It was from a technical standpoint,
but it was like we got to
get these students home.
So the conference was a year shorter.
But then, just to kind of
truncate this a little bit
over the next couple of years,
your involvement began to increase.
You were always involved with the music
and you're always
involved with the videos.
But you started getting up on stage.
And I would say, I don't remember
exactly what year it was.
But this is just a little
bit of the evolution
of how we became Rhett and Link.
I'd say three to four conferences in
you were just up there from the beginning
and we were doing it together.
Yeah.
We probably had to stop talking about that
and talk about like, okay,
well what's happening
vocationally at this
time, like professionally,
Right?
what are we trying to do
because the Christmas
Conference thing continued on.
So it's probably best to talk about
what we did after we graduated.
Yeah.
We've talked about how much
of an outlet Campus Crusade
provided for us to engage an audience
and also develop, especially
you at this point develop
as a comedian and for us to
develop as like creators.
But personally,
so much of our college
experience was wrapped up
in our involvement in Campus Crusade
if it wasn't friends that we had,
or acquaintances we had through our study
in our engineering curriculum.
Basically all of our friends,
definitely all of our closest friends
were just as involved in
Campus Crusade as we were.
And that meant we were involved
in every single aspect of it.
Yeah.
There was the Bible study every week,
you talked about Mark Valentine
and the impact he had on our lives,
like, he would meet
with us and talk about,
like, going through a breakup
with my high school girlfriend
and like, all the heart wrenching stuff
that you have to go through
when you're discovering
who you are in college,
and all of the potential
pitfalls associated with that.
It's like,
Yeah.
I can't thank him and
the organization enough
for providing an environment
for us to develop
who we were in every way possible.
Yeah.
That was extremely positive.
And we've alluded to our college
experience in general terms
and you can filter that through everything
we're saying today that
like it was an amazing,
thrilling time in our lives.
So we were a part of something
bigger than ourselves
and also really looking at ourselves
and how we can develop as people
that do things that matter.
Well, and more specifically,
'cause again, we've
established that, okay,
we're not in the same place
as we were at the time.
Like the way we think about
the world is not the same
that it was is when we were in college
but that does not change the
fact that our involvement
with Crew and guys like Mike
Mahaffey, Mark Valentine,
Todd Smith, it was incredibly instrumental
in us sort of understanding
what it meant to be
a person of integrity.
You know, I'm saying
Oh yeah.
like that,
now that you can't have integrity
or character outside of
the system like that.
But it was like,
we were growing as people really
like in an accelerated rate
and honestly when we looked around,
and a lot of our peers in college,
there's a lot of that and
that wasn't happening.
It just kind of felt like
I'm just here for fun.
And we were like, I'm here for purpose,
and this is something that
is so much bigger than me
and it's bigger than just my life
and it's bigger than just this group
and it's bigger than just Earth.
This was like a universal purpose
and all the having all these people
'cause when you're that age, like 18 to 21
your potential for being
passionate about things is
as high as it ever will be, trust me.
And I think so yeah.
It's gonna go down.
It's gonna go down, but 18
to 21 boy it is on fire.
And it was just being associated
with an organization
like that, at that time.
It was just super instrumental
and kind of forming us into who we are.
Yeah, I mean, we would
go to the fall retreat,
we would go to the Christmas conference
and from the Christmas conference,
they would say you can
spend your entire summer
on a thing called summer project.
We both responded to that
I spent an entire summer
as a student in Santa Cruz, California,
which is where I participated
in the 70s dance contest.
That's on this T-shirt
that we're selling at
mythical.com right now.
It's crazy.
And that's why you went to Slovakia.
You talked about being in Slovakia.
And like writing letters to Jesse
because you had just
started almost dating.
Yeah.
Christy went on summer
project to Santa Cruz
the year after me.
And we were corresponding
when she got back.
The night she got back
is when we got engaged.
Christy I met you, well,
you and Jesse met a
little but differently.
We met at church.
Christy and I met through Campus Crusade,
she was a student at Meredith.
She came to those weekly meetings,
she saw me helping lead the music.
She was interested, she
joined the music team,
partially because she was kind
of wanted to get to know me.
So many the majority of the aspects of
who were being built to be
and who we were becoming
was through the context of
Campus Crusade.
So it was such a meaningful thing that
when we were graduating.
Well, I feel like I feel
it's necessary to acknowledge
there's another side of
it too, for other people.
Yeah.
If you're listening to
this, talk about this
and you were involved
in the campus ministry,
whether it was Campus
Crusade or another one,
you may think very differently
about your time there, right?
Right.
You may have been a time of
spiritual trauma for you.
That's the case with a lot of people,
especially a lot of women.
Because there even to this day,
there tend to be very particular roles
that are expected of men and women
in conservative Christian circles,
like the ones that we were involved with.
And so it may seem sort of like,
insensitive for us to talk about,
like, even though we don't
really we're not there anymore.
And this isn't the way
we think about the world
to talk about it as if
it was these glory days,
and everything was great.
And we were growing and all this stuff.
It really was like that for us
because it was an environment
that was really, really set up well,
for people like us to sort
of flourish and succeed.
Yeah.
But there was a lot that we didn't know.
And there, I'm sure there were people
who were suffering, and I'm
sure that there were people,
especially a lot of
women who might look back
and be like, I actually
look back at that time,
and I feel very differently about it.
So just want to acknowledge that.
And I'm glad you did.
I say all that really just set the stage
for what our mindset not what it is now,
but what it was when we graduate.
Not to mention,
I'll add one more thing,
not to mention people,
LGBT people, which was
not on our radar at all,
coming from where we came from.
But we know that there
were LGBT people in crusade
if they were going in and they
were really getting involved,
that was something that was
not being supported in any way.
And I think that--
But it wasn't something
that was on our radar.
Your hinted at topics
that we will talk bout,
Yeah.
in over the next few episode.
Yeah.
So but I'm glad that you're seeing it now
because it's important that
we're not painting this picture
of something that there's
not a flip side to it.
Yeah.
And we haven't had evolved
views on since that point
and so we will get into that.
We're gonna get into all
that in a subsequent episode.
We're really trying to keep this more like
the logistics connecting the dots,
Yeah.
from a career standpoint.
Right.
but from a,
belief standpoint and like
personal impact, good and bad.
Yeah.
I think those are things
that we can talk about
we will talk about later.
But a lot of people have a tendency
to when they kind of come out of
a deeply religious environment,
they just talk a bunch of shit about it.
And, we'll talk our fair share
shit about it at some point.
But I think that the reality is is that
it really is contributed
so much to who we are
and the way we move in the world.
And especially the way that
we kind of have carried out
our careers so that's why we talk about it
with the level of fondness
because I still have a
lot of love and respect
for a lot of people who
we're in are involved.
So when we graduated
I graduated I immediately got married
I technically had another semester,
but I'll make that another Lost
Year podcast years from now.
No, it's not really anything there.
But basically.
Where do you want to end this one?
Because we're at an hour right now.
And I kind of feel like we
just got through college.
We basically got a lot
of details to fill in
from graduating and then
and then getting to YouTube.
Yeah, I think this is a good place
to put a pin in it until next week,
I will say that the big
question that people
who see where we are now like journalists
or whatnot want to ask is,
or just the most obvious question
that people wanna ask is,
how did you make a decision
to go from to quit your jobs,
as engineers to then go
into full-time entertainment
like to make that risk,
to make that leap that had to be scary,
how did you make that jump?
And actually, the bigger issue with us was
at this juncture in our lives,
given our involvement here,
and there's some opportunity.
And there's a pull to us
continue to want to be a part of
this organization and to also develop
and to have an audience
versus just being engineers.
And so there was a few years
of working through that,
which I think will be the starting point
Yeah.
of the next episode.
That was some of the biggest
decisions that we ever made,
in our lives, in our careers as families
as friends were made in that juncture,
because you got to remember,
this is happening in 2000.
If you think about
YouTube didn't even exist
until late 2005 practically for like,
for people to be aware of it 2006,
it's like, so if we're graduating college,
and YouTube doesn't even
exist for five or six years,
what did we do in order
to bridge that gap,
and to position ourselves so
that we could take advantage
of this thing we didn't even
know was gonna be there.
We weren't just engineers,
and then we just quit,
Yeah
and became entertainers
It was a little more
this not what happened
complicated than that.
at all.
there's five years.
And the things that we
did may blow your mind.
And we're gonna talk about next week.
So I mean,
I'm trying to figure out
how I feel at this point.
I've got a little bit
of a charge out of this.
I feel wired.
I feel that way.
I feel like, I just know.
It's not all out.
I feels good when it's all out.
This is such a, I don't know,
it's just there's a lot of the things
that we're talking about are
pretty explosive for people.
And it's just like
that's just the reality.
This is as personal as it
gets for a lot of people is,
what you think about the
bigger, deeper things in life
and your opinions about those
and who you associate with
and the group's you're involved in.
My only regret is that
we haven't incorporated
more politics into this first.
No, it's so yeah,
I want to keep going.
And maybe we'll keep
recording, but I know.
We'll keep recording.
We're gonna be in the same outfits
from we're just gonna start
another episode in a second.
I'm sorry, you gotta wait a week
but this will give you an
opportunity to use hashtag
EarBiscuits to be a part
of the conversation,
log your thoughts,
any questions that are popping up for you.
And, again, we're gonna be logging those
and it'll be a while before
we have an opportunity
to address them.
In a way that you can hear it,
but go ahead and and do that now.
And we'll talk at you next week.
Well, I'm gonna I still have a wreck.
Oh, get the wreck.
I kept the wreck,
I come because I'm very
excited about this wreck.
And beholden to it, okay.
I've been excited about this for a while.
And I'm gonna read about it
because I want to get it right.
So I found a podcast
called the 1619 Podcast.
This is a limited audio
series from the New York Times
observing the 400th
anniversary of the beginning
of American slavery.
Here's a little description
in August of 1619,
a ship carrying more
than 20 enslaved Africans
arrived in the English colony of Virginia.
America was not yet America,
but this was the moment it began.
No aspect of the country
that would be formed here
has been untouched by
the 250 years of slavery
that followed on the 400th anniversary
of this fateful moment.
It is time to tell the story.
1619 is a New York Times
audio series hosted by
Nicole Hannah-Jones.
You can find more information
about it at newyorktimes.com
or nytimes.com/1619podcast.
Now,
I just think you ought to listen to this
I believe it should be required listening
for every American and
anybody else in the world
who just wants to kind of
understand the reality of,
the history of slavery and then racism
towards black people in America.
There's a lot of things you don't hear
in your history books.
There's a lot of things that the way
that things were framed,
and frankly, whitewashed to go down easy
for the majority of people.
That's what we learned
and that's the way that we learned about
a lot of these things.
But as somebody who grew up in the South,
and kind of went into
adulthood thinking that like,
oh, yeah, I mean, racism and like,
that stuff's kind of that was in the past.
I mean, that America used to be that way.
It's pretty eye opening and enlightening
of course, I know, I didn't think that
before it listen to this podcast
I changed my ideas about
that a long-time ago,
but I think that this
is super illuminating.
Very, very well done,
and it's only about five or six episodes
and you can be completely done with it.
So 1619 Podcast, check it out.
All right, we'll catch you next week.
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click on the playlist on the right.
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Thanks for being your mythical best.
