hello everybody Griffin McElroy was included and Forbes 30 under 30 list as a media luminary and it's one of the founders of a series of very successful podcasts most notably the chart-topping my brother my brother and me and the adventure zone he is also a founding member of video game website polygon of Vox media releasing video content including the notable monster factory the aforementioned podcast my brother my brother and me was developed into a television series for NBC's comedy streaming app seizo and was the number one television show on iTunes when it was released these media ventures have only continued to grow and expand with the graphic novel adaptation of The Adventure Zone podcast becoming a New York Times best seller as of July 2018 this adaptation reached the highest placement for a graphic novel on the times fiction list to date opening the door for him and his brothers and father to write a miniseries for the Marvel Comics universe so without further ado please welcome Griffin McElroy [Applause] thank you this is very strange I I was backstage in the in the green room and I say this just feels weird and I don't know why and then I realized that it was the first time I've maybe been alone in the green room and then it dawned on me I would be alone on stage and that's where I'm at right now seriously thank you all so much thank you thank you for that and thank you for coming out to to see me this I I i hope you all appreciate the fact that I never thought I would be doing anything like this because I never thought I would be invited to do anything like this so I genuinely want to thank FSU and everybody involved with organizing the the golden tribe series this really means a lot all of that was my way of couching this by saying I've never done anything like this before so just to set the expectations so if you don't know who I am you've picked a really weird way to speech Tuesday night and I'm assuming that you're a student here because if you spent thirty five dollars to watch some internet Rando talk about his business okay all right I have nothing for you if you are that person I guess to the six of you I'm what the internet calls a content creator which is a term that someone came up with that describes someone who makes a bunch of different kinds of things because just doing one kind of thing doesn't pay the bills great listed my bona fides which I appreciate because now I don't have to do that myself I'm genuinely usually pretty uncomfortable talking about my bona fides but it's important when you you hear about the stuff that I do and that I've done that you remember that I am I'm a cloud man I'm a child boy with very few marketable skills and if I found success in my career it is because I have been able to ring every drop of juice out of that very limited skillset as I possibly can and hopefully that's one of the things I can talk about today I also plan on discussing the benefits and pitfalls of tying your career to your family permanently terrific ibly and how to do all of the all the things listed above without suffering tremendous mental injury just kidding that's not possible but at least I can serve as a cautionary tale if anything else and I want to also catch all this and say like I don't know how practical the things I can share today are going to be because the sort of patchwork components of my career make up a career that is unlike anybody else's that I know about which is a weird flex now that I'm saying it out loud also a lot of the success that I found happened in the sort of rough-and-tumble Internet of 2007 which I wrote that originally as a joke and then I realized it was 12 years ago and I went into a panic spiral so yeah I'm gonna get started we're gonna do a Q&A at the end if you all have any questions I should also mention like I'm gonna touch on some personal stuff in this speech because you know my personal life and my career life are essentially the same I do podcasts exclusively with my family I host a podcast with my wife there are events from my childhood that informed my professional development today which my therapist has a lot of fun with so I was born and raised in a town called Huntington West Virginia it too was a college town go herd there were about 50,000 people there when when school was in session and Marshall is actually where I matriculated and where I learned cool words like matriculated and overall like Huntington was a great place to grow up we our house was two blocks away from the big city park Ritter Park which we never visited because we were too busy playing Super Nintendo and our rooms but still it was nice to have you know the option available my dad who you may know from his work on the adventure zone a radio DJ for a handful of radio stations around town his tenure was mostly at 103.3 radio country radio TCR which may come as a surprise if you have listened to our shows before because we never talk about country music and the reason is that none of us liked it very much including my dad which i think is a testament to his willpower cuz he worked there for like 30 years and my mom was the secretary for the church we all grew up and we all grew up in the Southern Baptist Church which is a whole nother kettle of fish and my two brothers Travis is three years older than I am and Justin is three years older than him weirdly they share the same birthday three years apart which was a real challenge for me because it wasn't my birthday and that doesn't seem fair and yeah I had a great I I had a great childhood generally speaking because our family just we loved each other very very much even if growing up in that house was kind of like being in an 18-year long season of Last Comic Standing from time to time usually whenever I talk about sort of the origins of our family dynamic I harken back to just the dinner table all of us sitting around the dinner table we had dinner together every night usually a home home-cooked meal very norman rockwell asked and the whole time we were just trying so hard to make each other laugh which makes us maybe sound like a pretty in substantial family which is not the the truth we definitely use humor to deflect from tension and that has turned out to be a very profitable skill but we were also able to you know sometimes get serious and hash stuff out when we needed to one of the earliest lessons my dad taught me when I was like five ended up being actually one of the most useful things anybody's ever taught me which was the phrase read the room I was five so like it's a shame yet to say that to a five-year-old and our dad introduced us to just like so much comedy growing up he had this VHS collection that was thousands of tapes large where he would just record stuff off TV and he had his own like this is not a joke yet his own like Dewey Decimal System he had like a card catalog of literally thousands of tapes with like episodes of kids in the hall was a big one in Saturday Night Live and Marx Brothers and episodes the second city and Laurel and Hardy just real great Elementary School Fair and there's like Mystery Science Theater 3000 and then like if we didn't want to watch something funny there was like a ton of Star Trek Deep Space 9 on there as well if you wanted to break the pattern and sort of reinforcing that that that comedy background that kind of like interest in entertainment our parents enrolled us in the local community theater scene which was weirdly thriving in an Appalachian relatively small town the size of Huntington it was thriving in large part due to the involvement of parents like ours and Justin and Travis were very drawn to the bright lights of the of the the Great White Way which is why they majored in theater in college and then I being the youngest had the benefit of watching them not do anything with those degrees and choosing my own and yeah so we were all doing theater together our parents actually more or less invented the theater program at the church that we all grew up in and I want to give you a moment to just like picture the mental image of the upstart theater program budding in the heart of an Appalachian Southern Baptist Church like it sounds like the plot of a great new like Bravo reality show if I've ever heard one they would do like our Easter pageants my dad would write these Christmas dinner dramas I got to play Jesus for a play that we took on the road for a couple of mission trips which is a real feather in my cap and we did all this together right like we had dinner every night together and we made each other laugh when we did community theater together and we you know we'd go on car trips for 14 hours where we just talk and joke and make each other laugh we have so much practice being funny together entirely for each other's benefit and we managed to turn that practice into you know quickly kind of a successful career in comedy which I think more than anything speaks to our shrewd resourcefulness the only thing that I did more than you know making jokes in my family when I was growing up was playing video games and Justin and I managed to turn that into a career to another kind of common goof at our expenses that we never let a moment by that we don't record for some sort of product and that one's super on the nose but I was super uncertain on what I wanted to do growing up even through college the careers that I considered pursuing in my youth were very random like I wanted to be a singer for a while I wanted to be a movie star which is a broad category for I wanted people to know who I was I guess I wanted to be a psychologist I wanted to be a youth minister that was my plan for a very long time and then I wanted to be some kind of journalist which I guess I kind of did and then in my sophomore year of high school I had a teacher named Miss Ray who was an English teacher and she revived the TV news program at our high school and at that time me and my friends were making these terrible short videos with like handycams and imac editing software and I decided I wanted to do that 45 minutes a day during the school day every day so I started doing that which was what got me interested in broadcast journalism and it's why I decided to do that in in college so right around that time that my interest in in the TV news stuff kind of peaked my mom got sick she was diagnosed with skin cancer and she took on this really aggressive treatment and that that really aggressive treatment really threw our family for a loop her and dad were traveling all the time to get that treatment Travis was at college at Oklahoma University and Justin was working for the Ironton Tribune and so he was gone a whole lot and it was kind of a scary time it was I think we were all super confident that everything was going to work out because we had lived a pretty charmed existence up to that point and after a few horrible months of this treatment she went into remission and life more or less went back to normal and then the last semester of my senior year of high school her cancer came back and from the period that we learned that it came back to the day that she died was like three weeks it was nothing and I know this is a weird thing to include in a lecture about internet business but stick with me it was very bad it was you know it's the worst thing that could possibly happen to you back then and none of us were equipped to deal with it a lot of them emotional maturity that our family had at that time and a lot of the skills that you younger folks would call adulting those all came from mom and she was very much I know it's cliche but it was very much a glue that holds the family situation and so when she was gone it just everything I knew about life just dried up overnight and when you go through a loss like that it's it's terrible and the second terrible thing that happens immediately after it's just these aftershocks of the fate of you remaining a family unit just kind of being up in the air there were times where we would have like Justin and Travis and dad and I we would have arguments we would have like screaming arguments and a lot of it was based mostly in sort of dramatics and hysterics because we were way out of our out of our league and we were all so raw and so you know mistakenly convinced that the others weren't you know doing enough to help out the family or whatever none of it was true we were all just like doing a bad job at grieving and I remember there was this one night and I don't remember who said this but even if I did I probably wouldn't put them on blast like this where we were having one of these arguments and one of us just said like well that's it let's just you you move away and you'll go here and that that'll be it and we'll just talk on holidays and I think all of us realized like first of all we were being kind of silly and second of all like we were at a crossroads right then and there where it could've gone either way we could have said yeah that sounds good and then we didn't see each other except for holidays and you know our family status was dissolved largely or we could decide to never let each other out of our sight ever again unfortunately we went with the with the latter and this may seem like sentimental or whatever but like the stuff that we do together the creative work that we've done together for almost a decade now I have nobody else in my life other than my wife who I could do that work with because the trust and and patience and love involved with you know maintaining a a professional career that doesn't affect your personal relationships and maintains your personal relationships in a way that doesn't affect your professional career that's unthinkably hard and the only way that we were able to do it is we went through this crucible in the aftermath of my mom's death and we had this decision of we're gonna be important parts of each other's lives for the rest of them no matter what and that decision is why we actually started working together in the first place but before that happened I was seduced by the siren call of video games journalism so there's there's a weird chain of events that kind of led up to my games journalism career the the big break as it were so justin was working for the anagen Tribune this was a local paper for a town about 30 minutes outside of Huntington it's where dad currently lives today and our local paper The Herald Dispatch decided that the internet existed and so they started making blogs and so Justin and I started writing a video game blog for a local paper and nobody read it there was one company who made the video game adaptation of the DreamWorks movie shark tales who inexplicably inexplicably sent us a huge box just full of shark tales and I was the most serious anyone ever took us but we took ourselves plenty serious so kind of off the back of our blog Justin started pitching freelance work to all these different game magazines that we'd grown up all reading and loving and you know fledgling sort of video game websites and he actually started to get some work my favorite anecdote of his and it kind of resembles how I actually thought about work once I got involved in the industry and was scared I was going to be booted out at any second was he would tell these press outlets like give me the shittiest games that you have and then you don't have to review him and that'll free you up to play good games and as somebody who worked in the industry for ten years that's a pretty enticing offer and so he did that he started to get in these magazines and you know as his younger brother I thought it was the coolest thing ever Travis was doing cool stuff at the time - but it wasn't immediately involved with my personal develop my professional development so that's I'll hit you up with that on the next lecture and eventually he applied to and after a few applications got a job at a website called joystick with a Q which was part of the AOL weblog ring when that existed and he freelance there for a couple of years and then they hired him full-time as a reviews editor and around that time they were looking for a weekend editor which I did this job for a while so I feel pretty confident that I am able to say it's a pretty thankless and at times kind of shitty position because you're on call all weekend if any news breaks are expected to stop what you're doing and write it up even if it said you know 1 a.m. there's nobody else there to help you out so they weren't getting a ton of applications for it I assume but I applied and the editor in chief at the time a guy named Chris Grant who was also be able to in chief of polygon and a very dear friend to this day he had read our Herald Dispatch game blog when he was hiring Justin's so he knew my byline and and kind of knew my work and so I applied and I interviewed and I ended up getting the job and that was super super exciting for me at the same time I was also like a full-time college student I was pursuing my broadcast journalism degree which by that time this was 2007 I think I'd realized that I didn't want to work at a TV news station and so I decided like I was just going to complete my degree and like just this state of constant quiet panic which maybe some of you will find relatable and then I I got this job at joystick which one of the graduation requires it's actually my favorite thing about the journalism school that I attended is that you have to do some work in the field before you can graduate and where most of my peers were doing more traditional stuff like radio stations and newspapers and apprenticeships at the local TV stations I was working for an AOL video game blog and none of them took me very seriously but now prints dead so them sorry print that wasn't fair that wasn't fair to print back then you got paid $10 a post at AOL and also I was dead broke I had no money it sir I was compelled to write like the maximum amount of post per month available to my position and again like with no supporter of the weekend I was really flying without a net but I loved it like I was insistent that I I wanted to work more I wanted to do more than just the weekend so eventually they bumped me up to working four days a week Friday through Monday but then that was just kind of weird timing so they made me a contributing editor which at the time basically meant somebody who writes posts during you know Monday to Friday but they didn't stop me as weekend editor so I was literally working seven days a week and writing a hundred and eighty posts a month which was the limit the cap on what I was able to write to complicate matters in 2008 MTV launched a program called street team oh eight where they would hire a hip fresh young journalist from every state who would then cover the 2008 presidential election which I don't know if y'all remember was a pretty badass election and I didn't know much about politics but like everybody in my journalism school applied for this thing including my girlfriend at the time who's also in the in the journalism school and I got it for West Virginia which put it straight on a lot of my relationships at the journalism school but it was great I got to go to New York and I got a bunch of like cool gear and I made these video packages every week that I was super proud of that like 25 people watched but I got to meet sway and Kurt Loder and have lunch with them so that was reward enough for me and like this is the thing about my early career that's kind of a tough pill to swallow I was working seven days a week for joystick probably fifty hours a week at joystick I was not a full-time employee mind you I had no benefits I actually went sans insurance for a while in my 20s just kind of roll in the the hard six on that one hoping that I stayed healthy and I didn't and they never actually hired me in the four years that I worked there they never hired me as a full-time employee which now is illegal in most states fortunately if you're working full time hours you're expected to give people you know full-time benefits and stuff but that was not true back in the day so I was doing that the the 50 hours a week joystick and I was doing these weekly video packages for MTV and I was a full-time student at Marshall trying to complete my degree in four years and so I didn't have a social life which is not my way of saying that I am an introvert which I absolutely and completely am I literally mean that I did not have time in my day to make friends I didn't have time in my day to do anything because I was on call all weekend like there was no party partying happening during that period not that I was getting you know mad invites or anything like that and I didn't mind like I didn't I didn't mind at all that I was not developing as a social human being at all because I was I was working and I was succeeding and I was happy with the work I was doing and the work I was doing was being acknowledged by other people I worked with and I felt I felt valued and I felt like I had a future because I was capable of producing lots and lots of you know passable work without you know dropping dead and it's astonishing how long that way of thinking held true in my life until very recently the idea that I was just indefatigable and immune to the effects of stress and isolation which nobody is and that's why you're hearing you know every day about these self-made YouTube influencers who are like taking sabbaticals and you know talking about their mental health finally because it's easy when you're working that hard to think that you are invincible until all of a sudden you realize you haven't been and then the cumulative you know gunk that you have worked up and the stress and the loneliness that you've worked yourself into is actually really bad for your brain the good thing though to come out of all that work is that I did really well at joystick eventually they hired two new weekend editors so I was able to leave leave that job behind and become reviews editor a job I was terrible at but luckily I only had to do it for five months before we left that website to start polygons it was around the end of my time at joystick in 2010 I had graduated college I was living by myself in our family home that we had grown up in it was kind of falling apart around me and I realized hey this sucks and decided that I you know I loved West Virginia I loved living there but I really needed to go and at that time Travis was also back from oh you and he was kind of floundering a bit too he had done some you know part-time jobs in the area went back to school for a semester and nothing really came of it and there was this day where we just looked at each other like we could go like we could help each other leave and take our first steps out of out of West Virginia and so we did just that we moved to Cincinnati Ohio in 2009 actually we moved to a town called Batavia Ohio which is like 30 minutes outside of Cincinnati and there's a mall there and a cheeseburger in Paradise and that's it by the way I hope you enjoyed the pre-show playlist they told me they told me they were doing that I was like oh sure and I started getting tweets like that's a lot of barenaked ladies my man so it was there in Batavia Ohio that podcasting entered my life I had these 30-minute drives to Cincinnati any time I wanted to do anything that was not related to mall or Cheeseburger in Paradise which you know those two things have me covered for most stuff and you know 30 minutes there 30 minutes back that's like perfect podcast length and this was 2010 and you know the medium had had started to develop and in all these exciting ways so Travis turned me on to this show called you look nice today which was this very early podcast about just these three super funny guys and I listened to the whole catalogue super fast and then I started over again and I was just obsessed with it and then I started branching out and finding my own podcast I got turned on to a show called oh yeah dude which is like really like OG podcast that is still going today it's just like a news recap show that I still love very very dearly and most notably Jordan Jesse go on the maximum fun Network and while I was getting into those Justin was actually he had started to co-host a video game podcast for joystick alongside Chris grant and another joystick writer guy named Ludwig Heitzman who was hysterically funny that show actually started to gain a considerable following considering how sort of competitive the gaming podcast market was and then I eventually started guesting on that show while I was still working a joystick and then I started guesting more and more frequently and then people started to know who I was it was like the first personality forward stuff I had ever done in my career and people started like no my name which up to that point I was just this anonymous news grunt who was you know out 180 posts per month like you know I needed I needed that money to live which I did and then people like all of a sudden I started to be on the podcast and people kind of knew who I was and I was a super shy kid who like struggled to talk to strangers which made me just a great fit for a journalism program and so when people started to know who I was it was really really weird so like all these things kind of came together when we me and Travis were living together in Batavia there were kind of these two forces that led directly to my brother my brother and me Justin and I were doing the the joystick podcast and loved doing it and also at the same time like we were more geographically scattered than we had ever been and we didn't like that Justin and I you know loved working together at joystick and we wanted to do something with with Travis and you know we all loved podcasts so Justin suggested one April day in 2010 that we should do a podcast together and it was an easy yes from all of us and it is it boggles my mind when I think back to how slapdash that whole process was of putting the first episode of my brother my brother and me together because it changed my life more than anything I've ever made I guess if you want to look at it as sort of a an important important thing that happened we agreed to make a podcast on a Monday on Wednesday we got together in an AOL Instant Messenger chat room which really freezes this story in amber for future paleontologists to carbon date it we were in this a while instant messenger chatroom and this text log I saved it because I could sense its cosmic importance and it exists somewhere in a harddrive for my somewhere in my house I have so many hard drives and I tried to find it for y'all but I couldn't but in this 45-minute long AOL chat we picked a name for the show we picked a theme song and we picked like what the show is gonna be about in 45 minutes Travis the first line of the chat I remember is me saying okay so the theme song has got to be take a chance on me by ABBA and Justin and Travis were like yes yes yes and we did that for like 30 episodes and then we got very afraid that Apple was going to take every bread cent that we had ever owned and we decided to frame the show as an advice show mostly because it was 2010 and folks were already kind of like getting tired of the you know a handful of dudes talking about stuff genre so we thought the advice angle would kind of help set the show apart so that was on a Wednesday on Friday we recorded the first episode I used a rock band microphone that came with the video game rock band Travis used a built-in mic on his PC tower and Justin Justin used a like $10 the skinniest headset I've ever seen Travis and I were recording from the same apartment in Batavia but in separate rooms because we were lunatics but we did it like we just did it in the span of five days we agreed to do it decided what it was going to be and did it and released it and the luckiest break we got was fortunately because of the joystick podcast and the audience that had grown there we had a portion of that audience who knew that we were and latched on to our show like from from the beginning you know it wasn't it wasn't enormous but it was enough it was this this seed and they were so great they were so awesome and helped to build us up and in a really really important way when we were just starting out I remember like a couple episodes in people were making fan art and like that that that was the best thing that it ever had that this thing that we were making as a family was resonating with other people and that experience and that feeling has only grown exponentially which has made me like the luckiest person in the whole universe and so we did it for a few months and then moved from Batavia to Chicago with a couple friends that I made in in Cincinnati and you know basically experienced and of another year of frozen solitude and at that point Travis and I didn't live together which made doing the podcast all the more important and it was during the winter that I lived in Chicago one February January day in 2011 I was stocking up for like blizzard survival sundries at the Trader Joe's and I was checking out and I was looking at my email on my phone and I saw that we had out of nowhere gotten an email from Jesse thorn host of Jordon Jesse go on the maximum fund network and he asked us if we wanted to join because some listeners of his show had suggested that he listened to ours and he did and he liked it and he wanted us to be a part of the network of this show that we all loved and I flipped in the Trader Joe's checkout aisle I you know ran out to my car and I called Justin I was like check your email and we were all just like in disbelief that this incredible thing it just happened so we joined and you know started to make a little bit of money off of a BIM BAM once we had our first pledge drive a couple months later and we started to get some advertisers which maximum fun helps their their constituent shows set up and that was like novel it was not anywhere near something that we could like support ourselves on on my 24th birthday that April in Chicago we did our first live show opening for Jordan Jesse go at the main stage of second city and that was that was a real that was a real mom's sphaghetti moment that was a real which is to say I did I yurts backstage a second city but due to nerves I still get like stage fright every time I walk on stage to deliver a lecture to the student body of FSU but that was like the most intense like that it had ever been but we did it and it was fun and people liked it so he started organizing our own live shows by ourselves which is such a bad idea I usually they were in our hometowns because we were lazy so I booked a couple in Austin at this like art warehouse where we showed up the day of the show a couple hours before showtime and somebody walked out of the warehouse and handed us the keys and left and we were like oh no so we're like tweeted like does anybody know how to run a sound board and lights and like our friends and significant others took tickets and like we really it was very it was very bohemian and so it kind of kept going like that like we did more live shows we got more advertisers as the years passed and we did more pledge drives we had more listeners and we would get more donors and it became more and more of a reality that we could support ourselves doing this and it kind of turned into a part-time job and then in 2014 Justin and Sydney were expecting their first child and we wanted to give Justin you know some some time off so we recorded a couple episodes of Ben BAM in advance one of which Dungeons & Dragons fifth edition had just come out and I wanted to play it and I didn't have any friends in Chicago so I tricked my family and they're playing it professionally so we recorded this episode I'm a BIM BAM that was just all of us playing D&D and we played it with our dad who he kind of like brought into the fold in the same way that Justin and I who had worked together joystick for a while wanted to do something with Travis the three of us were having so much fun doing this thing that like we wanted to bring dad into it because we were excited to be doing it and we you know loved each other and we wanted to have fun together so we recorded this episode and we didn't know what to expect from it we didn't know what like the response was going to be and we published it and there was a lot of demand for us to keep doing it so we launched it as the adventure zone not really knowing whether it was going to be anything or not and then it turned out to be the biggest thing that we had ever done we started to eventually like after a year or so started to dabble in like more like dramatic storytelling and less like RPG goofy goof tabletalk and that surprisingly to all of us really like resonated with the audience at that show it found because we have thought of ourselves as just these comedy clowns the the entire time we were doing the BIM BAM but that show that adventure zone really started to mean something else to the people who started listening to it Justin likes to describe Taz is a car that started to fly which I love because it's a it's a well it's a very flattering metaphor but it also if you could imagine being in a car as it starts to fly and how terrifying that would be because the show got big it got it got scary big pretty fast and as the DM I felt this enormous pressure to deliver this like complex and satisfying narrative first of all to my family who I was running a diety game for which if any of you DM Dungeons & Dragons game my heart goes out to you it's a lot of fist pumping a lot of silent fist pumping in the air which I love hello the best and you know doing that work doing that writing to you know impress my family and the audience that we had was super hard work so I had moved to Austin in the summer of 2011 and that's where I met my wife Rachel and we got married very quickly we got engaged like a year later and then got married in 2013 and I'd found a social life in Austin that was like unlike anything I'd ever had before since I left Huntington and for like the first time in my adult life I was really happy but my workload was buckwild I was full time at Joystiq and then launching polygons which is you know kind of a terrifying work upheaval that involved a lot of labor to get that thing off the ground the whole time just like crossing our fingers that it was gonna work out and eventually it did which is great and we were doing my BIM BAM we were doing more and more live shows from a BIM BAM I was traveling for polygons from from time to time and I was just writing tasks all the time every free moment I had during the work day I was writing tasks Rachel would go to sleep and I'd stay up for a couple more hours and just write more tests I had an idea for something test stands for The Adventure Zone sometimes I don't know what audience I'm speaking to and I don't want you to think I'm writing like whee Looney Tunes fanfiction but it was it was it was hard work it was a time-consuming work but I loved it like I loved pouring myself into it and I had this like super important realization that has really shaped my work ethic ever since and it is this realization that there is no upper limit on the amount of work that you can put into most things to improve them I could I could write my ass off to come up with new and exciting ideas for our campaign and the more that I did that the more I wrote the more I could delete the old stuff I wrote and come up with even better stuff and so the show would get better because of it I started editing the bin BAM like pretty early on and I didn't know what I was doing so I taught myself how to do it and the more time I spent on the edit the better the show got and that was especially true for adventure zone especially once we started doing music and in the fall of 2015 about a year in I wanted to put music in the show because I thought it would be like a good way to underscore these dramatic moments but I didn't know how to license music I didn't know how to like pay for it and I didn't know like what kind of budget we could potentially set aside for that so I was like how hard could it be to make music yourself and with that hubris and like a metric ton of Garage Band loops I started to make music for the adventure zone and the show got better because of it and I you know took YouTube tutorials on how to use the software and some online classes on like music theory and the more work I put into it the better the show got and there didn't seem to be any limit on how much work I could do and the audience like saw those changes to and the show just like just exploded but like I said it was it was a ridiculous amount of work on top of the you know other podcasts we were doing and my role is deputy news editor at polygon which was a weird fit for me I was never really happy in that role because again like me in journalism we were never just a great fit and I actually had thought about quitting Travis had done so he'd quit the Cincinnati Shakespeare Shakespeare Company he had worked at and was doing podcasting full-time and he moved out to LA with his wife Teresa to like support himself doing the podcast and I thought about doing the same thing about leaving polygons not about moving to LA I would never I would never but around that time Vox started to get more focused on making video content and polygons needed somebody to do that on their end and I saw that as the next vine that I could swing - because if I screwed it up like what's the worst that could happen I was thinking about leaving anyway and so for the next year like I taught myself how to make videos and hopefully videos that people would watch and after about a year of doing that and not really breaking through we had this All Hands video conference in New York and after talking about it we came to the realization that like we just need to do goofs y'all and so I came up with the idea of monster factory there and pitched it thank you we just recorded a new one yesterday oh my god it's so good and so I pitched it at that video conference and then as soon as we went home we recorded it and I edited it and we posted it and it did super well and that series that that pilot even established the tone of every other piece of video content I would ever do for that website and I I loved it it made me so it made me so happy and you know the work I was doing a polygon started to take off and adventure zone was taking off from a pin band we were touring more and more with and there was just this critical mass of things that I was working on and you know proud of and working on them very hard and I was still very much in that mindset of like I'm invincible I have infinite time and stamina and my brain can't be killed so is with that mindset that we decided it's not a few more things to the pile and so I started to do like more and more stuff at polygon I would just have an idea for a video and then it would just spiral into a video series and like I want to play World of Warcraft that's a bad idea when you're as busy as I was but what if we make a video series out of it haha clever life hack Griffin Rachel and I you know loved each other very much and loved talking to each other very much so of course we have to do a podcast together and we were watching The Bachelor religiously with our friends at that time and so you know why not make a podcast about it and then eventually the show came up with an answer for that question which is because the show sucks and is a very it got the show got exponentially grosser from the period that we started doing the show and we had a miserable time just like watching it let alone recording a show about it every week and so we changed formats and started doing a show called wonderful that is just us talking thank you it's just it's the diametric opposite of our bachelor recap podcast where you just talk about things we like and make us happy every week and it's like a joy to record that show we were nearing the end of the first adventure zone campaign which we started touring with as well and we were approached by a literary agent who said you should do a graphic novel of this and we said who would want that and then a publisher called first second said we would very much like that and so we teamed up with Carrie peach who was an artist in the the fan community of Taz who had made all this incredible fan art and started working with her to make this graphic novel and it took a long time to figure out how to make that first book how to adapt a podcast of a game into a written thing on a page and it was tough because we actually started writing a book - which comes out this is summer the adventure zone coming to come we started writing book two before book one came out and you know we were used to this instant feedback loop of just making something and putting it up and seeing what people thought of it and that doesn't happen in book publishing so we didn't know what to really expect and then it came out was the number one New York Times bestseller and that was by far the weirdest call I've ever gotten in my entire life it was also like a weird they called our publisher called me first for some reason and then like the etiquette of like waiting for my brothers and dad to find out and like do I text them I don't want to burst the bubble I want to it was that was a weird day man and then I got approached to write a story for a Star Wars short story compilation called a certain point of view and I was like yes yes I will yes I will write your short story for your Star Wars book are you sure we started to do an annual podcast about the movie paul blart mall cop - with [Applause] what a paul blart mall cop - fans in the house with our two friends and incredibly funny comedians from New Zealand Tim and Guy it's called till death do us Blart and the premises if one of us dies we have named a successor so the show will continue through the end of linear time the movie trolls came out and Justin there were a few prominent youtubers who got cast in it and Justin watched the movie a thousand times with his daughter and then we got super high in Portland and said why can't we be in the next trolls movie and so with the same amount of prep work that apparently goes into all of our pilots we recorded right then and there the McElroy brothers will be in trolls - now trolls world tour and then last summer we found out we'd succeeded in our quixotic quest and it was during that time that I expressed interest in doing some more voice acting work and we have a ton of awesome folks who listened to our shows who work in animation and games and stuff like that so we started to do voice acting work started touring more and more we got a booking agency who started to book us bigger and bigger venues we were doing like weekend a month usually three cities a tour we worked with a talent agent who got us the BIM BAM TV show on seeso which was NBC's short-lived alt comedy streaming platform pour went out ripsi so and so in September 2016 we took three weeks off everything that we were doing which like is hard to do when your schedule is as busy as ours was and we just knocked out these six episodes in Huntington just shooting on this brutal schedule and it was hectic and it was scary because it was unlike any other work we've done before and we were pretty sure we were gonna make a very bad TV show but we got it done and then the next February came out and we were really happy with it and the fans were happy with it and then a few months later seaso shut down which I don't that wasn't I still I don't think it was our fault so like all these things kept popping up and some of them we actively pursued some of them kind of fell in our laps but we said yes to all of it and I'm glad that like I'm glad we did that work I'm glad that it got made I really am but around that time we also like started settling down with our families a month after we shot the TV show Travis and Theresa had their first child and then a month to the day after that Rachel and I had our first child our only child no I said first I've got 15 children and it didn't take me long to like look at this pile of work that it accumulated you know exponentially oftentimes when I wasn't looking directly at that pile and and so I considered the pile and I said oh no this is unsustainable and so in the summer of 2017 things kind of reached a breaking point like we were balancing all of these different things at once and we also we felt this abstract pressure of like a dozen other things that we could be doing like we would talk with people about doing another TV show or you know a season to him a Bam Bam are like any project that whatever company approached us that could happen and like when you have that this like me as but it's like cloud of things that could be happening and you don't do any of them because you're not sure if they're a good idea or not you feel constantly like you're failing like you are like you're not living up to your potential or you know you're not getting the things done that you need to get done and that was a terrible feeling and we were luckily all kind of on the same page which was we need to slow down I I am proud of the fact that I have always set a firm barrier between work time and and family time I dropped my son off at daycare and pick him up and when I pick him up like that's it I walk out of the house and get my car and that's it for work and I I kept that that very sacred but there's nothing that can like defend against me being like high-strung all the time because of the amount of work I was doing or keeping me from you know having to stay up late at night after Henry and Rachel go to bed and finishing the work that I have to do and then being tired all day the next day when we're supposed to be playing together it started to have just a really detrimental effect on on all of our lives and so we took steps to pare down and for me the the big part of that was leaving polygons which I did in April of last year we are still doing monster factory on a monthly basis because they can pry that from our cold dead hands and but my role at the job was a lot more than that I remember you know I was exhausted in my my time to spend at polygon was you know crumbling a bit and I could feel my interest in like my passion for doing this job like kind of start waning and it was around that time that we started to hire a new wave of video team employees and looking at all these applications and all of these videos submissions all these incredible video submissions I just knew that like my interest in doing this job my passion for this job had been completely eclipsed and it was time for me to kind of you know leave and free up the free up the money for them to hire them and so I left polygon and you know we put some of our bigger ideas to bed we started to say no to things some projects that could potentially come to fruition and we started to focus on things that like really really mattered to us and only taking on new jobs that were like manageable we started to take on things that we knew we could just you know knock out in a couple weeks or you know had a deadline that we could meet and be done with it and so yeah that's kind of where we're at right now and unexpected like great thing about sort of taking on that philosophy is that when something comes around that we like really do want to do now we have time to do it because it's not part of this weird cloud of potential projects last August when the graphic novel came out hit The Times bestseller list someone from Marvel reached out to our literary agent said hey we're doing this this miniseries called war of the realms and the Thor cannon and do you guys want to take some big heroes and do whatever the hell you want with them and we were like well let's check our Google Calendar yes give us give a spider-man give us your spider-man and we'll do it and that's been a bracing experience it's been incredible it's it's been especially a dream come true for my dad you actually used to work in a comics industry many moons ago before we were doing podcasts and you know you feel a lot of pressure I felt the same way with the Star Wars short story I wrote not to break this enormous IP that'd meant so much to me growing up and and so there's certain considerations that go into that that we don't have to do in our goof ass podcasts I remember actually for what I was writing the Star Wars short story I had some bit in there where I said something about like you know he felt the earth between his toes or something like that referring to dirt as earth and the editor got back was like earth doesn't exist in Star Wars and I was like oh didn't even think about that and all of these things all these opportunities had a way of compounding on top of one another and some of them we can attribute to just like having cool fans who are working on cool stuff and asked us to work with them and a lot of it kind of mutated off side projects that we were already doing and the more we did the more there was to do and after you know doing that for too much for too long we kind of realized what was important to us and what to prioritize which which brings us to where we are today we're still doing the BIM BAM every week we're at about 450 episodes of that show which isn't buckwild Adventure Zone is on its second season and it still is like time consuming as it ever was my wife and I are still doing wonderful every week and that shows too a joy to record and you know we're traveling usually doing one travel thing a month whether it's you know pod con in January or you know with a three city tour on a weekend in in in February or four March we're going on a cruise the Joko cruise at a Fort Lauderdale in like two days which I need to pack for and everything on top of that like is variable and it is also like budgeted fiercely last year like one of the best things we've ever done was hire Amanda who's our business manager who has helped us after 10 years of pretending to be a business like actually start behaving like one and you know having that having that budget of what our time is you know helps us to do stuff that actually interests us when the opportunity comes around like no joke doing for Florida State University so like that's the history of the of the you know the show and the family business and if you turned out of all that I don't really blame you but I thought it would be helpful to kind of talk about some takeaways that you all might find you know maybe practical if this is maybe the kind of work that you're interested in doing or any kind of like self-made creative work and I feel the big question that I never know how to answer it was like how do I get a job in games journalism or online like whatever because there's not one answer to that there are tons of different answers to that but one sort of constant and all those is you get very lucky and I that's not false humility you you get lucky and the ones who a lot of the ones who make it just got lucky Justin Travis and I are all you know just had white dudes which obviously like introduces an unfair imbalance in you know finding those those lucky breaks and again like Justin likes to attribute our success to Gallagher the watermelon smashing man because he wrote this feature on this terrible full-motion video game that Gallagher made and Chris Grant read it and that's why he decided to hire Justin and like that was the chain of events that led me to standing on this stage today if it weren't for Gallagher I wouldn't be here which is kind of a horrible realization so that said here's a few things that I think could could be helpful if you want to make stuff online the first thing and this is a really lazy one is to not just do what you love do what you're already doing which is not me saying like give up on your dreams it's me saying like if you subscribe to like the Malcolm Gladwell outliers like 10,000 hours Theory where you have to do something for 10,000 hours to be considered an expert at it you know joking around the dinner table we had 10,000 hours of making jokes for each other and making each other laugh you know before we started doing a podcast together I almost certainly had 10,000 hours of video game time log by the time I was like a just 10 so I was uniquely equipped to do that job as well I believe that like everybody has something or maybe a few things that they know more about than like 95% of the rest of us and a lot of those things are things that I want to hear about and I think that's true for a lot of people because human beings just have infinite capacity for curiosity so if you have something that you're good at and that you know about and that you're already doing and you think there's other people who would like to hear about it like that's probably something you should think about pursuing this one's gonna sound shitty at the top to know the meaning of hard work and I promise I don't mean it like an angry baby boomer like I'm sure you all get enough of that already I I mean when am I supposed to drink what am I supposed to drink water we didn't talk about this ahead of time man I feel like Marco Rubio during that one state of the reunion yo I mean know the meaning of hard work in like a more literal and personal sense like figuring out what is hard work for you is like an impossible constantly moving target I've been working from home for 12 years now and I have constantly reevaluated what it means like to do a good day's work and starting out like that meant I didn't have a boss breathing down my physical neck and so you know my desk and computer which had world Warcraft on it was in the same room as my bed and like those two things were available and I could just do them instead of working and fighting that off was was a difficult thing and then obviously I over corrected a bit work was all I did and then I you know burnout and I'd have to dial it back and after going through that pattern enough times you start to like lose context for when you're working enough I would have periods and I still do this where I have enormous guilt that I am not living up to my potential that I'm not doing the work that I know I can do and then I'm if I take a step back and look at it I say like I'm actually working myself to the bone I'm working too much and I'm just not I don't have good context for it and then I'll have times where I'm like oh my god so I'm dead on my feet I'm so tired I've been working so much and I'll get to the end of the day and be like you played Diablo for like three hours today and your brain just like tricks yourself into into like not actually knowing what you're how you're doing this is less a piece of advice because I don't actually know a great way to dial it in and stay dialed in because that's hard work in and of itself but expect it like be patient with the fact that your your work day is going to constantly change you're gonna work hard and you're gonna work hard up to what you think is a you know your your limit that you can feel good about and still be happy doing other things at the end of the day and by the way like in the modern you know shitty gig economy you're gonna have people who tell you that actually that's not enough and if you don't work ten times harder than that we're gonna replace you because you're easily replaced and if you do end up at a place like that leave because you're never gonna be happy there this one is kind of a cheat collaborate with people you love I had this sort of genetically built in I'm not saying that you should work with your family because very few people should but if you're if you're trying to like forge a new career path by yourself you're gonna make it a thousand times harder than it needs to be if you try and do it alone so maybe it is family maybe it's you know close friends and loved ones maybe it's people whose work you really admire even if it's in other fields who want to work with you every part of the creative process is improved by having other people doing it alongside you and the added benefit of that is you're not lonely all the time and I can't stress how important that is I might collaborate I don't even necessarily mean you know co-hosts a podcast together just make them make somebody a part of it which brings me to find a source of feedback that matters to you find a few ideally starting out like find a friend who knows something about the thing you're trying to do even if they're just an enthusiast and make that friend be brutally honest with you with the the stuff that you're making and have them be brutally honest because they love you and they they don't want you to embarrass yourself and they want you to make the best thing that they know you can make this friend will be very hard to find but you can also make yourself this person like be honest with yourself and this is another tightrope walk where if you are overly critical of your work you'll never make anything but if you can like be your own honest critic your own fair critic you will you will know when your work is ready for other people to see and that is an important moment and then if you're lucky enough to find an audience for God's sakes listen to what they have to say this is another thing that changed so much for us over the time we were doing the podcasts starting out we said a lot of dumb on my bread my brother my brother and me a lot of like unintentionally but that doesn't matter a lot of hurtful and our listeners who exhibited an amount of like patience that we did not deserve told us how much it hurt them and why it hurt them and so we felt terrible about that and we tried to stop doing it and the show and all the shows that we do today are what they are today largely because of what they taught us they they cared about our show and a lot of them cared about us as as people and they wanted us to be better so of course like that feedback mattered and there of course like also sources a feedback of people who you know on a different end of things just like thought that they could make a funnier show than us and so they never let us hear the end of it there started to be people who kind of defined themselves by the fact that they didn't like us and the work that we did and they never hesitated to let us know about it and there were people who like had feedback but like they didn't care if it was good or helpful or like had anything to do with what we were doing they just wanted to say something out loud and if you treat that stuff like the important stuff then whatever you're making is gonna crash and burn and if you get so fed up with that stuff that you don't listen to any feedback then your shows also going to crash and burn so know the difference between the to find the feedback that matters and really listen to it and get get interested in learning and improving your craft I was a terrible student I was a really really really bad student I was very good at like taking tests which made me an infuriating person to be a student alongside but I was not interested in learning I just wasn't and that's a cruel joke because now I'm 31 and I realize how little I know and I'm like I would love to actually learn some stuff can I get an honorary Doctorate for this how's that work wait I don't think you actually immediately know things when they give you an honorary Doctorate I was like I was working at joystick and I remember I was like I can do this here I can just like slip by not knowing anything but I was working on the weekends I didn't have any backup and so I would mess up a lot and I knew I was you know one bad post away from losing this this incredible shot that I had and so I started to go to my co-workers and learn directly from them and you know I memorized the AP Stylebook front and back and I started to check and double-check and triple-check every post I wrote before I published it and I got better at that job and I took a lot of satisfaction in it learning to edit the podcast and improving my editing learning to write music and improving how I make music that stuff improved the work that we did which is satisfying but I also took pleasure in the learning of the thing and ideally that's what's gonna happen with you too if you love the thing that you're doing learning to do it better is not going to be a painful thing it's going to be like a wonderful thing and it's also going to show you like that your show can improve and how it can improve but it's also like important to not judge yourself by the work that like the best people in your field are doing because again if you do that like you're never gonna make anything the the road from like where you are the starting point to where they are is is enormous and winding and again there's like tons of roads that that will get you there not all of them require you know a formal education there's resources online and communities that can help you do anything so find them and then you know enjoy the process of improving your craft and the last point that I had here that I'm gonna take a drink of water about so don't laugh at me you monsters oh man usually when there's three of us I can like not talk for an hour and sneak those in my last point is take care of yourself you should be doing this anyway but especially if you decide to you know make your own arch or con I can't believe I just referred to my as art but you've heard me like refer to mental health a couple times in this lecture and is it's only something that like embarrassingly recently did I start to realize it's a factor in my life that I need to take seriously because it's so easy when you're on your grind to feel like you are impervious to the effects of stress and anxiety and sleep deprivation and exhaustion and creative burnout and social isolation and you know malicious feedback for me like I was doing five jobs at once and looking at myself like I'm Robocop and I get that all the time from listeners who like anytime we make something new they're like I don't know how you have time to to do all this stuff and you know my my immediate response is I'm talking Robocop but the real answer is like yeah I'm really not taking very good care of myself and I know it's unfair for me like stand up here and say like don't work too hard because it's because of that work that I'm standing here in the first place it's because of the like you know week-long stints in Batavia where I was working around the clock and I literally didn't leave the house and the whole time I was just like what's depression what and it's because of that work that like I in some part found success and I don't know how things would have been different if I take it more time for myself I don't know how things would have changed if I had taken vacations like I don't know but what I do know and where I messed up and honestly like I don't have many regrets in my life but this thing like I regret maybe more than anything is that the thought that I was maybe doing something bad for me literally never crossed my mind so it's unfair for me to stand up here and say like I did the work but maybe you shouldn't because it can mess you up but what I will say is find what you want to do find what you're already doing if you're lazy like us find what you're good at and find people to help you along the way and hold yourself accountable for what you know you can do and try super hard but while you're doing all that don't let yourself forget about your own happiness or your sense of community or your health or don't let yourself forget about literally everything else in the world while you're while you're chasing that dream don't undervalue those things don't think that you are somehow above meaning them because nobody is you're not invincible this is I'm realizing now this is kind of a bummer way to end the lecture is saying that your but if you take away one thing from everything I have to say today let it be that you are not Robocop and I'm sorry that you had to find out this way so that's all I have prepared for you we're gonna do I guess some Q and a do we have the microphones out what are these microphones I've heard so much about this will be nice because then you all will have to talk and I will be able to drink this delicious non branded water thank you okay I think we have the microphones out I don't know how long we're going to be going so we may have to cut folks off eventually but if the spirit moves you and you want to come down and ask your questions we can just like ping-pong around between the different microphones I'm watching a very polite interaction happening over to my left I'm seeing a lot of people line up I'm just gonna go ahead and tell you that lines probably gonna be too long so I guess people will come and tell you when to cut the line off but we will start over here hi hello yes so I was wondering starting out it was mostly unconsciously that I was doing that that I was actually like getting better because we weren't taking the podcast very seriously when we started doing it because we didn't think it was gonna be anything but like a fun family experiment and so I learned how to get better at editing just by doing it because it needed to get done and Justin and Travis I'm the youngest brother and so a lot of the time I get made to do the things that the other two don't want to do and that's been true of editing now for a decade man I really need to pass the buck back that way so originally like it was just like I had to do it and unconsciously got better I wouldn't say I was like working harder at it and then I also I think like the thing that kind of pushed us forward was adventure zone I think we all kind of realized like Adventure Zone was becoming something kind of special and we wanted to make it like the best thing that it could possibly be like we all love doing the BIM BAM and we all thought it was a fun show to make but Adventure Zone felt like something else entirely it felt like it felt like a story we were all were telling together and so the editing needed to be better for that to make it what we want it to be and so that was really where I started to take it super super seriously but starting out it was just like I did it because I had to do I got better just because I was doing it which is a fine way to start doing things yeah thanks Hey hi what's up hi my name is Lily I actually host a podcast called the good boys girls which is a McElroy fan podcast about my girlfriend we are we are hosted by the lunar light studio network which is actually a network that I own Oh sick I was 18 and thought I'm starting a podcast I should probably also start a network yeah why not that's not how it works but I can be I didn't know that at the time so my question for you is really just about like podcast business stuff mostly like finding advertisers and how you deal with like the financial side of things cuz you know I'm a I'm student here yes and so my girlfriend is 25 and she's also in college and so that both of us are trying to juggle school but also like how to incorporate our business and yes it's all that that part really we're just now doing I will I will fess up to the fact that I complained about Justin and Travis making me edit but really we all have deliberated like different jobs to different people and so like I'm the post-production guy and pre-production on Taz and Travis does you know pre-production on BIM BAM and was very much our outreach guy for a long time and Justin was involved in handling the business stuff so I'm not I don't have a lot of like knowledge on that and then when we hired Amanda she who's our business manager she had started to she knows how to do this stuff and we were all so busy that we didn't have time to like figure out how to do it unfortunately like joining maximum fund they were able to do these things for us which they do for all of their shows so in terms of like finding advertisers I mean we we managed to attract the attention of advertisers by kind of going above and beyond early days in the bin BAM I would write songs bespoke for every advertiser we ever had which was bonkers and I think back on it and going kind of going above and beyond like that like attracted more and more people to our show which of course like you can't do unless you already have an audio I I think what you're doing is kind of incredible because I can't imagine starting a podcast network like we do lots of shows and we have lots of people who say like why don't you do your own Network and first of all like because we like being a part of max fun but also like I don't know how to do it none of us know how to do it so yeah I would hit up Jesse the Warren not a joke he will answer your email he's a very very sweet man and he'll be able to hook you out for sure thanks Hey hi how's it going I sound like a whole new person I know it's wonderful isn't it no I'm drinking more water than I've ever drank in my entire life now this is a sweet vacation okay [Music] my beating heart but are you hiring am i hiring yeah for what everything you will be surprised how far I can stretch my limited skill set it's not a bad question because actually we've hired two people in the last year which is we own a small business which is I must hey everybody it's me Griffin macro a small business owner I'm I'm who you may have heard me from politics they talk about me a lot am i hiring no I am NOT if I'm being completely honest we have dabbled in the hiring arts from time to time obviously the hires we've made in the last couple years or the last like year have changed our lives have been incredible but before that you know we had used assistant assistants from time to time I actually hired an editor for my bin ban who did like three episodes and it didn't work out and then I was like oh I'm never letting anybody else touch our podcasts ever again you again sorry you're asking the perfect wrong mcelroy because I am just as a result of the fact that I am in charge of post-production is like I'm the last one to have a hand on the ball before people here and so I'm such a perfectionist that the idea of handing over control of anything is a problem for me and again I'm working real hard to fix that but unfortunately at the moment no but all I'll let you know I guess oh yes please do I'll continue to admire from a distance okay I appreciate it thank you hey yeah get right on it yeah you're good okay she obviously has to go through the grieving process but I don't live like anywhere close to her anymore and I can see her sort of turning in on herself and as someone who lives far away you know I don't know what I can do for her as someone who's been through that grieving process do you have any advice on what side this is this is an incredible question and I hope I can hold it together while talking about it I so my mom died in 2005 right that was that was a while ago and because of this sort of invincibility that I felt at work like that that that affected actually every part of kind of like how I thought about my self and my personality in my brain which was to say like I thought like I coped with what happened very very well because I was you know I thought I was invincible and then a couple of years ago a very close friend of mine his his dad passed away suddenly in a car accident and for a number of reasons I was kind of coming to terms with my needing to take my mental health seriously and I realized like oh maybe I didn't do a very good job coping with that and so I chickened out and I like didn't reach out to him because I who was I to tell this guy what to do because I did a bad job with it and then it was like a year later and we went on a trip together and I apologized I said like I'm so sorry that I didn't come to you like I just felt like I was such a at it that I wouldn't know what to say and he said like I appreciate you apologizing because he could have just said anything and when he said that I was I was happy that we had you know gotten this weird thing out of here but I was also kind of gutted because he was right your friends like probably you're it's good it's a tough thing and there is no like easy fix for it obviously for a long period of time but and I know it's cliche but just like being there is the most important thing I can't remember a lot from when my mom died because that's sort of a post-traumatic thing that first year is just kind of a blur to me but what I do remember is my friend Finley who I was in a play with went to gamestop and bought this shitty Star Wars Episode two video game or something it was like a fighting game and he brought it over to my house like a week after my mom died we just played it I remember that so like do that if you can do that because I promise it makes a bigger difference than you you would think it would hello how's it going good my name is Meg hey and I was wondering if you had any tips for like just sort of motivating yourself because there's like a thousand things I want to do but like I kind of have a hard time like actually getting myself to do them and so yeah if you had any like tips on self motivation that'd be good yeah it's I kind of I'm a lazy guy like I I well I can't say that that's that's wild historically I was a pretty lazy person and the only reason that like we started to take the shows seriously the only reason why we did the pilot episode at all is because we thought it would be a joke we thought it'd be a laugh we thought it'd be fun to do and so I wasn't thinking of it as some new discipline or some new shot at a career that I had to take super seriously and it worked and every other time that I've tried to force something it hasn't worked and so like you know there's this whole philosophy of knowledge that you meet without like chasing it down viciously with purpose sticks with you a lot you know a lot better than the stuff that you feel like you need to get right now and so I would say like just do one of them that sounds easy and fun and if it doesn't work out then like okay if you like we're trying that thing out and you learned that it wasn't for you you didn't waste your time I spent a bunch of money downloading game development software last year just like buying tools and assets and I was like make a game and I did that for like four days and I was like no I am NOT but I did it and I learned more about like how games work so that's cool and I tried this thing that I've always been interested in doing and then decided it wasn't for me and that's good to like get that out of the way so like I do I would say just like do one that sounds like a fun thing you could do like during a weekend afternoon and just try it and it doesn't have to be the thing that you ended up sticking with but maybe it is and maybe I'll get lucky but if you don't you know you can have a good time anyway thank you yeah it's I mean yeah if you if you've never listened to my brother my brother and me I bring Yahoo's that our fans find they I used to find them myself and then I couldn't physically anymore go to that website and so they agreed to head down into the mine shaft what would we do if it went away I mean we'd find something else to do Justin and Travis are usually pretty good at coming up with bids that live for like a month and then we never hear from them again so maybe the show would just become that maybe it would just become farm wisdom and riddles like I mean there's tons that there's no shortage of places on the internet where people say dumb so I think we'd probably be able to find find a new source of goof material yeah thank you thanks for giving me that panic sorry hi I know it's everyone my name is Mary and I have a very serious question cool which one of the new Pokemon starters are you gonna choose is my favorite stobbles good samus good I mean my the strategist in me says char bunny but what is it I thought I could impress you I'm sorry I was gonna say I was gonna say the green one yeah god I miss those days [Laughter] yeah I don't know I usually go with the fire started just because there's fewer fire type Pokemon I feel like but I like that grass wanna what's it gonna do with that bad I don't know I guess all that is to say any of them but Zabul thank you hi hello you want talk about ukyo what's up actually I'm more of a fan of hearthstone alright alright well yeah okay that's illegal okay all right who reached out first you guys are Lin okay that's a great question yes judge well Justin was the one who kind of like first heard from Lin or got in touch with Lin I had never met Lin until and I was like pretty unplugged from the musical theater scene so like and this was when he was doing in the heights which is an incredible show and I like I didn't know anything about any musical theater at all and then we did a we had this one day in New York and this was the the worst thing we've ever done tour planning wise we did a show in New York City which is probably our biggest market and we did it in a 99-seat theater so we put the tickets on sale and they sold out in four seconds which is not a flex it's a way of saying that like it's a huge market of course there's gonna be 99 people that want a list of your show so that one sold out and they're like okay we'll do a second show and then the venue put the tickets on sale 15 minutes early and they sold out in four seconds since we were like okay that's unfair so we'll do a third show we did three shows in one day it was the worst day but after one of the shows we were out meeting folks in the lobby and Lin was there and just was like those lin-manuel Miranda I was like oh hey what's up nice to meet you and now we were I you know we chatted because he's an amazing guy and we you know surprisingly had a lot to talk about and and then we just kind of had this like friendship that came out of that where we had him on our show and he was hysterical and he wrote us a musical number for our podcast and he I remember things kind of changed from for me when we were gonna do another show in New York and he invited us to come to a preview of Hamilton which is like was the hottest ticket in town we sat next to Candice Bergen and I saw Hamilton and I was like oh this is the smartest man that's currently living uh-oh I should have I should have known everything about him and his body of work the whole time and so then it became very intimidating but yeah he's just a great dude yeah I'm is that as I said the number one New York Times best seller thing is unbelievable but like the fact that like he'll hang out with us when we come to New York is actually the most unbelievable thing and it really puts our amount of Fame and success in perspective because we did a red-carpet opening of Jimmy Buffett's welcome to Margaritaville who are also kind of friends and we were like getting drinks with Lynne because we recorded something in the hotel right before and we laughed and then realized like oh this is a red-carpet premiere for a Broadway show and Lynn's standing like five feet away from us and it was like a black hole had opened and just just the entire borough just kind of like descended like crows on our party was the scariest thing that's ever happened to me so yeah it's weird huh sure and then um I lost it okay yeah so a lot of people were really touched by tez and now that you've released a comic book it's expanding Morris or plans to extend it even like the doing more of the balanced arc or taking the balanced arc into like different mediums yeah typically animated TV shows yeah yeah we are we we have been in a perpetual state of talking about that for a long time what you got to understand is like we get a lot of people talking to us like fans and like production companies like hey let's talk about it boom boom BIM BAM season 2 and I was like I would love to hear you try to make sense of that because we live in three different states and all have children and like I can no longer go to Huntington for three weeks I can't do it and more importantly I won't do it so you tell me how we make that and that's very much true for you know a bigger Taz project and like I said like we budget our time other than the core stuff that we're doing like super fiercely so if we decided to do like a Taz TV show it's has animated show which I'd love to do I think it'd be incredible but that would be it like that would be the only we could maybe keep doing the podcast alongside it but like I'm not going to do that on top of a billion other things and bury myself in the hole because I love hanging out with my two-year-old and I can't do that as much as I'm doing all this other stuff so yeah it's tough it's like we are to answer your question and I hope it's not in like a you know false tantalizing way but like yeah we're talking about it and I would love to find a thing that makes sense I genuinely look what I would love to make one of those I'd love to make a task game of some sort but it just it has to make sense and by virtue of the fact that we are you know this this family-owned operation who does a ton of different like because of that like it's harder for us to do big stuff than the average bear so yeah that's the answer thank you yeah thanks hey hey I'm just gonna Baskin and also I feel the need to introduce myself by name because literally yeah do it hi I'm Chris hi Chris thank you marry kill in that case wet bed behead no are you serious I'm gonna do this are you sure yeah do you have a backup question I'm gonna do that game I'm Mary Mary married to somebody already I also don't wanna murder okay yeah you mean the parts that my family members played in the show a visitor yeah yeah yeah are you starting to figure out this this is never gonna happen I know yeah you got to take the big swings right that's what the whole point of this whole speech was I was called with a sermon what great question because I have been thinking about that yeah yeah I've done nothing I got it at like noon and I woke up at 4:30 this morning so I napped for two hours and then this is this isn't a joke I've edited two podcasts today since I've been in telling I was editing backstage and episode of wonderful that's coming out next week because I'm about to go on a boat for two weeks and the big wheel keeps on turnin so that is how I spent my day in Tallahassee it's a it's a beautiful city from what I've seen I don't take it personally I never see anywhere we spent three days in New Orleans and like got to walk around there that was the first time that like we have done that in all the shoes we've been touring most of the time it's like we see the hotel I've been to Seattle six different times and I can tell you where the hotel is and where the Convention Center is so yeah nothing sorry yeah thank you hello I just wanted to thank you first off for like bringing in so much joy just you and your whole family for like me I'm sure many other people so but then my actual question was how do you find the time to like feel kind of the full moments and feel mindful when you're all these accomplishments and crazy just events in your life or happening within like a span of like a decade and some years I mean some of them in the span of like 2017 was a crazy year for me I was at 30 under 30 an hour you know we got hired on to do this you know graphic novel and our you know the finale of balance came out and got like a million downloads in a single day like a bunch of stuff happened I think that's when the Star Wars thing happened like all of this wild stuff happened and I'll be I'll be perfectly honest one of the like terrible side effects of keeping yourself as busy as I was keeping myself is that I wasn't mindful of those things I wasn't necessarily celebrating the the the positive response to the work that I was doing I was enough to like you know keep myself invested in doing it which is important but you know I I thought the 30 under 30 thing was like a cosmic joke that was gonna get pulled out from under me at any minute and then it didn't and I was like oh wow cool and then I made a joke about it on the very next podcast and continued to to this day and so like yeah I don't think I get an especially good job of like really appreciating the good things that were happening which is I mean it only reinforces the kind of bad habits of of work that I was getting into at the time where you know I was doing all this work and then being like well for what and it's like because it's awesome and because of the incredible like audience that you have in all of these like remarkable blessings that were being bestowed upon you like that's why you're doing it I now realize how important that stuff is I hope I am getting better at being mindful of just life in general is I it's it's it really had things really have changed since I left polygon and I've tried to keep my life more in in my own grasp and so yeah it's gotten better since then but I don't know I didn't do a good job of it so I guess ask another podcaster I'm sorry I keep kicking the can down the down the hallway that's the turn of phrase for what that means so yeah sorry I don't have more hi killer yeah great alright so you've mentioned a couple of times now how special Tazz has been for a lot of people myself included and I think one of the things that makes it special for a lot of us is the representation of LGBTQ characters that you include in your show you can damn it [Applause] alright alright let's calm down okay so obviously you're aware of the following yeah what how how would you say that that knowledge has sort of influenced like the characters and the storylines that you right now for TAS I mean so so I it's it is tough to say our show's developed a like a big LGBTQ following and a lot of it I actually think came from maximum fun which is like an incredibly inclusive network and was doing incredible work at building that inclusivity before we joined it and it was a lot of the LGBTQ community who like kind of helped us correct the shitty shitty things that we would say on my BIM BAM allow at the time because a lot of it was at their expense because you know we were I mean I do I'm not gonna apologize for it there was it was shitty but you know we were we lived a fairly insular life in a small small town in West Virginia and all of a sudden we're speaking to this much larger audience and we're speaking without much kindness or thought into it and so we had a large LGBTQ following and when we started to do the the adventure zone and started to dabble in like storytelling started to dabble in narrative we were ill-prepared I think for what that was gonna mean to people I had never written a story before in my life like I had no idea like I did know right because I have read stories and seen movies and shows so like I knew how stories could resonate with people and what you want out of them but we weren't being especially mindful about that when we started doing the show and then we realized largely because there was an enormous demand from our audience that they wanted that representation and thinking about it we're like yeah like that's it easy that's an easy call because more diverse characters leads to like better stories and and more diverse stories and you have to be like extra mindful because you don't want to like it up and we definitely fell into bad tropes as we went and tried to correct those two and yeah it never was a I I used to get kind of uncomfortable when people would like bring this up not not for you know any shitty reason but but just because like it seemed so obvious like why wouldn't why wouldn't you do this and I I guess you can chalk it up to a lot of people just not even thinking that it's something that's important but once you do know it's important like why I resisted genuine this is not me being trying to be like a fake ally or anything like that I just like I genuinely don't understand the alternative mindset and so it's you know it's it's something that we keep in mind not just for adventure zone but you know hopefully for all the shows that that we do in terms of career in terms of like things that you want to do artistically or create sure you want to hash this out right yeah I mean really really really take a you like things yes see if you're good so I mean for me I a lot of this stuff I talked about during this Beach is stuff that happened when I was where you are now like in you know freshman sophomore year of college knowing I didn't want to be a broadcast journalist major but doing it anyway and like the whole time I'm like oh eventually I'm gonna have to do something for money to live and not knowing what that thing was going to be and then I owe so much to Justin and the work that he did to get a foothold in the games industry because that said everything else up because I watched him do that and I was like you I love games and I actually could do it and losing that inhibition losing that doubt that it was something I could do made me think about this thing that I loved and did all the time in this new light of some that I could actually do and it didn't feel pie-in-the-sky it didn't feel like I want to be the next big movie star but if I don't know if Justin hadn't like done that work I definitely wouldn't have considered that as a job and I don't know where I'd be today I don't know what I'd be doing so I'm not saying you know that you're suffering from a lack of imagination I'm saying that like this is a Primo age to have this exact like inflection point of not knowing which of your interests that you have been developing and learning about over the last 20-some odd years or whatever and which ones can be something that you actually want to do 40 hours a week for you know the next 40 years or whatever so I mean I don't know what to tell you other than like we'd have to list out every one of your interests and that would probably take up the rest of our time but yeah I would just say like be patient with yourself and really just try to think about even if it seems wildly unrealistic like what you would like to do every day because that's ultimately what a job is which I hope that didn't come off as condescending genuinely yeah yeah thank you
When he told the story about how quickly his mom passed after the cancer came back I audibly went "oh no" all alone in the caf at work. 💓
IS THAT WHITE MALE WITH GLASSES GRIFFIN MCELROY?!
Yay! I'm glad this was shared!
I am really not surprised that he is really good at this
First time seeing Griffin's face. And now I only see Hank Green.
Thanks for posting this! I was actually trying to look for a Griffin keynote just yesterday (I’ve watched Travis’s and Justin’s).
That bang-marry-kill question was cringey as fuck.
this is really nice. wish I could've attended. fan questions are horrible though. one girl really just wanted to pimp her podcast. one asked for a job. and the some dude was trying to be funny like Griffin is some hired clown who didn't just bare his soul for these people. big yikes.
Ahhhh, Griffin parts the kimono