Welcome to "Ear Biscuits", I'm Link. And I'm Rhett. This week at the Round
Table of dim lighting, we are talking all about what
we call our other best friend, the trio that was Rhett, Link and Ben. Ben Greenwood, our childhood friend, who we've talked about on and off, from time to time. Yeah, he's come up a lot. But we're gonna devote an entire episode to talking about Ben. Yeah, this is an important episode for us. I mean, maybe, I hope it will be for you too listening because, I mean, whether
it's a childhood friend or someone that you meet
along the way in your life, I think that there, there are
people that have an impact on your life, and sometimes
it's not until you look back on all those shared
experiences can you really piece together how deep that impact goes. So, I'm looking forward to this episode. Over the, I was gonna say
years, I guess over the years, there's been times when
I've thought I wanna, I wanna do what we're doing today. I wanna, I wanna talk about
our friendship with Ben, and just pull it all
together just for the sake of taking away even more from it
and appreciate it even more. I hope that's what happens today and. Yeah, because we've, we've
talked about and we have, as we're about to
demonstrate, incorporated Ben into our work. We've also talked about, he
just, he was such an influence on us and the way that we
lived our lives as kids, which has translated into the
way that we live our lives as adults, which I think
is all about mythicality. Such, that-- Absolutely, like, yeah, when we wrote our "Book of Mythicality",
which if you don't know, we wrote a book, it's part
coffee table, part autobiography, lots of stories, lots of illustrations. Get it for somebody. Get it for yourself. I didn't mean, get it for
yourself if you don't have it. When you say get it for
somebody, makes it sound like, only get it as gift. I assume you already have one. 'Cause you won't enjoy it. Yeah, when we set out to write this thing, and we defined what mythicality meant. Which you know what? I'm gonna read it. The quality or state of being
that embodies a synergistic coalescence of curiosity,
creativity, and tomfoolery, sometimes referred to as curio tomfoolery. I didn't even say that right,
sometimes referred to as Curiotomfoolivity. Foolivity. Ideally experienced in
the context of friendship, and intended to bring
goodwill to the universe. We worked on that definition
for quite some time. And we worked on this
book for a long time. That's what we're about y'all. If you wanna know what Rhett
and Link's about, that's it. It's about curiotomfoolivity. Right. And we dedicated this book
in memory of Ben Greenwood. His friendship changed our
lives, but ended way too soon. And there's a picture of
the three of us together right there. So of course we dedicated
the book to Ben because of how he embodied mythicality, and then I think we talked about him a little bit more in the book, but the thing that we really
did the way we brought Ben to life in a character,
is the character of Ben in our novel, "The Lost
Causes of Bleak Creek", this isn't like a Rhett
and Link book promo time, this is about Ben but we have to do this to establish the context. But yes, we wrote a novel last year, "The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek"
and our favorite character besides of course, Rex and Leaf, no actually, our actual
favorite character in the book is Ben who is based on Ben Greenwood. Yeah, read the acknowledgement
in the back there. This isn't a lot-- Because this this novel
was dedicated to our kids. Right, dedicated to our kids. But there's a long list of
people that we acknowledged and thanked in the end. Our childhood friend Ben
Greenwood, for leading us into constant adventure and
fearlessly embodying mythicality and all that life held for you. You gave us the tree,
the rocks and the river. And if you've read the book, or heard us tell lots of stories about these things, you know what the tree the
rocks in the river are? One of the first stories that I think about is damming the creek. Yeah. So, I'm interested in if
you remember the first time you met Ben, but I'd love to
talk about this story first because I think in a lot
of ways, it's kind of, we have a lot of memories and
we'll go through a lot of them but that one, it just
it really encapsulates who he was as a person. Yeah, I don't, I think I
can talk about meeting Ben for the not that I don't have
a story about meeting Ben. But I can just tell you quickly
because he was in my class in third grade, 'cause you
were in a different class in third grade that year. Miss Hood's class? Right. I think it might have
been fourth grade then. We were in Miss Hood's class together. Oh, Everhart was the year that we weren't in the same class. Fourth grade.
But I don't know-- Is that when Ben moved to town? First year was third
grade, Miss Hood's class. Okay, yeah, we were in
that class together then. But because he lived pretty close to me, he lived inside of Keith Hills. I live right outside of Keith Hills. So I think I ended up kind
of playing with him first. Yeah, yeah. But I just remember my
impression of this guy, first of all, you, I've
talked about this before, but unlike you at that
age, I was very much like, I'd meet you and then that night, I ask if I can spend
the night at your house. Like I invited myself over
to so, and I'm and I'm more introverted now and would
never do that, but as a kid, I got to know people and
immediately invited myself. I was like, "So can I spend
the night your house?" It was pretty indiscriminatory. Yeah, and so that was what I did with Ben and I think as a new kid
in town, he was like, "Yeah, I got a friend." And I just found this guy and his family to be so interesting. You know, they were from Oklahoma, they had moved from Oklahoma, and the way Ben talked about Oklahoma, made me think the Oklahoma
was a magical place. Land of milk and honey? He talked about giant catfish
that could eat children. And then he would talk he
talked about his grandfather. And this is something
that now I've kind of seen multiple kids do in
different movies, and stuff, but the way he talked
about his grandfather was as if his grandfather was the biggest, baddest badass in town, who could beat up anybody
including his own dad. And just he was like, he would just talk about his grandfather, like his grandfather was
this larger than life guy who knew everything
and was incredibly strong. Like the strength of Ben's
grandfather was something that was legendary that
was like, and you know, this is before the age of information, like the internet was just kind of get-- You couldn't Google his grandfather to validate these claims. You couldn't Google Oklahoma and be like, oh, Oklahoma is just a state above Texas that's shaped like a pot. Right. Nothing against Oklahoma,
but it's just another state. It's as magical as any other
state, but it's pretty flat. He had a way of making-- Yes, his imagination, was incredible.
Everything magical. I was immediately
captivated, and I was like, I wanna be around this kid. His dad, his family was
interesting because his dad was a professor at Campbell,
just like your dad, right? He was a biology professor, am I right? I think he was in the, he was in the pharmacy school maybe? Or maybe biology. I think they all had the same building, he was in a scientific
discipline of some sort, yes. Okay. But the, behind his house
was a whole stretch of woods. And Ben would always
go out into the woods. And I remember when the three
of us started hanging out about every, I don't know,
I got the impression that about every three to five times
that you guys would hang out I would also be there because
I had farther to come, and you know. Right, and you were, you were a little scared
of things at that time. Just at that time. You've always been a little
bit scared of things. Ben was not scared of anything. He wasn't scared of anything. I mean, he was always
gallivanting through the woods and there was a if you go
deep enough into the woods, there was a creek that, and actually, it was Buies Creek. It was Buies Creek, yeah. That ran back there. And just like all the other
times, there was something crazy that we embarked upon, it
was most likely Ben's idea at this point to build
a dam to dam the creek in order to what? Make a little pond that then. Put fish in it. Put fish, stock it with fish. To stock a pond, and also to build a raft, to raft out throughout our pond. So we did all three of these things. In different places at the same time. But so we went back there and
we dedicated an entire day. Like beavers, man. Just taking rocks, taking logs, taking everything we could scrounge up. Well, we found a plot,
In the woods. To give you an idea,
_ To throw into the creek. Like, Buies Creek, when it
was just typically flowing, this is one of those
creeks that probably like 10 feet across, maybe
20 feet in some places, maybe five feet in other places. But in the middle of the
summer, it's not flowing, you can basically walk across it. If you find a good spot you
can walk across on some rocks without getting wet. Maybe a couple of feet
deep at the deepest point. But if you find one of
those places that like a log is already kind of across the creek and there's some rocks, you're like, oh, I can add a little bit to this and we could be beavers
and build our own dam. It's just, you know, my kids don't know what to do today. You know. They're not damming a
creek, I'll tell you that. This day and age, it's like well, if they're not, you know, I don't wanna get into that. If kids go out and dam a creek now, it's like oh, we got there on the news. Three teens dam creek. We spent like sun up to sun
sundown in this endeavor. And we we dammed the creek. Yep. For like a few minutes. No. Okay, and my recollection, we went and caught fish on the pond and brought them down. Hey, you might have done
that on another day. But--
Because-- No, I do remember that it didn't hold. Well, I think that maybe the first time when we did it with you, it was we went we revisited
the plan because yeah, eventually it was just
like we're not beavers. You know what I'm saying? I want as much as I want
to be a beaver sometimes, I'm not a beaver, and I don't
understand the dam math, you know, which is the math of dams. Right. And the physics of dams maybe, and the whole thing just collapsed. But there was a time in
which we would we dammed it, went down to the creek, caught some like crappie, we would catch all kinds of crappie. Yeah. Down there. He fished a lot. There were a lot of I mean,
the, the creek emptied into a series of ponds that-- Basically man made ponds
for the golf course Yeah, for the Keith Hills golf course. We fish down there all the time. You can catch some bass,
some brim and some crappie. We got some crappy, put them in a bucket, brought them up, put them in there, they swim around for a little bit, and then the dam broke again, because that's what happens to dams. I wasn't much of a fisherman. So I kind of, I think-- A lot of my time spent with
Ben was fishing because-- He was an outdoorsman. He was. Because we also, we cut, you
know, we've talked about this, about how we would just
find a tree and cut it down. Sometimes just going and finding a tree, just selecting a tree in the woods and spending all day with an ax trading off cutting down this giant tree, which is incredibly dangerous, not to mention, not really
environmentally responsible because we were just timbering
one tree for nothing. But he owned an ax. Yeah. And he sharpened his ax. And he invited us to
trudge into the woods, pick the perfect tree, and it was a big one. Again, this is an all day endeavor, taking, trading off,
chopping this thing down. It was absolutely exhausting. Right. And when that thing started to creek. Hours of not talking. Yeah. Of just chopping. But we learned, like we learned like, oh, if you want to cut down
a tree like you just don't, you got to like create, you got to like come in
from the top at an angle, you had to go in from
the bottom at an angle. Like we kind of learned by just doing how you chop down a tree. I mean, I haven't had to use
that skill yet again, but-- And you're talking and we're talking like, seventh grade, maybe sixth grade. Right. But we're the raft thing, Ben cut down a tree about
that big, a pine tree. Okay. And then he cut it up. And then we took ropes
and we tied it together. And then we tried to float it on the pond. I wasn't there for that. And the whole thing came apart as soon as we tried to float it, like when we tried to get on it, it was like, this isn't stable enough. I can guarantee you if I was there, it still wouldn't have worked. You know what I'm saying? But he just the idea. He would build a lean to, right? Well, yeah, so that's, uh, that's one of my favorite
stories about Ben is the time that he, there
was a an empty lot across, well, basically woods across
the street from his house. Now, I've gone back, you
know, in the past couple years and now that whole side of
the street and Keith Hills is filled with houses, but for a long time it was just woods. Yeah. And he said, I go to his house, he's like, I think we should build an A frame. And I'm like, yeah, I have no idea what the hell an A frame is. But I'm like, yeah, that's right, A frame. Let's do it. Okay. And so again, the thing that was so
mysterious about Ben was in a day before the internet, how did people learn things? He just learned things in books. He just, I guess he just
went to the library, which nobody else was doing. And we're just be like, I got this. I know how to build A frame. I don't even know what part. It wasn't until we finished
and it wasn't A frame by looking at it from the side, I was like, oh, A frame. The whole time, I was like, yeah, A frame, and I was like, where's the A? But we spent all day building this thing out of two by fours. And oh, not limbs? No, we use two by fours as
the braces of this thing. Okay. And like nailed them together. But then We got sticks. Again the whole time, I'm kind of acting like
I know what we're doing. You know, I'm saying like, I'm there. I'm helping, but I'm kind of like waiting
to see him do something then to know what we're doing. And he probably knew all of this. And then we put sticks, big sticks on it, leaned up against each other, then smaller sticks. And then we made a giant pit of mud. And then started putting the
mud on top of all the sticks, and then put leaves on top of that, and like straw and grass and stuff. Yeah. Ben was like, that guy from primitive. What's it called that YouTube channel? Primitive technology. Primitive technology. Yeah, he would be that guy. If he had a YouTube channel, and so he, we did this and then of course, he was like, we're gonna do this. And then we're gonna sleep in there. Camp? And so that night, after
we finished the thing, we like kind of like
cleaned out underneath it. We put our sleeping bags under there. And we camped this A frame, and I just thought, this is the coolest thing I've ever done. And every everything
that Ben set out to do was the coolest thing we'd ever done. Yeah, well and that A frame, for many, many, many years, we probably did that in like fifth grade. Even when I would come
back home from college, I would go out there
and it'd be like, man, there's still like, I mean, I wouldn't sleep
under there anymore. But like there's like mud. The roof is kind of still intact. It was like it was it wasn't A frame man. It held up. So I mean, if you've read the
"Lost Causes of Bleak Creek" now you see the connection
between a kid who can escape from a reformed school, and instead of going
back home to his parents, just subsists on his own in the woods. Yeah, eating squirrels. Not something that we made up. Yeah, he could easily have done all that. I remember you two taking
me out to this A frame, which in my mind was a lean to, but I guess it leaned on the other to. It leaned on to itself. Yeah.
Made an A. And then you said, would you want, would you like to smoke a big George? And I'm like, ah, I'm afraid. Yeah. So again, this idea came from
the fact that Ben was so, again, he's reading some book and he's like, hey, you want
to make some Juniper tea? I'm like, yes. And so he's like, oh, we got
to go get these Juniper bushes and we got to put them in water
and steep it and make tea, and it tasted like absolute crap. It was horrible, made you want to vomit. But he would have these
things that he would make that were sort of the "My
Side of the Mountain". "My Side of the Mountain" was my favorite book growing up, and I kind of saw Ben as that kid. I wanted to be that kid,
but I saw Ben as the kid. Yeah. Who could do these things. And that kid lived in a hollowed out tree. Hollow tree. And so we had we had done all this stuff, and it hadn't necessarily
tasted good or whatever. But then in that same
woodsy area over there we built A frame, there where the stalks of-- It was like a weed. It was like a weed that
basically was like bamboo. Yeah, very rigid.
It was a rigid, sort of like sectioned off bamboo like-- Hull. Shaft. And it would, it dried up, it was very hard. Yeah, it would it would
grow and then it would die. And you could snap it off. Snap it off, and then I, look, I
mean I'm gonna give Ben the credit on this one, he can take it, one day he decided what if we smoked this, like a, but it wasn't
like a let's smoke this like was smoke weed. It was more like let's smoke
this like a peace pipe. Yeah. Ceremonial
Like it was, more like a native american type thing, finding something in the
earth and smoking it. But it, I mean it was a hollow device that could be used for smoking if you put something in
it that was worth smoking. But we didn't. When you offered it to me, it was empty and you
just lit the end of it. You lit the end--
With a match. So you suck the smoke through and it was acrid. It was smoking a big George, man. We didn't do anything for you except make you cough a lot. Well yeah. And when you ask me to do it, I do remember that neither
one of you were also doing it. It wasn't-- We've done this at at length. Right. We've smoked big George. But I mean, I just felt this great sense of privilege to be hanging out with you guys when it was like oh man, you've built this thing, and I'm getting invited
to be a part of this. It's like, I mean on one hand, I was like man, I'm
missing out on some fun. But I'm glad to be here for whatever's going on. On the days that he wasn't
carrying around an ax, he would always carry around a machete. Machete. And then we each went to Wamble and Sons and bought our own machetes 'cause you're going through, there's no paths unless you make them. And we would always go explore the woods. And there would be these huge vine that would grow up into the trees. And the vines would, I mean, it would be as big around
as a silver dollar. Some of them would be huge. That's an interesting measurement. Big around as a silver dollar. Those were the, a silver dollar diameter is the perfect diameter for a vine. I think a little bit bigger than that. In fact, I'll tell, I have the story of something
that happened to me on a vine that we will tell you in just one second. But first, we're gonna let you know that you can get this new shirt that Link is wearing--
Snuck it out on me. Yeah I did. I was in the middle of a story. Yeah, well, see, I added a teaser. And yeah.
Read that. This is I was a teenage mythical beast. This is our homage to, can we, I mean, it's really an homage to
Teen Wolf, but it's not. I don't think we can say that. It's not Teen Wolf, you know, 'cause of like copyrights.
It's cool though. It's a and original creation. Mythical.com. Teenage Mythical beast. So we would go into the
woods with our machetes, and you're not just chopping
down to make a path, but you see these vines growing up, and you chop the bottom, and then you walk, you grab it and you walk aways until it
starts getting so taught, you know it's like cause it's anchored up into the top of the tree, and then you just, you jump and you swing like Tarzan. And around the Cape Fear river, and around Buies Creek,
all behind Ben's house, the place was full of these vines. And if you found the exact right diameter, and you found it anchored
to the right tree with the right topography, you could swing just an epic distance. We found one when we
were back in Buies Creek, but I don't think it made the edit. We didn't have a machete. We didn't have anything
to cut it at the bottom. And then the one that we found was, it was broken, and when, that kills it. Well yeah, once you cut the vine, we actually had these theories about can you cut the vine and can we bring a bucket of water and set the vine in the bucket of water to make the vine live longer so we can swing on it more. Yeah. But I was always super, you know, worried because I was always
the biggest and heaviest one, so you know that if
the vine's gonna break, it's gonna break on the big boy. Your dad had instilled this awareness, or maybe even a fear of injury because you know, you were a
burgeoning basketball star, at least in your mind. Well in the minds of all those
in Harnett County as well. Take the bait. Take the bait. So I remember it 'cause I was, I was already in high school this time. Yeah. And it was when they were beginning to sort of clear out the area that then eventually
became the second 18 holes for Keith Hills, but we didn't
know what they were doing, but there was kind of a weird dirt road that they had kind of
cut through the woods. Yeah, this was one of our
last vine swinging adventures. This is the last time I swung on a vine. And like you said, you
find the right topography. So it was perfect. There was a hill, and the tree that had a vine on it was right next to this road that was going downhill. Dirt road.
Dirt road. And we cut the vine, and you guys started swinging, and it was like, it was magical because it was the kind
of thing you could go really high up on this hill, and then swing and then at your pinnacle, at your peak, you guys were probably eight feet off the ground, 10 feet off the ground. If not 50. And I was nervous, it was probably like
sophomore or junior year, like well into thinking I'm
gonna play college basketball. And I was always worried at that point about getting injured. And I was up, but I can't
say no to this perfect vine. So I swung, and I was in
the middle of just like, this euphoric meeting, the end of the pendulum, and like, I was up on the vine. My knees were in the air. That was also a mistake because at it's pinnacle, the vine just completely gave away. I mean I kept it in my hands. Right, right. You hold the vine the whole time. But it's like no longer holding on to whatever branch it needed to. Wasn't your fault. And I come down on that dirt road, on my tailbone. Oh, gosh, I remember seeing it happen. And I remember the noise you made. Do you remember all the words, because-- Oh, oh. It was like--
You were all the, I said, I unleashed a tirade of profanity. It was, we cursed at times. But like I cursed so much
in span of about 30 seconds, and I was like, I think
I've broken my back. I think I've broken my tailbone. And it's my theory that my back problems, that's when they started. But you know, it was all worth it. I think I probably compressed
some discs at that point. Ben had a canoe. We would take the canoe
on the Cape Fear river. And his parents, God bless 'em, would, we'd put the
canoe on top of the car, and we'd drive Lillington, or sometimes all the way to Raven Rock, and they just wait to say bon voyage. And then they'd say we'll pick you up in either Buies Creek or way down in Irwin, like six hours later. Well that, well- If we did all of that. That was the day we went
to Buck Horn Dam though. That was when it took hours and hours. But we would do all stretches of the river in this canoe, and three boys in a canoe, it's like, it was amazing. Later, we ended up buying kayaks. Ben didn't get one for
reasons we'll get into, but like the love for the river, and you know, we've
talked about it so much and how swimming in the river, crossing the river. He did get a kayak. Did he get a kayak? Yeah, 'cause he could actually, he was the only one
who could roll it over. That is right. Yeah, I don't, I don't
know why I forgot that. Our love for the river was because Ben was the one
who always wanted to be there and said, yeah, we can
take a canoe out on there. This is something that we can do. He never thought of an idea, and then said, no, we can't do that. He would think of an idea
and we would just do it. And, you know, the
interesting thing is that I think that there was a, because I will say, you know, I give Ben a credit for being the one that kind of like sparked
this sort of sense of adventure and sense of imagination. But I also, I want to
recognize just the fact that I think he could have done that, he could have done that with other kids who would have not responded to it, who would write like, but we were, we were on board. Oh, yeah. It was very much, and that we kind of kept that same spirit. Like, it's like--
It resonated. I don't know how to do this. He didn't have to talk us in to anything. It was very much like yes, we're here for this. Yes, let's go to Buck Horn Dam. There was, we never
stopped to ask the question is this a good idea. Is this safe? Might we die? And I think--
Right. If we had a stopped and
asked those questions, we probably would've, a number of things we wouldn't've done. I'm glad we didn't ask those questions. We're very fortunate
that we got out with it with only minor injuries. But yeah, we were completely
on board for all this stuff. Many times when we would
go out and chase cows, he would be there chasing
cows right along with us. Yeah. There's, we told those stories before. He had a trampoline. And he was very, he was so like, skinny, but he was pretty athletic-- He was very athletic. He was very daring. And he would do all of
these flips and stuff on the trampoline, and he made up this terminology where, I guess all kids do
this on the trampoline, where you jump really high, and then you, when your in the air, you pivot, and then you land on your back, and you bounce off of your back and come back up. But he called this a blurah! Blurah, yeah. Because I think that's the sound he made when all of the air was
forced out of his lungs as he impacted with
the trampoline, blurah! So he, he had a way of
contextualizing and inventing ways to think about things
that all kids were doing that elevated it. So it wasn't just let's, come over, let's jump on the trampoline. It's like no let's master
master the art of a blurah. Well, and I don't know if you, I assume you were here for some of this. We spend a lot, once
the trampoline happened, we spent a lot of time on the trampoline, like days just on the trampoline, figuring out things, coming up with moves. But one of the things he also did is put a tarp over the trampoline, and then get dish soap and put it all over the tarp, and then get a hose and wet it down. And then the trampoline
was at a slight angle. Which is very safe. And we would run, dive onto the trampoline, slide completely off of it, like slide completely over it and then off the other
side into the woods. I remember this. It was one of those trampolines where the springs were exposed too, if I remember correctly.
Oh yeah. We didn't have a net or anything. I don't know how you went
across the springs, but you did. No, well, because they
were covered with a tarp. That's right. The whole thing was covered with a tarp and it didn't help that you
kind of sort of hit the bar and the springs on the other side. But there was many, we get
we went through this phase, did you ever spend the
night with us out there on the trampoline? Uh uh. We would, we went through, we stopped like using the A frame because it like kind of,
the grass kind of grew up. And we just put our sleeping
bags on the trampoline. And it was kind of funny because like, when you put your sleeping
bags on the trampoline, even though you're small, I wasn't small, but you're relatively light boys. You know, the nature of
a trampoline is it dips-- It sags. In the middle and so, by the middle of the night, you're both kinda like
right up against each other in your sleeping bags. And the thing I, one of the
things I remember about Ben is his sense of humor was so silly. Yeah. Like it was just this, we would sit out there and we would tell, we would tell each other jokes. It was make up jokes. Yeah. And they were always horrible jokes that like didn't have punchlines. It was very anti-comedy. But you would achieve
some sort of delirium. Oh, we would start laughing. Yeah. Just so uncontrollably. Couldn't stop. Having those like laugh attacks where you would just, you can't stop. You're like what, I don't remember what you said. I don't remember, your
joke probably wasn't good. Yeah. I don't remember it now. He was funny though. And he, you know, he watched Letterman. He watched Carson. He would stay up late and do that. And that's just something that I just, I wasn't allowed to do. And I didn't, it was, it was scary to stay up late. I'm not gonna do that. But yeah, so, and I do remember he
went through this spell. I mean people talk about the innuendo of the good morning. Like he was the king of that. Oh yeah. I remember like in the, in grade school, the kids, I mean the
teachers would say something, and all right, so and so, you need to come up to the front. And he would just start laughing. And he would like look at us and like, he, I remember he had this like, he had a dirty mind. And he would like, he would love laughing at things that were like forced innuendos. Yeah. And we went through this season of really reveling in the innuendo. Do you remember that? I well, I still revel in the innuendo. You still do. It wasn't a stage. It continued throughout my entire life. And he was such a smart guy. I mean I think he did
end up reading a lot. And he had that computer in the back of the house there. And again, I come over there one day, and the two of you had been working on a from scratch computer
coded role playing game that you sat me down, and I was like the first user to just like test out
your role playing game. It was only text based. Well and--
And you had spent hours on this. Well, we had spent--
Days. We'd spent, we would revisit it. It was called the Isle of Rhettben. Okay. Which was not very creative. We just combined our two names. I see that. It was, you know, it was just basic programming. And again, I don't know how
Ben learned how to do this, but he, I remember sitting
at his house one time, and once I kinda understood
basic programming, I remember he just went
to sleep one night, and I stayed up like almost all night just trudging away at like, it was a choose your own adventure game. Yeah.
So it's like you had to create these trees, these decision trees. And it was like all right, if Rhettben decides that he's
going to kill this dragon, then this is gotta happen. And I think if you actually
looked at the layering of this thing, it probably only had like four decision points. But that creates, I don't
know how to do that math off the top of my head, but it creates a number
of potential outcomes. And some where you would die, and there was some where
you would keep going. And do you remember
what happens if you win? Because it was a color monitor. No. The screen would flash basically like 12 different
colors over and over again. And I think that it played some tones that was like some
little celebration music. Just like every other
video game of that age? I never got to the end. Yeah, exactly. But like-- I've never beaten one video game. And again, and then that, that turned into like,
once I understood that, thanks to Ben, is when I
ended up writing that game on the calculator that was the
Adventure of Meryl Haggard. Yeah. I just wrote my senior year that you had to go into
prison and get Meryl. I would've never done any of that thing because the thing that Ben, we had, kinda what I
was getting at before-- You had to break Meryl outta prison. We had an appetite for this kind of thing. Once you kind of gave us the opportunity-- You had the avenue. You took it. Yeah. But he had the knowledge. Yeah. I think that's the thing that Ben had. He didn't just have the appetite for it, he had the ability. He would find the way to do it, and we were just like, ah, we got this guy that
knows how to do this stuff. So he's just gonna tell us what the next thing that we're doing. He was uninhibited. Sometimes we would go over there and we were all into rap music. And he would find these
interesting rap songs that weren't so mainstream. Like listen to this Fu Schnicken song. And I developed this dance, and then he would then go into this-- He would teach us dances. It's so crazy. I would call it a jig. It was like mostly in the hips, knees and ankles. Well, it was-- This particular dance, and he would do these dance things that looked like, kinda looked like what Will Ferrell did as Elf in the basement of the publisher. And then the three of us would sit there and try to figure out-- We would learn the dance. Do you remember the
time we went over there and he was like, I figured out how to do the Roger Rabbit. Yeah. And the Roger Rabbit is when you put your, well at least, we may have been wrong. But it was when you
basically put your feet behind each other and you're like doing this thing, and you're like, you're stepping. And it's not easy to do. Yeah. And like we sat there, and go out in the driveway and like, trying to get this dance down. I mean when you're in
middle school, it's like, you have, if you're not uninhibited, you're not gonna sit
there and invent a dance. And if you are, you're not necessarily gonna invite your boys over to like teach 'em. This is something the girls did like when they, like
the cheerleader girls. They would get together and
do their cheerleading dances. But isn't it ironically
Tic Tok changing that. Yeah, definitely. But aren't people like teaching
each other how to dance. Oh he would kill at Tic Tok, man. He would've been a Tic
Toker extraordinaire. He would've been a, he would've been amazing at it. Yeah, music was a big part
of what we were doing. And he's the one who then
bought a drum machine. Now we had already done some
talent show performances, as we've talked about before. We would, Link and I would kind of-- The story I'm gonna tell is
the seventh grade talent show. Right. But what we would do
before the drum machine is we would sing along with a track. Yeah. And so we would just be, we would play like a Digital Underground
song or whatever and we would sing it. But then Ben gets this like Yamaha, I don't remember what brand it was, drum machine, which was basically this, you know, black drum machine. I remember four-- Yeah, pads. Pads. He played--
A bunch of things, you could play the drums. But then you could also kind of program some beats, it had some
built in beats as well. He could also beatbox. Yep. Better than us. But we would all do it. It's something that we
did in our spare time. I remember, seventh grade, I got the job of being the guy who set up the microphones. And Ben also got the job. We worked together. Whenever there was an assembly at Buies Creek Elementary School, we would go and we would, we'd get out of class 15 minutes early because we had to set up the microphones and test them and make sure they worked before whatever the assembly was. And so we spent a lot
of time setting them up. And then when the talent
show rolled around, and there was like rehearsals for that, we would hang out and
setting up the microphones for the rehearsal, and as seventh graders, it was our first year to
be able to participate in this talent show, which we worshiped the
seventh and eighth graders who would perform an amazing
rap song the previous years. So we finally, yeah,
we performed same song by Digital Underground. And then Ben was a part of that. And I remember we were
setting up the microphones, and then we, we'd either, we were about to or we
had just done a rehearsal, and we go backstage. Well, I go backstage and I, I notice that Ben is crying. I don't know that I'd ever
seen Ben cry, you know. And I was like hey, hey man, it's okay, we're gonna, you
know, we're gonna do great. We're gonna kill it. We're gonna kill it at the talent show, like we're, I'm feeling good about this. The first graders are gonna love us. We know the words. Your beatboxing is amazing. And this drum machine makes
you look totally legit, man. And he said that's not it. And he said, I said well
what's, what's wrong. And he said, oh, don't worry about it. And he didn't tell me what was wrong. But then I remember you told me days after this that your
mom had given you the news after talking to Ben's mom that he was sick. And we're like wow guys, he's sick. And we had seen--
He's sick? We had noticed that Ben would, you know, miss a day of school. Yeah. But that wasn't that unusual. But it was happening. It was more frequent than you would. Yeah, it got increasingly frequent. Expect. And it's not anything that
he talked about, you know. He didn't, he didn't wanna bring it up. But as it turns out, he eventually would tell us that the doctor's diagnosed him with chronic fatigue syndrome. Which at the time, I mean it's still a very, they still have, last I checked, they don't have a whole
lot of understanding about this disease. It's sort of like one of those, you know, like Lyme Disease used to be. Like I don't know, we don't
know exactly what this is, and this might just be a name for a family of different
conditions or whatever. But this was the beginning
of people talking about it in the mid-90s. And it-- Or actually the early 90s. And it was, it was also discussed-- We had no idea what was going on. It was discussed at times of kinda being a catch-all for when you don't know exactly what's wrong with someone too. But you know that they're
extremely fatigued. I mean he described some mornings not being able to get out of bed. I do remember him telling us at one point in seventh grade, he said, sometimes he could barely
crawl to the bathroom in order to use the bathroom. We couldn't believe it. We didn't know how to process it. We never saw this. Like we never saw it firsthand. He did, he didn't look well. He started to look more frail. But when we would call him and say hey, do you wanna do something, sometimes the answer would be no, but if the answer was yes, it would be, we would be
able to go on our adventures. Yeah, we'd show up and we'd hop on our bikes, and we'd go play just like we always had. In eighth grade, then
that was seventh grade, in eighth grade, when school started back, he didn't come back. Right, they said that he was going to be basically homeschooled. Yeah. From that point on. And I remember, you know, this was, I've never been good at processing
this type of information. I'm still not good at it. Like when somebody's
going through something, I'm like I don't know how
to comfort you right now. It's like that part of my
brain was damaged or something. You know, it's like, and I remember being like this is this guy that we've spent all this time with, we've done all this stuff with, and all of a sudden, it's like he's not, oh, he's not at school. And he's sick. How could, how could
someone like as so vibrant, that has so much zest for life, how could they be the
ones drained of life? It just, it did not add up. Well there was something else-- I couldn't believe it. Well, the interesting
thing that was happening as well, and this is like
a tale as old as time, is that we were kind of, we were kind of moving along with what it was like to be in middle school. And we thought I was, I had a girlfriend. Yeah, I got a girlfriend. And it was like that for a while. That was the only thing that mattered. Well that was definitely your world. Yeah. Whenever you got a girlfriend. Yeah. And so it was like, okay, I'm playing, I'm playing basketball. I'm thinking about high school. I'm thinking about all
the girls in high school. I got my girlfriend right now. We were doing those sort
of middle school things. And it wasn't that the, you know, going into the river and
fishing and swinging on vines and camping and all this
stuff wasn't something that we wanted to keep doing. But it had, it wasn't
everything to us anymore. It was something that
we did when we could. Right. And so because we couldn't, and it was interesting
because I, you know, I felt like that because a lot of you have
asked the question like you and Link been best friends, you've been best friends
this whole time, right? It's like, yeah, we we
have been best friends. But it wasn't like it was
me and you and nobody else. Yeah. In a lot of ways, me and Ben were closer for a few of those years, like in like, third, fourth, fifth grade. And then as he started kind
of dealing with his stuff, and me and you kind of continued on living a quote unquote, normal life that was kind of unencumbered by the kind of issues that he was facing, then we basically like our friendship kind of just superseded
every other friendship, and it's been that way ever since. Yeah, I mean, I definitely remember feeling on the outskirts of the trio. You know, it was like I said, I would show up to things and kind of have to, I would
gather what I missed, you know. I think it's fair to say that
for for that period of time, we were bests, I don't know, I think, I think we were best friends, but you were bester
friend, the two of you. Yeah, it wasn't something
we thought about. Yeah. And there were no list being made. Right. And there was no discussions about that. But yeah, I, I could
feel that a little bit. But again, it was because I, you know, I knew it wasn't calculated. Ben was the, the kindest,
most welcoming person of all, anyone we had met at that age, you know. There's, it was impossible
to hold anything against him. So I didn't feel jealous. Like I said, I felt like, I
felt privileged to be invited as this scared kid who wasn't adventurous, that was kind of brought
along for the ride and kind of ushered out
of my shell, so to speak. But you know, it was difficult living on the other side of Buies Creek and knowing that there was
probably stuff going on. There were A frames being built, and there were, there were
fish being caught and you know, I wasn't a part of it. But as we got older, I was increasingly a part of it. And then as Ben started,
wasn't able to do as much then I think we got
even closer and closer. So kinda fast forward a little bit. So high school, high school got you know, I have a lot of regrets about the amount of time that would pass between seeing Ben. Yeah. And I would hear, my mom,
like, would talk to his mom and would find out that like, oh, Ben is really struggling
with chronic fatigue. And, you know, he basically didn't get out
of bed this week or whatever. And then she would be like, you should, you need to go see him. And it was interesting because, because, again, I'm, I'm not making this, I'm
not making an excuse. I felt so inadequate to engage and be like, I know we're not gonna
go over there and like, go do something fun. I'm gonna sit there and we're going to talk about
what he's what he's doing. Like am I supposed to
sit beside his bedside? I don't, Ben, Ben game the impression he didn't want us to see him that way. Yeah, right. And, you know, I also regret not, not saying
you know what, it's fine. You know, I want to hang out with you even if that just means
sitting in your room. But we didn't really have a, I don't know we didn't
have a track to go on. It's like, okay, this is how you do it. This is how you empathize with somebody. You know, I do wish you, to your parents credit, to your mom's credit, she was like, hey, you need to, you need to go see him. And you did. Yeah. And then I would hear about it. Again, I felt a little bit
more on the outskirts of it. But it kind of felt-- It was intimidating. But it felt like it was, it was like, oh, what are
we going to talk about now? Yeah. Because I'm doing all these really typical high school things, you know. It's like what am I
gonna talk to Ben about. I'm supposed to talk about all the stuff that you can't do. Right. And so the times between
visiting each other would just get longer and longer. And then-- But there would still be times throughout high school that we would get together. I think, am I right about this? I remember-- Sometimes, yeah. Ben became famous for his running, which was extremely odd given everything we've told you. He would, he always wore these duck shoes. Now a duck boot, you know, it's a lace up boot that the whole bottom is like rubber, so it's waterproof. Those were his signature shoes. The only type of shoes that
he wore were duck shoes. And he wore low top duck shoes where it had like three
eyelets on either side, or two and you lace it up. He would not wear socks. And he would wear those duck boots, but they were supposed to keep water out, but like he would walk through stuff and the water would be all, going all in it. He wouldn't care. But he would run for miles. He would jog around Keith Hills. He would jog around Keith Hills in these shoes. And he was such and odd bird, right. Everybody, everybody knew, oh, there goes Ben. He's got chronic fatigue syndrome, yet he's running around. You know it's-- Well, I mean and I don't know, again, I don't know, we never talked
a lot about that period in his life. But my understanding is
that he would have good days and bad days.
Yeah. And so it's like okay, I've got energy today. I'm gonna, I'm going out. I'm gonna run. Yeah. And then we would get together. It was just increasingly infrequent as we got into high school. Okay, and one of the other
things that was happening, and we talked a little bit about this in "Lost Years" is like we were basically becoming very, very serious about our faith. We had started the band. And so this was beginning
to kind of consume us and it was the way we talked-- Consume our time. It didn't eat us. No, no, I-- Consumed our time. Yeah, yeah. But I'm saying that our lives began-- Our passions. Much more oriented towards God. Especially with the band. Yeah. We spent as much time as we could as a band. You started neglecting your basketball. I mean we were talking
more about filmmakers too. So it was like those two passions were, and then whatever girlfriend you had pretty much filled you to capacity. I'm not gonna take the bait on that one. But the, the interesting thing that
was happening with Ben is that he'd always been this, again, he's the one that had the knowledge about things, right and as he, he had all
this time on his hands where he was basically
not able to kinda get up and do things physically. The dude was reading, and then by this point, he was
on the internet all the time. And he would occasionally just kinda mention something that I would be like, wow, Ben is in a different place, spiritually.
Spiritually. He didn't go to church with us. He's got lots of thoughts
about this stuff, thoughts that were to me, sort of like where is he getting this information because this isn't what, this isn't what we're
talking about in youth group. This isn't, this isn't orthodox, you know what I'm saying. Yeah. And so we always had this
kinda sense that like, you know, Ben is kinda just, he's kinda his own guy. You know, I definitely don't think he'd call himself a Christian. And that was becoming more
and more important to us. So then there was another
sort of a new roadblock-- Source of tension in our friendship, yeah. This, well, am I gonna talk to him about this stuff. Because we were developing this conviction that we needed to share the gospel with our friends. I mean this is why we started the band, and we did invitations at our concerts. Like we would invite our friends out to watch us play, and then at the end, we would, we'd talk about
this in the "Lost Years" book, we would go into this thing where it's like all right
everybody, bow your heads, we're gonna pray, give you the opportunity to accept Christ. That's what we were
doing with our friends. And so, Ben's sort of ideas that were, that seemed
different and challenging began to be, I would say
even intimidating to me. Hmm. Fast forward a little bit more, we go to college. We go head first into Campus Crusade. We've told that story. So if you,
Yeah. If you superimposed that on, you know, well I got an email address. I would email Ben occasionally. Yeah, at that point, it kinda resorted to email. We were off at school. He was still back at home. I think he took classes, like
college classes from home if I remember correctly. Yeah. But so, you know, there would be a couple of emails back and forth every month or two. And I remember, and it
wouldn't be the three of us. I would talk to him. You would talk to him separately, right. We didn't understand CC. Right. We didn't understand threads. I remember him saying one time, he's like I like getting emails from you because you write like you talk. That made me feel really good. I don't know what it was, but for some reason I remember
that specifically. But it wasn't, it was, the emails were far enough in between that every time we would
restart an email exchange, it would kinda be catch up. So it wasn't like we were
having an active relationship. It was more like let's, let's make sure we know what's going on in each other's lives a little bit. But again, the more you
share about your life, the more you feel like
you're sharing things that he might and to be experiencing, or isn't able to experience-- Well not just that, it's like-- It's hard. Our lives were more
and more about ministry and growing in our
relationship with Christ. It was like that was what it was about. And I remember we would
have these email exchanges, and I would, you know,
I'd say something about what I might be doing. And he kinda gave, he gives these, he had these perspectives, and these like interesting
thoughts about things, but I just, I couldn't engage with him. And again, there was just this, the time between correspondence
continued to increase. Then I went to, in terms of the way that I
kinda interacted with Ben while I was in college, 98 I went on summer
project with Campus Crusade in New York City, as I talked about. And of course, that time, when you're that age, and you sort of put
yourself in the situation where you've been doing
nothing but ministry for two months, and it's been all about
sharing the gospel with people, and you've learned how
to do that very well. And on Campus Crusade, in Campus Crusade, that means taking people through a
presentation of the gospel, which we called the four spiritual laws, and I think now they call it the would you like to know
God personally booklet, and it's probably something different now. But essentially, it's a
short, easy to digest booklet that sort of explains
the truth of the gospel in a digestible way that
people can then make a decision on the spot. You remember what they are? God has a wonderful plan for your life. Two. We all have sinned. We are sinful, and therefore
separated from God. Three, Christ died and paid the penalty for our sins so that we could reestablish a relationship with God if point four, you make a decision to place your faith in what Christ did on your behalf. Yeah, so there you go. Maybe I just saved some people. So, I-- But it was that, it was that concise. Yeah.
Right? And so it made it very sharable, which was again, the
evangelistic part of-- Yeah. And so one of the things I was thinking when I got back from New York is I was like Ben is
really on my heart, right. I was like, this guy, I love this guy. And he's not a Christian. And I've got to share the gospel with him. I got to. It is my, it is my, I am mandated to share
the gospel with this guy. And I was like I agree. He was, you know, we were both real good
friends with him, but, you know, you were even
closer a friend that I was. So this is on you. Cause we both don't need to do it. Now, okay, I'm gonna tell-- 'Cause it seems like it
would be really tough. I'm gonna tell you what I did, and I'm gonna kinda give
you my perspective on it later. So went over there and had one of our sort of
like awkward conversations, and kinda caught up with him in what he had been doing, kinda told him about my summer. And just said hey, there's something that I'd like to share with you that I think is really important. And then I basically break out the booklet, and walk him through it. And then, I think he just
said something at the end like the whole point is that
you're supposed to bring people to point of decision. You wanna close the sale, essentially. You know, you want
people to say yes or no, and if they say yes, you wanna be, okay, would you like to pray to receive Christ right now. Ben was a little too
smart to get to that point to say, he wasn't gonna, he wasn't gonna let me get to that point. Right, meaning he was smart enough to know what you were trying to do. He saw what was happening. Because he knew that he didn't
want to make that decision, he was smart enough to like, to circumvent the awkward ending. To tactfully and kindly say I'll think about it, basically. Now, I find it very ironic that you got this guy who is, was so, so more knowledgeable about so many things than I was, who, we'd had this rich experience, and he had taught me so many things, and I had done all these
adventurous things with him because he had gone and
he had done the research, and he had read all this stuff. And then I go away, and I come back with a booklet. A pamphlet really. I come back with a one
size fits all pamphlet. And instead of having a real conversation, I'm like you wanna go through
this booklet together. Yeah. To me, it just, I cringe thinking about it now, not because I was ashamed
of the gospel at the time. I wasn't. I thought that it was
everybody needed to hear it. But the impersonal, unloving nature, I would say, and the way that I did it that didn't take into
account his circumstance. I think it--
A conversation, a real conversation-- I think it was very
loving, and very cringy. I don't think it was unloving. I think it was the best that you could do based on the convictions that you held. Okay. And I don't think, and I think that Ben knew that, so and he knew that he did not
want to make that decision. So he graciously let you off the hook. You know. But I just felt--
Because I felt, didn't you-- I felt like a hypocrite. Because it's like, hey, man, I went off, I lived a life. I did all this cool stuff. I kind of saw you when my mom
told told me to come see you. And then I go off and I
come back and I'm like, hey, and I've got this, I've got the good news. I've gone off. I figured this stuff out. I know everything that there
is to know about the secret to, to the, to the good life, basically. And it's all in this book. Here it is. Let's go through it together. And it just I to me, I'm offended on behalf of
Ben when I think about it, but he was gracious and he took it like a friend in a loving way. Yeah. And at least, you at the time, I feel like at least you could
share that much, you know. The ball was in his court as if maybe he didn't know those things before you shared them, I think is how I felt about it. You know, all you can do is share, and then you leave the results to God. But you feel, you feel this, you know, this tremendous pressure to, to share until you have, and then there's at least
relief like, hey, I've, I've done my part, you know. But then in retrospect, you look at all the context and you start to have the feelings that you just shared, and I, I totally get that. I mean, I didn't have that
conversation at that point. We both had, you know, other things that
we'll talk about very soon, but from there it was, I mean, when we graduated, we got married. I don't, I don't I don't think Ben was able to come to my wedding. Did Ben come to your wedding? No, I don't think so. Yeah, I don't think so either. But I think there was
still the occasional, you know, like maybe once
a year, we would see him. And it would be like, I feel so bad that it's been
so long since I've seen you. You know, you're still, you have this condition in your home, and I've moved on with my life. Now I'm married. Now I'm having kids. Now I'm, I'm, I'm leaving my engineering job and I'm joining the
staff of Campus Crusade. Now I'm leaving Campus Crusade. I think there'll be these few
and far between touch points is like, this is how my life
continues to move forward. And there will be occasional emails and based on the
conversation that we had had, we had sort of established sort of a dialogue about
philosophical, spiritual things. So occasionally, he would send something that was, you know, he was he was doing all kinds of research about all kinds of things, and he was, he wasn't
closed off by any means. He would reach out to let me know that he had read something, or he had this thought
about Jesus or whatever. Yeah, but I definitely had this, this guilt that I think is well founded that like someone who
was so important to me that I just didn't make time for. And if I did make time, it was like, it was there was still this weight of like this one issue
loomed large in my mind, and was kind of like the, maybe the real reason I've, I ultimately would reconnect over time was because this looming issue
of like, eternal destiny. Yeah, he's not saved. And then, you know, we
eventually leave staff, and we start we start our careers. I mean, we started working in
the basement in Lillington. And and making our videos from there, as we, as we got going. Some of the exchanges
that we'd have with him, again, by that point,
we were in Lillington, we were 10 minutes away from his house. Yeah. And then it was like,
yeah, we should see Ben. We should go by and see
him, but we got to work. We got to work. And then I gotta go, I gotta drive the opposite
direction 15 minutes in order to like, help with
the baby and like, you know, continue to do my life because there's so much
going on in my life. But I know that he knew
about the work we were doing. He got a big kick out of
the songs that we'd write and like the music videos
that we would make, and so like there'll be
some email exchanges there. Do you remember when we got the news? Like how we heard? I don't. I don't remember specifically either. But we, I, yes, I don't remember how we heard, but we heard from someone. And it was kind of going around the county that like Ben was sick. It's like, well, Ben's
kinda always been sick. Now Ben is really sick. Ben's got cancer. Oh man. Ben has cancer. Is it connected? Well, people didn't know. You know, and then-- Did we go see him? I have to think we went
and saw him when we, when we got that news that
he had cancer at his house. I definitely think as
he started to get worse, it was, it was testicular cancer-- That moved very quickly. That moved very quickly, by the time they caught it, it had, it had spread
and it was really bad. And then we, we, once we found out we saw him
a few times at his house, and every time he was
looking worse and worse. And then we got the the word. I mean do your remember
visiting him at his house? I, honestly I, not until after we had visit him, visited him at hospice. They put him in hospice, which was basically an end
of life care, you're dying. So we're going to make you
as comfortable as possible. And we're going to give
you around the clock care in a facility, which
now was in Lillington. Oh, and it was it was-- It was on our way from-- A mile from our-- We would carpool from Fu Quay-- Office. And we'd go past this facility, hang a right, and then go to our studio. So you know, the plan was, well at least once a week, we'll go by and see him, I think is what we, you know, it's like we were scrambling. We were trying to make, make our, make our lives work. But on our way into work, we can go by there and
see him for an hour. So it's, I mean, it's, if you've never seen anybody in hospice, it's kind of, it's like a hospital room. There's a hospital bed in there, and I don't know how long he was there. I, my recollection is
that it was a few months. I don't think so. Maybe it was six weeks. You think it might have been four weeks? I, in my recollection, he
was there for a few weeks. And then they were like, well, he's gonna, he's gonna pass away, and so we want that to
happen at his house. And so they basically put the hospital bed and everything in the house, downstairs. But, so to kind of get, you know, there was this, there was a lot of guilt associated with you know, having, having not seen him, and but the main thing that
we were thinking about was this guy is going to die. Yeah. And we got, and we had to save him. Yeah, we saw him. I mean we would visit him. We visited him a few times. And it was, it was, he was doing bad but it was, he was, he always had a smile for us. He had the same sense of
humor that he always had. He had-- He'd crack a joke, something about his balls because that was where the cancer started. Yeah, I remember him saying you know, he, he said do you want to see it? Yeah. And then he, you know, he just had a hospital gown on and we like looked at each other. It was just the three of us in that room. And we're like, I guess. And he can't, you know, he had this, this smile on his face like, this is, this is funny. And then he like he showed
us his testicle that was, like, as big as an orange. Yeah. I mean, like, and then he made a joke about it. And we laughed, because that's who he was. Yeah. And he, he had the ability to do that. And then he said, if you, if you think something's wrong, don't ignore it, because
that's what I did. Yeah. And I think, I think that may have
been in our last visit. Well, what I remember is
that we would go see him. And then every time we saw him, we would turn the conversation
towards spiritual things. So regardless of how it started, we like Ben, you know, I know we haven't talked
about it that much. I know I talked about it
talk to you about this when I was in college, but you know, have you thought about
your eternal destiny? Have you thought about
where you're gonna go? Or we might just say it. I don't remember exactly how he said it. But I think some ways it was more like, well you know that God loves you. And, you know, we would say things that were more like
encouraging platitudes. Well, I specifically, I mean, the way I remember it, I would ask him questions like, what do you think about God now? Yeah, I remember that. Where are you at with the way that you think about Jesus? You know, this dude thought a lot about the spiritual things, and he had a spirituality. He wasn't an atheist. He was definitely, I would say he was agnostic
because he had this-- He said I didn't know, I don't know. He was like I just-- I just don't know.
Don't know. And I remember one time basically pressing, I was like, this is, I know this is offensive, and this is tough and the dude is dying, but this is his soul is worth it. Yeah. And and I think, in this particular time, we had the sense that it was
close to the end for him. We had been talking about
in our previous visits, his preparations. He said, I want you guys. I want you guys to sing at my funeral. Yeah. And we were like, oh, gosh. Okay. And he said, I want you to
sing one of your funny songs, like the corn hole song. Like that, again, that was his, that was his way. He was like, I think it would. I was like, well that's
gonna be weird, Ben. He's like-- Exactly. Exactly. That's what he wanted. I want you to sing the corn
hole song at my funeral. And, he said, you know, we said, Ben, we want to, I don't know if he said
it or if we said it, but he wanted to go to
the river one more time. And so I remember, we
mentioned that to his parents, like, you know, he wants
to go to the river, and they were like, we don't, we don't know if he's able, like if we take a wheelchair, and like, just take him
to the edge of the river where you guys used to swim is like, if you think that we could do that, we would want to do that. The next time we visited
was after that conversation, and we got a sense that
it was the last time and that's when he showed us
his balls and made us laugh, but I remember before you went in, his older sister, who we
had known our whole lives, said to us, guys just, just try not to talk
about religious, religion. Like that's how she put it. She was like, I don't want you to-- I think she-- We don't wanna upset him at
this point in his process. Well, I think what was happening is, you know, he loved seeing us. But we were so singularly
focused on bringing him faith--
Helping him. That--
We felt. The conversation would get, I recall one time where I really, I just really pressed in, and I said, Ben, you know, what do you have to lose? If just just pray a prayer with us to make this decision. This was the last meeting. Yeah. But this was the last meeting before his sister told us to not to talk about it anymore 'cause we honored that. And what happened was, is he said, I don't know. I don't know. I can't be sure. And he started crying. Yeah. And, you know, the thing is it the time I felt bad, but I was like, well, crying a little bit now is not anything compared
to what will happen to him if he doesn't make this decision. I mean, that's the logic that
was happening in my brain. Yeah. And we had talked about it ahead of time that we had to do, we just felt like we had
to be as clear as possible and do everything we could to help him. So this I was not blindsided
by you pressing him. We had agreed upon it. Yeah. And I, I mean, we would leave those
meetings and I would just ball like on the on the way back home. You know, feeling, feeling responsible for that? Yeah. And worrying about him. But his sister told us
the next time we went, and she said, you know-- But you said you pressed him, and I mean, to pray with us, right? Yeah. So, yeah, that's what you meant by that was, well, I don't remember
exactly how we said it, but it was, you know, you don't have to know. It's just let's just pray and you can, we can pray something, you can repeat after us, and you can, you can accept Jesus. I mean, and he said, okay. And he, you know, it was basically we prayed, you know, and it was, it's one of those things that like, you can look at it at the
time afterward and say, okay, I feel, I feel relieved. Maybe that did it. I feel, I mean, the words were right. We can't control, like, what's going on in his heart. But you know, he did say the words. And it was kind of reduced to that. Like a-- Yeah. From an outsider's perspective, you might think of it as
like a magical incantation. That's not how we thought of it. But it was. If he was sincere in his heart, then-- Then that--
Then he was saved. And only God knows.
Yeah. So yeah-- And I don't know if he, you know, if he if he did it for us, or if he did it for him. But the thing is is that-- Or both probably. You know, it's just so
hard to process because it gave us this sense
of closure that okay, all right, we did everything we could. And I think that we
were acting out of love because of the way that we thought about the world at the time. He knew that. He knew that. And you know, so I don't blame us for
doing something that was, you know, I wish we could've spent, I wish we could've spent
a different kind of time. Yeah. That's opposed to like, trying to convince him of something that I don't even believe any more. You know. Yeah. So there was, if there was one more meeting at the, then that was it. I don't recall seeing him when they moved him back to his house, I again I, this may be
the nature of memory. I have a, a recollection of talking
to him once in his home. But I made, that may be something
that I've just created because I've been in
his home so many times, and they told me where the bed was, and but I seem to remember, no, I think I did talk to him because he was getting a little
delirious at the end. I wasn't there for this. And he had actually, you know, so had like a catheter, and he got up in the
middle of night and like, walked and didn't realize
it was in and stuff, and they were just like, it's, you know, he was telling me that and he was kind of talking
about it as a funny story. Like, let me tell you what
happened to me last night. But then it quickly got to a place where, you know, his mom said that, you know, you don't you don't
want to see him like this. He's dying. When we got the call it was, I mean, we knew the call was coming. So we weren't blindsided by it, and I think at the time we didn't feel, we felt like we had, we had done our piece. You know, I think that's
how we felt about it then, not how we feel about it right now. Yeah. And yeah, they, they asked us to, to, they said there'll be
an opportunity to share at the graveside service. And either they asked us to sing a song, or we volunteered and said that he-- He asked us to, but-- But we didn't sing the corn hole song. We knew we could not--
Spoiler alert. Sing the corn hole song. But we thought that the perfect compromise was, and of course this was, this has a whole different
meaning now, but, you know, it didn't at the time, to sing the Michael Jackson song, "Ben", which is about your pet rat. A killer rat who was Michael Jackson's pet. Yeah, and I pulled up the lyrics. Yeah, you learned it on the guitar. We sang it in harmony at
the graveside service. Ben, most people would turn you away. I don't listen to a word they say. They don't see you as I do. I wish they would try to. I'm sure they'd think again, if they had a friend like Ben. So we made a joke about it being a song about Michael Jackson and a rat. Which was very appropriate for Ben. That he would love that, and everybody agreed who was there. And it was, it was a
difficult song to sing. But-- Well, and do you remember what we said? Because I remember, in
addition to the song-- I remember, I think I know what
you're gonna say, yeah. Again, you know, interesting thing is that at the time, it wasn't that I wasn't, you know, as I said in the stories, it wasn't that I hadn't doubted things pretty significantly at that point, but it hadn't gotten to
the core of my faith yet. So, so, this didn't create a crisis. It created a moment where
we had to believe that Ben-- He was in heaven. He was in heaven. And that's what I told
everybody at that funeral. I was like, you know-- He did have faith. I didn't go into the details of what the story that happened because I thought that
might be inappropriate. But-- Yeah. We basically said that, you know, again, this is one of the things that is so interesting. I've been to lots of funerals. And I haven't, I've, every one I've been to for the most part has been a Christian funeral. You know, there's a certain, it's, it's ironic, because there's a hope that comes with faith, the idea that people go on and that you're going to see people again, and you're going to see people in heaven. Which may be true. And but then the flip
side of that is that, well, if you subscribe to
a particular, you know, understanding of Christianity, well, some people are not
going to be in heaven, they're going to be in hell. And those funerals are awkward when someone is not saved,
and everybody knows it. It's like, well, he lived a good life. Let's tell some, let's tell
some stories about him. And let's just hope that God has mercy on his soul essentially. Which I just always find
so, you know, I get it. I understand it. That's just the way
you see the world then, that's the kind of the way
that you're going to respond. But for us for Ben, because we had gotten him to
the point to pray that prayer, we could have this
perspective that was like, Ben left this world with faith and that's what, that's why we're going to see him again. And we were able to say that. And I don't know, it's it's interesting, because now looking back on it, and the way that I see the world now, and I'm like, yeah, maybe
I'll see Ben again one day. I don't know. I don't think that I can know. And I no longer really
care that I can know. But I, I see what we did
was very much about us. I'm not saying we didn't love Ben. I'm not saying we didn't
actually care about him. And I'm not saying that
we weren't motivated by a concern for his soul. But I also think that a part, a not insignificant part of that process was about us feeling good, and being okay with ourselves, and being able to say that we did our job, we did our duty, and now we can get up at the funeral and say that he's got faith. And, you know-- I mean, I don't-- I don't believe blame us, but it was-- I don't think it was the majority selfish. I think they were, I think there were elements to that. I think that we just, we needed to have that hope, because we loved him so much. Yeah. And we wanted to share it because we wanted to say something at the funeral because if there was anybody, we wanted to help anyone else that felt the same way that we felt. Yeah. But I don't know how it
made his family feel. And it probably didn't
make 'em feel better. And I also-- I think they understood, right. Yeah, they, I think they understood that our hearts were in the right place, but they were already hurting so much. It was like, I do-- I think they gave us
the benefit of the doubt because, I mean listen. Yeah. They lived in Buies Creek, North Carolina for a long time. And they knew that we
were sincere believers who cared about this guy, and saw the world in that way, and just wanted to see him come to faith. I think it probably was
a little bit annoying because I don't know, I don't know where they are, or where they were at the time. But I have, they always
seemed to be really thoughtful people who didn't just
acquiesce to the status quo, which the status quo in Buies Creek was you're gonna be a
Bible believing Christian. And so, I do, you know, I don't know. I feel like there's a part of me that
wants to apologize, you know. I think that, you know, in these-- On behalf of my former self. In these, my thought on that is in these books, you know, as we've shared at the top, we've really, we really sought to honor Ben because of how important he is to us. But I do think that there's also a part of it that's like, it's the best we can do to make amends for the regrets that we have, and again, it's not just
the spiritual stuff, but it's just you know, not being capable of being the friend that he deserved. Yeah. And over many years since his diagnosis, his original diagnosis. And you know, so, I think that, I think it's
been our best effort to, to honor him and to, but yeah, I am sorry for, and I know he forgave us. We did discuss it at his bedside. We told him we were sorry-- For not being there for him. For not being there for him. And he forgave us. Yeah. That's the kind of person that he is. And you know, so, I think that everything that we do, he touches. And I think that's the, that's the best we can do to honor him. It's what we are, what we have done. Yeah, I think the only
thing I'll add to that is that you know, we don't know, we don't know what's next after this life. But there's one thing I do
know with certainty is that Ben lives on. And his legacy is what we try to honor, and what we try to embody. And with that, I'll give a recommendation, which is along these same lines. Okay. We've all got, we've all got Bens in our lives. And it doesn't have to be somebody who, you know, is sick, or is dying. It might be. But just somebody who is been a friend and impacted you, and, maybe some circumstances of life have led you away from them, and you haven't connected
with them in a while. Make an effort to connect with them. Okay, well, thanks for listening. If you wanna contribute
to this conversation, you know what to do, #EarBiscuits. We'll, we'll talk at you next week. And probably not cry next week. I don't know. To watch more "Ear Biscuits", click on the playlist on the right. To watch the previous
episode of "Ear Biscuits", click on the playlist to the left. And don't forget to click on the circular
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favorite podcast platforms. Thanks for being your mythical best.
A very hard listen. It’s admirable that the guys are opening up like this - it makes them more personable to their older audience (I’m 30)
I had noticed over time that the guys never spoke of Ben as a young adult, only as an elementary/middle schooler. There was a complete absence of Ben stories between middle school and his death. I knew he died about a decade ago, and that they had still been friends at that point, so I kinda idly thought that maybe he had wanted to keep his adult life more private at that point and asked the guys not to talk about his current life on GMM, which they continued to respect after his passing. I guess the sad thing was that there were simply no more Ben stories to tell after middle school due to his condition. I really think the world was robbed of a very special person.
Rhett still seems very affected by his pressuring of Ben to accept Jesus before he died. The regret is SO palpable in this EB. I mentioned in the other thread that I just wanted to reach in through the speaker and hug him.
It was a really powerful episode and I cried along with them. RIP mythical friend, Ben.
Damn I felt for Rhett when I listened to this last week, but seeing how much it still haunts him on video makes it all the more sad.
The pure love and respect that they showed when sharing these stories of their friend was heart warming and heart breaking. The Lost Causes of Bleak Creek is an exceptional book. Ben was one of my favorite characters. Even if it is fiction, I feel privileged to have experienced just a snippet of this person's personality, which they have enabled to live on through their writing. The loss of a close friend is, I imagine similar to losing a sibling and luckily I can't begin to imagine how that feels. I appreciate Rhett and Link, sharing this part of their lives with their fans. Such a personal thing to share with their audience.