Out of all the podcasts led by YouTube stars, we’re particularly partial to Ear Biscuits, hosted by the inseparable duo of Rhett McLaughlin and Link Neal. Each week, we will bring you a recap of the latest Ear Biscuits episode, as well as an invitation to listen in and join the conversation.
YouTube vloggers must often consider how much of their personal lives to share online, and no one understands that concept better than Charles Trippy. Trippy is YouTube’s iron man, having releleased a daily video every day for more than seven years. Throughout that streak, he’s had his fair share of ups and downs, and as he has lived through them, he has allowed his fans to live alongside him. This incredible openness was on full display when Trippy sat down with Rhett and Link to record an episode of their Ear Biscuits podcast.
Trippy’s online video origins go back to the pre-YouTube era, when he shared his life on mid-2000s relics like Myspace and Google Video. At the time, he says he had “no idea what I was f**king doing,” but he would soon discover a routine that would come to define him as a content creator. In 2008, he began releasing daily vlogs. More than 2,200 videos later, he’s still at it.
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Keeping up such a rigorous schedule has required Trippy to continuously experiment with new formats. When he started, he claims “the technology wasn’t there,” but his videos evolved as YouTube did. He has changed up his titles, thumbnails, and runtimes over the years, and has gathered hundreds of thousands of fans along the way. Now, when it comes to vlogging, he’s an expert. “I can do it in my sleep,” he brags.
Trippy’s best known daily vlog came in 2013, when he filmed his own brain surgery. The shocking nature of the video caused it to get picked up by multiple media outlets, but when Trippy talks about it, he sees it as inspirational material for viewers, who, like him, are also trying to understand cancer. “That’s something I think very few people understand,” he says, “and that’s why I continue doing these videos, because there’s a lot of people watching these videos who are going through that or have family members.” “If they’re going through the same thing, he adds, “they can see it’s not a death sentence.”
Looking back, he is grateful to the Internet for its “moral support,” but at the same time, he still manages to keep his situation in perspective. When talking about it, he compares himself to stage four cancer patients–compared to them, he didn’t have it so bad. He’s still not cancer-free, but he has not let his misfortune break his spirit. “This situation sucks,” he says of his own tumor, “but it’s life.”
Trippy shared another unfortunate update with his viewers in 2014 when he announced his divorce from his wife Alli, who had appeared in his videos for several years. On the podcast, he opened up about divorce and the way it affected his videos. As Trippy sees it, his breakup was a bump in the road, and by announcing it candidly to his viewers, he upheld his channel’s mission to catalog the full experience of his life. “That’s the whole point of these videos,” he says. “[I] went through a brain tumor, went through a divorce…this is life. I didn’t want to stop, didn’t want to hide it…you have to explain things.”
He ended up explaining in a video he describes as “just one of those spur of the moment things.” In retrospect, he characterizes his divorce vlog as “genuine” and apologizes to everyone–family, friends, and viewers–who were hurt by the situation.
Now, as Trippy puts it, “life is moving on.” His new girlfriend, also named Allie, currently appears in his videos, and his streak is still going strong. Every day, his fans have a chance to learn a little bit more about who he is, what’s going on in his life, and how he is affected by everything. It’s been an interesting journey so far, and he didn’t share any plans to end it anything time soon. As he tells Rhett and Link: “You’ll never know, guys.”
Check out Trippy’s Ear Biscuits episode on iTunes and Soundcloud.
