Molly, Alan, and Max had been friends for years before the August night in 2022 when they launched their new media company. That night their lives changed forever, and to date their videos total over 13.6M views. But this is not an overnight success story.

The countdown began on July 30, 2022, when Twitch streamer Max La Due left a blue, orange, and pink number 7 on the end screen after he ended one of his biweekly Twitch streams

That same day, YouTuber Molly McCormack posted an Instagram photo wearing a fanny pack that displayed the number 7.

Three days later, on August 2, 2022, Alan McCormack, Molly’s husband,  posted an Instagram reel of him singing a song by the “imaginary band” 4-Town, emphasis on the 4.

They never called it a countdown, but pretty soon people who’d been following their content on various platforms for years realized these numbers seemed to be counting down to something, and many hoped it meant they’d soon find out what Molly was going to do next.

For years Molly had been on a well-known YouTube channel that covered theme park content. While hundreds of thousands of people tuned into that content to help them plan their Disney and Universal vacations, there was also a growing group of people who simply watched these videos because they liked Molly. She brought to the YouTube space a kind of hosting talent akin to what was once found on traditional network shows on The Food Network, The Travel Channel, or the Discovery Channel.

In the summer of 2022, she announced she was leaving her job with the current content company, and people were surprised (many wondered why someone would leave such a dream job) and worried (they’d come to rely on her almost daily videos and were feeling the way you probably felt the last time you learned your favorite show got canceled).

When the countdown started, people got excited (probably like how you felt the last time your favorite show announced a reboot or another network picked it up).

Many had also come to know Max and Alan, as they had sometimes been featured as guest stars alongside Molly on the other channel, and buzz started growing as people hoped that perhaps the three of them were going to do something new together.

The countdown ended on August 6, 2022, and no one expected that over four thousand people would show up live to the Twitch livestream Molly, Alan, and Max hosted together to announce the launch of their new media company, Mammoth Club.

The name that started as a joke when they’d first texted about what to call their new company, looking for a words that started with “MAM” (for Molly, Alan, and Max), became the name that stuck. And in the end, a joke name becoming the real name is actually the best representation of their brand.

That night on the livestream, with thousands watching, they launched their new YouTube channel, shared their new logo, teased the new podcast called Zetus Lepetus (a Disney Channel Original Movie rewatch podcast), shared their new Discord community, and launched their Patreon.

They also announced their big goal of getting a certain amount of Patreon members, and said that if and when they hit that they would do three YouTube videos a week. Until then they’d start with two videos a week. They intentionally set a pretty big goal, but hoped they could reach it within a year.

They met that goal in four hours.

A few weeks later, their YouTube channel had 100K subscribers.

Their lives changed overnight, and in many ways, it was a dream come true not only for them, but for the community that formed right away on Patreon and Discord. That community immediately came up with a name for themselves, the MamFam, and many very real friendships were formed. (I too joined the Patreon and Discord and have met some of the best friends I’ve ever had.)

Mammoth Club is truly representative of a modern media company, and it was started by three best friends who care a lot about what they do and the people they create for.

In the months after the launch, I met up with Molly, Alan, and Max separately for three long interviews to find out how this all came to be, what it felt like to launch a company overnight, how they’re dealing with the negative comments that come with success on the internet, especially YouTube, and what exactly it is about the alchemy between the three of them that makes this work so well.

We also talked about how they got through the fears and risks of going into business with the people they loved most in the world,  why exactly their company blew up in one night, and why none of them saw it coming.

This is the story of how they met, how Mammoth Club came to be, what life has really been like after the launch, and what they’ve all learned about creating from the heart, working with your best friends, and betting on yourself.

Authors note: This profile is three-in-one; instead of publishing it in three parts or over three days or three weeks, I decided to share it in one extended narrative. I’ve labeled it into parts if you prefer to read in bursts, but I thought the piece worked best as a singular whole. It is the longest singular piece I’ve ever written outside of a book-length work, and once you finish it, I hope you’ll see why I thought this story, and these three creatives, warranted so many words. 

Part 1 – How They Met

“Look, it’s Mickey!”

Molly and I meet in the Voyageurs Lounge at Disney’s Riviera Resort, a small library-like room next to the cafe that features relics from Walt Disney’s European travels, a cozy space with soft blue carpets and two walls dedicated to nothing but overflowing bookshelves.

I park at Disney’s Hollywood Studios and take the Skyliner to the resort. As I walk towards the doors to the Riveria resort, I pause to wait because the little girl in front of me has stopped suddenly. She holds a disposable camera a few inches from an ordinary bush landscaping the resort and snaps a photo. Her mom tells her kindly to choose her photos wisely since they’ll only be here for three days and she only has 29 photos left.

As the mom keeps walking forward, the girl stays behind and takes two more pictures of the same shrub before moving on, as if every leaf posses a kind of magic when you’re a kid on a Disney vacation.

I continue and open the heavy doors at the back of the resort, and walk up the marble staircase to the Le Petite cafe where I order an iced latte, and then sit at a round wooden table in the library room next door, just below a glass case that houses one of Walt’s old hats and one of the first Mickey Mouse plushes ever made. While I wait for Molly, another little girl in a Minnie Mouse t-shirt rushes up to my table, points to the glass and says brightly to her mom, who is breathlessly trying to catch up with her, “Look, it’s Mickey!” Her mom, wearing a Buzz Lightyear sprit jersey apologizes to me for her daughter’s sudden intrusion on my table. I smile and say, really, I don’t mind.

Molly arrives next and gives me a hug before taking off her fringed jean jacket to sit down. Her bright blonde hair falls straight below her shoulders, and while she doesn’t have on the lipstick and sparkly Minnie Ears she’s come to be known for in her videos, she has a glowy presence about her. While she reveals later she struggles a lot with imposter syndrome, you would never know it from the outside. In every way, Molly appears to be a woman who is not afraid to take up space; so much so that many other women in the Mammoth Club have spoken about how she’s encouraged them to do the same.

As Molly sits down she apologizes profusely for being a few minutes late, but then her attention is immediately drawn to the Mickey plush and Walt Disney hat behind the glass. She looks at both with joy and tells me a few facts about them. She isn’t trying to teach me or prove how much she knows. It happens so automatically that it’s as if, like those girls, she hasn’t lost the ability to stop and appreciate anything that delights her.

It’s that ability, I think, that draws so many to her, that sense of joy so easily lost with age, the kind the world seems to try to beat out of all of us on a daily basis. Molly is no stranger to that battle, but somehow, she’s found a way to hold on.

“Do you realize you’re mouthing along with the words?”

Molly first stepped in front of a camera in middle school: to film a full reenactment of The Lord of the Rings movies with her friends. She wore many hats in this backyard adaptation (she was Frodo and Saurman and the head makeup artist; the bruises, she says, were all glittery because the only purple eyeshadow she had was sparkly, but it worked).

Her first Disney trip happened when she was two years old. “We went with my cousins who are several years older than me,” she says, “And one of the first things we saw was Mickey in one of those sweet nineties silver space suits with the rainbow trim. My cousins were scared of the characters because they were so big, and that happens a lot with kids. But I ran past everyone in my family and just ran up and hugged Mickey Mouse like I was hugging an old friend.”

As she grew older, most people her age lost interest in Disney. But she never did. “When a lot of my friends were hitting that age of like too cool to come to Disney World,” she says, “I was still planning trips on our computer and with the Birnbaum’s official travel books. I had every edition, even if I wasn’t coming to Disney that year, and I’d read them cover to cover.”

She also watched the travel-planning VHS tapes that helped people plan their vacations before the internet. “I would watch those like they were a movie,” she says. Molly would use that information to plan Disney trips for her family, even presenting budgets to her mom.

She also planned a Disney trip for her own 16th birthday, and her 21st.

So when she learned about the Disney College Program, an internship program where college students live and work at Disney for a semester or two, she applied and got in.

As part of the Traditions training (an introduction to the company, its history, and core values) that every Disney cast member goes through, a video for Walt Disney’s opening day speech from 1955 was shown. “The Traditions facilitator came up to me,” Molly says, “and tapped me on the shoulder while it was happening and goes, Do you realize you’re mouthing along with the words?”

Part of what kept Molly interested in Disney long after her friends’ interest faded was everything she learned about the creative people behind the parks and movies, and the work, heart, creativity, and craftsmanship they put into everything they did to create a story you could move through and be a part of.

Growing up, Molly read every book she could find about the history of the Disney theme parks, watched every documentary, read every trivia book, and couldn’t get enough.

People often ask Molly how she knows everything she talks about in her videos, and the truth of it is, she’s kind of been studying her whole life, though she never imagined it would lead to all this.

After graduating college, Molly got a professional internship with Disney and from there a full-time job in Guest Relations. But before she moved on from her professional internship, her last task was to call up the incoming class of professional interns to invite them to a welcome party. One of the people on her list to call was Alan McCormack.

“Alan is the best of us.”

I meet Alan in the spacious, glowy, wooden lobby of Disney’s Wilderness Lodge resort. He’s wearing a sage green v-neck T-shirt and has close-cropped light brown hair and kind eyes. We shake hands when we meet and while Alan is more formal than Molly or Max, he’s also incredibly kind and unassuming, the latter being particularly surprising since his 6’4” frame towers over my 5’2”. He is, you could say, as tall as Gaston from Beauty and the Beast, a character you can meet in Disney World. (I am about as tall as Chip or Dale.)

Alan is in fact a lot like Gaston in his height, voice, mannerisms, and face (he even looks a bit like Luke Evans who played Gaston in the live-action film), and yet Alan is the polar opposite of Gaston’s every personality trait.

Whereas Gaston is on the highest end of the arrogance scale, Alan is on the lowest, one of the most humble people you’ll ever meet. As selfish as Gaston is, that’s how selfless Alan is. As vain as Gaston is, that’s how modest Alan is. And as horrible and disrespectful Gaston is to Belle, that is how adoring and respectful Alan is to Molly (and everyone else for that matter).

Molly and Max often joke in Mammoth Club content that “Alan is the best of us,” because they love to hassle him and know how such compliments make an extremely modest person feel uncomfortable. But they tease him out of profound love, and make it clear that while they’re doing a bit, they actually really, really mean it.

And after meeting Alan, I know exactly what they mean.

After we’ve said our hellos Alan and I walk over to the Territory Lounge off to the side of the Wilderness Lodge lobby and settle into two polished wooden chairs while a kind waitress in a long green skirt with matching green vest comes promptly to take our orders. I haven’t had dinner so I ask Alan what he recommends, especially because in Mammoth Club videos his love and knowledge of food is evident in his detailed reviews. I order the charcuterie upon his recommendation, and let him know I just want a little since I’m not all that hungry, and that he’s welcome to share.

Alan lets me know up front that this is on him; he’ll be paying. I usually strongly insist otherwise, but somehow I already know that there is no way you will win a generosity-off with someone as gracious as Alan, so I just let it go and make a note to disclose that Alan paid for the cheese.

Unlike most people I profile, I am pretty sure this is one of Alan’s first ever times being interviewed like this, because in the grand scheme of things, of all three of them, he is the one whose life changed the most drastically when it comes to being in the limelight and having a large audience. This is all just a bit newer for him, but he doesn’t show it.

After we order, I tell him how much I enjoyed my interviews with Molly and Max, and he says, “You got the two hefty ones out of the way. I think Max and Molly are both very unique sides of the same coin; Max is very much the introverted, cerebral creative, and Molly’s the extroverted, outgoing creative. They’re both incredibly stubborn, which is fun to watch them work.”

I already know enough about Alan to know it’s very “Alan” of him to begin an interview about himself praising other people. I tell him that part of what I’m interested in writing about is how exactly the blend of the three of them works together to make Mammoth Club what it is.

 “It’s an alchemy,” he confirms, and then adds, “It’s controlled chaos.”

 “Well, I say, referencing my interviews with Molly and Max, “I’ve heard you’re a big part of helping control that chaos.”

“It’s like herding cats,” he says good-naturedly. “I do the best I can. But ultimately, at a certain point there is a laser pointer and I can only control it for very limited amounts of time.” Anyone who has heard Molly and Max hassle Alan during a Zetus Lepetus podcast episode, like that time they went on a long bit listing all the books they were ever assigned in high school, know about the laser pointer effect Alan is referring to.

If Molly takes lead on YouTube, and Max takes lead on streams, Alan takes the lead of the podcasts. And he’s an excellent host. It’s clear that either one of them could have their own successful creator content business, but instead, they’ve decided to do it together.

Before I ask Alan my next question, the waitress returns and we put in our order for charcuterie. As we do, she gives us our drinks and, after telling us she put a little extra cranberry in one of them, Alan responds, “You’re a treasure.” He doesn’t say this pompously or with any kind of syrupy, artificial sweetness. I come to learn this kind of compliment rolls out of him without him even thinking, and with a sincerity few posses. As much as Molly delights in small story details some might miss, Alan delights in the small ordinary gifts people give to each other every day, the ones that often go unnoticed.

“Who’s going?”

Alan’s appreciation for people might also have something to do with how he grew up. His dad had a job that required them to move around a lot, and Alan only spent a few years in any given place, never feeling a sense of a consistent community. When he went on his first Disney trip in high school as part of a DECA event, a business club he was in, he remembers being at EPCOT, looking up at the 45-foot Christmas tree outside the World Showcase Lagoon and thinking, “I want to work here.”

What struck him most was the sense of camaraderie he’d interpreted among the cast members during their trip. “It seemed like a place where everybody with a name tag is like part of the same deal,” he says. “They’re already-made friends. I wanted to go and do that too.”

In college he too applied for and got into the Disney College Program, and then got a professional internship. One day, just before that professional internship started, while walking the cheese aisle of Publix, he got a phone call from someone named Molly inviting him to a welcome party for the new interns.

Molly and Alan met at that first welcome event in January 2012.

They both thought the other seemed great, but Molly thought Alan was already dating the girl whom he’d brought to the event (it turned out he was just giving her a ride because she didn’t have a car), and Alan thought Molly was way out of his league. So after the event, they didn’t exchange numbers or make plans to see each other again.

But one night after a long shift, one of Molly’s friends texted her around 1am: “Hey, we’re all going to the Ale House.” But Molly was so tired and didn’t feel like going out tonight, especially because she was just minutes from pulling into her driveway.

But while at stop sign, she texted her friend back: “Who’s going?”

When the friend mentioned Alan as one of the people who would be there, Molly turned her car around. That’s when she realized she liked him.

At the Ale House, cheesy fries were ordered, laughs were had, and within a month Molly and Alan were dating.

“I was just trying to make lemonade outta lemons.”

After Alan’s professional internship, he worked in Guest Relations, and then, on a whim, went on a Disney audition and became a performer. As part of this, he spent some time alongside characters like Prince Eric, Prince Charming, and, Gaston.

But before we talk more about the work day when Alan got rushed to the hospital, a woman in a T-shirt comes up to our table. “Excuse me,” she says.

“Hello!” Alan reacts brightly.

“I’m sorry,” she continues, looking at Alan,  “You’re Mammoth Club, correct?

“I am, yeah,” he says.

“My friend Rick recognizes you,” she says, as she points to a guy a few tables back sitting with a few others. “He watches your YouTube.”

“Hi Rick!” Alan says across the room and waves.

“So when you’re done, if you get a chance, if you could you come take a picture with us we would really love it,” she says. She doesn’t seem nervous at all, but it seems Rick may have been feeling too shy or starstruck to come up to Alan himself.

“I’d be more than happy to,” Alan says.

“Thank you so much,” she says as she walks back to their table.

Alan now seems to be in a politeness conundrum. I can tell he doesn’t want to interrupt our interview, so I tell him, “You can go take a picture with them now if you want, so you don’t forget.”

That sounds good to him so he gets up to meet his fans, and while he’s gone the waitress brings the charcuterie plate. She tells me about the aged smokey blue cheese, the burrata with black truffle salt, the salami and capicola, and the lavashe with sesame seeds.

Alan returns and is visibly excited that the charcuterie has arrived. He tells me how much he loves the way it’s presented. It looks to me like a kind of fancy closet, the meat hanging on a rack like fresh pressed coats, the cheese and crackers below like expensive shoes.

We dive in and I ask Alan if he gets recognized like that a lot. “That’s never happened to me alone,” he says. “Outside of once in a Disney bathroom someone said, ‘You’re Alan!’

Usually when they’re out, people recognize and ask for pictures with Molly, and Alan is more than fine with that.

“I benefit from getting to exist in Molly and Max’s spheres,” he says, referring to when he co-hosts Twitch streams and YouTube videos. “I benefit from being able to float between them, which gives me a lot of flexibility to just kind of pop in and be like, ‘Hi, I’m here,’ and I get to take part without necessarily the pressure of control.

“But what that also leads to is, which is not a complaint but just naturally how it happens, I exist in the background.”

“I don’t think of you as in the background,” I say simply, something I truly believe and not something I say as a way to make him feel better, because he really isn’t complaining. Instead it seems that sometimes Alan’s deep appreciation for everyone else doesn’t always extend to himself, and I suspect he doesn’t quite always appreciate the value of his own presence.

But it’s also that quality that makes him such a great co-host on all of their content. He never tries to overpower; he always adds, he never takes away.

Before we get back to our original conversation, Alan asks me if I’ve had any of the burrata yet. I tell him I have and loved it. It’s his favorite, he explains, and he wanted to make sure I had gotten some because, as he puts it, “I’m not trying to bogart the burrata.”

We each take another delicate slice from the truffle burrata and Alan’s tone shifts a little as he continues telling me about his job in Disney entertainment and how it ended on hot Florida day when he had to be rushed to the hospital because half of his face went completely numb.

He’d suddenly gotten Bell’s Palsy, a facial paralysis that results from nerve dysfunction. The cause is typically unknown. Sometimes it can last weeks, and sometimes it can be permanent.

All Alan knew then was that his job was going to have to change, the facial paralysis meaning he’d have to transfer from Disney entertainment and work more behind-the-scenes.

He bounced around to a few locations, and eventually decided to train to be a captain, a kind of assistant manager in the theme parks. “I think I was just trying to make lemonade outta lemons,” he says.

To become a captain, Alan had to go through a special training class, and at the time, that class was taught by Max La Due.

Alan says his first impression of Max was someone who was “incredibly intelligent” and “very cerebral,” but they became almost instant friends when Alan realized they spoke the same language, specifically related to their love of games. “Nobody else really understood that or got that when I was in college,” Alan says.

They became friends right away, that kind of way you almost can’t quite explain or even remember; it just happens. You meet someone, you realize you speak a similar language, one you perhaps don’t get to speak with many people, and then before you know it, one of you is in the other’s wedding.

Later, when Alan first told Molly he wanted Max in their wedding, she was admittedly a bit confused. At that point, Max and Alan hadn’t known each other that long. “Are you sure?” Molly questioned.

Alan was sure.

Molly didn’t know then that Max would soon become her best friend too.

“Can I get a picture?”

The first time I meet Max in person is at a donut shop in Disney Springs in Florida. It was the summer before Mammoth Club launched, long before I knew I would write this story. We were simply meeting as friends after striking up a pretty instant friendship over Instagram in the vein of how he and Alan first connected, at least in that we quickly realized we spoke a similar language as related to storytelling, art, performance, and the creator world, a language I didn’t really get to speak at that level of depth with too many people.

I’d first started following Max after enjoying his online content, from his guest-spots on YouTube to his streams to his reels taste-testing weird soda flavors. Shortly after we first connected on Instagram, in March 2022, he spent some time in Florida on vacation to hang out with Molly and Alan. We’d chatted a bit one night that week and he told me that before they went to an escape room they were going to be taste-testing and ranking all the Kraft boxes of macaroni and cheese. I assumed this was for some kind of content they were creating for the show they were on, but he told me that no cameras were involved. This was just the kind of thing they did, he explained, and I thought that was one of the best things I’d ever heard.

If Molly has been able to preserve a bit of childlike wonder, Max seems to have been able to preserve that kind of 10th-grade spirit of random fun you have with your friends in high school when that first friend gets their driver’s license. You drive to grocery stores, stay up until 3am doing the most unpredictable things, laugh until your stomachs hurt, and think surely life can’t get any better than this.

So when Max came to Florida the summer of 2022 to visit Molly and Alan again, we decided to meet up at a donut shop on a Friday morning. I didn’t know then I’d be writing about him one day, nor did I know Mammoth Club was coming. But he did.

In fact, he was there that summer for the “Mammoth Summit,” the business planning retreat of sorts they’d put together to start mapping everything out.

But it was still a secret then.

I get to the donut shop early, as I often do, and order a purple ube coffee drink. I find a small table for two next to a large column just past the soda and condiments alcove against the far left wall lined with panels of fake grass. I sit on the soft orange padded booth facing a bright orange chair and large windows. Even though it’s the morning it’s already a hot Florida summer day and it feels good to be in the a/c, surrounded by the smell of fresh dough.

I wait for a bit and check some things on my phone, and then realize the column to my right is essentially hiding me from view. I decide to lean past it so I can see the entrance and the front counter, just to make sure I didn’t miss him coming in or that he didn’t miss seeing me, and when I do, I see Max walking towards me, and we both smile in recognition, the kind that comes when you finally meet a friend in person you first met online. I meet people this way all the time as a profiler, and it’s a strange and wonderful thing. But with Max, there is an ease I usually don’t feel with most people I’m meeting for the first time.

It immediately feels like I’ve known him my whole life.

And that’s likely because by the time we meet I’d probably watched over 100 hours of his streaming and video content. I imagine anyone who meets him after watching his content probably feels this way too, because Max is one of those rare people who is exactly the same person he is off camera as he is on.

As he makes his way to the table, I stand up and we hug like old friends. He too towers over me and is much taller than I’d imagined after seeing him only on screens, but that’s apparently something he gets a lot, most decidedly because both Alan and Molly are also very tall (I am also very petite).

Max wears slim fit blue jeans, high-top Nike’s, a plain gray t-shirt, and a patterned short-sleeve unbuttoned shirt over it. His dark brown hair parts on the side and creates a pleasant wave on top, the sides cropped relatively short.

He looks California, in a way I recognize from my years living there, something else we bonded over, both knowing what it’s like to move from Florida to California.

Max sits in the bright orange chair, places the orange donut he ordered on the table, and we talk for what feels like 20 minutes but turns out to be three hours. We laugh as a family starts taking over our whole section, practically sitting at our table with us, and Max says, “I think we’re being forced out.” We get up to leave, and as we walk through the glass doors, just before we turn right towards the parking garage, we hear someone behind us say, “Max?”

We turn around to see a guy with short brown tousled hair and a baseball cap. He lights up when Max turns around and then he says, “Hey I love your streams! Can I get a picture?” I offer to take it and he gives me his phone and I take a picture of them standing side by side just a few steps outside Everglazed Donuts in Disney Springs.

I stay quiet and let them have their interaction, but later will wish I would have asked the guy who stopped Max what his Twitch screenname was, realizing later it was likely we’d chatted during a stream before too.

The Mammoth Club launched a few months after this donut shop chat, and once I realized I wanted to write about it, Max and I do a Zoom interview (him back home in California, me in Florida) starting at 11pm EST, just after one of his Tuesday Trivia streams; it’s one of the only times we could make work for both of us due to the time difference and the fact that we both practically work two jobs. I brew coffee and tea to help me stay up late for this one, but decide it will be worth it.

And it is.

“What do I do now?”

After a fun-as-always Trivia Tuesday, I wait a few minutes for my tea to brew and give Max some time to catch his breath.

When he logs on to Zoom it looks almost exactly the same as it did during stream except darker. He explains how he usually goes into cave mode after being live, and I thank him for talking to me from the cave. He wears a white sweatshirt with pink roses at the corner, black headphones with red trim, and talks through a microphone that has the Mammoth Club logo sticker adhered to the front.

We laugh a lot in the beginning. And the middle. And the end. And in between laughs, he says a lot of profound things.

That’s what it’s like to watch Max’s streams, and be his friend.

When I hit the “record” button on Zoom, the first thing Max says is, “I won’t say anything really offensive now.” I laugh and then he tells me how as soon as I hit the “record” button Zoom, sent him a pop up that said “the meeting is being recorded” and gave him the option to either consent to be recorded or click “leave meeting.”

“It’s encouraging me to go now,” he says.

“Oh no, please don’t,” I say with a smile.

“You’re being recorded,” he says, parodying Zoom’s messaging, “get out.”

I’ve seen that “meeting is being recorded” pop up a million times, and without Max’s take, I would have never seen the humor in it.

That’s what Max does; he possesses a kind of comedic brilliance, a mind that sees the mundane just a little differently than most, the kind of person who can turn a last-minute shopping trip for socks into an anecdote you’ll find yourself still laughing about months later the next time you walk down a sock aisle.

Max has a talent to make almost anything funny, but what makes him so enjoyable to watch for hours upon hours every week for so many people is that he’s also not the kind of person who is always trying to be funny. He doesn’t try to turn everything into a bit, nor is he always trying to be the “funny one.”

And I think that’s because Max cares more about putting on a good show than about what people think about him. It seems to me that he doesn’t need to be the center of attention all the time, but that he does want to make sure any audience in his care is having a good time. And he seems to be one of those rare people who truly understands what it takes to put on a good show, something I’d guess he learned from his years working in Disney entertainment, combined with the way he consumes and studies content, and his experiences with his very first creative endeavor: jazz.

Max is a creative at heart, and the first expression of that came through the saxophone music he played all throughout high school and a bit into college. He majored in music in college, but the professor in charge of the saxophone program was strictly classical and wouldn’t allow Max to play jazz in the program.

Max didn’t dislike classical music; he respected the discipline, enjoyed listening to it, and appreciated the value of exact notes and exact timing.  But jazz was what inspired him to want to play music in the first place. “Jazz gives you a lot more freedom,” Max says, “where you are playing just based on chord structure, and playing what you feel within that chord structure.”

In college, he was essentially banned from studying the thing he loved. “I hated it. I was f*ing miserable,” he says. “It took the thing that I loved and just like beat it outta me.”

He changed his major from music to business management; he didn’t want to kill the thing he loved for a piece of paper. But up until then, music had always been his career goal, and now that he was changing that path, he wondered, “What do I do now?”

Around that same time, he got an email from his college notifying students that the Disney College Program was coming on campus to do an information session.

“If I tell somebody I’m gonna do that thing, I’m gonna do it.”

Max applied for and got into the Disney College Program, and there he felt a bit of that spark he’d lost with music, as well as a community of people who became really important to him. “And then I went home,” he says, “and I had changed, you know? I didn’t wanna be there anymore.”

He decided to apply for a second Disney College Program, move to Florida, and transfer schools.

Max’s first Disney College Program role was in quick service food, but his second was in entertainment, and he loved that job. “I asked for overtime all the time. I couldn’t get enough of it. I was in love with the thing. It was magic come to life, you know what I mean?”

Max knew then that this was the new career direction he wanted to take.

He still played saxophone once in a while for himself, but Disney took over his focus then, and he found that to be a good thing. “[Playing the saxaphone] had been so much who I was for so long that I think I needed to just put it down.” Setting it aside gave him space to find out who else he could be, explore what other proverbial chord structures out there he might enjoy playing in.

And once he found out how much he loved working in Disney entertainment, he focused on it the same way he used to focus on music. Max is an incredibly goal-oriented person. When he was five years old, he went to a Tiger Cubs info session where he learned that an Eagle Scout was the highest rank. He came home that day and told his parents he was going to be an Eagle Scout one day, even though he really had no idea what that meant. And sure enough, just before he turned 18, he became an Eagle Scout.

“If II tell somebody I’m gonna do that thing,” he says, “I’m gonna do it. And come hell or high water, it’s gonna happen. I am very competitive. I really like a challenge. It is very motivating to me. And so when I give myself one, I am intrinsically motivated to reach it.”

When Max decided he wanted to build a career at Disney, he set a goal to be a manager at Disney in five years.

Four years and ten months later, he became a manager.

And as part of the work Max did at Disney, he facilitated a new multi-day training program for new captains.

In one of those classes was a guy named Alan who was retraining for a new role because of Bell’s Palsy.

“And I think the thing that struck me,” Max says about his first impression of Alan, “was just this like unwavering positivity. Alan had every reason in the world to be pissed off. Alan had every reason in the world to be negative and mad and resentful, and the dude was just the most positive human I’d ever met. I was like, holy sh*t who is this guy? Why are you like this? How are you like this?”

“You’re not a positive person, Max?” I say half-joking, knowing he’s definitely not someone I’d consider negative, but half-referencing his delightful rants on the podcast and in streams, like how he’s known for happily yelling “you’re wrong!” when the majority of the chat gets a trivia question wrong.

“I don’t know,” he starts, and really seems to sink into the question. I tell him I was joking really, but he says, “No, I know. But you made me think and now I don’t have an answer.” He pauses for a moment and I can almost see what Alan describes to me later as the Lincoln Logs that work inside Max’s head when he thinks deeply, a trait Alan admires.

“I don’t think I’m a negative person,” Max begins after a few seconds of silence. “I think I am maybe realistic. I’m analytical and so I’ll see every side, including the positive ones.”

Max was drawn to Alan’s strength of character, and they also bonded over, as Max puts it, “nerd stuff.” They immediately started hanging out, playing Magic the Gathering and watching college football.

And then Max met Molly.

“She became this like surprise incredibly important person in my life.”

In the beginning, though, Max simply saw Molly as his friend’s girlfriend, and Molly saw Max as her boyfriend’s friend. They thought the other was nice enough, said polite hellos whenever Max came over, but that was about it.

“And then,” Max says, “she became this like surprise incredibly important person in my life that I was never expecting.”

But that would come later.

Alan and Molly eventually got engaged, and when Alan told Molly that Max was going to be in his wedding party, she was a bit confused, since everyone else in the party he’d known for so long, and Max he’d only known a short while.

But Alan was certain.

And it was at their wedding that Molly remembers seeing how fun Max was. Max didn’t know many people at the wedding, and yet there he was, as Molly remembers it, “completely sober, crushing it on the dance floor” and entertaining her nephews. “Oh, this guy’s fun,” she thought. “This guy is a good time.”

Not too long after that, Max stayed at their house for a few weeks in between moves, and he and Molly stayed up late binging Fuller House. They bonded so instantly that Molly felt more than comfortable yelling at him to move his car when it was blocking her in and she needed to get to work some mornings; they quickly developed a sibling-like relationship, something that they say means a lot to them, both only-children of divorced parents.

From then on their friendship was solidified, both finding great pleasure in the never-ending bits they’d come up with to drive Alan crazy, lounging on the couch, eating pub subs, and playing board games. “And that’s what it’s been ever since,” Molly says.

Though none of them knew then that one day there would be a camera in the room.

Part 2 – How They Changed

“Jealousy can be so powerful.”

All three started working at Disney thinking they’d work there for the rest of their lives, but one by one, each left, mostly because the people in the roles they wanted to grow into had been at Disney their whole lives, and weren’t going to be leaving any time soon.

One of the things Molly, Alan, and Max have in common is their commitment to growth, to getting better, and moving forward. Once it became clear the pace of growth didn’t match their own internal drive, they all moved on to other things.

Max followed a dream job with one of his favorite video game companies to Los Angeles, and Alan and Molly followed new jobs to Alabama, then Houston, then back to Orlando.

In Orlando, Molly got a fundraising job at a non-profit. There was a set amount of work to do every day, and with how hard and fast she worked, she was usually done early and, in her words, “bored out of my mind 90% of the time.” She was underemployed, but didn’t know what else to do.

She loved her boss, but she was deeply bored: the kind of bored you feel when you know deep down there’s something more you could be doing with your life, but have no idea yet what that is.

In her free time, she took Buzzfeed quizzes and read Disney blogs.

When that job ended, she took another at a big corporation. And it was there, on her 30th birthday, that she realized her life wasn’t where she wanted it to be. She hated that all she did all day was look at spreadsheets. “There was not a creative thing about this job and I hated it,” she says. “And when I turned 30 I was like, This is not what I want to do.”

Around that same time she also found herself getting really upset by all of the Disney bloggers she was reading online. She remembers complaining once to Alan in the car about one popular Disney blogger, saying, “I hate this woman because she gets to write about Disney and like that’s her job.” Molly says she knows now that what she was really feeling was jealousy, and it seems Alan sensed that too. Because his response was, “Well, email them and see if they’re hiring.”

She did. Because she didn’t really hate that woman, of course. She was actually inspired by her. And so she kept emailing that content company to see if they were hiring. And she kept emailing them.

“Jealousy can be so powerful,” Molly says, “especially if you reframe it that way. Some people reframe it as mean comments on the internet, but you can actually reframe it into changing your life to be the thing that’s sparking jealousy.”

Eventually, the content company was hiring, and Molly got a part-time job as a writer for a Disney blog, which she did on nights and weekends on the side of her corporate job.

Every time she turned in a new article, she made it known how much she was enjoying the work and how much she’d like to do more. So then they’d give her another article, and then another, and then she let her boss know that she’d really, really like to do this full-time if the opportunity ever arose.

Her boss at the time said a full-time role would possibly be opening up soon, but it would be on-the-ground reporting and include being on YouTube.

Molly didn’t hesitate. “Oh, I’ll make a fool myself on camera I don’t care,” she remembers thinking, willing to do whatever it took to make this kind of thing a full-time job. “And like a week later,” she says, “I was on a trial video shoot.”

Taking this full-time job was a pay cut, but she didn’t care. Because this time, she was looking for something more.

“I had sold myself this lie that I would be happy at a nine-to-five if I just made more money and I didn’t have work-life balance issues,” she says referencing the long hours and holiday and weekend shifts as one of the other reasons she left Disney, “but after four iterations of that, I was starting to realize, no, that’s not true. There are some people whom that is true for and they are perfectly happy putting in their 40 hours and living their life and that’s wonderful. But I was at this point like, okay, you’re clearly not that person. The happiest I’d ever been was when I first started at Disney, because I was very passionate about what I did. So at this point I was like, okay, you’ve been lying to yourself. You gotta try it out. It was a pay cut, but I was like if I can be happy doing what I’m doing then it’ll be alright.”

“I think I recorded my intro bit like 20 times.”

Molly’s first video was filmed in the Disney Springs parking lot. I find that first video and watch it: the camera is a bit shaky, but it doesn’t take away from the connection she exudes through the lens. She glances off camera for a moment and, only because I know this is her first and I’ve seen so many of her later videos, I can tell she’s a little nervous, but no one else would probably notice, because by the eighteenth second of the video she does one of the things she’s best at, something that clearly comes naturally: she gives a truly helpful tip to make your vacation a little better.

In this case, she reminds the viewer to not forget where they parked. (The Disney Springs lot especially is winding, and even the best of us have forgotten to take that photo of where we parked and end up doing the parking-lot-wander-of-shame, hoping beyond hope we don’t have to resort to hitting the panic button on our car keys, but have to keep it in our hand, at the ready just in case we have to succumb.)

Molly’s voice has a cadence that takes me back to Saturday mornings watching the Discovery Kids channel, or the first time I discovered Samantha Brown’s travel show, or that time I became addicted Food Network Star, the reality show that launched Guy Fieri.

Even in her very first video, Molly is able to do what only the people who won their season of Food Network Star could seem to do; she can show and teach and tell a story all at the same time. I always thought Food Network Star was such a great show because it showed how being able to do all three was such a hard and rare crossover skillset: some people are great on camera but a little too egotistical and concerned about how they are coming off, which can feel alienating to a viewer. Some are so knowledgeable about their craft, like a great chef, but crumble under the pressure of a camera lens. And some are incredibly charismatic on camera but don’t know how to tell a story or create content that brings a viewer through a narrative.

When I first saw Molly in a video, it was the first time, for me anyway, I’d ever seen that level of hosting prowess on YouTube. And I’m far from the only one who noticed.

People took to her right away, and the following of the YouTube channel she was on grew rapidly, as did the views on the videos (one has over one million views).

Though filming her first video wasn’t easy. She was indeed nervous, and wrote out a whole script for the first one. “I typed it all out and I had it on my phone,” she says. “Actually, I think I probably printed it.”

She also had a shot list ready to go, something she taught herself after watching a few other theme park videos to gain an understanding of what she needed to do. She had never done anything like this before.

“I think I recorded my intro bit like 20 times,” she says of that Disney Springs parking lot intro. “But as I kept going, it got easier and easier and I stopped being nervous and I started just having fun.”

She kept making more videos, and spent her 31st birthday as press at the opening event of the newest Star Wars ride at the time, Rise of the Resistance, at Disney’s Hollywood Studios.

Molly spent the next year making multiple videos a week at theme parks and water parks all around Orlando, including a Disney crusie.

She was living her dream.

And then, on March 15th, 2020, the Disney theme parks closed for what would be the longest period of time in their history.

“We’re not going anywhere.”

The last in-park video Molly made before the closures was published on the channel after the parks had shut down, and, before publishing it, Molly added a new intro to the video, letting viewers know that the footage they were about to see was filmed before the closures, and that while she and the other members of the cast wouldn’t be in the parks for a while, she said, eyes staring kindly into the lens, “We’re not going anywhere.”

I found and watched that video for the first time as research for this piece, and was surprised to find myself crying when she said that last part. It reminded me of how so many of us leaned on certain creators during that time, and how often artists help us get through the worst times of our lives, simply by choosing to do what they love most in their own lives.

For the next few months, Molly and the content company she worked for created videos from their homes. Molly donned her Minnie Ears and shared vacation planning tips from her office, hoping that eventually those tips would be useful whenever people were able to travel again.

But it soon became clear the closures were going last longer than anyone thought. “And it became a very different job then,” she says, “because now I was trying to entertain people from my house in the midst of an unprecedented, horrible thing happening. And you’re getting all this horrible news about covid and thousands and thousands of people around the world are dying. And like, who cares that Disney World’s closed, right? But for some reason we kept doing it, and people said, thank you for keeping on doing it. So then I just kept doing it.”

The channel Molly worked for started developing a variety of at-home content, and Max and Alan started guest starring on some of the content, and later guest starred in a few parks videos once the parks opened again. They found they enjoyed creating content together.

On one night during the pandemic, Molly watched an old Disney Channel Original movie and texted her group chat with Alan and Max, “These movies are crazy, ya’ll.” Max started watching too and they started a running commentary on all the shenanigans and plot holes and wild dialogue in these old made-for-tv movies. One of them said maybe they should do a watch-along podcast one day. “We’re in our thirties, it’s time for us to have a podcast,” Max would joke.

But they didn’t make any plans. They were all busy with their full-time jobs, and Molly wasn’t sure she could imagine creating content as a hobby on top of creating it as a full-time job.

“Don’t just talk about creative endeavors: create.”

The Disney parks opened back up in July 2020, with many new safety rules and restrictions in place. Molly reported on all of them, but also dealt with a lot of anxiety those first few months back.

But she kept going, making hundreds of videos over the next two years.

She loved her job, but after making so many videos, she couldn’t help but start to dream about what other kinds of videos she could make, and how she could grow. She started to feel a pull to want to branch out beyond the Orlando theme parks and also make content about other kinds of experiences, maybe even travel content.

And like any creative, she couldn’t help but wonder what it might be like to be her own boss, to not have to run her ideas past anyone else, to not have to do anything other than what she wanted to do, and to be the one who would, as she put it, “take all of the risk and all of the reward of those decisions.”

While the thought was exciting, it also seemed terrifying, and mostly impossible.

Her job afforded her a secure salary, the funding to be able to report from Disney hotels or Disney cruises or Disneyland in California, and media access to opening events, like that time she was able to go on the media voyage of Disney’s Star Wars themed experiential hotel, The Galactic Star Cruiser.

So she pushed away the thought of branching out.

Around that same time, in January 2022, Max posted his New Years Resolution on Instagram.

The caption read:

Happy New Year to everyone! I hope 2022 brings you exactly what you need, whether that’s peace, growth, resilience, or success. 

For the sake of accountability, here are my resolutions for 2022:

– Find a therapist that I enjoy
– Exceed the donation matching cap at work ($1000)
– Play 15 games I’ve never played before
– Don’t just talk about creative endeavors: create.

What are your resolutions or hopes for the new year?

Molly commented, “Have you considered playing Barbie Horse Adventures or Titanic: Mystery Out of Time?” To which Max replied, “I promise that I will play Barbie Horse Adventures this year, just for you.”

Max finds and DM’s me this old post during our interview; I read it afterwards and reply, “Did you ever play Barbie Horse Adventures though?” He replies back, “Let’s not talk about my failings.”

His greatest success, though, was how he approached the last one: “Don’t just talk about creative endeavors: create.” His intention was to start streaming on Twitch again.

He’d streamed a bit on Twitch before the pandemic, but in 2020, when he had to work from home, he realized the last thing he wanted to do after sitting at a computer in his small apartment all day was spend more hours in front of the computer.

But now he had an inkling to start creating again, especially when he saw the responses he was getting in the YouTube comments, something he truly wasn’t expecting, because the way he saw it, he was just helping out a friend.

But people were responding and commenting in droves, finding and following him on Instagram, and looking forward to the episodes he was on.

And as lockdowns started to end, Max started to feel like he’d just missed out on two years of his life. “I was feeling like I was coming out of the pandemic wanting to do things,” he says. “It was like, go get the tattoos you wanna get, go take the trip you wanna take; you have no idea when you are not gonna be able to do the thing you wanna do, so just do the thing.”

So on January 1, 2022, Max posted his resolutions, along with a photo on Instagram of he, Molly, and Alan toasting their New Years drinks with Disney fireworks in the sky.

That photo nor caption, however, were a hint towards the company they would start just eight months later. When I asked again just to make sure, “so Mammoth Club, or even the idea of you three ever going into business together one day wasn’t a thing you’d ever talked about then?”

 “It wasn’t even a twinkle in somebody’s eye, man,” Max says.

His only intention was to start streaming again on Twitch to have his own personal creative outlet. And this time he didn’t want to just stream video games. This time, he wanted to dabble in the “Just Chatting” category as it’s called on Twitch, and do more of a variety show.

However, he admits that this is one of the places where his realism and confidence fight each other, and one of the reasons the year prior he had been thinking a lot about creating for himself again but hadn’t done anything about it yet. “I had a bunch of ideas because I was watching other streamers and was really inspired by things I was seeing, but I was like, I don’t know if anybody will show up.”

The first times he streamed pre-2020 only five people showed up, and they were all his friends.

He was fine with that, but with these new ideas he had, some of the concepts wouldn’t even work if no one showed up, so it was a bit nerve wracking.

 “And then finally,” he says of writing that January 2022 post, “I was like, stop saying you’re gonna do it and just do it, you know? So two months later I did.”

For his first stream back in March 2022, he watched and commented on every castle show in the history of the Magic Kingdom on YouTube. Eighteen people showed up. “And they weren’t my friends,” he adds.

On the next stream, 25 people showed up. (I was one of those 25.)

The audience kept growing steadily, and Max’s response to that is very much confidence meets realist: “I was really happy how it worked. But I was tempering myself because I was like, that [kind of upwards growth] is gonna stop, it’s not gonna keep going.”

But it did.

“What do you want?”

Max also asked Alan and Molly to join him as guests on a few streams, including the one in July 2022, when Max was in Florida and they ate and rated every Oreo they could collect from a variety of grocery stores (affectionately known now by the MamFam as “The Oreo Stream”). It was the first piece of content they all did together that resembled what the Mammoth Club would become.

And while Molly truly, genuinely loves theme parks, she also really enjoyed making content in a new space, on a new topic, and interacting with people directly through the live chat. She also couldn’t believe how many people showed up to, as she puts it, “watch us eat cookies for a few hours.”

But they did. About 500 people. (Over 38,000 people have watched the video replay since, which now lives on their Mammoth Club Streams YouTube Channel.)

Because of those streams, and perhaps a bit because of that post-pandemic sense of “what’s next?,” Molly was struggling to ignore that itch to expand creatively. But she was in her dream job, and it afforded her so many opportunities and resources. How could she ever leave?

But one day, during a visit with Max at Disney’s California Adventure, she and Max got in line for the Jumpin Jellyfish ride in the carnival section of park, and Max asked her a version of a question he’d been asking for for the last few months: “What do you want?”

He sensed she was having that same itch he’d had to do more creatively, and, as a people manager, he cares a lot about people and wants to see them grow towards whatever they want. And he seems to know that one of the best ways to do that is to ask people good questions and then really listen.

When it comes to Molly, he says, “I care about her and I love her,” and so it seems any good friend of Max will also get the benefit of his support and coach-like nature, helping you towards dreams even you are still unsure about.

So while in line for Jumpin’ Jellyfish, Max asked Molly, “What’s next? What do you want?”

Usually when he’d ask one of these questions Molly would talk about how much she did want to create in new areas, but the conversation always usually ended with her talking herself out of it, because how could she afford to quit her job and then afford to pay for all the travel content she’d still want to make?

But when Max asked the question this time, in line at Jumpin’ Jellyfish,  instead of ending her answer with her fears, she ended with a question of her own, one she hadn’t asked before. “Well,” she said, looking at Max as the pink and red and yellow jellyfish “jumped” into the sky above them, “how could that even happen?”

Knowing her financial concerns, Max responded, “Well, Alan and I can pay for it.”

“Well, I’m not going to let you pay for it,” Molly said.

“You will if we are in business together,” Max said.

That was the first moment Molly ever thought of it like a business, and that’s when she started to see things differently.

It was hard for her to see a reason to stop making YouTube videos at such a great job to only take on all the risk and lose all the resources. There was so much to lose and seemingly not much more to gain.

Except, when she started thinking about it not as just her going out on her own, but starting a new business, one that wasn’t just about her but also involved creating with her two favorite people in the world, she started to dream.

True to what he said about the New Years post, the three of them had never talked about going into business together before. Max volunteered Alan for this business right in line for those Jellyfish, with Alan thousands of miles away in Florida. But Max knew Alan would be in simply because of past conversations they’d had about the potential they saw in Molly. “She can conquer the f*ing world,” Max says of the theme of those conversations. “And I think we both wanted that for her.”

They’d never talked about starting a business together, but the idea was simply a solution that came to him in the Jumpin’ Jellyfish line. “I like to solve problems,” Max says, “and I know what my income is and I know what Alan’s income is, and I knew the state of the game, and I believe in Molly a lot. So when she was like, ‘How do I pay for it?’ I was like, here is your solution.”

But before they could dive deeper into what that might look like, it was time to get on the ride (they rode the yellow one). No plans were made, just ideas shared, and maybe, just maybe, something sparked. But Max didn’t know for sure.

“What would this look like?”

“Max has always been a big instigator of like, What’s next?” Molly says as she tells me her version of the Jumpin Jellyfish story. “And he and I had had conversations before, but this one is when I was like, Huh.

“I got home I couldn’t stop thinking about it. And we were texting in our group text and I was like, What would this look like? What would this be like? What would we do? What would we make?

“And we decided to all get on a call and see if this is actually something we wanted to work on.

The more they talked, the more Molly’s fears dissipated. Not because she suddenly thought it would all work out perfectly, but because the more they dreamt up what this could be, the more she realized it wasn’t about money or risk or failure anymore. “At this point,” she says of her thought process then, “it’s not about anything other than me knowing if I can do it on my own. And no matter what happens, if I don’t do it, I’ll always wonder if I could’ve.”

Outwardly, Molly seems to possess the same confident and realistic nature as Max, but her realistic nature sometimes plummets into imposter syndrome, which comes out when I ask her why she doubted she could do it on her own in the first place, especially when Max and Alan were so sure she could. It’s clear her doubts aren’t some kind of put-on false modesty; she really wasn’t sure.

So much so that right after she quit her job she applied to DoorDash, Instacart, and UberEats to make sure she was going to be able to bring in money to fund the business and not just rely on Alan and Max’s salaries. “I didn’t like the idea of like not contributing,” she says, “so I was like, if I can just make a little extra money doing something else then I can either help fund videos or like help our household, you know?”

She was under no illusion that their business would make money right away.

She wasn’t wrong to think that either; it takes almost everyone a very long time to make consistent income in any creative business.

But she was also dealing with imposter syndrome, worried that people only watched her all these years because they liked theme parks, not because they liked her. “Will they like me if I’m not presenting Disney content?” she wondered. “If I travel to New York, or we go to Tokyo and we don’t just do Disney, will people still care?”

That was a big fear, because the whole goal was to branch out and make new kinds of content in addition to theme park content.

In the late summer of 2022, Molly shared on Instagram that she was leaving her job. Now it was official. They were about to start their own company. Molly was excited, and absolutely terrified.

Part 3 – How They Launched

“Should, Can, Will, Won’t.”

After settling on the name Mammoth Club, they set up a three-day “Mammoth Summit” during Max’s next Florida visit.

In short, the Mammoth Summit was where, as Molly puts it, “We kind of laid out all of our hopes, dreams, and fears. We laid all our cards out, like what kind of content we wanted to make. And we did a bunch of activities, like ‘Should, Can, Will, Won’t’.”

For that activity, there were four big notepad pages stuck up to the wall and they wrote on post-it notes all the types of content they might make, sticking each one onto the category they thought it should go, and then debated.

The exercise, Molly says, was illuminating. “We yelled at each other during this process because there were certain things that I was so used to doing that I was like, ‘We should make this.’ And they’re like, ‘Do you even like making that?’ And it’s like, No. So there were times where there were things I knew would get a bunch of clicks and I knew would get us a bunch of views and I knew I would do a good job, but I had to ask myself, Do I actually wanna make it? And so we had those conversations of like, that’s not us, that’s not our style.”

They debated until they all felt good about where each content type fell.

“That way,” Molly explains, “if it ever comes down to like, should we make this content, we can look at those things.” They still return to their original decisions, and I think it’s one of the things that makes their content stand out; that early value-setting serving as a kind of added guardrail against the algorithm seizing creative control, something almost every creative business can be vulnerable to. When an algorithm plays a part in how you make a living, you can’t not pay attention. But by setting strong values ahead of time, and having other income streams with Patreon, Twitch, and merch, they’re able to lead with creativity over algorithmic performance.

The Mammoth Summit is also where they decided on their official titles. “I am the CSO,” Molly explains, “Which is Chief Shark Officer. Alan is CFO, which is Chief Food Officer. And Max is CCO, which is Chief Chaos Officer.”

These titles also align with their actual roles, with Max being the Chief Creative Officer, Alan being the Chief Financial Officer, and Molly being the Chief Strategy Officer. But really, Molly thought, “it’ll be funny because if I put CSO on something, people will think I’m the Chief Strategy Officer, but I will know I’m the Chief Shark Officer.”

While they seriously care about the work they’re doing and the people they’re doing it for, they don’t take themselves too seriously.

At the summit, they also wrote a mission statement and a vision statement, and during the exercises they did to come up with those, a theme that emerged over and over again was creating a sense of community, which is what ultimately led to the creation of the Mammoth Club Discord and the nature of the Patreon perks they created.

“Community was always a big part of this,” Molly says, “and it kind of started with the pandemic. Max, Alan, and I were each other’s community even though Max was literally thousands of miles away. We would get on a video call once a week or more and play Clue and we would just talk and be a social connection for each other.

“And little did I know that I was also becoming people’s community,” she says of the time people watched her videos during lockdowns. “One of the things I get told more than anything else when people talk to me in the parks is, ‘You got me through quarantine.’ It means a lot to me when people say it, but that’s very hard to process. Because I wasn’t making content to like help people get through one of the hardest things we’ve ever gotten through. I was just making Disney World content, right?

“But it was more than that for some people. And we thought about these people that were coming to Max’s streams every week and they started having their own community and they would recognize each other in the chat and we would recognize them. And that was important to us. Because we realize there’s not a lot of places people can go on the internet where things are happy and positive.”

The two values that began to serve as anchors for their new company were to create the content they wanted to create, and foster a positive community. “Those were the two things that we kind of hinged all this on,” Molly says.

Once the values were set, they began the next phase of planning: trying to figure out exactly how to create the kind of company they’d just dreamt up on papers now taped all over their walls. Was creating that kind of company even possible?

“Are people gonna care?”

The lead up to launch day was stressful and exciting. “I don’t know that I slept,” Molly says of that time. “I was so anxious. I was excited, but I was also like, Did I make a mistake? Is this gonna work? Are people gonna care? Can we do this? Will people like it? What are people gonna say? It was a bundle of every emotion possible.”

It wasn’t like she wasn’t used to putting herself out there; she’d been on YouTube for years. And anyone who’s ever put themselves on YouTube knows how to deal with negative comments. But this time felt different. This time felt more personal.  “We’d put so much of our heart and soul into everything from the idea to the name, to the colors,” she says. “We’d poured ourselves into all these ideas.”

Max was excited as well, but his head was more in problem-solving and planning mode. And his fears were a bit different. He wasn’t nervous if they took a leap and tried this thing and it failed, but, as he puts it, “my perspective is super different as I was not the person who gave up my job. Molly obviously was dealing with fears, like, I’m giving up a salary and how are we gonna pay bills and how is this thing gonna work and is anybody gonna care? And I think Alan has to have some of those questions too, because obviously he also is beholden to those bills and he is now single income. But my biggest fear has always been that we are three very close friends going into business together. And that scares the sh*t outta me a little bit. It still scares me, to be honest. I was never worried about like, what if it doesn’t work? I was always worried about what if something happens between us, and is it worth the risk?”

They decided it was worth the risk, and that they trusted each other enough. But Max knew it was still a risk to go into business with your two best friends.

But there was no turning back now. The countdown had begun.

Alan remembers the adrenaline during that time, and how the excitement felt like something he could almost touch, especially when they saw how much people were responding to their countdown posts. “This is what engaging in something that you’re passionate about and you love feels like,” he remembers thinking, “in a way that’s like tactile.”

That excitement got him through any fears.

And Alan, both because he deeply believes in Molly and Max’s creative talent and because, being the CFO, was also in charge of the financials and projections, from his perspective, he felt more confident than anyone that this would work.

It would just take time.

He ran some projections before they launched which showed him that, best-case scenario, in eight to twelve months the business could reasonably get to a sustainable financial place where they would no longer have to funnel in their own funding.

But he was wrong.

When Mammoth Club launched on August 7, 2022 to the thousands of people who showed up live, they hit Alan’s one-year projections in one single night. “Four hours, actually,” Alan says, still almost in disbelief.

“Throw every plan you’ve ever had out the window.”

Their Patreon had about 600 members overnight, and their YouTube channel had 100K subscribers in 34 days.

“I don’t think any of us could believe what was happening,” Molly says. One of her favorite memories is how, late that launch night, they ordered Taco Bell and sprawled out on their big L couch, in pajamas, laptops out, shouting updates from across the room like, “this many have joined the Discord” and “Whoa this many are following on Instagram” and “This video has this many views!” Kronk and Ella, Molly and Alan’s dogs, were also there, and Ella stole Molly’s taco, to help keep them humble she suspects.

There was definitely huge initial high. Alan describes it as a kind of vibration, like all of these intense emotions colliding.

In one night, their lives changed, and all of the financial and audience problems they were worried about were no longer problems. But now, they had new problems.

As Max describes it, “like, everything was a problem because we were not prepared at all.”

They launched what they thought would begin as a very small, slow-growing business. They had not planned to blow up in one night. They truly didn’t see that coming.

“We had all these plans, you know?” Max says, plans that would have worked well for a moderate launch. But after the launch they had, it was like, as he says, “throw every plan you’ve ever had out the window.” They had to make new plans, and fast.

“I think that one of the things that’s hard for us,” Max says, “and again, this is a great problem to have, but like we had a lot of momentum at the very beginning, and we didn’t get to grow slowly. We’re very lucky that we immediately had resources, that we immediately had a following, that we immediately hit a 100K on YouTube; I mean, that’s awesome. I’m thrilled about it. But it also meant that like we went from not existing to running in one night. We didn’t get to learn how to crawl, and then walk, and then run.”

Alan remembers those first weeks in business feeling like, as he puts it, “a toddler behind the wheel of the car. We don’t really know what we’re doing, but we are in a car going very fast.”

A big audience overnight also means a bigger audience to watch the inevitable mistakes that happen when growing something new. More eyes means more eyes (and more opinions) on everything. 

After launch, Molly put a child-lock on her phone to keep her from checking certain gossip websites that were posting things after the launch. “If you pay attention to those websites,” she says, “you’ll never do anything. There’s a lot of people that have a lot to say. And I logically understand that if your hobby is sitting around on a forum and trashing people you don’t know because they’re trying something then that says more about you than me. But it’s also hard not to listen to that, especially when sometimes those comments echo your own self-doubt. I went in knowing the internet’s a terrible place that people would be mean, but I didn’t realize how mean.

“I think the thing that makes it better is like 99% of what we get is positive. But that 1% seems to bother me more now. And I think it’s because I have so much more of myself into the content that I take it more personally.”

In a conversation with Alan once, she expressed concern over a piece of their content, and Alan said, “Is that concern coming from you or is that concern coming from the internet? Because if you, Molly, have a concern about how we’re doing some piece of content, that is a valid concern. If your concern is because you read too many people’s opinions on the internet, that is not a valid concern.” That helped her a lot and she tries to keep that in mind.

“But I think too,” she says, “part of it is remembering that I’m gonna get more heat because I’m a woman, and that’s how it is.”

“And,” I add, “a woman going out on her own, going for her dreams. The world hates that.”

“The world really hates that,” Molly agrees. “I don’t want people like that to come with me anyway. They’re not welcome. So I have to remember like, why am I putting any stock in someone I don’t even want following our content?”

When she’s feeling low, she tries instead to focus on ideating a piece of content she’d like to make next, or she’ll  hop on Discord and chat with the MamFam community. “That’s the fun part,” she says.

“Nobody ever prepares you for how your brain responds to that volume of negativity.”

While Molly had been on the internet for years before launching Mammoth Club, and Max had been streaming, Alan was a bit more new to being on the online stage, let alone being placed in front of such a large audience overnight.

While Molly had the biggest life change to make in quitting her job, Alan had the biggest shift in going from barely being on the internet (he didn’t even have an Instagram until just before launching Mammoth Club), to being recognized in a Disney resort while eating cheese.

When Alan made his first appearance in a Mammoth Club video with Molly (which myself and many others adored), a small minority of people responded unkindly. “There was this very visceral response to me being present in the video,” he says, “it wasn’t necessarily kind, and that’s okay. Like I was new to it. That’s not unexpected. However, what nobody ever prepares you for is how your brain responds to that volume of negativity.

“I think every human is conditioned over time to handle a certain volume of negativity. When you change the volume, and when I say volume, I mean both quantity and like you’re turning the volume up on the television. When you change the volume from something that you’re used to, which is your immediate friends, perhaps those strangers that you might meet IRL, to the entirety of the internet, nothing that you’ve ever done in your life prepares you for that, and there’s nobody who can help you, or soften that blow. So that was tough.”

He’s not complaining. I specifically asked all of them to tell me about how they deal with that part of it, because even I was shocked by some of the vitriol I saw, especially when the YouTube algorithm served me a few videos with their faces on the thumbnail, but these videos were not made by them. There were other creators making videos about the Mammoth Club and what Molly was doing next. Some praised their creative approach for what YouTube and the modern creator company could be, while others were simply gossip content akin to what you might find above a grocery store checkout conveyor, with comments to match.

As Alan says, there is no way to soften that initial blow, nor is there much you can do to soften it for the people you love. The three of them had a hard time watching the others go through it at various times, knowing how much it could hurt, wishing they could help, but knowing they couldn’t.

But they learned quickly how to manage that level of constant feedback and opinions.

Max says what helped him, and still helps him the most, is simply time. Every creator I’ve ever interviewed about this confirms that it always, always hurts in the moment, an annoying trait of being human. “Our brains suck,” Max says, “like, how can you read a hundred comments that are great and one comment is bad and we only think of the bad one? I hate that that’s how human psychology works.”

The good news is that typically, the more experience a creative has with that volume of negativity, the more they learn who to care about, who to ignore, and which strategies will best protect their mental health and allow them to keep going.

Max finds solace in remembering that no matter what, as he puts it, “we’re not gonna make everybody happy.”

There are also plenty of negative comments that don’t phase any of them in the least, ones that are easy to ignore. The ones that sting, and take a little time to get over, are the ones that trigger deeper things related to their own lives or doubts.

For Alan, one of those triggers was all of those feelings he used to feel being the new kid in school, with all of the moving around he did growing up. When the volume first got turned up for him, he went through an initial very rough two weeks. But then, something changed. “I think I hit a point where I was like, I’m not gonna make everybody happy. And at a certain point, if you are going to be mad at me, then just be mad.”

He says this without an ounce of bitterness, and perhaps even a hint of compassion for his naysayers as well as himself. He says sometimes he even feels bad that they are so vitriolic, knowing it likely stems from something else in their own lives. “It’s so taxing to be that upset.” Alan feels for the haters, of course he does.

We then start laughing as I say how that reminds me of some of the angry IMDb reviews he reads at the end of their Zetus Lepetus podcast episodes, with some people expressing incredibly angry thoughts about innocuous details in some Disney Channel Original Movies. “I don’t think I’ve every been that angry about a movie in my life,” I say, and we laugh.

You have to laugh.

Laughter is what the Mammoth Club is mostly known for, and why most people who watch their content flood their YouTube and Instagram and Discord with support, love, and gratitude.

In my time in the Mammoth Club, I’ve also seen many members of the MamFam talk about how much what Molly, Alan, and Max have done has inspired them to think about what they want, what they can create, and how they might get unstuck.

Many have also popped onto Discord at times to share really hard things – like multiple deaths in a family in just a few days, a miscarriage, a lost job – and in addition to being met with a lot of kind messages, many, in the same breath as sharing one of the hardest things they’ve been through, also share how the Mammoth Club Discord and Mammoth Club content truly helped them get through some of their hardest days.

Community like that doesn’t just happen, though. It has to be fostered. And Molly, Alan, and Max were really intentional about that.

“I think that a lot of creators don’t own their influence on their communities enough,” Max says. “I think your community often is a reflection of you, and I think people will mirror what they see. And so I hope what they see is friends that love each other and care about other humans. And like, we can be sassy, but we’re not mean.”

As soon as the Mammoth Club Discord started Molly, Alan, and Max would kindly step in when needed to shift a tone or explain rules of engagement. They chose moderators right away who shared those values, and together they disseminated those values throughout the Discord.

In the Mammoth Club Discord, no one gossips about other people or other content creators, sassy jokes and inside jokes abound, new people are welcomed with open arms, and there is always someone there who is happy to explain an inside joke or tell you why the MamFam is so obsessed with potatoes.

It’s not always perfect, of course, but they and the moderators have systems in place to catch anything that doesn’t align with creating a safe space, and are quick to have private conversations with anyone who behaves rudely or offensively. But luckily, Max says, that hasn’t happened much.

In many ways, the Mammoth Club Discord has become an incredibly positive community that very much reflects the nature and tone of Molly, Alan, and Max’s actual friendship, and is a direct result of what they’d hoped for when they wrote “community” as one of their values during the Mammoth Summit.

“There are people who have friends now that wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

After the launch, Max filmed a few videos with Molly and Alan when he was in Florida, and then it was time for him to fly back across the country to his home in California.

Molly got to work filming videos, traveling all across the country for special events, and running the day-to-day operations, while Max and Alan tried to figure out how to work two jobs. They both admit it was quite the struggle in the beginning as they had to completely reprioritize their lives. Free time was scarce.

“The way my life functions is completely different than the way it used to function,” Max says. It’s been hard, but it’s work worth doing.”

Max says the best part of all of this so far has been seeing the community that has formed. “Seeing folks connect and like meet each other in person because of this thing we did,” he says, has been so fulfilling. “There are people who have friends now that wouldn’t have met otherwise.”

When I ask Alan what his favorite part has been so far, he gives the most Alan response I could imagine: “Seeing Molly and Max’s talent be validated.”

Molly says her dream come true moment happened in a haunted house. Because the first press event she got invited to as Mammoth Club was for Universal Studios’ Halloween Horror nights. When she filled out the initial forms for the event in her office and had to write down the media outlet she was representing, she typed “Mammoth Club” and then burst into tears.

Mammoth Club has since attended multiple press events coast-to-coast, traveled around the country to film videos, filmed more than 100 videos at the time of publication, published 33 podcast episodes (double if you count the weekly behind-the-scenes episodes available to certain Patreon tiers), have live streamed over 70 times, and at the time of publication, their YouTube videos have had over 13.6 million views.

Before I leave my conversation with Molly at the Riviera, or the charcuterie with Alan at the Wilderness Lodge, or turn off my Zoom chat with Max in my office, I ask each of them to tell me what they think the others bring both as a friend and to the business. And as the great narrator Leslie Odom Jr. as Aaron Burr in the Hamilton cast album says, “I’ll let [them] tell it.”

Max on Molly as a friend: 

“As Molly and I have said, we’re the closest thing to siblings we would ever have. I feel some kind of like brain connection with her, like we are two halves of some whole, you know? People call us chaos twins, and there’s just a level of like the way we engage in things that are funny, the commitment to the bit, to the creativity. I think Molly’s my creative foil in a lot of ways. Often we are just this bundle of energy bouncing off of each other.”

Alan on Molly as a friend/wife:

“She’s my wife and I adore her.” (Alan says this with depth and tone that tells me he could spend another two hours unpacking what he means. People often ask to see their wedding photos or hear their engagement story, but they’ve made a concerted effort to keep some things private, and their audience is usually understanding and appreciative of those boundaries.)

Max on Molly as a business partner: 

“She’s the expert in terms of how to make the thing. She has all that stuff in her brain, she looks for the right shot, she gives the right information. She just does it and it’s really impressive.

“She brings a ton of expertise and knowledge of YouTube as a platform. And I think she is the other half of a creative whole, challenging me and pushing me and making ideas better and giving perspective.

“She also has a really high bar, a standard of excellence. I think Molly holds all of us to a standard in terms of what she thinks is good customer service and what she thinks is the right level of quality.”

 Alan on Molly as a business partner: 

“Molly has an unbridled passion for the subject matter and a disproportionate amount of care for the work in that she wants to ensure that everybody who experiences it receives the maximum benefit, whether it’s your first time or your 500th. She also has extreme ownership, and brings an intense focus.”

Molly on Alan as a friend/husband: 

“Alan is a rock, in a good way. We always joke, but we’re not joking, that he’s the best of us. Alan literally will do anything for anyone. That’s why we make fun of him so much, because we love him. He’s so nice that we have to mess with him.”

Max on Alan as a friend:

“Alan will literally drop anything he’s doing to do something for another human being. And he is the best of us. That’s not a meme. I think it’s true.

“I think what I saw in Alan when I first met him is still what I think now. He is the kindest human, way more than me.”

Molly on Alan as a business partner: 

“He’s a very logical person and he’s very solution oriented. I’m a very emotionally oriented, and I will come into his office all a flutter with a problem, and he will be like, Okay, well here’s some ideas. Here’s what can you do about that. And not that he’s not creative or funny or a good storyteller, but he’s very logical in his approach, which is very helpful.

“Like I was freaking out about the analytics again, because I’m always freaking out about the analytics, and he’s like, send me the spreadsheet.

“He color-coded it and added conditions with a color gradient so that visually it was clearer that something that seemed ‘bad’ or like a number had dropped wasn’t really that big of a change, showing me that numbers I perceived as being in the red were really only just a different shade of green.”

Max on Alan as a business partner: 

“He is the center. He is the thing that holds it together. He is what allows me and Molly to be chaos twins. A lot of what we do works because Alan’s there. He’s what keeps the whole thing from just f*ing breaking apart.

“Alan provides stability. Alan provides the level head. Alan is often the mediator because Molly and I both have strong opinions. If there are two people disagreeing, it’s me and Molly, you know? Like nobody’s butting heads with Alan.”

Alan on Max as a friend:

“He is unabashedly and unashamedly himself. Max, if you ask him his opinion, he will give it to you if you like it or not; you’re gonna get it. If you disagree or not, you’re gonna get it, and that’s fine, and that’s helpful. That’s what I want in somebody. If I ask you something, then I want your answer. I don’t want you to try to give me an answer that you think I want.”

Molly on Max as a friend:

“Max is very funny, and Max and I are usually the ones causing chaos, and then Alan is like trying to reign us in. So I can always count on Max to be down to do whatever stupid thing I’m doing.

“But what I don’t think people realize about Max is that he’s such a good friend. The best example I have is when I was really nervous to go put in my notice that I was leaving I was so scared. And Max said, ‘No matter what happens, we got you.’” (Her voice breaks and her eyes water when she recites this line to me across the table.)

“People know Max is funny and enjoyable and he’s silly and he’s sarcastic and he is all those things. But he’s also the best friend you can ask for.”

Molly on Max as a business partner: 

“Obviously he’s very funny. And he’s a very good storyteller. I think that’s something very unique about Max, and that’s important when our job is literally telling stories.

“Max is also very in tune with the internet, so he has a lot of really good ideas between working for a gaming company and then being of the internet when it comes to understanding different kinds of content and different ways to plus content that I would never think of coming from doing exclusively theme park content.

“We’ll start bouncing ideas off each other and Max brings a lot of like, here’s how you can gamify it or make a twist and do it a little bit differently. I think having a completely different perspective on content is very helpful.”

Alan on Max as a business partner: 

“If you say Molly is an expert of theme park content, Max understands the ecosystem of creation better than anybody I know, cause that’s what he consumes. Not only does he consume it, he consumes it with intention, which is a difference.

“He is also is unafraid to try something new. Molly understands what’s safe and what will work. She wants to try new things, but she needs somebody to be an echo to say yes, try it, if it fails it doesn’t matter. What matters is you gave it a shot. Max is the one who says, let’s go give it a shot.”

“You’ve just got to make something that you are proud of.”

As Molly and I finish up our interview, I set my empty coffee aside and turn off my tiny recorder as she puts back on her jean jacket and keeps talking to me while she puts on some red lipstick and gets out her pink sparkly Minnie Ears to prepare for filming for the rest of the day.

At the Wilderness Lodge, Alan pays for the cheese and the waitress brings out a free celebratory cupcake with blue icing to congratulate Alan on his YouTube channel. We aren’t exactly sure why this happens, but we think she either saw him get recognized and wanted to create a magical moment, or possibly she recognized him too.

We split the cupcake and then walk out to the now dark parking lot. And, just as we pass through the valet drop-off loop, to both of our surprise, we realize we’ve walked out at the exact moment the Magic Kingdom fireworks begin. The fireworks burst in the distance, and the Wilderness Lodge plays the music overhead: “Make a wish upon a star / Close your eyes and just believe it / You have traveled from so far / Now you’re close enough to feel it.”

In my office, Max and I finish the interview around 2am, but we stay on for another 20 minutes having a few laughs, talking about The Last of Us, Max sharing a few bonus stories. Somehow now I’m not tired at all.

But before we sign off, I ask Max what advice he has for any other creators who are having that similar creative itch he had in January 2022, to get back to creating.

“I think you just gotta hit the [proverbial] ‘start streaming’ button,” he says. “I think that in the creator community there’s always a desire to talk about numbers; everybody evaluates themselves by numbers, because what else are you gonna evaluate yourself by? But the problem with that is you’re never gonna be happy with the number. If you’re at 18 viewers, you think, if I could just hit 50, I’ll be happy. You hit 50 and you go, if I could just hit a 100, I’ll be happy. You hit 100, and you go, if I could just hit 500, I’ll be happy. You’re never happy.

“So if you’re doing it for the numbers, you’re never gonna be happy.

“You’ve just got to make something that you are proud of. And so I think, just hit the button, and be proud of the thing you make. And if one person watches, that’s f*ing awesome. They saw you do a thing you’re proud of.”

Back at the Riviera, just before Molly walks past the same green leaves that little girl took photos of when I arrived hours earlier, I ask her what advice she has for other creatives when it comes to betting on themselves, knowing what she knows now.

“I think you have to be smart,” she says. “I think you have to really plan things out and be logical and know you’re gonna have to roll your sleeves up and put a lot of work into it.

“But if I could tell another creative anything, or if I could tell Molly from one year ago, five years ago, ten years ago, I would say, Know your worth. Know what you bring to the table, know what makes you special and unique. If you believe in that, then you should bet on yourself. You should have faith in that, that you are worth your worth.”

What helped her come to know her worth?

“I still think I’m working on it,” she says, “But surrounding myself with people that remind me of that, like Max and Alan, has helped a lot. Surrounding yourself with people that remind you when you are doubting is a big help. Your community is a big part.”

One of her biggest fears, Molly tells me as we walk out of the Riviera and towards the Skyliner, was telling one of the most important people in her community about her decision to quit her steady full-time job and start her own company: her mom.

Molly’s mom has spent her entire life in a successful corporate career, and Molly was worried about what she would think about Molly taking such a big risk. When Molly told her mom what she was going to do, the first words out of her mom’s mouth were similar to what all of her other close friends said when she told them she was going to follow this dream and bet on herself: “It’s about time.” 

You can learn more about the Mammoth Club on YouTube, follow them on Instagram, join their Patreon, join the Discord, listen to their podcast, or join the next live Twitch stream here.