“None of this was on purpose,” Lyle Drescher, TFM ’19, aka Therapy Gecko, told a lecture hall packed with more than 250 Temple students. “I didn’t think to myself, ‘Oh I want to become a Therapy Gecko.’ I was just screwing around.” 

Drescher, who graduated from the School of Theater, Film and Media Arts in December of 2019, visited Main Campus on Monday, Sept. 9, to speak with students in a film foundations course taught by Tommy Butler. 

The students in attendance listened, laughed and asked questions as Drescher told the story of developing his eccentric Therapy Gecko livestreaming show, in which he paints his bearded face green, dons a lizard costume and invites strangers to call in and talk about whatever they want.  

Through four years of doing the show, Drescher’s YouTube channel has gained over 500,000 subscribers, and his Instagram is closing in on a million followers. His show has attracted guest appearances from celebrities like Doja Cat, Lil Yachty, Zack Fox and one of his comedy idols, Eric Andre.  

Online, his videos regularly attract hundreds of thousands, sometimes millions of views, and Drescher was recently the subject of a Vice mini documentary about his success. Offline, he’s taken his show on the road and done live Therapy Gecko shows in sold out venues across the world. 

But before his meteoric rise to internet fame, Drescher sat in the same seats as the students, and he tinkered and toyed with bizarre project ideas, often using Chet Pancake, chair of the Department of Film and Media Arts, as a sounding board. One formative Temple experience was hosting a DIY basement comedy show called Cave, which was covered by The Philadelphia Inquirer and once featured big-name comedians like Shane Gillis, Mark Normand and Stavros Halkias. 

“It’s one thing to join clubs, but if you can start something that’s local and in-person that gets other people around you, that’s the most valuable thing—forming a community,” Drescher said. “And Temple provided a really great community to be able to do that.” 

Drescher talked about furiously pursuing an internship with Adult Swim as a Temple student. It wasn’t until his final semester of eligibility that he finally landed the gig, thanks in part to connecting with folks from Adult Swim through X (formerly known as Twitter) direct messages. Using direct messages to connect with people was an industry secret that Drescher emphasized throughout his visit.  

“I got to talk to a lot of people that way,” he said. “I got to talk to the creator of Nathan for You. I talked to the head writer at ClickHole. I talked to some people at Adult Swim. 

“If you have a dream job or a dream internship or a TV show that you really like, go on Twitter or Instagram or Threads, and search for it and try to find someone who has under 1,000 followers,” he continued. “Because they’re on there, and they’re bored, and they’re looking at their Twitter DMs, and they would love to talk to you.” 

After graduating, Drescher worked a short stint at Adult Swim before returning home to Baltimore and developing content from his mom’s basement. His latest content idea, to dress up as a lizard and talk to strangers, was the continuation of something he’d been doing since he was 13: screwing around on the internet. 

“This is really just the result of 10 years of tinkering around,” he said. “It’s very simple; if you have any inkling of an idea, just do it. Don’t wait for anyone’s permission to do it. Don’t wait for them to assign you to do something, just try it. If you do that enough, I do believe that something eventually will stick.” 

Drescher wants to eventually move on to other projects. When asked about what might come next, he teased “weird art gallery stuff,” or perhaps a movie. But for now, Drescher says he is laser focused on Therapy Gecko, and the show’s success has allowed him to really focus on developing it before moving on to what’s next. 

“The nicest thing about having a project that’s been moderately successful is I get to calm down a little bit,” Drescher said. “I actually have time to complete this and then move on to another thing.” 

Watch Drescher talk about his journey to internet fame in a recent interview on Temple's campus.