How To Build A 10 Million Following - Mrwhosetheboss
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But I remember just before I fell asleep, I checked the view count and it was on like 3,000 views. And at the time I was like, "Well, that seems high, but okay, I'll just sleep on it." And I got it the next day and it was on 300,000. And then I checked my kind of inbox and it was filled with like, CNN News wants to talk to you, BBC News, Good Morning America, like all these places wanted a piece of me and I just, I couldn't understand what was happening. It was a mindset shift of like, "Whoa, this YouTube thing, like, this potential of virality,

it suddenly became like quite real. Hey friends, welcome back to the deep dive. In this episode, I speak to Aaron Mayne, who is Europe's biggest tech YouTuber, also known as MrWhosetheBoss. His channel has over 9 million subscribers and he's an absolute inspiration.

In the episode, we talk about Aaron's early life and how he would have these dreams of being a YouTuber when he was young and at school. And we talked about his journey of going full time on making silly internet videos on YouTube rather than doing a traditional prestigious consulting career at PwC. We talk a bit about his life as an influencer and what it's actually like to be Europe's biggest tech influencer and all the ridiculously cool things that he gets invited to do. And we also talk a little bit about the idea of hedonic adaptation. There is a point when you start to think like, what am I chasing here?

how is my life different when I'm at 10 million versus 9 million or 9 million versus 1 million? You know, at a certain point you're making a living, it's your business, you're comfortable. And so you have to kind of separate yourself from that. You can't tie yourself

to a number that you have no control over. I've been following Aaron's channel for absolutely ages now, and it was such an honor and joy and inspiration to be able to speak to him. I'm really gushing like I'm a real fanboy here, because I am, and it was great. It's also like really interesting just how he, how much effort goes into the magic that is his YouTube channel. And you'll see for later on in the episode, I'm just absolutely flabbergasted as to just the insane amount of effort he puts into it. And hopefully that'll come through in the episode as well. So yeah, grab a cup of tea, and I hope you enjoy this conversation with me and Mr. Who's the Boss. Let's go.

All right, Aaron, welcome to the podcast. How are you doing? I'm very good. It's good to be here. Yeah, it's nice seeing you in the flesh. We've spoken like twice, two, three times on the phone before. So it's weird seeing you here. I was actually just in the toilet earlier today and I was watching your pixel versus iPhone camera comparison. So yeah, I feel like I'm getting the full real life experience. Satisfactory toilet video. Yes. Yeah, it was quite satisfying.

Like the B-roll you have, like the little sound design when you show a photo, all the photos of yourself, all the selfies at different angles, different focal lengths. I have actually stopped. It's all very well done. I have stopped.

I feel like a DJ more and more every day because I'm spending more and more of my time looking at sound and how it syncs with the video. Yeah. I'm glad you mentioned it. Yeah, I thought the sound design was very well done. I was going to post a message to our editor on Slack and be like, can we do more sound stuff? Because it's just like all the little subtleties. Like where the beat drops. Yeah, it's very well done. Firstly, happy birthday. Thank you very much. You've just turned 26. Yeah. Yeah.

So, you know, you're like...

Absolutely huge. You've got like 10 million followers across the social media platforms. What would your high school self, secondary school self have said, let's say 10 years ago, if you'd known that this is where you'd be at 26? So I actually, I distinctly remember a little meeting I had with a friend. We were at school and we were looking at other YouTubers on the platform. And we were like dreaming of what it would be like to have 10,000 followers.

We would look at channels like that and we're like, oh my God, I could do that. And this person has the audience that could fill a stadium. That's ridiculous. Because when you're looking at numbers like 10,000, you can actually visualize it. And when you do visualize it, it seems enormous. So I don't know. I think I would have cried or had a fit if you told me. I don't know.

So one thing I found really interesting about your story, and you talked about this a little bit in the podcast with Stephen and a little bit in your Draw My Life video, is that growing up, you're a massive nerd, shall we say. I'm a nerd. I'm still a nerd. Yeah. And you said that in primary school, you ended up like playing chess for England or something. That's very cool. And then in secondary school, things were a little bit difficult. I wonder if you can talk a bit more about what that experience was like.

Yeah, I think I think more and more it's easy to feel insecure in yourself I think for me YouTube was like a vehicle towards confidence and I was almost lucky that I found it and like did it properly and

But at school, I had very little reassurance in myself. And like people would constantly tell me, like every touch point I had with another person was generally a negative one. It's like, oh, you're really nerdy. Oh, you're really lanky. Oh, your skin is awful. Oh, you need to shave that beard of yours or if you call it a beard. So I just didn't have a very good impression of myself. And then how did YouTube fit into this?

So I think I was probably at my lowest point when I started YouTube. And to be honest, even when I started it for the first few years, it wasn't a big part of my life and I was quite embarrassed about it and I wouldn't tell anyone. But I think there was like an internal sense of like, I am doing something that other people aren't doing. And that's quite nice. So was it a kind of a way of...

of having an aspect of your identity that you could kind of point to internally and say that, yeah, I'm doing something cool? Was that the vibe? - Something like that, yeah. I mean, I had no idea that it could be a career or what it would turn into, but yeah, it felt cool. I remember actually there was a point when I showed my friend that I had a channel with 5,000 subscribers and he said, "No way, that's not you."

Because at that point, it was only my hands. But I had to convince him. I had to be like, look, listen, that's my voice. Now hear my voice in person. It's me. Nice. What prompted you to start the channel? So my brother bought me my first smartphone. And I think especially relative to my real life at the time, this smartphone was like, it was like a guilty pleasure. Like I just fell in love with that thing. And so like naturally just learned as much as I could about it.

And then one day I just thought I've got enough info to share with people. So I just made this video on like how to customize it, just add themes, make it faster. And it just did better than I expected. And then I kept going. But I literally, I remember a point where my life goal was to get that phone to score a certain score in a benchmarking app.

That was just my purpose. It wasn't a good phone, but I wanted it to be better. And that kind of created a drive to find out how to do that. A lot of people have this thing where they get super interested in something, they go deep on it. But then I imagine most people don't then go a step beyond and think, I'm going to make a YouTube video about this thing. What was it about you, can you remember, that made that leap?

So I actually don't remember. Yeah, I don't remember. I just I'm just very, very, very grateful for whatever the trigger was. Yeah. I'm assuming it was something to do with the fact that I did watch other YouTubers. And I think some part of me just wanted to be like them. Were you worried at all about what people would think?

when you started? Extremely. Extremely, yeah. I mean like I was not a confident person and I was very aware that on camera I was not going to give a good impression. It was strongly driven by my passion for what I was covering. Put it that way. Ouch. On camera as in if people saw your face that... Yeah, I didn't reveal my face for a good few years I think. It was just hands.

And even then people were like, your voice is so irritating. Shut up. But yeah, it was good. What were the kind of comments like in those? Because like when I started, it was like, I started, it was like 2017. I was, I was pretty old. I was like 23. And it was all educational content where the comments were just broadly like, oh my God, thank you so much for helping me get into uni kind of vibes.

But whenever I see comments on tech videos in particular, it seems like it's a bit more polarizing. The tech audience is quite hard to please.

So they're a very educated, but also cynical bunch. They can be amazing, but they will pick apart everything you say. And you can never contradict yourself. You have to make sure you're 100% consistent and like you fact check everything you say. And so when you throw that kind of pressure on like a 15 year old who doesn't really know what they're doing completely, you're gonna get things wrong. And I think I wasn't ready for people to pounce on me in the way they did.

But it's good that it happened because you develop a thicker skin. How did people pounce on you? Oh, it's stuff like, you're doing this all wrong, you idiot. Or like, I mean, there was racist stuff. There was like, there was all sorts of just like nasty comments. I mean, technically there is truth hidden in most of them. And as long as you can kind of scrape away the layers that you don't like, you can find it. But definitely abrasive comments, I'll put it that way. And do you start getting those from like day one or...?

I think especially on day one. Oh, wow. Because the videos were the worst. I think the better your videos get, generally speaking, the more the tone shifts to positivity. Yeah. So you're 15, not having a great time at school socially, and you decide to start the YouTube channel. And on day one, you start getting hate comments about it. Yeah, my first video did better than I thought it would. Okay.

It hit like 50,000 views which is rare for a first video. Yeah, it's also like really good for back then as well. Yeah, yeah, especially good for back then. So I wasn't ready for it. Yeah, there was definitely an influx of people. None of them subscribed because the video was so bad. You know, there were comments. And so at that point,

Again, if I imagine myself at 15, you know, things are going great at school. I put out a video. It gets a bunch of hate comments. It would be very easy for me to just be like, okay, I fried this thing. It's not working. Let's, I don't know, try and become a chess international master. I don't know, whatever. Like really lean into the nerd. What was it, do you think, that kept you going with the YouTube stuff? We're going to take a very quick break to introduce our sponsor for this episode, and that is Blast.

Brilliant. I've been using Brilliant for the last two plus years. They're a fantastic platform for learning maths, science and computer science with engaging and interactive online courses. And the great thing about Brilliant is that they really teach stuff from a very first principles based approach. It's almost like the way that we were taught in places like Oxford and Cambridge, where you learn a concept and then you apply

apply the concept to an interesting problem rather than just being spoon-fed stuff like we initially learned in school. My favorite courses on Brilliant are the computer science ones. As some of you guys might know, I was torn between applying to medicine and computer science. I went to medicine in the end, but I always had an affinity to computer science and taking the courses on Brilliant, like their introduction to algorithms and their introduction to Python really helped me get more of a grasp of computer science than I've ever had

So I think this is really important actually.

It is said a lot. You have to really love what you do. So it's the fact that I had all this tech in my house because I'd been buying it anyway as I was growing up. And I was so passionate about that tech that I just I was having fun doing it. So my my first two years was basically me just kind of like roaming around my house trying to find things I already had using equipment I already had and just filming it and just talking.

I wasn't thinking about things like, you know, watch time or retention or like, you know, consumer insights. It was very much just a case of, oh, this is fun. Were you trying to stick to like an upload schedule or anything then or? I didn't know what an upload schedule was. So you started the channel at 15. What did things look like then on the channel kind of over the next few years? Very kind of like bitty.

It wasn't that I wasn't trying to be consistent, but it's the fact that oftentimes I just didn't have anything to show or say. It wasn't like I was getting the latest Samsungs or latest Apples or anything like that. So when I got something cool, I talked about it. But it also meant that like I was doing videos at very strange times when most people wouldn't have been like the day before my A-level exams. I was just sat in the garden recording some earphones that just came in and stuff like that. What was the growth like in those in those early few years?

Nothing special. And you just kept at it because it was fun? Yeah, yeah, pretty much. Okay. At what point did you start kind of taking it seriously? So there was one big turning point and it happened partway through university. So it was probably like 20, I think it was 2015. And it was one video I uploaded just as part of one of my, you know, many other videos I've uploaded. Didn't think much of it. And I fell asleep.

But I remember just before I fell asleep, I checked the view count and it was on like 3,000 views. And at the time I was like, well, that seems high, but okay, I'll just sleep on it. And I got it the next day and it was on 300,000. And then I checked my kind of inbox and it was filled with like CNN News wants to talk to you, BBC News, Good Morning America, like all these places wanted a piece of me. And I just, I couldn't understand what was happening. And it was getting like 80,000 views an hour. I just was not accustomed to numbers like that.

And it was basically a video on how to turn your phone into like a hologram. So it just did really well. I think it was a combination of like clear tutorial released at the right time. It was like a Friday just before the weekend. So it became like this viral DIY project, I guess.

And even though that one thing didn't change my overall average view count too much or didn't rocket my channel into millions, it was a mindset shift of like, whoa, this YouTube thing, this potential of virality, it suddenly became quite real. So what happened then? So yeah, I still wasn't making enough from it to call it a job immediately and just quit everything. But it was...

It was definitely a shift for me, my parents, my family, my friends, like everyone was all of a sudden like, whoa, like there's something here. So I think I started taking it more seriously, creating a rough schedule, trying to actually get stuff from brands, like things like that. So if I had to put one thing as like a turning point, it would be that. Interesting. So it sounds like kind of if you were halfway through university, you would have been sort of 19-ish, 19, 20 when that happened.

So you'd been doing YouTube for like five years, four or five years at that point, kind of just for fun. Yeah. Because you enjoyed the process. You enjoyed reviewing the stuff because you were into tech. You were passionate about the thing. And then like all of that...

I think this is fascinating because there's always kind of this myth of the overnight success. And when you see, you know, I love looking at channels that are huge now and looking at their older videos and saying, oh, wow, you know, like how Mark has started and how you started and all these like people who are absolutely enormous. I think now speaking to a lot of people who are starting YouTube channels,

The survivorship bias means that the only channels they really see are the big ones. And it's hard to imagine that you could be doing this thing for five years before any real traction and start starting to take it seriously. Yeah. And it's also tough to see what exactly led up to that moment. So before I posted that hologram video, even though in my head, I'm like, well, what was I pratting around at with those 300 videos before that? Why did I need to make those? I should have just made this from the start. Yeah.

I needed to make every one of those videos to learn the things I needed to know to make the hologram video. Did you end up going on like Good Morning America and things like that? I took on a few of them. There were a few like local news channels I did. Yeah. What was that experience like? Like being on the news? Very, I felt a little out of place. We'll put it that way. Because I didn't know how to like present still. It was still like the video itself. It's not something I'm proud of, like from a production standpoint. I still wouldn't back that.

back how I came across in that video. And so you ended up sort of being sort of... I won't watch them again, these interviews. No, fair enough. Okay. So at that point you started taking things more seriously. What...

what was your kind of non-YouTube life looking like at the time? - I had a pretty good time at uni. I was very disciplined with my time because as I started to take YouTube seriously, it's like, well, okay, so I'm at uni, I've got to have a good social life, I've got to get a first class honors, I've got to do YouTube. And so those three things alone means you're quite busy. And then you've got family, you know, you want to see them, you want to be there for the big moments.

So I scheduled my time quite well such that I think I got everything I wanted to get done done, but it just meant that I couldn't waste time. So I'd find myself in lots of situations where

The default option would be to just stay and just chat with someone. But I had to be like, right, okay, it's nine. I'm going to go script. Bye. Do you still have that kind of attitude today? So what I found is like the larger the channel has gotten, the more I've started to put my time at a premium. It's very much like that now, except I think I am more in control of my time and I'm more...

I understand myself better. So for example, I'll have situations. Well, I'll try and I'll try and set my life up so that the minute I finish working, I am with my friends. Okay. So for example, I was scripting all the way on the way here. And I literally from here, I'm off to meet a friend. So it's kind of like, there's no dead time.

Which in itself sounds stressful because then you're planning every single minute. But it means you really look forward to the times when you switch off because you're completely switched off. What does that planning process look like for you? It's all in my head. It's like a little mental jigsaw. Okay. So in the morning you decide here's what my schedule looks like for the day or do you plan it out like a week in advance? Like what is it?

I think I've just got naturally quite good at just shuffling things around in my brain such that I kind of, I have a guide in my head of what needs to be done, what point I can switch off and that kind of thing. Okay. Yeah.

Interesting. But I always have these like short-term things to look forward to as well. So for example, this weekend, I'm really excited because I've got a party tomorrow. And that party has been in my brain for the last two or three weeks as a kind of like way of making sure I get the things I want to get done done and making them more enjoyable to get done. Yeah. Yeah. Like a lot of people talk about how the majority of an enjoyment of an event is in looking forward to the event and then the event happens and then there is some extra enjoyment in like reflecting back on the event. So it sounds like you're

I get a lot of enjoyment just from looking forward to things. I think because I don't maybe do as many fun things as other people, I'd imagine most of my enjoyment is the looking forward part of it. What do you mean you don't do as many fun things as other people? Because I don't have that much time off. I think you must have found this as well. As your channel starts to grow...

because you're putting a higher premium on your time, it takes more to pull you away from that. And so the stuff that you make time for has to be of higher importance, I guess, because the opportunity cost is higher. Yeah. Do you find yourself thinking about that in terms of, in terms of like social life and relationships and friends and stuff as well? Try not to, but it's really hard to separate yourself from it. You know, when you're self-employed, like

it your life does become one kind of like jigsaw puzzle and social life and work life do blend into one sometimes you pull all-nighters sometimes you have to just do it so i have had to cancel on people sometimes and i hate cancelling on people i have had to say no i can't come to your wedding because i've got work to do um but more often than not i do make time for the things that i think are important

And when you say that I can't come to your wedding because I have to do work, like, I imagine people would find that a bit strange because they're like, you're a big YouTuber, you control your time, you can do what you want, you're hashtag living the dream. What does it mean to kind of, like, you have to have to do work? So, I think one thing that I do feel and I need to get better at is almost like a sense of FOMO.

It's a sense that at any point in time, you're almost scared to say, yes, I can come to your thing in two months because you're not sure of what opportunity is going to present itself. Because so oftentimes I wake up, I check my inbox and probably once every two days, there is something that I think is really, really cool that I really want to do. And I've had loads of situations where I'm like, I then check my calendar and I'm like, oh my God, I can't do that because I've said yes to this person for this thing. Yeah.

And so if someone says, can you book a week off my wedding in Italy in a year's time? I am naturally very, very hesitant to do that. And I will delay it as much as I possibly can and probably try to confirm two weeks before. What sort of emails are you getting? It's like every two days, like... Do you want some to forward them your way? Yeah, please. I get none of these emails. I get emails from like Chinese charger manufacturers being like, hey, can we send you a review? Yeah.

I grow them. Oh, I get those too. They're great. I got some makeup ones as well, actually. Hey, Aaron, we love your beauty channel. I was like, well, thank you. It's all sorts of stuff, but a lot of it is like experience-based. Like, I love the idea of like doing stuff that feels different. I feel like I'm going off on a tangent here, but...

I am of the philosophy that I want to do something different every day, right? Even if that means on the way out to go to work, I kick the door. So my, like that becomes the day my foot is hurting, right? I want to lead a distinct life.

And so when companies come to me and offer experiences and they say, okay, let's fly you round on a helicopter in London to take footage with our new phone. It's hard to say no. Or like, you know, let's hire out a theme park or let's do this video in a plane. And then you jump out that plane. And like all this stuff is constantly coming in because I feel like this is like the new age of influencers and every brand wants to be a part of it. Obviously I have to turn down a lot of those because I'm like,

a tech channel and you have to like, you know, it's integrity first. So if a company wants you to do some big, you know, brand promotion, you have to be very selective, but I want to filter out those opportunities and make sure like I consider all of them. But the fact that that stuff comes in makes it harder for you to say yes to things. Cause then you don't want to be like, ah, crap. I said yes to that thing like a year ago and now kind of. And then I'll be sitting at like some baby shower thinking like, oh, I could have been in like the Dubai arena right now, you know, crowd surfing or no, not crowd surfing. Yeah.

Who's the boss live show or something like that. God, I don't know why I said that. That's really cool that you get these sorts of, like when did that stuff start happening? Like what stage of your channel do you start getting offers to fly in helicopters and things like that? Pretty recently, pretty recently. I'm not adjusted to it by any means. It's like probably in the last year. I think what happens is like,

There is an element with YouTube of exponential growth, right? Providing that you use the data you're given, you respond to the comments that have been sort of left in terms of like you take their feedback on board and keep improving. You will see a trajectory. And so like I think in the last year, my channel has gone from like 3 million to nearly 9 million. And if you go back, it's a similar kind of like jump each year proportionally.

So the difference in like value you're giving to a brand at 9 million versus 3 million is enormous. And it's also that kind of status shift of like, okay, this is a big influencer to this is the biggest tech influencer in like Europe. Right. So it's like, you're the go-to person. Yeah. So that, that makes a difference too. And then all of a sudden your inbox gets flooded with all these, all these cool things. And yeah. One thing that I find on a lower scale is like,

We talked about valuing your time. And there's a few people talk about this idea of setting your own personal hourly rate and then not doing things that are not making more than the hourly rate. Or if you don't like doing something, you can outsource it for less than the hourly rate, then that's all good.

And so I kind of followed this semi-religiously to eliminate things like laundry from my life. I'm like, well, you know, even that 15 minutes I spent hanging up clothing, if I just outsourced it and I spent that 15 minutes scripting a video, well, that's significantly more valuable to my business and my life than that 15 minutes of doing laundry.

But then it's very easy to start thinking, hmm, is it really worth, you know, X thousand dollars to hang out with that friend for two hours? And I have like, you know, at one point, probably about a year ago, I started to find myself thinking in those terms. I was like, okay, no, no, no. Like there's got to be like some sort of separation between the social, like real life and the business. How did you do that? Recognizing that when it comes to, so like, so yeah,

Recognizing that ultimately relationships are the most important thing in life. And, you know, when you read these books around, you know, top five regrets of the dying and so on, it's always around, I wish I hadn't worked so hard. I wish I'd made more time for my friends. There was, you know, the other day there was a scenario in which I could have had a sleepover at a friend's place and we would have kind of chilled until the early hours of the morning and then woken up at like 11 a.m.,

Or I could have gone home early, woken up at a reasonable hour and done three extra hours of writing on my book. And I thought, hmm, you know, a few weeks from now, will I remember more the hangout with this friend or the three hours of writing for my book? Clearly, the three hours of writing for my book are going to be more ROI positive, but there is some

intangible social value for my life and for my memories and stuff around hanging out with friends instead. I think that that intangibility makes it really hard when you're trying to view the world in black and white, isn't it? It's like, okay, you can measurably see the value of doing your work, but you can't measurably see the value of hanging out with your friends. Even though it's there, it's programmed into us. We need that interaction. I think because we can't measure it,

that's probably where the disconnect happens. Yeah, I think so. And I think like when you were describing how you manage your time at uni, that was fairly similar to how I would do mine as well in that...

I had this kind of diminishing returns curve of social interaction in my mind. So I was like, you know, I could spend an hour at this party or I could spend three hours at this party. And if I just go for an hour, I will get 95% of the value. And if I stay for the extra three hours, there's really nothing more to be gained.

And there was a very like liberating moment when I realised that if I'm at a party, I can just leave whenever I want, even without saying goodbye. And no one will really notice because everyone else is like, you know, tipsy or drunk at this point. So I can just leave and like edit a video. And then all of a sudden it was like, I can have my cake and eat it too, as long as I keep diminishing returns of light. So I'm laughing because I think I thought the exact same thing. But also...

At that point, are you enjoying being at the party? Well, what's the point going at all? Is it to try and maintain connections with people who you don't like that much? Yeah, I had a weird attitude towards parties in that I thought I should enjoy them. And I thought I should become the sort of person who enjoys parties because I wanted to be confident, charismatic, and all that jazz. And to break away from my massive nerd, unconfident guy that I was in school. And then...

It was actually a few years into uni where I was having like a DMC with some friends around parties. And even my cool friends said that they didn't enjoy parties. I was like, whoa, that was my blow. I was like, wait a minute. If the cool kids don't enjoy parties and actually everyone seems to prefer like intimate dinners of like, you know, four or five people max, that's like vibes. Then why am I forcing myself to attend these parties? Just for the sake of it. So then once I realized that kind of my attendance at parties significantly dipped.

Okay, so traversing the timeline back to you're at university, you start to take the YouTube channel seriously. You start to kind of split your time between aiming for a first class, having some semblance of a social life and also continuing to do the YouTube thing. Were there...

you know, I'm big on like productivity hacks and time management hacks and stuff. Other than the kind of curtailing social interaction to be on the point of diminishing returns, did you use any other kind of strategies and hindsight that helped you make the time for all this kind of stuff? I think the big thing for me was seeing things as bonuses. It's the idea of not punishing yourself for not doing things, but encouraging yourself to do things. So, in my head, when I was sort of setting up the day,

I would try to tell myself, okay, your goal is not necessarily to finish this YouTube video, but it's to kind of like film a part of it. And then what I would tend to find is that when I pick up my camera, I'm like, okay, I might as well do the whole thing. And I would feel even better at the end of the day because I've done more than I asked of myself. But also sometimes when I just couldn't do it all, I wouldn't feel bad and then sleep terribly and have nightmares about tech videos. I would just be like, well, you know, it's fine. I did what I needed to do. Okay. So,

- So like setting low expectations for yourself and then being happier when you sort of surpass those expectations. - Yeah, and it's tricky to do when you're ambitious. 'Cause on one hand I was trying to become like, you know, UK's biggest tech YouTuber. And it's tough to do that when you have to temper your own expectations. But it was almost like a really deliberate thing I did

for my own mental health one thing that came up when i was when we were kind of researching your vibes is that you seem to be quite big on goal setting um in that you tweeted at the start of the year that all right new goals for the year 10 million subscribers on on youtube a million followers on twitter and i think a million followers on instagram uh and you've now hit that milestone on twitter and instagram and basically basically we're gonna hit it on youtube as well which is awesome um

I don't think I'm going to make it this year, but it's close enough. Close enough. It strikes me that this is in stark contrast to at the start when you're 50 and you're like, I'm just going to make videos for fun. At what point did your goals shift to I'm aiming to be the UK's largest tech YouTuber?

So I've always actually been very numbers driven. So even at the start when I didn't really have a schedule, I still had like sheets on my wall of like how many subscribers I wanted to hit. I've always had that in me. And actually, to be honest, I think as the channel's grown, I've sort of tried to detach myself as much as possible from those numbers. Because YouTube is one of those things that you just...

You can't win. So, I mean, there's an element, there is a point when you start to think like, what am I chasing here? Like, how is my life different when I'm at 10 million versus 9 million or 9 million versus 1 million? You know, at a certain point you're making a living, it's your business, you're comfortable. And so you have to kind of separate yourself from that. You can't tie yourself together.

to a number that you have no control over. I agree wholeheartedly. But you were doing that at the start? Yeah. Okay. Why? Because, so at the start, it was like, I was very much thinking of it in terms of like that conversation I had with my friend where we're like, oh my God, 10,000 people. That's so many people. Let's try and get to that goal. Okay. But,

But it's very much after passing like a million subscribers, for example, which in my head was this inconceivable number that it was like, oh, if you pass a million, you're just like you're a celebrity, you know. And it's when you pass that and then you have this point of internal reflection where it's like, I have just achieved everything I ever set out to and more. Why am I not elated all the time?

That you're like, okay. Well, actually this isn't as important as I thought it was so the numbers for you It sounds like the numbers for you were motivating in the early stages with like numbers on the wall and the subscriber counts and things like that Yeah, the reason I do it now like the reason I've got this pin tweet saying we want to hit this this and this is is partly as a kind of

a bit of a challenge, like a fun thing to do. But a lot of it is just to get other people on board, like my followers on board with kind of where my head's at, what I'm aiming for. It gives them something to kind of like aim for as well with me. But at the same time, so you're setting this goal for yourself.

as a bit of a challenge, but at the same time you are also detached, like you're trying to detach your personal sense of self-worth from the hitting of the goal. Yes, yeah. I'm not going to be upset if we don't hit 10 million this year. I've been thinking a lot about goal setting because I am writing a book themed around productivity where the core message is that really the secret to productivity is to enjoy yourself because if you're enjoying the journey and having fun then productivity takes care of itself.

as like the general theme. And the first chapter, which I've been working on a draft of like in the last two weeks is about setting goals. And my personal philosophy on goal setting is,

has always been that I've not really been a fan of goals, like you said, that are outside of my control. And so when I started the YouTube channel, the goal was one or two videos a week for the next five years. And that's all I'm gonna, that's the goal because I actually have that fully within my control of being able to do that myself. It's like an input goal. Whereas if I were to think, like for example, in writing this book, at some point my goal was, I wanna publish a book that hits the New York Times bestseller list.

And whenever I would think of that as being a goal, it would be very demotivating and I would end up procrastinating and not doing anything because it would feel like, oh, every word I write now has to be a best-selling word. And I really ramped up the stakes and I wasn't enjoying the process anymore.

And then I shifted the goal to, to be honest, I just want to write a book I'm proud of. And I like writing, I like reading, and I'm probably going to keep writing books for the rest of my life. So, hey, this is just book number one. Who cares? I just want to write something I'm proud of. All of a sudden, I was like, damn, this is just immediately makes it so much more fun to try and go towards this goal. And I still got the New York Times list in the back of my mind because, you know, it's like any actor wants the Oscars. It's the stretch goal. It's the stretch goal. Yeah. Yeah.

But I try not to think about it because for me personally, it like leads to sort of sadness and demotivation. What's your take on that? Pretty similar to yours. I think to start with, I was very much of the opinion that if I tell myself to make one or two videos a week, then the lazy part of my brain is going to try and make two bad videos a week because it can still achieve that goal while putting in less effort.

But then as the channel grew, it was like I almost trusted myself a bit more. It's like if I tell myself I'm going to do two videos a week, then I know that I'll make sure they're good videos. So the goal was kind of a quality metric, quality bar for you as well. At what point did you decide I want to be the UK's biggest tech YouTuber? Presumably it wasn't at the age of 15.

- No, no, it was towards the tail end of uni, which actually worked out quite well because I was busy at uni. And to be honest, some part of it was frustrating 'cause it was like, I had this vision, but I also had finals

and finals are not easy. So it was kind of like very much like a flurry of like, like a whirlwind of just running around completing various tasks. And then the second uni ended, I felt so, so like on it. I just had every hour of my waking day to just spend on YouTube. It was so liberating. And I use them all on YouTube. - What was your sort of PWC saga? - Yeah, so,

So I say to people when they're younger, try as many things as possible, because if you don't, you will end up down some sort of path.

Right. It's just not necessarily the path that you want to go down. And I think that's where I was because I was kind of, you know, I was good at maths. I was good at writing essays. And so I was just kind of, you know, I picked the subjects that I was strong at and that funnels you into economics and then that funnels you into a certain job. And so I was kind of sitting there in my Pricewaterhouse internship, which is quite, you know, it's fairly prestigious.

But I was not having a good time. Like I didn't get on that well with the people. I just thought the work was mind numbingly boring. And I was like, I was sat at my office sketching YouTube ideas. Yeah. Pricewaterhouse. Don't tell them. But it was definitely a realization of like, oh my God, I've got to change something. This can't be my life. I got offered the job at PwC. And then at that point, after really thinking about it and evaluating it, I turned it down.

which makes the whole saga seem entirely pointless. Like, why did you go to school to go to uni to go to, you know, to get this job to then quit before you started? But I think all those things needed to happen for me to realize that YouTube was an option and it was a better option.

Oh, this is interesting. So, this mirrors my exact kind of train of thought over the last few months. Because a year ago, I took a break from medicine, as one does after two years of working as a doctor. It's very standard to take a gap. I'm sure you've got friends who are medics. And I was intending to like travel the world and stuff. And then the pandemic happened.

And it just so happened that during the pandemic, the YouTube channel really started to take off for probably pandemic related reasons. People are at home quite a lot. Everyone wants to be more productive, have a side hustle. All of those things that I was talking about started to do really well. And it's only in the last few months that I've really been thinking because I always had in the back of my mind that YouTube is my side hustle and I do medicine as my main gig.

And in the last probably few weeks, I kind of admitted to myself that I'm probably never going to be a doctor again. And that was like really scary because...

You know, there was the element of sunk cost, but, you know, having read a lot of Daniel Kahneman stuff, I was like, okay, sunk cost fallacy, like, who cares? It doesn't matter that I've spent six years at uni and two years working to get to this point. There was also an element of fear in that there were two aspects of fear. One was, what if...

I, what if, what if I get canceled and everything disappears, then at least I'll be able to be a doctor again as like a fallback backup option. But the other element of fear, which I think was stronger was that I built my brand off the back of, Hey, I'm a doctor went to Cambridge, bloody blah, bloody blah. Here is a video about productivity. If I now stop being a doctor, will people think that I, am I quote just a YouTuber and did,

does my kind of internet career now, now is, is, is that going to suffer as a result of losing this badge of this badge of prestige? It's like, what are you then? Yeah, exactly. What the hell am I? Like, it was like, how do I, how do I describe myself? And someone asks, what do you do? It's like, well, I make videos on the internet. Um, did you have any of those thoughts as you were leaving a fairly traditional, prestigious career that you'd worked for years to get to? The backup thing was definitely in my mind, like having a backup option. Um,

I think YouTube definitely felt like a risk more so at that point when it was like, you can jump, you can make this leap onto this new thing than it does looking back now. I think when you look back, it's always easier to be like, oh yeah, of course I made the right decision and it was obvious and, but it wasn't at the time. Yeah. I remember having that thought process when I was in my final year of uni, where

where the YouTube channel, I think, had not even hit 1,000 subscribers at that point. I was on like video number 35. I was on like 400 subscribers. And I was thinking, okay, I've got finals coming up. I could take finals seriously or I could take YouTube seriously. And I was like, okay, I'm pretty confident that based on my current medical knowledge, I could pass finals, just not do very well.

And I'm pretty confident that I'm out of the running for a distinction because of the way the numbers worked out. So I was like, okay, every percentage point I get above a pass mark is therefore kind of wasted effort. Presuming there's no correlation between performance as a doctor and performance on written exams, which most people said there wasn't.

um so i threw everything into youtube at the time so you're in a position where with very low effort you could get a pass with extremely high effort well potentially maybe probably not even be in the running for a distinction right uh so i thought let's go youtube all the way and ended up kind of just scraping a pass in written finals and i'm thinking okay cool so that worked out let's let's take it seriously for the clinical stuff which actually matters um but and in hindsight that was like a

obviously the right thing to do but at the time it felt very much like a hmm i'm not sure this youtube thing has legs but i know i'm gonna kick myself if i don't give it a go yeah you never assume that your channel is going to be like the one to hit a million yeah yeah

yeah like i and i think i think at the time i was thinking oh my god if i can hit 4 000 subscribers then like that's like the best thing ever and then i had that i was like 10 10k 10k you're just naming numbers 10k gives you like access to the youtube space oh my god um and it just like the numbers just stop stop meaning anything after a while when you stop being able to visualize them because like 10 000 is like well my school hall could fit a thousand people like

10 schools that's a lot of people and then but beyond that it's just really hard to it is as soon as you get to six digits it's i don't think we have any grasp of it we can't so you did the internship you decided to turn down the job offer and now you're going full-time on the youtube thing can you remember what what were your stats at the time like what was your sub count

What was the revenue? I think I had 250K subscribers. Okay. Um, the revenue wasn't amazing. I think it was just a bit more than the PWC job, like the entrant kind of job. Yeah. Because ad revenue wasn't as much then. Um, there was no sponsorships at all because I think it's partly because I didn't know how to get them. Yeah. And also the infrastructure wasn't there like, you know, five, six, seven years ago where brands were kind of hopping on and agencies were approaching you. Okay.

So you're on 250k subs, kind of making a living, but not like a ball of living. What did your life look like then? Like 24-7 YouTube? What was the vibe? So as soon as I left uni, like I said, I had this kind of like, I was relieved from the pressure of having to juggle many things. So I felt free.

But also at the same time, I pushed myself really hard. I think there was this thing in my head of like, YouTube is one of those platforms, who knows how long it's going to be there for, while you've got this opportunity, run with it. So I made a video like every single day. It was just me in my back garden, just getting tech, investing in stuff to then cover, to then try and sell and make a bit of a loss on and all that kind of stuff. Yeah. A video every single day? How long did you keep that up for?

about six months ish. Yeah. What did your, what did your like day in the life look like then? Like at the time it was, cause in one day you've got to do everything. You've got a script, your video in the morning, you've got to film your video in the afternoon. You then got to edit your video in the evening. So it was very much a case of like complete day packed. You don't have much time for other things. If you take a day off to go see a friend, then it's two videos the next day. Um,

Yeah, it was nuts and it did take me to a sort of a breaking point I guess where I I was like, okay, this isn't sustainable. I'm gonna try a different strategy How did you realize that this wasn't sustainable?

So there was one point, it was like a really, really hot day. And I was kind of like, I was filming with my camera, but I was like kind of like straining, my skin hurt. I was like super tired. And for some reason I just started crying. I'm not a crier, but I just started crying because I was in so much like pain from the kind of like long-term exhaustion and the exhaustion in the moment. And it was at that point that I was like, I can't finish this video. I just physically, I just couldn't do it.

And then I was like, okay, it's fine. I'm not gonna post a video tomorrow. I'll figure it out. Even though I was horrified at the thought of like not seeing that uptick in subscribers and be like wasted opportunity.

But then when I found out that it was okay, you know, my channel was still alive. Then I was like, okay, maybe I'll do one every two days or one every three days. And I think when you give yourself that space to be able to take your time with things, you can do them better. And that was actually a really important moment to be able to kind of like make better videos. If I hadn't given myself that space, I might still be doing one video a day and they'd be terrible. Yeah.

So you start off with the quantity thing because you're thinking that, you know, this is what the algorithm needs. I need to feed the machine. Yeah. And then you have a moment where you're like, okay, maybe quantity is now no longer serving me. Let's switch to quality. Yeah. I think also you can actually, you can enjoy the process a bit more when you take time with things. Like doing things like just to a strict schedule all the time is really just tiring. And it means you don't get any time to be creative or, you know, do anything fun.

Yeah, I had this moment a couple of weeks ago where, you know, there was a video we put out on the channel maybe last month, which...

I ended up getting a ton of dislikes for a very click-baity kind of title. All the comments were like, "Oh my God, I can't believe what your channel has turned into. This is awful. Sort it out." I was like, "Okay, these are all very reasonable comments. People have a point here." So I deleted the video and that kind of led me on the soul-searching mission of like, "Okay, how did we get to this point where I put out something that was objectively shit for the sake of I don't know what?"

And I did like, I had a few hours on a Saturday, I think it was about two or three weeks ago in here where I was just sitting in the communal spot by myself for like five hours.

And I was intending to film a video, but I thought, you know what? I'm just going to open up Apple Notes and just do some journaling and figure out why I'm feeling a bit weird about this YouTube stuff. And I realized that I'd been drinking the consistency Kool-Aid for so long that I just assumed we had to put out two videos a week. And yeah, we've got a sponsor every week. So we just have to put out a video every Tuesday and every Sunday. It's just...

one of the laws of physics, it has to be done. And then I started, I realized that a big part of why I'd been feeling a bit disconnected from the channel recently is because this drive for a video, like two videos a week on the topic of like kind of productivity, personal development stuff, where I've kind of said the stuff that needs to be said. And now it's like, we're really scraping the bottom of the barrel, trying to come up with ideas meant that we were putting out videos that I wasn't happy with. And then I thought, okay, what if I just

don't stick to that schedule anymore. And I did the kind of Tim Ferriss's fear setting exercise, you know, what's the worst that could happen? What are the worst case scenarios? And wrote them all out in detail and realized that actually these are all, all these worst case scenarios are pretty unlikely. And, and,

you know, having done this for now for four and a half years, focusing on quantity, we can now shift to focusing on quality and not being wedded to an upload schedule or not being wedded to this video has to come out at this certain time to appease this particular sponsor. Because if we want, we can just drop the sponsor and like, it doesn't matter who cares. And then that felt like ridiculously liberating. And as I was doing one of these, I think,

as I was doing one of these Tim Ferriss exercises of like, what's the worst case scenario? I was like tearing up a bit thinking like, oh my God, like all of this has gotten to this point where I can be like, you know what? Like I can take a step back and it's not going to be the end of the world. Yeah. Realization that you have control. Yeah. Yeah. And it was very like that thing you said where

you're almost you know i can't go to a friend's wedding because i have work i found myself thinking of those terms these last few months especially as our team has expanded now and we've got like 16 20 people ish depending on how you come full-time and part-time yeah it's mental um but i found most of my time being spent on being a manager and sort of zoom call after zoom call meeting after meeting after meeting and no time for actually

thinking about videos and filming content and stuff, which is the thing that I love doing. And one of my friends who I was living with is a doctor working in A&E where his schedule was like ridiculously absurd. And he was like, right, I've got a day off. Do you want to grab dinner? And I was like, oh, God.

no look at my calendar sorry i'm i've got 20 minutes of time between like 10 p.m and 10 20 p.m and then i have a call with someone from the u.s at 10 20 and he was like dude what are you doing is it yeah that's bad when you realize your schedule's worth and worse than theirs yeah um so now we're like okay take a step back i'm going to focus on the content angus is going to kind of manage the business side of things and trying to find more of a more of a middle ground there um but it sounds like that's similar to the experience you had on the whole like quality quantity thing yes back then yeah yeah i'd

I think I still need to do work on it internally. But more and more, I do want to focus on the things I'm good at and the things I'm needed for. So I never want to veer away from not being the presence on my channel. I don't want other hosts and things like that.

So if it means having less staff and having a smaller operation overall, that's fine by me because I love doing the core parts of it. So we're at this point, you've done a video every day for a whole six months. And then you decide, okay, we can take the foot off the pedal on quantity and focus on quality. What happens next on the channel? There wasn't some sudden miraculous kind of like, oh, this worked. This was the secret. But I think...

I did an economics degree. I'm very data-driven as it is. So I guess it's this kind of slow but measured level of improvement from video to video as you're kind of looking at retention graphs and being like, oh, loads of people dropped off there. I'm not going to do that again. And kind of like from video to video, when you're still doing content regularly, there's so much information available about what works and what doesn't. I don't think any other...

company or creator gets what you do as a substantially sized YouTuber in terms of like metrics to evaluate yourself with. Yeah. Companies would pay ridiculous amounts of money for data that like that. Yeah.

So if you know how to use it, it's extremely powerful. How do you use it? I don't look at my metrics at all. So I would love to learn from you about like, what can I be doing? How much time do you spend in the YouTube analytics? I look at it for every single video that I post. So two days after it's gone live, I'll kind of, I'll spend a good half an hour just going through it, being like, what countries did this hit? How long did those people stay on for? When did the majority drop off? Was there a significant spike or a significant dip? Did certain parts make people go back?

Things like that. Because you can see all of it, it's like, why wouldn't you? Well, you don't, but I think you should. Yeah. I really think I should as well. Yeah. So I found things like, for example, if I asked people to subscribe really early in the video, it was detrimental because you'd get a drop of like 20% of viewers potentially, but...

they wouldn't be subscribing, they'd just be irritated by the fact you've asked them to subscribe without showing them why. Because at the start of a video in the first like 15 seconds, people are very, very easy to lose. It's at that point that they decide whether they're going to, you know, full screen you and kind of invest in this video or whether they're going to, you know, click on one of the 30 that are kind of grabbing their attention from the side. How should I start?

If you were like kind of my YouTube mentor or whatever, how would you advise me to start looking at retention graphs and analytics a bit more? What's like a good starting point? I would look for troughs. So look at kind of points where you've got viewers that are stable and then when they go down and try to identify why they've gone down at that point. So for example, one of the other things I found was like,

I would do a round off at the end of a video. And at the point where you start rounding off a video, anyone who feels like they've got it, they're like, okay, I'm done. This is the end of the video. And so instead what I started doing is the second I finished the key content, I'm talking about the next video. So it's literally like, and that's what happened to Samsung.

Okay for the video on this that's there for the video on this that's there and I found immediately that like the amount of clicks I was getting on my end cards to lead to the next video We're like they tripled and so my outro now has my face in it. It didn't used to have my face in it It just used to be this kind of blaring music. Yeah, but now it feels like a continuation of the main content It does. Yeah, and I'm kind of being like look over there look over there and they can see me pointing to videos and

And I think actually, I think you said this once, not that long ago, actually, that the people who watch till the end are the most valuable audience members because they're more likely to follow through, right? Yeah. Yeah. So the end card thing is something that we started doing as well about a year ago and it worked really nicely. But kind of beyond that, I didn't really, I don't really look at the numbers because it's... Scary? It's, yeah, it's scary. It also feels like, and I don't know if this is a relic of my kind of olden days of like

Just, I think I have drunk the consistency Kool-Aid way too much where it's like, once you made a video, then forget about the video onto the next one. And the kind of 1% improvements over time, I think I've been doing from my own gut of like, oh, it would be cool if the next video had this thing.

And especially when I was editing my own videos, that was a lot easier to do. Now that there's like a layer between me and the video being edited, it's actually harder, especially because our editor Christian is in Romania. It's a lot harder to affect change

even with the whole remote thing and even with like Frame.io and all this other stuff that I'm now even thinking to the point of like, let's get Christian to switch to Final Cut Pro so he can send me the project file and I can do the Final Cut myself so that I can then have more finely tuned control over what's going on in the video. - I can understand that. Like I've not still fully handed off stuff that I probably should have handed off 'cause it's your baby, right? It's your face, it's your voice, it's your name. So I understand that.

But to be honest, I've actually benefited a lot from having two people. It's not a big team, but two people who are specialists in the area and who like I can hand things to and I know they'll do them better than I would. Okay. Well, what does your team look like right now? So it's editor, camera guy. Okay. It's very, very basic, but it's my camera guy, my editor. They're very, very good at their jobs to the point where I'm like, if I've got any piece of graphics I want doing, I will consult them because I know that they'll know better than me.

How long have you had those guys for? Editor for about three years, camera guy for about a year. Do you do any of the editing yourself now? I do it as a last resort. If there's like something really urgent, which there does tend to be with tech, like, you know, if Apple does an event, you want to react to it, you're editing that video because you can't ask your employees to stay up all night. Although they do that actually voluntarily, but I don't ask them. But yeah, so I'll do it if I have to. And like, well, one thing that really strikes me about your video is that that's,

Basically, every second there is something going on and I can't help but continuing to watch it. And then the meta part of me is thinking, oh, I love like all of these different things that are going on to make me encourage and encourage me to keep watching this. And the content itself is very valuable. And so, I think one thing that we do well on this on my channel is that the content is broadly valuable, but we do basically nothing when it comes to the visual side of things. And it may as well be a podcast. Yeah.

Yes. And I think like that, anytime I see one of your videos, I feel like ridiculously inspired. Like, oh my God, like the amount of post production has gone into this. It's insane. It's a kind of the, the way I describe it is a, an aggregation of micro refinements. So it's like all that stuff hasn't happened overnight. If you kind of go back through the channel and watch one video every year, you'd see a few new things each time. So like that's,

The day that I decided, okay, I'm gonna spend more time on music and try to create moods with what I'm saying. The day I decided to put my face in a circle so I'm visible at all times. And we've tried these experiments, looked at those graphs, seen that they've worked and then realized, okay, these are mainstays. - Is it like,

you have a gut feeling that when I put my face on the thing while showing overlay, it'll work. And then you look at the data or? - Yeah, exactly that. So you have a gut feeling, you try it, it works or it doesn't work and then you action it. - And how can you tell like you adding your face versus not adding a face? It's not like you're releasing the same video face and no face. So you have a control. - It's tough. But like, I think when you spend that much time with the data, you have a gauge on how well a certain video will keep people.

Okay. So, for example, I know that if I make a camera comparison, they don't have good retention. Like an average camera comparison might have 45, 50% retention. Okay. Right? And so, if you do a camera comparison and it gets 55%, you're like, that is an outlier. Oh, okay. Or if I do an unboxing or a top 10, if I do a top 10, that's going to get really good retention. Yeah. And so, you'll know what to expect. And in your top 10s, you start from number 10 rather than number one. Always. And...

you go, so something like, you know, and it starts off, it starts off A and then becomes B and then becomes positively C. And it's like, it's all so...

It's just so clever. I spend a lot of time on the scripts. And the other thing I do actually is when I'm scripting, I'm thinking of three different people. Okay. So there's three people I know in my life of different levels of, I guess, tech enthusiasm. And so with every line, I've almost reached a stage where I'm scanning it being like, is this interesting to all these three people? Would they watch this? Would they watch this? Would they watch this? Would they understand this? Is this funny to them? All that kind of stuff.

And I think when you do that, you end up with a script that is a little more broadly appealing than it would otherwise be. How much time do you spend on scripting? That's most of what I do.

Okay. So like for a standard, let's say for a kind of Google Pixel versus iPhone 13 Pro camera comparison, 22 minute long video. So that would, is it 22 minutes? 22 minutes, yeah. Oh yeah, that was your toilet break. That was my toilet break, yeah. Watching at double speed, obviously. Oh, oh dear. I think that was probably three and a half days of scripting. Three and a half days? Yeah. Are we talking eight hour days? No, we're talking like 14 hour days. We're talking like...

42 hours spent on scripting a single video. Ages and ages and ages. Because I do the initial kind of like what I think is going to happen. Then I test the phones and kind of like, because remember like what I'm saying, I am having to create my own findings. I'm not taking things and like doing, you know, passing them on. So, you have to make sure for every single thing you say, it is correct.

And that is one thing that I almost wouldn't, I wouldn't trust anyone else with because it's my name and my integrity. Yeah, that's your secret sauce as well. Yeah. Yeah. So I know how to test these products, but it takes time. Bloody hell.

What about for like a stand, like, so you did a video that was ways in which tech is bad or... I'm worried about humanity. Yeah, that was a bit of a departure from your phone's vibe. Yeah, you're not going to like this. It took about eight days of scripting, I think. So about 100 hours of scripting. Something like that. Yeah, I wasn't keeping track, but it was a long time.

It's the kind of time that like the practical part of me is thinking like, is this time well spent? But sometimes I kind of like, I get carried away thinking about how viewers are going to think, you know, I'm thinking about these three different categories of viewers and, and then sometimes scripts get away, away from you. It's like, okay, this should be a 12 minute video. And then you actually try and do it. And you're like, oh my God, that's 25, 26 minutes. So sometimes things add up out of your control and I don't tamper them because sometimes I'm like,

it's okay, this is going to be a big project. This is going to do really well over time. It's going to hit the YouTube criteria. It's fine. We'll spend more time on it. I was once watching an interview with Penn and Teller, you know, the magicians. Yeah. Where they were, it was at some kind of magic convention of some sort. Yeah.

Because I was super cool into close-up magic back in the day. Oh, I love close-up magic. Oh, really? Oh, nice. Exchange some tricks sometimes. I actually have a few decks of cards in here that someone gifted. Anyway, someone asked, like, they did some, like, ridiculous special on, like, David Letterman or something. And Penn was describing how they did it. And they were like, I mean, we literally...

hired a cockroach firm to put 10,000 cockroaches in this tank, shipped it across, I don't know, the Atlantic to the David Letterman show like three months before our appearance, built some stuff into the thing. And it was just like a really elaborate process. And they said something like, often magic is spending more time than anyone thinks is reasonable on doing a thing.

And that was kind of what I was thinking when you're like 50 hours of scripting for a 20 minute camera comparison, a hundred hours of scripting for a listicle about ways in which you're worried about tech. Like, yeah, that's just insane. Do you realize how insane that is? Maybe I don't. Maybe I don't. There's a lot of passes. Cause I like you're doing your factual pass where you go through and you're like, okay, I said that the

Pixels camera was better than the iPhones in this. So when you're checking that, you've then got to go take these phones out and just like take loads and loads of photos to make sure it's right. And then you're doing like a fun pass. Are there enough fun bits and are they scattered in the right places? Like we plan a lot of the jokes we're going to make and like the things that are going to be thrown at me during the video and stuff like that. Like,

because we want to make sure that there are points of respite. Because obviously it's a tech video, right? It's going to be very heavy on information. And no one wants to sit through 25 minutes of pure, like, this isn't uni. So you have to kind of think about those things. And you end up doing all these passes,

And that adds so much time to it. And yet you're still making like sometimes three videos a week, sometimes more than that. It's not three. It's probably a video a week right now. The goal is two videos a week, two really good videos a week. But I think I need more people to be able to do that. Bloody hell. Okay. And then when you're testing the cameras, for example, you've got your camera guy who's like...

filming you, testing the cameras and stuff? - Yeah, our processes are efficient given that we only have two people, but they could be more efficient if we had five. I think I wanna be in a position where I'm only doing the things that I want to do and the things that I need to do. And so right now there are still a few situations where I'm not doing that.

But I'm getting there. What I wouldn't want is like a huge corporate structure and 20 people. Yeah, 20 people with like middle management. That'd be horrible. Yeah, it's a nightmare. We've got a few of them in the studio right now. Absolute bullseye. Tell me more about your process for videos. Like I'm going full selfish mode. I just want to learn from you here. So before...

I think most YouTubers, when you reach a certain size, you start planning videos backwards. So when you think about a video, thinking about thumbnail, title, would people click on it? And then from there, you're like, okay, what's the content going to be like? Is it engaging? Is it delivering value? Will people finish that video thinking, whoa, I like this guy?

And then at that point, then you're thinking you take a step further back. It's like, okay, what's the storyline? What's the subplot? How are you keeping people throughout that video engaged? And then you work all the way back and then that's the point where you've got your content. You know what your next step is. The way the normal, the trigger point is either an idea I've had in bed or some past video that did really well that people really enjoyed. And they're like, can we have a part two or something someone else has done that I think

That's a really interesting idea. What if I applied it to phones or, you know, gadgets or whatever? I really got a sense that there was a storyline because you were like, I'm going to tell you about this product, but there's like, but there's a question here, like, who's it for? And it was like, you were, you kept on, that was like a thread going through, going through the content.

And all that stuff is the stuff that you do in your kind of multiple passes of figuring out. It's almost like writing a book. It is. Yeah. It is. In my head, like, I never thought I'd write as much as I do. Like, when I was a kid, I thought I'll be doing something where I'm working on an Excel spreadsheet or something. It didn't occur to me that my job is basically video essays. Video essays.

That is what it is. I think I've almost like, I've moved into my own, like this tech YouTube and I do that, but I think I'm moving more towards like the analytical side of things where I'm trying to break down things from an economics perspective. Yeah.

Yeah, like you did a kind of Xiaomi versus Samsung video, which was very interesting. You did like things you didn't know about Tesla video, which was very interesting. And this like kind of why I hate humanity or why tech is destroying the world type. And seeing those, I was just like really surprised. I was like, oh, I wonder what this video is going to be like. I was like, bloody hell, this is a really good video. Were you concerned moving away from the niche, inverted commas, of phones? Yeah.

into this more like analytical type stuff. - Yeah, I actually, so at the start of my channel, the tech was very broad and actually, so the focus was gaming consoles 'cause that's what I was interested in at the time.

And then there was a point when I decided to focus on phones because I didn't want to have a fragmented audience. What I was finding even early on is that because I was making videos on so many different things, I had 20% of my audience who wanted to see gaming consoles, 20% wanted to see headphones, 20% wanted to see phones. And that meant that every single time I posted a video, only 20% of people would like want to see that. Yeah.

And so I decided actually, okay, phones I'm interested in, phones there is, you know, reliable, big recurring market. I'm going to focus on that. But then when you get to a certain size, being niche caps you. So I'm now starting to think about things like I would like to cover laptops. I am interested in those too. I'll bring those in or cars or other things like that. Do you use a teleprompter? I've started using a teleprompter two months ago. Okay. What's that been like?

It helps. So I'm obsessed with my videos, right? I script them to the word. And so if you're going to have that kind of production, a teleprompter makes so much sense. It reduces the kind of the stress on the day of filming and it means you can get through it faster. We've had scripts where for like, for some videos, I've sat there for four and a half hours straight, like just filming before the teleprompter. And that video you could do in like half the time with a teleprompter.

Wait a minute, you're filming for four and a half hours on a video that's fully scripted? Yeah, yeah, yeah. Why does it take so long? Because I start thinking about how I should be pronouncing certain things and what emphasis I need to put on what words. And all of a sudden you start retaking your sentences again and again and again and again and apologizing to your cameraman for having to kind of like redo the movement.

Then also it's like for these fun bits So for example, I've got a video coming up where we're trying to make a phone levitate - just because I'm saying that the phone feels alive And so at that point we're like, okay Let's tie it to fishing wire and let's lift it while I'm doing that But that takes so much time to get right because you've got to get your inflection, right? Yeah And at the same time you've got to make sure that that's lifted doesn't fall on you the screen is facing the right way and it adds so much variables and

And then we're trying to bring in the cats every now and again for little breaks. And you can't control the cats very easily. So normally once per video, I'm going downstairs shouting Milo several times until he comes. And then I take him up, feed him. It just adds up. Bloody hell. Okay. So you put an unreasonable amount of time in scripting. And also it seems an unreasonable amount of time in filming to get all the things right. Yeah. And it's like how...

I don't think anyone watching your videos would think that your 20 minute video took four hours to film. Yeah, yeah. Sometimes people like, they leave comments like,

So sometimes I make a battery test video where I've got like eight phones on the table and like you can see their batteries run down. And people leave a comment like this man spent eight hours giving us this, you know, amazing video or something useful video. And what they don't realize is that eight hours was just the start of it. To set up that table for that video was a four hour job in itself.

Because you have to do things like, have you ever seen these videos? So the camera is like locked above. Yeah, the battery ones. Yeah. Where it's like a time lapse of like battery going down. So every single phone is taped to the table multiple times so that it doesn't budge. The camera, every hinge of the camera is taped together so that the camera doesn't budge. There's so many things that happen. Like we're using like laser pointers to make sure it's perfectly vertical. Like you have to do image corrections to make sure there's no distortion. Like...

There's more, there's more to it. If you want it, because I'm quite perfectionist, like I want it to be a certain way. And when you're like that, you're your own worst nightmare. Presumably you weren't like this when you were making one video every day. No. Okay. When did this like kind of perfectionism develop?

well i always want i always want to get better yeah and so like when you see an opportunity to get better you take it yeah and that's what leads you to having like a lot of things to think about so like at the point where you decide okay my face is going to be in a circle throughout the video yeah then when you're filming you're aware of that and then you have to film in a different way you can't just like pull your script yeah yeah

But if it makes the videos better, you do it. Yeah. Yeah. It's got to be done. Yeah. I mean, I've had the same philosophy on like, I will basically do whatever it takes to make the video better. But I am now seeing just how much more there is to go in terms of making videos better. Because if I script for like two hours, I think, oh my God, this is like a ridiculously scripted video.

Two hours? Yeah, genuinely. Like my, the videos, the most scripted video I've done was my first video that went viral, which was on how to study for exams. And that was probably about six hours of scripting because it was like a literature review going over the, going on PubMed, finding the studies, finding the graphs. And then maybe an extra like 20 hours in the edit to animate the graphs and stuff for the first time. And I've never put so much effort into a video since then.

Unbelievable. Those hours just aren't comprehensible to me. I mean, you're a hundred hours. I'm just thinking, Oh my God. Like I thought I was doing a good job in terms of trying to, trying to make the videos kind of. I don't take this as me doing a good job. I take this as me not maybe using my time as efficiently as I should be.

I don't think it's good. You know, when you're trying to like build a brand and stuff and do other things, I think you have to let go of it. I think you said something to me actually about if someone else can do the job 80% as well, you should let them. Yeah. It's tough for me to get to that, but I can see why. Yeah. I think I've, I've, I've been thinking about that phrase a lot. Like, so yeah,

When I did my first kind of successful business at uni, helping people get into med school, I made the mistake of not delegating enough. And the advice I then came across a few years later was this thing of if someone can do the job 80% as well as you can, you should delegate it to them because your time is worth more. You can do more things. And I think when it comes to growing a business like that, that makes a lot of sense. And I took that advice when it came to YouTube as well because my philosophy on this in the past was...

again, optimizing for quantity and recognizing that there is an algorithm to feed. There is a beast to feed. I kind of felt that the value for my videos was not in the edit. It was not in Matt D'Avella style cinematography or Peter McKinnon stuff, cinematography or Mr. Who's the boss 2021 style, like something happening every one second. It was in providing somewhat valuable information and doing it with some kind of like friendly, friendly kind of vibes. And so,

And so that led to that, those axioms led to a thing of, okay, cool. I can then therefore outsource editing because the editor, it's not that important. Background music doesn't really matter. We'll just slap whatever from epidemic sound. I've got a list of kind of songs that I like. I don't like drums. Cool. That creates a vibe. And a few like tweaks here and there where it meant that I can turn around a video with

Like a lot of our best videos have had 20 minutes of bullet point scripting and then me just spilling because I'm usually talking about stuff that I know sufficiently well. If someone asks me about time management or about productivity or about personal finance or money or whatever, I can just like talk about it. And that has gotten us to this point. But there is that thing of what's gotten you here won't necessarily get you there. And I think when you're competing in like world-class leagues, the whole 80% delegation thing,

I wonder if that stops being effective. I think there's also an element of, I think the reason I don't personally adopt it is because some part of me thinks, what's the goal there? Yeah. It's obviously created with this idea of like, earn the most money. But that's not really me. Like, I don't do things to earn money. I have enough. If you enjoy certain parts of the job and you think you'll have a better output from it, you'll get better comments and better engagement. I would rather do that even if it earns me less. Yeah. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense.

What is your goal for YouTube these days?

I think recently I have started thinking about things like legacy and like what I want my brand to mean and things like that, which is a very luxurious position to be in. I think I'm not worried about numbers or getting more subscribers. It would be great to do that. And I'm sure the day that I hit 10 million is going to be amazing and I'm going to celebrate and yeah, I'm really looking forward to it. But it's a bit bigger than that. Like I am thinking about things like books, apps,

other things that I want to just try. Why? I guess I never would have thought I had the opportunity to and now that I do it's it'll be fun it'll be different I might be good at it I might really enjoy it yeah it'd be a new experience if nothing else. So I was gonna ask you this like how do you think about your brand slash career let's say over the next five to ten years

It's tough, you know, because like, I think a lot of the growth has happened recently. So I'm still taking in the fact that I have a large YouTube channel now. It's new to me. So I haven't had much time to think about these things. But I like to think of myself as a teacher. I think if I had to identify myself as one thing, it would be someone who educates people. And so I would like my brand to mean or be associated with teacher, right?

And so whether that means through books, apps, I'm not too sure what the mechanism is yet. But I have that kind of vision of like being, I guess, synonymous with technology or education. When did you realize that that's what you wanted to do? Very recently. Okay. How did you come to the realization?

I have like a, so I've got this new management team and I think while I'm kind of stuck in the nitty gritty, they're very good at sort of seeing the bigger picture. And we have these kind of weekly calls where they're used to seeing the journey and the trajectory of YouTubers becoming businesses. And so they can kind of like impart a bit of that wisdom or like, this is what has worked for this person. This person found this thing really fun. Consider it. Okay. And so I have considered it. So how did that land on teacher?

Um, they asked me at one point, like, what, what do you see yourself as? And it was then kind of a moment of self-reflection where I was like, okay, if you boiled it down, that is what I do. I'm trying to like make tech fun. And you see that as being like a t-shirt type role.

Yeah. Interesting. Yeah. I think like if I had, if I was put into a school and someone said, you have a class to teach of like 20 kids, I think I'd do a really good job. Not saying that that is the job that I want to do. You know, I can obviously through my camera, I can teach millions. But that is actually what I like. So I had a similar realization about,

probably in the last year where I was trying to answer this question of what the hell do I want to do with my life? And one of the strategies I came across was, um, the idea of asking yourself, what do you want written on your gravestone? And I thought, I thought about this. I was like, okay, let's actually take this seriously. What do I want written on my gravestone? And I came very quickly. I was like, okay, some combination of good father, good husband and inspirational teacher. Um,

I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." I hadn't quite realized that because at the time I was really thinking, "Do I want to do medicine? Do I not want to do medicine?" And then realizing that if that's what I want written on my gravestone and we were to work back from that, like, do I care about practicing medicine or do I care more about teaching it? And I realized that all of the times where I've had the most fun in hospitals and at uni has been when I was teaching other medical students rather than when I was doing the job.

I was like, "Oh, that's interesting." And then reflecting back on my life, like, you know, I was doing like math tutoring when I was like 14 onwards and private tutoring and like a bunch of teaching in med school and a bunch of teaching as a doctor and YouTube is teaching as you figured out. I was like,

I was like, oh, this actually, you know, that's the thing that gives me fulfillment. Therefore, let's try and do more of this stuff. And that's actually changed your whole like approach. Yeah. Because now I'm like, great. Given that that's like the end goal. To be dead. To be dead. Yeah. To be dead, having been a good father, a good husband and a good teacher. And then that actually simplifies my life a bit because now I don't need to be wedded to, for example, practicing medicine. I don't need to be wedded to, for example, um,

you know, we've been working with this business coach, which has actually been really helpful, trying to figure out what's the core focus of the business. And landed on the phrase that

Sounds kind of cringe. To help people live their best life by creating inspiring educational content. Okay. And the more times I say it, the more comfortable I become with saying it. But that focus kind of goes with the teaching thing, that ultimately that's what we're trying to do. And it means that, like, yes, it would be cool to, you know, we're launching a stationary line. It would be cool to make my own keyboard. It would be cool to have my own everyday carry bag. But those are all side quests.

And I can recognize them as being side quests. It's just a little bit of spice. Whereas the core focus, the main thing is related to teaching. I like the ideology, but I find it hard to make my end goal something that will only happen when I'm not here anymore. If you see what I mean. This idea of aiming for what's going to be on your gravestone. Yeah.

it won't matter to you. You won't be able to experience it. I think I prefer the idea of aiming for what do you want your life to be? Those kinds of things in 10 years, because that is an end goal that I can experience. Ah, got it. So I, I agree. Gravestone stuff, you know, what are people going to say at your funeral? That kind of vibes is all very, very, very like long-term thinking. There's another, another thing that I've been using recently, more kind of short to medium term, which is,

what does my ideal ordinary week look like one year from now, five years from now, 10 years from now. And that's a lot more about like, actually, I would go on my calendar and fast forward to like 2026 and be like, all right, like, let's block out the sorts of things I'd like to be doing. And through that, I realized, oh, cool. I like the idea of having one day where all of my kind of in-person collaboration with the team is. I was like, oh, in-person, great.

let's build an in-person team rather than a remote team i realized that oh i want to be doing like squash and tennis and badminton like you know once a week cool let's block that in blocks of deep work deep work deep work deep work where the thing that i enjoy doing is reading writing and teaching cool let's block that in deep work oh just like focus blocks of work for um where i'm not interrupted by calls and things like that okay um yeah that feels high pressure

High pressure? Yeah, like telling myself that certain amounts of time are going to be deep work. Oh, I mean, yeah, there's a book by Cal Newport called Deep Work, which is what that reference is, where it's basically like, look, if you want to do something well, you need to have uninterrupted blocks of time to do it.

It sounds like your calendar is fairly deep worky by default. If you can have a hundred hours of time. I think it is. I feel intimidated if I sat down and be like, right, time to do some deep work. Yeah. How do you think of what you want your kind of week to look like? I'd say a year from now. The main thing for me is I'd like to have a little more control over my time. You know, this whole fear of like blocking off days and things. I think that's my one current barrier, which I'm trying to kind of get over.

because I have enough as it is. I am happy, I'm content, like I'm living a good life. And I think that kind of FOMO I get from like missing out on potential things that could be happening, it won't really matter in terms of my end goal.

So I just need to get better at kind of like separating that and then I'm good. Being more okay, being okay with like signing up to a friend's wedding. Yeah. Yeah. Even if it means saying no to a helicopter trip. Yeah. Yeah. How do you, how do you think about money? Mostly I use it just for convenience. So like it might mean that I could take an Uber instead of walking or it's

It just allows you to live your life in the way that you want to live your life. You could order in food one time instead of like needing to cook yourself, those kinds of things. I don't buy a lot of possessions. I get sent a lot because of my work, but I personally like very irregularly.

Because I mean, the things that I enjoy and things that I look forward to are basically just all experiences like this weekend is worth more to me than any like MacBook. Yeah. You know, this is this whole idea of hedonic adaptation that once you hit like whatever, whatever you gain, you become accustomed to that thing and then you then you need more of that thing to to to satisfy yourself.

I find that for me the more money I make, the more the goalpost shifts, the more the bar for how much money I need to be comfortable starts to suddenly rack up and it's like, "Oh, you know, I thought I was actually pretty happy in a thousand pound a month rental place, but 4,000 a month gets you a really nice rental place. And so I'm not even going to look at what 10,000 a month gets you." Like that level of stuff. Do you find yourself doing that at all? Yeah, it's actually like I think about hedonic adaptation a lot and

I actively try not to do it because I think it leads you to a life of like living in a huge house with a enormous suite of cars on your own. Feeling like you can't even hang out with normal people because your life is so far removed from theirs that you're different.

So I don't think it's a good path to go down. But it's really hard to separate yourself from it. It's like, if you could afford a Lamborghini, why would you not buy a Lamborghini? Those are internal conversations that I'm sure like most top YouTubers will have with themselves.

But I mean, the way I like look at cars is like, okay, I'll get a crummy car and then two years later I'll get a medium car and then I'll get a slightly nicer one. It's like a nice one. Like there's no rush to get to that end goal. And so even if you could theoretically afford a Lamborghini, you're like working up to the buying of a Lamborghini potentially, if that's what you're into rather than just going straight for it because you can. Yeah.

And I also like the way I see houses is like a big house. You can only be in one room at any one time. Yeah. Like I don't like, I don't see the point. Yeah. I quite like the idea of less time spent hoovering floors on, you know, like three different stories and more time just doing things I want to do. I mean, the value of a big house is in being able to host people, I think. Yeah. But then you can, it's very easy to like get an Airbnb and just do the same. That's what I'm doing tomorrow. Oh, yeah. Yeah.

And actually that way you can have different locations every time you have a party and have more different experiences. Do you think about the, like other than the car thing, do you think about the hedonic adaptation in other aspects of your life? Yeah. I think about it a lot when it comes to tech. So I made this video, right? I'm worried about humanity. And the underlying theme is that we are choosing ways of life that are higher stimulation, right?

Right? - Yeah. - Everything around us is becoming higher stimulation. Did you see the Meta, Facebook rebranding as Meta because they're trying to build a Metaverse? - No. - Okay. - Okay. - Yeah, Facebook has changed names to Meta. - Right. - And the idea is they're trying to build a world where everyone has almost a real life experience with people

from their homes where you can put on glasses for example connect with people in a way that you've never connected before to the point where it's indistinguishable from actually being with these people and the point is we're moving towards higher and higher levels of stimulation but hedonic adaptation means that we will adapt to those levels of stimulation and so we won't be happier because of it but the only thing we will feel is let down by other people

So the more the stimulation level rises, the more that relative to that, the people around us fall. Is it kind of like when you're used to listening to things at 2x speed and you realize people don't talk at 2x speed and there's a part of you that feels a bit slowly. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. I force myself with my friends, well, with some of the friends I really care about to listen at one time speed for that reason. Why didn't you move to London?

I was born in Nottingham. I've grown up in Nottingham. It's like my hometown. One day I want to move to London, but I want to do it for the right reasons. Not because I'm like tied to my friends because they've got jobs, they're busy. It's not like I'm going to come here and then all of a sudden my social life is going to like rocket forward. I'll do it when it feels right, I think.

There was something you said in a video. You said YouTube is a privilege of a job to have, but can also breed an attitude that creates relentless unhappiness. What do you mean by that? Are you quoting me to myself? Quoting you to yourself, yeah. It's a privilege of a job to have in that you can work from anywhere and you can pretty much do anything. And how many people can say that? But at the same time...

it's almost like that whole stimulation thing, the dopamine hit, the hedonic adaptation in that like you very quickly adjust to that and then you start thinking about what's next. So you become comfortable with the fact that you have such a great lifestyle and flexibility that you do and you start aiming for higher and higher numbers because it's symmetric driven. It's that idea.

And it's a trap that I think most YouTubers at some point fall into. And I think it leads us to making content that we're not proud of, like your clickbait video. Because you're not even thinking at that point about viewers. You're just thinking, oh, I've got to get more subscribers. And the way to get more subscribers is this. This works. This is data driven. I'm just going to do it. How do you feel when you get a video that's like tanking relative to your stuff? That's like 10 out of 10 on the stats. What goes through your mind if that ever happens?

To be honest, recently I've been pretty good at like knowing when a video is not going to do that well. I haven't been surprised for a while actually. I used to be very tied to it. I used to be like it would ruin my day and I felt only as good as the last video I'd uploaded. That's a YouTuber thing.

but more and more now I'm pretty much like I'll post a video and I'm like this will get a million in the first day, this will get two million in the first day, I'll know like roughly. There's another thing I want to quote to you which I thought was interesting. You said as the channel was getting bigger it felt like this continuous race to remain relevant among some of the most creative hard-working people on the planet and that really struck home with me because I feel this continuous

pressure to remain relevant. When I was starting out on YouTube, it's like, you know, I felt like that scrappy startup, you know, just kind of having fun. I'm like, oh my God, oh my God, things are working.

Now that I'm of a reasonable size, I am now the incumbent, like the old school boomer guy who is like struggling. I feel struggling to remain relevant. Do you feel like you're at the top? I don't feel I'm at the top top, but I feel I'm sort of in the major leagues with people who are in this sort of personal development type space. Other than in tech, there are very few YouTubers who are big today who were big 10 years ago and all these thoughts of, you know, what if...

my videos stop becoming relevant to people? What if no one stop, people stop caring? What if my whole kind of this internet career falls down because of the fact that people stop watching my stuff because they no longer identify with what I say?

Do you worry about that kind of stuff at all? I think I'm really lucky in the genre I picked because I think with tech, like by its very nature, providing you're covering the latest tech, you are relevant. So as long as your videos are interesting and informative and people trust your opinion, you will continue to remain relevant. Not that I'm taking it for granted, but like I still want to make every video better than the last. But if the next iPhone comes out and I cover it, I think it's safe to assume that people will watch it.

Like I sympathize with gamers. You know, like gamers can build up like millions of subscribers for one game like Minecraft. And then when interest with Minecraft falls, their entire channel just falls apart. And they have to switch game and pretty much like start audience from scratch. That's horrific. Yeah. Yeah. That's really tricky. Yeah. I guess tech is one of those nice things where I think you also tech age as well in that as a creator,

Marques is like more of an authority on tech than he was 10 years ago. Whereas in other things, like I started out in the student market,

As a student, you're less of an authority 10 years after graduation than you were at the point of graduation where you had all this like wisdom about what it's like being a student. I never thought of that. No, you're right. You're right. The ceiling, the age ceiling is very high for tech. I often get messages from wannabe YouTubers, like new YouTubers starting out, people on Instagram, people on TikTok, asking for kind of how to become more confident on camera.

you come across as very confident on camera and this is sort of like four hours of filming. If we ignore that side of things, you do seem pretty confident on camera, which strikes me as probably not how you were when you first started out. What would be your kind of top tips for someone looking to become more camera confident? I think like it's the scariest thing, but you have to just try it. And I think try it almost ready to receive criticism and then unmask that criticism into some useful feedback.

So it's like to start with, like when I first put my face on, I knew that there was going to be some comments there that I wasn't excited to read. And it was horrifying that thought. But I was like, well, there'll be usefulness. So there were people like, you idiot, sit further away from the camera.

And if you take away you idiot, that's actually a really useful piece of feedback. And then I did that. And then it's like, get your microphone out of the frame. And I'm like, okay. And then I research where do you put microphones? Oh, underneath. Okay, great. I'll do that. And slowly but surely you start to move towards a quality that you're actually proud of. But you've got to accept the fact that to start with it won't be. Yeah. Because you're watching people who've been doing it for 10 years, for example.

Yeah, a lot of artists talk about this, about how if you're starting out with drawing, it feels very demotivating because you know what good looks like. And you know that that's not what you're doing. And there was this book I was reading a couple of days ago called The Gain and the Gap.

And how, essentially, if you focus on measuring the gap between where you are and where you want to be, that can be very demotivating. Whereas if you focus on measuring the gain, like where are you compared to where you were, you can still keep where you want to be in mind, but you don't fixate on...

you don't fixate on the gap. I guess like the advice I usually give to people is also you will suck at the start and that's okay. A, like no one really cares, like it's not the end of the world and you have to, you do have to kind of put in your reps to get better at the thing. Yeah. And you put in your rep for your kind of 300 videos before or kind of like a video every single day for six months and once you've put in the reps

And if you're thinking about marginal improvement over time, you just naturally get very good at doing the thing when you've been doing it for long enough. Yeah. And if you feel like you're still not sure, all you need to do is to look at big creators at the start.

providing they haven't deleted their old videos everyone will have been bad yeah i think that's that's often quite uh one of the videos we show in our our youtuber course is uh marquez's like 100th video where he's like right video number 100 yeah yeah i want to want to give a good shout out to my 74 subscribers yeah that keeps showing up in the recommended yeah it occasionally comes up yeah that's quite quite interesting to see um

This has been fantastic. I'd love to end with some like a quick fiery type questions. Okay, so quick fire. What advice would you give to your younger self? It'll be okay. Who would you say has had the biggest influence on your career? Probably Marques. Oh, how so? Marques, so MKBHD, he was one of the tech channels I watched when I was younger. And when I was kind of with my friends and we were talking about being a YouTuber and getting 10,000 subscribers and things like that.

So from a very early age, I kind of, he provided a framework for what, how it could work. What's one tip for someone who's looking for success? Start with something you enjoy.

and that you're passionate about and that you'd want to be the best at. What does the first and last hour of your day look like? So both of them more recently are without phones. Oh. So my entire waking day is with phones and the first two are like get out of bed first, start your day and then turn off airplane mode and the last hour of my day is normally like just lying in a dark room somewhere. Oh, interesting. Yeah.

Okay. It's a thing about sleep. Like I've had a lot of problems in the past with sleep. Yeah. And one of the piece of advice that's really helped is trying to sync your life with the real life cycle of the sun. Yeah. And that involves the brightness of the rooms you're in. Yeah. So I look like a bit of a freak, but if someone calls me, for example, like when I'm about to sleep, I will just be sitting in darkness. And has that helped your sleep? What material item item under a hundred pounds could you not live without?

slash has added disproportionate value to your life? It would be under a hundred on eBay. Okay. The Ember mug. Oh, really? So I drink a lot of tea. Yep. And when I drink my tea, I like the reassurance that it's not going to go cold.

I enjoy it at 62 degrees. - 62? - Yeah, yeah. So my Ember mug allows me to kind of drink it at that temperature. - Oh, fair play. I had an Ember mug for a few weeks and I never found myself using it. It would always like go cold and then there's this wire and like heating up and-- - I like having one mug because then it saves washing up. - Yeah. - So like every time I've reviewed this mug, I'll just rinse it there and then put it to the side. So that means that there's no loads of mugs piling up, for example. So it's a two in one.

Yeah, they've recently released a white one, which I was thinking of getting because I prefer white vibes than dark vibes. I do as well, yes. What book would you recommend to anyone? I actually really enjoyed Steve Bartlett's book. Happy 60 Millionaire. Yeah. It's good. Yeah. It's very good. If you lost everything, let's say YouTube channel's gone, fame is gone, money's gone, but you still got all the skills, how would you start from scratch? What would you be doing? I think what I'd do is like...

jump straight back in after my morning period. I would probably, I mean, algorithms now are very favorable to people who know how to make good content. So even if you'd like start a brand new channel, if you make a great video, you will very quickly be categorized into this channel makes good videos. And so you have lots of situations where like big creators will start second channels and those second channels will very quickly catch up or get a surge in subscribers because of that.

So even though I feel like I've got loads of capital that I built up, it wouldn't be lost because the main asset is the skillset. What quote or mantra do you live by? I actually don't love quotes. I feel like they sacrifice practicality for sounding cool a lot of the time. And finally, journey or destination?

journey nice all right aaron thank you so much for for coming on this has been an absolute joy been amazing i've learned so much about youtube and stuff and i feel like i'm now going to go into a hole and be like oh my god like i need to reassess if i thought two hours of scripting was a long time to spend on a video i need to reassess i need to reassess because 100 is not okay that's how magic happens you spend an unreasonable amount of time on something that other people wouldn't wouldn't do and yeah i'd say that's a big part of why you're

why you've gone here but yeah thank you for being so honest thank you for being so transparent with everything it's been really great thank you and we'll put links to all of Aaron's stuff in the video description for whatever that's worth at your scale but hopefully a little trickle a little trickle of people can find your channel right that's it for this week's episode of deep dive thank you so much for watching I hope you enjoyed this episode as much as I did links to all the things we talked about including Aaron's YouTube channel and all the

All that jazz will be in the show notes or in the video description if you're watching this on YouTube. And wherever you're watching this, please, please, please, we'd love for you to leave a review on Apple Podcasts. That's where the reviews matter. Even if you don't use an Apple device, even if you're not listening on Apple Podcasts, you will find a review link in the show notes. And we'd love for you to give the show, give the episode, give the podcast, preferably a five-star review and some comments as well because it helps more people discover the podcast. Anyway, thanks so much for listening. Have a great evening and I'll see you hopefully in the next episode. Bye-bye.