The Highs And Lows Of Being A Viral Sensation - Max Fosh
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By the way, in case you haven't heard, my brand new book, Feel Good Productivity, is now out. It is available everywhere books are sold, and it's actually hit the New York Times and also the Sunday Times bestseller list. So thank you to everyone who's already got a copy of the book. If you've read the book already, I would love a review on Amazon. And if you haven't yet checked it out, you may like to check it out. It's available in physical format and also ebook and also audiobook everywhere books are sold. I think I was known as...

to being quite an odd guy at uni anyway and just doing things because they were funny. And then I just got so lucky one day where I walked past Zach Alsop

on the street, who was a fellow YouTuber at the time, who had about 30,000 subscribers at the time. And I said to him, look, mate, if you ever need a cameraman for anything, let me know. But I said to Zach, oh yeah, I make videos as well. I've got like 18 million views on my videos. And he weirdly said, yeah, actually, well, we're filming something tomorrow. Do you want to come and help film? So I helped film there. And then he had this idea to kind of break me into London Fashion Week, dressed up as a model. And we did that. And then that was just kind of like,

Boom. Just went stratospheric. Please, what was I? Just leave! Max!

I don't think I do enough to combat burnout. I do therapy. That was one of the first things that I bought with some YouTube money was like therapy. But then it all boils down to like ideas of like self-esteem. I've kind of got to a kind of an impasse where I know the things that make me feel bad when it comes to like negative thoughts when it comes to video making and like have big numbers. But the goalposts just move daily. I don't think I've ever said this publicly but

Max Fosh

Max is a YouTuber and stand-up comedian. You might have seen a video which now has 30 million views where he and our friends Zach and Jay, they faked him as a model to the top of London Fashion Week wearing like a garbage bag or something like that. Recently, he's also gone viral for playing a prank where he convinced people landing at Gatwick Airport that they were landing at Luton Airport instead.

He famously ran for mayor of London a couple years ago. He has gotten an official presidential pardon for a crime that he committed in 2009. And he seems to have built a career off the back of being an internet

prankster kind of vibe. Anyway, this is a sick conversation. We talk about how he became disillusioned with the world of corporations and like big corporate and a real job. And we talk about his journey through university, how getting involved in student radio ultimately led to him doing silly things on the internet and making silly videos now to the point where his YouTube channel is at nearly 1.5 million subscribers. He's building his own team. He's just done a whole stand-up

proper show thing at the Edinburgh Fringe and is performing at the London Palladium Theatre, which is this huge venue in about two months. And me and the team are going to be getting tickets to that. Anyway, I hope you enjoy this conversation with Max Fosch. By the way, just a flag, we actually had a bit of an audio issue for the first five or so minutes of this episode. We've kept them in because it's top banter and Max is like really freaking funny and like, yeah, but please excuse the audio for the first five minutes. It gets really good beyond that point.

You've been described as lots and lots of things. I'm really interested to know what you're going to describe me as, because is it going to be prankster? Because that's normally the number one that people go for. Oh, so I was going to ask you how you describe yourself, but the line from the video where I first discovered you was Zach and Jay's Fashion Week one, unsurprisingly. 30 million views. We faked a model, fake model to the top of London Fashion Week. Yeah. They described you as, we need a confident, unfashionable, blank canvas of a man. Yeah.

Yeah. That's a reasonable. I think that's probably, yeah, that's probably quite fair from, from Zappa J. Um, yeah, I think, I think I get a lot of, I get a lot of prankster, which I don't massively love. Um, I, I, I get a lot of, what do you do? That's mainly from my close family and friends. A lot of my family friends still think I make radio. I still think I do radio. Cause I started off like being a radio presenter. Yeah. One of your like internet bio says broadcaster before YouTuber. When we were doing our research, it was like a max watch as a broadcaster. That,

Is he broadcast? I don't. Yeah, I just don't think that kind of mainstream know what they just kind of panic on that. OK, what do we call this guy? So I think content creators probably the best, the best, best fitting one. Yeah. So your your story is somewhat circuitous and like interesting. So I wonder if we can just sort of start start there. Sure.

From my understanding, about 10 years ago, 2013, you started an internship and that started your hatred of the corporate world. Yes. What was going on there? Yeah. I kind of grew up in a very kind of privileged bubble. I went to a school called Harrow School, which is a very well-known and posh private school here in the UK. And

I don't want to say, I don't want to kind of like badmouth the school. And so this wasn't something that was actively being kind of pushed, but there was a feeling I felt of like, right, you go into certain avenues in a career. So whether that's law or finance or medicine.

And finance definitely was one of the big ones. And my father worked in insurance. And so when I was 17, I got the kind of very nepotistic opportunity to go and sit and just observe, which I found is a really interesting way of like prefacing an internship, going to observe like you're 17. You have no idea what's going on. I sat there for a week and I thought, is this it? Is this it?

We're all aware that this is the thing that everyone is so excited about. And I kind of got very kind of disenfranchised the idea that I was going to go and work in the city or work in finance. So like, I've never worked a corporate job. What was it like? It was everyone. So you get in, you don't really, how's your evening? Yeah, good, thanks mate. Yeah, nice. Tap, tap, tap for two hours. Don't say anything.

One stale bit of banter gets thrown around about Greg that's come in 30 minutes late with some ketchup down his top. Big breakfast, Greg. Yeah.

and then tap, tap, tap. And I was then sent, I was then sent to fetch the pies at lunch. And that was my favorite part of the day. So that's when I got to actively do something. I got really excited to go get the pies. Um, and came back and then some more stale banter about Greg. And then, and then after work drinks where people would get, uh,

pissed and they'd go home. I'd just like to preface, this isn't the entire existence of people who live in the Commonwealth. This was just my experience in the week that I was working there at Seventeen. And that's

I kind of realized I was much more, I wanted something that was much more creatively fulfilling. And so when I went to university, I changed my course within the first three or four months from economics and finance to English literature. And this is kind of one of the first times I realized I was probably quite good at blagging something because I hadn't done English at A-level. And so I walked into the English school and said, "Hi, I'd like to do your degree, please." And they said, "Okay, what did you do in your English A-level?" I said, "Well, I didn't do it."

And they said, okay, well, then we can't offer you a place in the English school. And I remember I said for some reason, but what if I get a 2.1 in my first year in economics? That surely proves that I'm a good student. So I'd be valued to your school. I think she was so taken aback, the head of English, that she just said,

Yeah, okay, fine. Deal. And I ended up getting a T1 in my first year of eComics. And so then that made me do English literature. And so that was suddenly... I was terrible. I was terrible at English literature, but it meant I was suddenly doing things that were slightly more creative. Okay. So at age 19, you sort of find your way into English literature as a degree. Yeah. What happens next in the maths? So I was then just joining societies. I was just like super...

interested and excited going from this very institutionalized world of Harrow where you get up at a certain time every day and you do this and you do this and do this into like meeting loads of different people from loads of different backgrounds and doing things that I never I probably would have had the opportunity to do at Harrow but it would be very regimented so I suddenly realized I could have my own radio show I joined the theater society I joined something called the 20 minute society which is where

They take your number and at any point throughout the week, they'll text you with an activity and you need to be there in 20 minutes. You have to drop everything you're doing. I love this spontaneous nature of university life. And so I was trying those different things and I understood, oh, I really like

entertaining people, whether that's on stage with the Theatre Society or broadcasting or basically just being able to talk uninterrupted for an hour on the radio. And so I did student radio, which then led me to hospital radio in Newcastle. Did that for three years, four years. Okay. The internship. Yes. What was it like? So I kind of, I arrived in this kind of corporate world at 17, working in kind of, I think it was trading.

And I kind of was really shocked at how this was it. This was the thing that we'd been kind of told, okay, yeah. Not necessarily by the

the institutional or teachers, but just by like peers and peers, parents. Yeah. This is the pinnacle. This is the pinnacle. Like you work in the city, you get to work in Lloyd's and go to go to bank station in your, in your pinstripe suit every day and get you, get your prep subscription coffee. Here we go, lads strap in. And then afterwards you have a couple of pints at the pub and you have some very stale conversation. Um, and so I kind of spent this week just being told to go and get pies and to just observe.

I remember I did actually get into a relatively confrontational conversation with somebody because someone said to me,

you're not doing anything. This is an opportunity that so many people would kill to do. You're not concentrating on what we're doing. I said, I don't know what you're doing. Just give me something to do. And actually that did work because then I was tasked with putting together the newsletter that the people would come into the office every morning and see the newsletter from the night before the markets in Asia. So I was getting in at 3, 4 a.m. to write up what happened in the markets.

I sent them to people's inboxes at 8am, which they 100% sent straight to junk. And then I got to leave at like two or three. But my point was, is that I, it was just not, it wasn't what I, I wasn't creatively fulfilled. And I thought, right, let's go and try and see if there's anything else. And so that when I went to university, I really made sure that I'm going to get my head down and just try loads of different things. Nice. We were talking about student radio. Like what is student radio?

Student radio is essentially a cupboard which has some foam on the walls, a microphone that doesn't work and some students thinking that they are Nick Grimshaw for an hour of every single day. And the idea is that some student radios are better than others. Like some of them are really good. Sunderland have one called Spark that is genuinely its own FM station. So it broadcasts in Newcastle, sorry, in Sunderland. Whereas Newcastle, when I was there,

it wasn't very good. Most of the time, the broadcast output just wasn't, it wouldn't work. So you, you wouldn't actually be broadcasting to anybody. So you'd just be talking in this microphone. Yeah, exactly. In a cupboard. In a cupboard. And you could listen to it online, I think, but often that wouldn't work. And I remember they had a real humbling experience. They had a listener counter. I found out there was a listener counter about two or three shows in and I logged on and I saw there were three people listening. And I knew that I knew two of those people because I'd asked them and sent them the link. So, um,

It was just an opportunity for me to try just being a radio presenter and like coming up with your own show and writing your own show. What are the segments? Okay. Getting some outside, outside broadcast stuff and Vox pops. And, and so I did that for about a year and I realized there's no, there's no progression here. You'll just, I'm just coming in and doing the same thing every week. And so luckily I looked into and found hospital radio, which is,

In Newcastle, when I was there, or still is, the hospital station there called Radio Tyneside was really well run and it was quite well funded. A radio station that's being broadcast in the hospital? Yes. So in hospitals, you have five buttons, I think, not in all hospitals, but a lot of them. So five buttons of radio stations. So there's Radio 1, Radio 4, Classic FM, Magic, etc.

and then normally the local station, which is Hostel Radio. And so we had Radio Tyneside was broadcasting to the six hospitals, I think, in the Newcastle and Gateshead area. So we had quite like a large listener base. I guess the patients in bed too are choosing to not go for Radio 1 or Radio 4. Yeah, I mean, it's quite slim pickings. It's kind of almost kind of this like hostage situation where you're always forcing them to listen to you. But I worked there for three years and started on the overnight shift of like,

2am till 4am and then work my way up. And when I left my last year, I was doing the breakfast show. So what does that look like? Like, what does your 2 to 4am shift and hospital radio look like? Luckily, a lot of it could be pre-recorded. So you could

they would like you to do a few live shows, but you could go in and pre-record the entire thing. And obviously there wouldn't be any interaction with the patients, but there kind of rarely was when you're in hospital. You're not exactly picking up your phone and texting into Radio Tyneside. Especially at two in the morning. Exactly. So it just kind of like was any other radio station in the sense that it was the same software and you just kind of...

So are you playing music or are you like doing just a minute or... You're playing music, you're playing music, which is easy listening music, which has been pre-programmed into the computer. But as I was there for longer, I realized that I could like swap things out and no one would really notice. I then did get in trouble because...

I once had a few complaints because I played the song Highway to Hell on hospital radio and I didn't even get sacked. And what was funny is I was brought up not on the fact of the title and the content of the song broadcast on hospital radio, but more the fact that it wasn't easy listening. And so, yeah, you're playing music, you play like three or four tracks and then you get like a minute or 45 seconds of whatever you want to talk about and then...

It's been years since I've listened to a music radio station. So what does the stuff in between the songs look like?

what would you be saying it could be it could be anything genuinely oh it's a lovely day today yeah two or four in the morning here at tineside yeah normally that's when like segments are quite important or you kind of every hour you have to do one of those needs to be what's on in newcastle this week so you get given like a little booklet okay and we see okay this person's playing at the time theater opera house and this person this person i don't know why you're like to

to broadcast that because these people are in hospital and they're not exactly like cute to catch some live comedy yeah um but then the rest of it is you can do whatever you like so i did a lot of like vox pop stuff so i would go out what does that mean so i would go and interview people on the street oh so previously i would go out interview people get some content edit it together and then put it in that segment so it's like so last week in newcastle i went out to go find out whether people thought there were more eyes or legs in the world and then just go like

So I was kind of creating these like one minute long segments that I would then like put in. And I was obsessed with this idea. That's when I realized I want to go into radio. I want to be a radio presenter. And I'd seen the career progression of all these kind of like my, my idols in the radio world. They had all done radio.

hospital radio and then they'd won this award at the hospital broadcasting association awards which is like it's the big nights in the hospital radio calendar uh and it was i was up for best newcomer and i won best newcomer here we go come on offers let's see radio one i'm free to to do a show and none came i i got one offer of a demo for bbc radio newcastle and i remember it was kind of a moment where i realized

I wasn't going to be a radio presenter because I walked in and they were like, great, okay, Max, we're going to get you to do a demo. Fantastic. Okay, just talk about whatever you want as if it's your own show. And all the other voices on BBC Radio Newcastle were like, welcome back to BBC Radio Newcastle. Fantastic local radio for the Northeast. And we've got Max here this afternoon. I'm like, hell yeah.

hello nice to see you all and it's safe to say that I didn't get the job of local radio in the northeast with the plumbiest accent so that's when I kind of realized oh I'm not really going to get a job in radio in the places that I would really like to get one so you didn't want Radio 4?

No, I mean, maybe, but that I was, I was looking after some, some excitement and to do like silly things. Okay. So the Archer's omnibus is not your idea. Yeah, not yet. It will be in a couple of years, but not, not, not the age of 21. Um, so that's when I just kind of started doing, I realized that I had loads of radio stuff. I didn't have any like video stuff.

And I was obsessed with this idea of getting an agent. I don't know why I thought once you get an agent, you are sorted. Everything's okay. So I thought, okay, I need to make a show real, but I don't have any video stuff. So I then thought, right, let's do just man on the street content, like interviewing people. I was in Newcastle, lots of students on nights out. Let's go chat to them. And yeah,

I reached out to the TV society that was doing their own show. A TV society? Yeah. Was that a university society? A university society that makes like television. And they were doing their own version of this called Big Market Banter. And I applied to be a presenter on Big Market Banter. And they said, no, sorry, we've got all our presenters at the moment. So I was like, well, great. I mean, it's in public. I can just go do it myself. So I filmed five episodes of me just interviewing people on nights out and put them on Facebook and

People were tagging their mates or Ali or lol, can't believe that person said that. So funny or look where he is. And it kind of started doing quite well in the sense of like a thousand people in my university would see it.

and i kind of people are you should keep doing them and i was like okay i guess i will so then for my last year at university i was just every single week i would go out and make a new video on a different topic and go back edit the video and put it up onto facebook okay lots of questions on this yeah how did you have the confidence to just do this uh was it the just was it like just the way you were born was it the private school was it like what i

I am inherently a bit of a show off and very extroverted. And I like talking to people and I was, yeah, I, I,

I just saw what it was being done. So the big market bank, I was watching this and I saw there were 18 minute long episodes, these things. And I remember the first minute would be, hi guys, welcome back to the show. Super excited. Harry and Becky here. So today we're going to be going out and interviewing. And I remember thinking, I'm so bored already.

And I was watching at the same time people like Cassim G on YouTube over in the States. And like, this guy is really funny. I want to make my own stuff like this. And so it was mainly just...

the answer of how do you like, how did I have the confidence to do it? I just, I just kind of didn't really think anything of it. And I think that's probably very lucky that upbringing I had Harrow very much instilled this like confidence, this assumed confidence in, in like things that I did. And like, cause with, when you first get there, the first thing you have to do is like do a song in front of your whole boarding house. Oh, so like you're 13 and you have to sing a song. You have to sing a song in front of 80 boys. So it's the, the, the house song. Oh,

so wow yeah like one at a time one at a time wow and so even if you can sing if you can't sing like you're you I was constantly being thrown into situations like that where eventually you get very very comfortable with like uncomfortable situations and getting thrown outside your comfort zone and so I guess that's how I had that confidence yeah and I was just a show-off fair play and so what what sort of stuff were you asking these people on nights out

I was just copying what I'd seen on YouTube. So initially I remember a video that I watched was one, this, this, uh, Antipodean news channel, um, did where they said Americans are not stupid. And they went out to America and asked them really easy general knowledge questions and

And it went hugely viral. I remember watching this video over and over again. God, this is amazing. It's basically my first video. Why did it go viral? Because it was like, yeah. Was it like really basic questions? Yeah. It was like, name a country beginning with U. And it was like Yugoslavia. And they were like, what about the United States of America? Oh, God, Damon. I hadn't thought of it. And so genuinely my first video was me just asking those questions. Yeah.

And so that's... And then I was thinking of like concepts. One was called Cards Against Humanity where I was just taking the questions, the prompts from Cards Against Humanity and just getting answers from people on the street. Like it wasn't particularly difficult. How were you filming yourself? Did you have like a camera? I had a camera person. I was kind of like...

This is how I kind of got my first employee, a girl called Coco, like just friends of mine. She said, does anyone want to go out and hold the camera with me for two hours on a night out? And then I found this girl called Coco and she was like keen. She's like, yeah, that sounds fun. So then she starts filming like all of the beginning. I wasn't paying her. I wasn't getting paid. No one was getting paid, but it was just like, oh, we're at uni. This is a fun thing to do. And so that's how I managed to get the first person involved.

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you and Coco going on nights out yeah sticking a microphone or like a phone in front of people yeah and asking them questions and then splicing it in together into like a four minute vids okay and chucking on Facebook yeah okay and I did that for a year I did I did that for 18 months and this is while you're doing hospital radio on the side yeah so I still think hospital radio is that a paid gig by the way hospital radio no oh so that was all so you're doing two to four a.m shift hospital radio just purely out of the goodness of your heart yeah

Because it was exciting. It was fun. You suddenly had this big studio and buttons and you could basically say whatever you liked as long as you didn't play Highway to Hell. So yeah, I was doing a lot of... And that formed so much of... It gave me such a big head start on what I now have on YouTube. And I always say to people who they're like, oh, I want to start something. I was like, do it in a period of your life where the risk is so low.

If it failed, if I didn't put out a video, it was fine because I could still go back to my friends and my family. Oh, I'm doing my degree, but I'm doing this bit on the side. And so I had that 18 months where I was at uni or three years of radio where there was no pressure for it to do well, succeed because-

I was, you know, I was also doing a degree. Yeah. I think that's one of the issues whenever the bar is high and it's like, I often find people who have success in some area of life, either it's at uni or it's in their jobs or something. And then they want to start a YouTube channel. Now all of a sudden there's this like high pressure on it and I'm like, oh, this has to succeed. Otherwise I'm a failure. Otherwise I suck. Dot, dot, dot. Yeah. And it needs, it needs to work instantly, which is not, not how YouTube works. I mean,

you can you can kind of hack the system and you can know retention tactics and all this kind of thing but um i think it takes time for you to understand what you're good at what you provide the best value in it's you it's education educating people and me i think it's entertaining people but if i decided to start an education channel or a kind of a wellness channel i wouldn't know where the hell to start it would take me those two years to understand what i was doing okay so you're chucking these videos on facebook what sort of response are you getting from people in the in the uni scene

I was just known as you're that interview guy. Okay. Yeah. And it was doing, it was like, it was doing quite well. I mean, just within that sphere. And it was kind of giving me the,

the social clout that I thought was quite fun at the time. And if, if, as I was doing more of them and if, if I was on the night out with my microphone and my camera, like I would have people who are really keen to chat and they want to be on the videos. And that was really, really cool to think that in like two or three months I'd grown something that previously I was like begging people, can you be on the, like, can you chat to me for two minutes? So then suddenly people, Oh, that guy, that guy. But I think I was known as to being quite a, quite a,

quite an odd guy at uni anyway and just doing things because they were funny um i remember my my first year i realized in my halls of residence that my desk in my my room was the exact width of the lift um in the halls of residence so one evening at midnight me and my mates we didn't go out but we just moved my desk into the lift with my laptop my books my plant my lights and

And I would then like work, but my back was to the entrance of the lift. And so the lift doors would open at one in the morning. I'd turn around and like, what are you doing? Get out of my room.

And so I got known as a lift boy for a bit at uni. But my point is that I was doing lots of these weird things because they were funny and I enjoyed doing them, but I wasn't even filming them. And so, yeah, that was my uni experience. And so your English degree was a bit of a side hustle while you were doing all this stuff? Absolutely. I did terribly badly in my English literature degree.

because I wasn't interested in writing about Chaucer. I was thinking about what were the questions that were going to be tonight when I was going to ask students on nights out.

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Okay, so what happens next? You're doing hospital radio, you're doing the Facebook video version of interviews. Yeah. What happens next? I graduate uni.

I went on a self-proclaimed tour with street smart with this, this video series. Um, and I thought, okay, this is my one chance. I'm going to like go all or nothing. So two weeks I drove around the country with Coco and every night we would go to a new university city. So let's say we started in Bristol. We'd film in Bristol in the evening, go to bed. I'd wake up, I'd edit the Bristol video from the night before, uh,

post it drive to exeter film in exeter go to bed at exeter so we did this for two weeks so we did 14 cities and 14 and at this point are you on youtube or is this still facebook well it was being posted on youtube but they were getting like 200 views on youtube yeah um and i was posting these on facebook and i i really thought right after this two weeks like things are going to blow up because of the consistency of it all and here we go and i didn't and i've done this two weeks killed myself like i hadn't lost a lot of money on petrol and

that kind of thing. And I was a bit dejected and I didn't really know what the whole, it was like, what's the point of this? I kind of had this thing at university was working, but it hasn't really like pushed on. And I then worked at a pub for about three or four months. I'm still making the videos. I was still kind of like still, still going. And then I just got so lucky one day where I walked past Zach also on the street, who was a fellow YouTuber at the time who had about 30,

30,000 subscribers at the time. And I watched him and I was a fan of his. And I said to him, look mate, if you ever need a cameraman for anything, let me know. And I had been lucky with my Facebook videos that I'd been reposted. One of my videos had been reposted by a big channel called Student Problems. And it got like 18 million views on Student Problems on their page.

And I didn't see a shot of that revenue. That's beside the point. Cheers, student problems. But I said to Zach, oh yeah, I make videos as well. I've got like 18 million views on my videos, right? Just purely just trying to like flex as much as I could. Like, give me a job, give me a job. And he weirdly said, yeah, actually, while we're filming something tomorrow, do you want to come and help film? So I helped film there and got to know him a little bit better.

And over the course of like three or four months, we kind of did more work to get more. I was still working pub. And then he had this idea to, to kind of break me into London fashion week, dressed up as a model. Um, and we did that. And then that was just kind of like, boom, just went stratospheric. Yeah. So what was that like? It was, uh,

And if you can give some context for people who might not have seen that video. Yeah, so the video was, it was basically a total rip-off of a video that Uber Butler had made about two years previously. He was a guy who worked at Vice and he managed to fake a fashion brand into Fashion Week by getting people to talk

about it. And so we had the idea of like, we're going to dress me up in ridiculous clothing. So we went to Primark, we bought like maternity trousers. Zach had like some shoes that he'd been given when he'd spent a night in jail for breaking into the EMA. So I was wearing, I was wearing jail shoes, maternity trousers. Like I had a rug on my sofa that we pinned in weird places. We then got like plastic packaging that you get in like parcels, the big pillow ones and wrapped them around my neck, like some sort of like Royal ruff.

And we just went to Fashion Week and we got Coco, who was actually still working with me at the time, to like trigger the flash on her camera and just shout my name. She's like, Max, Max, I'm here, I'm here. And like immediately loads of photographers like ran over, started taking pictures, asking who I was.

And then Zach pretends to be my manager. And it just kind of snowballs to the point where like we then sent those photos to the shows the next day being like, we've got this new hot model. He's making a real scene. Like you should get him into your shows. We got invited to shows, got invited to after parties. And we made this video documentary in this process. Well, Zach did post it on his channel. And I remember talking to my dad before it went live saying,

I'll be really happy if I get a thousand subscribers out of this video. And my dad was like, just be like, just be careful. You don't know. Nothing could happen. It's okay.

And almost immediately the video, when the video went out, it just exploded in a way that I haven't seen a video do like that. Yeah. Like 30 million views or something now. But it was, yeah. And, and so we, I went from 1800 subscribers to 80,000 subscribers in about four days. Because he linked your channel. Because yeah, my channel was linked and I was thinking I was a big part of the video. Yeah.

And so I guess people are like, oh, yeah, this guy seems cool. Check this guy out. And they went from 30,000 subscribers to 300,000 subscribers in five days, which was just mad. And so what I quite like is Zach is still probably one of my best mates and

we are both really kind of proud of the fact that our career trajectory is both kind of like really entwined in the sense that we both kind of blew up with the same video at the same time. Um, and so from there I realized, Oh, okay. I've suddenly got this audience. Um,

And did I, and I didn't do anything different. I just went back to making the same street interviews and like, oh, great. I've got no, no, no more people watching, but let's just do street interviews again. And that was really stupid. What was it about that video that you think hit it off so well?

The storytelling is phenomenal from Zach. Like the edit that he made is absolutely incredible. I think as well, it's the victim of the prank is the fashion industry. And that's a, I think that's a communal shared thing.

victim that people kind of don't feel too sorry about um a lot of those videos i'm do i'm always thinking okay is this punching up or is this punching down um and i think it's really important to think about that when you are doing the kind of content that i make uh because otherwise it can very quickly feel quite vindictive or or just not very nice um

I don't, I genuinely don't know. I don't know why that video has done so well. Um, it's just one that just. And so how did it feel seeing the numbers climb on that video? What was yours in like Zach's reaction? Were you like on the phone to you? Like, Oh my God. It was, it was dangerously addictive. Yeah. It was like, I remember like genuinely just like the,

like the cat, the rat in the experiment where like clicking for more food. Like I was just refreshing YouTube studio every two minutes, just watching the numbers. And it was, yeah, it was incredibly exciting and exciting.

but then it fades so quickly like a week later and you're like, okay, now what? I'm just going to make the same stuff that I have always done. And then, so like while you were there in fashion week doing sort of holding like your haughty pose and stuff. Yeah. What was going through your mind? Like how was that for you? I was terrified. I was genuinely terrified because I grew up like, I was a very good student at school. I always did what I was told. Like I got my homework in on time. This idea of kind of

the narrow, breaking the moulds and doing something a bit cheeky or naughty was something that was like completely alien to me. But I was determined to do it for that video because I knew the opportunity it would bring by being on Zach and Joe's channel. So I was very, I was pushing myself outside my comfort zone massively. Also, the costume that we had made, we put together with safety pins and one of the safety pins had come undone whilst we were filming. And so I generally had a safety pin in my back.

So one of them was like stuck in me. And so I was in quite a lot of pain. So the faces of just kind of like total disdain towards everyone was purely because I was in quite a lot of pain. So I think I was just like, let's just get this over and done with. It's nearly done. It's nearly over. Okay. And it's, I've now come to view this feeling of like, I call it the 10 seconds of terror.

And on the other side of 10 seconds of terror is, is something that's really exciting and really fun. Um, and something that you, you couldn't possibly imagine. So I always think if I'm ever, I'm doing less and less of these, these videos where, um,

I'm like pushing myself to go into extreme circumstances. But if I have ever in that scenario, I just think it's okay. 10 seconds of terror. It will be done soon. Okay. So you've got at this point, you've just exploded onto London Fashion Week. You've got your 80,000 subscribers. What happens next? So that was in March 2019. Yeah.

Then for the next year until March 2020, I just genuinely just kept making more street smart videos. I just went out and just interviewing again, people on nights out or people at events. So I went to the World Wife Carrying Championships and interviewed people there. And I moved more into like conventions. And that was my idea of like branching out. And then COVID hit. And I was a mess because I was like, this is my whole job.

around me interviewing people. So was the channel monetized at that point? The channel was monetized at this point. And that's how you were paying the bills? Yeah.

A little bit of both between like still working at the pub and, and doing, but the channel was basically monetized at that point. And Coco was still working with me and for free or for paid or like we were getting, like we were sharing 50% of the channel each, which I remember like looking back on it now, like seems mad, but we, I just wanted to do this. So I wasn't really thinking about like the split of it and, and how it was going to work. Um,

And so it was definitely not big enough channel to be able to be like supporting two people, two people's wages. So COVID hit and I was like, what am I going to do? I can't interview people. It's my whole bread and butter. And that's when I started to make different types of videos. So there was a stock photo in my flat that I had never, it was in a frame that I'd been bought. I'd never bothered to change out the stock photo.

And so I thought, and I'd never, never changed. So she'd become, this woman had become like part of my flat for two years because I'd been too lazy to change her out for a photo of my family or whatever. And so I then just, I remember sitting there like in lockdown board. I was like, I wonder who she is. I'd love to talk to her. That'd be cool. So I then spent this series, this like three part series of like trying to find the woman from the stock photo. And initially I thought it was going to be like a one. I thought it was going to be really easy. I thought I was going to put it in, reverse image search it. She's going to be a popular model, reach out to her, see if I could talk to her.

But it ended up being this like real goose chase. Like I was going, it took me six weeks to, to, by talking to experts and stock photography experts and, and like data analysts and, and people who worked in archives at Getty images. And it's like, do you know this person is, do you know the style? And I eventually found this, I found this, this model.

And that really, people really enjoyed that series. And I realized, okay, maybe I can do more storytelling bits rather than just shoving a microphone in front of someone's face and trying to get them to say something silly. And that's where, so COVID was kind of a blessing and was the best thing that could have happened. But although I totally lost my mind and was worried that it was the end of all YouTube,

It meant that it forced myself to try a different angle of video making. Okay. And so presumably you're living at home at this point, working in the pub part time, but pubs weren't really a thing. No, I think I was furloughed. I can't remember. Had I left the pub at this point? I think I'd left the pub just before COVID. I remember thinking, okay, I've just got this situation where I'm just...

I can just about, you know, make this work. I mean, I've also got to preface this as well. I knew that I would be okay if I failed as well. I've come from a background of immense privilege and I knew that it will be okay, but I know that I need to work hard at this. The insurance company is always there if you...

But if anything, that kind of like that was a real driving force to make you really want to go and work harder for it. Okay. So you start this foray into the world of then storytelling type videos. So what happened next? What was that? I then just since COVID have just been steadily making more and more and they're going bigger and bigger. And I've realized that with YouTube, you're often referred to as the guy or girl that does blank. So if people would come say hello in the street,

and they're with their mate, it would be, oh, you're the guy that does X, Y, Z. And that would change like every three or four months. So previously it was, oh, you're the guy that interviews posh people. And then I ran for London mayor. It was like, oh, you're the guy that ran for London mayor. And,

I realize it's important that I think you change what that thing that people are referring to you as. Not as frequently as possible, but it just showcases that you're still in people's consciousness. I mean, then there's a whole kind of deeper conversation about like relevancy and how important is relevancy. Yeah, that was what I was going to ask you about. But so for me, it was just I kind of did more and more things and was going slightly different.

they were kind of getting slightly closer to the bone in terms of like their feasibility or how difficult they were. Or like, for example, running for London mayor. Yeah. What was the deal with that? The BBC released a list of the candidates they thought they were going to run.

And at the bottom, it said what you need to do in order to run. And that included, it only needed two things, a £10,000 deposit that you got back if you got 5% of the vote, which for context, only three parties got back almost every single election. So Labour, Conservative and the Lib Dems, no, the Greens. I don't think the Lib Dem get back their deposit. So it's incredibly difficult to get your deposit back. So you just need a £10,000 deposit

and to get two signatures from each borough of registered voters. So you go to all that's 66 signatures. So that's all you need. And I remember I put it into a mate's group chat and one of my friends just went, you won't run for London mayor. I was like, maybe I could, maybe, maybe I could do this. And then, so I then realized the feasibility of this thing, it was possible.

I applied, I gave my, I had enough, just enough money. I thought if I make six or seven videos out of this, I'll probably make my money back. So I applied and then I realized, oh, I need a story here. I need something that is entertaining because it's not going to be funny for the six weeks or seven weeks of the campaign if you're just the YouTuber that's running for London Mayor. And then I was given the gift of Lawrence Fox.

who was another candidate who was running, who was also went to the same school as me, not the same time. But he had never no experience in politics, but he had 5 million pounds in backing. And I just thought amazing what happens if you just have two, two posh boys who have no interest, like no history of politics, if they just run against each other. And he was running on a, on a, on a, quite a controversial ticket. Um,

of one of like, he was kind of going for a relatively, like a right wing, left leaning kind of thing. And I just thought what was interesting is that I then had an opportunity. He was someone, he was an easy person to make content about because he was very polemic. He was very kind of in the media a lot for doing crazy things or saying silly things. And so I thought, okay, if I run against him,

it will be there. What do you mean by run against him? Like I just needed, you needed a baddie in the story. I needed a baddie in the story. Um, and so it was just kind of like an opportunity to, to do that. And so that's what I did. I, I, I challenged him to him to debates and like for him, it wasn't a good look that I was constantly cropping up because he was like running on like a serious ticket. My number one, um,

my number one policy point was don't vote for me. And I was, because I wanted to engage. I also wanted to engage young people to vote. Like, generally not for me, but for anybody. Because I think we had a lot of like politicians saying, it's very important to vote, guys. Always use your vote. But normally if you're a young person like this,

So I don't care what you've got to say. And so just having a horse in the race, hopefully was going to galvanize more young people to vote. And not for, but not for me. And I've released my manifesto, which included like things like we have many parks in London, but no Jurassic parks. I'm going to change that. I wanted to carpet the M25 to make it the smoothest road in the world.

So like I just came up with, I sat down with some mates like in the pub just to write my manifesto. And I made like a six, seven parts series about that. What was really funny at one point is that Lawrence Fox, his campaign team obviously paying for YouTube advertising.

And the YouTube algorithm was just putting his YouTube advertising in front of my videos. So therefore he was inadvertently paying for my campaign. So I then did a video where I said thank you to him and his top donor by dressing up in a delivery outfit, buying a column of Caterpillar and delivering a cake and a card to their offices and like essentially breaking in and pretending to be a delivery driver. And it just kind of like stirred this pot of, of, of,

the political world, I guess I wasn't doing anything particularly grand or, or, but it's just fun. What was your, this is going to sound somewhat pretentious, but what was your creative process in making these seven videos? What are you looking out for? How do you, how do you come up with the ideas? So I realized quite quickly. So I don't think I've ever said this publicly, but, um, I was always, I always had a knack of finding out where Lawrence Fox was, um,

And there was a reason for this. So initially I got told by a friend of mine who's a journalist that he was going to be doing this big unveiling of a bus to launch his campaign. And so then I thought, okay, he's doing this big launch of a bus. What could I do? Okay. Political buses have got kind of a history in our, in our political discourse. Why don't I wrap my car in the words, don't believe everything you read on a bus and just tail him as he drives through London on his open top bus.

And so I did this the first time round and it was quite funny. And he, Lawrence Fox, was a bit annoyed at me, but I found out where he was because a friend of mine was a journalist. And then it was very clear that his party that he was running, I think they're called the Reclaim Party, they were then only sending press releases to favorable media outlets that they trusted and they knew.

And, but I still managed to find out where he was every single time because there was, there may or may not have been a mole who was working in his party who didn't enjoy working in his party. So I thought, right, let's just send Max the location, the information and just do what you like. And so, um,

it was the creative process was genuinely just trying to take advantage of opportunities that I saw. And so then I saw that he was, he was getting very upset. Lawrence Fox was getting very upset that Sadiq Khan wouldn't debate him because he said, we're both candidates in this race, like debate me Sadiq Khan. And Sadiq Khan said, no, I'm only debating proper candidates. So Lawrence Fox got very upset. That's ridiculous. You need to debate me. So I then said, well, right, Lawrence, we need to have a debate.

we're both candidates at that point we were both polling one percent in the polls so i was like lawrence we need to have a debate come on let's do a debate and i got him on the phone to say yes let's have a debate and then he didn't turn up to the debate oh i i hosted it outside of his uh his office yeah and to make it as easy for him and so i was just seeing i was just watching what the mainstream political kind of juggernauts were doing against each other and then just kind of doing the same thing with lawrence and so were you releasing a video sort of each week of the

I was trying to make them every week, but it was quite difficult to come up with weekly things about Lawrence. And then a lot of the time, it was just about what it's like running for a political position in this country. And so I had a great time where the BBC and all the major broadcasters, their political ads are called every single candidate, of course. They do their due diligence and talk to them.

We were speaking to the head of BBC London, the political journalist at BBC London. She said, so why do you think you'd make a good London mayor? And I said, I wouldn't.

And it completely floored. She was like, well, then why, like, why are you running? It's like, I want to get more young people to vote. And she, she couldn't like, I could, I could tell that it wasn't her favorite interview that she'd done that day. Um, because I was just being quite irritating to, to interview. And so a lot of the, the, a lot of the process was just kind of like talking to people and, and documenting that process. And so to take the example of the driving behind the bus, where don't believe everything you read on bus. Yeah. Uh,

how does that then turn into a youtube video what is what is the process of doing a thing and then turning it into a video that does really well look like so i think that it's it's it's all it's all story um it's you've got to have like set up your why at the very beginning um then you've got to set out the i think my audience really enjoys the the feeling that they're doing this whole thing with me so i can show the process of how i'm actually making the video in the video

so i think once i i normally start with the big ending so like i'll get the footage of me going behind the bus and me talking to lawrence fox and him getting annoyed and his his security team trying to that they tried to at what point i was reversing and they tried to stand in front of my car like at the back of my car to stop me from reversing i'm just like gently nudged them further and further back um so i got that footage and then it's then it's

Like, okay, I put that in the timeline. I said, right, I need the intro or the hook. I call it hook or the exposition. Hook, then the exposition. What's an exposition? Exposition, explaining a little bit more about why you're doing it, how you're going to do it. And then it's normally the thing. And I just kind of, yeah, it normally takes about three or four days to edit a video if I know exactly...

what the beats are um so normally the hook is is a is a flashy 30 second like best bits then it's me we call it the kitchen shot so um i sit in my kitchen with my tripod and like so i need to do this today and this is going to involve doing this this and this and then it's like that process and so you're you're sort of faking the footage as if you were doing it at the time or some of it is i

like presumably when you wrap the car, you might as well film that process. Yeah. So yeah, I'm the, the, I'm, I'm filming that. Yeah. I'm filming that, the wrapping of the process, the wrapping of the car, but, um, all of the, not all of that 50% of the time when like I'm in the kitchen talking to camera, about half of it is the time when I was actually like thinking about it and I just rolled. Okay. But often there are extra bits that I didn't explain well enough when I did it originally that I need to add, um, to, to, to get a little bit more, uh,

uh clarity in what i'm trying to say um so yeah it's just so you're taking people through this process and at the end of it you get a video yeah um are you how are you thinking about like titles and thumbnails and all that jazz at that point i wasn't at that point i was classically doing the classic like okay upload in 15 minutes let's make a thumbnail okay done um

that has changed a lot recently um since i've kind of built out a team and by a team i said one person yeah um this is me and and my kind of producer editor aziz who he's just an extra me basically so we work on the video together we actually a lot of time we end we we start watch we make the video at different ends and meet in the middle so um

I'll normally start at the end. He starts at the beginning. We'll just meet in the middle. Now we're super, super driven on like titles and thumbnails and understanding what works and...

I very luckily am part of a Discord group of creators that every Thursday we meet and we have an hour and a half where we can each brings like a topic to discuss. And that can be whether like roasting thumbnails or roasting titles or content ideas. And it's got me much better understanding how YouTube works and understanding that the algorithm is just people.

And that's, I find really fascinating. That changed my perspective massively when someone says, oh, the algorithm hates me or the video's been killed by the algorithm. It's like, no, it's been killed because people aren't watching it or people don't want to watch it to the end. So YouTube's like, oh, this is not one that the audience is going to like. And so, yeah, if we want to get very nerdy and talk about

like CTR and AVD and things like that, then I do think about that a lot. And I'm editing a lot of the time to music. So I'll put, I use classical music as kind of exclusive, my USP and classical music is fantastic because it has a beginning, middle and end in the pieces. So if it's like a three, so let's say it's a 10 minute video, there's four, two and a half minute sections where I find pieces of music and they will come to their own natural crescendo. And then,

We'll go to black screen and that's the start of the next chapter. So we're thinking a lot of like, okay, let's keep the, let's hold the hand of the viewer all the way through this and try and tell the best story. So COVID happens, you've got, and then you get this Zach and Jay fashion week thing. Now you've got your 80,000 subscribers. What was the growth of the channel like? And what were the sort of main things that really made things take off? So I, I went from starting,

So I got 80,000 subscribers in March 2019 and until November 2021. So that is two and a half years. Two and a half years. I went from 80,000 subscribers to 400,000 subscribers right in two and a half years. And in November 2021, I hired Aziz. And from November 2021 to now, which we are in September 2022, so 10 months, we're on 1.4 million subscribers.

There's a lot of exponential growth. Yeah. So it suddenly just went boom. And that's because I think I had just genuinely somebody to talk to and somebody to just, is this a good idea? Yeah.

um, somebody to edit the videos with just generally just sharing the successes and the failures with somebody else was so much like more enjoyable than, um, like anything I'd done previously. And it showcased in the, in the, like my social blades, if you don't know what social blade is, you can check your numbers or your audience will definitely know what social blade is. Um, you could see like, it's just like a massive spike almost like two weeks after I hired as ease. And, um,

So that made me realize, okay, I can, I can make this thing that I'm doing, but with a, with a team, not necessarily a massive team, but like two or three people. I'm really interested in the idea of just having a small team who can just help me create these, these videos. Yeah, I think it was, it was exactly the same for me. So I first got an editor, Christian, who was our first, I guess, employee, um,

to about two and a half years into my youtube journey so like late 2019 and there was an immediate spike in everything on the channel because now all of a sudden i didn't have to do the editing which meant i could spend more time making videos and we released courses and revenues got rocketed and then we were able to build more of a team around it um i think that's like when you get to that point where you can then start working with someone even if it's a part-time thing even if you're just sort of outsourcing a bit of editing here and there to a friend it

It's just completely changes the game. Absolutely. And I think I'm, I'm still very scared of hiring someone else as well, because I'm not very good with like committing to be like, okay, this is a good idea. Even with like Aziz, not necessarily. It was about Aziz, but I was trying to find an editor for like nine months.

because I was like, this person needs to be like absolutely perfect. They need to be another version of me and know exactly my thought process. And then it was, that just comes by working together over long periods of time. Um, and so I am, I've got someone who's starting in two weeks time to, to help make videos for China. I do, I've got a lot of, I've got a, um, a platform on China that does quite well, um, an audience over there, which is, which is cool. Um, and so it

It's just kind of building a team and working together. So how do you make money these days? I make money from ad revenue, which since November 2021, and it's doing really well, ad revenue kind of changes quite a lot. But that's kind of like 10 to 20 grand a month.

Um, and, but that almost all goes into my wage, Aziz's wage, the, the, and, and also just the cost of the videos, like the, as we're doing more and more, um, the videos are just getting really expensive. Um, like this, I'm doing, there's currently a treasure hunt on to find a hundred thousand dollar fish.

That was not cheap, as you can imagine. And then the other comes from brand deals as well. And that rate changes and fluctuates as the videos do better because they look at your average for your last five videos.

And then I do stand up as well. So I've just done, I did a tour last year, stand up tour, just been to the Edinburgh Fringe for a month. I'm doing the London Palladium in November with my stand up show. And yeah. Have you got spare tickets for that? Yes. We still have about 200 tickets left. Oh, amazing. Please come on down. We should do a team trip. Yes, please do. That'll be sick.

Yeah, let's do that. That'll be fun. Please do come down. And that's like that stand up isn't something that makes a huge amount of money. Something that I found really interestingly was actually doing it because there are so many people that are taking like slices of the pie. So, yeah, mainly it comes from just brand deals and ad revenue. But I am I'm now looking more to diversify things.

by watching a lot of your stuff actually like this needs to although my my whole niche is the silly guy doing silly things that doesn't mean that i can't also make um a business and so hence the silly company is being born it's called the silly company i love it that's good it's like the boring company yeah exactly um one thing i often worry about is what does my career look like when i'm 40 or 50 am i still going to be a youtuber giving productivity advice yeah

I imagine if I were you, I'd be even more worried. What is that like for you? I'm not even worried about 45. I'm worried about the next six months. I think that, and this is why I ventured into different areas like standup is because I want to be the most valuable entertainer that I can be. So I want to have a lot of strings to my bow with YouTube. Essentially YouTube is what I do now. And it's just storytelling. And that I think will be, I think that's very valuable.

regardless what platform you're on, best movies, best TV shows, best YouTube videos are purely just being able to tell a story really, really well. So I think that I've got value in there. Stand up as well, being able to kind of talk to people on a large stage in front of lots of people, I think is a skill that I have. So I don't know whether I'll be making YouTube videos and I don't know whether it's going to be large, pranky, stunty vids.

And but I hope that I will have some value within the entertainment world because of the experience I have with just telling stories. And I guess so is your model that as long as you can make a living doing the thing that you love, which is entertaining people and you're happy, you want chasing big revenue numbers and all that shit?

No, yes and no. I think that I realized very quickly when I hit a million subscribers that chasing quantitative goals is a very dangerous game because you hit those numbers, if you ever do hit those numbers, and you then do a big sigh and you're like, oh, okay. Now what? I don't think I'm particularly...

money orientated um i don't think that i'm like like saving like collecting the pennies just to make sure that i hit a certain revenue number i think at the moment it's just being able to do things that i didn't people don't think are possible so i've got a few mad mad video ideas that i'd just be happy if i can make them like i want to i want to water ski behind a cruise ship

And I was telling this to my mechanic who was doing my MOT. And first of all, that was like blue is mine, like the idea that you could be a YouTuber. But he was like, oh, mate, that sounds amazing. Oh, yes, awesome. And then there was a woman who was also getting her car serviced when I told him about the idea to get a water ski behind a cruise ship. She was weirdly also called Karen. And she said, oh, you'll never do that. No, you can't do that.

And just this random woman telling me I can't do this has made me like, I will do this for the next five years. I'm sure I'm going to be able to water ski behind a cruise ship. So I think for me at the moment, it's just being able to... Do you know what, Ali? I was listening to, truthfully, I was listening to your episode with MQ...

Marques, before I got here, and you asked the same question. And I remember thinking to myself, I don't know what the answer is to that question. I genuinely don't know whether I'm doing this for monetary value, whether I'm doing this for kind of...

quote unquote fame or acclaim. And I also don't know whether I'm making, this is probably quite a detrimental thing to be thinking about, but I don't know whether when I'm making a video that I know is going to do really well, like is a big vid. I don't know whether I'm excited because I'm really excited to make this video.

or I'm excited because I know it's going to do really well. I still haven't come to terms with which one is winning in that kind of angel versus devil on my shoulder. Oh, mate. So I was having a chat to a YouTuber who I met over the weekend who has like 20 million subscribers. And I asked this question of like, how do you balance kind of

education value of the video with the money, with the growth. And he was like, mate, it changes depending on the day of the week. And I was like, oh, that's reassuring because I definitely have that. And even a guy with 20 million subscribers, he was like, yeah, this is, it depends on feeling, depends on if I've had enough sleep, depends on like, sometimes I'm very money motivated, sometimes very status motivated. Sometimes I just really want to make a really good video and that it changes every day. And that was so refreshing. That is refreshing actually. Cause I was just like, I feel like there, surely there must be an answer to this. And everyone I've asked is always like, I mean, uh,

marquez's thing was very much like i just want to make a really good video i was like that sounds simple enough i feel like my own motivations are a bit more dodgy where it's like to what extent do i want to be a inspirational teacher to people because i want the status versus because i actually think it's a absolutely all of those things yeah i always i always quite i find it quite hard to to comprehend that people like when marcus says that that there are people who actually are that kind of like

vindicated in their own in their own self-belief that that is all that they're making the videos for us because they just want to make a good video yeah i do sometimes go i like going back and watching videos of mine from like two years ago of like experiences that i've had and be like oh that was that was a really fun time or i enjoyed that's that was a fun video i liked watching that video um and so i find myself sometimes creepy into a into a world of like i'm making this video because i know it's going to do really really well and how do you feel about the the process when so i

I generally find when I'm chasing numbers, it feels bad and I burnt out very easily. Yes. Yes. And how have you stopped chasing numbers, Ali? I do journaling sessions basically every month where I'm just like, right, where I have to reaffirm to myself that chasing numbers is not the thing that I actually want to do because it's just so easy. Like you see the numbers just there and just like, oh, fuck, this was an 8 out of 10 video.

damn view to subscriber ratio is going down god like max's videos are doing really well yes theories and it's just the whole comparison trap and then it's like okay no hang on let's take a step back do a lot of journaling write five pages about why i'm doing this thing and why this is good and why i don't need to worry about money and all this kind of stuff yeah no i'm at the conclusion of

Make videos you want to make. Don't make videos to chase numbers. No, absolutely. And I think I'm now, as of recording this podcast right now, I'm probably in a bit of a vulnerable position because I've just done stand-up for six weeks and I haven't posted on the channel for six weeks. And so I've seen...

things are starting to dip again. And I'm now like, Oh no, this is the moment where it all goes bad. And I post a video that people don't like when I'm doing it just for the sake of posting a video. Cause I think it's going to do really, really well. What I do really, what I have learned that is really kind of refreshing is that the more that I make videos,

like fun videos or videos that I enjoy the more fun video ideas that I get in my mind and the more I make them so it's kind of like this this positive cycle and this negative cycle yeah so I don't I I haven't been able I don't have those processes I think in place because I think I'm probably arrogant enough and 27 and naive fine when when I have kind of like a really low week then I'll just get through I'll be I'll get out the other side and I'll be fine but that's probably a quite a quite a

What a bad kind of thought process to be going into. I do therapy, which that was one of the first things that I bought with some YouTube money was like therapy. It is very useful, but then it all boils down to like ideas of like self-esteem. And that is much...

harder because you can talk about that and I know I'm like the coach I know all of the processes I'm now going to therapy knowing exactly the questions that my therapist is going to ask me I know the same response I'm going to get and I know the bit where he's going to get me to cry and then I tell him off because I'm like you're just doing that because you want me to cry um so I

I kind of got to a kind of a, an impasse where I know the processes. I know the things that make me feel bad when it comes to like negative thoughts, when it comes to video making, because it's all about self-esteem and like, what other things just wanting to be like likes, I think, and wanting to be like, have videos that do really well and have big numbers and,

But the goalposts just move daily. Like I looked at my, we looked at, Aziz and I looked at our goals that we set at the beginning of 2022 and that was to hit 800,000 subscribers. We were on 500,000 at that point. And we're now on 1.4 million. And we haven't taken a step back. Well, I haven't taken a step back to think like, okay, it's fine. We've more than double tripled our goal for this year. I'm not thinking, can we hit 2 million by the end of the year?

Those noises, Ali, you're realizing this guy needs some help. No, honestly, I'm thinking, mate, I know the feeling. I'm thinking that it's so nice hearing you speak about exactly the same thoughts that go through my mind. I think I have been very careful to try my very best not to set any kind of quantitative goal.

at least not a goal that's outside of my control. So I might have a goal of like one or two videos a week because that's in my control. But anything around like subscriber count, view count, I found whenever I have a goal like that, it is net negative for me.

And so how do I control the things I can control and only set goals that are like that to which someone might be like, oh, but that's not ambitious. If you set a big, hairy, audacious goal, then you're more likely to hit it. And I'm like, yeah, probably. But go back to the conversation you had with Marques. He talked about like chasing every year. He wants to go like hit his goals hard or chase his goals. How do you feel about that kind of that idea of like it's very goal oriented and goal driven? Because when you reach goals, I was talking to a YouTuber whose goal was to hit 10 million subscribers.

And he did it and his growth was enormous. And he was like, okay, well now what? I've done it. Fantastic. I don't feel particularly different. I don't feel fantastic. And there's this hedonic adaptation that I'm really interested in because...

now it just looks like two youtubers that people watch just kind of like not complaining but god is it so hard isn't it 1.4 million instead of 800 god and so then then i catch myself in like okay don't be don't be such an ungrateful idiot yeah and about the whole thing and so it's it's constantly trying to kind of so just on that on that note uh deron brown's book happy is really good um it's

stoicism and happiness and stuff. In it, he talks about the kind of conundrum of being a celebrity in that there are all sorts of negatives associated with it, but you're never allowed to talk about it because you have to be just grateful. Oh my God, like, thank you so much to the fans. It's all of that stuff. And the instant, like in a public forum, you talk about the negatives, suddenly the public turns against you because it's like, of course you've ended up in this privileged position, et cetera. So I appreciate you

actually having the courage to talk about it. This is going to get clicked up. We don't want to get cancelled. It's going to be a problem. Yeah. The way that I've, I sort of think about it is I asked myself the question of like, you know, if I, if I had a hundred million in the bank, how would I be spending my time? And the answer is I'd be making videos about cool shit that I've learned so I can teach it to other people and document the process. And I'm like, cool. Do I need a hundred million in the bank to do that? No, I could just do that. Yeah. And I'm like, why don't I just do that? And I'm like, oh, well,

I want numbers to go up. I want to be more liked. I want to get more accolades. But it's like there was another really great from Alex Formosi, actually, one of the jacked guys I was telling you about.

He had a really good quote. He said that he realized that when he was 20, he wanted to be a millionaire. But when he was a millionaire, he wanted to be 20. And so why is he wasting all his time grinding and not enjoying the process when he's just going to want to go back to the start when he gets to the destination? And so I do genuinely think about that a lot. And I think I wrote it in my journal yesterday or something. Just this idea of just making sure that whatever I'm doing

I am taking the time to enjoy the process and not being too goal oriented. Cause I think being too goal oriented in a way it takes your eye off of the actual process. Yes. I think just whilst you're talking that, I think my one, if I'm being totally truthful, it is all accolade driven. I think at the moment is that's, that's what I want. I want to be able to say that I've done X, Y, Z, but I don't know who I'm like, want to say it to when there was no, I did my tour stand up tour.

Someone said, oh, what do you want to do now? I said, I want to do the London Palladium because that as a venue is one that I used to grow up watching like

Jack D and people like comedians like that doing their specials at the London Palladium. And so much so that I've rather kind of arrogantly, is that the word? I have asked the London Palladium who the youngest person who's ever done their own standup special at the London Palladium. And I'm waiting to hear back because there's something in me that wants me to be the youngest person ever to have done it.

Which is a really toxic way of thinking about things, I think. But I think I am all still very much accolade-driven at the moment, which I don't know whether that's a positive or a negative thing. But I think at the moment, that's just how I am. So there's a book I'm reading at the moment called The Second Mountain.

Okay. My tab called a chap called David Brooks. Um, it's thesis is basically that in life, there are two mountains. The first mountain is the mountain of success and status and happiness and being accolade driven and all that kind of stuff. And usually we're on that model when we're young, uh, that, that mountain. And then one of three things happens. Either you get to the summit and you realize, hang on, is this it? Or you get, uh, knocked off the mountain because someone dies and you're like, shit, or you get knocked off the mountain because of a health problem. And you're like, Oh my God, like,

I have a second chance at life. And in each of those three situations, you realize there is a second mountain and that's the second mountain, which is more about service. It's more about joy instead of it being like, Hey, I want to be cool and have freedom and stuff, which is very much what I optimized for the first mountain. That's more about, I want to commit myself to a cause. I want to really invest in relationships. I want to invest in my local community. I want to have a family. And that is where you experience true joy as a second mountain. Whereas the first mountain is more about like that short-term hedonism and status games that we all play.

Do you think that's an age-based mountain hiking situation? There seems to definitely, from people I know who have had lots of success in life, definitely as they've gotten older, especially as they've had kids, it's an immediate thing that takes them onto the second mountain. But what I guess I was trying to get from the book is he talks about

If you recognize yourself as being on the first mountain, which I do, how do you then recognize that and actually shift to the second mountain? Knowing that, like the pursuit of status and accolades and stuff,

is hollow and empty at the end of the day. And just like basically everyone who's done it says it says that that's true. And so it's like, what I'm trying to do is figure out, okay, how can I short circuit my desire for status and accolades and stuff and just move to second mountain mode sooner rather than later so that I feel less kind of anxious around, am I going to be relevant five years from now? Or is my YouTube channel growing fast enough? Um, there was a great, I mean, a slight tangent, um,

I think Colin and Samir told the story of Aziz Ansari meeting Frank Ocean at an awards ceremony. And Aziz Ansari went to Frank Ocean and was like, man, how'd you do it? Like, you just come along, you just make awesome albums and then you dip for like five years and we don't hear from you. And then you just come up and make another banger album. How'd you do it? And Frank Ocean just said, I just make less money.

and and it was like oh my god that's that's that's so true like you're just you're doing it because you're not turning around and saying yes to a huge check that's that's coming from from somebody else and that really resonated that that story really resonates with me so like yeah actually that is is true like how do you become somebody that is very enviable from everybody else well you just make less money than everyone else

There's a book called Finite and Infinite Games, which is big in the sort of business tech bro scene. But basically, it starts off with the idea that there are some games that are finite games that have an ending. And there are some games that are infinite games where the objective is to continue playing the game.

So something like Minecraft is an infinite game. There's no real point score. Like you just play because it's bounce. Like you build a Lego thing because it's fun. But something like Fortnite is a very finite game where there's a scoreboard and you have to win at the end of the thing. And it's kind of got me thinking that like in life, there are finite games. The game of I want to get the million subscriber plaque is a finite game. Like there is an ending.

But the infinite game of like, I'm doing the thing I love and making a living doing it, that's the sort of thing that we both want to just actually be able to continue doing. And so if you're at the point where you genuinely are playing your infinite game, which is you get to do the thing you love and you get to make a living doing it, the only goal that makes them that then therefore makes sense to have is the goal of being able to continue doing the thing.

And so the way I think about this is that like, if my goals are like revenue or like more big numbers and stuff, like I'm already doing the thing. I'm already like doing what I love and making money from it. So why don't I set my goals to be like, how do I make sure this is sustainable over a 30 year time horizon rather than potentially neglecting actually making decent content for the sake of over-monetizing for the sake of a course or for the sake of a brand deal? Short term money decisions tend to be finite gamey, I found. And whereas the more...

I'm actually doing the thing I love and producing content I'm proud of and don't really care about the money tends to be more infinite gamey. There's the idea that as soon, like people often find that, let's say people have hobbies, as soon as they start being paid to do their hobbies, they start to not enjoy it. Yeah.

where do you stand on on that if your whole idea is to make videos and enjoy making videos that's a really good question the way i the way i square that is by thinking and i have this literally as like an affirmation that i've written in my freaking bullet journal because i was dabbling with that the other day what what does it say i don't know if i can get it like word for word um i don't care about numbers i just do my thing and my amazing team takes care of the rest

So it's like in my dream world, the only thing I'd be thinking about is how do I make, how do I learn cool things and teach those to people? And the fact that I now have a team means that they can worry about the monetization side of the equation. And so I'm thinking that if I can just separate those two things out, like the creative from the commercial, then, and actually a lot of companies have a creative arm and a commercial arm because those two things don't really work nicely together. And if I can do that in my life, then that's, that's a dream.

Okay. I need to, I need to, can I have your team please? Yes. Fantastic. We can definitely help you out. Angus has hopped on so many calls with other creative friends and stuff too.

talk talk through the process of how we're trying to get there um one of the things i have in my bucket list is stand-up comedy set oh yes what is what's the deal with stand-up comedy how does one get started if one is into into interested in the thing that sounds like that's at the beginning of a stand-up so what's the deal with stand-up comedy um good shout good shout it's very meta i'm not sure how the pubs and clubs would enjoy that um stand-up comedy is uh

An incredibly rewarding experience, but it's also one of the most terrifying experiences you can do. And Rob Beckett, the comedian, gave some incredible advice about how to get started in stand-up comedy. And he said, imagine you're starting a nine-to-five job in an office. You go in on a Monday on your first day, and by Friday, you kind of know what you're doing. You kind of know who the people are. You know what your job is. Stand-up comedy is exactly the same thing, but you're just going to work five minutes at a time.

So it takes so much longer to be comfortable on stage, to know what you're doing, to know where your strengths and where your weaknesses are. And I genuinely think that with stand-up comedy, it is a case of just doing it. And it is a world where it's the most you-have-to-do-it-on-the-job job that you can possibly do. I don't think you can do much planning or you can write jokes, but jokes that you write in your room

Will genuinely, I found will have the opposite effect on stage. Jokes you don't think are funny will be really funny on stage and jokes you think are really good are rubbish on stage. And I was very lucky that I had a ready-made audience who were kind of happy to be kind of guinea pigs for me for like six months. I was just doing loads of work in progress shows.

in front of like 30 people. I then very luckily found a great team of producers and directors, a director who works with Joe Lysette on all of his stuff.

as well as having done the Dan and Phil world tour like five or six years ago. And so when I said, I want to make an hour long show, he came on board and we wrote this show essentially together. And he really supported me on that. And he's absolutely amazing because he understands YouTube. He understands what I was good at, understands what my audience wants when they come to a live show, but also merges that with standup and the way that the traditional comedy world works. So if you're going to do it, I think,

Just go to an open mic night when no one knows who you are and do five minutes and just stand on stage. It will be bad. Like, and that's okay. People might not laugh, but as long as you've got that first one out the way early doors, then I think it's all okay. And then someone also said to me,

People, when they go to comedy, they want to feel like they're being taken care of by the person on stage. So being a good stand-up comedian is just being able to be on stage and seem totally relaxed and everybody else feeling totally relaxed because they're like, oh, okay, this guy or gal knows what they're doing. That's fine. We can just enjoy the jokes. Whereas if you come on stage and almost immediately someone picks up the mic and they are messing around with the cable,

The audience is immediately like, oh God, I really hope this is okay. And as soon as the audience is in that position, you've lost. Like they have already not turned against you, but they're not in a position where they're going to be comfortable enough to laugh. So Ali, the answer is do it. Just go and do it. And don't worry about how well it goes because it will go badly. And when it goes badly, it's a great story. Yeah. It's either a good time or it's a good story. Yeah.

absolutely can we do a youtube collab where you where we i do a stand-up thingy and you're like my sure supporter yeah something yeah absolutely that'll be super fun yeah and then part of the story can be this conversation we've just had i'm like so i've been interested in stand-up comedy for a while and then you came with a podcast six months ago we had this conversation that's like ali you've just got to do it yeah it's like act two or whatever the however you do storytelling content which i've never done before but we'll

we'll give it a go. That could be fun. How does one become funny? That's a very good question. Comedy, I think there's a real structure to comedy. So comedy is basic, comedy is specificity. So I had a joke where I would go through my old notes on my phone

And I found that on my phone, I'd written on Christmas Day six years ago, weirdly, Girls Aloud Jump, the song Jump by Girls Aloud. I'd just written on a note. I had no idea why I'd written it. So I've had a bit in my show about when we write weird notes on our phones. And I realised when I was writing that...

The joke initially was something like, I wrote this and my family had asked me with putting together a Christmas playlist. And I wrote girls that joke. My director said, no, make it really specific. Said,

Uncle John tasked me with putting together a Christmas playlist, and so I chose Girls Love Jump. So that's much more, that's much funnier, whereas the concept of it isn't inherently that funny, but the specificity of Uncle John makes it funnier. So comedy is a specificity I've found, and I think that it's just...

I don't really know. We think a lot about, it's also contradictions. So this is what we're thinking when Aziz and I are thinking about like titles, YouTube titles and concepts. It's taking something that everybody knows and doing the weirdest thing with it. So I got roadkill. What's the weirdest thing you can do to roadkill? Serve it to Michelin star chefs. Aziz, is there any other concept, like video ideas we've had that's like really contradictory? Oh,

- We had richest man in the world for seven minutes. - That was a great example of how like the richest man in the world idea was around for a long time. Basically we're making the video, but then just adding that for seven minutes and trying to work that into the video, why would that be?

made it because it just makes it way more intriguing because if you just either get into it or just learn the world people think kind of like well it's probably not going to be real or like some joke thing but seven minutes it's like okay so what loophole do you buy into why only seven minutes oh yeah i mean like oh yeah and the other one was i caught fish and chips uh from the world's most polluted river

So I ate fish and chips from the tent. So that's a lot of like the comedy of the channel comes from just contradiction. So we're just constantly looking at like, okay, cameras, what's the weirdest thing you could do with a camera? Could you make a camera out of like a potato or, and I think that's just content in general. I think on YouTube, it's like a lot of the time I look at my homepage and I realize, oh, it's just,

Yeah, kind of contradictions. Oh, yeah. So we did a video with adult actors, porn stars, if you will. And we got them to just act in a short film. So I hired porn stars to act in my short film. And so like that was because that and it was great. They were they were great actors. And we had a great time. And it was it was a fun video to shoot that. How do you hire a porn star?

That was hard. That was genuinely, that was the hardest part of that video was trying to just trying to get in contact with like porn agents because I don't know any, not in my, not in my current days. And so I, the best way was, was generally was Instagram shout outs. That's where I find a lot of like,

my videos happen because someone on Instagram knows someone. So it was, it was a difficult day when I was like, hi, does anyone know any porn stars? Genuinely just like for a, for a video, not that kind of video, but does anyone know any porn stars? And we got, yeah, some, some really, really cool people who came down and were great actors.

I think the specificity point is really like thinking back to the start of our conversation when you did your impromptu bit about Greg and like the accent and the ketchup stain down the front. It's just the specificity is what makes that story like really funny. If you just talked about a guy coming in, he'd spilt something on his shirt. That's not funny. But it's, yeah, the more specific I think often is the funnier. What about accents?

What about them? So I, another thing I have in my bucket list is learn how to do acts of cool accents. Okay. And it's a thing that, so my, my singing teacher is like a professional Broadway actor or stuff and has actually studied accents and I can do like 50 of them with like actual notation and shit. Um,

you've busted out like four or five so far like is that just a thing that came naturally to you how do you how do you go about yeah to do like impressions and stuff accents i can't give much more kind of insight other than just like i've just been doing them for a long long time and just been like imitating people that i've seen on the telly ever since i was a kid um

And I just, yeah, I really enjoy doing accents. And there are some that I can do, some I can't do. Like some I can do well, some I can do really, really badly. What are your top three favorite ones? My favorite one, South African, I like doing. I like doing, what else do I like doing? I like doing really posh, like really posh is really fun because I get to, in my kind of my life, I have met a lot of these people now.

They just, you know, they just don't, their teeth just do not touch at all. They really just chat like this and it's fantastic. Absolutely fantastic and wonderful to be here with Ali. Wonderful guy, actually. You must watch his content. That slightly goes into Boris. Yeah.

Fantastic. So I like South African. I like posh. And just American is fun because American is just quite difficult to do because you just very easily just go into Southern and Texan, which becomes a stereotype, but.

But I've just been doing them my whole life, really. Nice. How does stand-up compare to doing stuff on video? Is it very different? It's completely different. Yeah. It's completely different because you get that immediate feedback, number one, but also the way you present the content has to be completely different. So I've tried in the past putting on two or three minute videos during my stand-up set.

And it just feels like you're putting, my director calls it, you're putting on videos for the kids. So it's like you're in class and now here we're going to watch this video. So they've got to be really short, sharp, and just almost responding to whatever the joke was or whatever you've just said on stage. So it is very different. You've got to, you're thinking much more about the audience

idea of liveness than you are when you, then you definitely don't think about that with YouTube, but comedy is at its best when the audience feels like it's the first time the comedian has ever said that. And so there are lots of times when you have audience interaction. That's why audience interaction works so well is because the audience feels like, oh, this comedian is being really funny in the moment and is doing something that hasn't been rehearsed and hasn't been planned. And there are, there are different tactics that you can use to,

that you can almost fake that or not fake that or facilitate that feeling. So there's some audience interaction work that I do where I know there's only a very finite number of answers in which the question I'm asking the audience member can give me back. And so I've got in the chamber three or four different responses that I know work and know are funny. So what's an example? Oh God, you're putting me on the spot here.

I'm just trying to think back to the show. Okay. Right. Yeah. It's going to slightly ruin the fact if you come to the, uh, the Palladium show, but whatever. Um, there's a bit in the show where I try and play a game of, uh,

find a posh person in the audience. And I call it guess whom? So what I do is I ask everyone to put their hands up in the air and I say, right, keep your hands up in the air. If you've ever referred to your parents as mommy or daddy, right? Okay. So you keep everyone who has their hands in the air. Some people like drop their hands. And then I will pretend on stage that there are more hands up on the rights than on the left. So I'll say, oh, there are seemingly more posh people on the right than on the left.

I know that a little bit like our political climate and that feels very live, even though that's a joke that I've written previously. It always goes down really well because as a joke, it's not that funny, but it's just, it feels like it's the first time I've ever said it. So if you come to the Plasium show, keep your mouth shut. So yeah. What's it like?

working with a director to write and produce like a whole like hour-long show like what how is that presumably it's very different to a five minute seven minute routine yeah you are looking at the flow of a show so you want to come on stage and you want to be high energy at the beginning you want to get into things immediately so the audience feel comfortable and they're like okay this guy's know what he's doing but then over time you can't have you can't sustain that energy the whole hour because your audience gets exhausted so

So you've got to give them periods where they can relax and they can slightly almost turn off a little bit from what you're saying, because I think the difficulty with

comedy with hour-long comedy is you're listening to someone talk for an hour which is an incredibly difficult thing to do to concentrate for an hour and if it's like a certain type of comedian who are very very clever comedy you've got to be on the whole time as an audience member to realize okay this is going on so we do have we make the sections very clear so the audience knows okay i'm in this bit for seven minutes or five minutes i can see the ending for this section that helps a lot um also giving time to put on

put on a TV show for the kids, like just like having, letting them have a reset where they can watch something rather than having to listen to me all the time. So a lot of the time it's just formatting. And then it's just about writing those individual elements and thinking about what works and what doesn't, but mainly it's about the structure of a show. And so a lot of the time when we're doing previews, we're like swapping and changing. It's like, well, we've put that bit after this bit, but that needs a connecting bit. Yeah.

But then that affects a callback that we've got later on the show. So it's very bitty. Okay. And what are the economics of being a stand-up comedian? Right. Is it a reasonable path to make a living for a normal person? I don't think it is, no. So you're going to have your producer. So these are the various people that will take a cut. You've got producers who will take cuts.

12.5% to 20% of the show's takings. You've got an agent who will take...

10 to 12 and a half percent, 10 to 15% of the takings. So already you've lost about 25% of your earnings there. The venue then takes normally, depends, sometimes they do like a flat fee, but most of the time it's like a percentage. So they're taking 30 to 40%. So before you even turn the microphone on, you're losing 60% to like costs. And

then you've got the costs of like a director if you've kind of had the money to do that you've got PR that will kind of hopefully get people

people to go to your show. I have just done a month at the Edinburgh Fringe Festival in a venue that's about 75 seats. So it was a small venue and I chose it to be a relatively small venue. I sold every seat out in that venue over the month. And I think we, which was great. And because the idea was that we wanted to make it a real scarcity of the tickets. So we sold every ticket for the run, which is about 2000 tickets over 30 days.

And I think I took home about two and a half thousand pounds and over the, over the month. And like it's spent, we've spent like six months writing the show. Um, and so I think, I mean, fringe is, is, is a bad example because no one makes any money at the fringe anyway, the fringe. And that was one of the big issues this year is because it's getting so incredibly expensive that it's so difficult for any new, wait,

Wait, what do you mean it's getting expensive? Accommodation is ludicrously expensive. It's kind of £1,000, £1,500 to stay in Edinburgh for the month in like a tiny box room. Just the whole creation process of bringing your shirt to the fringe is so expensive. So you're going to lose a lot of money. So my point is you don't really start making large amounts of money until you're consistently doing four, 500 seats of venues per

for the year. And I think that's going to be a problem because going forward, also the main, the shows that were selling out at the Edinburgh Fringe this year were all because they had platforms on social media or because they were really big on Twitter or they had a video that went viral recently or they were YouTube audiences. And I think for the comedy industry, that's something that's going to be quite...

I'd be relatively worried if you're a comedian and you're not kind of engaging in somewhat in the social media side of things. I can understand why you wouldn't be because it's like, well, hold on. No, I got into standup comedy because I want to be a standup comedian. I don't, what's this whole stuff. And now I need to be a content creator and do like silly TikTok dancers. There's a real misconception about what it means to be a TikTok creator or an online creator. But yeah, the big comedians in the UK, like obviously taking away your Gervais's and your, your, your Joe Lycett's, they're probably making good money, but,

Everybody else is, I don't think you're making huge, definitely not making generational money to kind of retire off. Yeah. So I've got a friend who is a musician and we just recently got a record deal a couple of years ago and he's just like, oh my God, they keep on saying I have to go on TikTok and do silly dances. And he's just like, I got into this to make music and now I'm having to build a social media following because that's apparently where songs go viral and stuff. And even in the book publishing industry,

There's a time every June or July where the publishers will start emailing everyone who's got any kind of audience because they know that the way to guarantee book sales is to give a book deal to someone with an audience. And a lot of genuine writers are just like, I don't have a platform. I need to build my email list. I know I should be on Twitter and Instagram and all those things. And I just can't be asked because it's not what I signed up to do. And so it's just weird, weird incentives where a lot of the social media famous people are getting book deals and stuff where now writing a book is now

anyone with any kind of audience can just publish a book with Penguin or something like that. Whereas before it used to be more of a prestige. You've published a book? Working on it. First draft is done. Now we're in the editing stage.

Okay. Because I'd be interested again to know what the financials of that are like. Because I know how it goes. You get given an advance when you sign the deal. Is that where most of the money comes from? And then it doesn't actually matter how many it sells? Or do you get a percentage of how many it sells? Yeah. So you get an advance and that's usually sort of... So most advances for first-time authors, maybe they'll give you like 10 grand in the UK. In the US, it's more like sort of in the tens of thousands, 200s of thousands. Again, if you have an audience.

So let's say you get a £20,000 advance, you'll get 25% of it on signing, 25% of it when you hand in the manuscript, 25% of it when the hardback's published, and the other 25 when the paperback's published. So across a four-year period, you'll get this £20,000 over a four-year period.

It's an advance, which means you have to pay it off. And you pay it off from book royalties. And so with the advance, they'll say that, okay, so it's a £20,000 advance and we'll give you 7.5% of the royalties up until you sell X tens of thousands of copies and then 10% and then 12.5% and then 15%. It's like, whoa, that's really high royalty figure. So if you sell a book for 15 quid, the author will be making about a quid from it-ish, if they're lucky.

And for the first 20,000 of those, that pays off the advance. And then subsequently- So you just take a loan, you're in debt. You're in debt. I mean, if the book doesn't earn out in its advance, which the vast majority of books don't, then you don't have to pay anything because, I mean, the publisher has taken that risk. I see. And so once your book has earned out its advance, at that point, you're making a pound every sale.

And if you're James Clear and you sold 12 million copies, now you're winning. If you're basically everyone else and you've sold like, oh, there was a stat that was going viral on Twitter because there was some book fair recently where like 98% of books don't even sell more than like 20 copies. So like the publishing industry is losing so much money, but it's the atomic habits. It's the Harry Potters. It's these huge books that are funding the whole thing.

for the other the other minnows that don't make any money at all yeah we we i did a video where i i got a book to be number one on amazon bestseller in the poetry section yeah i watched that and um i it's it's slightly jade in my my i saw that i think it was piers morgan said like did a congratulatory tweet for himself that his book was the top of the amazon bestselling list and i just kind of sat there thinking you need about 25 copies to get to get up there um but it's do

Do you think that's detrimental to the publishing industry in the whole? Do you think like the way that... Yeah, I just think the publishing industry from people I know who are in it are just like, yeah, it's kind of dying. There's no need for that gatekeeper anymore. Like back in the day where the only way to get your ideas out would be via television or via publishing press. These days, anyone can publish anything on Amazon.

and it's trivial and so like what is the point of a publisher they say they're gonna they're gonna market the book and stuff but they don't really and they'd go after people with audiences knowing that the audience is consulting yeah it's a weird weird kind of kind of system um

where yeah the margins are so low uh that so within i mean it's probably i felt very like a like an like an alien um when i was in edinburgh fringe because i was somebody who had an audience and i was selling tickets and it was my first edinburgh fringe and i've done comedy for 18 months and so all of the the comedy kind of reviewers that could let that

comedians, comedians, reviewers came in, like were absolutely slated. Like I was getting horrific reviews. And is that the same with, in the book world that people with audiences are kind of like their books are like looked down on by traditional. Yes, very much so. Big, big publishing. Yeah. So there's a, there's a lot of sort of insider baseball type stuff around the New York Times bestseller list and how, if you are an academic, then you don't need to sell as many copies to get on the bestseller list as if you're a bookseller.

as if you are a YouTuber, for example, where they're like, screw that. And you have to really sell loads of copies for them to not even be able to justify not having it on the bestseller list. Similarly, the way they do it is like, it's like this weird secret formula, kind of which is closely guarded, like the Coca-Cola recipe of there are certain Walmarts in random places

Places of America, where they sample those to see how many people in Texas, in this random Walmart, in this random town, bought your book in real life. Because the people with online audiences drive everyone to the Amazon pre-order page. And so that's an unfair advantage that people like you and me would have if we were to write a book. But a, quote, normal author, they would wait the Walmart Texan

sale way higher than the Amazon one. And so there's all this stuff around how do you actually get on the bestseller list beyond actually selling books because that's not really how it works. But there's a lot of random faffery around that. Similarly with music publishing, there's all sorts of stuff that

is a bit weird it sounds like comedy is similar yeah it's i think it's almost exactly the same and i was talking to a few people who've been nominated for the award up in edinburgh and like that's that's the one of the most probably the most um coveted award in comedy or thing in comedy and a lot of those people on that list are like oh i'm i'm probably gonna have to quit comedy in the next like year and a half because i just can't afford to keep doing this it's just too yeah it's too expensive

So what do you like, I guess, coming full circle to the career question that we talked about at the start, like, what do you see your career as being over the next like, month to years? I really don't know. I think my next goal is to build a team. And that's not necessarily a huge team, but a team that I'm really proud of and really like, just I could trust implicitly. Yeah.

And that's hard. That's really hard to do. I think I'd still like to be telling stories. I think I'd still like to be entertaining people. I'd still like to be doing silly things. Because I think there is a gap in the market for just doing things that are inherently silly and fun for the sake of it. And that's one of my biggest bugbears with TV. I've had a few kind of conversations with big producers and I'll pitch them some ideas. Yeah, we like it, but what's the why? Why are you doing this? Why? What's the deeper meaning here? And I often say just there isn't one. It's just because it's something that is just...

inherently silly and fun. It's like, no, there needs to be a why here. And so I really like this, this, this, this USB of like just doing something silly for the sake of being silly. As long as no one's getting hurt and it's a bit of fun. I think there is, there is a place for that. So I'm, I think I'm going to try and kind of market myself as, as the US, as the, as the silly guy, the silly guy, the silly guy, the posh, silly guy, posh, silly guy. Yeah. I mean, that's probably will be said behind my back. Um, but, uh, yeah, I'm, I'm, I'm the posh, silly guy. Nice. But,

But I'd love to ask you about burnout. A lot of creators talk about kind of burnout. What's been your relationship with burnout? I have burnt out a few times. Yeah.

I think during lockdown was a bad, like it showed its ugly head physically. Like I felt I was inherently just very depressed. And I don't think I do enough to combat burnout. Again, it's like, it's okay. Like I know I shouldn't do this because I'll probably get burnt out, but it's fine. I'll do it on this occasion because when I get burnt out, that's fine. It'll be over in two weeks and then I'll be able to be okay again.

So I would love to say that I sit here and get up early and journal and I go for a run every morning to clear my head before I have my ice latte and, you know, set the day straight. But that's not true. That is purely because I've listened to too many podcasts. I know what's the right thing to say. So I think that I don't have any good structures to avoid burnout. I have been burnt out in the past.

And I probably am going to be burnt out a few more times in the future, but I'm still, I think I'm too focused on that first mountain analogy that we're looking at. I'm too focused on the summit of that first mountain and I've got blisters all over my feet, but my, my, uh, I shoes, uh, I've determined to get to the top. Um, yeah.

Which again is probably a very worrying thing to say. And I've already looked back on this interview in like three years time and just be like, you were an absolute idiot. That's a sign of growth. But I am constantly looking for, I think I just don't prioritize the things that will stop burnout. Why?

Because I don't think that I don't, I don't value them and I don't value them highly enough. I don't think that they have, I can't see the objective value of, of them. So therefore I don't think that they are worth the time, which I know is. And then, but then the vague things like taking time off. Yeah.

then just like I took I went on holidays for two weeks after I did the Edinburgh Fringe run I was like right let's take some time off for two weeks and I was just thinking about the channel the whole time like what am I like this is this is rubbish like I've gone away to like have some time away but no I'm not enjoying this time away I was most happiest when I was doing the Fringe actually because I was like I wasn't thinking about the channel I was just thinking about every day I need to do my show and that's it and I could I could

I could compartmentalize things a little bit better. Yeah. I find the whole sort of taking time off thing is also massively overrated. In that whenever I take time off, I'm like, "Great, the calendar's empty. Now I can write the book properly." Or, "Now I can plan out this video that I've had in my mind for ages and haven't had time to think about."

The way I do holidays is usually trying to do something that looks like work for at least a few hours because then it gets out of my system and then I can enjoy the sunset cruise or the hike or the whatever rather than feeling like I haven't thought about a video for a while. Any advice you'd give to aspiring creators? Yes. Get good at making videos, which is what you think is like be good at it. Or at least be good at what you know you can be good at.

because I think often people are so determined to find hacks and cheats with YouTube and just any job, but ultimately it comes down with, can you provide value through a video to somebody? Are you making them laugh? Are you educating them? Are you entertaining them? If you're answering that question, yes, then great. And the best way to do that is by making videos. Someone said, oh, I've made three videos and

Can you, what do you think? What do you, can you give me some advice about what I should do next? I always say, okay, just make 50, make 50 and then decide whether you still want to do this. And if nothing's working after 50 and you're not seeing any growth at all, then that's a clear sign that maybe you shouldn't be doing this niche. Maybe you should be going somewhere else.

I don't agree that YouTube is too saturated and that you can't start a YouTube career now. That's absolute rubbish. I think anybody can still, you can, there are, there are people now with 10 subscribers who will have 10 million subscribers in three years time. That's definitely true. Whether you do that through shorts or the year through long form is a different conversation. Um, and depending on the quality of the audience that you want to have, um,

Yeah. Don't get me. Don't get me started on that. Sounds like a rabbit hole. Yeah. I'll start to, I'll start to get quite. Yeah. We've got a framework that we have for our YouTube course stuff, which is level one is get going. Level two is get good. Level three is get smart. Yeah. And get smart is where you worry about your niche and stuff. Yeah. And people are often like way too like, oh my God, is this the right, like, how am I going to start? It's like, look, just get good at making a video. Yeah.

Once you can do that once a week or whatever consistency you want, at that point, let's talk about your niche and- And retention tactics and what thumbnail you're going to use. So no, I completely agree with that methodology. Excellent. We've got the stamp of approval.

All right, so that's it for this week's episode of Deep Dive. Thank you so much for watching or listening. All the links and resources that we mentioned in the podcast are gonna be linked down in the video description or in the show notes, depending on where you're watching or listening to this. If you're listening to this on a podcast platform, then do please leave us a review on the iTunes store. It really helps other people discover the podcast. Or if you're watching this in full HD or 4K on YouTube, then you can leave a comment down below and ask any questions or any insights or any thoughts about the episode. That would be awesome. And if you enjoyed this episode, you might like to check out this episode here as well, which links in with some of the stuff that we talked about in the episode. So thanks for watching.

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