Caspar Lee: How He Built A 10+ Million YouTube Following In His 20s (And Why He Quit)
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I'm not asked on that many podcasts, but I've been asked on probably 10 podcasts this year. I've said no to every single one. Because I was like, what if I have a panic attack? The social media superstar is... Caspar Lee! Ready, one.

Casper is one of the OG YouTubers. He became an internet sensation. It was kind of in the very beginning, I feel like creators were kind of misfits. He started the company Influencer. He's also started his own management agency with Joe Sugg, who you also might be familiar with. He does a bunch of philanthropic things as well. And he's also recently started a venture capitalist fund. A successful business is 60% the right market, 30% the team, and 10% like the unique idea. But everyone's like, just think about it.

come up with a perfect idea. It's not, you can't predict the future. Now, this conversation is interesting because Casper is like one of the OG gang from the, from like the olden days of YouTube. And so we talk a lot about what that experience was like, what it was like growing up in South Africa and watching all these YouTubers and then being able to collaborate with them and then interviewing people like Ed Sheeran and this sort of

immensely like jet set lifestyle that casper was leading back in the day i was like 1920 and like people would say what are you doing or my grandmother would be like what are you doing with your life and you're like well i'm a youtuber this is my job and they're like well what's your real job and to be honest the time my grandmother actually understood it was a job worth pursuing was when i met the queen for the first time we talk about some of the downsides of fame and attention and some of the issues with burnout that youtubers and other creators kind of have amongst other

people. And we talk about his evolution from kind of entertainment vloggy type YouTuber to kind of business tycoon, investor, entrepreneur, philanthropist type chap, and what that arc was like. So I hope you enjoy this interview as much as I did. Caspar, use that, use that content. Thank you so much for coming on. Thank you. It's going to be interesting. You are like one of the OG YouTubers. You started in 2010 and made videos all the way through to 2019. And

You're like my age. So you would have started YouTube at the age of like 16. We're getting old, huh? We're getting old. I know. Like all these Gen Zers on TikTok and stuff. I always felt like the young one in the group that I kind of came up with on YouTube because I was 16. I think I was 17 when I signed my first contract with what they called Networks. It could have been Channel Flip or... No, I don't want to throw them under the bus. It might have been someone else.

And I remember trying to get out of the contract and they were like, no, you signed it. And it was a terrible contract. It wasn't Channel Flip, just in case. Channel Flip still exists. And then they were like, you can't get out. And I was like, I'm 17.

I was like, "Okay, you're out. Can you sign a new contract?" I'm like, "No, that's done. You had me. So now you lost me." What was YouTube like in the early days? Yeah, I mean, I guess kind of, as I alluded to, quite cowboyish, a lot of people trying to get involved but not really knowing what it was all about. For me, I literally started my channel because I wanted to impress the girls in my class. I thought YouTube was like the coolest thing in the world.

And it turns out it wasn't. It wasn't? No. Was this like that for you? Because for me, when I started...

People just thought I was such a weird person in my class, really. Yeah, I mean, even in 2017 when I started, people thought... Once it started to go well, people wanted to... Okay, so that's when it changed. That's when everyone wanted to be in a video, wanted to be in a thumbnail. But at the start, I was like, Ali, put the camera away. Ali, what are you doing? Get the camera out. You're supposed to be seeing a patient. Exactly. And not only that, it wasn't even the kids in my class, the teacher. I had a drama teacher. You think YouTube's all about entertaining, people should be excited that you're...

you're sharing something in yourself.

And my drama teacher was like, "This is lame. Why are you doing this?" Oh, wow. Imagine that. Is that rude? I know, right? I feel like drama teachers now should hopefully encourage people doing TikTok and whatever there is out there. Be real even maybe. But yeah, back then it was definitely not cool. But I just kept going at it because I'm quite an obsessive person and I really enjoyed the idea of becoming a YouTube partner. So do you know why that's a big deal?

I do, but like for our listeners. So, okay. A YouTube partner, especially back then, I mean, now it means you can monetize your videos, but back then I wasn't thinking about that. I was thinking getting a banner on my YouTube channel, which is, you could have basically, do you remember the custom banners there used to be? No. Okay. Before your time. Wait for my time. This is grandfather Casper talking. What was going on there? So you can, you can get a custom YouTube banner. Okay. This is all I wanted. You needed like a thousand subscribers. So I thought this is going to take five days. It's going to be great. Uh,

About two years later, still hadn't hit it. Eventually got close. And then my friend click bombed my channel. So you could actually get ads on your channel before. Oh, actually, no. Okay. I just became partner. Was very, very happy. Could get ads on my channel. Then a friend in my class clicked my ads like a thousand times. And YouTube thought,

Casper's trying to make a living by clicking his own ads. And so they banned my partnership and then I had to restart. And then when I restarted, that's when things started blowing up for me. When you said you had to restart the channel? Restarted, yeah. That was like my third channel. Shit. Completely from scratch. Yep. But the good thing is, I think when you restart on YouTube, because when I first started, I didn't know what I was doing. When I started the second time, I started to figure it out a bit. By the third time, I kind of understood how to do this.

and the secret was going to be collaborating. And so I started collaborating and I think it just worked. And I feel like that is my advice for people. Don't ever feel scared to restart something because something that at the time was probably the, I was so angry at the guy who did this to me, but now he's like my best friend because if he didn't do that to me, I wouldn't be where I am today.

This reminds me of when I was like five years old and I was playing Pokemon Blue on my Game Boy Pocket. And I got like a hundred and something. I didn't come to South Africa. And my brother new-gamed it. And he deleted the save file. And I was like... This was like...

days and days of work that I poured into this thing. But then I started again and I was like, I was actually kind of glad for it in hindsight. I don't think I've ever- You just smashed the game one time and you were like, way better? Yeah, I was way better the second time around. I was like, you know, I got Charizard rather than Venusaur and it felt more fun. So I think where I'm getting at with this and what you've probably experienced is like nothing is a waste of time. If you fail at something, you're learning and there's a little bit of inspirational content for you. I love it. I can put it on LinkedIn. Absolutely. We'll put the captions. Yeah.

What sort of stuff were you making in the early days? And relatedly, how did you have the balls to do that when presumably in school people would have been like, what the hell are you doing? Yeah. So very early days, we don't need to talk about it because it was so weird. It was like me in my bathtub saying like, is this scarier than showering?

Like that was what I thought content was. People want to see what's scary, a bathing or showering. I'm going to make a whole 10 minute video about this. No one cared. Got about 60 dislikes, three likes. So then I was like, oh, I have to create my own accounts so I can combat the dislikers. And so I had like 40 accounts. I don't know if that's allowed. So maybe we'll cut that out. Okay. But then eventually I started realizing that...

Maybe I had my own quirks and people liked what I did, but what they really wanted to see was me with other people. And so there was this website called YouNow where you could like live stream behind other creators. So it was basically like a...

like an open mic so you you stand in line you wait and you go on live after other phrases and there was this guy called jack scap uh pointless blog uh marcus butler i've heard of your eyes are not lighting up yeah you don't know who these people are but these are like the very kind of ogp youtubers in the uk they had like at the time like 10 000 subscribers and i was like you

I was like, you guys, you guys are my biggest heroes. So I basically went on after them on YouNow, just said how much I love them, said I'd love to make videos with them. And eventually they listened and they said, let's chat. I reached out. I convinced my mom to let me fly to the UK to meet people I'd met on the internet at the age of 17.

This was instead of going on like a hockey tour. So I like gave up this big hockey tour I was gonna go on to do this. Everyone at school thought I was crazy. Came over, I did what I think I do well, which is I'm able to kind of meet people and then meet their friends and then collaborate with people. And I built this network and collaborated with about 10 creators. And when I came back, I went from like 5,000 subscribers to 100,000. This was at the time I was finishing school.

So it was finally working and I said, "I'm going to take a year out after school, not going to go to university." My parents were like, "You're crazy." So I went on my own way, paid for it through AdSense. Lucky enough, it started to work. And then yeah, eventually got to start making videos with some crazy people.

I guess I feel like the height was having Ed Sheeran in my bathroom and me interviewing him at a time when like celebrities didn't take YouTube that seriously. And yeah, that's kind of my YouTube story. It's all through collaborating. Were you in South Africa?

So yeah, I was originally in South Africa when I started in a very small town. Whereabouts? Do you know Naisna? No. I know Ladybrand and Bloemfontein. Ladybrand. I used to live in Lesotho. Okay. Lady... No, you mean Lady Smith? I used to be called Ladybrand back in the day. Maybe it's Ladybrand. I mean, it's a small town. Do you have like a Google person like Joe Rogan? Or do you just do it yourself? Ladybrand is a small agricultural town in the Free State Province of South Africa. It's a thing.

18 kilometers from Maseru. Yeah. Because I used to live in Lesotho for like five years. I've been to Lesotho once or twice. It's freezing up there. It's cold in the winter, yeah. So Lesotho, for those who don't know, is like a separate country within South Africa. It's a kingdom. Yeah. And we have two countries like that. We've got Lesotho and Swaziland.

Were you working there as a doctor? This was when I was a child. My mum was working there as a doctor. I was a child doctor as well. Having out prescriptions as a child. We moved to the UK in 2003. How long were you in Lesotho? Age 0 to 6.

I can speak Afrikaans, but I'm not good at it.

That sounds good. The only thing I could remember was like "Geen suker biggyvongny" or something like "no sugar added" that was on the... Wait, say it again? "Geen suker biggyvongny" "Suker" Yeah, I don't even know if I'm pronouncing it. I wish I could say that's wrong, but I'm so bad at comments. So I'm going to just accept that as facts and hopefully someone in the comments can call you out. Fingers crossed. So you flew to the UK at the age of 17 to collab with YouTubers? Yeah. And I literally got picked up by Marcus Butler, who you know. Yeah.

You don't know JackScap. No. People in here know JackScap. Yeah. We're going to have some... So JackScap, they are just really cool. They were these YouTubers who... You can compare them to the D'Amelios. Okay. And they're going to hate me saying that, but just hear me out. Everyone loved them. They were so cool. At the height of their fame, they were like...

We want to go into something that they thought was more meaningful. They wanted to get into sustainability. They wanted to get into architecture. They literally walked away from what they were doing at the very height of what they were doing, which was like insane. And like they could have carried on and on and on and on and had an incredible YouTube career.

But they were like, no, this is not for us. And I think that's quite cool. Why did they decide it wasn't for them? I mean, I haven't asked them particularly, but I feel like they wanted to do something else and maybe it wasn't making them happy. And I guess...

I had a different journey, but at the same time there were similarities to that. But I definitely did it for a lot longer and kept going. Whereas they were like, "No, enough is enough." But now they're back on YouTube. I'll have to check them out. JacksGap, absolute legends. Okay, so you started the YouTube channel in 2010 and you're screwing around making videos

Channel 1, Channel 2, Channel 3. Channel 3 is where it really starts to take off. So the first two channels, the first channel was called Dick of Africa. Okay. Do you want to know why? Why? I should probably clarify that. So because my middle name is Richard. Okay. So Dick. Yes. And then I was from Africa. And I thought that would be a good name. And it turns out it wasn't. And then it became DeCasp. Join those together. Okay.

And then the third channel was Caspaly. Well, yeah, DeCasp, which just became Caspaly. Once it became big enough that you could eventually call YouTube and you're like, can I change the name to Casper? Wait, you were big enough to be able to call YouTube? So you had like a hotline? At that point in my life, there was like, you could communicate with YouTube. I'm not sure if you, I'm sure you can today still. I wasn't talking to Suzanne herself. But yeah, you had a partner program.

Program manager I'm sure you do Yeah I got an email from one of them There we go You can say change my Well now I don't think it matters so much But like This is like Changing your URL And it was sick Yeah there's a little button You can press I'm obsessed with URLs Like getting Like short handles Things like that

do you have a what's your like official url youtube.com ali abdul but my name is not particularly common so that works out yeah um okay so when you're 17 you fly to the uk collab with all these youtubers that you admired for a while and you sort of explode to 100 000 subscribers what happens next like what's the journey what was the journey like yeah so yeah as i i kind of said in the very beginning but you get reached out to um

And I just signed the first person who reached out to me. So I signed a contract whereby AdSense goes to them and to me. So basically back before YouTube could do all their own ads, they used to get networks. And so there was this whole industry where networks would convince brands to put money before videos. And so they would work with the channels and with YouTube. And so, yeah, I signed a contract that wasn't great and got out of that because I was 17.

And then, yeah, next thing was, as I kind of alluded to, deciding, do I want to do this full time? I think a lot of creators, it's difficult to make the decision. But for me, I was very lucky. It really blew up. Like it was going very fast and I was at the right age whereby it was okay to take a year out and do something that no one considered a career. I mean, before I started there, I was talking about this earlier, there was 10 creators, I think, who were making money from it. There was like...

Maybe Shane Dawson, Shay Todd's. Everyone with Shay in their name basically was making money.

Ryan, people like that. Ryan Higger. Yeah, Ryan Higger. And I just, yeah. So that happened. Then there was kind of my, I know people say we're OG, but they were the real OGs. And that includes Charlie who's so cool. Like I should write a book on YouTube history. This would be really interesting. I actually went on Mastermind to talk about YouTube history and I came second. So that was great for me.

But yeah, then things, you know, I made the decision, let's go for this. And then, yeah. How much were you making back then when you decided this was full-time legit? So, yeah, good question.

I suppose in the very beginning I moved over. So I decided I'm going to travel between like Ireland, the US, England, and just try collaborate with as many people as possible. At that point, I remember having 4,000 pounds in my bank account. And so that sounds quite hectic, especially now with like with inflation and stuff. But at the time there was money coming into. And so I felt I was probably in the very beginning making like two and a half, 3,000 pounds a month.

And that was like top 10 YouTubers on the platform? No, not that. No, no. By that point, there were a lot more YouTubers doing quite well. But then things, you know, over the, I'd say kind of between 2013 and 2016, yeah, things got pretty good in terms of financially. It's not something we really actually spoke about at the time. I think, you know, we, I think there are two reasons. One, we weren't necessarily doing YouTube for that, but it was a byproduct.

And two, you didn't want to, we weren't the sort of people who were like, oh, we're making all this money. We want to talk about it. We want to flex. Whereas now I think there are people who also like to make content about that too, which is great. Whereas back then it just wasn't really a thing. So back in 2013, 2016, let's say you had like a million subscribers. How much money were these sorts of people making?

Yeah, so not as much as they are today. But it's never been on subscribers. But if someone's getting 20 million views a month, let's say back then, I'd say depends how they monetize. I mean, from AdSense alone, maybe like 20,000 pounds a month from the AdSense. But I think that would only make up like 10%.

you know they could they could they could make over a million a year from everything else as well like merchants like or to be honest more like they could do that but like brand deals were and are still a huge part of part of it then there's also things like uh deals with uh platforms so new platforms being created and then youtube having to kind of

start to counteract that and pay their own creators to stay on the platform and do certain things. So yeah, there were tons of things going on that you could get to a point where you're making a lot of money. And now I've just, I mean, seeing what some of these creators are doing, like MrBeast, 50 million revenue. I mean, it's insane. But yeah, it was never, you know, in the beginning something we

we thought about it. But as it progressed, you do start to go, "Oh, wow, this is a career." And you can't understand, especially when you were 19, 20, and people would say, "What are you doing?" Or my grandmother would be like, "What are you doing with your life?" And you're like, "Well, I'm a YouTuber. This is my job." And they're like, "Well, what's your real job?"

But you would never be like, "Well, look at my bank account. It's actually a job, I promise." But you would try and explain to them. And to be honest, the time my grandmother actually understood it was a job worth pursuing was when I met the Queen for the first time. And then she was like, "Okay, finally, you've got a real job now. I'm proud of you."

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I guess back in the day, from what I've heard from people who were in or experienced YouTube back in the day,

it wasn't even on the cards that you could make money from the thing. Whereas over time, like people now see, oh, oh yeah, there's monetization potential and you get this weird like incentives. Whereas I guess you were doing it for the bants. Whereas to be honest, even in 2017, I started YouTube because I saw there was like some kind of business opportunity here. That's awesome. I mean, yeah, I think it went, it was kind of in the very beginning. I feel like creators were kind of misfits and I can say that cause I'm putting myself in that, in that bucket.

kids, people who were just kind of internet kids. And then like the next few waves of creators, they became a lot more cool kids. And not only that, there were a lot of really talented people who

who had already done something with their lives and they were like, "Okay, YouTube is an opportunity to take it to the next level." So entrepreneurs or musicians or actors, they all created YouTube channels. So it also became quite competitive. And not only were you competing with people, you're competing with big companies like CNN. I don't know why CNN is my first big company on YouTube.

But every company now has a YouTube channel. All the late night shows all have clips and all that stuff. What were some of the challenges? So I suppose the challenges, I mean, to be honest, I think kind of learning that adults don't always know what's best just because they're older than you. So when you're young, you're doing really well and you don't know why it's kind of an accident.

You really try and look for advice from other people. And I think growing up, and this is something maybe all young people go through, I definitely did. You reach out to people who are older and they must know the answers and you get your advice and then you just do what they say.

And that's not always right. I mean, of course, people who are legal respect them, they usually do have a bit more experience, but you got to speak to the right people. You got to make the right calls. And that's partly why I do what I do today is like, I've made some mistakes, not like in terms of being canceled or things like that, but more just things along the way. I wish I knew when I was starting that,

things that make things a lot more efficient can help you in terms of burnout things like that like what?

Well, just for example, like just setting up how you set up your affairs as like a, you become a creator, you need to set up a company. How does that work? Where do you do that? How do you do that? Things like how do you set up a system whereby you don't feel alone as a creator? How do you create a team who can help you be consistent with your content without also taking away from it and making it to kind of maybe corporates? Some creators struggle with that. Like the reason they're so successful is because they're so organic.

But how do you keep that organic stuff going while scaling that up? So yeah, tons of just, there's tons of things. And then just in terms of mental health, how do you kind of stay, not grounded, but a lot of creators I've met struggle with anxiety. I think it's a lot of, not just creators, but just in general, young people. And having a job whereby there's not that many boundaries, there's no like,

off switch or you don't go home and you're done and you put up your your feet not saying it's really difficult all the time but you're kind of always on and uh i think you know a lot about that sort of stuff so keen to get your thoughts on boundaries too well i mean i think i think the level of which i know is very different uh kind of i i think the the super interesting thing um this sort of kind of seeing seeing your story is that

You were squarely in like the entertainment category. Yeah. Whereas I'm squarely in the education category. And I feel like it's easier to be in... It's way easier to be in education because you just teach people stuff. And if I need content, I'll read a book and talk about the book. It's like, how the hell do you be entertaining for like nine years in a row? And then also like the whole thing around... Well, you don't. Yeah. You make some shit videos. But carry on. Yeah. I think the difficulty of staying entertaining for a long period of time, plus also like...

The fact that I think you developed a very strong and sort of lifestyle vloggery type people have this strong parasocial relationship with the audience where they genuinely feel as if they're your friend and will be disappointed if you do anything bad and stuff like that. And also just the stratospheric growth and things and collabing with all these people. That...

that's something that I can't relate to at all because it's just felt pretty chill on my end because. Well, I think that's the genius of what you do. And, you know, you've, you can create formats a lot more, maybe a lot more than I say an entertainer. And I think, you know, when I do talk to creators and advise them, it's like, how can we come up with some formats about what you're doing? Because you don't want every single time you upload something the next week, you're like starting from scratch. And that's, I think again,

Again, we weren't trained. We didn't know how this worked at all. It was kind of accidental. We didn't understand what that really meant. We eventually started creating formats and things evolved. But yeah, I think being a gaming creator must be very challenging, but at the same time, they get these new games that come out every now and then, and then they can play those and the audience gets excited, like GTA 6 is coming out or whatever, and everyone can jump on that.

Whereas the entertainment creators are relying on their own relevancy. How can they keep pushing things? And yeah, I definitely very early on saw that. And I think that's also partly why I wanted to start building things that I could be like, if people don't care about me in three, four, five years, especially when I'm 60 or 70 years old.

what am I going to do then? And so that's also partly why I launched the companies I launched. This is literally the stuff I think about on a daily basis, but like, you know, I've been doing this for five years now. Like, well, what does it look like five years from now when I'm 50? Will I still be like, what's up guys? Welcome back to the channel. You've created infrastructure. I love like, that's why I also wanted to interview people a lot. I feel like then you're not reliant so much just on you. It's like bringing other people in their audience enjoys it.

and being almost a platform for people rather than it all being about Ali. Okay, so how did you... Okay, so I have so many questions on this. The first one... Well, I haven't done it. I didn't do it well myself, but I can try and give you advice. I mean, this is... How did you... What were the struggles slash talent challenges with burnout back in the day?

Because I guess the word wasn't used that often back in 2010 to 2015. It only really started going into people's vocabulary recently, I guess. And I feel like creators say it a lot, and I think people must be like, "What the fuck? Why are you..." Sorry, I don't know if I can swear. It's all good. Great.

Why are you burnt out? Your job is to travel the world having fun and you film it. And so I don't think burnout is by any means exclusive to creators. It's like a universal thing. But I think, I saw Grace Beverly talking about this, like no matter how, and she was on your podcast and she said this exact thing, maybe just put her video in, I don't have to say it. But no matter how much you enjoy what you're doing, and in the beginning, if you do it enough,

you start to get burnt out, especially if you push it too much and you don't take breaks and you don't have structure. So I mean personally, I just kept pushing through it as long as I could. And then luckily it got to a point where I really felt it and instead of making like a big deal out of it or anything, because it wasn't planned, I just said to myself, take a break.

And that break has basically led me here. That break was in 2019 and I haven't uploaded since. But I suppose what

What's so lucky is, and partly planned by me, is like I have a life outside of YouTube that I can get up every day and I'm just as excited about as I was making videos. So that's also hard. And I advise creators and YouTubers to have lives outside of their work or do work outside of YouTube as well that they can do one day.

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How did you maintain consistency over a nine-year period? There's going to be times where you just don't feel like doing video, but you sort of feel like, oh, I probably should because of the algorithm and stuff. How did you deal with that? Look, I think my videos were really getting pretty good near the end. In terms of the beginning and stuff, I was very lucky. A lot of people tuned in because they liked either me or my friends or the people I was interviewing. So in terms of consistency...

It wasn't always that consistent, but at that time on YouTube, people just loved it. It wasn't as maybe difficult. There wasn't as much choice. And also when there's certain hype around people, they can do anything and people might watch it. So there was a bit of that in the beginning.

But in terms of kind of learning how to stay consistent, I think, you know, formats were important. I did eventually bring in people who could help. And that's like the secret. That's literally my secret to anything I do in life is find people better than me and get them to help me do what I do or I can help them do what they do and we can work together. So, yeah, I do recommend like also pacing yourselves or pacing yourself in terms of consistency and just...

I think you have to be passionate. It's so hard to do anything if you're not enjoying what you're doing. And it's like running a marathon, even though it might be a simple thing like editing a video, if you just aren't enjoying it. So I think consistency comes when you follow your passions too. So do you think, because there's a lot of people, I run this course that helps people kind of start their YouTube channels and have accountability and community and stuff. And a lot of them really struggle with this thing around like,

you kind of do have to do it for a long time before you can expect to see any kind of results or if at all. And the thing I always say is like, find a way to make it fun because if you're doing it for the intrinsic joy of doing the thing, you're not worried about the numbers. And I find even now to this day, five years on, the less I think about numbers, the happier I am. And I think if you do it for the money, which takes... If you look, I think it's hard because on YouTube...

we're constantly served big creators. So we see like the, you know, the tip of the iceberg. So everyone thinks like, that's what you get to, but like 99.9% of people just don't. And so if you're doing it for that, you'll definitely probably quit before you get there. So you got to do it for something else. And then if that happens, that's great. And it's

Someone like MrBeast is a great example. He just loved it. He talks about this all the time. And if you look at him when he started, imagine anyone being able to look at his first video on YouTube and seeing him when he was, I don't know, nine years old, being like, this is going to be kind of the biggest entertainer in the world in 2022. You just wouldn't know. And he wouldn't know.

And so he couldn't have that as a goal because he probably wouldn't have made it. But he had smaller goals. For me, getting partnership was huge. Things like that. So if you enjoy it, that really helps. What sort of goals did you have along the way other than partnership? I suppose I wanted to be a talk show host. I thought that was my idea of heaven. And then...

Along the way, I realized that I used to get like massive anxiety every time I was going to interview someone who I really looked up to, who I had to kind of hold a conversation with.

After the interview, I was usually happy. But before, I would spend like five days just in utter fear of what am I going to ask Ed Sheeran? What am I going to say to Kevin Hart? I'm just name dropping here just to give you a bit of flavor. But it wasn't just them. It was the fact that it was the people around them, all of that stuff. And I actually realized as much as I wanted that goal, it was not necessarily for me. Yeah.

So if you were to, I'd say during the journey, let's say 2010 onwards, if you were to have sampled your contentment, on a scale of 0 to 10, how content are you day to day? Right now? I guess over time, what would that graph have looked like for you? I think in the very beginning, super content, just getting five subscribers a day. And then as things blew up, like,

like beyond the scale. Like this is a comedy. This is happening. Everything's so new. Everything's so exciting. And then, and then actually funny enough, even at like the height of it, I probably felt like I was achieving less than, than I felt when I was getting five subscribers a day, which is really weird. I think partly because I,

You compare yourself to people around you, and I was surrounded by other people killing it, and you're always like, okay, how do I get there? But I think it's also just human nature. You get kind of used to it. And then the pressure also gets added, you know,

I think it's natural to look at 100 comments and you see 99. People say this a thousand times and they're all positive, but you look at the one negative and that brings you down. But yeah, it's by no means a sob story. I'd say my contentment didn't last like it was in the very beginning, but it was still great. I still had a great time, met amazing people. But you definitely get used to

Whatever it is that you achieve in life, if it's money, if it's fame, if it's being rewarded for your academic achievements, I think you do get used to it and your happiness can't derive from those things. There is a certain base level whereby it's definitely difficult if you don't have, say, a certain amount of money. But once you get past that,

It doesn't make people happier at all. So it's a great lesson to learn. But a billion, I think it would change. If I had a billion, then I'd be so happy. I mean, most people say that if you take their net worth and multiply it by three, then they'd be happy. Oh, I just need three times as much. I've met some billionaires who are just so very unhappy. Why do you think that is? Because loads of people say this, but like, oh, there's so many unhappy billionaires. But like for someone, for a normal person, it's like, oh, well, it's easy to look at that and think,

I think, again, fame, money, whatever it is, it kind of accentuates whatever your personality is. So I think there's some billionaires who are probably really nice people and some really famous people. A lot of famous people are really nice people. And it's just made them even nicer because now they can do it on a crazy level.

But at the same time, if you're not a happy person, I think it can make it way worse. Because maybe you think, "Oh, this is going to finally bring you happiness," and you get there and you're like, "Oh, well, this hasn't worked." And then also everyone's kind of saying yes to you all the time, I'm sure, and that probably adds to everything. But yeah, it's fascinating. It's kind of scary that a lot of people do spend their whole lives after that, and you

It's hard to say 100% it doesn't actually lead to it, but I think from everything everyone's seen in the world, even if you look at people in the public eye and you see what happens to them when they get there, it's not always right. It's not always good. Yeah, did you see any like... Not that I've got there, by the way. I'm talking about people in meds. Like there's almost a trope that you see of musicians and stuff that they get famous and then suddenly they're on drugs and alcohol, going to rehab, etc., etc.,

I haven't looked at Ed Sheeran as someone who has avoided that somehow. Yeah, but I think he struggled with anxiety and he's spoken about that a lot. And that's kind of, again, there's something, it makes whatever you maybe have in your life a lot more extreme. I guess in the world of creators, YouTubers, what did you see as being the downsides of fame?

YouTube is very transparent. So everyone sees exactly how things are going. I think, you know, in the old days as an actor, maybe it's also quite similar with a musician, maybe that's why they get so stressed. But like everyone can see exactly how you're doing on YouTube every time. So you're only as kind of good as your last video. And I think no matter what people say, and they're like, I don't care like how it's going or whatever, they look at that and they're like, fuck, that video's not got 10 million views in a day.

I wanted 12, which is so weird because you're like, 10 million views is crazy. Yeah. Yeah, I think you see that at every level of the thing. And this is why I often, like, I find that...

you know, the numbers wax and wane when you see the analytics just in front of you every single day. It's just like, oh, last video was eight out of 10 on the analytics. God, next one really needs to be good. Oh shit, the next one's not good. Crap. Beginning of the end, like I'm irrelevant now and no one's going to care. Were you having those sorts of thoughts? Well, yeah, the problem is when you allow the good to make you feel happy, you allow the bad to make you feel sad. And so you've got to almost avoid getting too excited when things are going well with certain things because you've got to try and find that happiness outside. Like,

I've got this most incredible girlfriend, Amber, and we've been together for five years now. And, you know, I'm currently going through, you know, many things with my businesses, good, bad, loads of great things. And sometimes there's difficult days. And like going home and just kind of switching off and getting my happiness from just hanging out with her is a lot healthier. And it makes me feel like hopefully when things don't go so well, because that's bound to happen,

that hopefully that won't affect me as much. As long as I don't let the really good stuff make me super happy. Not saying don't take any happiness from it, but don't rely on it for your happiness. Yeah. In 2017, you talked about... You made a video talking about your experience with having Tourette's. Yeah. For people who might not have heard about it, what is Tourette's and how did that affect your life? Yeah, so Tourette's, I think in the mainstream media, is people...

who swear a lot and they just can't control it and they say like really inappropriate things

or people who do like loads of things with their arms, which is kind of physical tics. And I kind of, I struggled a little bit with both, but less swearing. I used to whistle, used to bob my head like that, used to click my leg. Actually, one time we were on safari in South Africa and there was an elephant and our car broke down, kind of, like it wouldn't start, we couldn't start the engine and it was looking at us and it was going like...

with its ears, you know, and that's when they hate you. And then I just had to make this monkey noise. Like, I know it sounds ridiculous, but I screeched. And that was kind of one of the first times my parents were like, okay, shit. Like, I think I was like six at the time.

and they're like, "This is... he can't control these things." We researched it, there wasn't that much out about it at the time. And yeah, eventually got on lots of medication, some of the medication actually led to horrible allergic reactions.

But yeah, it got really bad around 12 years old. Just got, obviously it's something quite easy to bully someone about. So it got a bit bullied. Teachers would kind of kick me out of class if they didn't really understand it, which sounds crazy because we explained it to them, but maybe they thought I was still taking the piss.

And yeah, it was tough, but what made it better was when I was focusing on something. So if I was playing tennis or if I was playing computer games or if I was making YouTube videos, or even now, like I'm focusing, it always improved. And so I think that's partly why I got so obsessed with, well, maybe lots of people in South Africa were out there hanging out with their friends and so on. Maybe I was more obsessed in what I was doing because it was an escape.

So yeah, but now I think around 50% I don't know what the stat is, but a lot of people with Tourette's when they're younger When they get older it gets a lot better And and someone one of those lucky ones who it hasn't got a worse. It's kind of gotten a lot better for me Yeah, yeah, how how was it kind of making a video about it talking about the experience so interestingly

It was never kind of a big part of what I did, but I realized that there were going to be a percentage of my followers who had Tourette's. And there was nothing better than when I heard that the US football goalkeeper had Tourette's. I don't even know his name. It's not a big deal to me, but just hearing of someone's kind of successful having Tourette's made me feel really good. So I was like, okay, maybe there'll be someone...

in my audience who can listen to this. So I made a video about it and yeah, people reacted really well. I'm sure there were some comments, but that was the time when I looked at the positive comments and I was like, that's great. And yeah, it's something I'm actually proud of that I went through because I think it's important to have challenges in life. And yeah, that's something I had as a challenge.

I read somewhere that you worked into mindfulness and meditation. What was your journey with those things? So my mom used to do it and she used to try to get me to meditate when I had Tourette's and that didn't work. So many years later, this was actually during lockdown, so I had this crazy experience where

I didn't see people very much. And then when I did, for some reason I was getting so socially anxious. And it could be something like sitting in the car with a really good friend, like my best friend, I could be in the car with him and I could basically have a panic attack. And it really came out of nowhere. And I'm not sure if it's related to just stress at the time or... I still don't know why it happened, but I sought out therapy.

And, you know, we worked through it. But one of the things the guy recommended was to meditate. And so I downloaded the Calm app and I learned about meditation.

experiencing feelings in my body and thoughts and kind of noticing them for what they are and not taking them as seriously as I used to. But yeah, that said, it was still, it doesn't just fix it. It's not one of those things. I think some people think like if I meditate 10 times this week, everything's going to be good. You still have, there's still other factors at play. But over time it's definitely kind of helped alongside

just doing things again and doing things that I'm uncomfortable with. Uncomfortable with? So yeah, like for example, podcasts. Yeah. You know, I'm not asked on that many podcasts, but I've been asked on probably 10 podcasts this year and I've said no to every single one. And because I was like, what if I have a panic attack while I'm doing a podcast, which is, you'd probably look at me now and you're like, you probably don't seem like that. Yeah.

But, but yeah, I, so I was avoiding it. And then I was like, I got the DM from you and I'm already getting a lot better. Like the last kind of year and a half, I've just been trying to do things that make me scared. And I was like, okay, this is a great opportunity. He seems like a really nice guy. This is not going to be intimidating. And now I'm going to do it. And even before this, I'm obviously, I was pretty nervous. Um, but yeah,

But now I've done it, I'm going to probably do more. And so that's also my advice. One is meditating, but two, if something really scares you, obviously don't jump right into the deep end, but try and do it because it's way worse in your head. Especially things like sitting in the car with my friend. I mean, there's nothing dangerous about that, but something about that was giving me anxiety. You didn't have anxiety before this?

Not so much. No, no. But I think it is related to Tourette's. I mean, Tourette's, ADD, bit of OCD, all of these things are kind of related. So yeah, you know, it's something my mom struggled with, my sister struggles with. So yeah. But I think, you know, again, it's one of those things which at the time it sucks and so on. But if you can use it

to teach yourself lessons and also appreciate when you're not feeling anxious and you're just like, "Wow, I feel normal." And then you just enjoy simple things, then it's actually a bit of a power too. What does your meditation practice look like? So it's super competitive. The opposite of what meditation should be. I basically sit down and listen to Calm. What's her name on Calm?

There's this one, Teresa, is her name Teresa or something? Everyone, people in the comments will know who I'm talking about. And she basically does a guided meditation and I do that. But sometimes even before I'm doing something that's difficult, I'll just take some time to breathe. No matter what happens, I'll feel nervous. Like I can't stop that. But I'll notice what that is and I'll be like, okay, what's the worst that can happen? You can end up in hospital.

What's the worst that can happen? You could die. Okay, that sucks. I'm just catastrophizing here. Okay. That's what usually goes through my brain. So then what do you do? Then I'm just like, fuck! Then I just go and do it. No, you just go and do it. And then I just feel like you breathe. You can even get things like this, which you might think, why do I have this? And when I first met you, we shook hands and I had it in my hand. You probably don't remember. But this is like, it's just like something I can play with. It distracts me.

Things like that. You just come up with your own stories of things that work for you. Maybe going for a run, for example, in the morning could also help kind of release stress. Things like that. Makes life quite fun.

trying to like coming up with ways to get through things and then the best thing is once you finally do something you're really nervous about or you struggled with in the past and you actually do it there's no better feeling like after this podcast I'm just gonna go home being like yeah I did it battle through exactly

Yeah. So this is something I've been, I've been looking into a fair bit. I mean, firstly, thank you for being so open. This is great. Like, um, I'm sure there are people listening to this who are fully relating with all of the things you're saying and like, oh my God, thank God someone's talking about this. Well, I saw, I think, saw Lewis Capaldi recently talk about this. That makes me feel good. Like it's not just me. So yeah. Cause seeing him struggle makes me feel great. Yeah. Cause especially with a lot of the, a lot of the mental health stuff as well. Like it's,

It's so easy to think that this is just the way I am, this is normal, and that no one else has those struggles. But hearing people like you being open about it on podcasts is just super nice and helpful. Yeah, thank you. I've been...

doing a bunch of research for the book that i'm writing around um like uh energy and and like uh sympathetic versus parasympathetic nervous system um i'll pretend i know what those mean sympathetic nervous system you know when you're in sort of stress mode when you're in fight or flight yeah and you literally you know this stuff well can you give me a session yeah we'll give it a go um but there's

It's sort of even people who say that they don't, who wouldn't identify with struggling with anxiety. There's some stat that like 75% of the workforce in, at least in the US, feels that sort of sympathetic activation in that sort of stress anxious mode while they're at work.

And, you know, there's a lot of stuff around how evolutionarily it made sense that, you know, there was a bit of a threat in the grass and now you want to be in fight or flight mode because you might have to run away from a tiger. But, you know, having a conversation with your boss at work or being in the car with your friend, like where the brain tricks us into being in reactive fight or flight mode. And weirdly, there's like so much science around just like deep breathing, like, you know, short circuit sympathetic mode activates parasympathetics, which is like rest and recharge mode.

And retraining, again, I'm not going to know the words that you know, like retraining those things in your brain that kind of every time at that point when I didn't want to get in a car, I was like, every time I got to a car, it just happened. And you just got to

slowly learn how to deal with it and eventually you can retrain your mind not to have that feeling and so that's why you know people who get to where they get to it's from practice they don't not everyone starts off super confident and and and able to do everything it takes time and that's why i love hearing people like lewis capaldi or whoever it is saying like how difficult it was yeah so 2019 you upload your last youtube video

You decide that you're going to take a break. Yeah, I should have made like a I'm quitting YouTube video. That would have been good. That would have been like Ninja's recent thing. I'm back, baby. Why did you take that extended break and why did it extend for so long? So it was also around the time things were kind of going into lockdown. So I was taking, I think around the time, if I remember correctly, I took like a few months break.

The businesses also that I'm involved in, so I've got a few things that I do outside of YouTube and they were really starting to take up a lot of time. And at the same time, I wasn't enjoying what I was doing as much. I don't think my audience was even enjoying what I was doing that much at the time. There just wasn't this feeling of like momentum. And so I just didn't think about it too much. I was like, "It's gonna take a few weeks."

and that turned into years. And now I'm loving what I'm doing. And so I suppose to be a YouTuber now, you really have to, it has to be a big priority and it has to kind of almost be a full-time job unless you have a great team. So I wasn't prepared to do that because I needed to also focus on my other ventures.

Yeah. So when you say momentum and you felt the audience wasn't enjoying it, like what were those signs? What was that like? So, I mean, yeah, it's just, I feel like, you know, views aren't at the same place as they were when you were, when you're on your way up. But yeah, also struggling with ideas, struggling just to be like, I want to make this video. I think YouTube, it went also from a place whereby, you

if you had a certain amount of subscribers those subscribers would see your content to being about how much time was your audience watching your video so the watch time became super important um and yeah that was that was it's difficult it's difficult to keep going especially as we spoke about earlier in terms of entertainment and youtube and

I just saw it as a great opportunity to focus on what I was doing. And not also, I didn't want to stay on YouTube as long as I possibly could and just wait. I wanted to be like, this was a great chapter in my life. I really enjoyed it. It went really well. And now I'm doing this. What was the story behind the first offshoot business? Yeah, so one of my companies is called Influencer.com.

That's a good domain. Thank you. How much did that cost? Yeah, I mean, so my co-founder actually got it. It's like a house. But it's definitely helpful. So essentially, at the time, my co-founder was like, he was about 20 years old. He was friends with my girlfriend at the time. And he asked her if he could meet with me. And we met.

And I spent like three hours with him. Firstly, what you said, I was so impressed by the domain. And then he kind of told me about his dream of helping creators work with brands at scale. And I just thought the one big problem right now with the space is that creators are working with brands they don't really like to work with. And there's not much choice for creators.

And so I was like, this is a great opportunity for creators to be able to make a living from what they do and choose the right brands to work with. And hopefully their audience will see that too. And then they'll be happy for the creator. So yeah, that's how we kind of got going. The vision was to build meaningful relationships between brands, creators and their audiences.

At the time, it was just the two of us. Since then, we've scaled the team to five countries. We've got 93 people there. And yeah, we've worked with amazing brands, amazing agencies. And yeah, just so proud of the culture we built there. The leadership team. Yes, it's been a great experience. What's your role? So I'm chief visionary officer and co-founder. So I get really involved in

In a number of areas. Firstly, I am Ben's shoulder to cry on, who's our CEO. Everything that happens, he comes to me and we talk about it. That's really great when you have a business where you have a co-founder that you're so open with.

Essentially, I help guide the product, what creators want, because I speak to a lot of creators. I was a creator. Then also working with the brands and helping guide their creative strategy. So what kind of content works on different platforms? And not only on different platforms, what kind of content works on the features within those platforms? It sounds quite obvious, but

When you're working with a brand who says, we want to work with 300 creators and we want to create this campaign and it needs to hit this, this and this. And then all the different creators within that have their own styles, their own objectives. And you kind of have to bring that all together. That's when you need a company that not only has incredible people working there who understand the space, but also the technology, which can

connects everything together. So for example, pulls in information from the APIs to share with the brand, making sure it's all legitimate and it's not screenshots.

That's what we've built at Influencer. That's super exciting. - So what is the product? 'Cause I think I last looked at it in 2018 or 2019, something like that, where I was like, "Oh, I can work with Starbucks." And then it was like, "Oh, but you..." And it's like, "Oh, you connect your..." It was very solid onboard. I was like, "Wow, this is good onboarding." - Thank you. Yeah, yeah. And to be honest, we didn't focus on creators for the first kind of four or five years as much as I'd like to in terms of the product because we needed to get the brands

on board, so we needed to build great products for them so that they would spend more money with our creators. But now we're able to focus on the creators a lot more when it comes to products. So we have waves for advertisers, which essentially allows the brands to log on, choose the creators they want to work with. Once that happens, they're able to kind of guide the content exactly how it's going to look, how it's going to feel, approve it.

and then also receive all the analytics afterwards. So it's kind of like what a Trello board looks like. So it's kind of like a Trello board, but within each layer, the stats are being pulled in directly from the APIs. So it's all in one place. It allows, again, people might not realize, but influencer marketing, there's so many stages to it. You might have a brand, then you have an agency,

Then you have us sometimes who comes in, then you have a manager, and then you have a talent. So you've got five stakeholders all wanting to approve a piece of content. And so it's very difficult when you're doing that with 300 creators with five of those people. And so basically the product does that for them.

And for creators, we've got Waves for Creators now, which is coming out on app right now. Right now it's web app, but now it's coming out on iPhone and Android. And it essentially allows creators to build media kits that pulls in the information automatically. That's handy. So you can have one link you share with everyone. That's so convenient. You don't have to screenshot little things and update the stats manually. Exactly. And then obviously it's also going to allow you to work with brands and be discoverable. Yeah.

And yeah, it's very, very exciting, but it is different. I suppose a lot of creators, I speak to build consumer facing businesses, which they could come on your podcast and they can be like, "Here's my product, come and buy it." And I kind of always wanted to do B2B stuff.

And I think it's because I was, I maybe struggled. I'm not good at selling to my own audience. I know what you mean. It's really hard selling to individuals. Exactly. Whereas B2B... Businesses want to spend money to make money. Exactly. And also it's kind of more unique as a creator in that space because only 10% I think of creative businesses are B2B, whereas the rest are consumer. Yeah.

So it was a kind of a good spot for me to go and see. It's really solid. Like I've been speaking to a few people who've, um, on the podcast recently who have had like big multi tens of millions of dollars exits. Um,

from B2B companies, B2B marketing thingies that have a bit of a technology underlay. It seems like you guys have a strong technology. Exactly. Underlying foundation. Business is very valuable. And it's not tied to you as an individual and your own personal relevancy. Exactly. Which must be like very non-stressful in a way. Exactly what I wanted to try and do. And yeah, no, it's been great. And then...

I also have Margravine with Joe Sugg. So Margravine's a management company that we started with, do you know WME IMG? - Yeah, I've heard of those. The big agency type thing. - Yeah, they represent people like Jessica Alba. I don't know why that's the one celebrity that comes to my mind. But we convinced them to launch a management company with us that basically could help our talent when it comes to both the digital careers, but also the more traditional stuff. So it's kind of bringing those two things together.

And the reason I love that is because I get to work with like creators who are starting out today and try and act like a grandfather and be like, back in my day, it was like this. And this is what I did. These are the mistakes I made. And then we've built a great team there too. So we actually just opened an office in LA last week.

So yeah, it's been really fun. What does a day in your life look like? Or a week in your life if it's two? Yeah, so because I'm working across multiple things, there's two other things we haven't mentioned yet. Actually, okay, so for context, what are the two other things and then we can map this out. So we've got proper living. I mean, this is why it's embarrassing when people say, what do you do? And then I try and go into this speech. I'm like, people are probably thinking you're just some guy from LA who thinks he does all these things. But yeah.

But basically I got another thing called Proper Living, which is a student accommodation business, an excuse for me to go back to South Africa. And so we have like 200 apartments. .co.za. I remember that domain. So those are the days. And that actually is consumer. Yeah. However...

Funny enough, we're also selling to buildings. So we want them to use our brand so that we then can sell it to them. How the hell did you start a student property rental business? You go from being an entertainment YouTuber to a real estate mogul. What's going on there? So essentially, it was an opportunity brought to me as an investment. So they said, do you want to invest in this property? It's going to be a student accommodation business. And I said, that's cool. Maybe I'll do it. But

And it struck me that student accommodation in South Africa, at least, I'm sure it's like this internationally too, but it had terrible social media. It had terrible marketing. It had terrible branding. And so I thought, okay, I'll invest the money, but I also want to basically start a company where...

whereby we build a brand and then going forward when you build buildings you use my brand and we go like that. So yeah, we built this really cool brand. We started with a building with 90 rooms. We've got now our third building this year so it'll be over 200 and we have a waiting list of like 1.5k students in Cape Town which is crazy because

There's not that many kids in Cape Town. But at the same time, what's great about it is 1.5K is not a lot of people in terms of a consumer product. But when it comes to accommodation, it's very meaningful. That's what I've been building with. So that's what's quite fun. We've seen this product that is usually...

It's kind of a big ticket item for someone, but it wasn't being sold correctly to people. So that was the idea there. So what do you do with this company? So with Proper Living? Yeah, with Proper Living. So Proper Living, we're just scaling over the next 30 years. Yeah, but what...

What do you personally do? I'm a founder, a co-founder on the board. And basically, I just help run it. But with Proper Living, we have a great management team. I'm not kind of like day-to-day on the ground trying to check people into their rooms.

But that's also something I've, again, to do all of these things, it sounds a bit crazy. And you're like, how do you, why do you do all of these things? It's really the teams I've put together or the teams that have come together. And then they've wanted me to be involved. And then I really let them like do what they do, which is like operate. And I'm there to really just help elevate. That sounded very cringy, but hopefully it works. No, I'm loving this. Like this is like kind of, if we think of what does the evolution of a creator look like?

It's like you've got, you know, starting off doing all the YouTube videos yourself, doing your own editing and stuff. Then you've got sort of the next level where you build a little bit of a team around you. Like I've got my editor, I've got my thumbnail guy. I never did that. I skipped that. You skipped that step. And then it's always like, all right, cool. Now I need to build products and shit within the own ecosystem. So you try and sell stuff to your own audience. And then it's like, oh crap, this is all still based on my own relevancy. Therefore, let me build a brand like James Hoffman's physical goods company. Let me build a brand that is not within...

But that's not tied to my own relevancy, but I can just be the marketing driver or the marketing director for the said brand. And it's like, you've sort of gone to sort of two levels up, which is even, which is like, okay, cool. Let's build a brand. Let me be the co-founder or maybe the owner and we'll get another team to operate it.

And then it's like, sort of the next level up from that is like, I'm going to be a board member and co-founder of multiple things, hire a CEO and like a management team to run all of them so that I get to do the fun visionary type marketing type stuff. And other people get to do the boring day to day management stuff. I wish it was all planned. It just kind of, as things go and develop over time, you, I suppose you get a leverage.

Either is it money that you could invest into something or have you got a ton of, you have a network that you could introduce people to? And yeah, you just find great people. You make sure that they really are passionate about what they're doing. But yeah, I've been super fortunate. I mean, the people running these companies are like the heroes. So I'm just like the lucky guy. So, yeah.

So we've got influencer, we've got the management, we've got proper living. What's item number four on the portfolio? This is super exciting. An exclusive for you.

We're doing water. No, I'm joking. Sorry. That's not that. Speaking of. But no, so I've got a fund as well now that I'm a partner in. That sounds fancy. What is a fund? So it's called Creative... What is a fund? What is a fund? So there's many different types of funds. This is a venture capital fund. So we invest in early stage startups. We take kind of a small ticket size, usually like 1% of the business. Okay.

and we help the entrepreneur scale. - Pre-Seed, Series A? - Between Seed and Series A. Sometimes we have done a B before, a Series B, and basically these are just different stages in companies in kind of their raising capital careers, raising capital careers in their growth journeys.

And, yeah, I mean, right now, kind of the titles are being a bit blurred with some people. Like, they're changing, like, they're saying, we're doing a pre-seed, a pre-pre-pre-seed, all these things. But usually the business we invest in are worth kind of between, you know, $12 million.

to 50 million and uh we we try and you know get get a person not a not a big amount we don't come in there as the lead but we invest how did you set this up was this a thing someone came to you and was like casper mate you should be a partner in this VC fund so yeah so essentially um

Early on, when I started Influencer, other entrepreneurs started to come to me and basically say, would you like to be an investor? They liked the idea, I think, of having a creator on their cap table, someone who could talk about their company. And I think they also liked the idea that I also had my own kind of business and maybe there are some experiences which I could share with them. And so I've got a genius partner called Sasha Kaletsky.

At the time he was at Harvard Business School being really smart. He was like top 1% of everything he ever did. I said to him, "Is this a good investment?" Because I wasn't an investor. I didn't know what a good investment looked like, especially in venture capital, which is a very unique asset class. He saw some of them and he was like, "That's not good. That's not good. Oh, well, that is good. Actually, can I invest in that with you?"

And we went to the founders and they're like, yeah, you can invest with Casper. And so he kind of realized that as just a very smart guy, the founders weren't that interested in having him just invest.

because they could get, especially the best companies in the world, they can get money from anywhere. But what the founders wanted was creators on their cap table and then celebrities, musicians, people that they could talk about or could talk about their products. - Ashton Kutcher. - Exactly. - People like that. - Exactly. So then Sasha was like, "Hmm, what about if we put together a collective of creators and we all start investing together?" So essentially we invested in about

kind of seven companies with YouTubers, musicians, actors, and we would just bring them deals and we would invest. And then Sascha, my partner, he would invest his own money. So he was just making money by being able to come into these really good investments.

That did really well. There were some great paper returns, it was a good time. But then we also had an accident in a company called Faceit, which is a gaming platform. It merged with another company, but then eventually it was $1.5 billion it sold for.

And so, yeah, we returned our fund. Well, not our fund at the time. It was just a group of us investing, but we returned all the money. So all the seven companies, one of them returned the fund? One of them returned all the investments, yeah. Sick. It was great. So now everything's still going. There's some really good, they're absolutely killing it. But within three years, you don't really expect many exits. Yeah, I mean, it's more like a five to 10 year time horizon, isn't it?

But then people saw that and Sasha was working at a company called Bridgepoint, which is like a huge private equity firm. They've got like 30 billion under assets or something. And he told them he wanted to set up a fund and we set it up and some of the top guys there invested. And yeah, we set out to raise like $10 million or something like that. We raised $20 million in

And now we get to invest in some incredible consumer internet startups around the world alongside incredible creators. And yeah, it's very fun.

Why are you doing all this? Why not put your feet up, have a good time with Amber, live the chill life? It's just, to be honest, working with good people I really enjoy. I think when we go back to what I said about those businesses I am involved in, I am operationally involved, but

But I do see myself as an investor. I love to do loads of things. I don't like having all my eggs in a single basket. And so I think investing in stuff is great because I can help them in terms of giving them advice as an entrepreneur, but also kind of navigate this social media space. And a lot of these companies now, they take social media very seriously. That's how a lot of them grow, as you know.

And so, yeah, I feel like I can provide value. I like to wake up every day and have a challenge. It's just good fun. And, you know, we're just getting started. I'm still in my 20s. Yeah. So let's see. So not time to, I guess, retire yet.

Because something... Okay, so I've had a few chats on this pod in the last few days where I've had this idea floating in my mind of, hey, this seems kind of cool, working with businesses and stuff. And I think, oh, I'm only 28. Why won't anyone listen to me? And I was like, freaking, like, you're literally doing the thing that's like at the pinnacle of kind of the evolution of creator economy. Well, I think it's like...

Again, it's the people who I'm working with. I'm somehow getting very lucky with getting them to wanting to do stuff with me. For example, the fund without Sasha doesn't exist, but I'm hopefully providing him with something where he can also say the same thing. That's what a really good partnership feels like. It goes back maybe to the really start of my career on YouTube was I couldn't convince people to collaborate with me when I had...

20 subscribers. I couldn't convince people with 10,000 subscribers to collaborate with me then. When I got to 10,000 subscribers, I could do stuff with them. When I got to whatever I got to, you can start to do stuff with people. What I recommend is just really collaborate with as many people as you can. Don't just say on day one, I'm going to reach out to Elon Musk and ask him to invest in my company.

Build up slowly, get people who are doing stuff. And as you build up and you get more and more people to help you, you eventually get more and more leverage. And then eventually somehow you're doing cool shit and people...

People kind of think you just got there overnight, but there's like years and years of work that went into that. I guess it's worth bearing in mind you started in like 2010. So like you've been- Yeah. But you're, I mean, you're killing it. I've seen how many people are downloading your courses. Yeah. But like, you know, view to subscriber ratio is going down over time and all that. Will that be relevant three years from now? All of that shit. But that's the thing. I feel like there's just such an opportunity for anyone who understands the space, like you do new media. Yeah.

There's just so many things you can do and it doesn't just have to be your stuff. It can be helping, for example, do you know Josh Peters? He does like pranks. Josh Peters and Archie Manners. So he's like my best friend. We actually live together still. And he does these incredible YouTube videos

but he also realizes that's great, but he can also help. He can create his own advertising company. He can help other brands that share his vision and are quite cheeky. He can help them create incredible content. And so now he's doing that as well. And so I really, I guess, if there are any creators listening, I'm going to create a bit of competition for myself, which I probably shouldn't, but don't just look at creating consumer products. Look at the B2B space to help

help do some stuff there and get everyone on the same wavelength because a lot of brands out there don't know what they're doing and we've got to help them. What drives you these days? What drives me? Presumably it's not making more money at this stage. Presumably. But like, I mean, there's always like a bit of part of it. Investors are always like, oh, but like, really, come on. What drives me?

I suppose it's going back to doing little challenges, trying to do things I'm scared of because I get like a huge rush once I've done it. But yeah, I kind of... It's like doing cool shit. Yeah, doing cool shit, just enjoying love. I kind of just every day I look at my calendar and it's kind of made up of a little bit of influencer, a little bit of margarita, a little bit of creative ventures and so on. And it's so fun to like get to meet all these people. Right now I also enjoy...

mentoring some people in my company who maybe this could be their first job and things like that, and just getting to speak to them and seeing what they're doing, that kind of stuff. I know that's what you have to say when you're on a podcast. What else inspires me? I don't know. I guess challenge. I've spoken to someone who actually, and you've spoken to many of these people who've sold

a business maybe they've built up and they've like thought the day that they sell their business will be the happiest day of their life. And it's a very happy day. But what happens is like a week or two later, they start like itching and going, what's my meaning? Like, I don't want to just go and play golf for the rest of my life. And they realize like that humans are built to have challenges. It's like when you play the Sims on cheat mode, right? Am I right? What was the cheat mode on the Sims? Yeah.

I remember when it was in Word. It was like unlimited. I used to play SimCity. Yeah. Did you ever play on cheat? Oh, yeah. Was that more fun or less fun than... It was always fun for a bit. Let's get Taipei 101. Let's shove that. Twin Towers. Let's put them in the town. Let's get Empire State Building. Put it over there.

All right, I'm bored now. Yeah, exactly. Whereas if I'd taken it seriously, I would have understood. But I'm definitely not playing life on cheat mode yet. It's still, yeah. Still some zeros to go. Still some time to go. Let's say, I don't know, let's say you had 100 million in the bank. Would there be any difference between your calendar, that hypothetical and now? Probably not, no. Nice, that's a good place to be. Yeah, yeah.

Yeah, because that was like three weeks ago I had it 100 million. So now it's gone down to like 84. Crypto is a bit... I think...

In life, I think, no. I just enjoy it. I really do. That's sick. Would you? Would you change things? So the only thing I would change is I probably wouldn't sell courses anymore. I'd just chuck them on YouTube for free. I think courses are the only thing that I do that actually... But that's not a scheduling thing.

uh no it's not scheduling but in terms okay if you're gonna go like that yeah yeah um yeah i think there's a lot more things i could do to help other people that i'd love to do definitely um in what way do you want to help other people like do you have an idea of what sort of quick service you want to offer to the world as cringe as that sounds but i do think it will involve south africa um i think it's it's going through a very difficult time uh

And there's just unlimited things you could do there to try and make a difference. So I would like to set up an NGO in South Africa one day around young people, around education. Education there is just, it's not where it should be like many places. And so even as someone who never went to university myself, I just see the power of going to school, of learning, you know, being safe at school, having a meal, all those things. Like I'm so lucky now

You know, to have grown up in a home where I could get a camera. Things like that. There's so many things I had in my life that if I didn't have, I would have had no chance. So I just want to try and give that to a few more people one day. Okay, so if you...

I guess you've been in this sort of online world now for a very long time. And we have, you know, a bunch of kind of young entrepreneurs and actually a lot of older people who want to become entrepreneurs listening to this, who love the idea of being able to do what they love and make a living from what they love, whether that's the creator world or the business world or the freelancer world or anything like that.

Do you have any general top tips, things that you've learned over these, big question, but like things you've learned of these last 12 years that you think. Hold on, let me have a look at my answers here. Yeah. Top 10 tips. No, this is my thing is, it's not about how hard you work. It's about how smart you work. So if you're just spending tons of time on something, that doesn't mean it's going to reap rewards. It's not always the right thing to be doing. So be prepared to

not only, obviously I'm not saying don't work hard, but work smart, be prepared to walk away from things that aren't actually gonna work. But that said, you could also work away from the next fucking Facebook. So again, I caveat all my answers with like, I'm like a contrarian to myself. Then just again, surround yourself with people that you aspire to be more like. So it's a pretty common thing that people say, but like the five people you spend most of your time with become the person you are or you become the person.

So surround yourself with people like that. Know your value. Everyone's good at something. And when you know your value, sell yourself. When you meet people, try your best. Obviously, don't just go in there

and brag about yourself, but be confident and remind people why it's important that you're around and you're involved. Like for me, I think my angle is a creator who hopefully understands business. And so I always remind people of that and try and make sure like everyone knows this is what they can come to me for. And then when they think of something, maybe they think, oh, I need someone to come to a panel. Oh, him, because I make it very clear what I can add.

I suppose meeting people, I spoke about our fund earlier. We don't meet everyone, but we try and meet as many entrepreneurs as we can, just because even if it's not the perfect business for us to invest in, because we probably only invest in like 1% of the deals we do. I mean, the deals we look at, but we want to meet everyone.

have a conversation, learn something from them. They can hopefully learn something from us and they can walk away with a good experience because you never know where those people are going to end up. And like, there are a lot of people out there who only give time of day to people who they think they can get something from now. And I think that is like,

I think that's a short term, it makes sense, but long term, it's actually really stupid. And when I say it makes sense, it's just, it's a shitty way to be, but you can see why people think, oh, why would I spend time with this person? Don't be like, that's just so, so silly because everyone has something to add now. And also you never know where they're going to be. So those are a few tips. I mean,

I don't know if you have anything to add. I don't know. I mean, honestly, I was surprised that you said yes to the podcast. Really? Because I was thinking that, oh, it's a bit of a long shot. Caspary's a big deal. You had MKBHD. Is that how you say it? He's like the best. Yeah, he happened to have seen some of the videos. There we go. That's kind of cool. I mean, yeah, it just, as I said, I don't, look,

Look, I don't get asked to go on every podcast in the world, but I haven't been on a podcast probably in a very long time. I'm just a big fan of what you do. Do you ever struggle with procrastination? Yes. What do you do about it? Not great.

I think, okay, here we go. The answer is to make sure someone else is going to be disappointed if you don't do it. So I'm a people pleaser. So for example, I don't have a PT, but let's just say I had a PT and I wanted to get really strong in the gym.

I would go to the gym not to disappoint that person. Yeah, I've got my PT session at seven today. There you go. And you don't want to disappoint them. Whereas if it's just me and my silo, I'm going to like just come up with an excuse. So when it comes to like waking up early, if I want to wake up early and I'm like, I procrastinate, I don't like doing that. I'll set something really early that I have to go to and then I'll do it. I love doing that too. Like sort of the 8am breakfast. You hate yourself for it, but you have to do it. And then you're there, you've got the coffee, it's like, ah.

I'm glad I woke up for this. So just being around other people, doing stuff with other people. I think that's why creators also struggle a lot. A lot of them work in silos. And when they don't have a team, it's really hard because you're procrastinating. There's no one else kind of there to take account for what you're doing. Hmm.

So I think that helps. Yeah. But I'm, again, by no means good at that. I'm a procrastinator. What do you do when you're struggling to motivate yourself to do something, but you feel like, oh, I've got to do this thing, but I don't really feel like it right now? I just don't do it. I mean, I try and think about how I'm going to feel good afterwards. I mean, running, for example...

I like to use running as a tool to make me a better person, if that makes sense. So again, this morning I had to go to run because I wanted to be in a good spirit for this.

And so I feel like if you can, if you're doing good things and you got to make a real reason for them to exist and why you do it, if you don't really want to do it and it's not going to help you, then don't do it. But if it is going to help you, then just think about how much it's going to help. I think. Does that make any sense? It does. Yeah. I haven't done this guru stuff in a while, but trying my best. Grandfather Casper. Yeah.

A lot of people, when they become successful, they're like, work-life balance and rest. But they don't tell you that when for the first 10 years of their career, they were grinding and sort of had no balance at all. What are your thoughts on work-life balance? I do actually think it's important. I think I'm very fortunate again that

with what I do to have people who are so good at what they do. So I don't feel like I have to constantly grind. What about in the early days? In the early days, no, I mean, no, I just didn't stop, but it didn't feel like a grind. So that's maybe the answer is like, if it feels like a grind, then it's probably, you're not going to be able to make it without burning out.

But some people are grinding because they're just on such a hike because they love what they're doing or they're seeing momentum. And then you can just keep going. Yeah, I think that's the thing. Like with a lot of these, like I've asked this question to so many people, like super successful entrepreneurs and stuff. And they're always like,

Yeah, there's not a lot you can do to get away from the fact that especially in the early days, you're going to put in loads of work. And if you enjoy that work, it doesn't feel like work. But if you're, it's like, my friend, Tiago Forte tweeted like a few months ago that I often think about, which is that,

You can't really outwork someone for whom it feels like play or something like that. Exactly. If I'm having fun cracking out YouTube videos and courses and shit, there's no way someone who considers that a grind is ever going to get that same output. So I don't really like the stuff on YouTube, which is like, you got to wake up at 5 a.m. No matter how upset you are with your life, you got to do it.

Because like, you could watch that. I don't know if that was good. That was my American YouTube accent. Yeah.

But I just don't think that's sustainable. Maybe it's good when you're on the treadmill to listen to that kind of stuff. But as you said, you've got to enjoy what you're doing. But also, you've got to remember, don't just walk away from something because it's not fun one day. You've got to also, like, you're going to go through tough times and you've got to just keep pushing. Yeah. How do you know? So you've done lots of projects and stuff, right?

How do you know when to quit something versus when to like just keep going with it because maybe you're in a bit of a local minima or dip? Yeah, I mean, I haven't quit that many things. So maybe I don't know. I'm not the best person to answer this. Obviously, I've okay. You'd be like, well, YouTube.

But I feel like that was after a long time. So most things I feel like I've started, I've still kind of, you know, everything I've started five years ago, I'm still doing. But how do you know when to quit? If it really isn't, you know, working or bringing you any joy, I think that might be a good time.

But it really depends. I need to look at every situation and analyze it before I can give like a broad piece of advice like that, I feel. That's very sensible. Yeah, exactly. But the funny thing is as well... That's not what the gurus say. The gurus have an answer for everything. But actually...

Quitting might be the best thing you ever do. Not quitting might be the best thing you ever do. I feel like people think if they just, they think, or they ask for advice from someone that the right answer is going to come back to them, but we can't tell what the future is going to be. You know, someone could say you should, you should have quit.

Bitcoin in 2019 or whatever because it was really high and it kept going and then they should have said, "Oh, don't quit." And then it just collapsed. You don't know when the right time... You don't really know these things. So I feel like the answer is not to try and perfect every decision. It's just to make decisions. And even if they're right 60 or 70% of the time, at least you're moving in the right direction, but you'll make a lot of mistakes along the way.

That's the same with starting something new. Don't try and make it perfect before you release it because that's just not going to work. Yeah. We released an episode recently with a professional poker player. There we go. He talked about how in poker you have to make zillions of these decisions. I love this. I was literally thinking about poker. Oh, right. Yeah. What I was going to think of saying there is I heard something the other day when someone got bluffed off a hand and they were like,

They were like happy about it. They had the best hand, but they folded to someone with a worse hand and they were happy about it. And I was like, why are you happy about it? It's like, because if you can't be bluffed off a hand, you'll be a terrible poker player. Even though you're wrong, sometimes you'll be wrong. If you're never bluffed off a hand, you'll make mistakes because you'll think everyone's trying to bluff you and then you'll call someone who's actually got a good hand.

Does that make sense? It does, yeah. And so I think poker has a lot of analogies we can use. It's like whether or not the decision was good is...

independent of the outcome. Because what matters is the information you had at the time and the fact that you made a decision. Exactly. And sometimes people have incredible outcomes and they might've made some terrible decisions and everyone rewards them for it and thinks they're a genius. And like, you know, when people are successful in life, I find like they end up giving everyone tons of advice because they've been successful, but they, again, it could have, it could have been their decisions. It could have been the right market. I think

A successful business is 60% the right market, 30% the team, and 10% like the unique idea. But everyone's like, just think, come up with a perfect idea. It's not, you can't predict the future. That's so true. I think sort of that just sparked an idea. I think, was it like Coca-Cola or something like in the world of marketing where they say that,

20% of our marketing campaigns need to fail. And if they're not, we're not being innovative enough. That's exactly it. And I also think like, I feel like I should apply that advice to my own YouTube channel. Like earlier today, I was meant to film a video or meant to is a strong word, but like I was aiming to film a video, but I was just overthinking that. How do I perfect the hook?

It's like, oh, if you don't get people lost at the first 30 seconds, who cares? Watch time, blah, blah, blah. I should have just filmed the freaking thing and just spoken from the heart and not had so much of not being so precious about like, oh, I really need this to be good. I am a bit afraid with social media being all about watch time, what that does to just allowing for differences to occur. Yeah.

I think everything has to be... I know that the content's all very different, but you can almost see the formula happening in front of you as a viewer. And I think people are going to eventually get a little tired of that. And I wonder what happens when you get tired of the perfect watch time formula. Do people then have to do something different? Because just screaming at you in the beginning to try and get you to get excited about it, and then keep you... There's not a second you get bored.

I feel like people will push away from that eventually. And I am starting to see actually some more kind of slow paced videos doing really well on YouTube too. So I guess it depends on how you're watching the video, if you're watching it on your phone or on the TV. But yeah, it's definitely not my favorite content to watch, that stuff that's going to catch as many people as possible within the watch time algorithm. Yeah.

Yeah, there was someone I was speaking to like just on a similar note. I can't remember who it was recently on the pod who said something like when they train people in sales or in lead generation, they say that your job is to get 99 rejections. And they never get to that number because people always say yes. And they're like, oh shit, I got six rejections and like four yeses and now I've made my, and I've been able to quit my job. That's exactly, and that is like life. You just, you miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Love it.

I took that from the basketball player. But yeah, it is really my favorite kind of quote because you just got to take enough shots and you'll get lucky eventually, hopefully. I mean, that's what roulette taught me. Roulette? You played roulette? I've played some roulette in my life. Nice. Eventually hit zero if you play enough. The Russian kind or the... Oh no, normal, normal. Normal roulette. But you do lose money eventually. Yeah.

Um, any books that you recommend? Fiction, nonfiction, anything, anything I should check out? Ooh, uh, Happy by Darren Brown. I love it. It's one of my favorite books. There you go. So good. Darren Brown is a dream guest to have on the podcast. Yeah. He'll, he would, he'd be great. Yeah. He's, uh, it's such, I just, yeah, I love it. Um, it's quite like dense. It's surprising. It's actually, it's right. I think when I thought of Darren Brown, I didn't think of this guy who understood so much about this space. Um,

But yeah, it was brilliant. It was also quite easy. There's a book called The Politics of Geography. Have you heard of that? The Politics of Geography? Hopefully I've got the name right. Prisoners of Geography? Prisoners of Geography. Thank you. I think Angus recommended that to me the other day. I think I've got it on Audible. There you go. That's how bad my memory is. But it actually explains like, it talks about a lot of things we're experiencing today. And this was written like 10 years ago. It's all about how

where your country is situated in the world and the geography in which it lies really impacts the politics and the decisions and outcomes of why certain places are so successful versus others and so on. It's quite scary actually. It's almost like nature of a nurture kind of stuff. You just realize, are we all destined for things based on where our country is in the world?

Yeah, I guess that would have resonated with you in particular, like being from South Africa. Yeah. No, I mean, yeah, it's all about how, yeah, different... And if you've been born in like a different neighborhood, suddenly we would be sitting here. Yeah. Like me as well. Exactly. Exactly. Mental. Anything else? Do you have anything?

Uh, oh, I have, I've recently read a book called The Go-Giver. Can I see if you have any other? The Go-Giver. Yeah, it's actually sick. So one of our podcast guests recommended it like two days ago and I started listening to it. But then turns out that one of our team members actually sent me a copy before he started working for us. How many books do you read a month?

I think I average about one or two a week. But I audible most things at like three times speed. So it's a bit, it's a bit. Yeah, I've become quite bad actually. I started just reading the FT now. Oh, have you done that? Yeah, no, check me out. That's when you know you run a fund. It's quite bad because my partner is all like, every time I have like a cool story I want to share with him, he's like, I've already read that. I was like, fuck, there's only like 10 articles in the FT a day. So no, it's actually, I do recommend, not the FT, but I recommend...

if you can get a subscription to or just read a newspaper. It might also bring a bit of unhappiness, but I feel like there's so much you can learn that you don't pick up instantly, but over time you're like, oh wow, there's a lot more I can talk about because I'm reading about this stuff every day. But I love nonfiction as well. That's partly why I read the

Yeah, I was at a conference, the retreat thing over the weekend with someone who's like a senior editor at Time Magazine. And I asked her like, what are the things I should read? And she said, okay, the key is to read magazine articles like Economist, Time, all that kind of stuff. Because those are like...

really worked on and fact-checked a lot. Okay, that's a really good point, yeah. Whereas newspapers, it's too quick, they don't have time to fact-check and blog posts, like, who cares? Yeah, but I feel the FT is like basically... Yeah, she recommended FT. She was like, it's a solid read. Yeah, it's like going to be complete fact, nothing news. And it's quite boring, factual articles. Yeah.

or is those what you're talking about? They've allowed their people to spend time, even though it's coming out every day, they don't have that many stories. My understanding is that in the FT, there is a section of like how rich people spend their money. Oh yeah, it's called... Yeah, it's literally... It's called HTS...

They had to make it an acronym because it sounded a little bit... I think it's how to spend your money is what it's meant to be. So on that note, what have been some purchases that have added disproportionate value to your life? Cheap, expensive, it could be anything. That have added disproportionate value to my life. A purchase you've made that you've been like, you know, people say that things don't make you happy, but actually...

Woolen socks. Actually, yeah, I started knitting. So knitting. The FT subscription. Excellent. What was I trying to think? Gifts I've given my girlfriend have helped a lot. Like jewelry, because every time I see her, I'm like, you remember that? Yeah, I got you that. So those sorts of things. To be honest, I'm a big fan of watches. I only have one kind of watch right now, but...

yeah i like i like i like watches as like an investment vehicle or something to wear but i like the fact that i'm also trying to work out what which watch is going to work in terms of an investment so it's kind of for both it's like i enjoy the way it looks but i like the fact that it's going up in value even though i probably won't sell it i like i kind of like the game of that well the worst thing i ever bought was probably uh

a golf bag because it's just so frustrating. Do you play golf? I do. Oh, you do. And, uh, it is, it's called fun. I've been thinking of getting into it. We should. Yeah. I've heard, I've heard I should take lessons for a bit. Oh, that's, I was, I feel like you read my mind. I was going to say, don't do what I did, which is think, oh, you're going to be brilliant at golf. And then, and then you just completely create a weird swing. And, uh, yeah, you end up just, yeah, I'm still bad after like three, four years of playing golf.

It feels like one of those things that there's a clear learning curve, but it's also a game you can play up until you're 17, 18. It's great. It's great for clearing the mind. Driving range. It is good fun. It's addictive, I think, because

You hit loads of bad shots, but then every now and then you get the perfect shot and it's just like you crave it. It's about having struggles. You need something difficult. You need something to do. Casper's saying golf is a struggle. Cancelled. First world problems. No, it feels like a good thing to do with friends on a weekend. You've kind of got a thing to do and you just chat and walk around. It's outdoors. It's nice. Yeah, yeah, yeah. 100%. Or with me and my friends, we're just like...

really competitive so we don't talk we just like oh wow we just get really upset and like try and put each other off and yeah things like that it's quite but then at the end of the day we're all happy damn okay i'm gonna get some recommendations yeah so get get lessons for like two years and we can play golf for two years okay fine i'll hit you up two years from now because then you'll be on my level over like finally competing at 90 that's my best score nice i don't know what that means no no

means you on a golf course you uh it's usually 72 is how you should go around a golf course is how many shots you should hit okay and so like whatever you go over that should be your handicap so if you shoot 90 that's like 18 handicap and then you play against someone who goes who shoots maybe 74 and they're like a two handicap and then you can play with them does that make sense oh yeah makes sense all the golf fans out there valley i hope you enjoyed that excellent excellent

Casper, thank you so much. Thank you. It's been wonderful. I hope it was enjoyable. Any final words of wisdom from grandfather Casper? My nose is itchy and I think it is from this cake. So I'm going to have more. But I think there's something in this cake I'm allergic to. You're just going to scran another mouthful, as they say. While you've got the cake in your mouth, any final parting words of wisdom for people who might have listened to all two hours of this so far?

Hi, mom. Can you return my messages, please? Parting words of wisdom. You miss 100% of the shots you don't take. Love it. Thank you very much.

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