Charlie Houpert on YouTube Growth, Burnout, and the Art-Business Balance

everyone should have got a meeting is being live streamed thingy yes sir all right fingers crossed are you alive this is the fun part are we live people people in the youtube chat if you can hear us then please um say something in the chat we're working all right hey people welcome to the party this is um the second one of our series of part-time youtuber academy live-streamed conversations we had becky and chris yesterday and today

we have charlie from charisma on command so we've got in the zoom call we've got our ptya students and alumni and on the youtube live stream we've got everyone else who's watching for free on youtube so thanks for joining us charlie thank you so much for coming on how are you doing dude i'm excited this is technologically beyond me so i'm very thrilled to have such such a cool setup happening excellent excellent um so i guess

i want to give it a a a bit of backstory because i have i've had like a a weird personal relationship with you for a very long time it kind of sounds weird but i first discovered your content way back in like 2014 when i read your book which was at the time called kickassery and i thought it was amazing and that book like absolutely like changed probably like changed the game for me in terms of

like like social skills and stuff and then charisma university i think i think it was called charisma university then i i remember being on a webinar and asking you some questions and you answered them really well and then i signed up to charisma university which was the very the only the first online course i'd ever signed up for and it was sick um and then i sent you an email being like hey thanks chrisman university was

amazing and trying to buy some of your merch and stuff and then like a few years later i found that you had a youtube channel and you were just absolutely exploding on youtube so i wonder if we can start by talking a little bit about what was that journey like and kind of what was charisma on command say say seven years ago and how did things evolve as you decided to go down the youtube route yeah

wow you are an og i did not realize that that is how long that you've been around i have to say i found an email from you when i reached out to you because i saw pty i was like this is awesome i need to learn how i did this and i saw an email that i hadn't responded to i was like oh god i missed it um that was like from 2014 but yeah so i

started four hour work week was the inspiration and uh the the thing that motivated me about it was the idea that i didn't want to spend my entire life you know moving diagonally up a corporate ladder and a job that i didn't like so my friends and i started writing down all the things that we were genuinely interested in first business was parkour casino royale had just come out and we were like we're going to learn

how to do parkour i went outside tried it three times fell on my butt hurt my coccyx and that was realized it wasn't for me but we still went through and actually made a parkour training dvd that did all right it didn't wind up working as a business because i wasn't committed to it so then i realized for the second thing we did i had to like it on my own and the thing that i was

spending the most time doing was this sort of thing that became charisma breakdowns years later it was like looking at my friends and the people that i admired and wondering why in social interactions they could tell the same joke that i did in fact sometimes right after i told it and get a huge laugh and mine was much more of a measured response so that was what i was spending my time doing we started off training

mostly relating in like the dating world um was where we started and pivoted more to towards the charisma generally because when i was talking to my closest friends they were interested in the dating stuff but we're almost embarrassed to be associated with it because at the time there's all this pickup artist stuff going on uh and for i think some good some bad reasons we were like i don't i don't want to be associated with that

uh so an understanding that the people that we were most interested in working with were not just interested in dating they were interested in you know making closer connections with their boss and being a leader in their group of friends we opened it up more towards charisma there's still a dating component uh but what happened with youtube is we started on the blogs like which is i guess where you found us in our blog and our

it was like this little linear growth and at the beginning of 2014 2015 i made one video for a blog post on bill clinton never thought about it again and i came back six months later or something and it had a hundred thousand views which was more than we've done on our entire website in its preceding years so at that point it became pretty clear that youtube was the way to go which is obvious in retrospect

when you're talking about social skills you kind of need to see those sorts of things and then that was what started uh me focusing on youtube almost full time interesting and so how did how did that journey go because your channel is absolutely enormous now uh like and you know you're pulling in hundreds of thousands if not millions millions of views on basically every video and they're all really good um and so for most of our

most of our audience here here in the course um are towards the start of their youtube journey broadly we do have a few pros but no one as big as you certainly and i i imagine a lot of people watching in the youtube live stream skew more towards the beginner end so what did that what did that look like in the early days as you were starting the channel and getting it getting it off the ground

yeah well we there was a lot i forgot about this there were so many more attempts that didn't work than i recalled because i was remembering we like i had another thing i mean there's videos of me please don't look them up trying to sing on youtube there's videos there's all kinds of stuff where i was like trying to put content out there and it started with the talking head style i think there's at least one

of which is still on the channel like one of the first videos is me standing in front of a wall in my apartment in brazil uh so the talking head ones weren't working and that was a big breakthrough with the bill clinton was the realization that the format was what was going to break me through because no one was interested in another random guy with a crappy setup and bum audio trying to get through you know

explaining how to stand with good posture but when i latched on and did a little bit of fame jacking took a famous person played some b-roll all of a sudden there was way more interest in those clips so i probably had i don't know 10 to 20 videos of me just talking giving daily tips i saw someone said in the chat which i think was true and it was the break it was the uh the charisma

analysis the charisma breakdowns that are really what started to make us go parabolic and i was like all right let's double down on this format nice and can you can you remember what what sort of what sort of timeline was that because we again like thinking thinking to our students we've got a lot of people who have found success on youtube already but we also have lots who are still continuing to throw spaghetti at the wall

and hoping that it'll stick um how how much experimenty stuff did you do before you realized that charisma breakdowns were the area you want to double down on so it was probably 10 to 20 videos but what i didn't realize is and i'm going to talk about this is one of the things i want to do in my um in my workshop is the number one lever for experimentation is format in my opinion and i what

i was experimenting in was a lot of different topics let's talk about dating let's talk about work let's talk about this but it was all the same format of talking head if you haven't found what sticks i find that the best place to experiment is with format try an animated video try a breakdown try an interview try something like that because those have multipliers uh where you can be doing the same topic and even the same

title but in a different format it can go crazy so it was about 10 to 20 videos then i just realized i looked at my analytics saw that bill clinton was doing so well and it was in 20 end of 2015 or 16 i made a conor mcgregor video that again did really well and then in 2016 my new year's resolution was once a week didn't matter what i had to put out a video and i

hadn't obviously seen your course at that point but when i was watching it i was like oh my gosh this once a week thing i really think there is something to that consistency because you're learning how to make better videos and getting a ton of feedback on what the audience wants to see without burning yourself out and we've kept that once a week for now to twice a week up for about five years yeah i think

once a week really is the magical sweet spot we kind of went up to twice a week and then three times a week then back down to twice a week and now we're sort of on a bit of once a week um but we've never i i think there's one time in like 2018 when i was on holiday that i missed a week of uploads in the last like four and a half years of stuff because

i was like i misspoke we're twice a month now sorry oh we've actually pulled back yeah yeah we are doing less how how is that going for you doing doing less rather than sticking to that yeah so and i think that i never thought i'd get burnt out i was like i love this so much and what i realized is if you have to do anything for an extended period of time i believe that you will

burn out and the once a week extends that timeline for me i went four-ish years before i was like i feel like i've said what i had to say right now i feel like i need to go back to the well i need to live life learn things that i have to share so i don't find myself repeating myself luckily i have a co-founder ben who was not who had done a couple of the videos but

not a ton and he stepped in to do him now twice a month but from a business perspective uh it's actually been some of our best months ever uh and i think that that's because we are reaping the benefits of the relationship that we've built over the past five years so you know just taking away some videos hasn't really hurt that in terms of our core sales but in addition this is another tip again happy to

talk more at length about maybe not best for the beginners but we've been able to do a lot of successful a b testing with thumbnails and titles and have had crazy results with taking back catalog videos that weren't doing so well and if you look at the analytics it's like two years of flat and then an s curve and that's all with thumbnail testing and title testing great stuff um so that's really interesting is like a

broad overview of where you guys where you guys have come from um i want to open up open it up to our students now in the zoom call so if anyone has any questions feel free to put your hand up and we'll get you on video um or post in the chat and and we'll feed the questions to charlie we have a hand up from kevin hey kevin how you doing hey how are you doing um

so glad to be here first of all thank you for your time um i was actually looking at your older videos and that's how i found the daily tip video by the way i left that comment but i'm kind of curious um i was looking at your most popular video uh five common habits that make people instantly dislike you um so i'm kind of curious how does your process look like when you're deciding to commit to

a video or not and were these videos like this serendipitous or were they strategized from the beginning that particular one was serendipitous so there's a couple things that we look for and now i've seen patterns in what our audience wants we actually have a document that includes them so like uh thumbs up things are marvel actors and actresses uh that will be around for a long time trending moments and events so there's there's every couple of

months there's like the breakout charisma event and we didn't do this one but for instance when will smith had the entanglement thing where he and jada were on youtube and he had that entanglement moment had we made a video about that that would have gone bonkers now these types of videos there's been a couple where jordan peterson and kathy newman had a moment where they were like debating we did that one exploded as well brie larson

what we were tapping into there and i didn't i hopefully didn't feed it too much because i did talk generally about behavior and not about the person but there was a lot of hate for brie larson at that time so anything that had this slight negative uh title twinge was was very attractive to people and then i think actually the content in that video i did identify some of the things that people were uh clinging on

i think some of it was a political reaction to her but there were moments in interviews where she didn't come across very well and i tried to counterbalance them in that video and says look she doesn't always do this here's her doing the opposite and that's that's something that's very good but that was a serendipitous moment some of these videos were turned around normally i have a week i turn that one in like three days or

four days after these sorts of things started to come through yeah um and it was sorry three or four days to write and then several days to edit for for the editor and and uh my clo helps with some of the editing as well but yeah this the best videos if you look at them usually tap into checks all of our boxes for the types of things that make a video go viral end hits at a

moment that is just you know perfect it's it's a bit serendipitous as well um i'm kind of curious what are some of your criteria for that um for viral content as well what is some like criteria yeah let me see so this is very particular to to our audience so this is not going to be the same as everyone but marvel actors were huge game of thrones actors were huge we also have a don't do this

athletes are on the don't do this we've tried like lebron james who is you know he's at least at the level in his own respective thing as brie larson is at hers in fact he might be the goat but doesn't do well um singers haven't done as well youtubers really haven't done as well so we kind of have this list that we would think would do well that we try to avoid because we've tested it a

handful of times and then the yes list is the game of thrones people the marvel people a-list celebrities that are known around the world um and then a couple of topics that tend to do well for us our confidence respect and maintaining conversation are the big ones that we see do really well sweet thanks very much uh we've got a question we've got a hands up from tom hey tom hello there hello charlie this is solid

surreal for me because given the chat who actually got me into youtube um absolutely ages ago uh it's very very weird i i'm also slightly sorry i'm saying that um but um yes because i actually did your course online your first online course i probably wouldn't have done pty if you want something so superb uh so this is rather yeah brought it on for me um what i was gonna ask basically is what have you found

to be the biggest challenge um in trying to build youtube and your channel and stuff like that so for me at the moment i'm trying to just like learn new editing software and finding a nightmare um so yeah what's kind of the biggest obstacle you've come across you've struggled to shift and how did you get around it for me and this was uh i could try to go back to the beginning but if i look at

the whole part of my youtube career it's been being a boss uh i am not a good trainer believe it or not like what i am good at is saying things once putting them in the video and letting everyone else deal with it what i'm not good at is constantly coming back and like checking mistakes for someone which is again that's why i reached out to ali because i was like this pty is awesome the amount

of uh respect for the psychology when people are starting things that they need to be encouraged and all that kind of stuff that's not something i'm good at so that was very challenging for me as a boss when i was getting started and i was this is hopefully a bit more applicable to you um it was tapping into the things in a video that make it good content because there is an incredible divide between what we

as creators sometimes think good content is and what audiences respond to and good content so just to elaborate on that we talk about tips that are crunchy whenever we're making a video and we're trying to find where these crunchy tips are what we define as a crunchy tip is something that's that doesn't feel like it could come out of cosmo magazine it's not smile in an interview or have a firm handshake or be confident it has

to be and there's like things that we know can make tips more crunchy they can take them from general to uh to crunchier so for instance make eye contact not crunchy make eye contact for three seconds when you're in a group of people one two three one two three one two three much crunchier because we've added that element of specificity we also use comparing and contrasting i talked about brie larson it's one thing to say hey

this isn't good but when you can sharply contrast that with the behavior that is really good that makes that section of the video feel so much punchier um and then of course having that a role that we use is like having a moment to point to that exemplifies a belief and boiling distilling that down to just five or ten seconds where you can really show the moment that a joke hits or somebody makes someone else like

them uh learning that skill of creating crunchy tips and crunchy content took time to even identify that that was such an important piece of what makes a video work can i briefly ask you how you did that how did you identify those kind of moments or those things what was it just sort of like play around and edit things and say so i don't take too much time sorry no no no um so for me if

you actually look that's the way that my mind has worked and this has been what has worked for me on youtube is when something happens i am like very granular and trying to understand how so when i try to figure out why people like someone a lot of people go oh he's got charisma and i want to know what did he say do what was the moment so i would like re-watch the videos and re-look at

the scripts um and really try to find the moment and ask friends when did you start to like my video like not not i liked the video what was the second that you loved about that video and in getting that feedback you see people love just a couple things that i've learned uh strong a-roll is so important so getting like a craig ferguson and finding the funniest moments of him it's so much less work that i

have to do because the a-roll is carrying the enjoyment of that video so asking friends and going in myself and trying to figure out what are the five seconds or the one second of this video that is really spiking the enjoyment and the uh feeling that this is good content was something that i was doing and then really trimming it to the as much as possible everything that wasn't that so reducing the amount of setup time

that i had reducing the intro all of that kind of stuff and just grinding it down down down so that hopefully it's a lot more spikes and a lot fewer plateaus in terms of uh getting something out of the video thank you very much of course um so we've got a few questions from the chat um so topher says super curious what bottlenecks you've run into with editing your videos over the years yes so i i

was the editor at the beginning and you can tell because some of the videos are just like still photos for eight seconds at a time um but how i got my editor and i this is how i've done a lot of hiring it's been very very helpful luckily we've got an awesome audience and they're really into the videos that we've made so i put out a video that hey if you want to edit a video for

us uh we're looking for an editor please take this section of the video that i already did 60 seconds and send me how you would have edited it um so running through that process we were able to get a second uh i guess our first editor the first editor that wasn't me and that was super helpful but if you look at our videos before that and actually we were successful i think in any given channel you

can identify one to three things that make them successful for some people it's incredible production value like peter mckinnon he's just i mean he's awesome production value he's also very charismatic on camera it was not our production value that made us successful some of them are me splatting into a an onboard microphone of a mac with really like long drawn out things the thing that made us connect was always the breakdown style and the format um

so the editing for me was never a tremendous focus and in terms of i guess uh streamlining the other things i'm only partially familiar with what our editor does because i've let him handle that so much uh so maybe one day i'll have andre come on here with me he's been with us the entire time since he joined he was actually uh he was 19 years old he was a grocery bagger and he was the best

that we had he was just a someone who enjoyed editing and was a fan but i'm not totally familiar with the bottlenecks he's been able to get his job down he still does take a week though to do the videos so we get him like the videos on sunday and he'll be done them by the next sunday with a couple of passes and help from our col before they go up that's quite a lot of time

in the edit like what we've been finding for our students is we always ask you know what's the what's the bit of the process that's taking the longest time or that you wish you could outsource it the most frustrating answer is always editing editing editing and i think when starting out people have this idea that editing a youtube video like if you've never edited a video you don't realize just how freaking long it takes to edit

a video yeah and your guys videos are just so full of like aerial b-roll just like it's so well done um that i can i can appreciate that it does take up it takes a pro editor a whole week to do videos like that um a lot of our editing is and this is what i did and sort of i transferred it was finding the cultural references for b-roll that would connect with what i was saying

so pulling from the game of thrones and all those universes in order to to sort of tell the story with b-roll and what i would say if you are focused on editing uh you wanna wait most of the time you put into the first minute of the video and i've seen a lot of youtubers do this for the edits in the first 30 seconds of the minute are just next level production house by the time you

get to the end it's just one long talking head uh it actually does work so so if you can tilt your effort towards the beginning i think that's a little pro tip to save some time yeah definitely um we've been doing a lot of uh analyzing uh youtube channels like yours and like other kind of big tech youtubers who are blowing up and we find that in the first like 30 seconds there is something happening every

every second and then it goes to something happening every three seconds and something happening every five and then by the end yeah talking head at that point people are invested you've got on the bulk of the retention there um just on the note of editing we've got a few people who've asked have you had any issues with copyright and fair use how does that work for something like charisma breakdowns where you're getting clips from the tonight

show and interviews and things like that sure so you're dealing with two uh two sorts of systems and rules that you're trying to deal with the first one is the simple content id this has nothing to do with legality this has to do with what people are likely to claim and will claim and the second one is the legal question of does this person have a right to do this uh we've talked to lawyers we could

win and uh if we were to go into you know somebody who claims a video we could do that in court of law it'd be super expensive and that's not what i want my business to be i'm not i don't want to be in the business of litigating so we focus mostly on this first piece what is going to avoid the claim entirely um what we have found is that keeping the clips i say 15 but

realistically under 20 seconds is very important if you have like a story that someone's telling and it takes 45 seconds we know that we need to have a 15 second chunk of it and then cut away the b-roll while we sort of explain what just happened jump back in for 15 cut away the b-roll and then jump back in so limiting any sort of a-roll to 15 to 20 and real i mean there's but as soon

as you hit 30 be found like 30's like ding welcome nbc wants your video so we've avoided that we've also fought every single complaint at least once and i think a lot of people don't realize this that it's it's kind of just a negotiation and nobody's nobody's really going to go to the court of law but it's a game a little bit of brinksmanship a little bit of politeness uh the first thing when you get claimed

every single time you should say no this isn't the case we have someone uh not muted um cool so every single time we've just been like hey this is this is fair use for xyz reasons and we cite the four things i'm sure that you've had seven from legally you'll sort of talk about the things that that make something fair use and i would say eight out of ten times they drop the claim because we write

it in a professional tone it's just a few sentences it uses a small segment of the video it doesn't infringe on the market value etc uh but there's a handful of videos of art that we don't own the ad revenue to uh and it's a bummer and it's increasingly happening there are these companies that i really despise that clearly reach out to production houses and claim everything they possibly can under the sun uh even when it's

it is so obviously not and then they will fight you on it so there's a handful of our videos that we don't have access to ad revenue but most of them we've been able to do and we are avoiding any sort of claims with that 15 second rule fantastic um on again on the topic of editing i know you don't personally edit the videos anymore but when when you did slash if you have an insight to

this what's the kind of distribution of time um someone's asked uh abhishek's austin in the chat what's the distribution of time for like a roll cut finding b-roll finding music doing all the the motion graphics like do you have a rough idea of which are the disproportionately more intensive bits of that process well so i i choose all the arrows so all of that is or what now it's been but the script requires the reference to

the a-roll and so what i was doing when i was filming the script this was a bottleneck thing for me was um my scripts would look like you know block of text uh and a-roll and i would say second this to second this block of text payroll is the secondness what i used to do back in the day was uh record that section go and screen grab the a-roll record section two go and screw grab the

a-roll one thing was just batching and that would be recording all of the audio you know and then grabbing all of the a-roll and then was outsourcing the grabbing of the a-roll to my editor that part i know doesn't take too long because i've done it myself it's just a bit tedious to go and grab the exact things um i think what we're spending a lot of time on now um just because we we can afford

to is some of the fun little graphical stuff like the adobe after effects stuff in the first section of the video can take a little bit of time identifying the correct b-roll i know can take some time and then really it's just a volume thing because like you said the top youtubers are changing visual stimuli every couple of seconds if not every second we're not to every second but we try to be three or four seconds

on a particular scene before we're on to the next um so it is i think finding those clips brainstorming which ones would be appropriate tracking that down on youtube uh i believe that's where a lot of it goes sweet um on so we we've talked a little bit about bottlenecks uh diane asks how did you know when you needed to hire and in what order did you hire to sort of build the team that you've got

now so in my opinion uh people hire too late i i think that one of the things people don't realize is that once you are making money you can pretty accurately put a dollar amount on each hour you spend in the business and so for me once it was like once youtube was going i could either be working on a video making a video better or i could be responding to emails and and we did that

math for literally everything in the business and the answer was i charlie should not be doing anything other than making youtube videos because that was far and away the highest dollar value return on time i could have so the first hire that we made was a personal uh like a digital personal business called remote personal assistant um still with us and that was to help with incoming emails customer support requests and sort of systematizing a lot

of the things that i was just i'm terrible at systems so she made uh you know stock responses to certain questions hey i can't find my password she's like have you checked the spam folder if not you can go to this and that you know immediately cuts customer support requests down by a lot so that was the first hire one that i will say and this happens people often think it's strange but uh certainly at your

level and a lot of like the friends that i have in youtube i think they need real life assistance i think that that if they are still doing and this this is it's a wonderful uh thing to get out of but if you're still doing your own laundry worrying about your own meals all of this and you're trying to grow a business how much dollar value are you spending doing laundry now a lot of the people

might not be there quite yet but it's actually a higher that you can make sooner than you think um so in terms of how do you think about what to hire it's the biggest things that keep you from contributing the maximum amount of value to your business so i for instance identified editing wasn't where people were coming you know that wasn't why they were on our videos but if you think of someone like matt davella he

might not be able to outsource the editing right away because that's a huge value add to his videos so find the things that you have to do that aren't driving the value in your business and start you know getting that off so you can just put 100 of your time into the thing that is driving value that is working yeah that's exactly the process that i used once we start once once the youtube channel started to

make money and i realized oh hang on i could for example spend an hour to go to the post office take take the bus to the post office to return this 20 item i got from amazon 20 pound item i got from amazon and then take the bus back home i could spend an hour doing that or i could spend an hour writing the scripts for three new new youtube videos and if we're making a few

hundred to a few thousand per video on sponsorships or pre-sponsorships even a few tens of dollars per video on adsense and the channel is growing it is just an absolute no-brainer um and i've i i've it was only in the last few months that i started applying this even more rigorously and to the point that i've outsourced like laundry and like all these other aspects of my life and i i think this is a thing that

often people get very like angsty about that oh my god you think you're better than someone if you're really paying them to do your laundry or paying them to take a trash out it's like well no um but when it comes to the economic value i can generate for my business with an hour of my time i'm more than happy to pay someone a decent wage to do that thing instead that will allow me to spend

more time on my business if that's what i want to do but if it's something like hanging out with friends or playing board games or just relaxing i'm not going to put a dollar value on that obviously like you know that goes without saying because i i get personal value from that if you're serious about growing your business you need to pay a body double to go hang out with your family on the holidays but you

can't be wasting that time um all right let's go to cam cam you've got your hand up hey how's it going papanelli um charlie you said that again more recently is when you started to really accrue all this benefit of building this audience for so long uh you and i met in brazil like eight years ago and i thought you were gonna quit and go start a music career somehow somehow you kept this energy going about

this topic the whole time what i'm curious about is for those the rest of us um again we all believe in ali's teaching that we we need to do this at scale we do this for a long time how did you keep the energy the excitement the momentum up throughout the entirety of the process for when all of us reach that point sure so i think the biggest thing what i was able to keep up and

and what i can still do and like i'm partnering with this pty with with with ali which i'm super excited about the way that i'm built is if i am trying to solve a problem which i genuinely do not know the answer i'm intrigued i'm excited so a lot of these videos why don't people like brie larson was an honest to god question that i had i was like i don't i actually don't understand at the

beginning of the campaign i was like why is this donald trump fellow getting all of this attention like everyone says that he shouldn't be so the videos where i have sincere questions and i'm trying to solve something new are the ones where i feel the most inspired and i think i do my best work the ones where it's more like an assembly of ideas that i've encountered in books are the ones that burn me out the

fastest um so that's what it's been for me and i actually think that's that's a really useful content tip which is if you're if you're breaking ground on things that are novel to you which you cannot find in another book and you can't go ask someone you're going to make a really interesting video because you're probably telling people something that has never been said before and i actually think in terms of building business value there's a

lot of things wrong with our sales process but what does work is that people don't compare us to other options because i think that a lot of what they found on our channel is the first time they've ever heard some stuff not everything you know there's other things that have been uh just mutually discovered elsewhere are things that i've you know taken from tony robbins and put my own spin on but yeah where i'm finding new

stuff in my own life keeps me fired up the reason that i'm not as fired up about charisma stuff now is because i've kind of hit the edges of that so i went to bed i was like dude like i've said it all i don't i don't know what else to say at this point um but i but there's a lot of other things that i am still interested in understanding for instance you know when i

was sitting down i'd asked a couple of questions uh one of the big things that came back when i ran a survey on my list is how do you make money as a small youtuber and that is not something i had ever sat down and codified so going through that process of being like what worked for me what didn't work for me what have i seen break for other people and how do i build a model

around that that's exciting content for me to make um it won't be exciting for me to repeat the fifth time but i'm stoked about it right now awesome well thank you for sharing that thanks for spending time with us shout out guys for uh bringing charlie to us i was gonna say i recognized cam house i came home so i recognized this name where did i know it from brazil that's so cool um anon asks can

you go over your a b testing process briefly please and we're we're going to do a whole workshop on this in the next cohort so this can go deeper um this is this is uh the most valuable tip i can give to establish youtubers you need the view velocity in order to do it is that tubebuddy has an a b testing software uh it's like 50 bucks a month and it's absolutely worth it i took that

editor that andre who uh has been making a lot of our videos we supported him with another editor he was named therese she's awesome and so they're able to now we do instead of making one video a week with one editor we make uh two videos a month with two editors which creates a lot of free time so a ton of andre's time is going into literally every single day going through the videos that he thinks

could be doing better than they are or looking at the thumbnails that based on you know it's been three years we've learned a lot about thumbnails have an under optimized thumbnail and then he just runs a b tests on tubebuddy um so he'll take a thumbnail that was like a really grainy photo of this person that doesn't look really like george clooney and he'll get a sharper image of george clooney put them up next to each

other and what do you know this one has a higher click-through rate according to the tubebuddy software there's a handful well there's there's actually quite a bit of nuance to that but that process we've done it now 1200 times so we're on our 1200th something test has generated for us millions and millions of views and it is really nice that's the type of thing that i get excited about because it's like i think i said this

awesome thing three years ago i don't want to say it again how can i put it in front of more people and so that's been that's been very exciting for me uh to do because yeah i don't want to repeat myself but i want people to see to see some of the stuff that we've made and that's been incredibly helpful i'm intrigued by this thing of not repeating yourself so um i'm we've we've been working with

one of the one of the coaches at vid iq for a while and one of the things they always say i think daryl eaves talks about this too is that you actually can repeat content every three to six months ish because most people won't have seen most of your videos but it sounds like you're saying that you don't repeat stuff because it personally burns you out um i wonder like i wonder if you can talk more

about this balance between doing things for the numbers uh versus doing things for for for yourself um how do you think about that well i think this is this is like the age-old thing and the age-old question and i think there is a inherent tension between business and art i think that business is audience focused what does the audience want what can i give someone that they value and art is inner focused what is my honest

expression independent of what other people think and you know this is why actors do one for them one for me and i found myself at the beginning it was actually there was such alignment there serendipitously it was like this thing that is for me is also the thing that other people want what fantastic luck and also there's a lot of testing to find that um but now i am lucky enough and i agree with daryl's thing

like your audience is totally cool with you repeating yourself and in fact might even be benefited by that reinforcement oh i haven't thought about this and you put in a new way and now i can uh internalize it a bit more but for me it doesn't it doesn't get me fired up so the things that i'm looking for and this is again one of the reasons that i reached out to you is i need to be

doing the artistic side a little bit more i've built enough of a financial cushion where chasing uh more money like with a significant amount of my time is no longer worth it to me and so i want to do the art side of things and i also have a deep faith that after you know months and years of tinkering i will find another really really tight uh i don't know if it's a correlation or a junction

of business and art where i'm doing something that is novel and exciting and new to me but also really connects with people in a big way fantastic yeah i think one of the mistakes that i made uh recently is that initially i was doing all the videos and then i read books like the e-myth revisited and these kind of business books and discovered the power of outsourcing it was like outsourced editing all sorts of research and

they kind of got to the point where i think i'd outsourced too much in the way of the art and i was spending all my time on zoom calls doing business meetings which is like weird because i i quit my job to take i took a break from medicine so that i could be an entrepreneur and do whatever i want with my time and yet i was you know friends were like do you want to hang

out i was like oh well no because i've kind of got back to back zoom course for the next 18 hours um and now recently i've realized that i need to be more involved in the art side because that is the bit that i enjoy and i think the bit that i'm uniquely good at whereas to be honest i kind of suck as a manager and so if someone else can do the management of the team

side aside for me then i can focus on the art and even if technically people say that well when you're a ceo the only thing you should be doing is hiring uh or vision it's like well i i also want to be involved in the content and so i think there is this i really like the way you've put it this balance between art and business yeah and that that presumption you know you read any business

book the presumption is that what you want to do is maximize profits and that's ludicrous like that's not that's not what i want to do what i want to do is live a happy fulfilled life so uh that that just i'm not yeah i don't want to hire people all day if somebody wants to that's amazing and i'd like to work with them but that's not me um speaking of happy fulfilled life um how do you

dissociate your self-worth from your youtube analytics yeah um how do i dissociate it it happened gradually and so real life will will catch you eventually and what will happen is like you'll be told that you're amazing you'll be told that it's terrible you'll be you'll you'll be personally attacked you'll be personally idolized like all of these things will happen and eventually your brain will realize like this isn't true i was never as great as i was

made out to be nor was i as terrible so what i've learned is um and i do think it cuts both ways i just don't look at the comments anymore um because you know and i can still get a general idea like someone on the team will say hey did you know that everybody wants you to do a video of thomas shelby okay great that's the useful piece of information that i can take from that comment

section um but i there was a period where i responded when it was engaged and when you're small enough you can actually to turn a mean comment into like a friend you'll be oh i didn't you know i appreciate that feedback i'll try to incorporate this oh sorry i didn't mean to be so rude when you get to a certain size uh there is a dehumanization process that occurs and this is i realize i have done

this to celebrities my entire life and only through having a modicum of that experience have tried to stop which is they become perfect or devils in your mind so in seeing that happen with me and seeing the way that i project onto other people on the screen i've just learned that that is not the truth and instead try to um understand if i'm doing a good or bad job based on how i feel about the video

i also you there is this there is a serious business question about views um like what's going on with these views are these good bad up down what to do with that um and that's the business and arc thing that i come back to i actually know what is required to make a video that is one two three or ten like i i know what to do in order to do it i just sometimes choose not

to um and that's that's the business our thing if i get a little bit stressed look uh the channel's dying you know we can like let's lean on one of our old standards and i can tell you for us you know don draper if he's in the thumbnail we're gonna do very very well in terms of views uh but there's now two or three with him in the thumbnail so we might not want to take a

break of that for a little while um and then the last thing that i'll say is that i think really sitting down and deciding what enough is is very very important uh because as you grow you will find that the goal post just moves constantly it needs more subscribers more money more this more that it goes forever and i can remember being in brazil and and thinking that enough would be doing a job that i cared

about making enough money to pay my rent and every time that i you know think that i need more than that or the bigger house is the thing i go look there was a time when i was happy in brazil airbnb and i really really try to think about that so that i don't whether videos 10 to 10 or 1 of 10 is like i won i already have enough i've already like i've done it on

to the next on to inner fulfillment on to that kind of stuff because this external stuff is just it's uh it's a losing game after a certain point i feel very lucky to have i think surpassed that that point um that's so interesting like you've you've clearly thought a lot about this um oh yeah um yeah one of their i guess one of the issues i've been having recently is in in trying to tackle this question

of like what do i well what the hell do i actually want because um you know as you know once a youtube channel gets to a certain size especially if you have courses on the side that kind of ticks the box for i i have the money that i need to survive i have the money i need to pay my rent but at that point it becomes very easy to continue to chase more and there is

that phenomenon in youtube whereby you know you can see some channels that have like 10 million subscribers but their views and sort of subscribers keep going up but the views don't and you're like oh i i feel like i'm on this hamster wheel where i'm getting the same views on two million subscribers as i wasn't like 1.5 like what the hell's going on am i you know am i falling out of touch with the audience are

people not liking me anymore what the hell's going on and this uh keeping on having to continue to chase the numbers in theory for for the goal of like maintaining the view count and maintaining the business and stuff but but even then like i find i find that whenever i'm driving on my own in the car i just want to think like what is the point of all of this more and uh and and so like

a couple of weeks ago we had a a one-day session with a business coach uh which was actually really helpful and we were figuring out like core focus and values and like one of the things we're trying to figure out is what is our kind of 10-year plan what's our like 10-year mission um and he was saying that most companies would want to put numbers on this like we want to reach 100 million users by 2030

or or whatever but the way i found myself thinking is that i really don't give a toss about the numbers um my 10 year vision is i want to have a profitable business that helps people while having fun and honestly if that's if that's what we do yeah that's that's like totally cool but then i don't i don't know i don't know to an extent i'm bullshitting myself because at the moment the numbers are going up

so it's very easy for me to say oh well personal fulfillment but if the numbers start going down it doesn't stop plateauing that that's really when when the rubber meets the road um i i imagine these raw thoughts that you've had any any thoughts yeah certainly i mean one of the first things that i realized um about myself and i was like i just watched it i think i think seeing this in yourself is that there

is a more thing it's a related to last month you know what i mean how is this related to last month so in a way a very good month is a curse because then the like you can be at one and then go to 10 and then if you're at five that feels bad and just seeing this process play out like the buddhists have for millennia i'm just like this is insanity this this is this is

the worst uh torture i could put myself through is to have a higher higher bar for happiness as things get uh objectively you know you one would say better and better the other thing that's worth considering that that helps me it's a bit you might say it's a bit cynical but if you who designed the youtube analytics platform i didn't design it youtube designed it and why did they design it to keep me on a hamster

wheel making more videos right everything on there is is in one way as toxic as the facebook news feed with your little green arrow going up and your red arrow going down and it's just like keep making the hamster wheel that keeps people watching videos so i what i try to do whenever we have any sort of like spreadsheet that we're trying to decide the business there will be a column for profit but there is also

a column for happiness and there's there is also a column for required time and so i try to look at my spreadsheets and my analytics things that i've you know they're just little simple google sheets but that i've built for myself and spend less time in google analytics which was not built for me that was built to keep me doing the things that youtube wants me doing that are not in my best interest only only you

know but i use it it's a tool obviously there's tons of fantastic data for the very specific goal of growing your youtube channel but that's only a part of what i want in my life nice um changing gears a little bit um you i want to say recently recently relative to your youtube channel you started a podcast um the charlie and ben show uh what's yeah what's the deal with that how did you decide you wanted

to start a podcast and and how's it going yeah so the podcast uh it's again so this is remembering what it's for the podcast breaks even and uh i know i know what is required to make it go bigger you know we would have to have guests on i'd have to do my research i'd have to come up with a lot of uh interesting topics and maybe even a bit of clickbait but the point was and

just so you guys know the most important marketing decision you will ever make in your business is what to call it uh the worst from a marketing perspective is to put your name in it because that is completely self-centered and it's about you and it means it's unto you but it doesn't mean it's unto anyone else so why the name charlie and ben podcast well it wasn't intended as a marketing decision we wanted it to be

descriptive of what the podcast was meant to be for all time which was me and ben who was my best friend talking and so the goal was to say what is the reach of me and you having conversations that we normally have privately publicly uh maybe it's a little bit maybe it's a lot of it let's just see and find out but we wanted to make the process of doing it something that was as effortless as

our daily conversations which we have all the time so in terms of that goal it's done really well there's times where i've been tempted and you know want to do a better job and make it more and be more interesting than i naturally am and i try to curb that by reminding myself that it's already serving its goal which is just we're testing it out um and then the second thing was that i wanted to i

realized i was getting a lot of uh idealization you know when i go on charisma on command i don't swear i don't you know i'm a wonderful brother son friend etc i wanted to be a more complete human in my public my public-facing self and i felt like it was a very one-dimensional flawless look at me on in charisma on command or at least my flaws were only social flaws where i'd made a mistake and i

wanted i wanted people to disagree with me politically and and dislike me for my politics i wanted them to to go this guy is crazy in this um so that was the other goal and it's it's achieved that as well so it's worked out fair play so it sounds like that was more an art decision rather than a business oh 100 100 art if it does do well then you've got what i think because we were

looking at joe rogan basically and i was like dude here's a guy who it's probably irreplicable but is truly talking to people about things that interested in him and with the number one podcast in the world i was like do i have that personality naturally or not let's find out and the answer is i don't we're not joe rogan the things that interest me and my my uh immediate circle of people that i would invite on

are not the same comedians mma fighters as successful scientists that joe rogan has access to but that's okay uh you know also the timing bit later than joe rogan to start tmd alchemy and jiu jitsu i see i wonder if i can ask you see so you mentioned that you want people to dislike you um for for your politics um i've recently well well not recently like so like in in the past like the there have

been a couple of like hit piece videos that other people have made about me and like forum threads of like hate and stuff and i made the mistake of like reading and watching these initially um i was like and so this is stuff that like genuinely made me feel terrible which is which is weird because i thought i'd become accustomed to youtube comments but it's like when it's a specific video that someone's made or like a

specific like blog post or forum thread it just it just kind of kind of hits a bit differently and i saw that one i think within one of one of the episodes of your podcast you were talking about kind of dealing with with that sort of thing um what's what's that been like for you like getting over this sort of what what people on the internet think um yeah well i think the first thing which is

very tough to do and i've only been able to do it in time is to actually appreciate that because what they're pointing out is like you care what a stranger on the other side of the world who doesn't know about you says about you like isn't this a useful thing to know about yourself uh and i didn't feel that way at first man i was so upset because i've had that and there was one in particular

on youtube that really made me sad and kept me up at night and i'm i'm an arguer i'm a debater so i was having and winning the argument saying ha ha you misquoted this you took this over there that one's false i'm gonna bring in you know my star witness who was also at the event all these kinds of things um and i went on the uh we had the podcast and i you know made a

video specifically directed this person said if you want to come and talk about this i swear i will treat you friendly and fairly presume good faith on your part please come on and this person didn't respond to that and instead made another hit video where they didn't even acknowledge that i had asked them to speak and it was such a useful it was such a useful thing for me because here i am trying to like weigh

my soul you know fairly and assuming that this person would be the prosecutor and i would be the defense and it's just crazy it's just crazy so what i did instead is and i think this is uh this can be a humbling experience as well and i i it's not like i do it often but i've asked time to time uh you can ask friends and family where you're failing if you want an actual list of

the things that you really need to work on in your life and and and that sort of stuff um but yeah it was it was it wasn't going through it and being truly upset to the point of sleepless nights about it that the ridiculousness of the the entire thing sort of hit me um and i don't think i could have i thought similar to you that i was over it because i'd read all the comments and

i realized i was not probably am not but each one the the meaner they get the not tougher i get the less connected to those sorts of things i get yeah that's that's really interesting like because kind of this career about of being a youtuber as it were um being on the internet and in a way wanting like for me it's like i want to connect with people and i really want people to like me but

and and therefore if there are like inevitably when you reach a certain size they're going to be there they're going to be people that don't and when those people are vocal about it it's like you know there could be a thousand like really nice comments and one comment being like oh you know your channel's getting a bit stale you're repeating it's like i'm talking about productivity like what do you want me to say i was like

these other comments like oh my god this is the first time i've come across this tip like to use a calendar you've changed my life and it's like great but no bro you're repeating content it's like [Laughter] i guess it's a an ongoing ongoing journey yeah well you know if somebody said for instance a piece of criticism about which you were completely secure i don't know what it would be but if somebody was like hey charlie

you're really fat like that wouldn't stick with me uh but it's it's not the areas where you're actually in in an infraction it's the insecurities that is being pointed out is this stale is that you know and and so i actually you treat it like that they're very very helpful uh ways into your own insecurities and shames and all those sorts of things so one of the things that has interested me recently and part of part

of the breakthroughs that i've had around this has been from like therapy and experiences with psychedelics and all that kind of stuff which takes you into those insecurities in a profound way and what i've realized is that i and i believe everybody has a deep fear of being alone a deep fear of not being liked of being cast out and all those sorts of things and we have all of these coping mechanisms to deal with it

we try to make in order to do that we try to make everyone like us um so in addressing that and seeing that deep deep insecurity for what it is it does diminish the effect of those specific attacks at some point because you're like oh no it goes much deeper than that not only is my content stale like i'm i'm afraid of being alone as well so so don't don't even worry about the content oh amazing

um it sounds like we have a lot of things to talk about when we meet in person at some point when the u.s lets me in yeah and someone asked do you lose connection to nice comments too then and the answer is um you know uh i didn't i believe it was was when tom said something really nice to me on here like i felt that cam was saying that that we met in brazil like oh

my gosh it's i've lost connection to faceless nice comments and faceless mean comments but actually when i do see someone and there's that human interaction uh even if it's through zoom i connect with it a bit more so somebody ever which has never happened nobody has ever in my entire life in person had the guts to say something new to me whether or not they thought about it related to the youtube channel that is um that's

another thing to keep in mind is that the digital space and the real space i had one friend who was so helpful he was on a reality television show and you know there's all sorts of things said about him he's like dude you gotta open your eyes go outside and how many people are yelling at you zero how many people are saying that your content is getting stale zero so it's like connect with that because there

is a world outside of this space where no one will say anything mean and if you do get approached it's always kind it's always nice and i'm sure that that's your experience as well yeah absolutely like i was i was at the creator event for the last couple of days and one of the guys who also had a huge youtube channel and was like very very successful came up to me and said he just wanted to

say thanks because his sister had just gotten into medical school and had gotten a lot of inspiration from my earlier videos and like the current stuff as well and he was like thank you i was like oh that's like so nice um because i think i've also lost touch with uh sort of nice nice comments from strangers on the internet but when it happens in real life it's just overwhelmingly positive again no one has ever no

one's ever gonna say something mean in real life i think that's when for me i realized that oh maybe this actually does help people and it becomes more than just sort of numbers on a screen sure um i was gonna ask like while we're on this sort of deep tangent stuff um we have we we could talk about thumbnails but no one's asking in the chat i think people are interested in the way you guys watch

i'm happy i'm happy to do anything um when it when it came to kind of recognize it realizing that you had enough did you have like a specific number in mind like a sort of number in the bank account or like a what what was it that made you appreciate oh i actually do have enough and yeah well it's it's it's it's still a constant um i don't want to say war but it is a constant

check that i have so it's not like oh i had enough and i've never even double thought that it is it a continuing return to remember how happy you were when you were airbnb your own bed in brazil and sleeping on the floor like remember how good that was and so what i try to come back to is uh if everything was taken from me and i had to airbnb my own bed it was still the

best time of my life you know i don't want to say the best it was one of the best times of my life um and so just remembering how happy i have been with little is is the thing that i come back to now in terms of enough and like what i have uh a couple things help me uh i try to except for this new home that i've rented but i try to keep my i

moved ten days ago it's october first or something uh try to keeping my expenses low i also another thing with with businesses is people as they grow they want the business to expand like there's this ego thing that makes us want to go people will ask you how many employees do you have as if that matters like what's weird is out of politeness unless they don't ask what's your profit margin which is like how much cushion

do you have to breathe and feel comfortable with coronavirus hits and the and so that's what i try to do i try to add when i am focused on business i'm not trying to add views or subs like trying to do a good job be ethical and add dollars profit is is what i ultimately am interested in and i this i was at bid summit really cool awesome creators was blown away by the lack of business

acting in there was like views were the metric that people cared about and i saw people with sometimes bigger audiences bigger channels that were so disconnected from profit profit margin business model all of these sorts of things and so that has helped me as well as just being like look i want a lean business that has a large profit margin that is built in a sustainable way where we're not trading on our reputation to do any

short-term cash grabs and stuff like that so i feel safe in the future and then the last thing in terms of enough is realizing that you can invest more than dollars so if every single dollar i had was ever taken and i was unable to earn again i know through the friends that i've made the family that i have the connections maybe even you would let me crash on your couch for a night but i would

not starve her or go without shelter like actually the best investment that you can do is in relationships because if all of your stuff gets wiped out i can go crash at my friend's place and it'll take care of me so in viewing like uh deprivation as something that is mitigated not only by dollars in the bank investments that you have assets but also by the relationships that will take care of you in times of need

uh that is like oh i'm gonna be more charitable you know what i mean like let me help let me get this let me pay for this let me like while i have it let me spread it far and wide and then if i'm ever in a horrible position like it'll it'll find its way back to me amazing stuff yeah um a few weeks ago i was i was in a i i ended up sleeping on

like a friend's floor with my kind of camera bag as a pillow and like their towel as like a blanket i was like it's actually quite fun and it reminded me of that like stoic thing where they like once a month or whatever um you know these stoic sages would uh kind of be like cold on purpose and hungry and wet on purpose and they would ask themselves is this the condition i so feared and realized

yeah actually it's not so bad it's not bad sleeping on a friend's floor head propped up with a bag you know if if i lost absolutely everything then life is still pretty good yes yes and you know tim ferriss has a similar um worst case scenario like defining the worst case scenario thinking about the things you can do to mitigate it that's always helped me make uh decisions that seem risky but actually upon analysis are like

mostly upside very limited downsides like starting the business moving to brazil all that kind of stuff yeah um oh i oh on that note well one thing i really wanted to ask you and i will talk about this in a lot more in person when we ever meet um the uh one thing that really intrigued me about your story story when i first discovered you circa 2014 was the whole uh traveling around living in brazil type

stuff um it seems like now you're no no longer a digital nomadi and a bit more like no stability i wonder what was that kind of trajectory like for you and in particular i asked because would you recommend the digital nomadic stuff in hindsight so what i've learned when giving advice through the process of my life is that there's this this is incredible thing where like the value of one phase needs to be directly reversed in

order to move to the next phase so like i grew up in a stable home and it was great and had everything taken care of and i was like i need to go to the far flung side of the world i need to move every six months and it was awesome it was exactly what was needed at that point in time um additionally like i needed to not train employees to focus just on the thing like

just get stuff off my plate so that i could focus on the videos and let them do an adequate job at what they're doing the next phase which i've entered into of my life is like i've done it i don't i've seen the different things wherever you go there you are i've learned what i like about digital nomadi and what i've learned that i like is like good food good people and sunshine and so california is

you know expensive as hell but it's got the sunshine and then i try to get as many people as i can to california um so yeah i become way more interested in just like i want that stable thing i still recommend it to a lot of people that remind me of myself when they're younger and they're trying to figure out what they like in life what motivates them exploration especially by seeing other cultures lets you know

which things that you might be taking for granted that you do and don't like about your own culture and the own place you grow up so it's a really awesome thing to do it's not for me right now but there might be a time when in my 40s but i'm like let's get back out there you know climb a mountain lord knows fantastic that's really useful to know all right um i think we'll wrap things up

there thank you charlie thank you so much for coming on i know i've gotten a lot of value from this uh angus and god who are here with me in the office i've got a lot of value as of people in the zoom chat and uh on the youtube stream um yeah guys uh charlie and i are partnering up uh for this next cohort of the part-time youtuber academy uh enrollment opens tomorrow at 4 pm uk

time you can join the mailing list link in the video description uh charlie you're going to be giving i think two workshops uh one about thumbnails one about charisma and like growing on youtube and things with a bunch of other extra sessions involved as well so yeah yeah so i'm going to be hopping in uh if we'll coordinate a time but i know you have an executive package and we'll be hopping in i believe once a

week for that um viral videos combined with charisma on camera because they're close and uh what was the other one that you mentioned making money as a small channel well we'll talk about it but i'm interested in a lot of this different stuff so yeah if you're on ollie's list or if you're on my list um you'll get an email about that great so yeah looking forward to partnering up from from from tomorrow on this thank

you so much for taking the time to join the call uh thanks everyone uh in the part-time youtuber academy community on the zoom chat and everyone else on youtube for supporting the channel and hopefully