Transcript of How to Give Up Everything to Save Yourself (ft. Matt from Yes Theory)

Imagine this. You're 20 years old, broke, and working as a dishwasher in a restaurant. And one night, a new friend that you just met comes over and tells you about an idea that he had for a YouTube channel. You guys get excited and you decide to do it together. Now, imagine these videos go so well that within six months, you and your new friend are getting millions of views, being flown to Los Angeles, meeting up with billionaires and tycoons, and receiving massive checks to create as much content as you possibly can. Jump ahead seven years and you've made hundreds of videos, have millions of followers, and become famous worldwide. Your videos have been viewed over one billion times. That is, billion with a B. And yet, at the peak of your fame and fortune, you decide to hang it up. This is the story of today's guest, Matt Dahlia, one of the co-founders of Yes Theory, one of the most popular YouTube channels in the world, a channel that began as four friends traveling the world, challenging each other to say yes to some of life's most crazy adventures. Matt and I will talk about how it's possible to have a co-dependent relationship with an audience.

We talk about the perils of experiencing too much success too quickly and the courage that it takes to stand up for yourself, even when it means giving up your life's dream. I'm excited for this episode, not just because Matt's a friend of mine and his story is so crazy and unique, but simply because it's so rare to come across someone who is so successful yet completely candid about their struggles and fears. What we'll discover is that at its core, Matt's story is actually a very common one. It's about someone who gave away too much of themselves to be liked and admired by others. Now, as a grown adult in his 30s, he is desperately trying to get that back. Stick around for this one. It's going to be fucking crazy.

Bro, do.

You.

Even podcast.

Like.

Bro?

This is the subtle art of not giving a fuck podcast with your host, Mark Hanson. So in a recent study, they asked six to 17-year-olds what they wanted to be when they grew up. And the number one answer, by far, probably I don't even have to tell you, is a YouTuber. The answer was three times more common than an astronaut or any professional athlete. All the kids want to become a YouTuber. That's the dream. You became a famous YouTuber at a young age, your early 20s, grew a massive channel, and then called it quits. So what the fuck, dude? You've given up the dream. What's going on here?

I'm not trying to. Six-year-old me.

Would be like, You idiot. You ruined everything.

You.

Had a plan. You had it all.

What the fuck happened? That is a great question. To give a little bit of context, we started getting quite big in 2018, and we had been living in L. A. For a year, and it was like, Holy shit, we're growing so fast. All these famous people want to work with us. It's turning into this thing, this dream that we had, because up to that point, it was just an idea. It was a big dream. I actually went back and read my diary during that time. There was one diary entry where I could see the first signs of not being able to continue for much longer. It was essentially saying I, about 4-5 times a day, introduce myself to new people in my own house. We have people coming in constantly because we're recording. At the time, we were doing three videos a week. We were just recording constantly with strangers and people and throwing events and parties. Our channel was yes theory saying yes to things. We were just constantly saying yes, even when we didn't necessarily feel like it. It was the first glimpse in that diary entry of like, I don't actually level this part or actually a lot of it.

And at the time, I had no idea that I was more introverted than I thought. Youtube oftentimes requires this big extroversion or at least this fake extroversion. I don't know if fake is the best word, but you.

Turn.

It on. -you turn it on. I was going to say talking heads. I didn't want to insult. But oftentimes, especially the comedian talking heads, I've met quite a few of them where on camera they're very expressive and loud and funny, and then you meet them in person, they're way more introverted.

And for me, it's live events. Really? There's a switch that goes on and it's like, Okay, just get through the night. You could stay in the hotel quietly all day tomorrow.

Reflect on how.

Horribly you feel. You've got all these people coming into your house, shooting videos all the time. There are two things that stand out about that that are potentially very stressful or difficult to deal with. One is the lack of any barrier between public and private. I think anytime you don't have a clear me space or me time in your life, things just get bad pretty quickly. The second thing, I think, is this feeling that you always need to be on and performing. The camera is always on. Not only are these people coming into your house, but you have to pretend to like them even if you don't. You have to pretend to be having fun even if you're not. You have to pretend to be excited about whatever they're talking about, even if you don't care. I think it's just basic human psychology that doesn't work for a long period of time. Yeah. Was there any awareness around this at the time? Were you like, I need a week off, or I need space, I need a break. Can we do two videos a week instead of three? Anything like that? Any conversations around that?

I think YouTube attracts a particular person. The stat that you just shared of kids wanting to be YouTubers. The amount of people that I've met that have started to try doing YouTube, especially young people, and then quit pretty quickly because they realize it's not healthy for them, is actually quite high. There's actually very few people I know who have kept creating and succeeded. When you bring up these questions, it goes back to psychology as well. It's like, how was I raised? What was I taught as a kid? Obviously, my parents taught me amazing qualities and taught me to work hard. But there's a thing my mom would always say growing up is never say I'm lazy, not allowed in the house. You are literally not allowed to tell those words. And so the concept of taking a break felt very contradictory to how I was raised. And then the second thing is, I was also raised in an environment because we moved when I was quite young, and both of my siblings are quite introverted, and I was the most extroverted of the three of us. And so when we would go to parties and we didn't know many people in the neighborhood, I almost felt like the diplomat, like I would show up and be this guy that would put on the show and bring people around him.

And everybody loved Matt. And Matt was the handshaker and the joke-crack of the day. I don't know what.

You're talking about.

I'm funny with you guys. I don't make fun of.

Myself here. You're the Fonzy of the neighborhood.

And I think that honestly translated to YouTube, and it translated to the way Yes Theory operated. It was actually a joke between Thomas, Amar, and I, my two co-founders, because they're also quite extroverted, but they didn't have this need to please as much as I did. We would throw these huge events, and I would find myself at 2:00 in the morning in this conversation that I didn't want to be in out of just pure obligation, and I couldn't find them anywhere. They left two hours before to go to their rooms and just take a breather or left the house entirely. It became this common joke that if you were in a circle with Matt, he would keep the conversation up and you could just leave because he would take you to take care of you. -he'd take over.

-yeah.

I prided myself on that for a long time, but I think that was a huge part of what made it exhausting because I don't know if you've experienced this with YouTube, but it's so different from being an actor. When you're an actor, there's this understanding that you're playing a role. This isn't actually you.

-you're on set. -you're on set? Yeah. When you're upset, it's over.

You can be a dude. But with YouTube, there's this idea of like, Oh, this is Mark, and this is how Mark is always. And so if I walk up to Mark, it's this parasocial thing. He's going to be just like he is in his videos. There is this pressure to be that guy. I got to be like, I'm fucking outgoing. I'm going to listen to you. I'm going to make you feel seen. And that is a true part of me. But after a while, I think the reason for the burnout, a big part of it was I just got super tired of that role.

In everything that we just talked about, if you replace YouTube with, I think, any relationship, you would probably see a very similar result. When people grow up in family structures with maybe without strong boundaries in certain areas, they grow up in interrelationships without strong boundaries in those same areas. And it just so happens that your relationship was this massive relationship with a fan base of five or 10 million people, but it's the same core issue, right? It never felt appropriate for you to say, No, I need me time, when you were young. And so when you're put in a situation as an adult, very highly stressful situation, by the way, that I think most people would struggle to handle well. That same thing pops up. You don't feel okay saying no or backing off.

Do you experience that? Because even we had this conversation with the size, obviously, of your YouTube audience, but also your newsletters massive. Do you feel this obligation to sometimes overshare part of your life?

I used to when I started. It's interesting watching, I'm going to sound like an old man now. It's interesting watching your generation, the generation behind me coming up, because I look back now and I think to myself, Thank God I didn't blow up until my late 20s because I already had a lot of years to fuck up and make a lot of mistakes and figure myself out, figure out how to relate to people a little bit better. And even then, the rate of my audience growth early on, it was pretty gradual, the first three or four years.

With a blog.

Back then, blogging grew at a much slower pace than YouTube does these days or TikTok or Instagram. So I had more time to accustomed myself to it and figure out, find some of these pitfalls and adjust for them. Whereas I look at you guys' story, reading your book that's about to come out, your trajectory was so insanely steep. And at such a young age. To me, actually, what's crazy is that you guys are still friends. It's crazy that there's still a yes theory at all. It's remarkable that more things didn't go wrong in you guys' case.

It was going to sound really boujee, but I was getting a massage. Fuck yeah. Fuck yeah, dude.

Treated myself is something I'm never going to.

Go to. That's what we worked hard to get to. And I had this moment in mid-massage where I was like, Wow, I'm still... So much a part of me is still high school mat. In a way, it feels like I started yesterday almost out of high school. I had done college, but that mentality had stuck. When you're so busy making content, there is literally no time to pause, process, reflect. In a way, you stay in the mentality that you were in before you got famous? Yeah. And so I'm 31 now, but I have this feeling, and this is probably not going to sound very inspiring, but I'm like, Holy shit, I'm still like 19-year-old Matt. I've done all this crazy stuff and had all this success, but I feel like I have in many ways matured out of that guy. But again.

And this isn't meant to diminish your experience at all, but to me, it's remarkable, the parallel. People who get out of unhealthy marriages. Let's say somebody gets married at 20, it's a bad marriage. They stick in it until they're 31, right? And they come out of it. They often have a very similar experience of like they still feel... They go back to who they were at 19 before they got into the marriage. And I think a big reason for that is, I think comes back to the performing thing. It's like when you go into a bad marriage or a bad relationship, you hide your real self and you start performing to keep the other person happy. And you're like, Well, if I can just perform a little bit more, things will be okay. Things will get better. They'll be happy, then I'll be happy. And it gets in this ugly cycle. And then eventually it falls because that's not sustainable. But I've talked to, at this point, hundreds, maybe even thousands of people over the course of my career who are like, I'm 30, I'm 40, I'm 50. I was in a bad marriage for 20 years.

And I feel like I'm 20 again because I never lived for myself during those interim years. They put their identity off to the side and then pretended to be this other thing. And then when they come back, it's like, Yeah, it's still the old 20-year-old self sitting there on the sideline. I think that's why a lot of times you see middle-aged divorce people go into nightclubs. -it's not.

Going to be that guy. -smoke in.

Popular the first time.

I guess because you've seen so many case studies, what are examples of people learning to mature? How do the success stories usually unfold?

It's easy to sit here and poke fun at 40-year-olds going to nightclubs and taking Molly for the first time. But I do think there's a certain amount of that that's really important and healthy. You need to figure out who you are. Whether it's a marriage or a YouTube channel, if you've spent the last eight years of your life putting on a front or performing all the time, you need to go back and finish that project of like, Okay, who am I? Let me try all these things. Let me try out a bunch of activities and hobbies and identities and relationships and see what feels right for me. I think just granting yourself the freedom to do that is super healthy. What I love about what you've done with the guys is that it seems like you've really patched the relationships with the yes, sir, you guys. I get no sense of bitterness or resentment. Those friendships are still intact. You still have great things from that period of your life that you can honor that period of your life with. But I feel like I'm starting to psychoanalyze you, but...

Dude, I love this. I need this. This feels like therapy. Please keep going.

Keep going. No, but it's funny hearing you... And we've talked a little bit privately about your experience, but it really feels like you had a co-dependent relationship with a YouTube channel. And on the surface, that sentence sounds absurd, but people have co-dependent relationships with their careers. They have co-dependent relationships with their churches and religious groups. They have co-dependent relationships with self-help gurus. People have co-dependent relationships with a lot of different things. And I think it's very easy to see, especially somebody as young as you were when Yes, theory started, nobody knows who they are when they're 20, right? And so when you get this massive thing dumped on you, it's very hard to stay aligned and stay true to yourself during that rocket ship that takes off with you just desperately hanging on to the side of it.

Yeah, and you have no choice. Yeah. Because, I mean, yeah, I was literally washing dishes at 22 and 24, and we're starring on... We're gaining hundreds of thousands of followers. It's like the first actual success of my life. Up until that point, yeah, I'd gotten A's on essays in school, but I was like, Wait.

Hold on. -that's not success.

-yeah. But there's a 50-year-old successful businessman that want to talk to us about what we're doing. So you feel like it's this very fragile thing, and if you let go of it, then you have to start like, I have to be that kid in the restaurant scrubbing dishes at 3:00 AM again, and I don't want to be that guy. -for sure. -so there's this deep, deep fear of going back. And so, yeah.

It's very similar to, say, music or TV film. You understand that it's like one in a million make it. So if you start making it, top priorities are like, don't fuck this up. Don't derail the train while it's moving.

Yeah, it's big wave surfing. That's the analogy I use this. The last thing you want to do is jump off. Because if you're just going to crumble, it's going to suck more. Just finish riding the wave and then think about what just happened. Yeah.

Just walk us through the timeline of how quickly everything happened.

In 2014, I'm washing dishes in Montreal a few months out of college, and obviously very confused about what I want to do with my life. I had started this very small clothing startup, this streetwear brand. I was like, This is going to be the thing. It's going to blow up. I'm going to be a successful entrepreneur. Then after about six months, I realized that having a business is fucking impossibly difficult. At the time, I was looking for help, so I found this class at the school I used to go to, which was doing marketing consulting for local businesses and using their students to consult. One of the students that I that was consulting for my business was Thomas. Thomas had a small YouTube channel. I was noticing how YouTube was still quite new, but I was seeing how brands were starting to come from these big audiences online. I was like, Holy shit. If I just convince a YouTuber to shout out my brand, that'll bring a lot of traction. I eventually convinced Thomas to make a video with me. We make a video. We do a shout out at the end for my clothing company.

It doesn't sell any clothes, but it's like, Wow, we have this really intense bond and it's really fun. Then we decide to do the 30 things in 30 days that we've never done before. And then very almost like you said, it happened so fast that even in the book, it felt crazy to write it because it's like, How do I make this sound real? Because it sounds fake. All right. We're literally the third co-founder, is walking down the street one night and here's this party upstairs, which Thomas is at. So Amar sneaks up to the party out of curiosity, says hi to everybody, meets Thomas. Thomas tells him about him and I doing our YouTube thing. Amr is like, I'd love to help. Amr comes in and we meet a fourth co-founder, Darren, serendipitously. We filmed this 30 things in 30 days together in Montreal. We're like, might as well continue after this because we had so.

Much fun. How many followers did you.

Guys have? At the end of the month? Probably 1,500. Okay. It was steadily growing. When you cross a thousand, you're like, That's a thousand.

I mean, it usually takes people years to get.

To where they're at. Yeah, that's right. And we had one big viral video on day 19. We could feel like, Oh, this is unusual. This doesn't usually happen. This traction. Then four months in, we get this email from Liz Murdoch's team who are starting a channel with Snapchat and they say, We love what you guys are doing. We want this content to be on Snapchat, on the front page where millions of people are going to watch. You'll still be able to make your YouTube videos, but now you'll get this extra boost from Snapchat. And on top of that, we'll pay you to film for four months wherever you want. And again, dude, I mean, the Mars, when I think back at it, I'm like, Wow, he was 21 at the time. Imagine $50,000 to a 21-year-old.

What the-And you guys haven't even known each other for six months. Not even. Four. Four months, and you're getting offered 50K and.

Basically-and just continue being best friends. Just keep being best friends. That's all that fucking matters. It's just your relationship and how much fun you guys are having together. And soSo Snapchat flies us out to L. A. We end up on the front page of Snapchat. Millions of people watch us on Snapchat. Within a year, we have hundreds of thousands of people moving over to our YouTube channel. I think within about a year and a half to two years, we had 200, 300,000 subscribers. Three years, we had a million. There was no moment of, Hey, hold on, this is not working. Let's pivot. Let's do something else. It was like, No, this is from the get-go. It was like.

Holy shit. I actually don't even know. I don't understand the struggle of... When I hear people talk to me about like, Dude, I've been grinding on this for three years and I just don't know what to do. I can't relate. I just don't understand that process. So I can't really give advice. But at the same time, yeah, I paid a price for that.

Yeah. Well, it's interesting. So Morgan Hausel, the Finance writer, was on this podcast a few weeks ago. I love it. And he said something really great. He said that one of the worst things that can happen to an investor is they make a bunch of money really quickly because they mistakenly convince themselves that they're really good. And it gets them into a lot of trouble later on because they never develop the good habits from those failures that are necessary to make it sustainable in the long run. I wonder if there's a crossover there, like if there's an analogy there of too much success, too fast, not learning maybe some of the necessary lessons. And this comes back to your question to me is my audience grew slowly enough, and I had enough bad decisions that didn't work that I think by the time I did blow up, I developed a pretty good boundary between myself and my audience. I understood like, okay, this is the part of my life that I'm going to keep for myself, and I'm not going to share it. And then this is the part of my life that I'm going to share and is open to everybody.

And for me, that was a very, very important process.

I actually watched the Morgan Husel interview, and there was a... I think he referenced what Will said about fame. You know that there's nothing worse than losing fame. And he became obviously famous at a very young age and on a whole different level. So I can't even comprehend that. But there does grow this... If this is all you've known is the success as soon as it starts to dip, not even the views necessarily, but if people start getting frustrated with you or the criticism start coming in, you're not adapted for that because people love the rocket ship, but they don't love it when the rocket gets steady and they want to be part of the wave. But as soon as it becomes this big thing, I think more criticism starts to come in. And so yeah, it became this intense pressure to please constantly please, please, please, please at all costs. And like you were saying, it's developed this codependent relationship with it where the second you feel like you've made them mad or angry, you almost change your whole personality to...

You're.

Like, No, wait, guys. Yeah, no, really. I'm still fun.

I'm still fun.

Yeah.

And then the lack of boundaries thing, dude, I look back on some of the shit we did is crazy. One episode in particular to me is absurd to think about now, but Emaarh surprised me on this blind date to Rome with a girl. This beautiful Australian girl, and it was going to be this full day of adventures and the best blind date of all time. We filmed the episode, and her and I had this actual connection and we start seeing each other. I was in Europe at the time. She lived in Paris, so we spent a few weeks together. Then I moved back to LA and there was this thing of like, What do we do? What is this relationship now? I hadn't given her an answer, but in my mind, I was like, There's no way I'm going to keep this up. I was like, I'm just going to let the audience know because there's so many people asking what happened to Matt and this girl. I made a post on our Instagram, a photo of me and her. I was like, Hey, guys, just so you know, we're not seeing each other anymore.

We had a really great time, but obviously long-distance, et cetera. Then the next day, I got a call from her being like, Are you out of your mind?

Wait, and you told her, yeah?

I hadn't told her. No, dude. I hadn't mentioned it. I told thousands of random strangers.

You broke up with a girl by posting.

On Instagram.

To tend to hundreds of thousands of people.

But that goes to show you almost a disease.

How skewed, yeah. Just how.

It works. You're so lost in this world where you're so obsessed with what these strangers think about you. This person that you have a connection with almost goes to the side. I remember actually even waking up next to her in bed one morning. And the first thing I waited an hour until we crossed 600,000 subscribers. On Social Blade, you used to be able to see it. I don't know if you still can, but I was just watching these numbers go up. I'm in Paris with this girl, and I'm like, when I look back on it, and this goes back to me being a high school kid, now going forward, those are the moments where I want to be like, put the phone away, be present. This is living. You don't need to perform. You don't need to please all these people.

Do you think some of it was you were afraid to have those moments to actually live your life? You didn't know who you were. So if you did put the phone away in that moment, it was terrifying, horrifying.

Yeah. Yeah, yeah. Now, having done more inner work, I can see why I avoided it. There's a lot of scary shit to look at. The performance is nice because it's familiar. Yeah.

I bet there's a lot of classic Hollywood celebrity stories that are similar to that. There was a little bit of that with Will's story.

Because Will, I mean, even reading the book you guys wrote, there's... But he's like going from music to TV show and then TV.

Show to movies. He became an absolute workaholic. And he could always justify it because he's on a rocket ship and nobody wants to stop the rocket ship when it's going. But yeah, a lot of it was just avoiding dealing with a lot of family pain and childhood stuff and stuff with his dad.

Do you feel like for you you dealt with that stuff in your 20s? Like you were saying?

Not all of it. But I think, again, I remember very early on when I was blogging. I was probably three or four years in the blogging, and I noticed that there were certain things in my personal life that felt very good to write about. And there were certain things in my personal life that felt really bad to.

Write about. Like just internally?

Yeah. I mean, I never had an experience as extreme as the one with that girl. But there were definitely some things in my personal life that I wrote. And after it went up and I started getting comments and responses on it, I was like, Wow, this feels terrible. I wish I didn't write this. I don't want to know what people think.

About this. Because you hadn't fully processed it, or it was too personal?

Too personal, too sensitive. I don't remember exactly when, but it was a few years in, I just came to this realization because it really started making me miserable. Because I felt the same thing early. I think most creators feel this at some point early in their career of this trying to find that boundary of what parts of me am I going to share and what parts of me am I going to keep for myself? And I just noticed that it kept making me feel bad writing about certain things, certain topics. And then also sometimes people in your personal life read it and send you an angry text message or an angry phone call and are like, Wait, what the fuck? I didn't know you felt this way.

Yeah, but the views.

Yeah, but the views are killing it. So yeah, I just hit a point where I realized I'm like, I think for my own sanity, I need to get really clear with myself what I'm willing to share and what I'm not. And I think I made the decision that to really try to keep things to stuff in my past. I'm pretty comfortable sharing any problem I've had in the past. Any problem I'm having now, in the moment, I don't share that because the act of sharing it complicates it. Interesting. So it's like if I have a problem with my dad, which I did for many years, if I wrote about that, that's just going to make the problem fucking 10 times worse. So I never wrote about it. But it's like once things are good, then maybe at some point, it's like I can talk about it. But it seems obvious in retrospect, but when you're young and you're in it and you're still figuring out what those adult relationships look like in your life, it's hard. It's complicated.

I will say it's pretty crazy how much vulnerability, obviously, in relationships, but also parasocial relationships works. Like, for example, Amar, three years into making videos, got a letter from his dad about his dad wasn't happy. He's a very traditional guy and wasn't happy with the videos Omar was making and so essentially threatened to disown him. And Amar made the decision of reading the letter to our audience.

See, that makes me so uncomfortable.

So he's, like you're saying, it's opposite of what you're doing. In the middle of dealing with this problem, he shared this letter and then reminds people to stick to their truth. That, in a way, for us, was a huge turning point because our audience was really strong and our community was really believed in us. But that literally, I think, turned people into super fans. They became obsessed. And Amar, especially, got a ton of people from the Middle East and people from more traditional backgrounds who really identified with what he was sharing. I think about it. There's this line from one of my favorite artists, J. Cole, the rapper, in one of his songs. He talks about sharing too much with his audience. He goes, You know me better than I know myself. He talks about how scary that is. And the music I find that I've connected to the most is the music that's the most real, the most vulnerable, the most personal. And so that line is so freaking hard. I think about some of my favorite writers like Elizabeth Gilbert, Tara Westover with Educated, Roxane Gay. These writers reveal all their shit. And a lot of it's not fully dealt with.

And even with this book sometimes, a lot of the stuff that I wrote is not entirely dealt with. But there's this almost maybe like, sacrificial part of me, self-sacrificial part of me, or it's like Martyrdom that I hold. And maybe they have it too, these writers. But this feeling of like, this is what will connect the most with people. But I do feel afterwards this like, even with the newsletter, sometimes I'll write stuff and just be like, Oh. I find that now my opinion is changing. It's like the books that you've written have changed my life. I feel truly like I am a pupil of Mark Manson. It's funny being here because I do feel like you're an older brother for me in the way that before we even met, I was reading your stuff and just feeling very guided by it. And sothere's this sense of you do reveal some parts of your life in your books, in your blog, and now in your videos, but you limit it. I think it almost requires more creativity to find other things to talk about, because talking about yourself is easy. You know it's going to connect.

You don't have to be that creative about it, but after a while, it does drain you.

I'm glad you brought up the thing with Amar, because I remember seeing that video, and I also remember seeing the... He did a video where he reunited with his dad after not seeing him for six years. That one made me uncomfortable, too, because my reaction to that whole video was like, Dude, this is for you. This is not for us. This is for you. And that was my reaction. But I think you bring up a good point. There's definitely a question of how much is this going to help people. And I think in the case of the letter, and I think that's something that I never thought of just being fucking white boy from the West, is like how many other Middle Eastern Muslim kids feel the way struggle with the same thing that he's struggling with. And when you put that lens on it, it becomes extremely powerful. And it can actually be very liberating because I think social media, when it's used the best, is when it takes people who are experiencing something difficult in their lives and they feel like they're the only ones experiencing it, and then they see somebody, especially somebody very prominent, who's experiencing the same thing and just talking about it, just normalizing it, being like, This is a thing.

It's really hard in my life. It might be hard in yours too. I think that's very meaningful for millions of people. There was anything in my life that I really felt like talking about this could benefit millions of people who are experiencing the same thing and nobody's talking about it, then I would probably err on the side of like, Okay, I'm going to overshare, even though this might make my life more difficult.

It's especially tough, I would say, if you're desperate. If you're desperate for success and you want to build-Then you share everything. -let it out. Yeah. Yeah, that's the... And in a way, that was the decision we made. You let strangers have an opinion about a thing you haven't even started processing it. Then you're 31 years old and you're like, All right. Now we can go to therapy.

Time for therapy, yeah. It's also one of those classic, naive, idealistic, young-person things. I think most people, when you're 25, you're like, I should be able to share everything. I should be able to be who I am and in front of anybody all the time, and everybody else should feel the same way. And it's like you get to your 30s, you're like, life doesn't work that way.

It's way more.

Complicated than that.

For.

People out there who want to do some public facing career, want to have an audience of some sort, what does a healthy relationship look like? What are the things not to do and what are the things to do?

Having this big data pool of creators that I call my friends is like you see which ones are more stressed out than others. I've often found that the creators who are the least stressed out are the ones that don't need it to work. They don't need it to make a ton of money. This isn't their one way to make money. It's usually the ones that have a business and also happen to be creators and have a channel that works. But the second the creating and the ad revenue and the brand deals becomes your main stream of income, you run into this conundrum where it's, again, I think that's where the codependency develops. It's like this thing needs to work. And so you become obsessed with these views. And so I have this big newsletter audience and I'm like, The one thing I cannot do, the one mistake I cannot repeat is to make this my source of income. Because then it just fucks with how I speak to the audience. It fucks with my relationship with creativity. Down the line, I could see myself having a business that's unrelated to the creator part of it, but also getting to speak my mind through writing or speaking.

When I think about how you started this podcast with the 6-17-year-olds and how they all want to be YouTubers, I hear that. I'm like, Dude, if the mental health crisis is already.

Bad, imagine how much worse. There's a lot of really interesting research around what they call intrinsic motivation versus extrinsic motivation. So basically the difference is intrinsic motivation is you're doing this for yourself. You really care deeply about it, or it's just fun, enjoyable, you want to be good at it. Extrinsic motivation is you get paid for it. It's like external incentives pushing you to do something. And what the research finds is that external motivation is really, really good for non-creative tasks. So if you're a plumber or an accountant or data cruncher or whatever, the external rewards are very motivating and they feel very good. It's like, I fixed 20 toilets, so I get this much money. It feels good at the end of the day. What they found is that external motivators kill creative work, destroy the motivation for creative work. I feel like people in the creator economy talk about it a lot more just because the nature of this industry is that we're very open and vulnerable with our audiences. There's a permutation of that conversation that I've run into. Everybody I know in TV and film, I've had that conversation with. Everybody I know in music, I've had that conversation with.

Do you write the song that you know is going to get more streams? Or do you write the song you want to write? Do you pitch the TV pilot that you really care about, or do you pitch the TV pilot that is probably going to get picked up by the production company? I hear it everywhere. It's ever-present in any creative line of work. And the closest thing I've ever heard to any solution comes from Hollywood, which is there's a saying in Hollywood, which is you do one for them and one for you. So you do one Marvel movie that's going to make a shitload of money. So then the studio agrees to greenlight your passion project that's going to lose a bunch of money, and then you just go back and forth.

Yeah. I mean, for you creatively, has that been the case? Have you felt stifled by the extrinsic motivation?

Yes. Yeah, so I felt that a lot in... Interestingly, I felt that a lot in traditional media. And I think.

The reason- With the movie and stuff?

Yeah, TV, film, and books. I feel that a lot more. I feel a lot more stress and pressure and anxiety doing those projects than I do doing podcast, YouTube, newsletter, blog. Over many, many years, I think I've developed a very good relationship with my audience where I feel at liberty to try things that don't work. Because when a YouTube channel blows up in a year, you probably don't feel a whole lot of liberty to put out a shitty video. You're worried that the audience isn't going to forgive you for it. They've only known you for a year. They've only watched a few videos. Whereas I've been around long enough and my core audience has been around long enough that I know if I put out a bad newsletter or a bad video or something like, life's going to go on. It's going to be okay. I've got this massive library of content. And so at this point in my career, it actually feels very liberating to have the freedom to try things, to fail at things. It's like, let's try this new format on YouTube, or let's try this crazy idea on the podcast. And if it works, great.

If it doesn't work, then whatever. It's fine. We'll just iterate and try something else. When you get a big contract from a movie studio or a book publisher, there's no leeway for that. There's no like, Oh, why don't you try a few things and see if they work? It's like, no, no, no. We're writing you a fat fucking check. This better be a hit or there's not going to be another one. And that feels really daunting as a creative person. That's when the pressure comes in. And so, yeah, strangely, I actually feel... I feel happier and healthier in this world. Wild. Which is weird.

It's so crazy to me. As you're saying that, I'm like, Wow, you feel... I think that's maybe why I love your content on YouTube so much is because it feels very almost like totally free.

And to your point, I don't need the money.

And you don't need the money.

I don't care.

If.

I spend thousands of dollars throwing a dude out of a plane in a chicken suit plane and it doesn't make any money, I don't really care.

Which is an amazing place to be in. But even two minutes before getting here, I got a call from a friend who's a YouTuber. I was updating on my life and he was updating me on his. He was like, Dude, I'm justI'm just sick of the algorithm. I'm just sick of the algorithm. You know what I'm going to do? I'm going to go for three months to Sardinia and just do pottery. I'm not going to record it. I'm not going to make videos on it, whatever. It's perfect. I just want to get good at pottery. I was like, That is better than any video idea I've ever heard in my whole freaking life because that's.

Not-you do one for them, one.

For you. Exactly. Yeah, that's the one for you. I think the balance is that. It's like whatever that looks like, your version of it, it's like, what hobby do you not post on Instagram? I really love salsa dancing. I want to invest more time in salsa dancing. I'm not going to make videos about salsa dancing. Totally.

Because it would.

Spoil it. Yeah, it would ruin it. Because then you're like, God, I got to get so much better at salsa dancing. Otherwise, they're going to stop watching my salsa dance videos.

So as you know, I'm a huge gamer.

I've played-I.

Thought you were going to say salsa dance. No, no, no. Terrible salsa dancing. Terrible. But a huge gamer. And I'm actually good friends with a guy here in L. A. Who works for a major video game company. And he and I hang out a lot. We were surf buddies. And so whenever we hang out, we start talking about video games. And it was funny, when we first became friends, we would have these long, deep conversations about video game design and certain choices that different game publishers make and why this was a good choice and this was a bad choice and why this was a great game and that was a bad game. And he told me a few times, he's like, Dude, you need to start a gaming YouTube channel. Some of the stuff you say is so much more interesting than 90 % of the people in the industry. Everybody in the industry would watch your channel. I'm like, Never. I will never fucking do that because it's mine. I would never risk spoil ing my favorite thing to do with my free time.

Can I ask you something? The video that you had with your wife, was there a moment for you of like, maybe I shouldn't show this part of my life? Or were you pretty free to...

I think at this point, we're pretty free. The funny thing with my wife is we tried to work together at one point because she's also a creator. She's very good with video and design. This was years ago. This was before we were married. Shes started working. We started working together for a few months. We fought more in those two months than our entire rest of our relationship combined. And then finally, after that project was done, I was like, We're never working together again. Ever. Ever. You're amazing. But this is... I can't deal with this. I need separation. Yeah, yeah.

So yeah. Yeah, dude, that's a big lesson. I think the big one I'm taking away is I think not just with work and content, I think just in life in general is setting these boundaries and learning that I don't have to be everything to everybody, I think is the biggest thing. Which again, goes back to childhood stuff and childhood work and resolving a lot of that. I think my hesitation with doing podcasts, even in releasing the book, is don't know how inspiring it is to say that I don't have it. I don't have the answer and I don't have it figured out. In fact, I feel like the majority of my life has been one giant performance. I don't actually even know who I fully am. Even the end of the book, where I'm like, literally ends with me saying, I don't know what I want, so I'm going to go and try and find it. There's this feeling of... When you were asking about shame and stuff, I think there's shame around that because I feel like being a public figure and having a platform and stuff, you should have something to say. But I'm like, Guys, I am just fucking lost.

Just like, Look directly at the camera. I have no fucking clue.

Somebody said help.

I love your story because to millions of people... I mean, yours is just very public because of the path that you happen to take in life. But millions of fucking people go through the same thing. They get to their 30s and 40s, and they're like, I've been performing for 20 years. I have no fucking clue who I am or what I want or what I like. I hear from them all the time, get emails every single week from people.

Really? Yeah, all.

The time. -in the age group. -all the time. Well, it's very common. And it comes back. It's just I see it as I think it's a side effect of some co-dependent relationship. Most commons romantic relationship. But I hear from people... It's the lawyer who worked 90 hours a week for 15 years and then developed crippling depression and hated his life and quit, and now is like, who am I? What do I want? There's so many permutations of it. I think as long as you're just looking for what's right for you, hopefully that can give people the courage to do the same thing.

I think being in a codependent relationship of any kind, there is that sense of martyrdom. You're sacrificing your sofa this person or this thing. And so to start asking yourself what you want feels very selfish. I at least went through this whole process just to get to the point of being allowed to ask myself what I wanted. I had to work through the idea that I even could. And so, yeah, I think it's a... There's your inspiration. You want an inspiration? -yeah. It's like.

I have suffered intensely for years, and I still don't know what's right or wrong. You put that on a motivational poster.

Too true.

How was writing the book?

I'm very happy I wrote it, but I hated the majority of it. Yeah, I hated it. Itried to leave it. I actually hated the actual book itself. I had a terrible relationship with it. Because I was like, Look at what you're doing to me. I want to leave this thing. The book felt like this puzzle that I had to figure out in order to exit. For the first year and a half, it was like this intense battle with it where I was like, I just don't want to do this, but this is my only way out. I felt like I had no choice. There came this moment last year where I'd written a draft that I wasn't very happy with and that I'd sent to other readers I really respected for feedback and they were like, It's not that good. I was like, Dude, I just can't fucking do this. Literally, I have to go. I called everybody on the team and I was like, I'm leaving. I appreciate you all. I can't do this. Then Amar was the only one that was like, No, you can do this. I'm not letting you give up right now.

I was like, This motherfucker, this guy is just ruining my soul. But after that conversation with him, there was this switch where I was like, If I'm going to do this, it has to be a choice. I can't feel forced to do this anymore. I have to decide from the bottom of my heart like this is what I want to do. As soon as I made that decision, it completely transferred into this much more fun project that I got to do with other people. I had invited one of my best friends, who's a really great writer in the fourth co-founder of Yes Theory, to come work on it with me, Darren. It became this collaborative project. I went to Montreal where he lived and I got to see where it all started. That's when the process, the processing actually really started to happen. I started to get excited to share and even remembering the good times because it's so easy when you're trying to get out of a thing to remember only the shit times. Whether it's like a business or a divorce or whatever, it's like the whole thing was shit. The whole thing was shit.

Literally, that's the first draft was like, This was all shit. Blah, blah, blah.

I hate everyone. Goodbye.

Literally. He could never talk to me again. And then with Darren, it was this like, Wow, this was amazing. What the fuck? This is so unusual that this all happened so serendipitous. I think it really got reflected in the book. The original drafts were actually quite dark, full of anxiety and so much family stuff and blaming everybody. Then the final draft was like, Wow, gratitude. Yes, it was really hard, and this is why I'm leaving, but holy shit. Look at all these moments that we got to live and the lessons with them. It's interesting. I've shared the book with several creators, and I think almost more than any other people, especially YouTubers, the feedback has been the most almost surreal positive for me, because I think I'm describing the experience that they never get to share or read in a book. I think there's athletes and celebrities and stuff who have shared their memoirs or whatever. But I've never read a YouTuber talking about what it's like to build a -That's true. -a YouTube channel or a movement behind the scenes. I can't think of one. Yeah. I think to be able to have that relate to other creators I think is really cool.

Yeah. I think more than anybody, that's who I'm excited to get to read it is. My fellow content creators, you're not alone.

What is the success function of you guys as a team? The founders of Yes, siry! Were The Avengers. What is each person's superpower and why does it work between all of you?

Yeah, we're very different. I think that's the key. Very different people. Thomas is the most introverted and the storyteller, obsessed with storytelling. There was even a moment when I started filming with the boys again. A few months ago, we took this taxi from London to Morocco. It's like a taxi driver $10,000. They picked me up in Paris and we drove down to Beldu, France. It was my first time being back and I was like, Wow, this is all epic. But also I get to see why it's actually quite tiring because you're filming and you're traveling and all this stuff. And we get to the hotel at 10:00 PM and we're in the lobby and we're just kicking it, having a late dinner and Thomas goes up to the room. He's like, I'll see you guys later. Goes up to the room and I'm rooming with him and I go up to the hotel room like 30 minutes later and he's just in his boxers, hunched over his laptop, editing this specific scene from the thing that we'd filmed the day before. Like finding the perfect song for the scene. So someone with that level of obsession for storytelling.

In that moment, I was like, Wow, this guy is just like a born storyteller. Then Omar. Omar is like a... I think we had a creative savant. He's just a pure artist, pure, innocent child artistry. And then I'd say for me, it's almost like this obsession with community. Very much focused on how do we engage the community? How do we grow it? How do we get them to connect?

Which makes sense because while you were up at 2:00 a. M. Talking to people you didn't want to talk to, Thomas was probably editing the video.

Yeah, and Omar was skeething some big idea.

Yeah. So all of this is going to wrap up in two months. All of it. L. A, book, Yes, Siri, everything. What are your expectations on the other side of that, if you have any? And what are your plans? Because one reason I asked too is just to... Because there are so many monumental life shifts happening simultaneously, I think, and you definitely seem to have this, which is completely understand, there's nothing wrong with it, but you definitely seem to have this mentality of just get to the finish line. It's right there. I'm almost there. Just get there. Don't fuck it up. And I think it's just human nature to assume like, okay, once I get across the finish line, things will ease up and be easier. And I think because so many massive identity changes are happening simultaneously, you might actually get to the other side of it and feel really lost again and really like, fuck, what do I do with myself?

So Yeah, I mean, to give you an example that's related to this is I dated quite a bit during the eight years of yes theory, but I never had a long-term girlfriend. I was always convinced like, Wow! Once I have a really healthy relationship with the girl I love, it'll all be amazing. We'll figure it out. And so then I met this amazing girl, started dating. She became my girlfriend. There was a moment about two months in where I was laying in bed with her. She'd gone to bed and I got up and I went to my porch and I just sat there and I was like, Holy shit, this is not going to solve my problem. This is not going to do it. This was supposed to be the thing. The woman was supposed to save me, not myself. Yeah, right, of course. Yeah, I think having had that experience, I'm aware that the finish line is not really it. There's probably going to be a down, and I'm prepared for it. I'm expecting it. But at the same time, going back to what Morgan Hausel says in his book and on the podcast is like, freedom of choice is such a massive piece of joy, of happiness.

I find that that's what it'll give me more than anything, is the freedom to choose. Obviously, it'll come with a lot of anxiety as I'm making my choices. But I think once that starts to develop, it'll settle a little bit. That's the assumption. Maybe I just completely freaking...

Are you planning to take some of it just as vacation? Yeah, I.

Think I'm going to travel. Cool. I'm going toNo cameras. Yeah, no. I'm not a single camera, dude. Not even my phone. Dude, oh, my God. Literally, I have this visual of being on a beach, which is so cliché, but just not even with a drink in my hand, just like this on a big batch of sand and being like, Oh, my God.

I fucking did it. That'd be a sick drone shot. We could have an intro, and it's going to be great.

We'll start a channel.

Yeah, we'll start a channel. Matt's Day Off. Yeah, it's going to be amazing. Perfect. -never ends. It never ends. Never ends. All right, well, you've seen the show before, so you know that we finish every episode with a round of Fuck, Mary, Kill. I know I don't have to explain this game to you. We'll start with the easier one, which is Fuck Mary Kill: YouTube, book writing, podcasting.

Kill, unfortunately, I'm sorry, YouTube. Mary, bookwriting. Really? Yeah. And then I.

Think-even after all the pain it put you through.

After a little... I mean, holding your own book.

Is.

The coolest.

Thing of all time. There's an old saying which is painters love to paint, writers love having written. Which I have experience with every single book I've done.

It's like you're just.

Climbing through the shit. It's that scene in Shoshanker-Dibbon, where he's climbing through the sewage.

And.

Then he.

Comes out into the rain and he's just like, Preach on. Andy Dufraine, climb through 500 yards.

So pure shit. Right. That's book writing. That's exactly what.

Book writing is. I'm not married, but marriages I've heard are hard. True. There's a lot of shit eating in that, too. I feel like that's the marriage I would accept. Then podcasting, I'd fuck, but I do enjoy podcasting. But again, it's the camera thing for me. I think I.

Would-be audio-only.

-probably be audio-only. Got you. -got you.

Okay, next one. You've got to see this coming. Fuck Mary Kill. -thomas. -dude. -darren. -darren. -wow.

-wow.

It's a forced choice, so guys, it's my fault I'm making him do it. It's a forced choice. Don't hold it against them.

I feel married to Darren, that's the thing, because we wrote the book together, and that became a marriage. So I'd.

Married Darren. You guys have ridden off.

Into the sunset. Kind of, yeah. And I even filmed the last episode together. Just us two. So married Darren, a fucker, kill, Thomas or Mar. I never thought I'd be asked this question. All right, Matt.

I mean, whichever one you choose, you better have a good explanation.

I think... How do I say this without sounding like I'm fully... Yeah.

I just love that you're squirming right now. You're suddenly shifting a lot more in your chair.

I probably... I have a threesome. A threesome? -yeah. I have a threesome. One last big hurrah.

There you go. One big hurrah. The final video.

Yeah.

Exactly. For a different video site. Yeah. Awesome. Matt, brother, it's been a pleasure, dude. Thank you, dude, for coming by.

Appreciate you everything. -seriously.

-great seeing you, as always.

And honestly, big shoutouts to you for, I mean, throughout this process. You've been so amazing, so supportive. Just to have you by my side for it has been instrumental.

Yeah, dude. I mean, takes a lot of balls to do both things you did. It takes a lot of balls to build a YouTube channel that big, and it takes a lot of balls to leave. So a lot of respect for your courage and prioritizing yourself. It's something that's very hard to do. A lot of people are not able to do it. So I'm excited to see what's next for you and go enjoy that beach. Oh, God. No phones.

No cameras. I'm going to tell you all something new pictures, but...

Yeah, don't send me anything. -you want it for me? -just come back one day and tell me.

How it was. Just a big beard and the tan.

There you go.

Yeah, that's good.

Much love. That's it for this episode of Subtle or Not Giving a Fuck Podcast. Matt wrote Talk to strangers. Is there a subtitle?

The Yes Theory story.

Talk to strangers, the Yes, theory, story. It should be out everywhere when this episode goes up. So check it out. Bookstores link in the description below. And obviously, check out Yes, theory. They're fucking amazing. They're still carrying the torch. I love those guys. I never know how to end these things. So like and subscribe, leave a review, do something, buy a book, go outside, talk to your friends, call your mom. I'll see you next week.