Vikkstar: What It Really Took to Build The Sidemen (we didn’t plan for anyone to leave)

late night bites with friends already hard to beat that first too hot bite of fries you couldn't wait for followed by ice cold pepsi now that hits different suddenly the energy kicks back in the night goes longer and the laughs don't stop because pepsi brings out more flavor more fun and more of the moment food deserves pepsi grab a pepsi zero sugar today saying how you feel out loud is terrifying but that's what hinge's new free audiobook no ordinary love is all about it's a collection of real love stories about five couples that met on hinge the stories are written and read by temby dinton hurst nicola dynan curtis garner raven smith and rufy thorpe i hunter harris wrote and read the forward the audiobook's out now give it a listen i have to ask you obviously about ksi leaving at one point we said if one of us leaves does that end the sidemen how long until this bubble bursts those show how powerful the crew can be legacy ultimately this is honestly the hardest video i've ever had to make in my life so you were vic star one two three one two yeah because vic star was taken by some girl called vicky she got the youtube channel first i'd be recording in this call with everyone talking having fun stop turn off my phone i'd be like just sat in my bedroom and i haven't spoken to anyone in the real world in days but then i came to know the sidemen and we're seeing if you want to go somewhere fast go alone if you want to go somewhere far go together but you must see the comments and it must make an impact yes but before we get to that there's always tension in groups how do you manage that tension you can't see the illness you can't measure the illness but i was hospitalized and there was a sideman video we've been running around filming all day i'm just like oh my god i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm gonna die i'm in pieces you've clearly become very successful what do you believe you still have to prove and to whom that was the low point in the sidemen look pause with me for just a second now whether you've been with us every single week since day one or you just drop in when a guest catches your eye i see you i truly appreciate you every comment every share every time you show up it matters we're building a really special community here if you want to support what we're doing without spending a penny please just take a second and click the subscribe button it costs nothing but it signals to the world that these conversations matter thank you for being on this journey with us now let's get started how would you characterize sheffield for anyone who has not visited oh that's a good question um it's very english and it's smaller than london so people have been to london you kind of get this idea that all of the uk is this huge sprawling city but sheffield was quite small it felt um yeah quite homely the peak district is nearby which was beautiful it was a yeah it was a nice place to grow up yeah yeah i i tell you what i what stands out to me about sheffield is i went you probably would know this place too is oh my gosh i should have it's uh it was like fork or spoon hall or something along those lines was it spoon hall in the city center in the city center yeah because they used to make all the uh cutlery the steel yeah in in the city center so yes i know where you're talking about but i don't think that's the exact name but i can't think what it is but it's something to do with cutlery cutler's hall cutler's hall that's what it is yeah there you go and what blew me away was that was where that was the epicenter of cutlery yeah in all of england yep sheffield steel's very very famous so yeah there you go yeah so so then how do you believe that that history right impacted the community and the people who were there and their characteristics that's interesting yeah i think people they almost like very you know salt of the earth people they just everyone was quite genuine they say the further north you go in england kind of the more people will tell you stuff as it is so i feel like you got a lot of that um sometimes you know places were a little rough around the edges uh in that kind of slightly more northern way um a little less polite and reformed then things are down in london less expectations of that but yeah good people friendly people i had a good time though yeah yeah yeah i um i thoroughly enjoyed it and to your point is i felt like there was a little bit more i'm gonna tell you how it is yeah uh but but i'm going to do it with a smile yeah i remember when i first moved to sheffield i found it really difficult because i had to go to a new school had to fit in everyone spoke differently i distinctly remember them having different slang so in sheffield in so i grew i was born in guildford was there until i was kind of six or seven moved to sheffield and it was the strangest piece of slang i remember is in sheffield they call an alleyway a general right is that not just you can't even think how they got to that slang term but that one that stuck out to me and it just is so different to the word when people would say i had no idea what they were talking about so i remember the first few years that i was in sheffield it was kind of this a bit of a shock i'm like okay everyone's a bit different here it's my first time in life experiencing change yes so that was difficult and i think possibly kind of knocked my confidence a lot i went from being a very chatty kid to moving to sheffield and it was like okay it's different here i don't really know what i'm doing um but as the years went on i definitely kind of learned to you know understand people better i developed a sheffield accent if you go to my early youtube videos i have the broadest northern accent which is hilarious so you think that your accent though has shifted though over the years yeah and then it shifted back pretty quickly after i started youtube because i realized that people across the world watching the content they wouldn't understand if i was using sheffield slang and had that sheffield accent it's yeah it's and i also was making a lot of videos with people from all over the world there are people in canada people in australia through gaming online okay i had to make sense to them so it was very quickly reverted back to the to yeah i guess neutral english i wouldn't say i have a particular accent now it's more southern but it's just kind of neutral english it's neutral english it's interesting because i could hear the northern really yeah it's good because most people can't yeah i could hear i could hear just a little bit in there yeah um and so and and i didn't realize that so i didn't realize so you were you were not born in sheffield but you moved there you said when you were six or six or seven yeah okay and how does that you think impact you right because i remember moving when i was younger like i moved from jamaica queens to long island which is outside new york and then we moved from there to virginia and i remember how challenging it was at least for me to make my way into the social circle yeah so what was the impact to you i would say it's something that i never really truly recovered um from in a sense of those years at school i never felt like i properly fit in but then maybe that's me as a person which is also fine yeah yeah you know i found that i mean you've clearly become very successful as an entrepreneur and and i mean extraordinarily successful as an entrepreneur let's just call it what it is um and and we're going to talk about that but i have found that most of the incredibly successful just people whether it be in entrepreneurship music whatever it may be is that typically there's this feeling of not feeling enough at a young age yeah you know and and there's and then there's a drive that comes from that so if you tap into that what do you believe it was for you at a young age that you were not getting or feeling that then compelled you forward yeah i think there was a degree of that in you know not being the most kind of popular person you're always sat there thinking like how could as a kid you're like how can i be more popular what can i do and nothing really worked and i think maybe that was part of the drive but also i think honestly i got lucky i found that my hobby could become a job and no one really understood that at that point so i was lucky to one have this gaming and online world as kind of my escape from the day-to-day life and this place where i could reinvent myself as anyone and then also the fact that i was sharing the videos and discovered other people online were watching the videos it gave me this new exciting project to pursue but i mean i guess there was that drive but it was never in my head formalized as a drive it was just hey this is fun this is cool i'm going to keep trying to do this and do this better and that was it okay okay so then before you even put a camera on yourself or your or audio right when did you start gaming gaming from longer than i can remember ago because i've got two older brothers so video games growing up nintendo 64 game boy game boy color pokemon goldeneye all these games i was playing them um my older brothers would play them so i would always want to be involved and i guess the funny part is that they would never want me on their team and they're playing like split screen and that probably gave me another drive i'm like okay i'm gonna get good at these games and now i think either of them i beat them any day any day yeah now you're like here but but that's interesting though so as the little brother you want to play with them you want to be on their team and they're like nah yeah yeah yeah he has to go on your team for this game like yeah so now it's age 14 i think that becomes this major pivotal point in your life yes but before we get to that can i show you a photo okay all right so i want you to take a look at this all right so tell me roughly how old are you what's happening for you right now good question um i've got i'm probably maybe like eight or nine years old okay and i'm holding our infamous uh pet pet duck so yeah growing up i'm not entirely sure why i think my parents are not entirely sure why but growing up we had a pet duck and a pet chicken really genuinely yeah strange one yeah i think my parents went to the to the zoo uh to the farm to get rabbits for us which would have been a sensible pet and they said we don't have any rabbits but we have uh this duck and this chicken that are basically like the runts of the litter so the smallest ones in their litter so they won't be looked after very well in the zoo would you like to take them for whatever reason my parents said yes and um we we had a pet duck vick you had a duck yeah called chocolate so okay now you know so uh so i'm a i'm a dog dad same uh and and you know and i'll hold on to that and i i think our you know they our pets teach us things so much what what did your duck chocolate teach you i don't think i was at the right age and i don't think i was really responsible for the duck you know it taught me that they make a complete mess of a patio because you cannot train a duck or a chicken to go to the toilet in one place you just can't do it so yeah i i remember putting down the patio endlessly trying to just keep it clean because they they do what they want oh my gosh yeah wow i don't know if i met anyone who had a pet duck that's pretty cool yeah yes it's certainly a unique one all right so you mentioned your two older brothers there and your parents yes what would you say at an early age right what do you learn about love from your parents and i'm not talking about romantic love right i'm just talking about love in general yeah um and the reason why i ask that and i ask that often is because how we perceive love when we are at that age yes typically impacts how we then perceive love as an adult yeah so how did you view love from your parents at that time it's a good question really no one's ever asked me a question anywhere near that that uh that requires me to kind of go back that far and think because i guess when you're a kid you're not even thinking about love you're not even thinking about love when you're a kid you're not even thinking in these you don't your thought process is not this but i think it was very much that they were there for each other so it was kind of acts of service for each other was their main thing making sure that we always were doing the best we could do that was that was the main thing that i saw is kind of they were working as a team to make sure that we could thrive as kids the best we could and that's what i saw i think yeah i think that's and you did and you felt like they were working in part for you and your brothers yeah yeah okay okay that's beautiful so now before we get to 14 let's stop at 13 okay okay the reason why i want to stop at 13 is because so i have um you know i have a 15 year old and then i have a 12 year old okay and i feel like at that 12 you're really starting for the first time to create an identity for yourself you know i always say identity is the story we tell about ourselves that we believe so when you think back to 13 what was your identity it's a good question i would say my identity was someone who loved video games a lot that was my kind of my primary passion it was someone that um enjoyed excelling at school i'd been fortunately put in a position where i was able to really excel at school so that was kind of a bit of a part of my personality at that point or my identity at that point was that i could succeed in that environment and that was nice um and i was i was yeah my identity was that i was a younger brother so i had these somewhat cooler older brothers at the same school so that was a bit of a part of my identity there would be teachers who knew them before they knew me so they kind of already had an idea of what i would be like um which was interesting okay um and maybe i was possibly a little bit quiet at that point in my life which is uh interesting because i was probably trying to work out what is my identity and a little bit afraid in social settings to put myself out there too much kind of that fear of perception yes so and i think what's tough too is when you have older brothers who you just said cool older brothers yeah so they were cool in my head yes in reality i don't know someone would probably call on me to go no but in my world in my world they were there will be something probably watching something like this who went to school with them they'll be like they were not i think you got the call yeah you're cool you're still cool that's hilarious but but i i think that's that's so important because from your perception they were so i think a lot of younger brothers when you know that you have a cooler older brother or at least two of them you're always trying to be cool yeah right uh did you consider yourself to be cool probably not no i don't think so just because i wasn't i think i knew that from that point um i was i guess i was trying to be but i don't think i was and i think i knew i wasn't and maybe that was uh well i was a little more reserved and it's it's like chicken and the egg almost to be cool you have to think you're cool and then you become cool so you know maybe that's a a life lesson right yeah so interesting because you became very cool yeah and very uncool at the same time and i'm okay with that so i think that's also part of the fun yeah yeah yeah so all right so now just so i can ask though what was it about you at 13 that made you believe you were not cool i wasn't athletic couldn't play any sports growing up i would say at any point but especially we're going back 17 years or so growing up at that age and not being able to be good at any sport i was not good at any sport i was not good at any sport i was not good at any sport that's not good there was not one sport i could do and i think for some reason it was everyone every lunch every lunch break everyone plays football i just never was able to um yeah so i think that was a big part of it and also i think also because i excelled in academic studies that also was something that was not seen as cool so i had those two things that i just knew this is the way it is this is who i am it is what it is i get a situation i get it i get it i i think you're painting a good picture you know as to what life was like at 13 yeah so so then let's go into 14 because this is where i think your life just begins to take a whole another uh trajectory yeah so at 14 you then is that the first time that you start recording yourself playing video games yes it is yeah okay now why what was the purpose genuinely it was pretty much to share with some of my other friends i had that also played the same video games and it was almost this there wasn't anything in the games to show them so it was like oh i did this i recorded it have a look and they had their own youtube channel that was actually much bigger than my youtube channel and they were sharing clips and it was kind of mostly to share with each other and show things that we were doing that we thought were cool in the game it could be cool in the gaming world if i wasn't in the real world that was the idea and then other people was other people started watching them started watching me and it just opened this eye up to hang on a second there's people that i don't know not i i sent this video to five friends eight of them have watched the video and it's just like who are these three people this is cool these are completely unknown people let me see if i can make videos more of them would want to watch it was more of a curiosity and a fascination that led to something that built over time ah okay i see it so now did you start though with the camera with your face on camera no it was no yeah and it's it's almost funny to think back i grew up in a time when it was like protect your identity do not talk to strangers do not put your pictures online do not put videos online pre any of the social media we have now now it's very different so many kids have phones with front facing cameras they start making social media content from a young age and i think also in a lot of ways because it's so widely distributed it feels safer to do that i think when i grew up it was kind of be wary of strangers there wasn't as much monitoring of those situations where kids would end up in bad situations kind of contacting people they shouldn't have been contacting got it but that meant that i was originally just the game and a voice which is also how it was when i was gaming online which was quite nice because it almost allowed you to really reinvent your personality because i was vic star one two three this alias i thought up for myself that i thought was cool and i was just the gaming ability and the voice that was who i was and I had all of these friends that I knew from online. Funnily enough, we'll get to it later, I'm sure, but the Sidemen, we all played video games before we met each other as people. And you think, you know, it just goes to show what that can be. But, yeah, I was just, yeah, this username online when I started gaming. So how did the, so you were Vicstar, it was. One, two, three. Yeah, because Vicstar was taken by some girl called Vicky. Oh, she got the YouTube channel first, so the username. So you had to be Vicstar123. Yeah. So how do you believe at, say, 14, 15, going into 15, how was Vicstar123 different than Vic, who went to school every day? Very, very different, because, again, YouTube, social media, it's cool now, was not cool back then. So it was something that, again, it would have been another thing for people to go, like, they were taken. They were like, why do you sit in front of a microphone and talk to people on the internet while you play video games? This is weird, man. This is not cool. And it's funny how that changed, because kind of by the time I got to my A-levels doing sixth form at school, and all of a sudden my YouTube was a business, and there were large numbers of people watching, and kind of people would recognise me in public. That's when, to the people at school, they were like, oh, I get this, this is actually quite cool. But until that point, that's what they say, right? Right. When you start, everything is embarrassing. You just have to start, because once you get past, you have to go through the embarrassing stage to make it anyway. So I learned that from that point. So, yeah, very different people, but I guess they had their similarities, because I couldn't. It wasn't acting, I wasn't inventing a persona. It was me on both sides, but maybe even allowed me to put myself out a bit more. Exactly, because that's what I would imagine, is that you weren't two different people. You were just taking probably characteristics that you had and playing up certain aspects. Probably more of the social, front-facing, you know, charismatic attributes. That took time. If you watch my old videos, you'll realise that took time before it landed. But it's a skill you have to learn. Yes, yes. I mean, I've watched quite a few of your videos, and I do think that you have changed. My impression is in confidence. Yeah, I agree. As you've gone through the years. At what point, though, did you put the camera, did you put your face on camera? It would have been maybe like 2013 or 14. I did like a little bedroom tour where I showed my set-up. Originally shocked people quite a lot, because they didn't expect me to look the way I look, which was an interesting time. I think the internet was very unhinged back then. And I think that's also part of why I was scared to put myself out there as a human entity, so that people could kind of judge rather than just based on a voice and the game I was playing. So it took a lot to do that. And even when I would be doing that, it took a lot of confidence and push from the other sidemen. So when I started living with them, and they were all filming themselves without kind of any embarrassment or, you know, any reservations, that inspired me more to be like, okay, I need to be on the camera. People need to know me as a person, not just the game that I'm playing. If I want to take this further down the line. It made sense, but it was super out of my comfort zone. And crazy to think that if I had just at that point said, I'm never going to be on camera, there's absolutely no conceivable way I'd have this career now. So out of the comfort zone has to be done. - There you go. I mean, these are great, just lessons, like life lessons, career lessons. So now going back to before A-levels, right? At what point. Did you go from occasional. Or did you go from, I feel like this is fun. I'm Vikstar123, right? To this could be a business. At what point did you feel like this could actually be even a career? - It's probably when I signed my first contract with this big American YouTube partner network called Machinima. I don't know if you've ever heard of them. - No. - They're one of the very early on the scene in the gaming space. When we started making videos, you couldn't monetize YouTube videos. That's how early we were. If you think like now everyone wants to be a YouTuber or a content creator as a job. When we started, you literally couldn't put adverts on your videos or get paid. - Oh, okay. - So before you could even monetize your own channel, they came and they had their own channel that they had monetized. And they said, we'll pay you if you send your videos to us, we'll post them to our channel and we'll pay you $2 per thousand views or whatever it was. And I couldn't believe this. I was probably 14 or 15 years old at the time, had to get my parents to sign this contract for me as my legal guardians. And at that point, I'm not gonna lie, I probably thought I was a bit of a big shot. I was like, hang on a second, got my first contract. Okay, gonna make a couple dollars a month. But you know, I think that's the point where I realized, hang on a second, this thing I've been doing purely as a fun experiment, someone's gonna pay me for this now. Okay. This could theoretically be not even a job at that point. I was like, this could be a really good side job. So I'm not gonna have to go and get another job somewhere else. I could do this potentially as my side job. That was the idea at that point. - Wow, so at 14, 15, you thought, okay, you two could be at least a side job. - Yeah. - All right. So now I would imagine you're still doing well at school. - Yeah. - Parents, family think you're going off to university. - Yes. - Right? But you don't. - No. - So walk me back to that because you did quite well at school and your A levels, right? - Yes. Yeah, yeah. I did really well. That was always the deal with my parents. You can do your YouTube hobby thing. We'll support it. We'll help you out where they can. I mean, they couldn't, they didn't really understand what I was doing, but they were like, do your thing. They weren't against it. But the trade deal was all the exams, the studies that can't slip away. So. I pretty much also at that point became very unsociable in the real world because I was doing all my studies. Then I was doing all my YouTube stuff and I used to run home from school at lunch to set videos to upload or set videos to render out the editing software because computers and upload speeds were so slow then. If I wanted to post a video every day, I would have to edit it in the evening, set it to export and render all the clips together overnight. Sometimes I'd wake up before school and it would still be going or it would crash. That was the worst. You'd wake up and the editing software's crashed and you're like, well, okay. - I gotta go to school. - Yeah, so you set it to export again, go to school, run back from school at lunch, set the video to upload. And then maybe seven, eight hours later, it would be uploaded. And also during the whole time it was uploading, the family internet was gone. It was completely overloaded by the fact that I was uploading this video. I couldn't even game and record another video until that process was done. So yeah, I was kind of running around the clock and that made me a little kind of busy with those things. But the deal was do well at school, do your YouTube thing, keep your, and I think this was one thing my parents always taught me that I think was a good thing is the saying, don't keep all your eggs in one basket. So I was kind of doing the YouTube thing and also keeping my university open. My university options open. So I got a place for natural sciences at UCL, which I think would have been really challenging to do. I couldn't decide which science I liked. So I said, I'll do all of them as a degree, which when I went toward the university to do open days, they were kind of saying, this is going to be tough. You're not on one course here and you go and do modules from three different university courses. - Right. - Which I think would have been really tough. And maybe in my head at that point, I was thinking I can just maybe make this YouTube. - YouTube thing work at least for a few years. - But UCL, so according to what I have seen is UCL, and I wasn't familiar with it, is that consistently ranked as one of the top schools in the world. - Yeah, yeah, I think so, yeah. - Yeah, so you are offered a place at UCL. Your parents must, I'm a parent, I would say you're going to school. - They did want that, yeah, they did, yeah. - How would you compel them, convince them otherwise? - Well, I think it just, fortunately for me, it landed at this great time where I could do this gap year. And in my head, I was thinking, okay, if I can make some okay money doing this, balancing it with my studies, let me give it one year to really go for it. And it actually worked quite well. 'Cause I was like, I'm going to put my all in. And it's almost, I had that insurance policy. Let's say I get nine months into this year and either one, I don't enjoy doing it. I'm not doing it anymore. Two, my audience has disappeared and abandoned me 'cause I got boring. Or three, even at that time, it's funny to think, I've sat there looking at it and even my parents the same, and we were going, okay, so I'm earning money playing video games and posting it to the internet. How long until this bubble bursts? It didn't make sense at that time. You're thinking, okay, you've been doing this for a year or two. It feels a bit too good to be true. When is this all gonna? And I guess theoretically, potentially, it could have ended, one of the game publishers could have come in and said, "Hey YouTube, you're not allowed to monetize any content on our game and for me if it was one of the big games i was covering theoretically it could have all gone so that's why i had to keep the options open okay but luckily the gap yields is perfect worth saying i'm not saying i'm not going give me a year to give me a year just to to put my head down on youtube right so now roughly how much were you making though at that time oh i would say probably between like 20 and 30 000 a year a year this is a year but it's oh wow okay it's identifiable as a job at that point that i mean that's substantial yeah yeah definitely that's full-time income for many people all right so and you were how old at that time i would have been 18 so just finished my a levels yeah okay so now i can also appreciate you not you saying that i didn't have a you didn't have a social life yeah right because you were because at that time it's a full-time job yeah when you reflect back though do you think you missed out on any of your childhood it's a good question i'm gonna say no because for who i was it was what i wanted to be doing and i think actually maybe i would have ended up chasing something else that wasn't for me had i not had this gaming and online career kind of thing of building for me okay so i don't feel like one thing i guess if i had to pick one thing i maybe missed out on it would have been going to university itself i never got that experience i got a completely different experience which was amazing but i do a lot of my friends i do talk very fondly about their time at university it's this twilight period between being a kid and being an adult where people have a lot of fun and actually again we'll get to it later but the only times i've been to universities in the uk now is to dj a lot too impressive and i'm like i've seen these people having so much fun and i'm like i missed this but it was all worth it have you ever noticed how many of your friends are sitting on great business ideas it's usually nothing to do with thinking their idea isn't good enough and everything to do with the execution side feeling a bit too technical but with our show sponsor shopify so much of the technical side is taken care of for you it enables you to set up your own online store without a developer you just pick a store template customize it to your own branding upload some product photos set your prices and you're live shopify looks after your payments inventory orders returns it even helps with calculating shipping rates and if you also want help selling your products shopify's built-in tools write product descriptions create email campaigns and schedule social posts for you too it makes the technical part of running a business so much easier so give it a try yourself and sign up for your one pound per month trial and start selling today at shopify.co.uk need to talk the perfect lunch combo that first bite of your favorite sub followed by ice cold pepsi add a couple of friends and now that's next level suddenly the laughs get louder the stories keep flowing and the food tastes better because pepsi brings out more food for you and you can eat more food for yourself and you can eat more food for yourself more flavor more fun and more of the moment food deserves pepsi grab a pepsi zero sugar today endless summer escapes start here travel the worlds of netflix irl inspired by fan favorites like stranger things and squid game brave the upside down face off with the front man play leveled up arcade games shop exclusive merch and enjoy themed food and drinks beat the heat play eat and shop on repeat at netflix house at galleria dallas bring your crew and save get your tickets today at netflix.com slash house so then you just go all in right can you talk about what all in is because i've had the privilege of talking to folks like dan tdm tommy in it you know talia mar people who have done very well with youtube and the commonality and i know this is your story too is that they were relentless you know they were relentless and they were relentless and they were relentless and they were in posting. You live in it. You live it. So describe to us, what was that year like for you? So it was an interesting year. And at the start, so in terms of just hours, genuinely, we're talking 15, 16 hours every single day, working on something to do with the content, whether that's recording it, whether that's editing it, whether that's speaking with other people doing content about what is working, what isn't working, how it can be better. I think I was probably posting two or three videos a day at this point. And I kind of made a deal with myself when I started The Gap here. I said, OK, I'm potentially giving away a great opportunity at university, having a good degree, going and getting a good job. So I said to myself, I'm going to upload a new YouTube video to my main YouTube channel every single day without fail for as long as I possibly can. And I think probably for seven or eight weeks, I'm going to upload a new YouTube video to my main YouTube channel every single day without fail for as long as I possibly can. And I think probably for seven or eight weeks, I'm going to upload a new YouTube video to my main YouTube channel every single eight years, maybe a few hours. I missed it by the cadence of one video every single day. I stuck to that. And that's again, I didn't know at the time, but I realize now that's how you get good at anything. It's reps, putting stuff out, not worrying too much about it being perfect. They say like build it first, make it perfect later. And that's kind of how it went. But it was also great because the space was not so saturated back in 2014. This is so I could cover loads of different games genuinely was having fun playing the games and the challenge of making it entertaining to view doing it was some of my best friends who I'm still friends with loads of them today, which is great. So while I sit here and say it was every waking hour was working on this YouTube channel. This wasn't against my will. This was like, I love it. I can't wait to find out what's next. That's not to say it wasn't tough at times. Yes. The biggest challenge was when we I would make double the amount of videos. So I was thinking I don't want to give these people four days without my content. They're going to go watch someone else. Yes. Yes. So it was completely Yeah, nonstop. But the thing that was interesting is back in Sheffield. I had a few friends, but they then left to go to university. And I did realize that I was staying up all night pretty much record with people in Canada, America, Australia. I'd go to bed as the first thing in the morning. And then I'd go to bed. And that was how I was recording with people from overseas, you just had to be available and around at those hours. And it would be like, I'd turn off my computer, I'd be in this call with everyone talking, having fun. I'd like stop, turn off my computer, and I'd be like, sat in my bedroom. And I haven't spoken to anyone in the real world. In days that isn't my parents who I'm annoying by yelling into my microphone at three or four in the morning. I think they put up with a lot of that, honestly. Yes. So it's almost hilarious when you think back to it. But then the flip side of that was three or four months into my gap year, maybe actually more like four or five months in, I came to know the sidemen, three of them wanted to move out from where they were moving in, from where they were living. So we all moved into a house together. And that was probably the most pivotal change. Everything changed at that point. Everything changed. All right. So that we definitely have to talk about. But even in that, because I could, you painted a great visual, I could see you yelling into a microphone. The sun is coming up. Your parents have been sleeping or they're waking up to go to work. Yeah, they're waking up. They would see me in the hallway and they would just be like, what are you doing? What are you doing? Right. So now help me understand though. So I mean, your parents are professionals. Your brothers, your older brothers, did they go off to university? They both, yeah. One did computer science and one did medicine. So. Okay. And here's Vic. I was born to be an academic, but I missed that one. But this is what I'm saying. Like, so here's Vic. Yeah. Who had an offer to UCL who now is in his bedroom, probably in his pajama. What were you wearing? Oh yeah. Yeah. Probably. Yeah. Tracksuit bottoms and a t-shirt that I'd been wearing for two days. Right. Not even taking a shower. Right. Honestly. What do you truly, did you feel as if your family were on the same page as you? Did, did, did, did they see the vision that you had or were you the only one? I think they didn't see the vision and I would often try and explain to them, but I think that's just because it was so, you couldn't have foresight on what the space was going to become. So I had to try and persuade them. This could become this. I could be doing this. I might get this. Parts of it, they just didn't physically understand because it was numbers online. And I think when we started running events, like, you know, uh, or when we started running events, like meet and greets and, um, our charity football matches, then it became much more tangible to them because it's kind of a visual thing that they could see. Whereas when it was numbers online, it didn't make so much sense. So they could see I was clearly excited about it and it was, I was earning money from it. So it wasn't a complete waste of my time at that point. So from their point of view, they couldn't see the vision and I often would try and explain it to them. But I think also I was just, fortunately, childishly optimistic about the whole thing. And I think, you know, they've lived their whole life of things. Things were not always easy for them. So they would look at it and think, can this really go the way he says it's going to go? So they were always there giving that, that resounding, but also was good because it gave it this grounding sense of and it made me also fortunate to be in that position i was like i have to keep working in this position i can't say oh i'm making some good money i've made it now kick my feet up and let it fall apart it was almost they'd instilled on me that whatever you do you have to work hard on it do it to the best of your ability that's how you succeed so okay okay um how does before you move in with the sidemen right so you're still in the home you're waking up all the time or actually i don't even know how many how many hours are you sleeping at that point not enough probably some nights five hours and then some nights i would the the weirdest one that i remember so distinctly is some nights i would end up recording really late because it's going great these guys are making so many videos i can't miss out on going to bed while the americans are recording these big videos so i'd stay up till sometimes 9 a.m i'd go to sleep and i'd be so frazzled i'd wake up you and in the winter the sun had set again at like 5 p.m when i would wake up and be like it's dark i'm just gonna go back to sleep and then i wake up at 10 p.m it was not healthy it was no no it was a it was a degenerate cycle cycle yeah and and when you now think about that time period how did that impact your mental health yeah it probably wasn't great and i realized that maybe eight years into this career that okay this is all your life is at the moment it's chasing these uploads it's chasing these views it's chasing these subscribers this revenue and i did have to kind of make a big shift in my life to finally step away from that but the sad reality is also that's how i got to the point where i could make it so successful it's like the 10 000 hour rule you have to get to 10 000 hours in something before you've mastered it i got there very quickly by doing 16 hours of it every single day without fail so yeah it was it was a trade-off but uh one that i did have to change and it wasn't a healthy mindset but that's not to say i wasn't having fun throughout the whole process and generally very excited and optimistic about it it just couldn't last long term okay and what was it that you were excited about right what was it that was um lighting you up was it the follower count was it the money was it the access to other people online you know that you maybe looked up to was it all the above i would yeah i'd be lying if i didn't say it was all of the above all of these things are positive for me and it was almost it was almost we were proving ourselves in doing this and i think one thing that was is always stuck with me is i remember when i was 17 i went to a gaming event and i'd been covering call of duty non-stop at this point and call of duty had this event and technically i was invited to it but because i wasn't 18 i wasn't able to go to the event to play and record the game and i was like so devastated that i couldn't like get this really cool access to cover this game that i loved early that everyone else was doing and there were other situations where we were just desperate to get access to games to make content and we were kind of told no so it was almost exciting every step of the way saying hang on all these people who said no to us early on they're turning around coming back to us offering us more wanting our help and kind of value and what we built so it was almost a nice part also just to kind of prove people wrong which i think is kind of what you said is if you do grow up in a situation where you do feel like you're not appreciated or cool you want to kind of prove people wrong to a degree so yes yes so that was part of it yeah there's because i can i can feel along your journeys that there's this hunger yeah you know that i can even still see to this day it you know it exists and so now tell me about this here's another photo uh-huh are you ready all right okay i want you to tell me about who's in this photo okay all right and these guys iconic picture all right so so who's in that this is this is the side men way back when as genuinely as we're little kids effectively exactly and how old do you think you are in that it's a good question i was probably either 18 or 19 so this is very shortly after that i was 18 or 19 so this is very shortly after that i've moved away from home for the first time and i'm living with these completely you know who were at the start unknown guys okay but we're having just we're having fun it's amazing and and you decided so how did you come about how did the side men form yeah um the side men came together pretty much by accident which is why i think it works so well we all had our own youtube channels that we'd all had the kind of the we'd all jumped out of our comfort zone to make ourselves we'd all seen this we were all into video games wanted to put ourselves out there playing them and then social media started coming onto the scene 2010 2011 and the main one we were all about was twitter back then that was kind of where you could find the youtube community at that point it was again very unsaturated it was just us on there and we would all follow each other just to kind of it was you were watching to see hey what what is everyone else doing in the youtube scene okay who's doing the same as me who could i collaborate with for videos and so we'd seen each other doing that and then the big moment without us realizing it was when grand theft auto 5 came out okay 2013 um we all decided to start playing the game together just because we thought it'd be fun to make content together i actually funnily enough um happened to know a lot about the technical side of youtube so all that how the algorithms worked and how the systems worked when things broke people would often be like vick this is broken how do i deal with it how do i make this do better and josh from the sidemen happened to be asking me about some youtube issue where i joined their call and then for me the reason i'm in the sidemen was they said hey we're recording some gta next do you want to join and i said yes and we were just recording as independent creators together to all make videos for our own channels and for me it was like hey we're recording some gta next do you want to join and i said yes funnily enough ethan had made us a grand theft auto crew so we could all just join the lobby together it was kind of it wasn't really much more than just a way of all joining the same game and as a bit of a bit of a laugh a bit of fun he named the crew the ultimate sidemen which is it's peak english i'm sure as you know it is english english you know you'll fire a shot at yourself we're the sidemen we're just the the ultimate the ultimate sidemen you're not the main man you're the side yeah yeah so he made this gta crew and that's how we joined the game thought nothing more of it and we started making these videos together and people online loved them they thought that we got on well they enjoyed what we were doing and they started commenting under the videos i love sidemen gta videos when is there going to be more sidemen gta videos and we without realizing it had created a group a brand um effectively so we just kind of carried on that process we then went on to meet up in real life at gaming events like okay we all seem to get on we're all we all had the same mission effectively but we're all very different people which is fun because we're learning from each other and um that's how it started and then four of us moved into a house together the other three guys moved into a an apartment building not too far away and then we transitioned from the video games to the real life cameras which again for me was so out of my comfort zone and i don't know if you've heard of the video games but it's a lot of fun i would have never have done it without them would have never had the confidence to do it or felt the need to do it um and that's when we combined all of our audiences of a few hundred thousand subscribers each to this kind of group that had maybe a million followers and then and yeah as time went on it became bigger and bigger can can you unpack some of that for me right because that is i think an incredible story but you have uh seven different personalities right in that group and there's many people who would be who i'm sure has you know you've built up an audience and you think okay well i'm not going to join another group like i'm not going to join a group i'd rather be a solo act yeah so what do you think it was about the personalities even about yourself because this is about you that allowed you to join a group opposed to continue on solo because you're doing fine yeah solo so i think it was a handful of things i think it was the scene in general at that point and always has been something that we've always tried to push forward is collaboration is more exciting than competition realistically it opens a lot of doors for you we'd realize that people tended to enjoy us coming together in some instances more than the stuff we were doing alone and also we would just work harder so we would do both we would do videos on our own and then we do videos as a group and it kind of worked so it i think it was that mindset it's that you can build something better together it's like yeah um i think we just realized that early at that point and also we were having fun and we got on and that was a real kicker and we were there to kind of help each other um there's a saying and i i really like it i think it fits the sidemen perfectly and it's if you want to go somewhere fast go alone if you want to go somewhere far go together because you're going to need to rely on each other at the same time and i think it's a really good idea and i think it's a really different point and you can get a lot further it might be slower it might take you longer but you have something much more stable so absolutely yeah that's a profound african proverb right there there we go yeah and and so also what i'm beginning to see now in your story is that was your that was your college that was your university yes but it was not like any other university because there was no partying it was like we were sat in our bedrooms yelling into microphones and that was it like we didn't leave the house very much at all we would all be in our bedrooms making videos around the clock so it wasn't this uh you know this this partying celebrating culture it was like okay everyone let's lock in right but what what was what was then the goal so once you all kind of assembled and figured out that you could go farther together right what became the goal of this group this is my favorite thing about the side men's whole career and my whole career there has never once really been a hard setback tangible goal it's always just been how can we take it a bit further really what's gonna be fun what can we do next what's gonna work and that's allowed us one to be very fluid in terms of the direction we take um because we haven't been i set on one target we've kind of always tried there's a lot of trial and error um but we've never we never even set out to make the group into a group it was okay we're a group we make videos together this is great then youtube asked us to make an original series for them when they were trying to become a paid um paid video streaming platform okay they made a service called youtube red in attempt to compete with netflix and paid streaming platforms yes and um we made a series for them realized very quickly that we didn't like working under their production team and their creatives we prefer running our own and that woke us up to think okay let's just try and make i guess the goal that we set when we started making sidemen content formally together was let's make the best video we can once a week every week and we haven't really missed a week properly since we started doing that six or seven years ago but these goals aren't so much you know yeah long-term plans it's just let's build a system let's trial and error let's let's host a charity football match and see if we can sell 10 000 tickets yeah let's say we can sell it bigger next time bigger the time after but there's never been any long-term aims it's how do we keep this fun how do we keep this authentic to ourselves and how do we make it more interesting and better content for more people that's fascinating because i think there's so many people who probably think that you know you all come together and very methodically have laid out okay in three years this is what we want to be doing we're going to launch this in the fifth year but you're literally saying it is how can we just the next next few months the next few months yeah it's always been that way which is yeah completely different to kind of these corporate environments and i think also it speaks back to how our career started in a sense that when we started our careers we were just messing around having fun we weren't sat there thinking okay how can i start making a thousand a month two thousand a month how can i get to 20 000 subscribers 50 000 subscribers because if we would really struggle to get there it would dishearten us and we'd be like i've been trying so far to get to this point and and you can almost let yourself down whereas it's just okay can i take this a bit further let's see where it can go yes feels it's how our career started and it's kind of how we've continued it not to set these really tough hard aims for ourselves that we'll feel a failure if we don't reach them it's just like celebrate every step of the way and every step in the right direction that's mind-blowing it's mind-blowing yeah um the house can you tell us about what was it like to live in that house because i remember talking to uh talia mar yes about visiting uh and i was like tell me because i want to know like did the house smell like were they were they cooking together like so what was it what was the living dynamic in the house it was interesting because it was a place to just the the primary vision was make the best youtube content you can and then everything else hopefully works um i wouldn't say that it was particularly messy also wasn't clean um the guys would sometimes cook together i never cooked a thing it was oven food or just pre-made sandwiches and and cereal that was what i lived off so again we go back to this unhealthy period i was very unhealthy but i was just making it work myself um which was interesting but it was i mean it was a fun environment though it was just so we times will never be like that ever again in the sense that the expectation of content compared to now the quality standard expected was so much lower which was so so much fun we could pick up our phones and walk around the house and film things in each other's rooms and there wasn't anything like it on youtube it was that was the cutting edge at that point was doing that yes it was very easy for us just to mess around have fun be stupid and form it into this content that people really enjoy so so and i understand the the fun nature of it right but you're also a business at that point you're i would presume you're starting to make significant income yeah at that time now so can you give us roughly what was being made at that early stage i mean between all of us in the house maybe a year or two into it it's the house is generating kind of way in excess of a million a year in revenue between all of us so we're making serious money at this point but it's the opposite where you wouldn't think that because i'm sat there in my pajamas eating a a sandwich from tesco and and like sleeping on my mattress that's on the floor right you wouldn't tell um so we were doing really well at that point and that's what made it exciting yes but i think again we just were so new to the space especially for me it was like this is all just sitting in the banks save it save it save it because we don't know how long this is going to last we're doing great now but and at that point even maybe four years into our four or five years into our careers we'd seen people have meteoric rises huge huge declines and we were sat there thinking okay our time our time will come uh fortunately it didn't really which was great and that's because we were constantly reinventing and we had each other to kind of support each other yes um and we did just reinvent so many times we pushed ourselves out of our comfort zone many times but um yeah everyone was doing great at that time and though and that did also make it kind of fun because some of the boys they were buying chrome wrapped range rovers ksi's purple lamborghini parked up outside the house so you had this complete polar opposite where it was it was hilarious yeah i mean it's incredible like it i think to your point is like that will never happen again no it'll never happen again yeah you know what what you what you lived through there was there any danger because i've read stories about people egging the house and was there any real danger i don't think there was any real danger but there was consistent disruption disturbance from people around the house just because people wanted to come and see us and that wasn't something that we thought forward ahead to especially when we moved into the house we had millions less subscribers we had than we generated in the house so i would say it was more of an annoyance you've got people opening the letter box on halloween show really can you imagine that you guys come downstairs and make a picture and we turned off all the lights we're pretending we're not in and we would duck under the window to go to each other's rooms really because we would be in a tricky position because effectively you want i mean one we understood that that's a complete violation of privacy someone shouldn't be doing that in the first place but two we realized if they know we're in the house they're going to continue to do it and then three we also know let's say we were feeling nice and we went down and said okay let's take a picture we're going to do it and then we're going to do it and then we're going to do it and then we're going to do it and then we're going to do it and then we're going to do it and then we're going to do it and people know that that's something that can happen and it's going to multiply the problem yes so we were sat in this i mean again you look back in hindsight it's kind of hysterical because we were like trapped pretending we don't live in our own house because we were in this situation we couldn't really there was no solution to that problem no and you created it for yourself yeah exactly so we can blame anyone else yeah so if i can check him in in on how you perceived yourself right because you described how at 13. you know you felt uncool the identity was really one of being the younger brother yeah uh by the time so you're in the house you are held early 20s yeah okay what is your identity in your early 20s and how do you view yourself my entire identity is my identity was vickstar123 at that point it was no more vick no that was just it was all i did every day was something related every single day of the week um and it but it was cool because it was working for me it was my job it was my identity everything was kind of growing i was having fun with friends so that's who i was i was just someone who was enjoying doing what they were doing and could do it every day so that's it was yeah i was just celebrating that fact and i didn't see anything else being important at that point okay what what for example what was your biggest purchase at that time early so i did purchase myself a very nice car i purchased uh a second hand uh aston martin vantage v8 okay and that was that was maybe the first time i felt cool so i got this thing that is just undeniably cool uh so that That was probably. Yeah. And actually, yeah, to this day is one of the biggest purchases I've made. But yeah, that was yeah, that was something. But then the majority of the money was just in savings. OK, so. All right. So big, big pro there. Big pro. All right. So what about on the con side? What about if we can talk about criticism as much as you want to talk about the criticism? But this is something that everyone online has to face. Yeah. However, I think that you were the sidemen. You were growing at a point where. In my opinion, you tell me, but trolling really became a thing. Yeah. Like it almost if trolling feels like a profession now. People are good. Yeah. I've got years in the arts. Very good. Right. And also you had a massive profile. Yeah. And so I would imagine each of you have been targeted and that you must see the comments and it must make an impact. Yes. What has that impact? What was that impact on you then? Oh, yeah, it was it was forever tough. And I've always read a lot of the comments on my own content just because I feel like that's how it started. It was this relationship between us and the viewers in this relationship. And I think that's what it's all about, you know, when you're in real time, I post a video, they comment the same day. The next day I make another video having seen the comments of the day before. I think it's why YouTube has gone so far. And we've been able to do so much that traditional publishers haven't been able to do because it's that real time relationship. Some people call it parasocial. I don't think of it as that. OK, I think it's it's community. It's a real time community that you're building. And I think that meant that I would see a lot of it. And honestly, the majority of it was just. Kind of hating for the sake of hating, and I wouldn't feel that it was particularly true, which would make it very easy to disregard. And I think also important to have, I guess, build a strong self-esteem, because if your self-esteem is low, you're going to start reading people saying negative things and almost start to that. Maybe I mean, maybe they are true, but sometimes it's safer to say, no, that's not true. That's not right. I'm going to ignore that. Yes. So that was the easiest stuff to ignore. Sometimes stuff would hit on the nose and be like, I can see. Why you think that and why you don't like me because of that, and I think it was yeah, it's not nice. No, no one's going to sit and say it's nice, but I think little by little you microdose that negativity and you learn to just let it kind of wash over you. And I think also the more I grew up, the more I realized that actually everyone in life struggles at times, even people who seemingly are doing fantastic and that can cause people to say things that they don't really think or feel. And I almost a lot of the time, my mindset when people write stuff that's completely horrible, I just have to think, I feel bad that you're in a position where you have to say these things and I'm just going to try and ignore it and just hope that it all works out for that person. It's I guess that's one mechanism, but I think it's also true to a point. It's just and also you can't please everyone. You have to you have to have that mindset. This is true. This is true. When you think about the criticism, then was there any criticism that. That upon reflection. You thought, wow, they were right. And then you actually adjusted as a result of it. I think there have been so many of these over time. It's so strange actually having hours and hours of your social interactions be analyzed by people sat at home all of their own kind of psyche and mindset towards it. Then they have the power to tell you what they think. Yes. But also, I think it's been great. I think it's rounded me as a person. I think, yeah, sometimes I talk too much. Sometimes I'm too quiet in some environments, sometimes I'm too quiet in other environments. People will comment that like really quiet this video. Why didn't you feel the need to say anything or get involved in this moment? You kind of killed that moment. And sometimes I watch and be like, you know what, maybe I did, maybe the next time in that situation, I give it a bit more or it can be the opposite. Sometimes you do a bit too much and you watch it back and you like or it's the way the edit lands. You're like, OK, yeah, I yeah, that was a bit I can see why. And I don't mind it. I'm not going to do it again. I'm going to do it again. I think we're all pretty open which is nice I think yeah we all like to you know poke fun at each other it's the nature of the the business funnily enough and it's very English in its nature um but I think yeah we've and especially as we've grown older it's become a lot easier for us to come in and say this was a bit far this made me uncomfortable this needs to be removed from you know the video or don't don't do stuff like this and I think we've all learned to kind of respect that and that's been really important we have a lot of mutual respect for each other and that's allowed you know any disputes to you know be solved fairly quickly and most of us will just sit and talk with each other and that's how it works and and you go directly to the person have a conversation do you do you'll sit down as a team and say you know what this was over the line this needs to be removed um I think it's we have a group chat and kind of anything anything that we're discussing just kind of gets discussed in that or we might we used to have more meetings where we kind of all sit down together but I wouldn't say there's been many things you know so big that they felt they needed kind of a full boardroom meeting over I think we know each other super well we've grown up together so we kind of we get a feeling for when things are not right maybe someone will step in in the middle and just be that middle point and and it's nice because there's so many of us you know depending on the issue someone can step in and be that correct person to just kind of help the situation mellow over and work through so uh yeah I think it's just a mutual respect and understanding and knowing each other well okay has there ever been content that you have regretted oh that's a good question I don't think so really maybe I again I watched something back and I think I didn't act in the quite correct way but also that's part of why our content I think is so interesting is because it's so real it's not scripted reactions are genuine to how I as a person will react to a situation true sometimes people don't like how a person reacts you might be doing a cheap versus expensive holiday and I've been on the cheap side a bunch of times in a row so I'm gonna you know have a bit of a rage which is great because it's you know it's human and it's and also I'm usually kind of giving it a bit more and then some people will say oh the way he acted there was so ungrateful for the experience he's having but then also people will say I find that so funny look at him crashing out this is hilarious so I think sometimes you I think about how I acted in certain situations and whether I would change that or not okay but there's never been something um that I've done in content where I've like I I wish that never went out or happened so yeah how much pressure do you feel today for content to perform because when I look at the budgets of some of the content that you're producing is I've seen that you sometimes do half a million pounds that's our most expensive one is half a million pounds yeah uh do you feel pressure for this content to perform I think being honest yes which is tough we've been trying especially in the last year or two to reduce that expectation within all of us and make sure that primarily the content we think is fun and engaging because we always think that comes first you can build content to be kind of mass attention grabbing and it can perform better but is it better in the long run it's like it's like a sugary sweet some content's a sugary sweet and we you can get lost chasing the sugary sweet but I think yeah what we try to do as best we can is put the content first but you're right we have I mean including freelancers over a hundred employees so big overheads big video budgets there has to be a balance between okay we need these videos to perform but I think at the moment we're at a fair enough sweet spot where we can go and have fun on our shoots and we've got a lot of people helping us kind of elevate them from a production quality standard okay um but like you say it's uh it's always a bit of both it it is and and so what I like what you're what you're describing here and what I feel like you're describing is you've emerged from a creator to an entrepreneur yeah right you are a shareholder of a large business we just painted how big the business is yeah so when you view yourself today your identity yes and I know there's music that we're going to talk about as well but what would you say your identity is today yeah it's it's several things um which is nice which is fun it's diverse it's I am a content creator more than even a youtuber now I would say which is kind of cool to say um I don't know if I'm a content creator I'm a content creator I'm a content creator I don't love the term influencer um I don't see you as an influencer though but I think also I just think yeah I think yeah it's the it's just I create content in any way I can um and I think influencers sometimes devalues it's talking purely about the byproduct of the content it's like oh this content gets lots of views so it has lots of influence you're an influencer whereas for most of us it's the creative process comes first it's us how can I create something good and if I create something good then I'm a content creator and I'm a content creator and I'm a content creator then it has influence and I feel like yeah it's just an interesting one that I don't particularly love is people jump on the influence side as opposed to their creative side yes um in a means to kind of devalue I think anyway um but I see myself as that as one thing I see myself as a as a partner as a dog dad as someone who loves to travel and is lucky to have friends all over the world that I've met through this career that I want to go and spend time with as a business owner responsible for employees as an investor um we also have one thing you missed on your list is we have our own venture capital fund that we started um just over two years ago nice where we're uh investing into startups uh seed and pre-seed companies that we believe in and also using our influence to support those um companies as well as our cash investment okay so that's also another job that I kind of lead on um which is funny that I ended up in finance from from playing video games in my bedroom um so that's wild yeah that's one part of it and then also there's this new facet which is the music and DJing side which was another hobby that has turned into a side job for now and we'll see where it goes yeah but I'd like to think now a lot of different things which I think is healthy and good and I'm happy with that yes yes I could see that uh you're living a life exempt not even I couldn't have imagined 10 of it let alone the rest so yeah yeah very fortunate yeah it's incredible um I have to ask you obviously about KSI leaving yes um but but here's what I want to know I would have well you you have to tell me if operationally anything changes the six of us have said that we want to carry on making the content and we have the same team that we've built to help us deliver the content so um we are continuing making content and having a great time as a six of us which is amazing because we did always say at one point we said if one of us leaves do then others leave does that end the Sidemen we that was a complete unknown um that arrived on our doorstep and there is no roadmap there was no there is no off-ramp we never built an off-ramp there was no on-ramp to the Sidemen so to speak so uh yeah fortunately um yeah operationally uh the Sidemen is much the same which is uh which is what we wanted hey there I just want to say thank you for choosing we need to talk doing this podcast is one of the greatest joys of my life and I want to continue to share it with you so hit follow and the Bell icon it takes just a second and it helps us to continue to grow this podcast so now with music here's my biggest question is that do you feel as if there's extra pressure placed on you because you're coming into music as a creator first definitely yeah and and what is that pressure that you feel oh I think it's uh I had to well I'm still learning the art in front of a large audience of people which is a challenge I uh you know again I'm still learning the art in front of a large audience of people which is a challenge I uh you know again as I said earlier everything comes with a trade-off and that is part of my trade-off is that I wasn't able to kind of start DJing smaller rooms and build up and kind of you know really build up my skills as I kind of went on I was thrown straight in the deep end my first show was sold out Ministry of Sound London when I'd only ever DJ to myself in my bedroom so I was horrified the worst like imposter syndrome ever thinking what am I doing this is gonna be a mess turned out fine was great great vibes yes but um yeah I think I will always have that slight um yeah people will always have somewhat of a um opinion that um I've got to go a bit further to kind of to to make it work and that's what I'm trying to do because I genuinely enjoy it okay so when did you first fall in love with DJ so I first fell in love with EDM music um so a record label called Spinning Records and it must have been 2015 okay invited me to Miami Ultra Music festival have you ever been to i've been to ultra i've never been to ultra but uh my brother went to university of miami so i've been to miami a million times but yeah have you ever been to like an edm festival edc you know what in full transparency is edm is a genre of music that i only have heard after i've like gone to the after after after after like i've never just listened to it yeah yeah so so tell me about it so i went to this festival and my job was to film it for my youtube channel which i did and i had this artist kind of backstage access that the record label had set up for me and i was i'd never seen anything like it in my life this big miami park these huge stages fireworks djs playing music that i was like i really enjoy this music i just completely fell in love with the scene and that music then yes and again i thought well okay i'm gonna try and go to as many of these as i can so i went to miami ultra again the next year i went to edc in las vegas went to tomorrowland in europe and uh a norwegian legendary producer and dj by the name of alan walker became good friends with him also djs couldn't tour during lockdown very strange time for them we could still just about make videos but their entire livelihood was closed yes international travel was gone that was what they did they were in a different country every day yes and so they turned to video games and i was gaming with alan uh during lockdown we got to know each other through that then lockdown finished 2022 i was going to tomorrowland he was playing a sunset slot on the main stage in front of 80 000 people that's incredible which is just amazing i think it was like my third or fourth time at tomorrowland and he sent me a message and he said hey i get one special guest i'm going to go to tomorrowland and i'm going to be the guest on the main stage with me would you like to come and join me i'm thinking what of course but why sure um and we met with him at the festival got to know him a bit better he took me on stage with him there's all these people with the lights up and i'm looking out at a stage that i've stood in the crowd of four or five times thinking how on earth am i here behind the decks really special cool moment and then we came off the stage and he said to me he said you clearly love the music i see you've been coming to these festivals you've met up at them over the years you've already got an audience of people that will support you and what you're doing so if you can learn to dj and you can start learning to produce and work with some good people to make your own music then you can see where it goes wow look at that and i couldn't say no it was one of those moments yeah but how in the world vick do you balance now djing uh and that career i can see that's growing and i can see the passion you lit up when you talked about being on stage so i can see you're in that zone you're basically running a vc firm yeah right you have all of your other obligations with the sidemen content creation how do you balance it all so i think a big part of it is huge props to everyone that works on our team so i've got ryan who manages my music project and the sidemen we have a big team um that manage different areas of all of those projects so that's really important okay something that i didn't understand early on and i think that's really important and i think that's really really important and i think that's really really important um build your team bigger go further vibes from early on and i was very much in the mindset i need to save all the money i'm making here i can't be paying out all of this but obviously it lets you build something much more impactful and cool um great advice great advice that's and that's a big part of how it's possible and then also um i'm a bit obsessive with details so i've been trying to line things up so for example i had a friend's wedding and i was like oh my god i'm gonna do this in australia and then the week before we had sidemen filming in southeast asia in thailand so i booked a show in thailand while i was there with the sidemen then i carried on to australia and played four shows during the f1 while i was over there so with a bit of kind of strategic routing yes i can make it work and also i'm only taking dj shows that i'm kind of excited to do rather than taking shows multiple shows a week and kind of running myself to the ground doing it i'm trying to just keep it majority as kind of a passion project and yeah that's kind of how i'm doing it but so it's a lot of balancing and and when it's stuff you love it never feels like work i'm sure it's the same for you with the podcast yeah it's it's the same you know with all the projects i do i'm with you but at the same time the balance is so hard because for example uh last year i was running around doing a million different things and i went to the dentist the dentist and i was like oh my god i'm doing this i'm doing this i'm doing this and the dentist was like paul your molar is completely cracked and it's because you're stressed oh wow and i realized that i was not managing my stress well and and this is where i wanted to get into if we can talk about crohn's disease yes because one thing that i've noticed about in my research with with crohn's is how fatiguing it can be yes so i'd love to to hear from you about that how do you manage crohn's with everything that you're doing and also for anyone who's unaware of what crohn's disease is what is it yeah so crohn's is an autoimmune condition where for whatever reason the immune system attacks cells in the gut that it thinks are foreign so it kills them and it can cause a lot of damage it can cause a lot of knock-on symptoms that are not pleasant at all and it's kind of like the food you eat is the fuel for your body so if you're not digesting it properly if you've got issues with your body you're not digesting it properly you're not digesting it properly if you've got issues with your gut it can have all these knock-on effects the kind of fatigue nausea gastrointestinal discomfort um bleeding all of the uh unfortunate symptoms and yeah um it's tough i'll be honest and i think especially because it's an invisible condition that's one of the most challenging things and also it's a lifelong condition there's no cure for it so those are all difficult difficult things and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult difficult thing to do and i think it's a very difficult thing to do and i think it's a very uh that were difficult for me to process i was kind of in denial for quite a while it's something that's difficult to get fully diagnosed because it's not properly understood yet um what could i ask how old were you when you were diagnosed it would have been around four well i i my symptoms started four or five years ago and i was probably formally diagnosed around three years ago oh wow so this is recent yeah yeah it's and that's how it works it's a very difficult thing to do and it can come on at any point it can just and maybe i'm also thinking about maybe i always had some slight issues but it became a real problem i was hospitalized i was i had a few months where i are like about a month or two where i really couldn't eat very much um and so you were hospitalized hospitalized for yeah for a few days just just from just intense pain and i couldn't really eat without feeling pain and that was not great that was kind of a and it flares so it can kind of come and go um so that was really difficult i think there was a sideman video shortly afterwards where we were doing a traveling video and we'd been running around filming all day i'd been like living off snacks and we arrived in istanbul and i just said i cannot i'm just like i'm in pieces and so we kind of stopped our video there and flew home uh the next morning one i do have to kind of try and look after myself more so in the early years i was super unhealthy but i do try and make sure i'm not getting sick and i'm not getting sick and i'm not getting sick and i'm getting enough sleep i exercise well i'm trying to be really careful with my diet medication it's super helpful and i think for a lot of time i was kind of in denial and i was like do i really have this autoimmune condition maybe if i just eat a bit cleaner maybe if i just sleep a bit more rest a bit more it's gonna go away you kind of it's you hang on to like that hope yes and it's bizarre as well because it's not like when you get a stomach bug or like i broke this collarbone it's like i'm not gonna be able to do anything i'm not gonna be able to do anything okay it's gonna suck for a while but then it will get better and you're fine it took a while for me to get around the head sense of there is no known cure for this so i need to kind of address it tackle it deal with it um and fortunately it took a few medications i found one that did work um and it controlled the majority of my symptoms of the illness but also horrible side effects which is and it led me to kind of think okay maybe i'm gonna stop taking this because of the side effects it's quite recently and then all of the illness symptoms came back and it's it can be super frustrating because you're kind of thinking there's no there's nothing perfect for this yes um i'm gonna go on to a new autoimmune medication hopefully soon which hopefully works better that's the nice thing is the science is developing they're starting to understand it more they're developing more immune therapies and i've kind of accepted it and i'm like okay i'm gonna stop taking this because of the side effects it's quite i need some sort of medication because i've tried everything i can which is also so frustrating because you think i'm gonna live and eat so clean so healthy and it's not enough and i think a lot of people suffer with crohn's or ulcerative ulcerative colitis or other autoimmune illnesses and they all tend to be pretty invisible it's stuff inside you that's not working so one it's very easy for people that aren't you to look at you and go why are you being so lazy why are you giving it 100% and sometimes in your head you think what actually yeah i am just like maybe i didn't sleep enough last night you kind of almost want to give yourself excuses that aren't the illness and you can't see the illness you can't measure the illness yes so i think and i would imagine too for one thing that i've definitely picked up in this conversation is you have prided yourself on productivity yeah so for you to be taken out because of this illness yeah that must be even more excruciatingly hard for you to deal with it is but a kind of a few years ago i realized that i had to take some of the focus off my work and build stuff that wasn't my work and if i was solely focused on my work and going through when i was going through the worst of my crowns it would have i don't know i would have really struggled to deal with that at the point where i was working to 24 7 around the clock had i had my worst symptoms then you get dealt the the hand you're dealt but i guess what i also want to show and why i talk about it is because i think you can still continue to achieve sometimes you feel defeated by the illness but i've learned i have to do the testing i have to try different medications i have to deal with side effects of medications and it has got better and it can get better not entirely maybe maybe one day i'm hopeful for science and you know maybe maybe that's the one thing i'm rooting for but i think what's uh what's important about you talking about your crones is that you're admittedly saying hey i'm still trying to figure it out yeah just like your music you're like i'm going to learn in front of you yeah and i think there uh there's a level of courage that you have to have in order to to do that so i applaud you for that thank you yeah but also again it's yeah i think it's important for people to also a lot of people don't even understand that they're not going to understand what an autoimmune illness is that's what i might say they have crimes they go oh you've got a bit of a bad stomach is is that it and it's like hospital trips and uh can often lead to bowel cancer as well and we're seeing a huge rise in young people with uh bowel cancers actually a good friend of my wife who 28 was uh recently diagnosed with an early stage bowel cancer fortunately they caught it early she's had surgery to remove that uh the the tumor and is in remission of the cancer now but i guess it's another reason to talk about it is you know it's something that a lot of people they don't talk about gut issues but i guess it's also this is my chance to tell people if something is not right have it looked at and make sure that you're you're kind of fine because it's it's also it's it's sometimes inappropriate to talk about toilet habits and your gut and what's going on with food and people don't want to go and talk to a doctor about it but if you're not going to talk to a doctor about it then you're not going if you do have a condition an autoimmune condition or you do have a cancer or you know early stages of a cancer yes it's something that is so preventable if caught early so yes i feel like given my experience i need to talk about that this is so important because also before you were you know in preparation for you coming here i thought to myself you know how prevalent is you know and from the research i see one in every 350 people yeah you know that's a that's prevalent and i would suspect most don't know yeah you know yeah because to your point it is there could be bleeding or a pain that they're dealing with that they don't verbalize yeah and so i think your story is very compelling in that don't talk to someone about it yeah 100 and also i think i think it's a weird thing to say but don't be afraid of going on to medication because for so much time i wanted the milder of medication and i thought i'm gonna i'm gonna beat this myself and it kind of i mean took a long process for me to kind of realize no i need the medication and it is it did treat my crohn's symptoms so yes and you know it can be wrong for some people it can be right for other people it's not a perfect science so to speak and often medicine is given in cases where it isn't needed and that was always my concern because i was like i don't want to be given you know a hugely biologically altering medicine that i don't need but clearly i did need it but i just didn't want to hear what the doctors were saying and i was like maybe it's something else maybe it's um so that's just my experience and yeah i don't i'm i'm not a medical advisor obviously speak to your medical people first yeah i think the message here is is is is talk to someone yeah that's the key yeah yeah don't keep it to yourself yeah yeah can i ask you i have to ask you about the social media ban yes right and and the reason why i i ask you about this is because they're obviously the uk has instituted a social media ban for ages 16 and under yes and what i realize looking at your career is that if that ban was in place quite potentially you would not be where you are today correct yes so what's your opinion on the ban it's actually funnily a mixed opinion and that is because yes on the on the positive there's so many great young people doing fantastic stuff with social media but at the same time it's changed so much in the life that i've lived on social media since its inception to where it is now to where i can understand why they think the solution is to ban it i don't think the solution is to ban it but the way the algorithm feeds short form content based on scrolling patterns its own idea of your interests you know i think it's it's not a healthy form of content to consumers and i say that myself as someone who's yeah an adult but as a young child consuming that content i can't imagine for a lot of people it's very good so i understand that maybe an extreme system needs to be put in place to protect those people who are going to fall to it being bad for them but where do you draw the line i don't know the answer i don't think it's good or bad and i'm saying that as someone with this huge uk audience under the age of 16 so potentially a massive massive you know dent in career and earnings but at the same time i can understand why the government want to put it in place right right no no i it's interesting i didn't even think about that piece as well the fact that you have a massive audience under the age of 16 correct so that is going to definitely impact yes your business correct yeah um but i mean yeah it's it's a tricky one because i do think it's and it's changed so much even from when we started making content we all you had was long-form content that's where we told our stories that's where we became who we were and now there has been this pivot to our long-form content should really have short-form clippable moments because that is what is so much in demand but at the same time i think how long this podcast is you tell a real story in time you can't tell it in seven seconds and i do worry you know where short-form content is going to take us in general yes yes what do you believe you still have to prove and to whom i'd like to think and say nothing i don't know if that's is that ever the case you always want to prove something but i can't tangibly think about i want to i really you know i want to tick that off i at this point i try and look at everything everything's a blessing every next step i make i feel like i'm happy that i've achieved enough with what i was given and been able to have so much freedom and do so much fun and cool stuff but now every next step is just just a blessing so i don't have anything where i'm like i want to go and make that happen it's never been kind of my my mindset really so i want to show you this one last thing okay all right ready for it another another photo okay you're right yeah i like the real photo as well yeah every so much of stuff is on screens nowadays the real photo what i've noticed is a photo in your hand um allows you to reflect in a way and slow down in a way that we just don't do enough so that's exactly what i want you to do okay this photo i want you to describe what's happening in this photo yeah and then i want you to tell me the message that you now as a 30 year old man yeah have for this little boy okay here's a fun one so yeah this is this is me i think a school assembly playing the violin and this is probably yeah the the younger vick that we talked about who's just he's just trying his best you know he's not playing the coolest instrument in the world i did learn the piano and drums so they were the drums was the one that was called violin violin not very cool but i was trying my best it was a challenge but i was learning it and what would i tell this vick see this is tricky because i think my genuine i think it would be nice to say all of the lessons that i've learned which is get out of your comfort zone be confident um take risks learn as you go trial and error but at the same time i feel like giving myself that might have changed everything i think everything worked out well so my genuine advice to you is to myself would be keep doing what you're doing it's it may i mean maybe just it's gonna work out and then i would end up hopefully here but isn't that crazy the butterfly effect right i could tell him something and he could he could all send it all west he can go off yeah is is is there is there something though that that little that little vic you think needed that could be just you could just a little whisper again i'm gonna say no because he he made he made it work that's the thing so he didn't need anything else and anything else may have potentially led him astray a different path that wouldn't have worked out so well so i'm yeah i'm very fortunate to be sat in a position where i can say i wouldn't give myself too many words and i think the the things that i said or the lessons that i've tried to say that i've learned i would apply them to anyone else but not myself because it seemed to work that's interesting and maybe you have to learn the lesson yourself maybe maybe being told the lesson isn't enough maybe that's what life is you have to experience the lesson to really learn from it and that's where you grow that's it so all right that i'll take that that i'll take there we go so i appreciate it can i have this you can have this he's like i don't want that i'm doing festivals right now right um all right so the last last question this is everyone gets this question okay it's my favorite question is if you think through all of the conversations you've had in life okay i know you've had some incredible conversations tell me which one stands out to you the most who was the conversation with okay and what did you learn okay you have to sit and think for a minute or two i've had a few conversations just a few just a few i can imagine in my life i can imagine oh one if i could pin it to one conversation wow i'm gonna have to i've got too many boxes to fill with kind of different ideas my life has so many different areas but i think given that we've talked a lot about my career if i had to think about one conversation that i had about my career that was really important was um interestingly it was a conversation with my mom and when i wanted to start my gap year she made me almost write a little contract to myself just saying that i would kind of continue to make videos every day i would continue to enjoy i would try and make it work and it was really important to kind of have that as i started this chapter where i was taking this risk to be given that accountability to continue to show up and force it to work at some point so in terms of my career i'd say that was maybe one of the most important conversations but in reality it was a string of conversations across months but i do remember that moment where i kind of said i'm doing this i'm going to continue to enjoy and make videos every day yes yes i love it i love it i find this question so interesting because typically people go to they've had lots of great conversations right they'll go to a conversation with a loved one like a mom yeah or a grandparent yeah and just recollect something so simple but yet profound you know um i really enjoyed this uh there's lots of nuggets that i'm taking personally that have inspired me uh definitely just looking at the next level opposed to 10 levels yeah down the road i love that but to me your story stands as this 14 year old boy who was really searching for identity yeah and i can see that your identity has been forged through your success through all of your challenges yeah right but most importantly is you have had to live through them yeah and that is exactly the advice that you in essence gave your younger self yeah uh and and and that to me that's what stands the most and it's interesting because you're 30 you're a young guy like you are and so i can't imagine what i know you don't want to think about the next 30 you just want to think about 31 but i can't imagine what the next 30 is going to be it's going to be lots of learning today yeah yeah a lot um so vic i appreciate it thank you no thank you and i've also learned about myself through your questioning because these are so many thoughts that you never have to put into words so thank you for uh yeah you're exploring the story with me yeah you're welcome you're welcome thank you appreciate it vic star one two three i respected that vic came here during this time where a lot of people have questions especially around ksi leaving the sideman but he did a great job of holding to his boundaries at the same time explaining to us that this was an unplanned event however they have now created a plan to continue and so for anyone who ever had a question around will the sidemen continue vic answered that today he seems to me to be highly disciplined and i think that's the secret to his success is how disciplined he is you know when you think about how many how consistently he said you know when he was when he passed on uh on university how he committed to doing a video every day and he went eight years doing the video sometimes multiple times per day that requires a level of discipline of showing up that many of us can't do i was 16 made like a million quid tommy in it you are one of the most followed people in the world it was the most amazing thing and then it really backfired we had the police around and my mom was crying that was very scary start making these videos i got a taste and i was like oh i want more of that that was genuinely the last moment in my life that things felt like real and i was like just watching myself make the most money i've made keep it a big secret and no one at school knows so the day of reckoning came all of my self-esteem was leaning on this thing i'm the most popular person ever that was the worst feeling in the world because i'm still on this treadmill but i'm not really running for nothing anymore and at this point as well i'm finding it really hard to navigate so every week i'm having a call with a different youtuber ksi mr beast logan paul it appeared as if there was this brotherhood walkers were all misfits we don't fit in and then we're all helping each other at night i had a call that like techno had died i loved him he was a hero of mine and 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