❝Story04:30
Banned for ad clicks: the third channel that finally worked
Caspar's early goal was not money but a custom YouTube banner, which required a thousand subscribers and took two years. Shortly after becoming a partner, a classmate clicked his ads roughly a thousand times, YouTube read it as self-clicking fraud, and his partnership was pulled. He started over on a third channel, which is the one that took off. He is now friends with the classmate and says he would not be where he is without that reset.
“Casper's trying to make a living by clicking his own ads and so they banned my uh my partnership and then I had to restart”
“that is my advice for people don't ever feel scared to restart something”
❝Story07:30
Flying to the UK at 17 to meet people from the internet
Caspar found the UK YouTube scene through YouNow, a live-stream platform where you queued up to broadcast after other creators. He went live after Jacksgap, PointlessBlog and Marcus Butler, told them he loved their work and wanted to collaborate, and eventually they replied. He convinced his mother to let him fly to Britain to meet people he had met online, skipping a school hockey tour to do it, and was picked up at the airport by Marcus Butler.
“I convinced my mom to let me fly to the UK to meet people I'd met on the internet uh the age of 17”
❝Story18:30
"What's your real job?" — until he met the Queen
At 19 and 20, Caspar could not explain his career to family. His grandmother kept asking what he was doing with his life, and being a YouTuber did not register as a job. He never used his bank balance as the argument. The moment it became legitimate in her eyes was when he met the Queen for the first time, after which she told him he finally had a real job and she was proud of him.
“you're like well I'm a YouTuber this is my job and they're like well what's your real job”
“the time my grandmother actually um understood it was a job worth pursuing was when I met the queen for the first time”
❝Story41:30
Tourette's, bullying, and why focus made it disappear
Caspar describes Tourette's beyond the swearing stereotype: whistling, head bobbing, leg clicking. His parents first recognised it when he screeched at an elephant during a Safari breakdown at about six. It worsened around twelve, brought bullying and teachers removing him from class, and medication that caused allergic reactions. Ticks improved whenever he was focused, whether playing tennis, gaming or making videos, which he thinks partly explains how obsessive he became about YouTube. He made a video about it in 2017 because hearing a US goalkeeper had Tourette's had helped him.
“what made it better was when I was when I was ever when I was focusing on something so if I was playing tennis or…”
“just hearing of someone's kind of successful having Tourette's made me feel really good”
❝Story45:00
Panic attacks in lockdown and ten podcast invitations declined
During lockdown, after long stretches without seeing people, Caspar started getting severely socially anxious in ordinary settings, including sitting in a car with his best friend, where he could have a panic attack. He still does not know the cause and links it loosely to stress and to Tourette's, OCD and anxiety running in his family. He turned down around ten podcast invitations that year purely out of fear of having a panic attack on tape, and says this episode is the first he had done in a long time.
“like my best friend I could be in the car with him and I could basically have a panic attack and it really came out…”
“10 podcasts this year and I've said no to every single one and because I was like What if I have a panic attack while…”
❝Story1:08:30
How a creator cap table became a $20m venture fund
Founders started approaching Caspar as an investor because they wanted a creator on the cap table. He ran deals past Sasha Kaletsky, then at Harvard Business School, who rejected most and asked to co-invest in the good ones — and discovered founders would take creator money when they could raise from anywhere. They built a collective of creators, musicians and actors, invested in about seven companies, and one, the gaming platform Faceit, merged and eventually sold at 1.5 billion dollars, returning everything. Sasha, then at Bridgepoint, raised the fund off that record: a 10 million dollar target became 20 million.
“what about if we put together a collective of creators and we all start investing together”
“we also had an accident a company called faceit uh which is a gaming platform”