Kian and Jc Read online

  I think what I loved most about that car was that I really didn’t give a crap about it. I drove it like it was a tank. I’d park it with the wheels half on the curb. I’d hit trash cans by the side of the road. I never cleaned it out. With all the old burger wrappers and empty soda cans in it, you couldn’t even see the floor mats. It was all dented, and one of the side mirrors broke off.

  Eventually I traded it in for my new car. (It couldn’t have been that crappy, because I got a thousand dollars for it!) But I’ll bet if I went back today, the dealer would still have it out on the lot. All you had to do was sit in it a minute, and no one would want that car.

  Man, I miss that thing! It was the only thing I ever bought that I got way more out of than I ever would have expected. Maybe I should go buy it back. . . .

  I WAS BORN IN HOUSTON, TEXAS, BUT I GREW UP IN SAN ANTONIO.

  In fact, I lived with my parents until I was twenty. And when I finally left, I didn’t just move out of the house, but completely out of the state. Sorry, Mom.

  But I do have some great memories about my life at home. The earliest thing I can remember is the doctor pulling me out . . . and then I started crying. Just kidding. Actually, my first memory is my dad making me think he could talk to birds—and I totally believed him.

  This is back when I was about four and we were hanging out in the pool and my dad was eating a bag of these Cheetos. There was this bird sitting on the fence near us, so then my dad looked at me and said, “Check it out, Justin. I can talk to birds.” Then he starts making these bird noises like teekle-teekle (or, you know, some kind of weird bird sound), and he throws a Cheeto at the bird and the bird chirps, flies down, scoops up the Cheeto, and flies back up.

  I was all like, “What did you say to him, Dad?” and my dad told me, “Oh, the bird said he was hungry, so I told him to come and get some Cheetos. Now he’s going to go back to feed his babies.” And I bought it. Then there was another bird that didn’t come down to get the Cheeto my dad threw at him, and I asked my dad, “What did that bird say?” “Oh, that bird said he doesn’t like Cheetos. He likes Doritos.” I believed him for so long, and I actually bragged about it in school. Wow, I’m such a cool kid, huh? My dad could talk to birds.

  I HAVE SO MANY MEMORIES FROM BACK WHEN I LIVED IN TEXAS.

  My parents divorced when I was six, and I’ve always lived with my mom, so I was really close to her side of the family. I was the oldest kid in our family—not just older than my brother and sisters, but all my cousins, too. Oh, and I was a total momma’s boy. My mom did absolutely everything for me.

  My mom’s side of the family was really big, and back when I was about sixteen, we all started doing this really cool thing called Sunday Funday. Every Sunday my whole family would get together at my grandma and grandpa’s house, and they’d both cook for everyone. Grandma would cook inside, and Grandpa would be outside, grilling.

  At one of these Sunday Fundays I remember my grandpa once actually cooked two cow heads! He dug this seven-foot cooking pit and slow-cooked them for, like, three days. It was crazy for me to comprehend. The meat is called barbacoa. So we’d eat barbacoa all day, and then afterward we’d eat this dessert called chongos. (Which, you should know, is the best thing ever. It’s like a snow cone flavored with pickle juice and topped with Tajín and limón. Awesome!)

  So, at these things, everyone in my family was either adults—like twenty-five or older (hey, when you’re sixteen, twenty-five is an adult!)—or they were little kids. The cool thing is that since there was no one my own age to hang out with, I got to have fun with everyone. If the adults were grilling or playing poker or bingo or whatever, I could hang with them, or I could go outside and play with the kids on the four-wheeler or trampolines. No matter what was going on, I never got bored. It was cool. I love my family.

  My mom always said I got my sense of humor from my dad. He was a huge jokester—hey, he made me think he could speak bird, right? Ever since I can remember, I’ve always loved to crack jokes and make people laugh. My family knew me as the kid who would do anything. I was always just throwing it all out there.

  Once I hit school, I tried to be the class clown, but only in classes where I had friends. You know that person who could just say anything in front of the whole class? I so wasn’t that kid. If I didn’t know anyone, I’d be the really, really shy, quiet guy. But if I knew people in the class, I’d be totally comfortable, cracking jokes all the time.

  I never got in trouble though. Unlike Kian, I was a pretty good kid in school. I think the only time I ever got busted was for being tardy. My cousin Apryl used to play school with me even before I went to school. She taught me things and got me ready ahead of the rest of the class. So basically, it was really easy for me to go in and get good grades. Not to brag, but I didn’t really have to try too hard. But then I’d get bored and mess around with friends and laugh. But I’d only do it up until the point where I could tell I was about to get in trouble, and then I’d stop.

  I even wanted to make the teachers laugh. (Not that I was a teacher’s pet, but I always felt that life was just easier if I could be friends with my teachers. Easy extra credit—aayyee!)

  I pretty much got straight As from kindergarten all the way through eighth grade. You could say I was a pretty average student mostly. And then high school started. . . .

  And with high school came girls. I was a little playboy in high school. I was all about meeting girls and trying to get their numbers and doing cute stuff for them. I was that kid. I remember I used to text my crush during class and ask her, Are you bored? and she would be like, Yeah, so I would say, Leave for the bathroom in ten minutes and meet me in this hallway, or whatever. Then I would go to the bathroom too, and I would meet up with her just to talk about whatever—and then we’d both go back to class like nothing had happened.

  I was a little hopeless romantic. I even learned to play guitar just to get this one supercute girl to go out with me. See, in my church youth group there was this kid named Anthony who played the guitar, and all the girls really liked him. So I was like, I’m going to do that!

  So I got a guitar and learned a few chords and then taught myself a few songs off YouTube. Honestly, I wasn’t very good, but I worked at it enough to know how to play a few songs. I knew this girl really liked the Goo Goo Dolls, so I learned how to play their song “Slide.” Man, I remember practicing and practicing and practicing just so I could wow her. So one day after youth group, I went up to her and said, “There’s something I want to show you. . . .” So I took her out to the church garden and played “Slide” for her. (I messed up a lot, but I got through it!) At the very end she was like, “Oh my God! That was so cute!” So I thought I had an opening, and I asked her to be my girlfriend—and she said, “No!” (Well, she actually said, “Oh, that’s so sweet, but I don’t think I should have a boyfriend right now, blah, blah, blah . . .” You know, that whole spiel.) After that, I pretty much said, “Screw the guitar,” and that’s when I discovered YouTube.

  I first started watching YouTube when I found out about this guy named Mitchell Davis. He had this channel called LiveLavaLive, where he made these simple videos, like vlogs, where he’d do things like talk about getting a haircut. Man, he was funny as hell! He did this one video where he talks about this cologne he really likes and how it makes him feel like Usher. So he sprays it on, and suddenly all these effects start going off that make him look like he’s in an Usher video—then suddenly everything goes back to normal. Then he tries on another cologne, and everything goes all rock video around him. He really inspired me to want to make videos just like him. And, honestly, it didn’t seem that impossible. I’d been making videos pretty much all my life. I’d always play around with our video camera when I was a kid, filming myself dancing or jumping into the pool or petting our cat or whatever. But it wasn’t until January 1, 2010, that I posted my very first video to YouTube.

  I started recording the video the day before, on New Ye
ar’s Eve, using my MacBook Pro webcam. I was at one of my family’s Sunday Fundays, and I just went around, filming things—like the fireworks, or my grandma drinking wine. I edited the whole thing together and basically just narrated what was going on: “Here’s some fireworks”; then I’d show the fireworks. “Here’s my drunk grandma”; then I’d show my grandma drinking her wine. I posted it on my very first YouTube channel, JcWithJelly, and boom, there was my first video.

  In the beginning my videos were pretty simple. Sometimes it was just me going to a park and recording the ducks getting fed, or close-ups of me feeding oats to horses out of my hand, or the light on the grass at sunrise. Oh, and the big thing was my Vans—I’d always be wearing Vans, and I’d make sure to show my shoes in whatever I was filming. Then I’d take all the footage and set it to a song I really liked, and that would be my video. Then I’d post it to Myspace or Facebook, and that’s about it. It was really artsy stuff. But I don’t know who would watch these things now, seriously.

  I just posted the videos for fun. My friends and family would watch them, but that was about it. I did videos like that for about seven months, and then I decided to start over with a new channel. I wanted to be a bit more authentic—and funnier. I wasn’t thinking about a career, really; I just wanted to be myself and crack people up. It wasn’t until, like, my sixth video that I really “hit.” It was called “Jc Caylen: Just Be, Yourself,” and it was basically me saying who I was, what I did, and telling people to just be true to themselves. What happened was that Damon Fizzy (another YouTube creator) saw and liked my video, and he commented on it. Suddenly I was up from two hundred views to fifteen hundred views!

  Like we said before, the YouTube creator community was a great place. It was like this big, crazy, awesome family. And when I was just starting out in 2011 and 2012, it helped so much to meet all these other creators who were also trying to figure it out. We’d watch each other’s videos, comment on them, and get to be really good friends online—even if we lived across the country from one another. This is how Our2ndLife got started. This is how I met Kian, Connor Franta, Ricky Dillon, Trevor Moran, and Sam Pottorff—guys who would become a huge part of my life over the next few years.

  But that was later. First, over the next year, I buckled down and started taking this video thing more seriously. I started a collab channel called CoolCollabBro, where I was collaborating with a bunch of other people, including Connor and Ricky. We’d do things like make videos where we were lip-synching to popular songs or whatever, so our channel would get lots of hits when someone would do a search for the real song because our video would pop up.

  Around that time, like Kian said earlier, Google started something called the YouTube Partnership program. The idea here was that Google would partner with you to put ads up on your channel and you could make money. By late 2012 LifeWithJc had around twenty thousand to thirty thousand subscribers, and I got invited to join the program. I was so ecstatic when I got the letter—today anyone can become a partner, but back then, when it first came out, it was a big thing when you got to be a YouTube partner.

  It turned out to be really hard to make money at it, though. At least it was for me at first. Google wouldn’t send you a check until you had made at least 100 dollars, and it took me four months to make it to that point. But, man, I still remember when I got that first check. I thought I was so badass. Then I only had to wait another month and a half before I got another 100 dollars. Soon it got to the point where I was making 120 dollars a month. Then 180 dollars a month. But I still wasn’t making a living creating YouTube videos.

  Yet.

  My channel really blew up in 2013, when I got a group of my eight closest friends (including my O2L buds, Kian, Ricky, Connor, and Sam), and we did a music video to “Call Me Maybe” by Carly Rae Jepsen. The song was already a big hit, and so when we put our video up on YouTube and promoted it on Twitter, we were just thinking it would be awesome if Carly Rae saw it. But it turned out that Justin Bieber saw it and retweeted us, and since he had such a huge presence on social media, our video completely blew up. It got over half a million views, which was mind-blowingly huge for us then.

  The funny thing was that Justin Bieber and his friends had just done a similar video of them all dancing around to that song—and that’s where I got the idea to do one with my friends. I guess he thought it was cool that we did it too—plus, we were promoting Carly Rae’s song, and he owns part of her record label. So it was a win-win for everyone!

  At the same time I was working on my YouTube channels, I was going to college at UTSA (University of Texas at San Antonio), but honestly, being in college was the most depressing time of my life. My family didn’t have a lot of money, so I had to work to pay my way through school by doing different part-time jobs.

  My first job was at a Sonic drive-in, serving burgers and foot-long hot dogs on roller skates. (Yeah, I still have the videos—and no, I’m not going to post them!) I worked there for a good year or so. Then I worked at a frozen yogurt place called Spoon It, and then Urban Outfitters for about three months until I got fired because I blew off a shift to go to an Austin fan meet-up. Best decision I ever made!

  Besides the crappy jobs, college just wasn’t for me. I didn’t have any friends, I had lots of early morning classes (which sucked because I’m not a morning person at all), and since nobody seemed to care if you showed up or not, I ended up skipping a ton of classes. I didn’t do the homework, I’d miss exams—I just didn’t care.

  I started getting really depressed. I’d be working my ass off thirty hours a week at my jobs, getting paid $7.25 an hour, and then all my money would go to pay for school, which I hated and I was failing. I tried to explain it all to my mom, but she just didn’t understand. I probably didn’t really understand. It was a really bad cycle. The only thing that kept me sane and happy was making videos for my YouTube channel. All my friends were online, it was fun, and I didn’t have to worry about paying bills, grades . . . whatever.

  Once I started making enough money from YouTube that I thought I might be able to support myself off my videos, I made a huge decision: I dropped out of college and decided I was going to move out to LA.

  SO IF YOU WANT TO KNOW WHAT THE WORST DAY OF MY LIFE WAS,

  I’ll tell you—but the weird thing was that it was also the best day of my life. Yeah, I know, weird, but this is what happened.

  When I was eighteen, I finally got my driver’s license and my first car, an Infiniti G25—a totally badass car, by the way. I had this deal with my mom that if I showed her that I could handle having a car during the first week I had it, I could take it out alone on Saturday night. So, I was supercareful. I only drove my car back and forth to school during the week. She was impressed enough to let me take it out alone at night so long as I promised to be home by nine.

  That Saturday I picked up all my friends, and we were having the best time—we went to the mall, we went to the park, whatever. So then eight o’clock rolls around, and I texted my mom that I was going to spend the night at my best friend’s house. She told me that it was okay—as long as I had the car parked and was in his house by nine.

  I agreed, of course, but I was totally lying. My friend didn’t even get off work until ten thirty! We were really planning to go to this abandoned house to hang out. Me and my friends were having the best time riding around, blasting music, yelling out the window. . . . It was awesome. I was finally an adult! I had the night out with my new car—I felt so free! Like I said, it was one of the best days of my life!

  But then all of a sudden . . . This red truck takes an illegal left turn in front of us, and I just broadsided him. I didn’t even have time to release the gas; I plowed into this truck at full speed! I remember everything going black, and the next thing I knew, when I opened my eyes, there was candy everywhere. (We bought a ton of candy before we went out that night.)

  I stumbled out of the car. My leg was killing me; I was sure I’d broken it. (I
didn’t, luckily—just bruises.) My friends were still in the car, and we were all freaking out. I went over to the guy driving the truck and started yelling at him, but he was totally drunk, so he wasn’t making any sense.

  My car was absolutely totaled. When the cops showed up, they were amazed we all survived! One of my friends was bleeding profusely out of his head and had to be rushed to the hospital. I still get freaked out, thinking about what could have happened. It’s scary how quickly everything can change. The whole thing happened in, like, the blink of an eye. And then I had to call my mom and tell her what happened. I thought she’d be pissed, but when my family got there, they were all just crying. It was such a close call. It could have so easily been so much worse. And then I started bawling. It was just a mess.

  The end result was that I didn’t have a car anymore because it was totaled, I was grounded for two months, and I had to ride the bus to school again. The whole thing just sucked.

  So like I said, the best day of my life ended with the worst night of my life.

  WE MAKE OUR MOVE

  JC: Okay, I know in the earlier section I totally made it sound like one day I just woke up and decided to leave San Antonio for LA, but there’s a little more to the story than that. . . .

  By 2012 I’d already been doing my channel for a while, and I’d become friends online with Trevor, Connor, Ricky, Sam, and Kian. That year we all decided to go and meet each other for the first time at VidCon, which is this giant convention for YouTube creators. Okay, back in 2012 it wasn’t giant—but it was still pretty big and awesome, and I had a great time while I was there. I still remember the first time I met Kian. He had all these ideas and was just dying to get started. We were all psyched to do more together—but Kian was out of his mind. It was awesome.