Kian and Jc Read online

  The best thing was that I finally got to see LA. And I totally fell in love with it—the weather, the lifestyle, seeing how people out here lived compared to back in Texas—everything. It was actually the little things out in California that I really loved.

  Like when I visited Kian at his family’s house in San Clemente; they would just leave the doors and windows wide open. I was all like, “Aren’t you afraid of anyone stealing anything? You’re not afraid of giant bugs coming in?” And they were like, “There aren’t any giant bugs or people that would just come into your house in California.” And all I could think was, Holy crap! Then I saw that you could just skateboard anywhere out here, and I was totally in. I just love California.

  I crashed with Ricky and Connor in their apartment in LA for two weeks, and then I made the decision to quit college and all my part-time jobs. I told my mom I was going to move to LA. It was crazy! I mean, yeah, most kids move out of their parents’ house when they’re ready to leave, but not a lot of them go halfway across the country just to go make funny videos with a couple of guys they met online. It definitely wasn’t easy for my parents to let me go. I think they were worried I was about to monumentally screw up my life. I was the one who got straight As all through school. I was the one who went to college. And so they always thought I was going to become a doctor or something like that, but in the end, I had to do what I had to do.

  KIAN: Connor and Ricky were already planning on coming out to LA, and they were going to pick up Jc in Texas on the way, so I figured this would be a good time to move up to LA too, so I could see what we could all do together. I mean, if they were going to be there in the same state, we might as well hang out together and see what happens.

  Surprisingly, my mom was a lot more supportive about my decision to leave school and move to LA than I thought she would be. She knew I was making some money. She told me I could always go back and finish high school later. And college wasn’t going anywhere. It would always be an option, and so I should go and do what I needed to do.

  So the next day I bought my beloved piece-of-crap black Ford Focus with the YouTube money I’d saved. Then I packed up my stuff and moved out to LA. Saying it now makes it sound like it was an easy decision. It wasn’t. I was freaked out, moving away and being on my own for the first time. But I felt like this could be something special, and I felt like I had to take the chance.

  JC: SO WE ALL STAYED AT CONNOR AND RICKY’S APARTMENT IN WESTWOOD. FOUR GUYS IN A ONE-ROOM APARTMENT. YEAH.

  KIAN: The apartment actually had three rooms: the kitchen, Connor and Ricky’s room, and the living room. Jc and I crashed in the living room.

  JC: I loved living in Westwood! I loved the nightlife. It was a college town, so there was always something going on. We used to ride our skateboards around and go see movies and eat ice cream and just chill. We would hang out with Kian’s girlfriend and her roommate. And in that little apartment we were all working on our channel and making, like, four videos a week, at least. It was a lot of work, but we were all supermotivated. We could see it happening in real time—more subscribers, more views. It just kept us wanting to do more.

  KIAN: Oh yeah, that camera was always on!

  JC: I remember the first time I really knew this was bigger than just a couple of guys goofing around in our apartment. I think it was 2012. I went to the mall. I think I was at the Apple Store, and two girls approached me and wanted a picture. They knew me from the videos. They remembered stuff I’d done. It was awesome. A bit scary. But awesome. Then this mom in line was like, “Let me take your picture too?” She wrote my name down because she had no idea who I was, but maybe, she thought, her daughter would.

  JC: SO WE STARTED DOING THIS THING FOR OUR FANS,

  where we’d tweet out where we’d be, and just have them come and meet up with us. One of the first big ones was when we were going to Taco Bell’s headquarters. The Taco Bell peeps invited us to come try some new menu items they were testing. They asked us to see how many people we could get to a Taco Bell down the street. So, we were like, “Watch”—and we tweeted out that we were going to be at this one Taco Bell and to come by for a meet-up. Sooooo many people ended up coming out! We had, like, a thousand girls outside this one Taco Bell. They had to call the cops to control the scene. It was awesome.

  KIAN: Then we did one where we tweeted out that all the O2L guys were going to be at a park. We thought we might get a crowd, so we hired a security guard just to make sure everyone would be safe. But we had, like, a thousand people show. It was mayhem. We didn’t think about permits or anything, either. We met everyone and hung for a couple of hours. But it was a bit out of control.

  JC: WE WERE ALREADY FRIENDS, BUT WE ALL FIRST OFFICIALLY MET IN

  2012 in Anaheim, California, at VidCon—the huge YouTube convention. This was about five months after we met online. It was our first VidCon, and we all just hung out together and totally hit it off.

  I remember the first night there we all went to Sam’s house, and I said, “Guys, we have to make a channel together! It would be so badass!” And everyone was in! So we spent the whole night thinking of names, icons, coordinating schedules—everything.

  Before we decided to call it Our2ndLife, we were going to name ourselves 99 Cent Collab.

  KIAN: I’m 100 percent sure you were going to call it 99 Cent Collab because of the Arizona iced teas you were drinking, right?

  JC: Definitely. We were all drinking Arizona iced tea, and on the can it said 99 cents. Thank God Connor suggested something else! Actually, we were just going to go with Second Life, but that was already taken, so we settled on Our2ndLife, and eventually I started calling it O2L online (because it sounded cool and was shorter), and then everybody started copying me!

  JC: ONE OF THE THINGS WE HAD TO GET USED TO WAS THAT AS WE GOT

  more and more subscribers, companies wanted to brand with us, to get us to promote their stuff on our videos.

  KIAN: The two biggest ones were apps and movies. App makers would come to us and ask us to promote their new app, and movie studios would want us to talk about their new movies on our videos. It’s not like we just sit there and say, Hey, go out and watch this movie. We’d also have to do stuff that had to do with the movie.

  JC: There was one horror film we helped promote called Ouija. The studio flew us out to Chicago, where we got to be a part of a haunted house there. We filmed a bunch of videos—that was a totally fun experience.

  KIAN: The whole thing actually has a cool story to it. It started in this one video, where I was playing with a Ouija board, and then suddenly I went missing from social media for a week. An evil spirit abducted me and took me to Chicago.

  JC: So the idea was we all had to go to Chicago to “find him.” Then they basically just filmed us walking around the haunted house until we found him. We also had a special meet-and-greet for fans at the house after it closed for the night. That was the best part.

  JC: AFTER A FEW MONTHS OF LIVING IN THAT TINY APARTMENT IN WESTWOOD,

  we all decided to get a house together. Connor, Ricky, Kian, and I rented this four-bedroom place in Encino. It had a totally badass backyard. It was awesome living together. I’d wake up to Connor making coffee every morning. Ricky’s room smelled like a sweaty farm all the time. Kian and I would play Mario Kart every day. We’d have friends constantly over for parties. I felt like I was living in LA. It was a really good year. Everything was booming.

  KIAN: Jc and I were definitely the pranksters of the house. We were always messing with Ricky. We’d throw stuff like water balloons and plastic soda bottles at him from the balcony while he was lying out in the backyard. Oh, and one time we Saran-wrapped his car closed. He wasn’t too happy about that. We pretty much made his life hell! We’d try to prank Connor, but he wouldn’t react to it. It’s only fun when the person freaks out—and Ricky would always freak out.

  JC: One day Kian and I had a prank war just with each other. A whole day of getting each
other back and forth. It started out small: Kian put shaving cream all over my mirror. Then I got him back by putting shaving cream all over his clothes. It ended with me dumping ketchup and mustard all over Kian’s car.

  KIAN: I also Saran-wrapped Jc’s skateboard to a rock and threw it in the pool!

  JC: We all had a really good time, which was a good thing, because we were all about to spend a whole lot more time together.

  KIAN: You mean the tour?

  JC: Yeah, I mean the tour, but I was trying to tease to that chapter!

  WHEN I WAS YOUNGER, I WAS ALWAYS PULLING PRANKS.

  The best one I ever pulled off was when I was still in high school. One day I really didn’t want to go to my math class. Actually, I hated that class so much that I didn’t want anybody to go. So I took this paper clip, jammed it into the door lock, and bent it until it broke off. We couldn’t get into the room. They had to cancel class. And no one ever knew I did it. Well, until now. Sorry, Miss Woo!

  But the biggest prank I tried to pull off but didn’t get away with was when I was in the eighth grade. I’d been suspended for a week for trying to start a mosh pit at a school dance. So I was stuck at home with nothing to do, and I got bored. So, I went over to my friend Sam’s house. I knew he’d be home since he was homeschooled. We grabbed some eggs from the fridge and went to my school in the middle of the day and just started egging the school. There was this one window that I knew was the principal’s office. I couldn’t resist throwing an egg at it. The problem was that there was a security camera next to the window that recorded everything! I got in so much trouble.

  KIAN: SO ANYWAY, AFTER O2L HAD BEEN TOGETHER FOR ALMOST A YEAR,

  we had over a million subscribers. Things were starting to get seriously busy. We couldn’t handle the business side and the creative side. We also needed some guidance to get us to the next stage in our careers. So we ended up signing on with a manager. At this point, we all decided to take things on the road and go on tour. It only took a couple of days to kick things into high gear. ROAD TRIP!

  JC: We visited, like, seventeen different states in a month. There was always a meet-and-greet before, then we had about an hour of downtime, and then we’d do the show.

  KIAN: The shows were pretty awesome. There was a ton of interaction: we’d do improv with the audience, Trevor and Ricky sang, we’d do challenges where we’d bring audience members onstage, there’d be dance battles. . . .

  JC: They were pretty big shows too. Usually one-thousand-people venues. Anyway . . . when I found out we were going on tour, I was pumped! It’s one thing to do videos. It’s another to actually get to meet the people who enjoy them. It was amazing seeing how many people were into what we were doing.

  KIAN: It was all six of us—and Trevor’s mom—in a tour bus. There were so many cool stories. . . .

  JC: One time we were in Boston, Massachusetts, and the venue just sucked. There was no AC. It was just brutally hot, but the crowd was absolutely amazing! The first time we hit the stage, crowds will usually go crazy for maybe ten seconds, but this crowd cheered for, like, no joke, two minutes. They just kept going and it got louder and louder and we were all smiling. I completely teared up! That was one of the best tour dates we ever had!

  KIAN: I remember some bad times too. Like how we couldn’t crap on the bus because the toilet didn’t work right, and it stunk up the whole bus. So we literally pooped in bags and just threw them out the window!

  JC: There would be some crazy times when girls would follow the bus for hours until we stopped at a gas station or something.

  KIAN: In the middle of the tour, when we were at Penn State, I decided to dye my hair blue. Then Jc and everyone else dyed their hair different colors.

  JC: Our fans thought it was pretty cool, and for the rest of the tour after that, fans would dye their hair to match their favorite O2L guy.

  KIAN: Our biggest show was in New York, at DigiFest. They had all these different acts. There were, like, twenty thousand people in a stadium parking lot! That was amazing, doing our thing in front of so many people.

  JC: It was fantastic! All of it. It was seriously, like, the most epic road trip of all time. I got the chance to tour across the US in a tour bus with five of my best friends. It was a dream come true, and probably the best time of my life. But also it turned out to be a sad time, because what none of our fans knew was that O2L wasn’t going to be around much longer. . . .

  JC: RIGHT BEFORE THE TOUR STARTED, CONNOR TOLD US HE’D BE LEAVING O2L.

  We didn’t say anything to anyone on the road, but we felt sad, ’cause we knew it was all coming to an end.

  KIAN: We knew no one could ever replace Connor. O2L was a brotherhood more than a channel. We couldn’t replace any one of us and still be the same family, you know? So we were just planning on ending O2L altogether, but after going on the tour, seeing our fans and interacting with them, and having so much fun, the rest of us decided we wanted to see if there was some way to keep it going.

  JC: We thought we’d revamp the channel, try collaborating with other creators, see if there was a way to make our videos better. But after about two months of trying, we all decided that it was time O2L ended.

  KIAN: It was sad, but it was actually good for everyone. Now each of us would have time to do what he really wanted to do: Ricky and Trevor wanted to sing and Jc and I wanted to start our own channel. O2L would have just been a hassle getting in the way of each of us doing our own things. It was a hard decision, but looking back on it now, it was good we just decided to end it.

  JC: We did a good-bye week for our last week together. We each made one last video, and then we made one final video with all of us in it together. We definitely tried to tell our fans that this wasn’t good-bye, that none of us would be vanishing off social media forever or anything. We wanted people to know this was a good thing for all of us and a decision we all came to together. We were still a family, but we were just growing up. The fan response was amazing. They totally got it, which, weirdly, made me even more sad to say good-bye.

  KIAN: I’d been making videos with these guys for two and a half years. For me, to have to make one last video was really hard.

  JC: Ending O2L was crazy hard, but at the same time Kian and I had something else in mind. . . .

  JC: SO AFTER O2L BROKE UP AND CONNOR MOVED OUT, KIAN, RICKY, AND I

  wanted to move closer to Hollywood, so we moved into a three-bedroom house in the Hollywood Hills. We stayed in that place for five months, but it felt like forever.

  KIAN: Our dog, Hazel, was a puppy when we moved in, and she ripped up all the furniture and chewed everything to shreds. Not to mention that she wasn’t exactly housebroken. Nothing was safe from her in that house. Oh, and we played Ping-Pong on this really big slab of granite in the kitchen and pretty much ruined it.

  JC: Right after we moved in, we threw a party for a friend, and so many people showed up, somebody must have posted our address on Craigslist or something! There was even some kid who used to be on a Disney Channel show, sitting on our couch, acting like an idiot! We didn’t even know him.

  KIAN: That party completely cursed the house.

  JC: The toilets didn’t work. The pool heater didn’t work. The roof would leak when it rained. . . .

  KIAN: When Jc used the bathtub, the kitchen would flood. And then a few months later, when we thought nothing else could go wrong, two guys showed up at our front door, looking for the owner.

  JC: We were outside the house, filming a video called “Musical Moods” for our new channel, and these two guys suddenly show up in front of the house. They get out of their car and start looking around like they own the place before they come up to us, wanting to know where the owner is. Apparently, he was in “big trouble.”

  KIAN: We told them we didn’t know where he was, but they said that unless they got ahold of him, “things were gonna get ugly.” These guys looked like those little Homies action figures come to life. Seriously,
look up “bad guys” on Google images, and those were the guys who had come to our house!

  JC: They finally left, and we started filming again, but twenty minutes later they came back, gave us their number, and said we should let them know if we see him anytime soon. That’s when we decided it’d probably be a good idea if we found another place to live.

  (THE YOUTUBE CHANNEL, NOT US, ’CAUSE YOU ALREADY KNOW WHO WE ARE . . .)

  JC: Even before O2L broke up, Kian and I noticed that whenever we did videos together, they always had the most views. So we thought we’d make it a side project while we were still in O2L; a channel with just the two of us, called the Kian and Jc Channel. We knew that it was going to be difficult, making three videos a week for our new channel and a weekly video for O2L, but we were glad we’d started planning it when O2L decided to break up.

  KIAN: We actually came up with the idea of doing our own channel back in October 2014. We were planning on launching it in December, before our tour ended, but we didn’t want people to think that our channel was the reason why O2L had ended, so we decided to put it off and launch it in January instead.

  JC: We started to drop hints about it even before the breakup, a tweet here and there, but then finally in January we actually did a seven-day countdown—each day was a different thirty-second video with us in different costumes. One day we’d be astronauts, the next we’d be dressed like greasers, then sailors, and each day we’d be counting down to the new channel’s launch. Finally we launched on January 19.