Couple Things with Shawn and Andrew - 163 | how an olympian became a youtuber

Episode Date: May 24, 2023

This week on Couple Things we talk about our journey of how we became Youtubers. We chat about our past with the olympics and NFL, pregnancy, loss, and creating our network FamilyMade Media. Let us know what you think in the comments below! This podcast is sponsored by AG1 ▶ AG1 is going to give you a FREE 1-year supply of immune-supporting Vitamin D AND 5 FREE travel packs with your first purchase. All you have to do is visit https://www.drinkag1.com/couplethings to take ownership over your health and pick up the ultimate daily nutritional insurance! Love you guys! Shawn and Andrew Follow My Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/ShawnJohnson Follow My Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@shawnjohnson Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/ShawnJohnson Follow Andrew’s Instagram ▶ https://www.instagram.com/AndrewDEast Andrew’s Tik Tok ▶ https://www.tiktok.com/@andrewdeast?lang=en Like the Facebook page! ▶ https://www.facebook.com/AndrewDEast Learn more about your ad choices. Visit megaphone.fm/adchoices

What's up, everybody. Welcome back to a couple things with Sean and Andrew. A podcast all about couples and the things they go through. Today's topic is talking about how we got into podcasting, YouTubeing, TikTok, Instagramming, social media. Yeah, and kind of walking through our whole journey with it. Yeah, because you guys didn't know I was a gymnast. If you didn't know Sean was a gymnast and you probably know her from that, if not you might know, or from dancing with the stars. But now what's crazy is when we get stopped on the street, people are like, hey, I love your TikTok.

Or I love your YouTube or I love your podcast. Yeah. Which is crazy. It's wild. I mean, yeah. So we wanted to kind of take a step back and tell you how we got into this. We've also just been putting a lot of thought into transitions. We've been asked that quite a lot about how the transition was out of athletics

and into this new career that we have. That's a big thing in athletics. probably any industry that you transition out of, it's always like this really kind of tough time to figure out what's going to happen next. So where should we start? The beginning? I'll give you a quick summary of my former career.

How about that? Great. So started gymnastics when I was three, made the United States national team at 12, went to the Olympics at 16 in Beijing, China, all through that, I loved school. My dream was to go to Stanford University, become an orthopedic surgeon. I left school, my junior year, to go to the Olympics, came back, and I was just on this whirlwind of TV shows and interviews and campaigns.

And I was an ambassador for McDonald's and Coca-Cola and UNICEF. And, like, I traveled the world doing speaking circuits and did all this. And I did that for five years, deferred college that entire time and kind of got set on a new route. And it was about five years after into that craziness, I met Andrew. That's right. Background on me. Yep. I grew up with a dad who had played college football at Purdue, my oldest brother.

was an Olympic cyclist, which is how Sean and I met. There's a whole lot of videos that we've done on that. My second oldest brother was a college football player as now a professional crossfitter. He's a beast. And I had always grown up wanting to be an NFL player. I would draw myself wearing a uniform in elementary school. And I ended up going to Vandy to play college football. Studied civil engineering there.

If NFL didn't work out, I thought I was going to be doing missionary work. building wells and third world countries but as you'll soon find out that's not necessarily how things worked worked out because when Sean and I met I feel like just life took a lot of twists and turns that weren't expected but I will say this our roots my roots with filming and documenting and sharing and recording are deep so my dad grew up he would show up to every single one of my football games i'm talking elementary school middle school high school college and pros he didn't need to film as much in the pros but for all levels of football he would show up with a camera and record the whole game yep we would never watch it it was never like he was never like hey we got to do this because

we want to watch tape together just like he loved participating in our sport uh it was such a fun way to connect and he was super into it he'd always scheme away to get like a media pass when we were playing at Georgia at Alabama he'd like get up like an actual credential and end up on the field I'll never forget on my senior day he was standing right there as I was flipping the coin I actually remember I remember when we started dating and I would go to your football games every like I'd be sitting next to dad and I would like turn away for a second turn back and he'd be gone we'd be like where did dad go and you would look on the field and he'd either like either be in the press box or he'd be on the field it's crazy and he had just

He was doing that my whole life. It was great. But he filmed everything. We have a birth log for me, which we'll do a video on, I think. We have a birth log for my siblings. Very ahead of the time. And even my grandpa had a camera. Like when video cameras weren't a thing, camp quarters, I think they were called, back in the day, he had one.

And so we have footage of my dad and my mom dating when they were in high school. It's crazy. But I want to start this saga with a story from. 1985 that I think enlightens us as to how we got into this. So in 1985, my dad bought his first camcorder, right? He was pumped. He was like crushing it as his career in construction.

He was like, got his master's, the whole thing. He was building stadiums around the nation for football. I bought a camcorder. He was like, this is what I want to do. I want to be a videographer, a cinematographer. He puts an ad in the local newspaper saying, videographer for hire gets a call a couple days later it's from a couple who asked him to show up and i kid you not they wanted him to film them having adult time wow some naked time anyway i i just heard that story for the first time like two weeks ago obviously it didn't happen just to hold that story out i had to he said no but this is all because if you knew dad he was so quirky and i can only

imagine how that newspaper ad read that was totally it probably didn't come across as like this professional business it was probably sketchy and this couple was like that's how gay it's probably goofy is a better word so anyway my dad had done this my whole life uh we used to take the tapes though and take them out of camera put them in a bucket and put it in the bucket in the closet and so there was always this like gap of okay why are we filming these things i started my YouTube career in 2008, right? So I had seen my dad film everything, and I heard about YouTube. In 2008, my buddy Justin and my other buddy Sam made our first YouTube video, the Lake Lemon Road Trip Extravaganza, 2008. It was a 12-minute video for our hour-long road trip, which is absolutely

ridiculous. We filmed it on a flip camera. There's like this sweet little, like, the technology you back then was not what it is now, Sean. So I was either filming on my Samsung flip phone. I was very aware, Andrew. I lived through the same time as you did. Okay, that's great. So we spent months editing this road trip video. That's hilarious.

And it still exists on YouTube. We followed that up with another video in 2008 called the Hoosier Hill extravaganza 2008, which is ironic because Indiana has no high points. It's really just a hill. It's not like a mountain. So it's like, you know, us finding the highest point in Indiana, which is not that high. Do you get the joke? Okay.

So that's in 2008. I then got swept up into football. Sean's doing gymnastics, winning gold medals during that time. 2010 made another video about another road trip. I just was enthralled with this idea of editing. Love the process of editing, but also like making a storyline out of like a week-long experience. How can you make like an eight-minute video? I just love the challenge of that.

Which brings us to 2015, Sean. Okay. Give the people some background as to what was happening in that year with me graduating college, football, the things. So I met Andrew in 2012, started dating in 2013. I quit all of my work. speaking engagements, ambassadorships, everything for the entire year of 2013 and 14 while I was dating Andrew. I needed a clean start. I didn't know what I wanted to do. I transferred

from Stanford to Vanderbilt. I got started in college and I was just a dating college girl. That was about it. And it was amazing. And then in 2000, yeah, in 2015, when Andrew and I had started started getting more serious. Andrew is starting to bounce into the NFL. And out of the NFL. No. You were bouncing from team to team. We are talking about engagement and marriage.

I started picking up more work because we were talking about life together. And we kind of just came to this head a little bit in 2015 where Andrew, a friend of had started the YouTube influencing world they had like gotten into it Mallory Irvin and because we because I had so much experience with like negotiating contracts and agents and ambassadorships I would sit in on all of these meetings with her where she was looking for representation and kind of negotiating this life and Andrew and I just started having this conversation of should we do this should I give up my old career that I'm now picking back up and should we try something new and you already by nature of your dad documented literally every second of our life and already I was doing that already yeah um

just didn't have an outlet for it so it was always fun but we we were like should we make an official you know like YouTube channel and upload an official video I think you were less excited about it than I was I was in a place where we just got engaged. I just signed with my first NFL team, the chiefs. I was pumped. I was like, sweet, I'm going to be a football player, just like I had dreamed of for the next 10 years. Done.

I got cut after like three months and had zero money. So I was sitting on the couch, didn't know what to do. Sign up to be an Uber driver. When I hear Mallory was like, yeah, I just started a YouTube channel. I was like, oh, interesting. I don't know that was a thing. Like, you know, I started asking questions about, this is what you're spending time doing and then like you're now working with companies what does that

look like so in uh December of 2015 we found some camera that we had in the closet don't ever watch this video guys it's still there i freaking love it's it's it is not great to be honest with you but this was a big deal uh for sean to start a YouTube channel um we and we would jump from zero subscribers i'll never forget sitting there after we used a video and we got to 10,000 the first day subscribers and i was like oh my gosh but What was so unique about it and novel was you were the first kind of mainstream celebrity or traditional celebrity to branch into the YouTube world where now, you know, other people have tried to do it. Like Arod tried to start a channel. It's like it just was such a new thing.

I think literally you and Jack Black might have been the two. Well, the reason why it was so challenging and to kind of bridge this gap for you guys to understand. And the difference between traditional old school marketing and media. So if you saw me on the side of a McDonald's cup or if you saw me on a Coca-Cola can, the difference between that and the influencing world is very, very different. Or it was back then. We've made it different, I think, too. But go ahead.

Yeah. So my entire career that I had kind of built and it was, was stable. I could guarantee an income, especially with you bouncing around the NFL. I wanted to be a supporting spouse at the time. I had no income. It was, it was my, I was trying to help our family, you know. But the way that you, I ran that business, it was very, very tailored, very polished, very politically correct. You didn't give polarizing views. You didn't give your real opinions. The way you presented yourself on camera was like hair and makeup ready. You had to look tailored and professional and polished as if you were going into a corporate job.

Pay hundreds of dollars for people to come do your makeup or do your styling and outfits. It's like a whole thing. But the influencing world, especially back then, there was this divide between the corporate world and influencing where everything was very raw. It was not edited. You didn't wear hair and makeup fully done. You showed your actual self, your actual opinions without talking points, without a PR and press team behind you, without a lawyer's standing behind you to make sure you didn't like put a foot in your mouth all these things and that terrified me because i having that conversation with andrew in the position we were in 2015 where we didn't really have an income and we were wanting to pursue this NFL career by our first house

potentially get married all of these things i was like okay if we jump into this world it will shut the professional door for me that i was doing because your brand went from being super like you know fancy celebrity to like oh she's a YouTube channel like it like belittled you interesting well I do like I give you so many kudos for uh being a pioneer I think in a lot of ways you are in this realm um and I think you have shaped correct that there you okay were the pioneer what I think and I was gritting my teeth and holding on for dear life at the beginning because I was like I don't know what's going to come of this we're losing our stability I distinctly remember remember a conversation we had in our kitchen where it was you saying no this is my bread and butter

or it's like speeches yeah and i and i was pushing i was like sean we should do youtube full time and it wasn't and it wasn't and i mean this is a beautifully about marriage just the difference of perspectives but we did go about it in a smart way where it's not like i think we made a transition over a couple months so that there was a bridge right and to give one more anecdote here the thing that ended up pushing me over the edge of being bought into it, which took a while but it was so refreshing, was I had spent so much of my career

trying to act how do I say this? I don't want to say like something I wasn't, but A polished, like super polished version. Being a professional athlete, your job is to put on a front for your judges and your competitors that you were made of steel, that you were unbreakable.

Only show the good stuff. Yeah, and I remember watching on NBC all of these stories that they would say about me of like, oh, she's just a machine. And I wanted to be like, I'm not. I am a human being. I'm 16 years old. I'm struggling with boys and drama and girls,

like the girl teenage thing. And I just wanted to eat a cheeseburger. And I had never been given the opportunity to show my human side in this huge, YouTube venture felt refreshing because for the first time I felt like I could actually just be myself without people judging like corporations and companies without telling me oh you actually can't act like that even if it's who I was yeah your experience in the limelight I think does shed an interesting light on our experience on YouTube because you were so young as you were doing

all these TV shows and you know getting interviewed by David Letterman and all these people it's like that and you're a teenager so everyone else is in high school and college it's like well what else is going on in Sean's life like clearly this is a transformational period in a lot of people's lives I wish we could see the behind the scenes which I remember watching that first video and the reception it got Sports Illustrated wrote an article which I'll talk about in a second but I remember thinking wow this is so cool I actually believe we're engaged at this point I actually believe that the world would be a better place if I was able to show the world more of Sean.

And I fell in love with that smile. Let me see it. I know. I felt love with that smile as long as it took you to fall in love with me. But I was like, man, that would be a really cool side effect. So we got a very warm reception after our first video. We released a second video, okay? Sports Illustrated wrote,

a headline because this was a big deal for someone to like Sean to launch a YouTube channel. It was titled Sean Johnson's YouTube series episode two recap. Too Many pillows. On Sports Illustrated? Do you remember? That's what I'm saying.

Because the setting was a, you were in bed with all these pillows. Do you remember that? I will say though. We didn't know what we were doing. The reason why it had traction on Sports Illustrated and stuff was because this person and persona that Sports Illustrated, ESPN, NBC

was forced to talk about in a machine-like manner for so many years was all of a sudden becoming human. Does that make sense? And showing her bed, which again was a big thing. Relatable. I was truly like taking a mask off

and showing just what it was like to be a normal person. It's so funny. I remember we filmed that first video that was like two minutes long we probably filmed it six times yeah it was with a camera um Shannon sent you I think it was like a uh Panasonic I think yeah do you remember that yeah oh my gosh anyway and so we but I was immediately hooked with like the equipment with the editing I would just binge watch YouTube videos for hours learning about what's the best editing software how do you do these editing techniques what equipment's best which it was like super nostalgic

because I have fond memories of my dad taking us to these camera stores and, like, showing us these new sweet digital cameras when we were like eight. It was like sports equipped. You could do, anyway, it was like, I was hooked from the get-go. And I will say after we had posted a few videos, after I had started turning down speaking engagements and taking on this like new route, it was refreshing. Because for the first time, I think ever in my career, which was also now out. our career. I wasn't talking about being a gymnast. We were branding ourselves as you and I. And for the first time of my career, I had control over me. And that was the scariest thing to ever feel, but the most freeing and liberating thing to ever feel. To like, to be able to

just turn on a camera and not have to think about what am I talking about now. And I don't know. It was just very freeing. I remember, well, I was in the same position with, like, the NFL. I haven't gotten. I was like, oh, I don't control my own destiny with this, right? Yeah. Which maybe we have control problems. But I also, go ahead.

No, finish. I was just, I remember hearing stories about, like, Jess and Bieber making, like, 25 cents per view. Do you remember, like, these rumors? And I was like, also, maybe, you know, I was a bum at the time. Three months, no job. I was getting tryouts with teams. but three months no job and Sean is like the breadwinner which is fine I love that she's still it she's the main she's a main event but like I'm like I have to do something right so then I'm

looking at this I'm like if I could just cover our mortgage through doing this that would be great right it was amazing and I want to like tell you guys about a little bit about Andrew right now so that for the rest of eternity if you ever follow us you understand what's actually happening in the background, not a single thing we do would ever happen if it weren't for Andrew. I appreciate that. I would never in a million years have started a YouTube channel. I would still be doing speeches and I would be a different person. I would still be wearing a mask and living under the control of a team.

You have built our business. I, yes, I am a dreamer. I have dreams. But I'm paralyzed by failure to where it's hard for me to even get started. started on a project you have executed and built everything that we have dreamt of no i think we're a wonderful team i love us as a team i'm not kidding this is the thing about Andrew he's the most thank you thank you but i really view us as like such a complimentary squad we are but you are way too humble because you will never ever accept that it was you you'll never acknowledge it and it was thank you

what i love about what we do though is the more i can actually uplift you and hype you up the more successful we are so it's like i think it's a win it's the best case scenario ever it took us a couple iterations to get there because the youtube channel was not the first fincher i tried you remember the backpack company i do and you had to start a backpack company no i got a sample made up it was dope it's still somewhere in china after i got a demo made of it it's still in china it's the sample yeah we never received it i was i know well i didn't buy I didn't have enough money to. I didn't, to ship it over here.

I will say one of, this is going on a tangent, let me get off the path for a second. One of my favorite things about Andrew and I from the beginning of our relationship, I started a career, a full-on career when I was 12. I earned some money, not a lot. It's definitely like a, I don't know, what's that called like a faux paul or false belief?

Oh, yeah, that's fine. A false belief that people have of like Olympians that you make a lot of money off the Olympics, you don't. So I had a little... Maybe that's a whole episode in of itself. I know. I know. I had a little bit of money saved up.

But one of my favorite things about you and I is from my career, you and I were able to form a family together, engaged and married, where I supported you for a little bit, and then it would bounce back. And you would support me and my venture, and it would bounce back. And, like, the team that we've had that way has been really, really cool. I agree. I love you. I love you. I'm thankful for you. We got hooked right at the get-go, right?

And immediately, I put together, I want to find the spreadsheet. I put together a spreadsheet of all these YouTube channels that I love that I was watching. I remember losing all hope was freedom. Lof, Lof is what it was called, was like the social comedy kind of thing. Do you remember that guy at all? No. Hilarious. So I was like, okay, who are the YouTubers that we could collab with?

What are my favorite channels? I would search and find their email address. This is what I did all day every day. See, this is all email. While watching Silicon Valley. And then I would also come with a concept for like, okay, this guy does comedy. We were going to do one. Oh my gosh.

We got to find this email exchange. We were going to do one with Dude Perfect. Yeah, which freaking shout out Dude Perfect. We just met. I'd still love to do a video with you guys. Come on. Let's do it. But we were going to do one with a prank company that we were going to go to a pawn shop and pawn off your gold medals.

My gold medals, which are buried. in our backyard. Which we didn't do because of a couple of different reasons. But anyway, put together a spreadsheet, started doing this outreach, and like the amount of nose that we got, one, was humbling. It was painful. But also, the amount of yeses we got was, it's exciting enough to keep us in the game. Because, granted, the only thing going for us at the time was that I had an Olympic gold medal, but we had no followers on YouTube, Andrews bouncing around the NFL,

and we just wanted to like do collabs. and Vsauce wanted to do a collab with us which is awesome but Andrew would sit for days and days and days and just like cold email all of these people and he'd be like let's film a video whatever and then I will never forget

you compiled your yes list and we spent a year traveling the country to meet all of these people using the little money that we had saved up and that we were making I was I would still say yes like a speech or two to like fund our projects um oh my gosh but we would travel the country

and meet all of these people and gain new friends with them and they would teach us part of the people we met i know they would teach us like how to do youtube and how to like monetize it and make it a career and all this by the way there's an asterisk to the monetizing side that we'll get to but they would show us the ins and outs of these influencer worlds and we we gained a community and built our channel to a million, which was wild. It took a while there. We've never had a, we've never had like an explosion of like, wow, we're the biggest thing that's happened. We've just kind of just kept showing up, you know?

Hey, we had two number one videos. That's true. That's true. We did have a little streak of trending. Yeah. I'm super thankful there's been a slow build, you know. But through that whole thing that Andrew had created, the template of like bouncing around the country for a year. or building this YouTube channel, building a community,

we fell into this new world. We are no longer athletes. We were influencers and YouTubers. And it was so cool. So good memories. But then I'm going to go on a tangent. So add your commentary to this. I would say after that first year,

when we kind of gained our traction in our community, we got derailed a little bit because we lost the purpose of why we were, creating videos yeah well we'll get there I have this hall now okay okay don't don't skip ahead all right so we always from the get-go had viewed this as like a journal right just because of my dad like I was talking about but also I have this journal this now like over a thousand pages on Google docs I journaled ever since I was a sophomore in high school I started journal right before I lost my grandma I won't forget Sean was kind of doing a similar thing where

I remember when we first met she had these printed out photo albums like you had a but you still have a box of them. A be a bigillion of these little photo albums. So we were like natural journalers. I don't know if that's unique to us or not. Let us know if you journal. But we viewed the YouTube channel as the same thing where it's like this really cool way to document our lives,

which I still think YouTube is the coolest thing ever. It's like the democratization of media. I could go on a tangent about this forever. But what an amazing archive of like collective wisdom of humanity. It's amazing. I'll never get over it. So in 2015, where we were is I was

getting trials with NFL teams which we were making vlogs about. We were also engaged. Do you remember documenting our wedding planning process where we were doing cake tasting? We were doing wedding venue tours which was interesting to contrast that because we got an opportunity to do

a reality TV show. Remember that? And we ended up not doing that because we were like, wait, why would we go back to traditional media? YouTube is way more fun. It's so fun. We wanted to be able to document our life our way and not have someone else write our story.

That's right. The amount of reality TV shows we've turned down. A lot. Oh, my gosh. And YouTube is amazing because, again, the more Sean I could show to the world, the better. And we had these layers to chip away. But it also was so cool to see these comments that we would get.

And, man, we would spend hours. responding to comments and I just thought it was such a unique way to connect with fans you would start this conversation people would participate in it and then we could kind of respond and build this dialogue but we got to do a lot of you were still doing a lot of cool things like the invictus games when you were down there with Morgan Freeman and Prince Harry and it's like being able to share the behind the scenes of that or the Oscars red carpet and like here you are with these you know this these paparazzi taking pictures of you and then we make a YouTube video about like body image stuff on the red carpet and like this kind of the twisted world behind it.

It was like such a cool way for us to show, hey, you think it's this. Like Hollywood glamorizes it to be this. But let us tell you what's really going on. And I still feel so fortunate to be able to like paint a more robust full picture of this celebrity world that you participate in and I get a front row seat too. It's just a treat. So that's 2015. 2016, one of the biggest collabs we did that year was Bratali. And so we reached out to the family.

I guess they're all known now, the LeBlancs. Everyone knows their name. And they were so generous in helping us get our feet under us. They got us to 100,000 subscribers. So we're like five months in. This was April. I remember I got cut by the Seahawks on the drive to see the Bertali's. Yep.

We showed up. And they were, like, so nice to us. They did a couple of videos that super, like, boosted our channel, got to 100,000 subscribers. And it was kind of like game on. We kind of just did collab after collab after collab in 2016. We were getting married that year. I remember you were patient enough to be late to your bachelor rep.

I still actually feel really bad about this. We did a collab in Florida, remember, with the seven gymnastics girls. Then you flew directly to Chicago for your bachelor's party for. more on that collab later but um i'm sorry about that by the way okay you take work very seriously i was so um i hope i have more balance now you're getting a lot better thank you like the seven-day bachelor party you just went on so we did we did uh the bertaley collab actually started your musically account which is now tic-tok do you remember this i don't but that was that was the origination of our performed content was musically you don't remember that we made the first um you know it's crazy

we finish each other's sandwiches yep i mean it's crazy we finish each other's sandwiches that's what i was going to say that's what i was going to say that was our first tic-tok bro i am living i'm reliving this so hard right now you're going like day by day right now i am well this is for our we have to get through like seven more years it goes fast at this point okay so then 2016 i'm getting a bunch of tryouts I signed with the Seahawks that year. I signed with the Raiders, I think twice that year. And I was like filming us doing wedding planning. We released our wedding video, which was so fun.

Our bachelor, bachelorette parties. We had all these videos. And I was like, I'm so into this. I also started documenting my NFL journey of getting tryouts, getting signed, getting cut because I had never seen that side of things as a player. It was always like, you know, I grew up in Indianapolis as a cult fan. Peyton Manning is on the team for like 14 years. And you're like, oh, that's what?

every NFL player's like I'd never seen the experience of like a bubble player like I was where it's like oh hey we'll get signed for a couple months and then get cut so like it was almost like hard knocks before hard knocks existed was our YouTube channel shout out to stop don't ever think that out of context what do you mean the East family thinks their channel is oh I'm just saying that's why people like hard knocks wow that's why I thought anyway so we had documentation of like literally me getting cut and filming this which I don't even know if that's illegal now

this was all like new this was a frontier you were filming in the locker room this was I don't know what the it was also new no one had any rules around it so anyway we also used it in 2016 as a way to kind of stay in touch and share each other's experiences

Sean went to Rio for the Olympics in 2016 while I was in camp and then I went directly on tour so we oh my gosh I know. Our entire, like, first year of marriage, we weren't together, which was the hardest year of our lives. But it did give us a little bit of, like, connection and in exchanging videos. And we would do these vlogs where it was like, here's Sean's day. And then the same

video was like, meanwhile, Andrew was in two days, right? Yeah. Which those were always kind of fun to, like, put together because I remember, like, you doing golf lessons, you. you going to these different events showing how long you had to walk and like I'm glad that we have this footage that we can still refer to and hopefully show our kids one day um so we were kind of just like having fun with it and I think 2017 was a pivotal year because that was when we first got pregnant yep fall of 2017 this was pivotal this was probably the most pivotal um found out we were pregnant you tell the story okay so up until 2017, every once in a while we would have these like events that we would film and post

videos about that we were excited about. But I would say up until 2017 from the time that we started YouTube, we kind of like aimlessly did YouTube trying to be successful at it without a purpose. And we would go in and out of these phases of like, what are we doing? Why are we creating slime videos? Why are we, you know, what is our purpose for this? Like what good are we doing here? And we kind of felt lost on YouTube for a little bit every once in a while. It was still fun, but we just didn't have, like, a reason. 2017, we get pregnant. We documented the whole thing naturally, like, as if we were going to, like, keep it for ourselves.

Like, our first appointment, me telling Andrew, all of that stuff. Not because we were ever going to share that. That was not the type of content that we put on our YouTube channel back then. Our content was very light and fluffy and fun. Slime videos. Yeah. so this was like truly a video diary for ourselves a week or two weeks after i found out i was pregnant two days after i told andrew i was pregnant because we were apart i was traveling on a press

circuit andrew was bouncing around for tryouts um it was two days after i told him back when we were together i miscarried the pregnancy um we've filmed like that doctor's appointment and me finding out and like how we just kind of naturally dealt with that grief and we created a video for us to watch it was like again a video diary and I remember sitting there thinking I don't know why this was very out of context for my style but I was like I want to post this on our YouTube channel and I think that was majority in part to my gymnastics career I was taught to never show emotion or show weakness of any kind so even though we were married I hadn't really learned how to like vocalize pain to Andrew of any kind or weakness which is a whole other podcast story of how we got there but after this miscarriage I was just kind like I'm good. I'm fine. Whatever. I didn't know how to like have a conversation with Andrew and be like, I am grieving so badly right now and in so much pain and I don't know how to ask for help.

So in the back of my mind, I was like, what if someone on YouTube has gone through this before? Because I felt isolated as well. We kind of went back and forth. Andrew was very nervous about posting it. We went ahead and posted it and that video went to number one. I didn't know if any single person in the world would watch it because again it was not our style and i remember sitting there for hours reading the comments like that rolled in and it was from couples and women all over the world who had gone through the same thing who were saying i feel the same exact way i don't know how to talk to my husband i don't know how to ask for help thank you for posting this and we would just sit there and like communicate through the comments back and forth for hours and it was because of that video

and because of like the impact that that made it switched our entire purpose on youtube to no longer being frivolous but being a place where we could truly intentionally connect with people and try to relate to them on levels where we feel most isolated yeah and like and like share a message or start a conversation i think that was the first inkling experience that we had at that uh It was crazy. We'll talk later. We had tens of thousands of comments that are now deleted, which makes me sad and frustrated. Yeah. We'll be digging to that. That was a really pivotal moment where I was like,

oh my gosh, wait, we can, I think, make an impact doing this. And Sean, you know, I had experience walking into a room with Sean and women would just like break down and tears crying. I'm not, that happens still all the time. I hate when you say this. I'm just saying to see the effect that she has because of, you know, her success in gymnastics and she was like this idol for a lot of people. You're, I think you're America's sweetheart.

Were you not? You're my sweetheart. But it's like, okay, so how do we follow that up? Like what's the, how can we share some important message or like uplifting message? or make people what how can we actually do something cool with that effect and so um 2017 was pivotal in that in that point i remember that was also an interesting time because i had still i was like super obsessed with zack king and like the editing styles uh of how do you like make magic edits and all these things which is kind of again originations of like short form

type content but like just really with the storytelling making it captivating um I have a whole embarrassing highlight reel of that. Do you remember that one? I do. Of all these, oh yeah, me doing days with the stars cropped it. I will have to play some of this.

It's great. So, 2017 was a big year. 2018 was also a big year because in that spring, I launched the podcast, redirected, which was our first foyer into podcasting,

is now what we spend a lot of our time doing um and so fast forward to spring of 2019 when we got demonetized and comments turned off and we really felt comments deleted not just turned off deleted YouTube wiped all of our comments yeah which is a bummer so you remember if you're in the YouTube culture there's something called the adpocalypse which happened where like people were there's some weirdos on YouTube who would like exploit underage kids there's also a lot of like you know geopolitical war like people doing torture videos on YouTube and it's like yeah YouTube was figuring out where the line is right and how do they protect when you democratize something how do you like steward that well anyway we had done that collab with the seven

gymnastics girls as we previously mentioned the leader of that group turned out to be unfortunately a petaple a creep and I think he's still in prison yes anyway so because of our association with gymnastics which was it still is a big trending topic on YouTube and seven gymnastics girls I think YouTube kind of just associated us with like we had any gymnastics girls in the title of our video so they were like demonetize it as a blanket policy at that time given a lot of like security around girls and kids and gymnasts our channel understandably so because i was a gymnast got flagged in a natural algorithm and so we got shut down for a while very long time which honestly

we're all in favor of like unfortunately unfortunately our comments they get deleted and there's like you know that's a bummer because there was tens of thousands of comments comments but the more important thing is the protection of the kids so yeah just to clarify that that happened in 2019 that's also when we like realized we kind of took a step back and said okay well maybe we don't just go all in on YouTube maybe there's like how can we use YouTube as part of a broader strategy because we don't want to be married to like we don't want to be at the mercy of them turning off her comments or demonetizing us yada so that kind of sparked us thinking a little bigger than

just YouTube. In 2018, December 2018, that's also when I achieved my NFL dream after five years of bouncing around from team to team to team, signed with the Washington football team. And that was a really fun series to kind of like bring us full circle. We also started our dating series in 2018, which kind of turned into the couple things podcast. People loved us recounting how we met, what we liked about each other, what, like, what made us want to. What made us want get married to each other and you know that dating series turned a couple things which ultimately turned into family made which what we do now in 2019 we got pregnant he did January and that's when we had our first hire we hired Lexi which was a another pivotal moment for us as like a just

moving forward with things we realized John's going to be you know pregnant and not feeling good some of the time and then we're going to have a kid to deal with and and we were like kind of married to releasing one YouTube video a week remember that so how do we keep that going and how do we formalize things and it really helped force us to organize prioritize and focus what we're doing we had like systematize everything because now we had someone who like was like hey what do I do I do today and I had no idea so we were like dude we were paying Lexi through PayPal we were like just she was hanging out with us in a living room it was crazy I also want to add a lot of people, especially when we get to this point of like you had your first hire, a lot of people ask us how we make money.

And tying this full circle, so back when I was a gymnast in professional athletics, we worked in, I worked in marketing, basically. People like Coca-Cola and McDonald's would hire me. I would promote their product, but it was basically in exchange for being an ambassador or being sponsored for my career. fast forward now we're in this youtube world where we're showing our life and relating to people and we've built this community that trusts us to like be their friends and truly we are we make money based off of you know youtube's monetization so based off of how well your videos do and how many people watch it but also it opens up this door where we now get to promote products as well um and go back into what I was doing in gymnastics except this time around since we have full control if in every video we make back then we were showing whatever it was iPhone we'd be like hey iPhone we're promoting your product and we love it and we use it every single day is there a partnership we can do here yeah and we take that very very seriously with every product we promote we try it

first we have to believe in it we have to believe in the company we have to believe in the people who started it we have in-depth conversations and it was through this that we started building this business and yeah it took off it's also i mean i've had the experience where a product can literally change uh for sure with parenting it's like when you find you know a place that's slumber pod to put your kid in when they sleep or you know the place you put them when they nap or like the the right pacifier the right bottle that like helps them actually drink and eat enough it's like it can actually change the game right that goes for parenting it goes with health and wellness it goes with fitness it's like we're really excited to introduce products that hopefully helps you out and so

it's great to merge like a product with what we're already talking about and I think it's a huge honor for us to hopefully provide value in that sense we view it as like hey hopefully you try this product out it helped us and hopefully it'll help you too so we ended up bringing lexie on that year in 2019 to help us manage all this to manage our accounts in our um relationships with companies and our relationships with you guys who are listening to make sure that we kept everything up and running in a high quality way while we're on maternity leave and managing a baby so that was in 2019 that fall we had drew um our first child freaking princess love my life or about a week after i had drew i find out that couple things which i'd never heard of before a podcast had charted to number one

with no episodes and i was like what is this why is our face on this and Andrew's like this is our podcast i launched it and we need to record episodes now and i was literally a week postpartum and I was like I might kill you yeah mistakes were made for sure but it's amazing now um so redirected was my solo project podcast that has now I think 140 plus episodes we launched a couple things because obviously Sean's a bigger deal between us but I fell in love with this experience of like interviewing people or just like having a broader discussion I'm sorry I'm about to be my pants Sean needs to go to the bathroom okay I had fallen in love with this experience of down and doing interviews and meeting new people and then having this was kind of in the

political climate too where things were tense but what does it look like to have like an unbroken extended conversation in depth about a topic it's like I just think there's some magic about YouTube and there's some magic about podcast so that show launched had a lot of success we got nominated for the People's Choice Award in 2020 I actually hit number one or two in December of 2022 as well on the charts. And then, you know, after we had Drew, especially when we launched that show in 2019, there was a lot of discussion going on around like, hey, we've been doing YouTube for the last four years at that point.

And what does this look like when we have a kid, right? So there was, at that point, you had a lot of these, like, family blogging was really starting to, like, take off. And then there was kind of some people manipulate. that concept and making it almost like a scripted reality. And so we started having discussions of do we include our kids in this or not? And we viewed a couple things as a really important outlet for us to just have something that's just Sean and I.

We didn't know how we were going to navigate the situation with Drew or our future kids. And now our philosophy is kind of include the kids in a way that's from Sean and I's perspective as our content has always been from our perspective. It's not like a kid's channel. It's not about what the kids are doing necessarily. It's about what Sean and Andrew are doing, which has heavy overlap and what the kids are doing, obviously, because we spend a lot of time with them.

But always from our perspective, in case we ever just want to say, hey, we're done with that. So I don't know if we're, we have conversation about this all the time. Like, how can we navigate this wisely? No one's ever kind of done this before, right? social media started in 2008 with Twitter so like it's very young and we're just trying to go through it thoughtfully so there's that we never viewed our content as like scripted reality or like

hey now our income is dependent on this we always just try to maintain just like my dad did with making home videos like maintain this sense of creating shareable home videos is is how I consider even what we do was like shareable home videos so like yeah there's a storyline and we like kind of will do uh sit down narration of it but it's still a home video it's not like a youtube video right it's not like a miss it's not like a family mr beast type video so that makes sense anyway okay so uh with lexie we were able to increase um kind of like our as we systemized things and organized things we're able to increase the number of videos we output. So then we had YouTube videos going out every week.

Then we got exclusive deals with YouTube, with Facebook, with Amazon. And it's like we had a lot of content to create. So we're doing short form every week. We're doing podcasts, multiple every week. We're doing YouTube. And then we're making cuts for all these different platforms. And it started to like grow this team of Lexi. And then we had video editors.

And we have producers who like, hey, how does a couple things differ from? your East family YouTube channel and then telling storylines through each of those episodes because we got caught up and like just sitting down and recording a random podcast wasn't working there were expectations of like how can we patch together something that is pleasant to listen to and so now we have I think 12 W2 employees that we have this really amazing team I'm so thankful for that helps us keep that up without us losing our sanity or our priorities well the reason why we have so many employees now is and we have so many contractors i mean we have like a team of 30 pretty much is because it all kind of came to a head in 2021 when we had jet where looking at the type of

videos we are sharing and how much we are sharing and how much we were filming we kind of capped it we no longer wanted to continue putting more and more content around us out we didn't want to keep adding more shows we were comfortable with what we were sharing at the consistency we were sharing it but in order to grow that and continue to impact you guys and give you relatable content and like good-hearted wholesome family content that can hopefully impact our world for the better we had to grow our team because we wanted to find other people out there yeah who do what we do that we can help and uplift and help grow to hopefully create

a tidal wave of just good content for the world to see. Yeah, so in 2021 we're in this position where we had like a really solid process. We have this content calendar that's playing months in advance. We have these podcasts that are like, you know, having a good amount of reach and success. We're also at a point where we're sitting down and filming for like five or six hours a day

to like, you know, put out the YouTube video, put out the TikToks on all the things. and we simultaneously also you know there's a lot of stuff going on where we realize like Sean and I come from such a limited experience of she's from Ohio and I'm from Indiana and we're you know we have two kids biologically and there's so many other stories about adoption and special needs and you know losing loved ones and you know being a widow and like not everyone has this team that we've been able to build and so there's this hurdle in our niche of like family lifestyle videos of one separating yourself from like the more exploitative family content

which i hope to stay in arm's length away from always and two since it's with kids and with your spouse like there's kind of like this it adds complexities to the relationship and it's always like hey we can't do this because our plate's too full we have the kids to take care of So we reached this point where, like, how cool would it be if we could use our team that we've built to help reduce the obstacles of people in our niche who share a similar set of values to help create more content? Because there's so much, you know, as you said, promiscuous or, you know, kind of, I think, culturally undermining content with gambling, with profanity, with all these, like, things that. I think our type of content is the antithesis of, right? And there's this massive audience for our genre of content. And it's really like people want it.

So how can we help create more of it? Which continues us on the path of building family made. We're now we've been able to, we started family in 2021. We didn't have our first show signed until July of 2022. it took so many knows for us to finally get that first yes of like yeah i'll uh i want to do a show with family made and now people are signing biweekly and we have a long list that we're clearing as we speak we have 14 shows um signed i think they're no 14 shows live i think there's three or four more signed um and we did a whole video on family made a podcast on family made

but like it's so cool to build this ecosystem of family friendly, brand safe content that people want to listen to. And it's not like cheesy, it's not corny, it's like quality content about real topics that hopefully serves as conversation starters for people going through this phase of life, whether it be dating, engagement, marriage, young parts of parenting, what we've made videos on for the last eight years. right it's like creating a home base for those people to go to and and building out resources of not only podcasts but also courses and handouts and events um it's i'm really excited for the future and our experience on youtube has been such a treat i feel like we're the luckiest people in the world to be able to sit down and have these really fun conversations other podcasts with my wife I love the conversations that we get to have to be able to learn about you

by being in the office with you every day. It's like, I just feel spoiled. And I feel like where we started with the mission of sharing more Sean in the world. That was not our mission at all. I feel like I'm still doing that. I want to clarify that was not our mission. Ever.

No, you never said that. I did. But now we get to share more of what, you know, has made our life fulfilling and fruitful, which is not the Olympic gold medals necessarily, not necessarily, you know, achieving NFL dreams. It's like, gosh, our marriage when we look back on the past seven years, so fulfilling, our kids, so fulfilling. And we've had a lot of fun memories, like the zero-g video that we've got to do, the Ryan Trajan, the travel vlog that we made through Europe, gender reveals and pregnancy announcements with my parents,

which now I get to go look back on with my dad, Drew's birth vlog, Drew's first time at challenged gymnastics. It's like, gosh, there's so many full circle things. And we have this archive of a journal for our lives. And hopefully what we're building with family made will be this archive of resources to help people navigate this. in a less overwhelming way. I didn't have the idea to make this video until like two weeks ago, and then I was patching together our storyline,

and I was like, man, what a right it's been. Who knows where it goes from here? I know. But I love it. How many shows do you think we'll have by the end of the year at this rate? We need to cap it around 20. But you know what's crazy?

We put out... You just got serious. I think around 800 pieces of content last year. Short form videos, YouTube videos, podcasts, newsletters, courses, 800 pieces of content that hopefully nudges the world to take one step closer to making family the aspiration and not making a million dollars

or like using chat GPT or AI or like getting a six-pack. It's like, hey, make your marriage, make your family, your number one priority. And that's what we're trying to push towards. So anyway, I'll end my soapbox. maybe some of you found this intriguing thank you for going with us down memory lane but that's how we got into youtube and that's why uh you know people don't recognize sean as much as they used to for olympics or dance with the stars but more for tic-tok and youtube and you no no me they only know it's a height difference that really sticks that

sticks out that why people took pictures of you on the plane and i wasn't there oh what a ride Okay, well, we'll end it there. What are we two hours then? Yeah. Thank you for listening. I'm Andrew. I'm Sean. We're the East Fam.

Out.