 Hey friends, guess what? I just hit 50,000 subscribers. 50,000, 50,000, I just hit 50,000, yeah. I'm such a good dancer. Check it out, it's for real. 51.3 thousand, that's a lot of thousands. 50,000 is a huge number and it's kind of hard to comprehend. 50,000 is how many people fit in the CU stadium up here in Boulder, go buffs. 50,000 is how many people run the New York City Marathon and there are 50,000 people who live in the city of Grand Island, Nebraska. Have you ever been there? They have a great Dairy Queen. Hi there, can I get a medium Oreo blizzard? Okay. Uh-huh-huh. Now this video isn't a celebration about me and my accomplishments, it's more of a thank you to all of you for watching my videos and joining Team Dooser. When I first started doing this many, many years ago, pretty much my only audience member was my mom and she's a pretty tough critic. Building up my YouTube audience has been a ton of work, especially in the last three years when I started taking YouTube really seriously. My numbers aren't due to a viral hit. I've never had a video that's gone crazy and skyrocketed my numbers. My growth, my steady growth, has been due to just putting out a lot of videos, about 70 a year. But I love it, I love the process, I love creating and I love uploading and I love interacting with all of you and building up this community. I just looked at my hair and the viewfinder and it is like a windmill up there. Let's see if we can fix that. I don't know, my hair's a little greasy today, whatever. Now let's go way back to the beginning. My very first video I uploaded on YouTube which was on July 10th, 2006. YouTube had barely been around for a year at this point and I uploaded a video about my bike ride from Honduras to Boulder. Hello, we're here. It is a couple of days before the big ride and we're gonna try out the little trailer. The kids are very excited about this. Vamos a probar la Cartilla, ¿verdad, niños? Simon! Simon, bueno, bueno. This video is super pixelated. It's definitely not HD and it highlights my three month adventure from Honduras through Guatemala, Belize, all the way through Mexico and back home to Boulder, Colorado, about 4,000 miles. This is what it looks like in this direction. Wow, man. That trip essentially started my career. It got me excited about bike touring and about documenting my adventures. This is what we live on. Got two cans of these a day, maybe. And about a hundred farts, too. I continued sporadically uploading videos to YouTube, but the idea of building up subscribers and building up a community wasn't even on my radar. I didn't really promote my videos on social media and I sure never responded to comments. I was mainly putting videos online for my family and friends and to help sell myself to casting directors. For most of my career, I worked as a host and that was my bread and butter. Kind of. The TV world is super tricky to navigate and although I had some success, it was a freaking roller coaster and I never felt stable. Hey, I'm Ryan. Andooser. Andooser. Andooser. Andooser. Andooser. And today we're working in trees. It wasn't until January 2016 when my good friend Gene started bugging me to take YouTube more seriously and I was pretty hesitant. My goal, my dream was to be a TV host for the travel channel, not a YouTuber. YouTube, for me, was a place where kids opened up toys and where people watched makeup tutorials. I just didn't get it, but now I do and I see the light. So thank you, Gene, for getting me started on this YouTube journey. I absolutely love it. Hello and welcome to Out There. Remember the season finales of those 80s sitcoms where the whole cast would sit on the couch and have a little retrospective moment of the highlights of the season? Well, I always wanted to do that. I'm gonna do it now. So let's look into my YouTube channel and I wanna share with you some of my favorite old, old moments. Oh, hello. This is Ethan over here and Logan over here. This one is awesome. It's from 2006 and I got my good friend, Paul, to jump over the entire family on his bike, including my mom. Yeah, you guys gotta help your mom off the ground. Good work, Paul. This one is a holiday classic. The old tongue stuck to the frozen pole. I tripled, dog, dare you. Oh, I had some friends in town from Texas who didn't believe that your tongue would actually stick to a frozen pole and it did and my tongue became very, very frozen to that pole and my buddy, Chris, just stood there laughing his ass off. Ah, ah, ah, so funny. My entire age is the dumbest thing I've ever done. This was a really fun video and my little brother Ethan got to flex his amazing acting skills. Do you find yourself sitting on the couch day after day, watching mindless TV, eating junk and falling into a trap of laziness? Well then, you need the Out There Pill. What's the Out There Pill? This is the Out There Pill. Little, pink, different. Here, try this. Pfft. The idea was that he was lazy and that I gave him this magical pill called the Out There Pill and all of a sudden, boom, he's full of energy and he's running around and he's having a great time. Thanks, Out There Guy. No problem, I'm here to help. The Out There Pill contains 20% fresh air, 20% sunshine, 30% positive vibes, 29% smiles and laughter, and 1% funkiness. The Out There Pill has not yet been approved by doctors and may cause erratic behavior, but that's a good thing. This video is a bit of a classic here in Boulder. It was very popular on the public access TV show. So right behind me here is the pipe that we're gonna follow that hopefully goes through the mountain and my brother, Ethan, and I went on this trail that led to this pipe that goes through this mountain. It's totally off limits to hiking, but people really loved it. And after this played on TV, everybody wanted to go there and do it, but you can't really do it. So I got in a little bit of trouble for making this one, but it's an oldie and definitely a goodie. Looks like they patched up this tube with oversized toothpicks. Oh, it's this. Ha, ha, ha, ha. I'll do one more video. This one was back when we used to have these giant celebrations on the CU Boulder campus. 10,000 students would go. And I would go up there and interview them about why they were smoking and why they felt like marijuana should be legalized. This was way before marijuana was legal in Colorado. And I got a lot of funny people on camera. Let's just say that. What are you asking me? What were we talking about? No marijuana for the people that need it, man. I gotta go. How can you say it's peaceful when you're doing so much damage to that watermelon? Oh, dude. Dude. It's so true. It can't deny the destruction that I call. It's the watermelon, the destruction of the watermelon. I look back at a lot of these videos and they put a huge smile on my face and they bring me back to those exact moments. And I'm like, wow, that was really a young version of Ryan. That was 13 years ago I started doing this and I'm really grateful that I have lots of my life's biggest moments documented on YouTube. You know, it's December. And we knew that we were riding straight up the butt of winter. So here we are. There we go. Colorado flag is flying, baby. Welcome home, Jeff and Ryan. I love you, Colorado! And now for a motivational talk from your favorite Uncle Dooser. If there are any aspiring YouTubers out there or creatives or artists or pretty much anybody who wants to accomplish a goal or a dream, the key to success is hard work. When I first started taking YouTube seriously about three years ago, my videos didn't get many views and it was really discouraging. And I began to think, why am I wasting so much time making YouTube videos when I should be chasing jobs that are actually paying me money? But I could see the end goal with YouTube. So I stayed with it and I continued uploading and my videos got better. I got better with a camera and better editing and better storytelling. And I started interacting more with my viewers and building up this community and slowly but surely here we are today. I have 50,000 subscribers and that's way cool. That's awesome. It's still a very modest number though and I wanna get more and more and more and continue building this whole thing up until who knows how big it's gonna get. But I absolutely love it. I love being able to inspire you and I love interacting with you and I hope that you're finding some value in the videos that I'm making because I truly put all of my heart and soul into this content and it means the world to me when you guys write comments and talk to me because I don't know a lot of you in real life. I just know you through YouTube but it's still pretty cool that we have this whole YouTube world where we can interact and be pretend friends and who knows someday maybe we'll become real friends and that's already happened with some people. I've met some of my viewers out there and it's so cool. This video that you're watching right now is my 694th video which is absolutely insane. When I was a student studying journalism at the University of Colorado, there was no YouTube, it did not exist. So I never dreamed of being able to share stories in this manner and having this amount of freedom and I absolutely love it. So thank you so much for being part of all this. If you like what I do, consider joining my Patreon. There are links in the bottom of this video and as always my friends, get off your couch and get out there. Now it's your turn to get out there. Now get off your couch, that one right there, yep that one, and come out and play. The weather is beautiful. 50,000 subscribers, I got 50,000 subscribers. La la.