 Would you be willing to commit to a fairly intensive schedule in exchange for moving to Dubai to live and work in a community of creators? My answer would be yes. Imagine that, all three of us, weight loss competition. I was all four until he said exercise, but you know. Today's special guest got YPP suspended for being too small a year ago. He is now back in monetization and I want you to hear his story. So far every single day this year, I've been uploading every single day and whilst maintaining a full-time job, it can be very difficult. This is where you really understand the life of a smaller channel YouTuber. Portal 2 was my main game. Welcome to The George Show. Today's special guest got YPP suspended for being too small a year ago on February 20th, 2018. Brad, behind me, fought his way back. He is now back in monetization and I want you to hear his story in case you're still climbing that ladder to get to 1,000 subscribers in 4,000 hours of watch time. And Brad is a new recruiter for freedom. We'll find out why he decided to work with us. Take it away, Brad. Hiya. Cool. So my name is Brad. I am the owner, the host of my own channel, BTD, which stands for Brad's Technology Design. Now guys, I actually got hit with the YPP change, like George mentioned, but to me that was more of a, it was more of another goal to reach. Now, I know a lot of people got discouraged when that got taken away, but I saw it as encouragement to just put more effort in and not give up. And the key words there being not give up. Never give up. Exactly. I'm sure we'll come back to that. I'm sure we'll come back to that. But I put in so much hard work because I wanted that monetization back. I visioned it and I've been partnered with Freedom for about four years from today. So I got taken out of that partnership and I took an entire year to just fight, fight, fight, upload, upload, upload, keep consistent. And I got back there. I got my monetization back, which I'm super proud about and I've re-signed up now to Freedom. So I don't even count that gap as me being not partnered. To me, I've been with Freedom for four years, but the amount of effort and the willingness to not give up took me far. It took me far. And now I'm happy to be in the position now where I'm now back with Freedom as one of their recruiters as well. So let's touch on that. Why did you join us as a recruiter and how has the experience been so far? So one of the main things that's really shone out to me so far with working with Freedom is the people. One of the most amazing things about making a team work is the people, right? You have to have a great team. And we've definitely got that here. The people are amazing. The team leader we have, Matt, he is absolutely fantastic. So the people, for one thing, stands out to me and that's just 100%. So that's one of the main things for me personally. Except this guy, George, who keeps bugging you about constantly signing new channels and how come you're not available at 2am every day when I call you, right? The time difference is always fun. I'll be there in Dreamland and then my phone will be buzzing. George is dropping me messages. That's all fun and games. It's all joking aside, guys. I only call you at 1am. Then I stop. I promise. That's right. We'll have off-camera talks about that. It's all good. I'm happy to be a part of the team. I'm happy to meet all of these new amazing people. One of the main reasons why I chose Freedom to be... Well, why I wanted to join the recruitment team for Freedom is because, one, like I just said, I've been with Freedom for about four years now. So I understand the tools and offers that are great for smaller creators. And I really took passionate to that because before I was monetized, that was one of the main things I relied on, the tools and offers that Freedom gave smaller channels. And it helped me. It helped me dramatically. And just to have the opportunity now to become a recruiter of Freedom is even better because I can now say from an experienced point of view, what it's done for me and how it can help you with your channel as well. Yeah, that's an awesome summary. Thanks, Brad. And one thing that really impressed me about Brad's story is his dedication to scheduled uploads. Brad uploads every single day and he goes out of his way, even when he doesn't feel like it, to make sure there's a fresh piece of content on his channel every day. Brad, how long have you been uploading a video a day and how do you make that work with a full-time job to do that schedule? So this is where you really understand the life of a smaller channel YouTuber. Now, I've been on YouTube for 10 years. I only recently started caring about my channel about five years ago. Last year, I uploaded about three days a week. So far, every single day this year, I've been uploading every single day. And whilst maintaining a full-time job, it can be very difficult. I also don't live alone as well. I still live with the family. So it's also working around their balance at the same time. So I've had to plan myself a little schedule. I get two days off a week, which is Mondays and Tuesdays. Mondays is the day where I essentially get a couple of hours to myself. So I take that opportunity to record seven videos, so a week's worth of videos, all in those couple of hours. And then I pretty much spend the entire week after I get home from work just consistently editing. Now, I've been using Sony Vegas for about 11 years now, so it really doesn't take me all that long to edit because I know how to speed edit whilst maintaining that level of production value. And that's pretty much how I do it. I record all day on the Monday. I edit throughout the week. As soon as I get back home from work, Tuesdays is more of a family day because that's when my father is off work as well. So again, it's about finding that balance, but let me tell you, it can be training. I make it sound easy, maybe, but when things get in the way and freeze you off your schedule, it can be hard to maintain that balance again. But my passion for YouTube is never encouraged me to continue, I should say. Which is why I'm here now, still uploading every single day. That's an amazing story and I hope this motivates you who don't upload regularly to start. If Brad can do it with a full-time job and time for the family, then so can you. And I like your style, Brad. You collect all your footage on one day and then you spend the rest of the week editing it and releasing it on a daily basis. That's a good pattern. You should find a pattern yourselves, Freedom Family. Tell us down there in the comments below how you maintain a schedule. Let's all help each other grow together as a family by sharing best practices and tips so we can all learn from each other. One suggestion I made for Brad was to create a series of videos on the Freedom Central channel to give helpful advice and tips maybe on Sony Vegas because he's used it for 11 years. Or other three tools that we may encourage you to use like DaVinci Resolve or HitFilm Express or Lightwave which may be good enough for you if you don't need all the fancy features of a commercial product like Sony Vegas or Adobe Premiere. What do you think about that, Brad? Would you create videos about that topic or some other topic? I mean, yeah, definitely. Video editing is one of the main things I'm mainly passionate about which is actually one of the main reasons why I started my YouTube channel in the first place because of video editing, personally myself, the thought of creating something in your mind and then presenting that to other people. There's something just amazing about that and if I can help other people achieve that, then yeah, definitely. That's not a problem at all. So guys, what kinds of videos would you like to see Brad make? Tell us down there in the comments below. I personally would love to see videos about DaVinci Resolve and this behind me right now is DaVinci Resolve. It's a free video editor with a ton of tools. I'm told it's the best of the free editors out there and I haven't used it myself yet but it's installed at least. That's step one. Now I need to spend the time to actually learn it and see how it compares to Adobe Premiere which is what I currently use. Brad, one of the things we talked about is a shared vision. So offline when I was speaking to Brad, I was asking Brad what his long-term vision is and I shared our freedom's long-term vision of building up the company towards an IPO and the whole purpose of an IPO is that the management team doesn't change. That's the difference between an acquisition when some big fish buys a company and IPO when you let your shares be purchased by individuals on a stock market like the Nasdaq Stock Exchange. So we're choosing IPO because we don't want to change the direction of freedom. We think we have a good thing going and we don't want a bigger guy to tell us to stop or pivot to meet their needs. Much like Machinima Pivoted, they got rid of all their partners. The new orders of Machinima said we don't want to do MCNs anymore so every Machinima partner now gets to be a full-screen partner because the same owner also owns full-screen. This is the AT&T Churnen group and originally Warner Brothers bought Machinima so we don't want that to happen to freedom. That's an extreme example but you get the idea. So Brad, tell us about your long-term vision and how it aligns with freedoms. So my long-term vision for me personally myself is full-time YouTube. I can imagine there's a lot of people stream nowadays but again creating content is something I enjoy doing and creating that for an audience is just something else. There's something really rewarding about spending hours on a piece of content and then just seeing the feedback in the comments section below. That's the fun part for me. That is what I love doing and my long-term goal would be to do full-time YouTube and the reason why that links to freedom is because freedom have the tools necessary to get you to that point. There's a lot of things with the revenue share of how they can help you with your channel and how they can balance that out through different partnerships with freedom, music, 3D sets, there's a lot there. There's a lot there and again I'm all about production value and having that free it just seems like a win-win situation. So my long-term goal 100% I want to be full-time YouTube and I feel like sticking around for freedom is going to easily help me get there and me being a recruiter of freedom is just another way for me to tell you guys how you can get there as well, how you can share your success story with other people. We all start somewhere, we all grow to something else. Our mission is to help you build your career in this digital world. Let's grow together as a family. Welcome to freedom. Round about 12-13 is when I was really heavily into gaming. Portal 2 was my main game. Oh, okay, you're on my favorite list. I love that game. That's my favorite game. Absolutely love it, yeah. Yeah, Portal 2 was an amazing game. I actually only saw the videos of it. I was surprised at how quickly people put up the full walk-through. The moment the game was out it looked like there were full walk-throughs of the game. Me being one of them. That's awesome. So any trivia questions? Any questions that you think we can ask each other? Let's see, I do have, I think I have one. And I think you probably already answered this in the last video, but I don't think Brad knows. When was it that you fully decided that you wanted to make videos for YouTube? Is this for both of us? Oh, for George. So for me, I never knew YouTube until I started making videos about World of Warcraft. This was back in 2010 when World of Warcraft Cataclysm was six months to launch. We had one of the beta keys six months before the game became public and I started uploading videos there. That became TGN World of Warcraft and that was how we started TGN the GameNet, which eventually became a nice big brand that we sold to broadband TV because of very different visions of how TGN should look in the future. I wanted TGN to become what freedom became. Freedom is essentially the spiritual successor of TGN and of course, BBTV wanted TGN to become what it is today, which is a very different kind of vision, which is fine. But yeah, that's how I started uploading to YouTube World of Warcraft. Cool. How are you Brad? Just a little bit. I was never very good at that game. I don't know why, maybe I just didn't put enough time into it, I'm not too sure. I guess for me, oh god, making YouTube videos, this is a very good question. This is a very good question. I mean, I started out as gaming, that's one thing that a lot of people don't know. As much as I'm a reaction channel, I actually started out as gaming and the first ever gaming video I uploaded was a game called Cry of Fear, which I'm sure you guys know about, yeah. But that was a long time ago, that was a long time ago. I wasn't very good at horror games, I got scared very easily. So I quickly moved into comedy, sort of gaming, things like that. Just to sort of lift the spirits so I wasn't crying in every video. Yeah. Sorry to interrupt there Brad. George, do you know about the game Cry of Fear? I actually don't, I'm just kind of nodding here, hoping you wouldn't ask that question. That's a new journey question though. That's a great question. It's considered actually one of the scariest games made today. Yeah, it's based on psychological fear. And yeah, just one of the scariest games that's out there, really fast-paced movement that really gets a person off guard. So that's all I'm going to say about that. Definitely first year off guard, definitely. How about you, Seth has read, what's your first videos on YouTube? Well, the question was gaming, right? Which games you played, right? Yeah, like my first video was actually back in... Sorry, are you okay there, George? Yes, I just muted myself while I was talking, so I shouldn't have heard that. But actually, the... No, I'm still... oh. No, you're still here, you're still here. You guys have another incoming call. Okay, go ahead. My first video was actually back in 2012. I didn't take YouTube seriously until 2014, but 2012 was when I uploaded my first video, which was from a game called Shadow of the Colossus. Probably one of the best games I've ever played in my life, just for the fact that of its massive play area and the ability to scale giant titans and try to take them down. And not only that too, I love music when it comes to games, so had a great score involved with it too. So yeah, it was back in 2012, I don't remember what month it was, but yeah, my first video was a Shadow of the Colossus upload. And I look back on it now and it still cringes me to this day about how bad the quality was. Up in there, my friend. Yep. I don't like looking at my old videos. Comparing now to then, it just really makes your back shiver a bit. It does, yeah. And for those, if you've ever seen my videos of Shadow of the Colossus and wanted to know if I'm going to continue it in the future, yeah, probably. I just forgot about it. Just a little bit. Just a little bit, yeah. Cool. No, that's a great question. Brad, do you have a question for us? I do. I guess my question would be, when you realise that YouTube could be the starting platform for you both sort of growing into a business where you can actually have a form of, I guess, income, what was that realisation like and how did it ever get to an awkward point where you had to explain that to family members where you could say, hey, I'm going to quit my full-time job, because I know I can earn an earning off of YouTube or that's like a goal. Because I always find those questions to be awkward when you talk to a family member who isn't quite up-to-date with YouTube. Like how are you, what was that like for you guys saying, I'm going to focus my attention on this and they're thinking, well, that's just a website. I know what you mean. Unless you start making the money to be bigger than your current job is when you get the support of your family members, until then you get the crazy person. Why are you doing this instead of that? That's actually been my experience when I used to work at Microsoft as a full-time software developer in Redmond, Washington and I quit to do entrepreneurial pursuits that drained my bank account to zero over the next few years is when my family was quite critical of me saying, George, you had a great position. You could have climbed the corporate ladder. You could leave the company that many people try to get into and don't actually make it. And I told them, well, because I didn't enjoy myself there, I had the vision of being my own boss and building a business. And it didn't, you know, five or six failures later I discovered YouTube and then became full-time on just that. But yeah, I think for me, the family members support you when your income level is bigger than your previous job. On whatever you might be doing. YouTube or anything, yeah. That's a good answer. How about you, Cephas Red? For me, basically my whole, like my family agrees where you can do anything that you want to do. You put your mind to it. But at the same time, you got to be able to have, it's got to make sense where you got to make sure you had the appropriate income. So yeah, they're all for it. They love the idea of having me being on YouTube and making videos, especially making family-friendly content. It's also the sense of that I got to make sure that I have a good source of income coming in while I'm doing YouTube. So I've been working full-time ever since doing YouTube as well. So I'm waiting for the day that I can actually have YouTube as my full-time, well, quote, job. Because I consider this a fun thing rather than work. But everybody knows where I'm coming from. It's been the usual spiel. But it's the fact that, like, I can't wait to get to that point where YouTube will be my financial stability. So I don't have to worry about making sure I have the funds to pay bills while doing the thing that I'm quite passionate about, which is YouTube. And, of course, the question comes in saying, like, well, why is YouTube your passion? Well, because I love entertainment and this opportunity to entertain not only those around you, but those out there in the online world, which is massive. So this is a great opportunity. Probably the best opportunity we've had since the birth of YouTube. So yeah, why not? That's another really good answer, actually. I have one more question, actually, because of your answer. All right, follow-up question. Go for it. Yes, balancing the work life with the YouTube life. Now, I've already answered this. I think it was before you came onto the call. But how funny that balance, how easy is that for you? At first, it was pretty tough. But then I actually... Before, it was where I would go to work and then as soon as I was done work, I'd start recording, and then I would be editing all hours of the night. And then I'd lose sleep. It wasn't until I finally realized that you can schedule videos, which is probably one of the best things YouTube has invented on their platform. So I would work all the way through the week because Fridays and Saturdays were the best days for me. I always have Saturdays and Sundays off, but I would start recording on Fridays after I finish work, edit on Saturdays, and then upload on Sundays where I could schedule and upload every single day of the week. So I'd always schedule it where instead of recording or editing throughout the week, just do it all in one day, specifically, and then schedule it to go like that. Like a stack of cards. Like a domino effect. Yeah, like a domino effect. And of course, there's nothing wrong with doing a few little touches in order to make the video a little bit better throughout the week. And yeah, there will be times where all of a sudden you're like, ooh, hey, I want to make this quick video about something that just came out or do a quick reaction, and you do that through the middle of the week. But yeah, the big workload, the big stuff, I always recommend smaller YouTubers to try this is to do a day of recording, day of editing, day of uploading. If you can, put in the editing and the uploading on the same day, because it really, it isn't that hard to upload videos. But when you're editing, it's the rendering time that takes up most of your time. Oh yeah. I'm sure all three of us know about that. Yes. And thankfully, I do have an editing program called Cyberlink that actually doesn't take that long rendering videos, which is surprising. Because I've had Adobe Premiere Pro before, but unfortunately I can't afford it right now. We've all probably already heard that story from a lot of people too. Really expensive products. But it would take a 10 minute, 20 minute video would take two hours to render on Premiere Pro. Whereas, for people who are all funny that I'm mentioning this, I'm also doing a little product promotion, I guess. But it's sponsorship. Yeah. Well, yeah, sponsorship. Cyberlink, sponsorship, please. The Pro Director actually gives, I did a 30 minute video last night doing an unboxing video. And it only took about 45 minutes to render. Which was great. It took like the most minimal amount of data to get everything all ready. And when I uploaded it to YouTube, it was awesome. So, yeah, I totally know what we're coming from on that. And what the best practices and ideas are when it comes to making these videos and uploading them. Yeah. For hours, now that you've mentioned rendering time. But I'm not going to, I never want to schedule. Yeah, remember, George is on the call too. Yeah. So, I have an interesting question based on what you guys have said about your passion for editing, your challenges in scheduling and render times and just getting quality content out there. And that is everyone's doing the video production from their own home. Everyone is limited by their own hardware, by their internet speed, by whatever they happen to have where they live. Why not have everyone relocate? And of course, I'm going to say relocate to Dubai. But here's the question. If we had a full service package available, it could be a scholarship for those who can't afford it themselves. Sort of like a university gives scholarships to students. Where we would have almost like a think of it like a training schedule. Like, imagine an actor signs up for a movie. He has to commit probably a year of his life to let's say it's the movie 300 or even back in the day of The Matrix where we all heard the story of how the actors had to spend like six months in training just to get ready for the movie and they agreed to it. So the question to you is if we had this type of package where it included a schedule of these are the things you have to do every day which would be make some vlogs of the city interview some people make your own videos of course but also collaborate with at least two other people sort of like a set schedule where you'd have a certain amount of time for your own channel and a certain amount of time for the community or the whole like we're here in Dubai let's document the whole city let's meet the people let's work together because collaboration is the fastest way to grow on YouTube let's have a healthy schedule so in this commitment list would be a certain amount of hours for exercise not just say we're going to do exercise but actually do it and film it kind of have a proof that this is happening and even fun competitions like to see who's gaining in fitness and maybe have weigh-ins so you can see whether you're doing a good job whether you're losing that chub that you've always wanted to lose which is my problem that's a really good idea actually so long story short it's would you be willing to commit to a fairly intensive schedule in exchange for moving to Dubai to live and work in a community of creators I mean my answer would be yes I mean imagine that all three of us weight loss competition I would love that I would love that this needs to happen now I was all for until you said exercise but you know motivation yeah I kid I would be all for it just to have the opportunity to concentrate on the thing that we all love to do and then also concentrate on the thing that and I hate to use these words but concentrate on the thing that we have to do like quote have to do in order to achieve the goal that we need to get to so one of them being doing exercise no but I absolutely agree that yes I would definitely be for that absolutely 100% yeah I agree so that's one of my visions is as a company for us to offer these packages that allow creators to come live and work in Dubai and of course the ones that can afford it just pay for it themselves but the ones that can't we would like to create these list of things to do because I think even smaller creators that have that passion and energy and time to create the content that documents the city will help other people decide to come here because now they see it's not just George in Dubai it's George and you know, Cephas Red and Brad plus hopefully other people in the future we don't have any like direct plan yet but that's in my mind something I'd like to figure out the financials and the logistics of doing that so one thing we've done we've only been in Dubai 7 months one thing we've done now is we've been to most of the major places in Dubai because the best question to answer is where do you plant this flag where you would invite this community of creators to to live and work in a close proximity so it's easy to collaborate and make videos there's a place called production city it's actually called production city they're very literal about their names here there's also a sports city and a motor city and an academic city I mean, they're not kidding around when they go descriptive names so in production city is where there is the YouTube space which is a free resource with professional sound stages, lighting and camera that's free for any channel with 10,000 subscribers or more because if the YouTube space needs to first hit 10k subs so that's the only requirement that YouTube has but next to the YouTube space there is something called in five media which has no requirements it's a local subsidized video production office space basically it means it's cheap to make videos there on a commercial license so they're both quite close and the places that we think to have this community of creators is in that region of production city, studio city which is where these two spaces are YouTube space and in five media and then we've committed now to moving to a house in a place called Jamera park which is also fairly close to those locations and we've also seen a lot of apartments that have lots of availability near those areas so the practicality of this happening would be probably to rent like 10 apartment units to get a good deal if we have let's say 10 people ready to come we would like schedule it for a day maybe six months in the future just so everyone can commit to it and clean up anything they need to clean up before they would move because this would be like a six month or one year commitment to relocate and do this thing because in Dubai everything is on an annual contract you want to rent a place one year you want to get a job one year or more so they have contracts for two years and three years as well but the reality of Dubai is anyone can get a work visa anyone can be a resident there's no test requirements it's basically can you pay and do you have a clean criminal record okay then you're in definitely we'll start packing now then I'll call you whole right now because one thing we've learned about Dubai is it's very business focused and they are welcoming to any entrepreneurs of any nationality and it's really just a matter of cost and commitment and in terms of cost Dubai as I've been saying is a zero income tax environment which means if you make a million dollars you keep a million dollars both personally and in your business but in exchange the way the government makes money is they charge you fixed fees for everything you want to hire a new employee you pay a government fee you actually have to pay the government to hire somebody I mean I don't I mean just like like based on the guy's salary it's you know you pay him nothing you still have to pay the same fee to the government so you might consider that a hidden tax there's also other taxes like if you take a rent for a year the electricity and water company charges you 5% of your rent as an additional fee your electricity and water what does that have to do with electricity and water obviously nothing but it's the way the government is structured so that 0% income tax isn't that the government does a charity and deciding to just be nice like not charge you a percentage of your income they found other ways to make their money and I'm not faulting them I'm just saying that most people who think about 0% income tax think well that sounds impossible like how can a government run without collecting taxes on the the income of the companies in that country and this is how alright guys this has been a great episode thank you the audience for tuning in I'm going to end it here by asking both Cephas and Brad for a few final words but before I do that just as a quick summary the whole concept of bringing people bringing people here to Dubai is something I feel passionate for and when I spoke to Cephas and Brad offline they said that it would be just them coming here not them plus friends or family but I would love to pose the question to you the audience as well if you're interested in coming to Dubai think about whether you'd come by yourself or with friends and family and write down some of the things you would need for that to happen because I'd love to bring 10 creators here as like a first wave of people to start this whole concept of working together in close proximity collaborating on videos documenting all of Dubai and just having a great adventure for one year so with that any final words Brad I guess my final words would be I look forward to working with both of you great meeting you Cephas we're on the same team so I can chat with you offline as well and to anyone who's looking to sign up to Freedom you're more than welcome to speak to myself or Cephas or George and find out some more information and yeah let's grow let's do this we got this all right how about you Cephas ditto no kidding what he said no I can actually add on to that yeah definitely if there's anybody who wants to know more about what Freedom can offer we've all been informed Brad and I and we've got a great team and we're more than willing to make anything that's a bit of a mess to become more clear so by all means give us a shout and we will be able to help you out because it's an awesome experience and there's really nothing bad in regards to what we have to offer and if there's any kind of concern no this is an open door open door network awesome and the links to both Cephas red and Brad's channels are down there in the description below you're welcome to reach out anytime and until the next episode I am George I am Cephas red and Brad is are you there Brad and he is Brad and you've been watching click that I to partner with Freedom and join the Freedom family so we can all grow together you get many perks like position music you also get epidemic sound a lot of other access to royalty free videos sponsorships and many things to help you grow just click the links down there in the description below to get involved in our community our forums our discord chat servers meet our graphics team meet our community team all of that on discord and the forums what are you waiting for get started and we will grow together as a family because this is the freedom family you are part of it we are all part of it and we're all growing together to get more George click that big F that will subscribe you to freedom central home of the George show and Pewdiepie gave one of you freedom family