0:00 [Music] welcome back to JK out of the closet today Bart is opening up about starting JK and how that changed his life so this is my biggest moment number four you guys can watch the other three um how JK changed my life and um I credit a lot of it to Joe hello like if you guys like heard in the other couple of episodes it felt like my whole life I've always lived my life for someone else you know like for my parents or even joing the military I want to show them I'm not a ████ up and even in college I was I'm going to go Premed cuz that's what my parents want so I felt like I lived my life all my life's choices were were for someone else and then with JK it was the first time that I did
0:50 something for me and it was so like freeing cuz it started off with and I'm glad that we got into it at a time where there was no money it was just something that me and Joe did that was really really fun and like we couldn't wait to film we couldn't wait to make up random characters we couldn't wait to edit we couldn't wait to watch the finished product and because there's no money in it it was so pure and it was just cool this is something I get to do and express a part of me and also seeing that there's actually positive feedback my whole life I thought my normal isn't the world's normal I was I was like oh ████ my normal people actually like so that was like the first time where I was like oh F this is actually really really cool like I don't have to kill myself um although I don't have to kill
1:43 myself and um I could actually be myself and people like it so it was the first time you felt accepted for who you truly were rather than like trying to fit someone else's expectations yeah I see did you know how to express who you truly were until JK no okay I I really didn't and I think um JK helped open that door cuz it's like I think every part of you however you express yourself it's it's like a muscle you know you kind if you don't know how to do it you just don't you you don't even know where to start so I think what was easy was when we first started doing JK it was a bunch of characters so they're like little facets of who I am and I get to put this mask on and express this one part of me this other part of me this other part of me and then U I got to like be random characters and then when we started doing Vlogs and JK news where
2:35 we're speaking as ourselves I think that was kind of like the final level of like okay cool not only can I express all these parts of me but I could also put all of that together and now without a mask this is who I really am and it was it was very um think like therapeutic actually I think JK probably was like the therapy that I needed how does it turn into a business because it starts off so innocent and pure so that was the other part where I never thought I would get into business I always thought like people just had money and then they're bosses and when you're a boss you just hire people and then you just go tell them to do ████ and then like limousines just show up out don't know I thought that's what bosses and Entrepreneurship was so I didn't even know we were actually even doing a business I think we just we did a bunch of content then 6 months later
3:26 YouTube uh invites us to be a partner and and like oh cool we can make money so it was more so still like kind of like wage thinking I do this I get money so we get our first check it's 1,000 bucks and I'm like oh ████ 1,000 bucks that's crazy then we break it down oh ████ that's for 6 months worth of work that's actually nothing but the fact that we were able to do something we like to get money that was really cool then all the comments were like like oh you should make merch or whatever so none of it was like aha I'm going to be an entrepreneur it was just oh we should make merch oh yeah let's go let's go make merch so we' make clothes and then our first meet and greet we sold out of like I think like 300 shirts what was the First Merch that you ever had uh we made three t-shirts uh one says underwear model and then it had uh these red briefs then we had another one that says the uh Chinese nword and then ████
4:18 based off it's not Chinese N word it's it means that that that ████ that's a good correction I mean that I'm glad you were here but it sounds like the nword yeah yeah but you know we we put the NW in Chinese we sold it yeah that's what it sounded like monetized it baby oh we cleaned them out three shirts gone dude I hella had that shirt yeah so we had that one and then what was the third one we did ████ we got to find that shirt Model A white one and a black one I think so yeah I don't think there was a third shirt okay it was just those two yeah yeah but we sold all of them and even then I think in my mind Joe was more entrepreneur than I was he was like selling cars BB at the time in my mind it was just like oh cool they bought all the merch it wasn't it wasn't like oh ████ this is lucrative well he had sold lizards for
5:09 like 10 years yeah yeah he was catching up in front yard and piranhas businessman but pre but pre JK um I think what even made JK possible in my mind was when me and Joe were friends first he was a rapper at the time actually so I would go with him I would go with him to go like he would uh he would record songs at his friend's house I would see him shoot music videos I would see him perform at like clubs and bars and stuff so I think that was kind of like me going like oh ████ this guy just does whatever the ████ he wants this guy's hard as ████ and then have selling piranhas and ecstasy it's like you're catching birds in backyards and selling them on street so I was like oh ████ that's cool like you can actually like you could
6:00 actually do what you want and then so that that helped me like pursue JK and and without the money getting involved it became a very organic thing that led me into understanding what business was and then I'm like oh ████ okay so we need more staff but that means if if we need this guy to shoot for us all the time this guy needs to pay his rent oh no we need to make like some sort of monthly recurring model to be able to bring this guy on and then so it started like almost making us put on the entrepreneur business hat without even knowing that we're doing it would you say that that might have been like Joe's biggest influence on you oh yeah for sure so what was like Joe's like most biggest negative influence Joe's negative influence it's a great
6:50 question I don't think Joe had a negative influence on me to be honest Dam I think most of it has we go around the room who has negative when it's your turn gambling I think most of it has been uh positive because I felt like I've lived a lot of my life inside you know cuz it's like I I felt like alone I didn't feel like express myself and I think Joe lives a lot of his life outside so like if me and Joe are together like let's say like someone does something Joe oh that's gay and that's literally what is in my head but I couldn't say it cuz I don't have the express muscle so I think me being with Joe it's like we feel the same thing but mine is inside and his is outside what a sick positive influence great influence that's that is that's a good observation help me it helped me uh
7:40 be able to slowly express myself more and more and more and more that's true that's like when we were at JJ's Cafe and that fan was being weird and we were all thinking like what the hell and he immediately was like what the ████ are you talking about bro you're being weird bro we don't know you you're ████ weird shoving him out the door hey get the ████ out of here dude before we could even like think he's already like saying it I'm like damn this's fast yeah my my internal thoughts are his external thoughts it's so Bast funny the angel inside and the devil hands yeah that was what to call that that was a big big moment because yeah I never lived life for myself and I slowly was able to like make all my own decisions and each one of my own
8:31 decisions I also have to eat the rep repercussions of but because of that I was able to learn more so I was like oh if I wanted to ditch a class to go shoot a JK video that's on me you know every single thing was like it's on me and then if if JK fails it's on me but if I didn't become a doctor I'm like oh that's not what I wanted anyways you know so it's like for the first time it's like you have full ownership full responsibility so it's like the good and the bad side of things versus running someone else's track you're on your her own track um and without JK for sure there would be no bar Brigade or any other other stuff that was able to build off of this muscle that I had to first develop um living life for myself yeah I remember thinking that back in like the when you were at UCLA and I'm like yo we struck gold like this thing this things
9:21 like this don't happen like normally and we got to like really like Sprint with it and I'm like man this guy doesn't want to be a doctor why the ████ isn't he rolling with it and I didn't get it at the time that like you were going through your own Battle of like I have to stick to my thing but that also inspired me to go like I need to graduate too cuz you you were just saw him doing it you're like ████ I got to do it too I never stuck with anything in my life but he was inspiration for that of like oh he's going to he's going to see it out like he committed he's going to see it through so I'm going to see it through too and then so we both made a pack of like but we have to go to school first and and me and Joe ended up being ████ volunteers at a hospital too just cuz we're like okay like what's the safe way to do it oh let's let's find those occupations that have like the 3x12 schedule so either police officer
10:12 or nurses or whatever and so we'll do that I wish you picked cops man that would have been so good imagine us as cops dude mail nurses is cool we would volunteer at this like uh USC like um tertiary care hospital where we get like if you volunteered for 4 hours you get a free meal and yeah we're doing all kinds of stuff to try to try to like make it work I remember ████ helping a guy wipe the patient's butt and I was like ████ I don't want to do this ████ for a free you're like oh the nugs are so good oh the hospital food was amazing it was so good it was helpful being there too cuz then you have fresh residents that just came out of medical school and you just see them like doing the paperwork going like this cuz they're like working 80 hour days you know yeah and I'm like like I'm like oh is it like worth it at the end to make it he goes you just got
11:02 to really love it man and I'm like ████ that's the moral of story you guys were volunteering so you could become doctors to oh like some sort of medical profession had a 3x12 schedule so we could do JK the other four days God it God I was on my path to being a psychiatrist and he was going to be a medical doctor okay that makes sense and then that's when we were like do we really want to do this ████ it just sounds the way he told the story it sounds like you guys were just volunteering to get a meal hot plate that was that was the bonus that was b a little bit of money so you can afford it yeah that was that was the add up got it got it so you were still you do you're bothy and and then you eventually said what what makes you say ████ it we're doing this one track mind um I think what we said was so after we both graduated we're like I don't think we had a monetary amount it was more so
11:54 let's just pursue it 100% for a year and then see what happens so during that year um I was working as a tutor and I would work from I think like from 1 or 2 until 7 and then Joe was working at a warehouse and he would come every night from Monday through Friday and we would write from like 7/8 until 11: and then on the weekend Saturday and Sunday we would shoot skits and didn't matter if we had if we were sick if we had a fever or anything we're like this is what we're going to do and we did it for 52 weeks straight and we even had a show in the middle of it and then uh so we didn't turn anything down so we had a show in San Francisco so uh I remember it was me Joe and Gio we drove to San Francisco performed drove back on the
12:45 way back Joe slept so that he could make it to his job on Monday holy so we like we like hustle really really hard and I think by that end of that year I think our channel was making maybe like two or three grand a month and I'm like that's enough to do it we're like that's a grand for you and a grand for me we're good $28 baby $28 that's true yeah was like a grand for him a grand for me maybe a grand for Casey maybe a grand for Gio maybe maybe it was like four grand I don't think we paid ourselves though until later no I think what happened was um I wanted to finish my debt first and quit my job and then for that for I don't think for a year we paid ourselves at all but we paid them that's true we paid everybody else yeah no yeah we had we had to pay them because that's why I still tutored so I so like we did other jobs to pay
13:35 ourselves and then we used JK to pay the other people but after that we had like this kind of machine going and then so like um we're like okay this is a good machine and then so by the time we were able to quit our jobs we stuck to that Weekly upload for ████ I don't know how long like seven or eight years damn dude once a week opening up other channels and that was just running out of my house and then we finally were able to get this place and then from this place we grew to the place in downtown and it was it was just like it was cool to kind of like uh build kind of like a real life like Sim City but but like in real life and scene every every every step of the way yeah it was it was pretty cool we accomplished a bunch of things that I never would have even imagined um and even until this day I'm like damn that's ████ crazy what we did other than the obvious which is the
14:26 monetary part right yeah what's the biggest part about about JK that's changed your life anything you want to accomplish there's a way of reverse engineering it and breaking it down to a small enough of a step where you can always take the first step okay that's that's like the first thing so like cuz like when I was a kid I always just thought like everything just happened you know like if someone was a movie star it was cuz they're ████ eating a bunme on the street and somebody like oh w got discovered yeah you know like I'm a director look at that face yeah I always thought like that's how everything was it could be a movie star you ever wanted to be a picture yeah like someone was just like they got a basketball and it was just like oh slam dunk oh ████ it was just in me the whole time what the ████ like I I thought that's how people like made it yeah like
15:16 a kids movie exactly yeah there's a lot of people that believe that though yeah people still say that ████ too yeah but then when I meet people that have achieved the high level across all Industries I'm like oh everyone started really small and they just fell in love with what they did and then they eventually became ████ flee from ████ Red Hot Chili Preppers or whatever you know what a great example didn't know you were a Red Hot Chili Peppers guy so now that you've done this for so many many many years right and like that and like you just said it's like it's all about that next upload upload upload as you have kind of clawed back some of those things that are demanding your time do you do you do you see the value in like sacrificing those things so you
16:07 can have more free time for family or or do you miss having more to do I definitely miss having like the mental stimulation part of it cuz that stuff's really fun like even during the days when like JK was like full steam when we're doing uh like JK films and JK party and as the fields and writing the movie I remember I'd be in the office literally from like 9:00 a.m. until like 9:00 p.m. and we got all each J and gloomy or whatever um and I remember it being extremely fulfilling like you're playing this real life video game nonstop but also like I think everything is kind of age appropriate cuz at that time I think that's what matters to you and then as you get older like before I'd be like oh it's all for the art and then later on you're like I don't give a ████ about the art is it going to pay me
16:57 cuz I need to pay the bills or can I like support family so I think your values slowly start to shift um but now like where I'm at I really care about family so like no matter how stimulating or how cool something is it won't overshadow what's important to me right now well yeah no cuz I I you took me out for my birthday credit to me as my birthday recently and you were you were saying that like you and Gio have Thursday night date nights and you couldn't have done that before with barbell and I thought that was interesting because you know it's almost like you you added value in a different way oh yeah during those so like it was cool to go through those days cuz we started barbell during JK Full Steam you know like JK party JK films ask the feels riding the movie and then we had a gym and we were selling apparel and
17:47 supplements and vlogging every day like it was like crazy so like um me and Gio did have like a really dark time during our relationship and it was because we didn't really have a relationship we're way more more co-workers than we were um like boyfriend and girlfriend so that's like a part of our relationship that we felt like we sacrificed to pursue whatever we were pursuing so now we're like like now that we have this time like let's really like you know like uh enjoy what we kind of gave up at that time yeah yeah that's cool can you this is just a very fan question does like a favorite SK like OG JK films skit come to mind for you like your personal favorite one of my favorite is the The Wolverine trailer we
18:38 shot the Wolverine I really like that one that's one of my favorites too Yakuza yeah I like that one cuz like that's one of the like I feel like um so I think in Korean History Channel and the uncle stuff I think that that stuff's dope it's just me and Joe just content no editing no production and that's what like I guess got our first wave of followers and but we didn't like train for any of that you know it wasn't like oh yeah I did the full UCB course and then I was touring with Second City for however however a long and then now I'm able to demonstrate like the skill that we put together it was just like uh hey this is look at this trick I could do and the people like oh wow so it felt felt like yeah it felt like it wasn't
19:29 something something we really like worked hard for during those skit days like we took classes we had to learn what editing was and we have to put all that together so it's kind of taking I guess what was our natural Talent Plus the skill and the hard work then including all of the friends that we've met in the industry and being able to make something that is now like forever cemented is and it's will be online forever like I'll ta Ka watch it when he's 50 is pretty ████ cool coming in socks is forever cemented too in socks it's similar idea what way Deep dive deep dive 21 minutes no uh so when we come back we're going to talk about bart what what what I think changed his life the most becoming a father wow but after these ads after
20:21 thank you thank you
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