#234: Garrett Kennell – How thinking big helped Michelle Khare attract 4.8 million subscribers

Garrett Kennell [00:00:00]:
We have decided that nothing is too big for us. Generally, Michelle will be training for 2 to 3 episodes at once. We'll be in production for 1 or 2, and then we'll be in post for 2 to 3.

Jay Clouse [00:00:14]:
That man is Garrett Kennel, the chief creative officer for and husband to Michelle Carre. Garrett has been working on the channel since Michelle's very first video, all the way back in 2016.

Garrett Kennell [00:00:25]:
On day 1 when we released the why I love BuzzFeed episode, Michelle went from 0 to, I believe, 400,000 subscribers.

Jay Clouse [00:00:32]:
Since that first video, their channel has grown nearly 5,000,000 subscribers and done over 740,000,000 views, while being one of the most intense and complicated productions YouTube has ever seen. Their secret? They have a process for everything. And in this episode, Garrett breaks some of them down, like brainstorming.

Garrett Kennell [00:00:52]:
So the idea is that there is these 6 hats of thinking, and each hat represents a different aspect of thinking.

Jay Clouse [00:00:59]:
Decision making.

Garrett Kennell [00:01:01]:
We now not only have a green light meeting in our pre pro, but we now have a yellow light meeting. Before we can green light anything, it has to check all of these boxes.

Jay Clouse [00:01:09]:
And how you can start to make bigger, better videos at any scale.

Garrett Kennell [00:01:13]:
I I hate being the broken record and just saying like, you know, go out and make the video. But like, genuinely, you can get to any point by just showing other people how you tell stories. And if they like how you tell stories, they're gonna wanna tell the story with you. At least that's our mentality.

Jay Clouse [00:01:29]:
Thank you to Spotify for sponsoring this video.

Garrett Kennell [00:01:33]:
The first video is Michelle's video called why I left BuzzFeed. It's very first video on her channel. It's day 1 of her channel release. I mean, technically, she had a channel before that, but she had not been really posting with the intent of growing a a big audience here. So she hired me to direct that first episode, while off BuzzFeed, and that was sort of a genre at the time of people you know, there's this mass exodus out of BuzzFeed. And there was this genre of people sitting at camera talking and explaining their job and sort of spilling the tea, if you will, on on BuzzFeed. Michelle didn't have any tea. She loved her time there.

Garrett Kennell [00:02:09]:
She just wanted to make something, she wanted to trick people almost into, like, oh, you're expecting to watch this sit down thing, but instead, you're gonna get something action packed and fun and entertaining. She really wanted, this first video to be a sort of a statement of what she wanted the channel to become. And I think that was really important that she had the vision from the very beginning. And she pitched me that, and I just thought it was amazing. And so what we ended up making was, like, a fake movie trailer as if her story of why I left buzz seed. It was a, like, a cinematic marvel action trailer. So you see her with, you know, a stunt team, and it's very fun, very cinematic, and that video did very well for her. It sort of at that at her at her size at the time, sort of, you know, in a way went viral.

Garrett Kennell [00:02:56]:
And, actually, it's funny. A lot of our current employees now remember the moment that that video came out. And they, like, very specifically remember that video. So it lot you know, it lodged into people's minds, which was, I guess, the intent.

Jay Clouse [00:03:10]:
Okay. So you were there from the from the first video, and you end up doing this the series that became Challenge Accepted. How much time passed between first video and the beginning of Challenge Accepted as we know it today?

Garrett Kennell [00:03:24]:
Yeah. I believe there was a year or 2 between the first, like, movie trailer video that I made. We started a series called MK Ultra after that, which was partially scripted, partially unscripted, sort of blending our Michelle and I both have a passion for both. So that was sort of the marriage of those 2. And then we sort of hit a point with the MK Ultra series, which was her training like different superheroes. It really is the precursor to Challenge Accepted. We wanted to widen that out. And so Michelle and I came up with together the idea for challenge accepted, which why stop at stunts? Why can't she be the human guinea pig for anything out there? And we immediately were hit with, wow.

Garrett Kennell [00:04:06]:
That's a lot That's so many more ideas we can you know, we were already running out of, like, clickable superheroes for the thumbnail and title. Challenge accepted felt like we could reach a wider audience and and quite honestly make a a bigger impact. I think we could only go so far with the superhero genre, and we really wanted to play in different genres and spaces, and then Challenge Accepted allowed us to do that. So I think that was about 2 a year or 2 before we made our first episode of Challenge Accepted officially.

Jay Clouse [00:04:35]:
Sounds like from the beginning, where at least the beginning of this MK Ultra series, you guys were thinking pretty big.

Garrett Kennell [00:04:40]:
Mhmm.

Jay Clouse [00:04:41]:
So talk to me about your mindset and what you guys thought was possible and what your aspirations were at that time, if you can recall.

Garrett Kennell [00:04:47]:
At the time, we were still into the traditional world, and we were sort of saying, well, 1, the episodes were sort of a love letter to the movies that we loved, which were, like, huge MCU fanboys, and we just, like, love all things superhero and larger than life. It was sort of a love letter to the superhero genre in a way so that we could say, hey, Holly Hollywood, look what we're doing over here on YouTube. We're trying to match the the quality on YouTube. We're trying to match the Hollywood quality here on YouTube. And still sort of like a calling card. At the time, if, you know, Marvel reached out to us and we're like, we would like you to, you know, direct and star in an episode or a Disney plus show or, one of the Marvel properties, we would have, you know, died for that opportunity. That would have been amazing. So I think we're, at the time, still sort of hoping for maybe there's a world in which that those two worlds could come together.

Garrett Kennell [00:05:46]:
And then as we did that, it we were like, oh, we we can just do the thing ourselves here. Like, we don't necessarily need someone to reach their hand down and give us that opportunity. We can just start doing it. Michelle has always been about thinking big. She, at BuzzFeed, did some of some of their biggest production value videos, and she loves being able to surprise the world at what she's able to cobble together with almost nothing. I think she's an amazing leader. She's very inspiring. She knows how to pull people together and inspire them to work towards a, a common vision.

Garrett Kennell [00:06:26]:
And she's so good at articulating that vision so that when she told me this vision, I'm like, I know exactly how to create that. Obviously, that show in scale was just enormous because half the episode was training with a stunt double from an actual from that actual Marvel or DC property. The second half of those episodes were scripted narrative shorts where we have, you know, light like, traditional film set. We have professional sound and lighting and production design, and we're making these like little short films, and those were really expensive at the beginning. And we were just pouring any AdSense dollars that we got back into those episodes because they were fun to make. Like, I wasn't getting paid for those first few, because I didn't want to. I just wanted to make the coolest thing possible at that time, and it just started working.

Jay Clouse [00:07:15]:
Are you able to recall what really expensive at the time was?

Garrett Kennell [00:07:19]:
Yeah. I would say, man, an episode of MK Ultra with all the crew like, Michelle is very one one of my favorite qualities of her is she's so adamant about crew and talent being credited and paid appropriately. That if she didn't have money to pay a crew member their full rate that they were asking for at the time, then in her eyes, she doesn't have enough money to make the project as a whole and won't pursue it, with the exception of people like me who was, like, intentionally, like, giving my pay to the betterment of of the production. But we didn't expect that of anybody else. At the time, I wanna say, like, 5 to $10,000 probably was like, how are we gonna make this back? That was a lot of I I don't I I don't I a 100% know that, but I think it was around 10 to 5 to 10 k on that.

Jay Clouse [00:08:17]:
When you think about competing with the production quality of one of these Marvel Cinematic type pieces, it just sounds like such a big vision that I think people get in their own head about how could I ever and you've mentioned a couple of things. You mentioned cost. Sure. You've also mentioned that you guys have a crew that you bring on. So what is the scale of the crew for one of these videos that you were doing early on?

Garrett Kennell [00:08:42]:
I would say it's it's definitely like a skeleton crew micro version of what we do now. It's a lot of the same core people. It's the same DP, you know, that we've worked with since the beginning, who was my roommate in college. A lot of the just a lot of the same crew. I wanna say, like, 5 to 6 people probably were pulling those episodes off, and we were all just wearing a bunch of hats doing a bunch of different jobs. But most importantly, we were all just making something that we believed in and thought was just really fun to make. It felt like the energy of where kids again in in the backyard with a camera running around just pointing and shooting and saying, look at this cool thing that we're able to make if we pull our skills together.

Jay Clouse [00:09:24]:
And how long was a timeline for a video at the time?

Garrett Kennell [00:09:27]:
Oh, man. That way too long. And that was sort of our biggest, or yeah. Our timelines earlier on were very, very long. We haven't done a great job at shrinking those, if I'm gonna be honest, because I think post production now for an episode of Challenge Accepted is 8 weeks minimum. It was probably around that back then, not because the episodes were longer or needed more post just because we had less, experience doing them. We didn't know how to not assembly line make them, but we didn't have the the experience, the time to make them as fast as we needed to. So probably around 8 to 10 weeks, maybe a little less.

Garrett Kennell [00:10:06]:
I mean, we weren't posting that often just like we are now. I mean, both shows, MK Ultra, Challenge Accepted once a month, I I believe, was, like, the highest frequency highest frequency of posting we ever received with either of those those series.

Jay Clouse [00:10:19]:
After a quick break, Garrett talks about how they learn to get access to people who are hard to reach. So stick around. We'll be right back. And now back to my conversation with Garrett Kennel. You mentioned bringing in stuntmen as part of these MK Ultra videos. That sounds like you would need unique access to get that person. How were you able to reach these people when you were just early on in the channel? You didn't have the success that you have today. What were you able to do to get people to answer your call, let alone be a part of the videos?

Garrett Kennell [00:10:51]:
Yeah. It's a great question. I believe the access is one of Michelle's superpowers. She knows if she can open one door, that one door will open another door, and then that door will open another and another, and it will just keep going. Because if you build trust and credibility with one person, it will most likely transfer to the next. She is I mean, practically speaking, if we're talking tangible skills, she's the best email writer I've ever met. I wouldn't honestly, I can think big, but I can't actually make it happen without somebody like Michelle who knows how to do the tangible, granular tasks. She really knows how to outreach.

Garrett Kennell [00:11:36]:
She's really good at cold emailing. She's really good at articulating her vision and getting people inspired by her vision. When she I remember when she was pitching to the stunt community originally, they were really excited because it was a way I mean, the stunt community is rarely ever featured in Hollywood or celebrated in Hollywood. They don't there's no Oscar for stunts. They found this, like, way that they could actually be celebrated and honored through working on our some of our videos, which is why they were so kind and generous with their time. And we still work with many of those people today. Steve Brown, who was somebody we worked with on that old original series, is someone who was Michelle's, Michelle's stunt instructor for the Houdini escaping Houdini's deadliest trick challenge accepted episode. And so we've been working with some of these same people for a decade now, which has been really amazing.

Garrett Kennell [00:12:29]:
Michelle and I follow this. I don't know if you've ever heard of this. I'm looking up the name so I don't butcher this. Bono's 6 thinking hats. Have you ever heard of this?

Jay Clouse [00:12:39]:
I've never heard of this. I'm very interested.

Garrett Kennell [00:12:42]:
Okay. So I learned about this in therapy, and it's great. So there are I have a little graphic I'm referencing if I'm looking down. That's why I'll try to do it without it. So the idea is that there is these 6 hats of thinking, and each hat represents a different aspect of thinking. And the goal here is to allow yourself time to wear each hat and let yourself flow in that hat before moving to the next one. This is a great way to stop yourself from getting in your head, like you were mentioning earlier, and stopping an idea before it has the chance to really grow. So the 6 thinking hats, they're they're listed by colors.

Garrett Kennell [00:13:19]:
So there's a white hat, a blue hat, yellow, red, green, and black hat. Now the hat that you sort of alluded to is called the black hat. The black hat is criticism and skepticism. That's the hat that you wear when you wanna shoot ideas down and give critical reasons for why something won't work. Now, this is a great important hat to wear because it stops you from doing something naive. It it makes you look at critically where will this go wrong and allows you to sort of fix those problems ahead of time. I am, my one of my biggest flaws as a creative is when I brainstorm, I am always wearing the black hat. And that's really bad for brainstorming because I shut ideas down before they really have a chance to grow.

Garrett Kennell [00:14:04]:
Now, I do this because I have a lot of experience with brainstorming, and I think, oh, I already know how that's gonna pan out. But sometimes I'm wrong, and I really do need to allow myself to wear the other hats. So I'll go through some of them because I think they're really interesting. I don't know what you wanna might wanna do with this, but I use this for all of our projects.

Jay Clouse [00:14:22]:
I love this because already to this point, I think most people wear the black hat most of the time, and that is where they stop. They say there is a reason to believe this is not feasible. And so let's not even try to overcome the problem I just brought up. But let me point out the problem as a reason not to try.

Garrett Kennell [00:14:38]:
Exactly. So the yellow hat is all about sunshine and positivity. It is, optimism and possibility. Everything that could happen if you go down this path, which is a wonderful hat to wear when you're thinking big and brainstorming. And Michelle's very, very good at the yellow hat, and this is sort of where we, where we sort of combine our powers here. The green hat is creativity and surprise and, like, things that allow us to express ourselves creatively. So the green hat is useful for those reasons. Like, what could we say with this piece? The red hat is reflection and feeling and gut.

Garrett Kennell [00:15:28]:
So how does this make me feel in my gut to do an episode on this topic? Or something feels off about this or, you know, I actually have a really good feeling about this one. And then the white hat is about data and facts. Like, what are the facts with no emotion, no critical thing. Like, this will cost this amount of money. This idea will inspire this group of people. It costs this much to do x thing. It will be this hard you know, it this is how we would reach out to this person. Just facts.

Garrett Kennell [00:16:01]:
And then there's the blue hat, which is the management of process. So it's like systems, mechanics, processes to solve like, how do we actually put a system in place to arrive at what we want? And the goal is to wear all of these hats evenly throughout the process to get a full picture of what it is that you're going after. And so Michelle and I have been working towards wearing the green and yellow hats first, thinking big, not allowing any criticism, anything to come in, and you try to hold off on the black hat as long as possible. That's what we've been working towards.

Jay Clouse [00:16:39]:
I watched the Secret Service video last night. And at the beginning of the video, she says, we have been emailing the Secret Service for 9 months and have not gotten a response. And then she went back to a contact she already had who made an intro. Yep. And I I call that out explicitly because I think a lot of people would have given up month 2. You know? So, you know, earlier you said you said Michelle is great at writing emails. Sounds like it doesn't mean that she gets a response to the first email every time.

Garrett Kennell [00:17:12]:
Never. Yeah. That was a great example of I it was a contact at the FBI that helped us get that Secret Service, call eventually. And they had to give a verbal recommendation for us for them to even consider it. I believe we were the 1st YouTube channel ever, and now a couple of YouTubers since have been able to visit, which is really exciting and getting to see their take on it. But it was cool that that, like, literally that one door led to another. We get doors closed on us all the time. We've worked with NASA before, but we just tried to make another one with NASA, and we got the door closed on us.

Garrett Kennell [00:17:44]:
So, like, nothing is guaranteed. To be fair, I understand why we were we were trying to they, like, have they've built, like, a simulation of, what their Mars colony is going to be look like in the future, and we're trying to have Michelle and a group of creators live in the, in their Mars colony sim for like a week. And they were like, man, it's gonna cost too much money to, like, sterilize it and to make it work for the actual astronauts. Anyway, so we're trying to figure that out. But it's not guaranteed, but we're still trying. Another good example of this is our Butler episode, our Butler Academy episode. 1 of the best performing on the channel of all time. It's a it was a passion episode of mine.

Garrett Kennell [00:18:23]:
We didn't think it was gonna perform well. It's a video that I was, like, I just wanna make once I learned that it exists, I was like so obsessed with telling that story because I thought it was so interesting. What it means to be the people that, like, wanna dedicate their lives to hospitality and serving others and, like, super interesting to me. And alongside that episode, there's also a nanny school in England. I'm talking like Mary Poppins nanny. And they are the nannies that serve children of the royal families in England. So not only do they learn all the things they learn at Butler Academy, they also learn self defense, like how to shoot, and they learn stunt driving in case they're pursued by someone trying to kidnap a royal child. Wow.

Garrett Kennell [00:19:07]:
We've been wanting to make this episode for years. So the Butler episode, we came up with, it took us, I believe, 2 years to finally make it, and then it took us a year before we released it because we were struggling with the edit for so long. We've been trying to get this nanny school since we were trying to get the Butler school. So I think we're on year 4 now. We're still emailing them, and they keep saying no. They keep saying, well, we have a contract with a with another streamer, so we can't let you guys in yet. And the second they say no, Michelle sets a calendar reminder and says, in 3 months, reach out again. And she is persistent with that.

Garrett Kennell [00:19:46]:
And I swear to you, we're gonna get that episode someday because I think nanny's school would be so amazing. But I think that's a great example of she's relentless, and she's not afraid to keep asking. Now if someone's, like, absolutely not stop reaching out to us, that's a different story. But she she she finds a way, and she never stops trying, which is sort of the the theme of the taekwondo episode. That's that's her that's her mentality. And someday, you know, hopefully, that nanny's school will say yes.

Jay Clouse [00:20:17]:
As you've grown, you've gotten more credibility, which gives you more access. Plus, you've built these relationships over time. You've got more resources, so you can think bigger. I would imagine you've also gotten more opportunities and time pressure in some way. So do you find that you have an easier time thinking bigger now, or has it gotten harder?

Garrett Kennell [00:20:42]:
I think we have decided that nothing is too big for us, at least in the brainstorming process. We will always put that black hat on, and we will stop ourselves if it's a little too crazy. I mean, our brainstorms are crazy when we sit to brainstorm episodes. Like, we have a list of our 10, like, white whale episodes. Like, these are the big episodes that, like, would require an insane budget. It's probably very dangerous. We'd have to hire a bunch of safety teams to figure this out. Like, we're talking like, Michelle's trying to figure out how to go full evil can full evil Kenevel and, like, motorcycle ramp jump, like, a line of buses.

Garrett Kennell [00:21:20]:
We probably shouldn't do that, but it doesn't mean we didn't think about it. And we've had an entire meeting with the stunt team to figure it out, just to see if it was possible. And I think that's good because a lot of times we'll take that time to just let ourselves go there and see, okay. What would it take to actually make that? And though we might not always do the original idea, we will learn something new and exciting that will inspire another idea that does end up happening. A long time ago, we wanted to Michelle's always wanted to do a martial art, and she's never been able to figure out how to do a martial arts video. And this is sort of a the recent upload where Michelle trains to try to get a black belt in Taekwondo in 90 days is sort of an example of this where our original idea for it is we would fly to Korea, and she'd have a master for, like, 3 months. And she or for longer than 3 months. Sorry.

Garrett Kennell [00:22:15]:
She would fly to Korea. She would have 3 to 6 months to train. Still not enough to get a black belt, but, like, full dedication in the thing. And we just realized that wasn't feasible with her schedule and with the cost of going to Korea and flying a whole team out for that period of time. And so it forced us the black hat sort of forced us to brainstorm us into a a format and a structure that actually ended up working for the episode. So it's still worth going there and thinking those ideas because it often will arrive you at a at a even better conclusion.

Jay Clouse [00:22:48]:
When we come back, we get into the weeds of how a video truly gets made. From processes to logistics, we get very, very specific. So don't go anywhere. We'll be right back. And now please enjoy the rest of my conversation with Garrett Kennel. I wanna understand more on the operations and logistics side of how you guys run the company, I guess, because you have these videos that have up to 8 weeks of post production. You have the training on the front end of these videos, which is weeks, if not months. I would imagine you guys produce more than one video, like, in parallel.

Garrett Kennell [00:23:25]:
Generally, Michelle will be training for 2 to 3 episodes at once. We'll be in production for 1 or 2, and then we'll be in post for 2 to 3. It really depends on the time of year. At this very moment in time, she's training for 2 sorry, 3 episodes. We're in post for 1, and we're about to go into production for 2 in the next 2 weeks. So it's all staggered. It's very confusing. I think the best example I have of this is there's a I very vividly remember in, like, season 3 of Challenge Accepted, she's we're doing our NASA episode, and she's in a fighter pilot jet.

Garrett Kennell [00:24:08]:
And she is flying and doing barrel rolls in a fighter jet, and she lands. She immediately throws up. And an hour later, she drives from the airport, the the air hanger to her ballet lesson and does 2 hours of ballet because we she was also training for her ballet episode at the same time. And I think that's just such a perfect example of, one, why, like, only Michelle can do what Michelle does, but to show, like, how logistically complicated this show is to actually pull off, and why no studio even will dare, try to do it in the way that we do it, which I think is our competitive edge, honestly.

Jay Clouse [00:24:50]:
I'm just I'm thinking I think in terms of, like, literal calendars sometimes. Because my curse is I get I get caught in the weeds. So I'm thinking you've got several videos in parallel. Michelle's training. You're probably overseeing the process. You're checking in on edits. You're probably having sponsors coming in constantly saying, how can we get involved? How busy does your day to day feel?

Garrett Kennell [00:25:16]:
Right now, our our days are insane. There are low there are lulls, but generally, they are incredibly busy. Very dense. Like today, I'm gonna be in post production for 2 episodes, or formula 1 episode and our courtroom episode. We're finally doing, like, a law episode. And I'm going to be bouncing between 2 edits simultaneously while also making decisions for a shoot that's coming up next week and being constantly pulled out to make because I direct on set in pre pro and in post, so my brain is sort of stretched in all these different directions. And I do all that so Michelle can just focus on the training. Like, Michelle will have an initial vision for an episode and then pitch it, and then it's my job to take that and then make sure it gets translated and communicated to all different departments throughout the process.

Garrett Kennell [00:26:07]:
But it is a it is a a whirlwind to be it's it it feels like whiplash being brought from one project to the next and being like, okay. Now we're in the Formula 1 episode. This is the theme. This is the lesson Michelle learned. This is the message we're trying to get to people. And then suddenly, I'm yanked out, and I'm thinking about the US justice system and the intricacies of that and the messaging we wanna give in that episode. And then we'll I'll be whiplashed to, like, a commercial that we're filming for Saint Jude coming up in a couple weeks. And, like, okay.

Garrett Kennell [00:26:35]:
Now I'm in commercial brain mode and brand mode. And how do I sell this product and work with this brand to actually achieve the mission they want while also giving them what they're paying for, which is Michelle's spin on their commercial and giving it that energy in life that Michelle does so well. So our days are dense, and it is crazy being whipped back and forth into these different trains of thought.

Jay Clouse [00:27:01]:
Do you think she feels the same way in terms of whiplash, or is she fairly I mean, obviously, the I the idea of going from, like, jet to, ballet, that seems like whiplash. But is she shielded to mostly, like, prep and on camera work at this point?

Garrett Kennell [00:27:18]:
Problem is she's too good of a producer. Like, I don't think many people know this, but she is the like, we have producers now that help us who are amazing. But Michelle, one of her superpower is being a incredible producer. She knows how to set up a video to succeed. She knows how to email. She knows how to make call sheets and budgets and logistics, and, like, she is so on top of it. She's so type a when it comes to that stuff, and she can't help herself. We have some of the best producers we've ever worked with, and she still can't help getting into the weeds and, like, what if we tweak this here and tweak this there? And I think she loves it.

Garrett Kennell [00:27:55]:
It's not because she has to. It's because she wants to. She loves being involved in it, and I think it makes the videos better. She definitely feels the whiplash between she spends I mean, there was a day like, she for example, boxing happened, like, over a year ago, and she's still training because she loves it. So she during her taekwondo episode, she was doing an hour to 2 hours a day of taekwondo and then still driving another 40 minutes to do another hour of boxing training for no reason other than she just loves it. But then she'll come back to the office, and she'll spend the rest of day rest of the day in emails, like, focused and dialed in, making sure all these cogs are moving correctly.

Jay Clouse [00:28:36]:
So with all this chaos Mhmm. And everything happening all at once, what drives the pace? What what keeps things moving forward at the pace that you're going and not say, like, let's just slow the process down so things feel a little bit easier?

Garrett Kennell [00:28:52]:
Michelle and I are like, one of the things we're pretty proud of this last couple of years is our work life balance. So the 9 to 5 is super dense and chaotic. And then right after that, we're off the brakes. And or we're on the brakes, and we are we actually have a moment to rest and reset. Doesn't always go that perfectly, as I just explained it. But we try really hard to stay with that, and that has been very helpful in, the sustainability of this whole thing. What keeps us going, though, what keeps our foot on the gas, is that we love the process. We love making these episodes.

Garrett Kennell [00:29:34]:
I, from the traditional world, as a kid, my dream would be, I wanna make a boxing movie. I wanna make a western. I wanna make, you know, whatever genre it is. And what's fun with Challenge Accepted is we can take every episode, even though the tone and the format is familiar to an audience member, we get to genre bend everything that we do. If we do an equestrian episode, I can skew that into western, and I can finally do my own wild west. You know, if we we shot a video where Michelle works in a Michelin kitchen, great. I get to do my master chef episode and get to play in that genre with that tropes. For upcoming courtroom episode where Michelle is it's like a simulation where Michelle's defending a a fake murder trial.

Garrett Kennell [00:30:16]:
So she's being a lawyer. We hired a real judge, a real district attorney. We have a whole, like, simulated courtroom set up, like, 35 actors. We have a real jury coming in. Michelle's gonna have to, like, defend a fake defend it in a murder trial. And I get to play with the law and order tropes, finally. Like, it I love getting to attach and have those creative genres, and it's always new and exciting for us. And it's the response, like, man, when we got it real for an example that pops into my mind is we did our paramedic episode, and there was somebody under in the comments who said, thank you for posting this.

Garrett Kennell [00:30:58]:
I'm really excited because I'm taking my test to be an EMT in a couple weeks. And then it has, like, a couple thousand up votes. And then it says, edit, update. And this person came back to edit that comment, and now they said they've passed and they've been an EMT for, like, 2 years.

Jay Clouse [00:31:13]:
Wow.

Garrett Kennell [00:31:14]:
And, like, seeing that is so crazy because, oh, that video literally changed the trajectory of that person's life, and now they're saving lives is is bizarre to me. And so we do feel there is impact with the episodes, and that nothing drives me more than, like, the thing that I love and have so much fun creating is actually affecting people in a positive way. So that's why we keep we keep doing this at this pace because it's it's fun.

Jay Clouse [00:31:47]:
How do you know when something is done? You know, like, are you are you driven by we wanna get this many videos done in a year or this many in a month or we have this date promised to sponsors. Because, like, if you took a week longer, 2 weeks longer on any given video

Garrett Kennell [00:32:02]:
Mhmm.

Jay Clouse [00:32:02]:
Your throughput for the year is gonna decrease. And I'm just wondering how you land on the pace that you have arrived on.

Garrett Kennell [00:32:10]:
By the end of this year, we will have uploaded 9 episodes. So less than once a month, which is not what our goal was at the beginning of this year. But that's the pace that we can make the show at the standard of quality that we want. Like, we've tried to we've tried to increase the pace and the episodes we're not as proud of. Like, we can we can look at the episodes that were a little bit more rushed out the door, and we're just not as proud of those episodes or they didn't impact people as much. Sometimes they'll get just as many views or more, but we're not as proud of them. And oftentimes, if we're not as proud of them, they will perform worse. But But it's not even about the performance, honestly, at this point.

Garrett Kennell [00:32:55]:
It's about how do we feel making the thing, because once if we're not having fun making the thing anymore, we're we're gonna pivot and make something else that is fun for us. We still have that energy of kids running around with video cameras, like, having fun with our friends. Like, that's still what it feels like. And I wanna hold on to that as long as possible. Because I think that is the magic of YouTube, and why people love making content for YouTube, and why people like watching content on YouTube.

Jay Clouse [00:33:20]:
When you have those videos that you think, that wasn't quite what we

Garrett Kennell [00:33:23]:
Mhmm.

Jay Clouse [00:33:23]:
That wasn't quite to our standard. Is it because you didn't spend as much time in post production or production or preproduction?

Garrett Kennell [00:33:31]:
It could be any of it could be all of the above. Not spending time in pre pro, production, post, all of those things could result in us not being a 100% with the episode that we release. Now, generally, you'll hear Michelle say in podcast, like, we won't release something until, like, we are super proud of it. But as you know, sometimes it is not possible because of brand obligations as you sort of pointed out. And what we found is let me think about this. Sometimes we'll get down to a moment where we realize, oh, this episode doesn't actually work. It worked on paper, but it didn't actually work as well as we thought after we made the thing. And that was a disconnect between pre pro and production.

Garrett Kennell [00:34:17]:
So at somewhere along that line, we green lit an idea that didn't really work as well as we thought it did. And we've actually since put processes in place to to remedy that problem. We now not only have a green light meeting in our pre pro, but we now have a yellow light meeting. And our yellow light meeting is before we can green light anything, it has to pass all of it has to check all of these boxes. So title and thumbnail, obviously, at this point, everyone we've heard a 1000000 times, you gotta have your packaging before you start. That's very true for us. There were times where we get way too far in the process and realize, wait a minute. No one's gonna click on this.

Garrett Kennell [00:34:55]:
How are we gonna package this? That's an easy one to solve. But it was also things like casting. I think casting's really big for us. So one of the yellow yellow light meeting check boxes is, do we have a partner that we're willing to work with that we think is going to make the story rich and exciting to watch. Good examples of that are is Master Yi in our Taekwondo episode or Tony Jeff Jeffries in our boxing episode. Those are two characters that are so much fun to watch even without Michelle. Take Michelle out. These are characters you'd watch hours of because they're interesting, they're compelling.

Garrett Kennell [00:35:30]:
And so we really wanna make sure that we're working with people who can stand on their own and have stories to tell even beyond Michelle. Because then in our worst case scenario, let's say Michelle's having an off day on set. We know that other character will still be a compelling person to follow. These are all things you can solve in pre pro. So that yellow light meeting really make sure that we have our our our our casting dialed in, and that's generally related to who Michelle's coach is for the episode. But for another YouTuber, it might be their cast of characters that represent their friends or, you know, what restaurant you decide to go to to review and the people in the restaurant. Like, it it that the word casting will be different for everyone, but we have a pretty strict vetting process and interview process when we go to work with somebody for an episode. Because they need to be able to for for the example of Taekwondo, that coach for Michelle has to sustain 90 days of I mean, in that 90 day episode, she trains for 90, and we filmed for 42 of those days.

Garrett Kennell [00:36:34]:
42 days, we had cameras in the room. Sometimes it's just me and a camera and Michelle, but other times, it is a full production crew. And that character that we work with has to be compelling for 42 days of filming, or it's just not gonna work out. So that's an example of how we've solved this issue of, you know, if we got to a product we're not proud of, usually, we can solve things in post. Sometimes we can solve things with reshoots and not specifically reshooting a scene that's already happened, but more of shooting additional footage. I think Taekwondo is a is a good example of spoiler alert, at the end of the episode, Michelle does not break her brick in her final black belt test, therefore not earning her black belt. And it is a huge episode of failure for her in that she doesn't achieve the things she set out to, which is not always common in our episodes. But that's what happened.

Garrett Kennell [00:37:33]:
So that's the story. And we really wanted to film it it wasn't satisfying, compelling. So we shot an additional scene where she tries to get her black belt again couple weeks later. And she fails a second time at getting her black belt and still doesn't get it. However, that additional scene that we filmed, what it did for the story was showing that Michelle was willing to keep trying again until she gets it. It wasn't about getting it or not. It was about showing that she's the story point we were trying to say, she's willing to keep trying, and that's the beauty of taekwondo is you can always keep trying to better yourself. That's sort of the the theme and the message of that episode.

Garrett Kennell [00:38:28]:
And so that's an example of even though the scene in on paper seems somewhat similar to the scene that initially happened, shooting that extra scene a few weeks later really helped round out the message, and make the theme feel more full circle, and gave a lot more weight to it. So that's another example of, like, how we have learned to solve the problem of, oh, it's not a 100% working. Where can we tweak this? And that can happen at all stages of production.

Jay Clouse [00:38:57]:
I've heard you mention brainstorming session, green light session, yellow light session. We have training sessions. We have other filming sessions. When you look at your calendar week to week, how many of these things are, like, standing? We do this thing on this day every week or every month at this time versus as needed. We're putting something on the calendar for the people that need to be there.

Garrett Kennell [00:39:20]:
Our days are pretty scheduled. Monday morning, every week, we have a all hands, like, Monday morning kickoff where all of the employees in the company, we have 6 full time. So everyone comes. We're all in person. We all sit down, and we talk about what's gonna happen for the week. What's everyone working on? What are our big wins for each individual person that week? Like, where did everyone shine? And it's very exciting to see, like, what things people mention about each other and what what qualities things stood out. After the Monday morning kickoff meeting, we always have a scheduled development meeting, and that is, like, a 3 to 4 hour meeting where we go through every single project that the company is working on from pre production to production to post production, and then to brainstorm and new ideas. It's called the the fun zone or the idea zone.

Garrett Kennell [00:40:10]:
When we get to that point, that means we've completed all the tasks for all the other episodes, And now we're just talking about new ideas that we will then filter into this system. And that's like a 3 to 4 hour meeting, and it is Nick, our head of operations and senior producer. It's Michelle. It's myself and our executive assistant, and we sit there for the 3 hours and basically go down the list project by project. List out everything that still needs to be done for it, and how we're going to solve it. And then the rest of the week is all of us separately going out to solve those tasks that we've laid out. When I'm not in those meetings on Monday, I am sitting in post overseeing the edits. Usually, we're always editing 2 episodes simultaneously.

Garrett Kennell [00:40:54]:
We have 2 editors, both named Ryan. They're both god tier. I don't know how we got so lucky to work with these guys. They're responsible for so much of the incredible storytelling that you see in these episodes. And they're both editing an episode simultaneously, so they each take their own generally. Like, one episode for 1 Ryan, one episode for the other, and they'll like to switch off. And when I'm not in post and we have a production, I will get pulled out from post to be deployed on set to shoot. And so they're pretty autonomous at this point where they can make creative choices and decisions and, because they really understand the vision of the show.

Garrett Kennell [00:41:31]:
And did I answer the question?

Jay Clouse [00:41:35]:
Yeah. Yeah. I'm I'm literally trying to get, like, as much insight into how this thing operates because there's so many moving parts.

Garrett Kennell [00:41:40]:
Mhmm. And it's

Jay Clouse [00:41:41]:
like such it's so far on the end of the spectrum of logistically and operationally complex, or at least it would seem to me from the outside Yeah. That it's impressive that it continues to run. And I wonder how I wondered how much of it is routine and, like, scheduled as is or how much is kind of ad hoc. And it sounds like there's a lot of both.

Garrett Kennell [00:42:04]:
There's definitely a lot of both. Like, I'm looking at the I'm pulling up the calendar right now, and, like, every minute of Michelle's this whole week is completely booked. But, like, what would happen if a shoot randomly had to be dropped in? Like, we have a we have people on our team, very, very talented people, who will then take Michelle's schedule and figure out how to slot that in and move things around so that she can something Michelle refuses to do is not do something that she's agreed to. So once she said she'll do it, she'll find a way to do it, and she will move anything around to make sure that it will happen. But I'm just, like, looking through the schedule and, like, all the Monday morning meetings. I can see what everyone in the company is doing at what time. All these different cogs are sort of operating in their own world, and they're all working to make this whole thing happen. So we're doing our best.

Garrett Kennell [00:42:56]:
It doesn't always work, but when it does, it's very satisfying.

Jay Clouse [00:43:01]:
When you have a video that turns out the the necessary budget for this is larger than our typical video Mhmm. Do you pitch specific packages to sponsors and say, this is a video we're doing. We think you're a great sponsor for this. Or do you vet sponsors and then try to match them to a video that's in your pipeline?

Garrett Kennell [00:43:21]:
It's a mix of both. We so we have this list of our white whale episodes, which I mentioned earlier. Those are the episodes that we cannot make without help. We don't wanna take outside investment money. Everything we make is money made from the channel, mostly AdSense. Our goal is to make these White Whale episodes because those are, like, our dream creative episodes. Those we will go to brands and say, here's a thumbnail we've mopped up. Here's the idea.

Garrett Kennell [00:43:50]:
We know it's gonna perform well. It's data backed based on all these other episodes we've done. And about once a year, we'll get one of those bought, essentially. This year was our Taekwondo episode, that dove bit when they saw the episode when it was pitched to them. The year prior, I'm trying to think what the big I I don't recall what the one last year was. This upcoming year, we just sold another of our white whale episodes, which is really exciting. So now we're able to, like, see that video in a different I mean, going back to the theme of thinking big, it allows us to take that episode and think big again on it, and open ourselves back up. Oh, now that we have budget for this episode, we know how much we can take home from this.

Garrett Kennell [00:44:39]:
We know we can think a little bigger and maybe inflate it a bit more than what we thought now that it's been actually bought, which is really exciting. The other side of this is the brands coming to us and saying, how many episodes what episodes do you have to slot me into? Now we only release, you know, 9 to 10 a year. So there's a scarcity model or a scarcity mindset there, which I think is surprisingly helpful to us. Because if a brand wants to be in challenge accepted, they only have 9 to 10 chances. And a lot of those are already pre bought before the year begins. So I think Houdini is a good example of that one was funny because brands didn't want to, sponsor Houdini because they were like, but what if Michelle actually, you know, like, dies or gets hurt? Actually, it was really funny. We reached out to liquid death originally to sponsor that episode because we thought that would be really funny to fill the tank with liquid death. Wow.

Garrett Kennell [00:45:40]:
They declined, which is shocking because it's, like, so on brand for their marketing. Their loss, we did eventually find a sponsor for it. We got to work with SoFi, on our Houdini episode. It was perfect. They were great. It worked out really well. But that's an example of a brand coming to us and asking, what slate do you have available? And then we sort of look at what we have and what would make the most sense for that deal.

Jay Clouse [00:46:05]:
How long are those timelines of those conversations? Like, if you're getting a brand to bid on a white whale episode Mhmm. Are are these conversations that have been years in the making, months in the making?

Garrett Kennell [00:46:16]:
Some of them can be years in the making. Generally, if it's a white whale episode, it's something we've can't we've come up with or had for a year or so now. And when they from the time they buy the episode to the time where the video comes out, could be 8 to 12 months. Taekwondo was came out, I I believe, 10 months after it was originally bought by the brand, essentially, which is I love that timeline. It gives us time to really integrate the brand in a way that's meaningful. Their whole messaging for their campaign was promoting women in sports in spaces in sports spaces that they don't generally feel welcomed or comfortable. And it was great because Taekwondo is a very male dominated sport and martial art, and it worked really well with the theme that we were sort of exploring. And because it was so early on, we actually had time to integrate it into the story and the video better, which I think was a better product for everybody.

Garrett Kennell [00:47:16]:
Now the brands that come to us and say, what videos do you have? Where could we slot in? I would say about a month to 2 months, maybe 3. Generally, if we slot them into an episode that's already been shot, it's probably a month and a half. That's way easier for us. We still will go out and shoot a scene that makes sense for the episode. So it's not just like a harsh cutaway to Michelle in front of a screen talking about a brand. We try to integrate them as much as possible. But if you want to be, like, truly integrated and you're a part of the actual story as it's unfolding, you're gonna have to wait longer. Because she might be 2 months into her 3 months of training, and then you have 8 weeks of post after that.

Garrett Kennell [00:48:00]:
So it really depends on if it's an academy video that's shot over a week versus a long term training episode like Taekwondo, which is over 90 days.

Jay Clouse [00:48:09]:
If we look back at the the story of this channel over 8 plus years, it's a huge channel. You've done tons of views. You've grown very quickly. What can people starting today learn from your example of how to grow quickly on YouTube and today's marketplace?

Garrett Kennell [00:48:27]:
Back when I was a kid, I would just take a camera and point it and just start running with it. And I know everyone says just, like, do the thing. Just make the video. But I really believe that that is what allows us to get to the point where we're dreaming bigger and bigger and making bigger and bigger episodes. I mean, a lot of people, they're like, oh, it's cool. You worked with all these government organizations and, like, NASA and, like, that's crazy, but, like, how do I do that? I mean, to be honest, like, in season 1 of Challenge Accepted, like, NASA was one of our first big episode partners, and we had not worked with anyone else of notable size to that point. They were sold on the way Michelle was handling the story and telling the story. That was enough for them to say, oh, we trust Michelle and her team to tell our story.

Garrett Kennell [00:49:24]:
And eventually, working with NASA led to working with the FBI, and that eventually led to, like, the Secret Service and all these other crazy institutions that, like, I couldn't even imagine working with. But it all started because they trusted the way that she told the story, and so my sort of suggest you know, my advice for that is to just, at any scale, tell the story you wanna tell, and people will be attracted to the integrity or the style or the tone or the way that you speak about something, and it will just sort of grow from there. I mean, I'll I'll be honest. Challenge accepted. I mean, I think on day 1 when we released the YLF Buzzfeed episode, Michelle went from 0 to, I believe, 400,000 subscribers. And that was the biggest jump in the channel's history. From 400 k to where we are now, which is just under 5,000,000, it has been a slow, steady climb. There's never been, like, one episode be released, and suddenly we have, you know, half a 1000000 subscribers or a 1000000 subscriber.

Garrett Kennell [00:50:28]:
We've never had that sort of inflection point, which I think was really nice for us to and I think Marquez speaks about this a lot. Like, the slow, steady growth, which really allows you to slowly get comfortable with the bigger and bigger scope ideas as you go on. I think Cleo Abram is a great example of this as well. Like, slowly scoping out and handling bigger and bigger projects. I wouldn't try to do some of our season 6 episodes of challenge accepted on episode on season 1. Like, I wouldn't have tried Houdini's deadliest trick in season 1 of challenge accepted. But I don't even know if I would have thought to do something like that, if I'm being honest. Back then, at least.

Garrett Kennell [00:51:15]:
So I don't know. I I hate being the broken record and just saying, like, you know, go out and make the video. But, like, genuinely, you can get to any point by just showing other people how you tell stories. And if they like how you tell stories, they're gonna wanna tell the story with you. At least that's our mentality.