May 30, 2023 • 34 mins
Freddie Wong is a YouTube OG. As YouTube transformed from a backwater website to a behemoth media platform, Freddie's career as an indie filmmaker grew with it, logging nearly 2 billion views and over 9 million subscribers on his channel "freddiew." In this episode, Freddie Wong talks about building an online video channel into a real production company, his love for action comedy, and how artists in the digital age can be creative when it comes to making a living.
To watch Freddie's videos, check out Freddie's YouTube channel! For one of our personal favorites try this one.
See omnystudio.com/listener for privacy information.
Mark as Played
Transcript
Episode Transcript
Available transcripts are automatically generated. Complete accuracy is not guaranteed.
Speaker 1 (00:15):
Pushkin. All right, y'all, So it's twenty twenty three and
we should probably finally act like it is on this show. Obviously,
one of the most ubiquitous ways to make it from
the bottom these days is to become an influencer. Freddy Wong,
my guest on today's show, is an early version of that.
(00:35):
A YouTuber. He started his channel, Freddy w and six,
back when YouTube was still a fledgling video sharing website.
That YouTube channel eventually became a real production company, Rocket Jump. Today,
rocket Jump has over one point six billion views on
YouTube and nine million subscribers. His YouTube journey, sparked by
(00:57):
an early love of film, led to a production deal
with Lionsgate to create a Hulu show a handful of
years ago. Since then, he stopped regularly uploading videos online,
has dabbled in podcast, and is generally just plotting what
his next move's gonna be. On today's episode, we check
in with one of the original stars of YouTube and
(01:17):
explore the ups and downs of internet fame and creation.
This is started from the bottom, harder and success stories
from people like us pretty long. Man, Thanks for doing this, appreciate.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
You, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Man So I want to I want to get into
all things YouTube and filmmaking. I want to talk filmmaking.
But I'm just curious where there's not like a ton
of info about your early life out and about in public.
What where did your love of storytelling developed?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Probably when I spent that stint in prison. No no, no, no,
I honestly, you know what it was was growing up
there were two Blockbuster videos that was like the close
one and then the bigger, nicer one. My dad loves movies,
loves American movies, and he would show us like just
so much. So like pretty much every weekend we'd be
at the Blockbuster just renting movies. So like Friday we'd
(02:14):
see something, Saturday night, we see something Sunday afternoon. I
would have, you know, a third movie sometimes, Like it
was just a lot of time in video stores, honestly.
And also my dad, who like just has such a
like I remember, I remember when I was like I
must have been like eleven or twelve. He was like, Yo,
you have to see this guy, Dustin Hoffman. He's one
(02:36):
of the greatest American actors. And so he rented the Graduate.
I'm like, I kind of think I okay, I don't
quite get what's going on with him in this, like mom,
but like it seems kind of you know, definitely didn't
quite get it. Like I still remember watching the ending
and feeling a certain way be like what the interesting ending?
And then like the next week he was like, you
think that was crazy, here's his next movie? And then
(02:58):
he rented Midnight Cowboy Wow, which like which is like
you'd rather get very famous, like almost X ray, right,
or I think at the time even extra I remember
being like as a kid being like, I'm too young
for this, but that was the that was the approach.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
So your dad was, would you say outside of movies?
Your dad was conservative in his approach to raise.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Both of my parents.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Like, you know, I get this a lot because I
think a lot of people have the shared experience in
terms of the Asian American like typical Asian American experience. Right.
The reason why there's a lot of similarity on it
is because at least speaking to East Asian specifically Chinese
immigrants China.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
So I'm full Chinese, so you kind.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Of have to essentially historically you kind of have like
these waves of immigration and migration, right, if you're in
California and you're like Japanese or Chinese, Like there's a
chance that your family goes.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Back, like back to like railroad times, right.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
But the Pacific Northwest a lot of the Asian population
there in my case, right escaping from the Cultural Revolution
in China. You have a lot of Southeast Asians post
Vietnam War, right, And so like there's a reason why
when you think about like the typical East Asian experience,
a lot of them, you know, like it's because it's
like it's fresh immigrant families hitting this sort of specific generation.
So there's a lot of commonality, is there, Like a
(04:08):
lot the sort of touchstones were the same. Take school seriously, right, Like,
But I think I do acknowledge that it was different
for me because I think my parents just had a
different approach to it. You know, at least for myself
and my brother, we had a lot more freedom because
you know, like sophomore year in high school, like I
want to make a movie with a friend of mine,
and they're like, as long as your grades are fine,
do whatever you want, right, Like that was the sort
(04:30):
of feeling on that. I think part of it also
is because my mom, she was a professional dancer in China,
and so has this kind of artistic bend and has
the sort of appreciation for the stuff that isn't going
to make you six figures all the time, you know.
Like so I think that like that combination kind of output,
(04:50):
my brother.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
And so you dab puts you onto movie making or
to your love of film. And then you are lucky
enough to live near a Blockbuster.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
I mean, it's when I think about this, I think
about luck a lot, and I think that there's a
lot of things that fall in place here. Right, So
consider that I'm lucky enough to have be alive in
an era when you have Blockbuster Video, and you have
video rental, and you have DVDs and VHS tapes, and
you have the access to a library, right huge and
especially in the pre broadband internet days, that's a big deal.
(05:21):
Right On top of that, we have the iMac that
came out the first real kind of accessible consumer computer
that let you take high eight or digital eight or
mini DV footage and like edit it. Because I remember
like taking vacation videos and kind of messing with them,
and like you know, on the computer at home, being
able to do that already, like.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's like camera like Jamie yeah, like.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Like yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah, like a little sony
thing got Like it was that era of camera where
they were like, yo, we got night vision mode. Yeah yeah, yeah,
you know night vision mode. Like they stop that. Yeah,
Like no, but no cameras come with night vision. But
that was a moment where it was like, Yo, this
camera soons three, it was so cool and how does
(06:05):
this work? Like I remember growing up and like doing
like making a little spe effects videos with my brother,
Like we would take these pool cues and like do
those choreographed sword fights, and then I would go back
into the computer and like put lightsaber effects on it.
Because you know, that's the pinnacle of filmmaking at the time,
was doing cool Star Wars lightsaber.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
So there's a certain amount of luck involved and we're
doing what you do, and I mean you happened. You're
growing up in the heyday of in a early nineties
would be another high water mark for movie making, you know,
and you're being able to rent movies and to fill
to rent movies and also like again right, like you
remember that that early nineties coincides with this indie movie revolution, right,
(06:46):
You're talking about guys like Aronofsky coming out, you're talking
about Quintartino, and then people being like, ooh, indie film,
what's going on here? And on top of that, there
was a demand for it because people were building so
many screens. There are so many flights, they just need
to fill fill them up with screens. So you had
companies that were willing to take a shot on like
the Sofia Coppolas of the world, or the people who
were like, hey, they just had a Sun Dance film
(07:08):
and that's it. The dominant mythology growing up for a
filmmaker was like, oh, you got to make an indie
and go to a festival and do all that stuff,
which I think has you know, changed quite a bit
in the year. So you've been growing up formative years
being spent in that indie filmmaking boom loving cinema. Did
that make you feel like you could be a filmmaker?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
One hundred percent yes, one hundred percent. Yes. It's like, oh,
you can tell these stories and you can do it cheap.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
As long as you do it cheap, and you know,
I mean like it was a total it's just a
totally different context. So now so then that you know,
in that hunt, in that search for trying to find
ways to make movies anyway we could, we got onto online.
Another four tu of this development, right, that you could
put things online and people could see it and you
could potentially generate an audience from it. That was just
(07:49):
starting when I was in college. People were like, ooh.
The idea of like a popular YouTuber meaning anything was
completely foreign to everybody, even in film school.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I remember after I graduated, I was.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Like, oh, hey, I'm gonna do doing this YouTube challenge
and think everyone's response for the film school. So I
was always just like what why, Like what is what's
the point? You know, like even that even just the
idea of like making a video, putting it somewhere, getting
someone to even find it. Yeah, sometimes you didn't want
the video to go viral because you have to pay
for it, because your bandwidth costs would spike up that
week because all of a sudden people are sharing it
(08:19):
on emails and now I gotta pay a thousand bucks
at the end of the month because people were watching it.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
So you mentioned you went to film school. I mean
you're born and raised in Seattle in Washington, Yes, correct, correct,
come down to USC for film school. Yeah, you're twenty
in two thousand and five, which I would say is
probably the year that YouTube really plants itself in the
mainstream consciousness. You know, yeah, but you have Hollywood dream
I mean, you have dreams to break into Hollywood to
(08:44):
some extent. You moved down. Now you're in film school
at USC where George Lucas went, and you know, like
everyone went right, and it's like you at some point
decide to go to make stuff for YouTube rather than
try to necessarily break into film the more traditional route.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
So for a little bit we were doing that. We
were doing direct to DVD movies. I was working on
direct to DVD movies, and like in film school, I
met this guy named Brandon Loatch who was my partner
for a base all the YouTube era, and we were
watching YouTube and we were seeing these guys like build
audiences and we had no idea what it really meant.
But I do very distinctly remember being like, you know,
(09:19):
like Kevin Smith can make movies whatever, he can kind
of do whatever he wants because he's got this group
of audience who likes his movies and they like him
as a person who makes movies. So he kind of
has this weird built in audience, and like I remember
at the time being I feel like if you could
build up an audience first, maybe you get more freedom later.
And that was like literally the depth of the thinking.
(09:41):
So Brandon and I were like, well, let's do a
YouTube channel, let's try stuff, let's try making stuff. In college,
we were making like little videos, and we were seeing
some of them pop off. Like one of my early
videos was this guitar Hero video or it's just me
playing Guitar Hero or a very ridiculous way, but like
that popped off and it was one of those weird
formative moments where we were watching it and we're like, yo,
it's gonna get a million views, and they're like, wow,
that's crazy. And then it hit a million views and
(10:02):
kept going. We're like, oh, it doesn't just stop. It
just keeps going like this isn't like it hits a
million and then no one ever sees again, Like these
keep going for a while. So like we got into
this feeling of like, oh, it's so cool to try
and like make something and try and have it be
something that people react to and respond to emotionally, and
maybe they want to share it, try to just pump
(10:22):
those numbers as opposed to I think a lot of
times a way think about artists like they they close
themselves off and they do their great works and then
they present it to the adoring public, where whereas in
this case it was more about for us like Trama's
populous approach of like, well, let's see what whether people
want to see.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
It change your aim. It kind of did change your
dream in a sense.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
To an extent, because I think fundamentally anybody who gets
into film, especially coming at it from like a popular
film standpoint, Ie, you didn't grow up watching like the
experimental films of like a guy like Stan Bracket or something,
and you got into movies because you saw Jurassic Park
and you want to like, there is a certain and
that's why to me, film is such a fascinating artistic medium.
(11:00):
There's a certain acknowledgment of commerciality with film. There's a
certain acknowledgement that this stuff costs money to make and
that people need to pay money to see it in
order to justify the cost. And how do you get
people to see it? You need to be populist to
some extent, right, And it's really interesting because that's like
this inconsistency at the core of this art form because
it's not pure art, but it's also not pure populist
(11:23):
mass drivel either. It finds this balance in between, and
film I think has always had that tension inside of it.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
So when you go back to twenty year old you,
who's starting to upload stuff to YouTube, Yeah, what at
that point, like if you could have been like in
twenty years my dream film is to make X, Like
what would you have compared it to? Would it have
been in Dressing Park?
Speaker 3 (11:44):
I mean, like for me, it was the two things
that it was the two things that I loved growing up,
which was I love comedy, I love action, and to me,
action comedy is one of the hardest genres that to
do well because I also I grew up with like
actually movies like The Matrix, And I remember a formative
experience watching The Matrix in theaters was like when Neo
starts blocking Agent Smith at the end with one hand,
he turns into it as one hand. I remember standing
(12:07):
up in the theater do it up, and my parents like,
what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Like sit down?
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Like no, Like what I'm seeing here is so big
and so important to me that like I can't remain
seated anymore. I have to like and like I remember
me like what I can't that what I didn't know
what to do with myself for that, So like stuff
like The Matrix was high up there, like you know,
I think everybody after they saw that movie, especially of
our generation of filmmakers, was like yo, slow mo diving
(12:35):
you know, which then you know, took me down the
path of you know, of course the Hong Kong Blood
operas and all that, and being familiar with you know,
John woodswork before The Matrix to be like, wow, finally
there's like an American movie that's doing this stuff that
I love in these Hong Kong movies, so like just
big action movies and just like the fun of it right,
Like to me, humor is like such a I loved
like the melt Brooks and the Naked Gun movies and
(12:57):
like all those the Socker Brothers movies.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Like I thought that maybe like a.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Dio die Hard would have been like a dream movie
doing something like that.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
A funnier though, like it's not even funnier than that,
like okay, okay, like definitely funnier because I even goofy
and at the end of the day, I just I
love I love film comedy too.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
So it's like if you could blend like Hong Kong
action movies.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
And humor and also as a visualfects nerd, right like
I love doing like the Star Wars lightsabers and doing
all the cool stuff that you can do with.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Computers because I was a big nerd growing up too.
Somewhere in there, somewhere in there, it.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Was kind of the tree well, you know, and having
painted that dream, that's not too far off from what
you started uploading to YouTube and YouTube, I could see
where you're thinking would be that would be a good
platform for it. Because an action comedy film, of course
needs some sort of exposition. You need a plot, you
need narrative movement.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
But but it could be gags. It could be gased
like you don't.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Need to have like a you don't need to have
like a a pulp fiction.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Style humanity story.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, it could just be like here's a cool I mean,
like right, like here's it. And how many movies get
summed up by like the best kung fu fights from
this movie and people just sit there on YouTube and
watch the fights only you know what I mean, Like,
so action has that has that almost purity of like
almost like dance, right, almost like choreography. Here's just the
thing on its own, here's the self contained universe, here's
(14:12):
gags within it. But yeah, that honestly, you know, YouTube
gave us the freedom to do that, so we really,
we really took it and felt like we took good
advantage of that.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
We're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back. Freddie tells me about his first taste of
viral success. What was your first big kind of hit
on YouTube?
Speaker 3 (14:42):
So in twenty ten is when we started, And at
the end of twenty ten, we did this video called
Future first person Shooter where we took a GoPro two
at the time, taped it to the side of my
head and did like this sort of riff which became
this visual motif that shows up throughout our work at
that time. But like it was a riff on like
what first person shooters looked like the perspective of the
(15:04):
video games. Yeah, but the novelty of it was I
think it was that it was real, right, and I
think that for people who were really into playing video
games at that time, you're just like, oh, this is
an interesting imagining of like what perhaps in the future
when graphics are photo realistic, maybe this is what looks like.
And we were taking little jokes from multiplayer games and
stuff like Call of Duty and stuff like that, and
(15:25):
we did a little pyrotechnics illegal pyrotechnics on it, and
so it had like a visual pop to it, but
also just kind of looked different and also, let's tell
a little story, let's get some jokes, and then let's
do some stuff that looks cool. And that was around
Christmas of twenty ten, I believe, and I remember it
went out and then like because there was just like
no content around Christmas, all of these blogs just picked
(15:48):
it up and we just saw like in the morning
everyone opened their presence and then like everyone got bored
by about like twelve o'clock and then like all these
video game blogs were like check it out, like this
is what it looks like in the future first and
it just sort of went and it went in a
way in a speed that we had never seen before,
like whoa, everyone's covering this and that I remember really
opening my eyes being like WHOA, how quickly stuff can
(16:09):
go and how like quickly stuff can spread.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
That was like my first experience with it at this point.
Do you view that as your career?
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, so, I mean, like career is such a weird
one because I feel like I've spent my whole life
just kind of like going from things that I think
are interesting. And I've been fortunate in that the things
I find interesting also have some overlap with my ability
to sort of make some money from it and sustain
myself in the other ways you need.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
To with life. Does that make me a little basic? Probably?
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Probably it does. You know, I'm not gonna that's fine,
That's fine, you know. But so like at the time,
I remember we were again, here's another fortunate thing. At
that time, we myself, these guys Sam and Nico, like,
we were all living in this loft in downtown Los
Angeles and it was I think our rent. Each We
paid two hundred bucks a month, like two hundred two
(16:57):
and and fifty bucks a month, and we were all
sharing this giant, crazy cool former paint factory space. There
are no walls, so we all slept in like one
room but just different corners of the same room.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Was cold.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
We'd like turn on the oven and like heat our
hands up by the oven. But we were able to
pursue YouTube because it was like, Bro, you know, I
just quit my job. I was working at twice century
Fox doing video game stuff, and I was like I'm
done with this, and I was, you know, talking to
brand or like we could do this for a year
and be fine, Like because our rent is so low,
we can just take that risk, right, you know, Like
(17:29):
it was good that stuff popped out very early for
us comparatively, but like we were ready to just be like, yeah,
let's just do this for a year.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
See what happens.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
You know, when when your stuff starts popping off in
twenty ten, you're starting to get like, you know, get
big numbers on videos, like we really starting to like
make money like how to lead your circumstances.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
A little bit.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
And when you when we talk about the eras of YouTube, right,
that really started to take off in the second and
third years of doing things, because at that point then
you start to get like brand attention. There was like companies,
video game companies, what have you that were starting to
be like, oh, maybe we can use YouTube business alternative
advertising platform, and they weren't paying as much as like
TV commercials, even though anything that we did was getting
(18:09):
more exposure for them than a teeny commercial Everwood. But
but like again the context right, like nobody Madison Avenue
didn't respect it in that way. So once things start
to like really in terms of being like, oh this
is like can be like a real like money maker
for us was one you start to be like, oh,
I guess we could do like a little video promoting
a game. But there was that window about to your
window where it was like you start to be like
brand deals started to show up, and then people could
(18:31):
start to like, oh, shoot, I can we can shoot
this for this much and here's how much it's coming in,
and we almost were like a little mini ad agency.
It started to change things because you know, we're like, oh, okay,
we can buy like a nice camera. Now, oh wait,
hey we can maybe buy this light or like buy
this green screen pop up thing, you know, and then
they're not like crazy expensive stuff. But it started to
be like, oh, this is allowing us to keep doing
(18:52):
what we like doing. And also I think we very
quickly realized that it was just great practice every week
forcing yourself to make something, finish it, see it through
put it up and then next week you're just doing
something completely different. That process where you're forced to just
take something to completion over and over and over again.
I think it's a valuable craft, and I think that
we realized very quickly. We're like, this is great because
we get to practice visual effects, we get practice doing movies.
(19:16):
We can make mistakes, but it's fine because next week
we'll do.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Another video, you know, and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
What was what set us apart at that time was
that we really took it seriously. Like I think a
lot of people, especially once money started rolling in, they're like,
what's the minimum amount of work I can do to
get a YouTube video up and get views. I don't
think we ever had that mindset. It was always about
trying to do it better and trying to improve our
craft as filmmakers. We'd shoot it, we'd edit it, we'd
send the edit to sound design, where I would do
(19:42):
sound design. Brandon would then do additional vfxs. I would
help out VFX. He would do the color of it.
We'd do a color pass, we'd mix it in pro tools,
do a fo like we were doing it like it
was a full movie and we're doing one every week,
So like I fucked my sleep up. But you know,
like that was but that was the like the grind.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
No no, I.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Mean like no, I mean honestly, at a certain point,
like we were brand and I were doing like an
all nighter every week for like two years, Like that
was just the energy of the time.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah. Yeah, at this era when you are twenty five,
you're pulling all nighters, you're making money on YouTube, you're
in LA again, mid twenties, like having some level of success,
How did you manage to keep focused, to have the
drive to keep to pull on nighters once a week
every night for two years rather than just go blow
money like and you know.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
I mean, I think a big part of it was
seeing numbers go up and being like, wow, more people
are seeing this and we're reaching more people sort of
on a week by week basis, which was really just
exciting to just note that alone puts a lot of
gas in the engine, so to speak, because it's just fun,
right and at the end of the day, we got
to do whatever we want to do every week, and
there was a certain creative freedom to that challenge of
being like, all right, well we're gonna do this week
how we're gonna top ourselves. And it required a lot
(20:51):
of energy, required a love of effort, required your full
life dedication towards it. But I think the difference was
the end goal was always I want to make things
that people see. And how they do that. Is it
in a dark theater that they pay fifteen bucks for
or is it on their phone right before classes start
in school.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
To me, that's immaterial.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
I don't care about that as much comparatively, right, Like,
I know a lot of filmmakers in my generation talking
about the cinematic experience and you got to see it
on the big screen, And to me, I'm like, listen,
if I get that luxury, great, But right now where
I'm at, like, yo, if anybody just sees it, I'm happy,
Like I don't care. If I'm not gonna put any
restrictions on it. I'm already nobody's I'm already in nobody,
you know what I mean. Like, I can't afford to
(21:32):
be like you can only see myself. I'm like, anywhere
anyhow you can find that you can see it, Like,
I'm happy. I don't care so to that to that extent.
Right if you said, listen, I'm gonna give you a choice.
Would you rather have a theatrical release that does okay?
Or would you rather have like a home video iTunes
only streaming only thing, but a lot of more.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
People see it.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
At the end of the day, I think that I
got into film because I like entertaining people and I
like entertaining myself. Right, I think I find a lot
of stuff we do very funny too, and I get
a kick out of it. Right, So if that becomes
sort of higher on your list of priorities than other
totally valid artistic sensibilities, right then I think that sort
of shapes your worldview a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
I think it might be interesting to answer those to
tease those out a little bit more, Like, like, you
picked the theatrical release, roup, what do you think then
happens to your career theoretically?
Speaker 3 (22:19):
So I think that in I think that in Hollywood
and this industry specifically, there's a halo effect of having
done things right. Like, only if you've done something in
the exact context they're looking at, do they think you
can do that thing in that context? So your constant
I've felt, at least in my experience, I've always felt
like I'm constantly needing to prove myself and prove I
can do something again and again and again. And what
(22:40):
it does for your career if you get a film
and it's you know, sort of the more atracial, theatical approach,
and it allows you those opportunities that are more in
that direction of things.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
And by the way, I will note that this is
sort of it's where a very weird time period because
stuff is shifting. But like I would say, let's say
a few years ago, that's the kind of thing that
would say like, okay, cool, maybe you could you might
be opened up now to a commercial directing gig or
like a television episode. Now you get a couple television
direction credits, or it makes it easier for like, hey,
(23:10):
I want to raise money in the traditional routes for
another theatrical feature film.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Oh, you've done it.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Once already and you've hear some numbers for it. Okay,
you're a more trustworthy ncity. You're more likely to get
that compared to someone who's like, I've never directed a
future film before and I want some money for that.
So it opens up the doors in that direction of
the industry, right, And I think what's interesting is that
those are different doors. It's not there's not a lot overlap.
Because then let's take the other direction. Let's take a okay, cool,
you made a movie. It became huge on iTunes. Everyone
(23:38):
downloaded on iTunes, incredible numbers on it did better than
like commercial movies that week, like that sort of thing.
A lot of people saw what that opens up potentially,
like crowdfunding, for example, in that scenario becomes a little
bit easier for you compared to like an indie movie
that someone's done that nobody's necessarily seen. I think you're
more likely to access the direct to audience thing, and
I think it's a much more DIY route in that direction.
(23:59):
Right when'm talking about crowdfunding, I'm talking about that sort
of stuff. But again, different doors, different directions.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
So that really and that's really scenario released in iTunes.
It's successful. It's taking you further away from the traditional route,
opening you up though to an audience of people who
might then you might be able to fund crowd source
fund or maybe then do it the actual and then
maybe created a.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Film that you could release potentially right like or or
the other direction where it's like, oh maybe we just
keep doing stuff online only I know, you know, there's
some some folks I know who are like, yeah, they
don't care about theatrial release, but they they aim everything
around the iTunes release and how they digitally sort of
monetize it.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Right, So like that's where we're at right now. We
did this.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
We started a podcast, a Dungeons and Dragons podcast called
Dungeons and Daddies, which is not a BDSM podcast. It's
a Dungeons and Dragons podcast, and it's like it's it's
a story where it's like an improv comedy thing. We
like myself and four friends we play Dungeons and Dragons
and we play four dads, like human dads from our
world sent into a fantasy world to like rescue their kids,
(24:59):
and it's like dad humor and all that stuff, you know.
We started a Patreon for it. The podcast has been
growing over the past couple of years. Matt and myself,
my directing partner, we were like, all right, cool, this
is our way of funding a movie. We're gonna use
this and we fund the movie. So we shot the movie
at the end of last year. We're in post production
it now, and we're gonna go like the festival route
for it, and like worst case scenario, we got good
(25:19):
practice and we'll do another one. So you know, look,
I think I think you can go in any direction
and you can find your way to it. What matters
is do you want that? Do you want to actually
make movies? Because in the course of my career, I've
found a lot of people, and I've met a lot
of people who are doing things because it was getting views.
They're doing things because it was making them money, and like,
I don't know a single one of them who managed
(25:41):
to keep it up. Like they all do it and
they love it and they make up you know, some
of them make boatloads of cash doing it, but then
at certain point they're like, I gotta do something else.
But like for me, I feel like very fortunate in
that I've managed to find the thing I like to
do early on. So this sort of exploring of like oh,
let's get into like sort of longer form film. It
was because you know, we were seeing YouTube change and
we were like, yeah, I don't think we kind of
like we don't work here as well anymore. We don't
(26:03):
have the stamina to keep up that kind of schedule
that we were doing anymore. And you know, we felt
like we said a lot in the world world of
short film, and I want to be like, what can
I say now in longer form formats? And what are
the kind of stories I can tell in longer forms?
So that was from YouTube to like the web series,
to Do is a couple of shows for Hulu and
now doing trying to do a movie. It's it's all
just sort of the same vein of artistic exploration. So
(26:23):
it really just comes down to I think if you
love filmmaking, you genuinely do love it, and you would
do it no matter what. It doesn't matter if anyone's watching,
it doesn't matter if you can make money off of it,
you take a job and do it on the side.
If that's how much you love it, that's I think
what you need to be asking yourself because if it's
not that fine, I think you have to find something
that is that way for you.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Hey, stick around, because after the break started from the bottom.
Producer David Jah joins me on Mike as we ask
Freddie about the obstacles he faced in Hollywood as an
Asian creator. David, I know you're a fan of Freddie.
Anything you want to.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Ask, you know, Freddy, I will say, when I was
grown up, YouTube did seem like a way for Asian
filmmakers to sort of circumvent the institution of Hollywood. It was,
and it was a breadth of fresh air to see
a yellow face out there.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
So I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on
being an Asian creator.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
So here's the way I feel about that, which is,
when I think about myself as an American, I think
myself as a human being, I don't ever want to
feel like I'm constrained by anything. So for me, and
there's Asian stories that I want to tell, but I
feel like I don't want to be someone to be
like and they only tell Asian stories, Right, I feel
(27:47):
like that is in and of itself, its own cage
that you get segmented into and can be discarded and ignored.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I would much rather be someone to be like who
has the freedom that is implicit to white filmmakers, which
is you can make something and cover any subject. So
in that sense, I think that when I look at,
you know, sort of the generations to come, I think
the message that I would want to send is like,
not one of like stick to the world that you
(28:16):
know and only say that it's like no, no, no. I
think art is about exploring and empathizing with other viewpoints.
And maybe I'll overreach, maybe I'll try and tell a
story that I like, ooh, didn't get all the nuance
on that.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
That's the risk of art.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
And I think that I just look around and I
see so few, especially because you know there's a stereotype
with with sort of Asian parenting and growing up. I
see so few artistic Asian types. And then that bums
me out because like it's devastating. It's devastating, it's a
threat to us. So what do you make of this
recent trend then, where Asian actors, Asian movie makers, Asian
(28:51):
media is sort of being pushed towards this pigeonhole where
we have to be Asian.
Speaker 5 (28:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah, like that's our thing now, Like that's our genre.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
Now.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I was literally joking.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
I was literally joking the other day where I'm like,
I can't wait until we get past this era of
movies where our parents apologize to us as like the
plot point, like the.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Tropes, man, it's so bad, it's out of control. You know,
a lot of Asian Americans don't like Asian American content.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yeah, And so to me, at least, to me at least,
what's interesting about it is like there's kind of two
factors that play there, Right, There's there is a palatability
towards a predominantly white dominated quote unquote mainstream culture.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
What YouTube and online has opened up is that there
are niche cultures that are huge, right, Like K pop
is exploded because of online video. Right, So the question
of mainstream possibility, to me, the only answer to when
someone tries to pigeonhole you.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Is you must resist it as hard as you can.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
You must go as hard as you can in the
opposite direction in order to not be pigeonholed. I think
that the obligation is not to be like, what is
the most commercially viable thing that I can fit in
to the white media landscape that will get us the
sort of athletes?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Nah?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
Fuck that That's why, honestly, that's why I think about
Better Luck Tomorrow so much. Justin Lynn's film that you
know he started his career off with, which depicted these
very studious.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Group of Asians doing crimes.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
You know, the very famous example in the film History
where he played that at a festival he was sun
Dance and like a critic stood up and I was like,
you're depicting Asians in this like negative light, Like how
can you do this as an Asian filmmaker? And Roger
Ebert stood up and I was like, no, man, he
should be able to say that.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Why not?
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Hell yeah, we do crimes, do you know what I'm saying? Like,
that's the kind of stuff where I want. I want
to be like, listen, this stuff is out there. How
we respond to it is within our control, you know.
And I think that, like it's always going to be
commercially viable to hw with white culture. There's gravity. The
gravity is going to pull you towards what's the mainstream
pop culture accessibility? Right it's and I think it's up
(30:53):
to us, as if you're a true artist, it's up
to you to like fire the boost of rockets, be
like no, hell no, we're going over here.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yo, Freddy over nine million subscribers, one point six billion views. Man,
by any measure of success, like your successful filmilmmaker, Like,
I feel like in another era there's a war where
you should be Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez if you wanted
to be right, Like, if you wanted to have that,
you should be Quentin Tarantino if you wanted to have that.
(31:22):
Right Maybe, I mean, look, I mean been given the
same opportunities at least that these people were given. Right,
But like it feels like the given the level of
audience's been able to build the level of success you've
been on the to have as a filmmaker, Like you
should be given the opportunities that a lot of like
indie filmmakers have been given over the years. Like is
there do you feel like the predominant view of Asian
(31:46):
involvement in cinema has been a factor in that?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Or I mean, I think there's always things in life
that are some parts are in your hands, some parts
are out of your hands, right, Like there's certain things
that's just like I can't control what the taste is
and like, hey, you know what, here's the book that
was the Asian book that got popular and then you know,
right like that a lot of the stuff in life
I think is out of your hands and then other
stuff in my hands. I think I've always tried to
(32:11):
stay as close to my sort of artistic principles, guiding
principles as possible.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Those are the choices that you make.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
And for me, I think that you know, there certainly
must be some I think there's of course, externalizing factors
that have influenced the path that I took.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Kind of bullshit like Kevin Smith can make a career
out of clerks, Like why can't see it?
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Might be like I'm happy though, I'll be able to.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Make some sort of commercial career out of in film,
out of Rocket Jump.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Even you said earlier like you keep having to prove yourself,
like like it's not good enough.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
See, I love that, but I love that you like that.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
I love being in a position where I feel like
I have to prove myself.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
But that's the thing I love that.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
I don't know why I'm addicted to it because I
think that, like I think that that place is where
it's like, that's where it's all on the line, and
to me, it's like it's your choice, right. You can
either be like, dang, the system's unfair, or maybe this
is an Asian thing. I grew up here the Ox.
Everyone says Ye're the Ox. They just put their head
down work. That's like that's how I feel. I just
put my head down, like, all right, listen, the world
(33:13):
is not rewarding me in the way or whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I don't care.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
I'm just gonna keep working on my stuff because I
love doing this the way. I feel like as long
as I can at least sustain my career, at least
I can kind of like pay for my rent and like,
you know, pay for my food. I'm gonna keep going
kind of the direction, the direction that I go.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
You know, it's funny. I feel like that's I feel
like that's the primary way people of color become successful
is just learning to put your head down and work.
Because when you lift your head up and you start
to realize, yeah, this a little depressing.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
A little fit.
Speaker 5 (33:41):
Yeah, it's so sad. We gotta just put our head
down and ignore it. Shit, man, Freddie want thank you
may Yeah, thank you so much. That was Freddy Wong,
one of the og stars of YouTube and early influencers. Obviously,
his career in media has taken some twists and turns,
(34:03):
but it's incredible what.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
He's managed to accomplish. All from a YouTube channel that
he started to as the six called Freddy w startup
from the Bottom is produced by David Jaw, edited by
Keishaw Williams, engineered by Bent Holliday, Booked by Laura Morgan
with production help from Lea Rose. The show is executive
produced by Jacob Goldstein, who's not all up in the
(34:27):
videos for Pushkin Industries. Our theme music's by Bent Holliday
and David Jaw featuring Anthony Yaggs and Savanna Joe Lack.
Listen to Start Up from the Bottom. Wherever you get
your podcasts and if you want ad free episodes available
one week early sign up for Pushkin Plus. Check out
Pushkin dot Fm or the Apple Show page for more information.
(34:49):
If you like her show, please remember to share, rate,
and review us on your podcast app. I'm justin Richmond.
Pushkin. All right, y'all, So it's twenty twenty three and
we should probably finally act like it is on this show. Obviously,
one of the most ubiquitous ways to make it from
the bottom these days is to become an influencer. Freddy Wong,
my guest on today's show, is an early version of that.
(00:35):
A YouTuber. He started his channel, Freddy w and six,
back when YouTube was still a fledgling video sharing website.
That YouTube channel eventually became a real production company, Rocket Jump. Today,
rocket Jump has over one point six billion views on
YouTube and nine million subscribers. His YouTube journey, sparked by
(00:57):
an early love of film, led to a production deal
with Lionsgate to create a Hulu show a handful of
years ago. Since then, he stopped regularly uploading videos online,
has dabbled in podcast, and is generally just plotting what
his next move's gonna be. On today's episode, we check
in with one of the original stars of YouTube and
(01:17):
explore the ups and downs of internet fame and creation.
This is started from the bottom, harder and success stories
from people like us pretty long. Man, Thanks for doing this, appreciate.
Speaker 2 (01:31):
You, Thanks for having me on.
Speaker 1 (01:32):
Man So I want to I want to get into
all things YouTube and filmmaking. I want to talk filmmaking.
But I'm just curious where there's not like a ton
of info about your early life out and about in public.
What where did your love of storytelling developed?
Speaker 3 (01:51):
Probably when I spent that stint in prison. No no, no, no,
I honestly, you know what it was was growing up
there were two Blockbuster videos that was like the close
one and then the bigger, nicer one. My dad loves movies,
loves American movies, and he would show us like just
so much. So like pretty much every weekend we'd be
at the Blockbuster just renting movies. So like Friday we'd
(02:14):
see something, Saturday night, we see something Sunday afternoon. I
would have, you know, a third movie sometimes, Like it
was just a lot of time in video stores, honestly.
And also my dad, who like just has such a
like I remember, I remember when I was like I
must have been like eleven or twelve. He was like, Yo,
you have to see this guy, Dustin Hoffman. He's one
(02:36):
of the greatest American actors. And so he rented the Graduate.
I'm like, I kind of think I okay, I don't
quite get what's going on with him in this, like mom,
but like it seems kind of you know, definitely didn't
quite get it. Like I still remember watching the ending
and feeling a certain way be like what the interesting ending?
And then like the next week he was like, you
think that was crazy, here's his next movie? And then
(02:58):
he rented Midnight Cowboy Wow, which like which is like
you'd rather get very famous, like almost X ray, right,
or I think at the time even extra I remember
being like as a kid being like, I'm too young
for this, but that was the that was the approach.
Speaker 1 (03:10):
So your dad was, would you say outside of movies?
Your dad was conservative in his approach to raise.
Speaker 2 (03:16):
Both of my parents.
Speaker 3 (03:17):
Like, you know, I get this a lot because I
think a lot of people have the shared experience in
terms of the Asian American like typical Asian American experience. Right.
The reason why there's a lot of similarity on it
is because at least speaking to East Asian specifically Chinese
immigrants China.
Speaker 2 (03:34):
So I'm full Chinese, so you kind.
Speaker 3 (03:35):
Of have to essentially historically you kind of have like
these waves of immigration and migration, right, if you're in
California and you're like Japanese or Chinese, Like there's a
chance that your family goes.
Speaker 2 (03:46):
Back, like back to like railroad times, right.
Speaker 3 (03:48):
But the Pacific Northwest a lot of the Asian population
there in my case, right escaping from the Cultural Revolution
in China. You have a lot of Southeast Asians post
Vietnam War, right, And so like there's a reason why
when you think about like the typical East Asian experience,
a lot of them, you know, like it's because it's
like it's fresh immigrant families hitting this sort of specific generation.
So there's a lot of commonality, is there, Like a
(04:08):
lot the sort of touchstones were the same. Take school seriously, right, Like,
But I think I do acknowledge that it was different
for me because I think my parents just had a
different approach to it. You know, at least for myself
and my brother, we had a lot more freedom because
you know, like sophomore year in high school, like I
want to make a movie with a friend of mine,
and they're like, as long as your grades are fine,
do whatever you want, right, Like that was the sort
(04:30):
of feeling on that. I think part of it also
is because my mom, she was a professional dancer in China,
and so has this kind of artistic bend and has
the sort of appreciation for the stuff that isn't going
to make you six figures all the time, you know.
Like so I think that like that combination kind of output,
(04:50):
my brother.
Speaker 1 (04:51):
And so you dab puts you onto movie making or
to your love of film. And then you are lucky
enough to live near a Blockbuster.
Speaker 3 (05:01):
I mean, it's when I think about this, I think
about luck a lot, and I think that there's a
lot of things that fall in place here. Right, So
consider that I'm lucky enough to have be alive in
an era when you have Blockbuster Video, and you have
video rental, and you have DVDs and VHS tapes, and
you have the access to a library, right huge and
especially in the pre broadband internet days, that's a big deal.
(05:21):
Right On top of that, we have the iMac that
came out the first real kind of accessible consumer computer
that let you take high eight or digital eight or
mini DV footage and like edit it. Because I remember
like taking vacation videos and kind of messing with them,
and like you know, on the computer at home, being
able to do that already, like.
Speaker 1 (05:40):
That's like camera like Jamie yeah, like.
Speaker 3 (05:43):
Like yeah, oh yeah, yeah yeah, like a little sony
thing got Like it was that era of camera where
they were like, yo, we got night vision mode. Yeah yeah, yeah,
you know night vision mode. Like they stop that. Yeah,
Like no, but no cameras come with night vision. But
that was a moment where it was like, Yo, this
camera soons three, it was so cool and how does
(06:05):
this work? Like I remember growing up and like doing
like making a little spe effects videos with my brother,
Like we would take these pool cues and like do
those choreographed sword fights, and then I would go back
into the computer and like put lightsaber effects on it.
Because you know, that's the pinnacle of filmmaking at the time,
was doing cool Star Wars lightsaber.
Speaker 1 (06:23):
So there's a certain amount of luck involved and we're
doing what you do, and I mean you happened. You're
growing up in the heyday of in a early nineties
would be another high water mark for movie making, you know,
and you're being able to rent movies and to fill
to rent movies and also like again right, like you
remember that that early nineties coincides with this indie movie revolution, right,
(06:46):
You're talking about guys like Aronofsky coming out, you're talking
about Quintartino, and then people being like, ooh, indie film,
what's going on here? And on top of that, there
was a demand for it because people were building so
many screens. There are so many flights, they just need
to fill fill them up with screens. So you had
companies that were willing to take a shot on like
the Sofia Coppolas of the world, or the people who
were like, hey, they just had a Sun Dance film
(07:08):
and that's it. The dominant mythology growing up for a
filmmaker was like, oh, you got to make an indie
and go to a festival and do all that stuff,
which I think has you know, changed quite a bit
in the year. So you've been growing up formative years
being spent in that indie filmmaking boom loving cinema. Did
that make you feel like you could be a filmmaker?
Speaker 2 (07:23):
One hundred percent yes, one hundred percent. Yes. It's like, oh,
you can tell these stories and you can do it cheap.
Speaker 3 (07:28):
As long as you do it cheap, and you know,
I mean like it was a total it's just a
totally different context. So now so then that you know,
in that hunt, in that search for trying to find
ways to make movies anyway we could, we got onto online.
Another four tu of this development, right, that you could
put things online and people could see it and you
could potentially generate an audience from it. That was just
(07:49):
starting when I was in college. People were like, ooh.
The idea of like a popular YouTuber meaning anything was
completely foreign to everybody, even in film school.
Speaker 2 (07:57):
I remember after I graduated, I was.
Speaker 3 (07:59):
Like, oh, hey, I'm gonna do doing this YouTube challenge
and think everyone's response for the film school. So I
was always just like what why, Like what is what's
the point? You know, like even that even just the
idea of like making a video, putting it somewhere, getting
someone to even find it. Yeah, sometimes you didn't want
the video to go viral because you have to pay
for it, because your bandwidth costs would spike up that
week because all of a sudden people are sharing it
(08:19):
on emails and now I gotta pay a thousand bucks
at the end of the month because people were watching it.
Speaker 1 (08:24):
So you mentioned you went to film school. I mean
you're born and raised in Seattle in Washington, Yes, correct, correct,
come down to USC for film school. Yeah, you're twenty
in two thousand and five, which I would say is
probably the year that YouTube really plants itself in the
mainstream consciousness. You know, yeah, but you have Hollywood dream
I mean, you have dreams to break into Hollywood to
(08:44):
some extent. You moved down. Now you're in film school
at USC where George Lucas went, and you know, like
everyone went right, and it's like you at some point
decide to go to make stuff for YouTube rather than
try to necessarily break into film the more traditional route.
Speaker 3 (08:59):
So for a little bit we were doing that. We
were doing direct to DVD movies. I was working on
direct to DVD movies, and like in film school, I
met this guy named Brandon Loatch who was my partner
for a base all the YouTube era, and we were
watching YouTube and we were seeing these guys like build
audiences and we had no idea what it really meant.
But I do very distinctly remember being like, you know,
(09:19):
like Kevin Smith can make movies whatever, he can kind
of do whatever he wants because he's got this group
of audience who likes his movies and they like him
as a person who makes movies. So he kind of
has this weird built in audience, and like I remember
at the time being I feel like if you could
build up an audience first, maybe you get more freedom later.
And that was like literally the depth of the thinking.
(09:41):
So Brandon and I were like, well, let's do a
YouTube channel, let's try stuff, let's try making stuff. In college,
we were making like little videos, and we were seeing
some of them pop off. Like one of my early
videos was this guitar Hero video or it's just me
playing Guitar Hero or a very ridiculous way, but like
that popped off and it was one of those weird
formative moments where we were watching it and we're like, yo,
it's gonna get a million views, and they're like, wow,
that's crazy. And then it hit a million views and
(10:02):
kept going. We're like, oh, it doesn't just stop. It
just keeps going like this isn't like it hits a
million and then no one ever sees again, Like these
keep going for a while. So like we got into
this feeling of like, oh, it's so cool to try
and like make something and try and have it be
something that people react to and respond to emotionally, and
maybe they want to share it, try to just pump
(10:22):
those numbers as opposed to I think a lot of
times a way think about artists like they they close
themselves off and they do their great works and then
they present it to the adoring public, where whereas in
this case it was more about for us like Trama's
populous approach of like, well, let's see what whether people
want to see.
Speaker 1 (10:35):
It change your aim. It kind of did change your
dream in a sense.
Speaker 3 (10:40):
To an extent, because I think fundamentally anybody who gets
into film, especially coming at it from like a popular
film standpoint, Ie, you didn't grow up watching like the
experimental films of like a guy like Stan Bracket or something,
and you got into movies because you saw Jurassic Park
and you want to like, there is a certain and
that's why to me, film is such a fascinating artistic medium.
(11:00):
There's a certain acknowledgment of commerciality with film. There's a
certain acknowledgement that this stuff costs money to make and
that people need to pay money to see it in
order to justify the cost. And how do you get
people to see it? You need to be populist to
some extent, right, And it's really interesting because that's like
this inconsistency at the core of this art form because
it's not pure art, but it's also not pure populist
(11:23):
mass drivel either. It finds this balance in between, and
film I think has always had that tension inside of it.
Speaker 1 (11:29):
So when you go back to twenty year old you,
who's starting to upload stuff to YouTube, Yeah, what at
that point, like if you could have been like in
twenty years my dream film is to make X, Like
what would you have compared it to? Would it have
been in Dressing Park?
Speaker 3 (11:44):
I mean, like for me, it was the two things
that it was the two things that I loved growing up,
which was I love comedy, I love action, and to me,
action comedy is one of the hardest genres that to
do well because I also I grew up with like
actually movies like The Matrix, And I remember a formative
experience watching The Matrix in theaters was like when Neo
starts blocking Agent Smith at the end with one hand,
he turns into it as one hand. I remember standing
(12:07):
up in the theater do it up, and my parents like,
what are you doing?
Speaker 2 (12:11):
Like sit down?
Speaker 3 (12:11):
Like no, Like what I'm seeing here is so big
and so important to me that like I can't remain
seated anymore. I have to like and like I remember
me like what I can't that what I didn't know
what to do with myself for that, So like stuff
like The Matrix was high up there, like you know,
I think everybody after they saw that movie, especially of
our generation of filmmakers, was like yo, slow mo diving
(12:35):
you know, which then you know, took me down the
path of you know, of course the Hong Kong Blood
operas and all that, and being familiar with you know,
John woodswork before The Matrix to be like, wow, finally
there's like an American movie that's doing this stuff that
I love in these Hong Kong movies, so like just
big action movies and just like the fun of it right,
Like to me, humor is like such a I loved
like the melt Brooks and the Naked Gun movies and
(12:57):
like all those the Socker Brothers movies.
Speaker 2 (12:59):
Like I thought that maybe like a.
Speaker 1 (13:00):
Dio die Hard would have been like a dream movie
doing something like that.
Speaker 3 (13:04):
A funnier though, like it's not even funnier than that,
like okay, okay, like definitely funnier because I even goofy
and at the end of the day, I just I
love I love film comedy too.
Speaker 2 (13:12):
So it's like if you could blend like Hong Kong
action movies.
Speaker 3 (13:15):
And humor and also as a visualfects nerd, right like
I love doing like the Star Wars lightsabers and doing
all the cool stuff that you can do with.
Speaker 2 (13:22):
Computers because I was a big nerd growing up too.
Somewhere in there, somewhere in there, it.
Speaker 1 (13:26):
Was kind of the tree well, you know, and having
painted that dream, that's not too far off from what
you started uploading to YouTube and YouTube, I could see
where you're thinking would be that would be a good
platform for it. Because an action comedy film, of course
needs some sort of exposition. You need a plot, you
need narrative movement.
Speaker 2 (13:45):
But but it could be gags. It could be gased
like you don't.
Speaker 1 (13:48):
Need to have like a you don't need to have
like a a pulp fiction.
Speaker 2 (13:50):
Style humanity story.
Speaker 3 (13:52):
Yeah, it could just be like here's a cool I mean,
like right, like here's it. And how many movies get
summed up by like the best kung fu fights from
this movie and people just sit there on YouTube and
watch the fights only you know what I mean, Like,
so action has that has that almost purity of like
almost like dance, right, almost like choreography. Here's just the
thing on its own, here's the self contained universe, here's
(14:12):
gags within it. But yeah, that honestly, you know, YouTube
gave us the freedom to do that, so we really,
we really took it and felt like we took good
advantage of that.
Speaker 1 (14:23):
We're going to take a quick break, but when we
come back. Freddie tells me about his first taste of
viral success. What was your first big kind of hit
on YouTube?
Speaker 3 (14:42):
So in twenty ten is when we started, And at
the end of twenty ten, we did this video called
Future first person Shooter where we took a GoPro two
at the time, taped it to the side of my
head and did like this sort of riff which became
this visual motif that shows up throughout our work at
that time. But like it was a riff on like
what first person shooters looked like the perspective of the
(15:04):
video games. Yeah, but the novelty of it was I
think it was that it was real, right, and I
think that for people who were really into playing video
games at that time, you're just like, oh, this is
an interesting imagining of like what perhaps in the future
when graphics are photo realistic, maybe this is what looks like.
And we were taking little jokes from multiplayer games and
stuff like Call of Duty and stuff like that, and
(15:25):
we did a little pyrotechnics illegal pyrotechnics on it, and
so it had like a visual pop to it, but
also just kind of looked different and also, let's tell
a little story, let's get some jokes, and then let's
do some stuff that looks cool. And that was around
Christmas of twenty ten, I believe, and I remember it
went out and then like because there was just like
no content around Christmas, all of these blogs just picked
(15:48):
it up and we just saw like in the morning
everyone opened their presence and then like everyone got bored
by about like twelve o'clock and then like all these
video game blogs were like check it out, like this
is what it looks like in the future first and
it just sort of went and it went in a
way in a speed that we had never seen before,
like whoa, everyone's covering this and that I remember really
opening my eyes being like WHOA, how quickly stuff can
(16:09):
go and how like quickly stuff can spread.
Speaker 1 (16:11):
That was like my first experience with it at this point.
Do you view that as your career?
Speaker 3 (16:16):
Yeah, so, I mean, like career is such a weird
one because I feel like I've spent my whole life
just kind of like going from things that I think
are interesting. And I've been fortunate in that the things
I find interesting also have some overlap with my ability
to sort of make some money from it and sustain
myself in the other ways you need.
Speaker 2 (16:34):
To with life. Does that make me a little basic? Probably?
Speaker 3 (16:36):
Probably it does. You know, I'm not gonna that's fine,
That's fine, you know. But so like at the time,
I remember we were again, here's another fortunate thing. At
that time, we myself, these guys Sam and Nico, like,
we were all living in this loft in downtown Los
Angeles and it was I think our rent. Each We
paid two hundred bucks a month, like two hundred two
(16:57):
and and fifty bucks a month, and we were all
sharing this giant, crazy cool former paint factory space. There
are no walls, so we all slept in like one
room but just different corners of the same room.
Speaker 2 (17:09):
Was cold.
Speaker 3 (17:09):
We'd like turn on the oven and like heat our
hands up by the oven. But we were able to
pursue YouTube because it was like, Bro, you know, I
just quit my job. I was working at twice century
Fox doing video game stuff, and I was like I'm
done with this, and I was, you know, talking to
brand or like we could do this for a year
and be fine, Like because our rent is so low,
we can just take that risk, right, you know, Like
(17:29):
it was good that stuff popped out very early for
us comparatively, but like we were ready to just be like, yeah,
let's just do this for a year.
Speaker 2 (17:35):
See what happens.
Speaker 1 (17:36):
You know, when when your stuff starts popping off in
twenty ten, you're starting to get like, you know, get
big numbers on videos, like we really starting to like
make money like how to lead your circumstances.
Speaker 2 (17:48):
A little bit.
Speaker 3 (17:49):
And when you when we talk about the eras of YouTube, right,
that really started to take off in the second and
third years of doing things, because at that point then
you start to get like brand attention. There was like companies,
video game companies, what have you that were starting to
be like, oh, maybe we can use YouTube business alternative
advertising platform, and they weren't paying as much as like
TV commercials, even though anything that we did was getting
(18:09):
more exposure for them than a teeny commercial Everwood. But
but like again the context right, like nobody Madison Avenue
didn't respect it in that way. So once things start
to like really in terms of being like, oh this
is like can be like a real like money maker
for us was one you start to be like, oh,
I guess we could do like a little video promoting
a game. But there was that window about to your
window where it was like you start to be like
brand deals started to show up, and then people could
(18:31):
start to like, oh, shoot, I can we can shoot
this for this much and here's how much it's coming in,
and we almost were like a little mini ad agency.
It started to change things because you know, we're like, oh, okay,
we can buy like a nice camera. Now, oh wait,
hey we can maybe buy this light or like buy
this green screen pop up thing, you know, and then
they're not like crazy expensive stuff. But it started to
be like, oh, this is allowing us to keep doing
(18:52):
what we like doing. And also I think we very
quickly realized that it was just great practice every week
forcing yourself to make something, finish it, see it through
put it up and then next week you're just doing
something completely different. That process where you're forced to just
take something to completion over and over and over again.
I think it's a valuable craft, and I think that
we realized very quickly. We're like, this is great because
we get to practice visual effects, we get practice doing movies.
(19:16):
We can make mistakes, but it's fine because next week
we'll do.
Speaker 2 (19:19):
Another video, you know, and it doesn't matter.
Speaker 3 (19:21):
What was what set us apart at that time was
that we really took it seriously. Like I think a
lot of people, especially once money started rolling in, they're like,
what's the minimum amount of work I can do to
get a YouTube video up and get views. I don't
think we ever had that mindset. It was always about
trying to do it better and trying to improve our
craft as filmmakers. We'd shoot it, we'd edit it, we'd
send the edit to sound design, where I would do
(19:42):
sound design. Brandon would then do additional vfxs. I would
help out VFX. He would do the color of it.
We'd do a color pass, we'd mix it in pro tools,
do a fo like we were doing it like it
was a full movie and we're doing one every week,
So like I fucked my sleep up. But you know,
like that was but that was the like the grind.
Speaker 1 (20:00):
No no, I.
Speaker 3 (20:02):
Mean like no, I mean honestly, at a certain point,
like we were brand and I were doing like an
all nighter every week for like two years, Like that
was just the energy of the time.
Speaker 1 (20:10):
Yeah. Yeah, at this era when you are twenty five,
you're pulling all nighters, you're making money on YouTube, you're
in LA again, mid twenties, like having some level of success,
How did you manage to keep focused, to have the
drive to keep to pull on nighters once a week
every night for two years rather than just go blow
money like and you know.
Speaker 3 (20:29):
I mean, I think a big part of it was
seeing numbers go up and being like, wow, more people
are seeing this and we're reaching more people sort of
on a week by week basis, which was really just
exciting to just note that alone puts a lot of
gas in the engine, so to speak, because it's just fun,
right and at the end of the day, we got
to do whatever we want to do every week, and
there was a certain creative freedom to that challenge of
being like, all right, well we're gonna do this week
how we're gonna top ourselves. And it required a lot
(20:51):
of energy, required a love of effort, required your full
life dedication towards it. But I think the difference was
the end goal was always I want to make things
that people see. And how they do that. Is it
in a dark theater that they pay fifteen bucks for
or is it on their phone right before classes start
in school.
Speaker 2 (21:09):
To me, that's immaterial.
Speaker 3 (21:11):
I don't care about that as much comparatively, right, Like,
I know a lot of filmmakers in my generation talking
about the cinematic experience and you got to see it
on the big screen, And to me, I'm like, listen,
if I get that luxury, great, But right now where
I'm at, like, yo, if anybody just sees it, I'm happy,
Like I don't care. If I'm not gonna put any
restrictions on it. I'm already nobody's I'm already in nobody,
you know what I mean. Like, I can't afford to
(21:32):
be like you can only see myself. I'm like, anywhere
anyhow you can find that you can see it, Like,
I'm happy. I don't care so to that to that extent.
Right if you said, listen, I'm gonna give you a choice.
Would you rather have a theatrical release that does okay?
Or would you rather have like a home video iTunes
only streaming only thing, but a lot of more.
Speaker 2 (21:50):
People see it.
Speaker 3 (21:51):
At the end of the day, I think that I
got into film because I like entertaining people and I
like entertaining myself. Right, I think I find a lot
of stuff we do very funny too, and I get
a kick out of it. Right, So if that becomes
sort of higher on your list of priorities than other
totally valid artistic sensibilities, right then I think that sort
of shapes your worldview a little bit.
Speaker 1 (22:10):
I think it might be interesting to answer those to
tease those out a little bit more, Like, like, you
picked the theatrical release, roup, what do you think then
happens to your career theoretically?
Speaker 3 (22:19):
So I think that in I think that in Hollywood
and this industry specifically, there's a halo effect of having
done things right. Like, only if you've done something in
the exact context they're looking at, do they think you
can do that thing in that context? So your constant
I've felt, at least in my experience, I've always felt
like I'm constantly needing to prove myself and prove I
can do something again and again and again. And what
(22:40):
it does for your career if you get a film
and it's you know, sort of the more atracial, theatical approach,
and it allows you those opportunities that are more in
that direction of things.
Speaker 2 (22:49):
Right.
Speaker 3 (22:49):
And by the way, I will note that this is
sort of it's where a very weird time period because
stuff is shifting. But like I would say, let's say
a few years ago, that's the kind of thing that
would say like, okay, cool, maybe you could you might
be opened up now to a commercial directing gig or
like a television episode. Now you get a couple television
direction credits, or it makes it easier for like, hey,
(23:10):
I want to raise money in the traditional routes for
another theatrical feature film.
Speaker 2 (23:14):
Oh, you've done it.
Speaker 3 (23:15):
Once already and you've hear some numbers for it. Okay,
you're a more trustworthy ncity. You're more likely to get
that compared to someone who's like, I've never directed a
future film before and I want some money for that.
So it opens up the doors in that direction of
the industry, right, And I think what's interesting is that
those are different doors. It's not there's not a lot overlap.
Because then let's take the other direction. Let's take a okay, cool,
you made a movie. It became huge on iTunes. Everyone
(23:38):
downloaded on iTunes, incredible numbers on it did better than
like commercial movies that week, like that sort of thing.
A lot of people saw what that opens up potentially,
like crowdfunding, for example, in that scenario becomes a little
bit easier for you compared to like an indie movie
that someone's done that nobody's necessarily seen. I think you're
more likely to access the direct to audience thing, and
I think it's a much more DIY route in that direction.
(23:59):
Right when'm talking about crowdfunding, I'm talking about that sort
of stuff. But again, different doors, different directions.
Speaker 1 (24:04):
So that really and that's really scenario released in iTunes.
It's successful. It's taking you further away from the traditional route,
opening you up though to an audience of people who
might then you might be able to fund crowd source
fund or maybe then do it the actual and then
maybe created a.
Speaker 3 (24:20):
Film that you could release potentially right like or or
the other direction where it's like, oh maybe we just
keep doing stuff online only I know, you know, there's
some some folks I know who are like, yeah, they
don't care about theatrial release, but they they aim everything
around the iTunes release and how they digitally sort of
monetize it.
Speaker 2 (24:37):
Right, So like that's where we're at right now. We
did this.
Speaker 3 (24:39):
We started a podcast, a Dungeons and Dragons podcast called
Dungeons and Daddies, which is not a BDSM podcast. It's
a Dungeons and Dragons podcast, and it's like it's it's
a story where it's like an improv comedy thing. We
like myself and four friends we play Dungeons and Dragons
and we play four dads, like human dads from our
world sent into a fantasy world to like rescue their kids,
(24:59):
and it's like dad humor and all that stuff, you know.
We started a Patreon for it. The podcast has been
growing over the past couple of years. Matt and myself,
my directing partner, we were like, all right, cool, this
is our way of funding a movie. We're gonna use
this and we fund the movie. So we shot the movie
at the end of last year. We're in post production
it now, and we're gonna go like the festival route
for it, and like worst case scenario, we got good
(25:19):
practice and we'll do another one. So you know, look,
I think I think you can go in any direction
and you can find your way to it. What matters
is do you want that? Do you want to actually
make movies? Because in the course of my career, I've
found a lot of people, and I've met a lot
of people who are doing things because it was getting views.
They're doing things because it was making them money, and like,
I don't know a single one of them who managed
(25:41):
to keep it up. Like they all do it and
they love it and they make up you know, some
of them make boatloads of cash doing it, but then
at certain point they're like, I gotta do something else.
But like for me, I feel like very fortunate in
that I've managed to find the thing I like to
do early on. So this sort of exploring of like oh,
let's get into like sort of longer form film. It
was because you know, we were seeing YouTube change and
we were like, yeah, I don't think we kind of
like we don't work here as well anymore. We don't
(26:03):
have the stamina to keep up that kind of schedule
that we were doing anymore. And you know, we felt
like we said a lot in the world world of
short film, and I want to be like, what can
I say now in longer form formats? And what are
the kind of stories I can tell in longer forms?
So that was from YouTube to like the web series,
to Do is a couple of shows for Hulu and
now doing trying to do a movie. It's it's all
just sort of the same vein of artistic exploration. So
(26:23):
it really just comes down to I think if you
love filmmaking, you genuinely do love it, and you would
do it no matter what. It doesn't matter if anyone's watching,
it doesn't matter if you can make money off of it,
you take a job and do it on the side.
If that's how much you love it, that's I think
what you need to be asking yourself because if it's
not that fine, I think you have to find something
that is that way for you.
Speaker 1 (26:43):
Hey, stick around, because after the break started from the bottom.
Producer David Jah joins me on Mike as we ask
Freddie about the obstacles he faced in Hollywood as an
Asian creator. David, I know you're a fan of Freddie.
Anything you want to.
Speaker 4 (27:02):
Ask, you know, Freddy, I will say, when I was
grown up, YouTube did seem like a way for Asian
filmmakers to sort of circumvent the institution of Hollywood. It was,
and it was a breadth of fresh air to see
a yellow face out there.
Speaker 1 (27:22):
Yeah.
Speaker 4 (27:22):
So I'm just wondering if you have any thoughts on
being an Asian creator.
Speaker 3 (27:26):
So here's the way I feel about that, which is,
when I think about myself as an American, I think
myself as a human being, I don't ever want to
feel like I'm constrained by anything. So for me, and
there's Asian stories that I want to tell, but I
feel like I don't want to be someone to be
like and they only tell Asian stories, Right, I feel
(27:47):
like that is in and of itself, its own cage
that you get segmented into and can be discarded and ignored.
Speaker 2 (27:54):
Right.
Speaker 3 (27:54):
I would much rather be someone to be like who
has the freedom that is implicit to white filmmakers, which
is you can make something and cover any subject. So
in that sense, I think that when I look at,
you know, sort of the generations to come, I think
the message that I would want to send is like,
not one of like stick to the world that you
(28:16):
know and only say that it's like no, no, no. I
think art is about exploring and empathizing with other viewpoints.
And maybe I'll overreach, maybe I'll try and tell a
story that I like, ooh, didn't get all the nuance
on that.
Speaker 2 (28:26):
That's the risk of art.
Speaker 3 (28:27):
And I think that I just look around and I
see so few, especially because you know there's a stereotype
with with sort of Asian parenting and growing up. I
see so few artistic Asian types. And then that bums
me out because like it's devastating. It's devastating, it's a
threat to us. So what do you make of this
recent trend then, where Asian actors, Asian movie makers, Asian
(28:51):
media is sort of being pushed towards this pigeonhole where
we have to be Asian.
Speaker 5 (28:56):
Yeah.
Speaker 2 (28:57):
Yeah, like that's our thing now, Like that's our genre.
Speaker 4 (28:59):
Now.
Speaker 2 (29:00):
I was literally joking.
Speaker 3 (29:01):
I was literally joking the other day where I'm like,
I can't wait until we get past this era of
movies where our parents apologize to us as like the
plot point, like the.
Speaker 4 (29:11):
Tropes, man, it's so bad, it's out of control. You know,
a lot of Asian Americans don't like Asian American content.
Speaker 3 (29:20):
Yeah, And so to me, at least, to me at least,
what's interesting about it is like there's kind of two
factors that play there, Right, There's there is a palatability
towards a predominantly white dominated quote unquote mainstream culture.
Speaker 2 (29:34):
Right.
Speaker 3 (29:34):
What YouTube and online has opened up is that there
are niche cultures that are huge, right, Like K pop
is exploded because of online video. Right, So the question
of mainstream possibility, to me, the only answer to when
someone tries to pigeonhole you.
Speaker 2 (29:47):
Is you must resist it as hard as you can.
Speaker 3 (29:49):
You must go as hard as you can in the
opposite direction in order to not be pigeonholed. I think
that the obligation is not to be like, what is
the most commercially viable thing that I can fit in
to the white media landscape that will get us the
sort of athletes?
Speaker 1 (30:04):
Nah?
Speaker 3 (30:04):
Fuck that That's why, honestly, that's why I think about
Better Luck Tomorrow so much. Justin Lynn's film that you
know he started his career off with, which depicted these
very studious.
Speaker 2 (30:15):
Group of Asians doing crimes.
Speaker 3 (30:16):
You know, the very famous example in the film History
where he played that at a festival he was sun
Dance and like a critic stood up and I was like,
you're depicting Asians in this like negative light, Like how
can you do this as an Asian filmmaker? And Roger
Ebert stood up and I was like, no, man, he
should be able to say that.
Speaker 2 (30:31):
Why not?
Speaker 3 (30:32):
Hell yeah, we do crimes, do you know what I'm saying? Like,
that's the kind of stuff where I want. I want
to be like, listen, this stuff is out there. How
we respond to it is within our control, you know.
And I think that, like it's always going to be
commercially viable to hw with white culture. There's gravity. The
gravity is going to pull you towards what's the mainstream
pop culture accessibility? Right it's and I think it's up
(30:53):
to us, as if you're a true artist, it's up
to you to like fire the boost of rockets, be
like no, hell no, we're going over here.
Speaker 2 (30:58):
You know what I mean?
Speaker 1 (31:00):
Yo, Freddy over nine million subscribers, one point six billion views. Man,
by any measure of success, like your successful filmilmmaker, Like,
I feel like in another era there's a war where
you should be Kevin Smith, Robert Rodriguez if you wanted
to be right, Like, if you wanted to have that,
you should be Quentin Tarantino if you wanted to have that.
(31:22):
Right Maybe, I mean, look, I mean been given the
same opportunities at least that these people were given. Right,
But like it feels like the given the level of
audience's been able to build the level of success you've
been on the to have as a filmmaker, Like you
should be given the opportunities that a lot of like
indie filmmakers have been given over the years. Like is
there do you feel like the predominant view of Asian
(31:46):
involvement in cinema has been a factor in that?
Speaker 3 (31:49):
Or I mean, I think there's always things in life
that are some parts are in your hands, some parts
are out of your hands, right, Like there's certain things
that's just like I can't control what the taste is
and like, hey, you know what, here's the book that
was the Asian book that got popular and then you know,
right like that a lot of the stuff in life
I think is out of your hands and then other
stuff in my hands. I think I've always tried to
(32:11):
stay as close to my sort of artistic principles, guiding
principles as possible.
Speaker 2 (32:16):
Those are the choices that you make.
Speaker 3 (32:18):
And for me, I think that you know, there certainly
must be some I think there's of course, externalizing factors
that have influenced the path that I took.
Speaker 1 (32:25):
Kind of bullshit like Kevin Smith can make a career
out of clerks, Like why can't see it?
Speaker 2 (32:30):
Might be like I'm happy though, I'll be able to.
Speaker 1 (32:33):
Make some sort of commercial career out of in film,
out of Rocket Jump.
Speaker 4 (32:39):
Even you said earlier like you keep having to prove yourself,
like like it's not good enough.
Speaker 2 (32:43):
See, I love that, but I love that you like that.
Speaker 3 (32:45):
I love being in a position where I feel like
I have to prove myself.
Speaker 2 (32:50):
But that's the thing I love that.
Speaker 3 (32:51):
I don't know why I'm addicted to it because I
think that, like I think that that place is where
it's like, that's where it's all on the line, and
to me, it's like it's your choice, right. You can
either be like, dang, the system's unfair, or maybe this
is an Asian thing. I grew up here the Ox.
Everyone says Ye're the Ox. They just put their head
down work. That's like that's how I feel. I just
put my head down, like, all right, listen, the world
(33:13):
is not rewarding me in the way or whatever.
Speaker 2 (33:14):
I don't care.
Speaker 3 (33:15):
I'm just gonna keep working on my stuff because I
love doing this the way. I feel like as long
as I can at least sustain my career, at least
I can kind of like pay for my rent and like,
you know, pay for my food. I'm gonna keep going
kind of the direction, the direction that I go.
Speaker 1 (33:27):
You know, it's funny. I feel like that's I feel
like that's the primary way people of color become successful
is just learning to put your head down and work.
Because when you lift your head up and you start
to realize, yeah, this a little depressing.
Speaker 2 (33:40):
A little fit.
Speaker 5 (33:41):
Yeah, it's so sad. We gotta just put our head
down and ignore it. Shit, man, Freddie want thank you
may Yeah, thank you so much. That was Freddy Wong,
one of the og stars of YouTube and early influencers. Obviously,
his career in media has taken some twists and turns,
(34:03):
but it's incredible what.
Speaker 1 (34:05):
He's managed to accomplish. All from a YouTube channel that
he started to as the six called Freddy w startup
from the Bottom is produced by David Jaw, edited by
Keishaw Williams, engineered by Bent Holliday, Booked by Laura Morgan
with production help from Lea Rose. The show is executive
produced by Jacob Goldstein, who's not all up in the
(34:27):
videos for Pushkin Industries. Our theme music's by Bent Holliday
and David Jaw featuring Anthony Yaggs and Savanna Joe Lack.
Listen to Start Up from the Bottom. Wherever you get
your podcasts and if you want ad free episodes available
one week early sign up for Pushkin Plus. Check out
Pushkin dot Fm or the Apple Show page for more information.
(34:49):
If you like her show, please remember to share, rate,
and review us on your podcast app. I'm justin Richmond.
Popular Podcasts
On Purpose with Jay Shetty
I’m Jay Shetty host of On Purpose the worlds #1 Mental Health podcast and I’m so grateful you found us. I started this podcast 5 years ago to invite you into conversations and workshops that are designed to help make you happier, healthier and more healed. I believe that when you (yes you) feel seen, heard and understood you’re able to deal with relationship struggles, work challenges and life’s ups and downs with more ease and grace. I interview experts, celebrities, thought leaders and athletes so that we can grow our mindset, build better habits and uncover a side of them we’ve never seen before. New episodes every Monday and Friday. Your support means the world to me and I don’t take it for granted — click the follow button and leave a review to help us spread the love with On Purpose. I can’t wait for you to listen to your first or 500th episode!
The Breakfast Club
The World's Most Dangerous Morning Show, The Breakfast Club, With DJ Envy And Charlamagne Tha God!
The Joe Rogan Experience
The official podcast of comedian Joe Rogan.