TRANSCRIPT: The Dan Hentschel Podcast - Episode 8T)

Hi, everybody. Welcome to the Dan Hentschel podcast. We got to have a talk about something and I just want to warn you right at the top that some of you are probably going to be very--... This episode is going to be very painful for some of you. And believe me, I wish that I didn't have to say or do any of this.

But we are a family and I take that very seriously. I consider you all my children, you're the reason that I get up in the morning and I love you all with all of my heart. But if you start misbehaving, that's when I have to get out the belt. And I just want you to understand that the pain that you're about to feel is because I love you so much.

If I didn't love you, then I wouldn't care enough to cause you this pain so that you can be better, so that we can be better as a family. So I've been making content online for a long time. The first piece of content I ever made that was successful was a review of a book called The Fault in Our Stars by John Green that I posted on Tumblr.

Now, all of these words mean very, very different things today in 2023 than they did at the time this happened in 2012. Back then, that was the coolest possible sentence I could ever say. That was back before we found out that John Green was a pedophile. Before we had progressed as a society enough to realize that the Fault in our Stars was actually a terrible book.

Point is that was the first time my craft got widespread public recognition and John Green himself reblogged me on Tumblr and said, This guy's awesome. He's so funny. I know now with the benefit of hindsight that he was grooming me, but at the time I was very flattered and I tried to parlay this into a YouTube career. Eventually I lost interest and abandoned the account, but I'm glad I did because if some of those videos resurfaced, I don't think I'd ever work again.

Fast forward Summer 2017. This was the second content creation milestone of my life. I was home from college for the summer and I made a YouTube video about how much I hated my home town of Bel Air, Maryland. Bel Air is a suburb about 30 miles outside of Baltimore, and this video essentially made me the Michael Jackson of Bel Air, Maryland.

Those people had never seen anything like the talent that I had. It was like I was an alien that had landed from outer space. So again, at first I tried to use this new momentum to start a YouTube career, but the same as last time. I kind of lost interest, kind of abandoned it. Life goes on. More years go by.

I graduate from college. I moved to Los Angeles in 2020, and by this time Tik Tok has really become popular. And I remember so many people between 2018 and 2021 saying to me, Dan, you've got to get your ass on TikTok. You're so talented, you could change the game on there. And I was always kind of like, Yeah, you know, I don't know.

Like I've kind of gotten, to be honest, pretty desensitized to that kind of stuff because my entire life I've always kind of given off the impression that one day I was going to be really successful and famous people were always kind of saying stuff to try to hitch a ride on on me however they could for when I eventually would blast off into the stratosphere of superstardom.

So I never really took anybody's encouragement all that seriously. March 2021 I started posting on to the account that I am now famous for. That spring, I posted a handful of videos just kind of dipping my toe in the water. You know, one was about me having a pet rock. One was about me trying to go to every Chipotle in America.

It was nothing with any particular focus, just kind of fun, silly stuff that came to my mind. It wasn't until later that summer of 2021. Actually, probably two years ago this month that I really got my first taste of the limelight. I made a video about canned sardines, basically reviewing different brands of sardines. It was a couple of videos that were like sardine taste tests.

This got me my first round of followers. So naturally I decided to keep making videos about sardines. I realized I had stumbled upon something that was working, something that clicked with people that people wanted to watch. And I said to myself, People seem to like this sort of gross canned food theme. So I started to think about the other kinds of canned foods that I regularly like to eat myself and real life canned Vienna sausages, canned clams, that sort of thing.

The first big wave of followers that I ever got came when I made a video where I tried to make a rotisserie chicken skeleton, basically at the grocery store by my partner at the time, sold these really good rotisserie chickens. And what I did was essentially peeled off all the meat. And then I boiled the bones of the chicken and bleached them with hydrogen peroxide.

And I showed my whole process and I said, I'm going to reconstruct a full chicken skeleton out of only the materials available in a rotisserie chicken. And this was back in the day when it was very fashionable to say, but, you know, like "follow for part two" or or "part one of two," whatever, People don't really do that anymore.

But at the time, splitting videos into multiple parts was very common because TikTok hadn't given you the option of making videos that were 3 minutes or 10 minutes or whatever it was. So at the end of this video I said, Follow for part two, and then in part two, I'll actually assemble the skeleton from these bones and you'll see the finished product.

This video-- I could be wrong here, but I'm pretty sure that it got me 20,000 followers pretty much overnight, which was absolutely exhilarating. Here I was. TikTok prodigy. Finally, it was felt like it was all coming together for me. I always knew it my whole life that I was better than everyone else. I just didn't know exactly why or how that was going to manifest itself in my life.

And now I was finding out my destiny was being fulfilled. And I will never forget. At the time I was cat sitting for my friend in the valley that weekend that it happened, and those cats could have jumped headfirst into the garbage disposal and turned it on for all I knew because I was glued to my phone. The whole 30 minute drive over there, I don't think I looked at the road a single time.

I think I poured cat food into a bowl, but I honestly can't say. I had far bigger priorities than that. I was becoming famous and I know probably none of you know what that feels like, but it was like literally pure euphoria was getting injected directly into my eyeballs from a glowing little box. And obviously that's my phone.

It was a high that I cannot explain and that I never wanted to end. But of course, because no good thing can last forever. Eventually the drip of notifications kind of started to slow down and reality started to set in and I was like, Oh crap, now what the hell do I do? I've got 20,000 people who are expecting me to reconstruct this skeleton of a chicken, which I started to realize was going to be impossible.

So I thought, okay, maybe I can kind of stall these people for a little bit. But even so, now I've got this whole other problem, which is how do I follow this up? Like, what do I even do to keep the momentum going? I didn't have a clue. So I said, okay, What worked about the first few successful videos?

Food was one element and bones. Those were the two major thematic elements. So I just kind of started throwing spaghetti at the wall, anything to do with food and bones. But every time I posted a video, people would comment, you know, like, Excuse me, you promised me a finished rotisserie chicken skeleton. People would say, You're a moron, you're doing this wrong, you're doing that wrong, all kinds of negative things. 

It was completely overwhelming. I had never experienced anything like that before. The onslaught of people demanding I create the content that they wanted and I was desperately trying to make them happy. But it felt like no matter what I did, nothing was good enough for these people. They were always somebody saying something.

I floundered around trying to do one video per day, just going to the store, literally going across the shelf of the canned seafood aisle and saying, okay, today's video is going to be canned oysters, tomorrow, canned clams. Next day I can do anchovies, etc., etc.. And I learned the first lesson about how to be successful on TikTok, which is find one thing that works and then do it over and over again as long as you can, because TikTok, the algorithm needs you to be a category.

They need to have you pinned as a specific type of entertainment. So that they can then serve you to people for you pages based on their interests. So the first category that I was ever pegged as was "Guy who reviews canned seafood in a gross and chaotic way," that was kind of my first brand. All of these videos are still available on my TikTok.

I can't stand to go back and watch them personally, but I've left everything up that I've ever made it completely intact so that you can go back and see the progression of things. So, okay, fine. I'm "Guy who reviews canned seafood in a gross and chaotic way." Because I was doing a video per day, I started to kind of craft a formula for each video.

At the time, I had a big glass table and what I would do was open the can spill the contents onto the table, eat the contents off of the table using my bare hands, and then I would drink the juice that was leftover in the can and this was a sustainable model. It was working for a very long time.

For anybody who wants to become a successful content creator on Tik Tok, what I suggest you do is make one video per day and just see what happens. Keep posting until you find something that works. Assess how people respond, make small adjustments every day based on the performance of the previous day, and eventually you will learn to kind of intuitively work with the algorithm and the audience.

And as time passes, you'll see, like I did, the content kind of starts to shape itself. So by this point, it's now late 2021, and I'm starting to get depressed because now I feel stuck. I feel like the audience has gotten ahead of me. It's kind of like when if you're walking a dog, but it's more like the dog's walking you because it's pulling you wherever it wants to go.

That's what I felt like, and I didn't want to be doing gross food content at all to begin with. I hated it. I thought it was trashy. I thought it was gimmicky. I was humiliated to be posting the kind of stuff that I was. But you can't just start doing exactly what you want right out of the gate.

Now, in retrospect, this area of my content was absolutely crucial for me to hone my skills of content creation because the way I look at it, every video was, "look at this thing, Look at how gross it is. I demand your attention." And it showed me how to take other ideas and concepts and package them in a way that would be accessible to people.

But I'm kind of getting ahead of myself. So late 2021, I'm depressed, I'm dreading every new video, and also I'm just physically, literally running out of material. The canned seafood aisle only has so many things on it, so every day I'm kind of trying to add elements to make it more interesting. I started kind of expanding the concept and I said, okay, people like this for the canned food, but they like the canned food because canned food is gross.

Any food can technically be gross. So then I started doing things like I would buy a can of beans, and then I would mix the beans with orange soda, stuff like that. That was very easy, very low effort, reproduce, able and was getting views great. But the longer this went on, the more I couldn't take it anymore. Like I said, I was feeling stuck.

I didn't like doing it. I wasn't doing it for myself. It was all just to make the people in the audience happy. And eventually I was like, Then what's the point. If I hate doing it and I'm not even close to creating the type of content that I feel in my heart I want to be doing, then why am I doing it at all?

At this point, it's just a second job that I'm doing for free for a horde of dumb asses. So come November, December 2021, I just stop completely. I said, Forget it. I don't want to do this anymore at all. I've been pigeonholed into this thing. I can't get out. At this point I had gotten to 100,000 followers, which was a milestone, but it was not a happy accomplishment at all.

In fact, if I felt dread deep inside because I felt like I had dug a hole for myself, that was 100,000 followers deep. So I completely gave up. And I remember being so low that one day something inside me just snapped. And I said to myself, If the rest of my life is going to be this miserable, then I can't do it.

So I'm just going to do whatever I want and I don't care what anybody says. That was when I started posting video content on Instagram because I didn't have a following on Instagram yet. It took a solid two years before the following started to transfer over to my other platforms. But that to me at the time was very freeing because it meant that I could do whatever I want.

So now we're at Winter 2022, and in retrospect, this was probably one of the happiest periods of my life with regards to my relationship with my online self, because I was completely free. I was just doing whatever the hell came to my mind. Most of it, I'm sure, was terrible, but because the only people who were seeing it were people I knew in real life in some capacity, most of them were probably just rolling their eyes and skipping past it.

Or if they did watch it, they felt like social graces were preventing them from commenting and saying, "Dan, this is the cringiest thing I've ever seen and you should just kill yourself," like a normal person on the internet would have said in reaction to the stuff that I was posting. This allowed me to develop a voice and a perspective and get good and make content that was actually watchable and get followers.

And then because that was going well, I eventually came back to Tik Tok because I felt like I was in a position to freshen up the content and I had ideas and I had a plan in my head for how to incrementally, day by day, take where I was content wise and steer it into the content that I wanted to make by kind of tapering the audience off of what they were expecting.

So I expanded the radius again. People expected gross food because it's weird. What else is weird? What if I just do things that are weird in general? That was when I started kind of combine in the gross food element with more conceptual surrealism. So for instance, I would make a video where I mixed sardines with vitamin water, and then I would weave that together with a narrative where I killed my grandparents.

I really liked making these videos, but hardly anybody else did. A small handful of people did enjoy them, but overall it was a completely different type of content targeted at a completely different audience. So people got really mad and on every video they'd say, You know, Why are you doing this dumb crap? We want you to review canned fish. That's why we're here. 

And the more upset that they got, the more I started to enjoy myself because I would get madder and madder that they were being so annoying and so picky about demanding exactly what they wanted for me. Like they were spoiled children. So I started to deliberately do things that would pass them off. And in retrospect, I don't blame people for getting upset because, like I said, I was essentially targeting a completely different audience than I had been before because the content was completely different.

But it was fuel for me creatively to kind of be like, I hate all of you. I like making you mad because you're not treating me like a person. You're just barking demands at me like I'm a vending machine that dispenses the content that you want to see. So now it's summer 2022 and my Tik Tok content has become a very mixed bag.

I didn't have one single thing. I had kind of the general theme of growing food, but now there was also film school, surrealist, short films and eventually I started trying to move more in the direction of comedy food content. So for instance, there was a video that I did where I ordered a burrito bowl from Chipotle, and then 10 minutes later I ordered the same thing from the same location and compared the two orders.

So if one was different slightly or less full or there was more block, that was kind of the point of that. And I try to make it funny and add little jokes and what have you. I remember one video was, I got a small fry from two different McDonald's locations and I counted how many fries were in either order to see which location gave me more fries.

And again, because I was trying to make one video a day and kind of incrementally change things based on the day before, this concept started to evolve into using the amount of fries as a unit of measure meant for variables that I would change. 

And what I mean by that is, I had one video where I went through the drive there once and ordered nicely. You know, said please and thank you and all that. And then the second time I ordered meanly and then I would count the amount of fries in both orders to see which ordering strategy got me more fries. 

Then in another one I went through the drive thru and ordered a small fries and said I'm pro-life. Then I went through again and ordered the same thing, but said I'm pro-choice and I would count the amount of fries and say McDonald's is pro-choice because they gave me more fries when I said that's what I was.

Months went by where I kind of beat this premise into the ground, which wasn't even that funny to begin with. Until late summer 2022, pretty much this exact time last year, where I was at my lowest engagement to date because I was totally lost. I had no solid footing in regards to the type of content I was making.

I was just kind of trying anything and everything, no matter how stupid it was, just wildly stabbing in the dark. And I started to think about the types of TikToks that I was seeing on my feeds going viral and getting popular and circulating. And a lot of them were just people talking to the camera. And I remember thinking, Why am I ordering hundreds of dollars worth of McDonald's a week to not even get any views anyway, if these people are going viral just for their dumb thoughts?

So I started experimenting with sitting my phone on my desk and writing a script where I just tried to be entertaining with the words that I was saying as opposed to the actions that I was doing. 

My mother is a therapist. I kind of grew up in that world. I've been to a lot of therapists, as you can probably imagine, and I had seen so many psychology type influencers who were pushing these kind of nonsensical mental health concepts, and nobody ever seemed to question their credentials or where the hell they even came from.

And I started to think, I bet I could just make up some random crap that sounds smart and people would totally buy it. And you can see if you look back at my account history, how little by little I started to kind of whittle this concept and it began to take shape very roughly. It would be a video like that mixed in with other different types of videos because I was just just beginning to mess around with different things.

And then I remember very vividly the first one of those videos to ever really take off was one where I gave advice for quitting a porn addiction and I said, You can taper off of porn by gradually replacing it with dirty optical illusions and then pictures of sand dunes because they look like nude bodies and then finally just stare at the wall and make yourself sneeze with cayenne pepper. And by then you will have completely neurologically replaced masturbating. 

And it had been months since I'd had a successful video at that point. So I was really, really happy. And I said, okay, I've found something here that's working that is exciting to me. Let's see where it can go. So I just started doing more and more stuff in that vein of off kilter, neurotic advice that seemed like it would work, but also is kind of crazy. And obviously that started to get really popular and it's probably the reason why you're even subscribed to this Patreon to begin with. 

So at the current moment you're probably thinking, I'm so glad I shut that podcast off 10 minutes ago because it was so boring. I'm going to unsubscribe from this Patreon immediately. But I want you to know: there is a reason why I explained all of that. 

Because that was almost exactly a year ago. I've spent the past entire year every day doing the same type of content. It's evolved slightly. You know, there have been some permutations to it. I've tried to find ways to keep it fresh and interesting. Eventually it went from silly, wacky advice that slightly crazy to more full on mask off instructions for how to be a psychopath and manipulate people into bending to your every whim.

But here's the deal. Over the past year, I've explored every fucking nook and cranny that I can with this type of content. I understand that there are people here who really got attached to it, and that's the only reason why they're here. But you have to understand that I can't keep doing the same thing for my entire life.

At some point I've got to read the writing on the wall and say it's over. I've beaten it completely into the ground. There is nowhere else to go. The moment has come and gone. The world has changed, the zeitgeist has changed. We're living in a completely different landscape. I'm the first person to admit this. It took a while for me to accept it, but now I'm over it.

I'm ready to move on and I'm ready to find the next thing. And I'm getting pissed off because just like every other time that I tried to shift the type of content that I made, people started getting pissy with me and acting like babies get over it. The reason I explained all the background of my content creation journey was so that you would see the type of content I've been making that you've gotten so attached you didn't just come completely out of thin air.

It came from putting out shitty garbage until I had experimented enough that I happened to stumble upon something that worked. And I refined it from there day by day. That's the creative process. People whined all day long when I stopped reviewing canned food, but then I moved on to something that was monumentally more successful. I didn't know it at the time, you know, I spent a lot of time in those transitional periods feeling like a failure and feeling humiliated to even be putting out any of the garbage that I was that nobody was watching in the first place.

But I had to do that to find what worked. And that's where I am again now. Some people are not happy. I've gotten more than one comment recently saying You're trying too hard to be funny and relevant. And I remember it blew me away when I read that because I was like, Yeah, I am. What did you think I was doing this entire time? That's my whole reason for being alive is to try to be funny and relevant. 

And I read another comment the other day where somebody said, "he's targeting a completely different audience than the one he had before." And I guess I am because I'm growing as a creative and as a person. So maybe you're not the target audience anymore.

In which case my suggestion would be Go fuck yourself. Not everything has to be catered to you and your specific sensibilities, Despite what a lot of other content creators in entertainment would have you believe. A lot of people feel emboldened to talk to me this way because they're used to content creators and entertainers bending over backwards to give them exactly what they want.

But that's how you get shitty, uninteresting chicken McNuggets sludge that passes itself off as art because it's designed by a committee to make money from people and be a commodity. And there's plenty of that garbage already out there. So go watch something else if you don't like it. 

But I'm confident that if I trust my own instincts, I will eventually find something that works even better and is even more successful than what I've already been doing.

It's not about the money for me. It's not about having however many followers. So believe me when I say don't let the door hit you on the way out. 

That being said, if you are someone who hears all of this and still supports me, I want you to know that I cherish you with all my heart. I really do.

There are people who have followed me since I was making that rotisserie chicken skeleton, and they are people I now consider my dear friends. So I am not ungrateful in the slightest for your support because you're actually cool and not some drooling shithead unlike all the other dumb asses who just breeze in shit on the floor and leave.

So that's all I got for today. I'm sorry I told you it wasn't going to be pretty, but rub some dirt on it. You'll be fine. Pull your pants back up and quit crying. I hope you have a wonderful day. And thanks again for all of your support.