I've literally given away over a million dollars.

(cinematic music)

A lot of people think

that I just came up in a rich household,

and I'm a trust fund baby.

I get called that a lot.

In reality, my mom was in the military.

She was a single mom and she worked a lot.

What's up, guys?

What's up, guys?

What's up, guys?

I basically did YouTube videos for years

without making any money.

When I first started, the videos were horrible,

and then they slowly got less and less horrible

throughout the years.

Even then when I was making money the first few years,

it was nothing, it was scraps.

You grind and you grind and you grind,

year after year, after year after year.

It definitely does hit you,

but I had more reasons than just wanting to be famous

or just wanting money.

Anything that you can fit in this mysterious circle,

we'll pay for it.

- [Man] Thank you so much.

- Dude that's awesome

(people clapping)

- We ain't never have nobody bless us like this.

- As selfish as it sounds,

I like helping people because it just makes me happy.

I like seeing their faces light up,

I like seeing how excited they get.

Nothing is more entertaining

than just seeing someone just go

from like having a rough day to just going like "What!".

- Genuinely from the bottom of my heart, thank you.

Thank you. - Aww.

It's just what I love.

It literally is what makes me happy.

(calm music)

I was really shy, especially when I was younger,

I really didn't like being around people.

Just thinking about possibly being a YouTuber one day

was enough to keep me happy.

I wanna use brands to allow me to help people.

I was like, "I think I just cracked the code."

At the end of the day, I'm just kind of selfish.

Giving people money makes me happy.

If you had told me when I was 13

that I would give away a million dollars in a single video,

I just wouldn't have even known how much money that was.

I would be like, "Is that more than a hundred bucks?"

I mean, $50 was a lot to me back then.

(calm music)

I'm just from a small town,

relatively small town in North Carolina,

just grew up with my brother.

My mom raised us, nothing too crazy.

My mom was in the military, which is why

I was born in a different state than my brother.

We were always moving around.

- I was on active duty for 21 years.

And for a couple of those years,

Jimmy was moved around on a couple army installations.

- It definitely

made for an interesting childhood at that age.

- Jimmy as a child, some of my younger memories of him,

little Legos, building Lego forts.

Like the entire room is a huge Lego fort.

He was intense, and he was passionate

about what it was that he was working on at the time.

- As weird as it sounds, especially when I was younger,

I really didn't like being around people.

And I have a very obsessive personality.

When I like something, it just consumes my life.

My first instance of that was probably baseball.

I didn't want to do anything else.

Good luck getting me to study for a test at that age.

- When he first found that bat at 10 years old,

it was nonstop.

He was driven in Little League,

going on to playing in Babe Ruth,

he absolutely loved baseball.

- But, my first time going on the baseball field

for a Little League practice

was just the most awkward thing ever.

I didn't know how to socialize.

(children speaking indistinctly)

A funny story is I would always wear my hat like this,

and the coaches will pull it up.

I was beyond shy.

Even if there was a person in front of me,

like good luck getting me in to talk to them, impossible.

I didn't have that much social interaction.

My mom wasn't home much.

I watched a lot of ESPN.

But outside of sports, it was just literally YouTube.

That was all I watched.

No one in my school liked videos

so I kind of just felt like an outcast

'cause I just was hyper obsessed over it

and no one else really related to me on it.

- Good evening, ladies and gentlemen.

- Chris is one of my oldest friends,

probably my oldest friend that I still know to this day.

I dare you to slap Chris.

(Chris grunts)

I've known him basically my entire life,

and especially when I was doing videos earlier on.

- This should be in the outtakes,

I don't know why I'm having so much fun.

- He was the funniest guy I've ever met.

And I just noticed that when he was in the videos,

they were so much funnier.

And he's just so good on camera.

- I'm sorry.

Interviews make me so nervous, I'm sorry.

Me and Jimmy first met when we were in, like,

I think he was in middle school, I was in high school.

We were kind of the only kids that really liked YouTube

and really enjoyed talking about it.

But then one day he said that

he wanted to start a channel of his own.

- I have a memory of this one video I watched back then

where one of my favorite creators, Woody's Gamer Tech,

quit his job and went full-time on YouTube.

And this was like before,

like a lot of people didn't even know

you could make money on YouTube back then.

I remember seeing that I was like 12,

then it kind of just clicked in my head,

I was like, wait a minute, you can make money doing this.

That's one of my first memories

of when, like I really started consuming YouTube.

'Cause then from that point I was like, oh, like,

I kind of want to do this.

- [YouTuber] This may be a challenge, back off.

- I was there with Jimmy

the day he created his YouTube channel

and I was actually his first subscriber.

- When you create an account on Xbox,

they have this thing where it just gives you a gamer tag.

And I was just like Mr. Beast, this sounds cool.

Oh, oh crap.

I've never, don't.

Go, you freaking orange square.

- During that time, he was kind of trying

a bunch of different things.

- [Jimmy] What is going on guys,

I'd have kind of a mini rant for you guys real quick.

- He started making commentary style YouTube videos,

which is like, you have somebody playing a video game

and then you're just talking over,

giving your opinions about it.

- I don't want to give like YouTube tips or anything

'cause I'm not a big channel at, by any means.

- He started doing that for a while,

which kind of turned into a new series that he started,

where he was talking about YouTubers

and how much money they make.

- [Jimmy] What's up guys.

Pewdiepie is getting around seven and a half million views

per day, which is around 13 14,000 a day.

And millions upon millions of dollars a year.

- That's the type of stuff I was making

when I was like 14, 15 on YouTube.

And then when I was 15 years old,

I got diagnosed with Crohn's

(tense music)

It was pretty rough, basically your intestines are inflamed.

And because they're inflamed,

you don't process food as well.

So I eat something.

It would just go right through me,

like literally within a day then, because it's so inflamed.

It's like, someone's just dragging like

a knife across your stomach.

So it was super painful.

- Jimmy's diagnosis of Crohn's was earth shattering

the weight loss, the loss of energy,

all those facets of Crohn's attacked him really, really bad.

And it was, it was a pretty serious situation.

- I went from like 180 pounds down to 139.

I remember 139 because that was my lowest,

which at 6''2 was like a frail little twig.

I mean, I barely could get out of bed.

I had no energy to do anything.

I didn't even want to go to school

and I just hated my life back then, I was really miserable.

- He didn't have an ability to hold down any food.

It was months and months and months for us to figure out

a treatment plan so that he could start eating again.

- Playing baseball was pure torture,

especially the medicine I was on.

I was always throwing up behind the dugout and I always had

to go use the bathroom a bunch during the games.

I probably would have tried to play baseball in college,

but because of Crohn's,

it definitely changed the trajectory.

And I was like, all right, I'm done with that.

And then I just went all in on YouTube

and I was beyond obsessed.

Hey you, subscribe.

Me being shy and not liking talking

and not having much confidence

were like such a big obstacle.

I'm just kidding.

But despite that, I still just did it

just because I just wanted it so bad.

Have a good day, I don't know.

This is my trailer, kind of sucks.

(explosion)

I was like, you know what, I don't like talking to people,

but I just really like making videos.

So as weird as that sounds so.

I just gotta get used to it

because this is just kind of what I enjoy doing.

So I'm gonna try to commit myself to making a video

every other day for the next three months

and just see where my YouTube channel goes.

- At first, it seemed like a hobby,

but then he wouldn't want to go to the movies.

He wanted to focus on filming a video.

And like when I started hanging out with him,

filming more videos with him, I understood that for him

like this was like, he's obsessed with it.

Like this is what he wanted.

- Look at it quadruple digits.

Why does this guy have 2000 subscribers?

And why am I speaking in third person?

3,000 subscribers!

I've always told myself when I hit 10,000 subscribers,

I will tell my mom that I do YouTube.

When I first started making content.

I definitely did not tell my mom.

And that comes back to me just being super shy.

And I just didn't know how she would react.

So for the first few hundred videos, she had no idea.

And she always thought

I was just talking to someone in my room.

You know that chick from Twilight that can read minds?

- And I'd be walking past his room.

And he'd just be talking to people on the computer.

- Well, I'm her cousin and I can read minds as well.

- I thought it was the people he was gaming with.

I thought it was baseball friends.

I thought it was people from high school.

Never, ever did I connect

that he was actually doing YouTube videos.

- Surprise.