The "Going Viral" Rollercoaster

Hey, good morning, friends. It's not really morning. It is lunchtime. It's noon. And I have been struggling to keep up with a YouTube video that has gone viral.

If you're listening to these, I don't know if you even know who I am or care. But I do a lot of different projects. And in today's world, you know, there's the old famous quote.

about everybody having their 15 minutes of fame and that has been extrapolated out to everyone gets their 15 seconds of fame on the internet. And I've had my 15 seconds of fame multiple times. A couple of years ago, I ran into a woman in a hotel lobby around 10 p.m. My wife and I were on a road trip and we checked into a room and

while we were in the lobby I saw a woman dragging a large canvas like a canvas you would paint on like this painting canvas is probably I don't know four foot by three foot it's pretty large and um uh

I could only see the back of it. And so I stopped. She was heading towards the elevator. So after we were done, we went towards the elevator and we were there at the same time. And I said, listen, I just started up a conversation. I said, you got to show me what's on that canvas because I'm a curious person. And when I see a woman dragging a painting canvas through a hotel lobby at 10 p.m., there's got to be a story there. And so she turned it around.

and on the canvas was a painting of uh the uh the dude from the big lebowski the movie and uh he was writing falcor the look dragon from the never ending story and i said is that the dude from big lebowski writing on falcor the look dragon and she looked at me like i was a crazy person and said yes and i said uh

I said, you've probably shown that to the only person in Arkansas right now that would get both of those references. And so we both laughed and we parted ways. And my wife took a picture of me standing next to this woman whose name I did not get holding this painting. She told me her house had burned down and she and her family were staying long-term in that hotel. And she, at night, her alone time was she would go up on the roof

of the hotel and go up there and paint. So she would drag her paintings up there, drag canvases up there and paint and then at night she would bring them back down. And anyway, my wife took a picture of this chance meeting.

And I tweeted it. And, you know, it's a picture of me and a woman I had not met. Like I said, I didn't even get her name. And me standing next to this large painting, which is kind of a bizarre painting. And we were still on our road trip. And the next day...

I said, hey, most of my tweets back then would get five likes. For a good tweet, I would get five likes. And I said, hey, that tweet got 10 likes. That's pretty amazing. And then it was a five or six hour drive home from where we were. And that tweet got 20 likes. And then it got 100. And then it got 200. Then it got 500. Then it got 1,000.

Then it got 5,000. Then it got 10,000 and 20,000 and 50,000. It did not stop. My phone was getting hot, was physically getting hot from the amount of alerts I was getting. I got a message from Twitter that said, congratulations, you have a tweet that is going viral. Here are some additional tools you may need to manage your Twitter account. I'd never seen anything like that.

And it was an amazing adrenaline rush. It was a super, super high. That tweet, which is still out there today somewhere, got retweeted another 5,000 times. And those people, you know, my post has 70,000 likes, but those people all retweeted it and then their posts got likes. So it was this huge viral moment for me. It was very exciting. It was very interesting.

And the next day I tweeted something. I said, hey, here's this retro lunchbox I bought. And I think it got five likes. And the ride was over. Whatever the excitement, the viral...

the viralness, the virility of that tweet did not translate to other people liking my other tweets. I told my wife it was like a roller coaster and then I got on this roller coaster and it just had this huge, super fast, thrilling trip. But at the end, it took me right back to where I got on. I got off and I was no change. It was not any different. So,

The reason I'm telling you that is because I do van life videos. Van life is a whole subculture that I only dip my toe into. You can define van life so many different ways. I'm always interested by how people can subdivide their own hobbies.

But they do. They always do. And I remember years ago, I saw a comic. Maybe, I don't even remember if it was a comic I saw or if somebody just told me. But I feel like it was a comic. And it was two guys comparing smartphones, you know. And they were explaining them to an alien. And one guy had an iPhone and one guy had a Samsung or Android type phone, you know.

and they were talking to the alien, and one guy said, my magical device that gives me access to all human knowledge and can do anything is better than that guy's magical device that does the same thing. And so it's kind of this funny joke that if you were trying to explain a smartphone to someone, like imagine, you know how every now and then they discover these lost tribes that have avoided civilization somehow, and maybe they're better off for it.

But imagine someone who has no experience with technology, maybe a time traveler from the past or something, you know, someone that has never seen a smartphone and you showed them the smartphone and

and you said, boy, look, you can go to Google and you can do anything. You can go to AI now. You can open up an AI thing and type in any question that's been asked in the history of the universe and it will give you something, you know, because it stole it from someone else. But you can search online. You can watch videos. You can watch movies. You can go to Spotify.

and type in any song that you've ever heard on the radio in your entire life, and it can play it. And then the person might ask, boy, this must cost a fortune, not the phone. Well, then you would say, yeah, you get the phone. They'll give you the phone if you sign up long enough or something to make payments. And then they would say, well, how much does it cost to have access to the entire recorded history of music? And you go, oh, it's free. And every six songs, they play an ad. Yeah.

you know or you show up youtube and you go hey guess what there's a half a million or not have a million half a billion videos or maybe more and you type in anything you want you want to know how to fix a vcr you want to know how to repair your vehicle's engine you want to see um you know what what it looks like to stand outside the pyramids uh you want to uh watch a guy climb mount everest just type it in and there's a dozen people or hundreds of people that have done it there's a video

Well, how much does it cost to access this entire treasure trove? Ah, it's free. You got to click skip when an ad comes up. That's it, you know. And so anyway, a little bit off track, but that's kind of my brand, is that you would point to someone else's phone and you're like, that guy's phone sucks because look, his icons are all different. Yeah.

He gets his access to all this stuff in a slightly different way than I do. Like, it just wouldn't make any sense. You know what I mean? So that's... But it's funny that we draw those lines, right? And the van life community is one of the strangest ones I've ever experienced because they can't even agree on what the definition of van life is. You go, what's van life? And they go, well... I mean, the people go...

you know van life is the people that from the 60s and 70s who bought vans and decided to go off grid and live in their vans full time and that's it

and you go, well, what about the people that experience houselessness, and they move into their vehicle, they move into a van? Nope, that's different. Those people are just homeless, but they live in a car. Well, but they live in a van. Isn't that van life, where they're literally living in a van every day? And so people make all these different lines in the sand where they say...

oh you know well these people are part-time like they're just weekend warriors so they're not really van life we're the real van life because we do it full-time you know or well these people bought their van but i built my van so i'm van life they're not van life you know so it's funny that uh i mean such a small community that's the that's the thing is if you look at it like from a imagine being at from outer space like in a galaxy and you go boy there's the earth

and you go down to the earth and you go, all right, well, there's 7 billion people here, you know, and then you zoom in further and you go, well, here's America. There's, you know, 300 million people plus living in America and you zoom in further and this is an actual fact that 1% of Americans live in their vehicle. About 3 million people in America live in a vehicle and then you zoom in and you go, boy, of those 3 million people,

X amount of people live in vans. They do this thing that's called van life. And so you've zoomed in so far. Imagine going from just seeing the Earth as a marble from outer space that you've zoomed all the way in to not just the people on the Earth, but the people in America, the people that live in vehicles, the people that live in vans. You've got it down to this really small, tiny subset of human beings on this planet. And then they're pointing fingers at each other, and they're going, well, he built his, and I bought mine.

it's just such a funny idea to me and honestly

Most of the people I find that are arguing about definitions of things are also not doing the things. Some are, you know, definitely there are people that are defending. They feel like they've built their little community and they've got their territory and they're defending it. You know, I'm doing this thing and you're not doing the same thing as I'm doing. You know, it's not enough to just say, well, but I'm enjoying this other thing over here. And they go, well, that's too bad. You can't call it this.

so anyway to get this back on track I made a video on YouTube about van life and specifically about stealth camping now stealth camping is the act of parking a vehicle overnight and sleeping in it in some place that you don't have permission to do so you know so that could be there's all kinds of places in fact that's what the video was about was 10 different ideas like sleeping you know outside of 24 hour supermarkets or sleeping at strip malls or hospital parking lots you know things like that

and um uh you know i got i've got so many comments the video has been up for about a week and as of this morning it has 50 000 views that is um uh by far you know i've had this channel this this um it's called big rob's van i've had this van life channel for two years and um all the top videos of views

are of repairs. Like I did a, I installed or I changed out my headlights. I upgraded the headlights on the van and I viewed that. And that one has like 25,000 views. And it's because other people that want to upgrade their headlights, they go search YouTube and they find this video and they watch it like a tutorial, you know. But I also do a lot of videos where I go camping. And I'll give you one example. There's one where, again, this is all, you know, related to stealth camping, right?

where I was driving down Route 66 here in Oklahoma.

And there's a giant dinosaur that's on display. It's just like a roadside attraction. And it's inside the parking lot of a business. And that business, due to theft, has a giant fence around it, which they lock at night. And so I found a friend of a friend who knew the owners. And I talked to them and I said, listen, this is a very strange request. I said, but could you...

Would it be okay if I slept in my car in your parking lot? I said, I won't get out of my car. I'm not going to touch your stuff. I'm not going to do anything. And the person, you know, like the chain of people that knew them, who knew me, said they can vouch for me. I'm not a weird guy. I mean, I am a weird guy. I want to go sleep in your parking lot for no reason. But I made this whole video where...

uh you know i'm sleeping in the car and then uh it's like jurassic park you could hear that the dinosaur stomping around and i made i made a little special effect where i had a glass of water on the table and i hit the the table underneath so it made the little ripple effect boom you know as the sound effect of the dinosaurs feet outside were supposedly stomping and then i open it up and there's the giant dinosaur i do the reveal you know it's very kind of cinematic and

Around Christmas time, the dinosaur is lit up with Christmas lights, but they also put a Santa Claus hat, which I don't know how they do. It's like 20 feet tall, but they put a Santa hat on top of it. So I did this whole reveal. I thought it was a really, really fun and good-spirited video and a good camping video. And it got 160 views.

which is like half the people in my high school. If I got half the people in my high school to watch it, that's how many views it got. The one that I have now with 50,000 views, that would be twice the population of my suburb, of my city.

It has about 25,000 people here, so that would be everybody watching it, you know, twice. So it's been a roller coaster. I've got all these comments coming in. I would say 95, that's probably low, 98, 99% of the comments are...

either informative or complimentary you know people say oh I love your list or hey here's something you forgot you should try this and I go hey I really should you know and then there's that zero point whatever percent where people just want to make fun of you they want to you know a lot of people they're like stealth camping is not camping

I go, okay, if you say so. Like, I didn't invent the term, you know what I mean? And it's, I mean, it's like arguing that tightrope walking isn't walking.

Like, that's the, you know, that's the hill you want to die on. I guess so. You're right. It's not. But, you know, I just, it's funny to me that people will get very defensive and want to argue terms, you know. I don't, that's not the right words. I don't define that or I don't agree with that. Okay. I'm still doing it, you know.

So anyway, yeah, I've spent the past several days. It's a very addictive thing to get that adrenaline of knowing that tens of thousands of people are watching you on YouTube and criticizing you and critiquing you and adding to the conversation and hopefully enjoying it and getting some information. But I know this.

I have a couple other videos

There's a little part of me that thinks, well, maybe some of those people will stick around. Maybe some of those 50,000 viewers will watch the next one. But if the next one gets 100 or whatever, I understand it. I've been on this roller coaster before. And so I know that sometimes you go on this wild ride, but at the end...

Roller coaster takes you right back to the beginning and you get off. And sometimes nothing has changed. Anyway, I'm going to go refresh that screen a few more times, see if there's more views. Keep riding the roller coaster while it's moving and wait for it to stop. Take care, everybody.