How Did Adam22 Survived This?

You just have definitely an out of the box kind of dude. Is that how you've always been when you were younger too in high school and stuff? Yeah. Like I always had things I was passionate about that basically like it made it impossible for me to focus on school or anything. You know, I was in the comic books, I was into drawing, I was into video games, I was into, you know, BMX, like all these things over the years that I just like if I'm interested in something, like even to this day, I don't really think about business. I just think about like what am I excited to talk about on camera or what am I excited to make on a day to day basis? Like the, if anything it's a problem for me that I'm not really like focused on like, okay, well how do I also make money at the same time? You know, I'm so focused on just what I'm excited about and what I'm into. Um, I've always pretty much been like that. I couldn't do good in school because I was just too focused on riding bikes and video games or whatever I was into that year. And that was your first thing, right? You'd had a BMX blog. Well, when I was, when I was 12, I started riding BMX and I turned 22 and I had moved to New York and I was basically playing online poker for a living at that time. Uh, and I was also like reading a lot of hip hop blogs, which were kind of like coming out around that time in like 2015 and I just had this epiphany of like, Oh, I could do this, but for BMX bikes. So I started this website and within like a year I was basically like the most well known media personality in BMX just because I had so much ---- that I wanted to talk. You know, I just had infinite opinions. And now we kind of live in like the opinion economy where anytime anybody has an opinion about anything, it's just pretty easy to monetize it. You know, if you have some crazy take that you want to get out there, Jason asks is a piece of ----. You make a YouTube video, Jason asks a piece of ----. Yeah, you're lit. Like that's the, you know, that like now we're used to that, but that was always just kind of me. I always have some crazy opinions on deck. Right. Um, and you weren't shy about putting them out there. No, I had to learn to be a little shy about it over time. I remember being, I remember being like 30 years old and kind of having the realization of like, if I want people to like me, I'm going to have to start being more strategic about talking in particular about those people, which to most people seems really obvious, but it took me a while to just accept. Like I have to be a little bit more careful about who I'm trashing. The first, the first time I saw you, I was really impressed with you because I felt like you were, uh, you were featuring like underground music and I just thought to myself, Oh my God, like this is so cool. Like this guy is like bringing people underground music and there's an audience for that. Yeah. Yeah. Before I started doing like all these rap underground rapper interviews, there wasn't really anybody doing that type of thing. Like there's, there might've been some smaller outlets and stuff, but I feel like, like I remember the first times that I interviewed these underground rappers, people were just commenting like, are you serious? You think we're going to watch an hour and a half long interview with these dudes with, you know, 50,000 followers or whatever. And I, I remember thinking like cut these up into little chunks or whatever. This is way before the clip era. And uh, yeah, that, that, but that again, like I just was, I had a bike shop in downtown LA or about 2013, 2014. And I was just like, you know what? I gotta, I gotta start interviewing all these rappers from all these underground warehouse shows that I'm going to. It was exciting to me because I've always been such a rap fan, but like culturally I felt kind of separate from it in the sense of like, you know, I always just thought like, Oh, the rapper type people are like dudes from LA and they're in gangs or they'd like, you know, wear chains and then all of a sudden I'm going to these underground shows with this young scrappy ass kids just making these crazy songs and like mosh pits at all the shows. And people are doing drugs out in the open at the shows and stuff. And I just got really excited about going to those shows. And I had already started doing BMX interviews and I just kind of like as, as I got the opportunities, I was just asking all these underground rappers to do interviews. And then that just kind of exploded. Yeah. Was that a cool feeling when you saw that there was an audience for it? And it was because I spent so many years trapped in this BMX world that is like very hard to escape from. Sure. It's a super niche. Yeah. It's like you could be the most popular, popular guy in that world. But how are you ever going to get anybody else to pay attention to you? Yeah. But I remember I, uh, I engineered some viral success at certain points. Like I remember I had a friend named Tate, Tate Ross Kelly, who's like this amazing BMX rider. And he had this one video that he was going to let me put out on the channel. And he was doing tons of these super creative tricks. And there had been another guy that went viral for a sort of similar video of him doing a bunch of creative stuff. So I remember I did like a Google search. I found every single blog post from that they had written about this one dude. And I messaged every single person from all these different blogs and websites and stuff. And I messaged them and said, Hey, I saw that you posted this video. I have another client that I managed. I was pretending to manage the guy that whatever, like I was just lying. And I was like, I have another piece of content that I think you might be interested. It would make a really good blog post. So I did that. And all of a sudden that got like 20 million views. And uh, you did what you took their videos and put them on your channel. Uh, yeah, I was just getting videos. Like people were just letting me upload all kinds of stuff at that time. But I got like hundreds of blogs to write about this one video. And then that just like made it go viral. And I just kind of like kept getting more and more into the mentality of like, Oh, I can actually like run game on the internet. I can, I can figure out how to make this happen. And now, now I'm really don't do almost anything to make content go viral. Just, you know, upload it and just see what happens. But back then it was like to make something go viral and BMX, you just really have to like contextualize it to make it so that the outside audience can kind of understand, you know? And then when you would do, I think that that's, those are the, that's like the best story, man. Cause it's like, uh, those are the best stories when somebody just does something for the love, you know, like you would just, just love going to hip hop shows. Yeah. Right. I was just having a good old time and just really hanging out with these dudes. And then it just kind of blew up. Do you ever feel like you're in danger? Like, I know you had a gun pulled on you once on your studio, right? I mean, I definitely move around a certain way and like, you know, I'm not really taking chances in terms of you're not live streaming. Uh, we live stream, but we have, you know, we have a armed security at the office. And you know, when I go to events and stuff, a lot of times I got armed security with me and stuff just because it's not really like, I think anybody's going to do anything, but it's like, I don't spend money on anything else. So I might as well invest in my safety, I guess. Right. So yeah, I don't really worry about it too much just because now, like at that time, bro, like years and years that we spent at that store, not thinking about security, not thinking about having a weapons on us or anything like that. And nothing ever happened for years and years and years. And then finally one crazy fan runs up on me with a gun and it just kind of completely changed the way that I thought about everything. So you were alive when that happened? Yeah. We were alive doing this thing that we were doing at the time where we like listen to the fans music for donations and we would spend sometimes like eight hours on live stream just in the back of the bike shop smoking weed. And I remember we ordered a food, we ordered like Bossa Nova and the guy was bringing it in. Like my guy went out to get it. And when he was bringing it in, this with the gun slipped in right around him. And it was crazy because the guy who was bringing the food in, he had a gun on him. And so this dude starts waving the gun in front of my head and I'm just like, what the going on? But then my homie he's got his gun already pointed at the dude's head. And for some reason he didn't pull the trigger cause I think he, in that moment he looked at the gun and he realized that it was a gun, which is not really a good reason to not do something. But it was, it was like a prop gun or it was like a fake gun with like it had duct tape on the handle and like that. Now obviously your security, if somebody points a gun at you, it's supposed to, you know, they're supposed to do what they got to do. But, um, but he was actually smart in that moment. Yeah. He's to be able to spot that probably spared himself some therapy bills right there. Yeah. Spared himself, you know, legal, legal issues. Or some were there or someone could have got shot. You could have gotten, you could have caught a bullet. Yeah. No, I mean it would have been crazy. Because basically it was like a domino type thing of like different people or whatever. But then what happened? Someone tackled him or someone got the gun from him. Yeah. I mean I think we all just sort of like wrestle them to the ground and then I didn't even hit him. My, my, my friends just honestly kicked him in the head until he was unconscious. Did you go to court with that guy? I did one time, but then they like canceled it at the last minute. I had to get up so early to go to court because Logan Paul told me, he's like, he's like, let me tell you something. I had a, I had a stalker one time chose not to press charges on him. Came back like five more times and more times or whatever. He's like, go to court, do it the right way. Okay. Yeah. Again, take your advice on this. Yeah, you did it. But I don't know if anything ever happened. You don't know what happened. Damn. I know there's like a, there's a stigma about calling the cops and hip hop, but figure you got to do what you got to do. We have a lot of people say that my fiance looks like it's Lena, right? A lot of people say my fiance looks like Lena. Sometimes I say Lena. I don't know why. No, everybody. Yeah. Um, let's see if they look alike. If you think they look alike. Oh, here we go. And I was, Oh, I can see it for sure. Yeah. How old is she? She's 31. Very pretty. Congrats. Yeah. You too, man. And it was so great. Like, um, getting to meet her. She was so sweet. So nice. Well, I wouldn't even probably know who you were if it wasn't for her because she was the diehard vlog squad fan. Okay. Yeah. Like, and that was maybe like the first YouTube channel where I saw her just like super excited to watch it every week. And so that definitely got me clued into you early on.