I Turned My Grandma Into A YouTube Celebrity
- My grandma and I went viral, and this is that story.
Now stick with me, because we have a lot to get through.
So this all starts in 2011.
I am in 8th grade, and like most middle schoolers,
I just wanna go viral on YouTube.
I start uploading videos of me dancing with my cat,
(upbeat music)
and this channel is totally private.
Every time someone found out about it in my life,
I would just delete it instantly.
About a year goes by, and I'm now a freshman in high school.
One day, I'm at my grandma's house,
and she's really making me laugh as she usually does.
As an experiment, I decided to put my camera
on my grandma's dashboard when she drove me home
and I filmed the entire thing,
and she had no idea that it was recording.
- 'Cause they could say, oh, the lady did it.
You know what I mean?
- Obviously she was kind of concerned
if the camera was on and I just said, yeah,
it's for a photography project, and she believed it.
Want to do the cinnamon challenge at your house?
- No, no, no, don't be crazy.
You think I wanna get,
what the hell was that?
- I get home, I edit it, put it on YouTube,
and decided to finally make my channel public.
They next day, I wake up to over 20,000 views
and to my 14 year old self, that was going viral,
and I just felt like I finally made it.
The rest of that year,
I continued to upload videos of myself,
but also with my grandma,
and noticed that the grandma videos
were getting way more views.
So in my head, I'm thinking, maybe this channel
is meant to be about me and my grandma.
I enter this online comedy contest
hosted by Simon Cowell and I end up winning.
So I used the reward money of $2,000
to buy myself a new computer
to start editing my videos properly,
and I kept this whole YouTube thing going.
Keep in mind, my grandma still has no idea
that these videos exist and the internet loves her.
Honestly, after the contest,
I started to get a little worried
that she was gonna find these videos
or someone's gonna show them to her.
- One time a kid threw a snowball on my car,
I got out of my car, and I ran after that kid.
- Because I didn't know if she was gonna freak out on me.
So the next year is 2014, and I hit 100 thousand subscribers
and it just hit me that this is becoming an actual thing.
At this point, I'm trying to get my driver's license
and my grandma is my ride to driver's ed.
A.K.A. a lot of time in the car together,
A.K.A. a lot of YouTube content.
I know what you're thinking.
Yep, she still has no idea.
I literally told her that I needed my camera for driver's ed
and that the dashboard was a safe place for it,
and she bought it.
I start this idea,
where I start having conversations with my grandma
about pop culture and celebrities
and things that are going on in the news.
Taylor Swift wants to go to prom with me.
- Who is that?
- I was able to convince her
that Miley Cyrus was my best friend,
I went to prom with Katy Perry
and I egged houses with Justin Beiber.
It was seriously insane,
before I knew it, at school, on there internet,
I became known as the kid that convinces his grandma
that celebrities are his friends.
Some of the videos start getting so many views
that my grandma begins getting recognized in public.
Like at the grocery store, at the mall,
even when she was driving.
Everyone is eating it up and my grandma has no idea, still.
I was in way too deep.
I knew I had to keep going, though,
so I told her that all those people that asked for photos
were my close friends at school
and they just happened to see my class projects.
- Okay, we're lost.
- Do we need a map?
So it's almost the end of 2014.
I hit 200 thousand subscribers
and my grandma literally cannot go to the store
without getting recognized at this point.
It was time to come clean.
In August of 2014, I decided to come clean
and show her all the videos.
I recorded her live reaction,
and she was actually really happy.
I though she was gonna kill me,
but to my surprise, she wanted to keep making more
and I was just so relieved.
Grandma, come here.
I have to show you something.
You know what YouTube is?
- No, yeah, show me YouTube.
(laughing)
See that. - This was 2012.
Now don't leave, because it's about to get crazy up in here.
I upload the confession of showing my grandma her videos
and this gets over a million views within the first week.
Media outlets all over the globe
begin talking about this random kid
that was able to film his grandma secretly for years.
I remember teachers in school,
even the ones that didn't like me
were telling me that they saw my story on the news.
I'm even driving to school
and listening to my favorite radio station
randomly talk about my YouTube channel.
The radio was on
because I didn't have an AUX cord, by the way.
There's all this media buzz stirring around.
One day, I open up my email
to a message from Jimmy Kimmel Live.
Honestly, I thought the email was fake,
but turned out to be real,
and they asked if I was down to be on the show via Skype.
Jimmy wanted me to convince my grandma
that the movie Frozen happened in real life,
and secretly record her again.
So grandma, do you wanna build a snowman?
- When?
- It was so funny,
because I wasn't allowed to tell my grandma
that we were gonna be on the show
and she found out from a friend at the senior center
and she actually got so pissed at me.
The next year, out of the blue,
we're asked to fly out to California
to film a Target commercial, my favorite store.
This is our first time ever on a plane together.
It was our first real trip.
All the stuff you need for your dorm room,
right, Grandma?
- Totes.
- That summer of 2015,
my grandma and I embarked on a road trip
from Connecticut all the way to Chicago
and filmed the entire thing for a web series.
That week was probably
one of the most memorable weeks of my entire life
and I really got to see a different side of my grandma
because you get trapped in a car with someone,
you really see the different side of them.
We go to VidCon, my grandma is a full blown celeb there.
Everyone's coming up to her asking for photos
and she even tells me that she feels like Marilyn Monroe.
Like most grandmas, she never expected to have like fans,
and so when people were asking for photos nonstop,
she at one point like ran away and was like, Kevin,
like you have to, I was working as her assistant kind of
and like monitoring everything,
and like making sure the pictures were running smoothly.
It was really cute, because she starting calling
all these kids her grandchildren,
and people were asking for her to adopt them
and she was saying yes.
Even though she knew all these videos existed,
she still didn't really understand
the whole concept of YouTube and the internet,
and kind of still thought that these people
that come up to her I know personally.
Cut to spring 2017, Steve Harvey asked us
to be on his show Little Big Shots Forever Young.
We head to LA again, and we talked to him on his show.
(cheering)
- Hi, fellas and girls.
- The premise of this show is having senior citizens
demonstrate their talents,
and we don't really have much talent
besides I guess being funny,
so we just sat on his couch and talked about vlogging
while other grandparents were acrobat-ing and doing magic.
After five years of being YouTubers together,
we decided to spend some of that YouTube paycheck
and get a trip to Cancun where we spent a week
and just relaxed.
Which brings us to today.
We're still making videos together
and she says it actually makes her feel young.
It's like her favorite thing to do,
and I'm just really happy and relieved
because starting out, I was a little nervous
that she'd get mad that I was doing this
and she's the one calling me saying like,
are we gonna make a video together?
Before all this, she was just my grandma,
and we had a normal relationship,
and now I'm happy to call her my best friend.
I'm just really happy that this whole experience
brought us so much closer,
because without it, I don't think I'd be as close with her.
(laughing)
I'm glad you're laughing, I thought you'd be mad.
(laughing)
I also think it's really important
to visit your grandparents because a lot of the time,
she's just sitting at home
and this has really given her something to do.
What started out as a secret
and something I did not want my grandma to ever know about.
Now she's the one that won't shut up about it
and is telling everybody we see to subscribe,
whether it's at the restaurant
or even at stoplights and that's just insane,
because Grandma, we're better than that.
By the way, please like and subscribe.
(exciting music)
