Speedrunning Legend: An Interview with Karl Jobst

Karl Jobst is a YouTuber and streamer whose channel documenting video game speedrunning has tens of millions of views.  He holds a plethora of speedrunning records in Perfect Dark and Goldeneye 007 on the N64, and was the first to beat the Dam level of Goldeneye on Agent in 52 seconds, surpassing a record that had stood for fifteen years.  His YouTube videos have covered astounding speedrunning feats, new discoveries, investigations into video game market manipulation by Wata Games, and the scandals surrounding gaming personality Billy Mitchell. The last of these videos led to his being sued by Mitchell in September 2021, for which he is currently awaiting trial.

Karl and I first met in 2000 on the GameFAQs.com Goldeneye 007 page when we were both fourteen and writing strategy guides for the site.  We corresponded by email, then fell out of touch for over twenty years until I found his YouTube channel.  I reached out to him as a blast from the past, and over Zoom we discussed classic gaming, positive life changes, and finding the balance between money and passion.

 

Part I: As Soon As We Did It, I Was Hooked

 

But I Also Have a Day Job: How old were you when you first got into video games?

Karl Jobst: Two and a half.  Some of my earliest memories are of playing a computer game, specifically Ultima V.  It’s a very complex game, and I don’t think the modern generation would even be able to play it.  Back then they didn’t really hold your hand and guide you.  It required a lot of proactiveness and investigation.  I probably wasn’t doing it right, because specifically my earliest memory is of me dying in the game.

BIAHADJ: And was this on the family PC?

KJ: Yes.  The first console I owned was a Nintendo 64, which I got for Christmas in 1997, so before then it was all PC.

BIAHADJ: Did you play often, or was it just an occasional hobby?

KJ: Oh, literally as much as I was allowed to, which was pretty much every day.  I think I wasn’t allowed to play the computer on Sundays—my stepdad was a physically active man, and he didn’t like me playing the computer, so I had rules enforced upon me that I couldn’t play on this day or that day.

BIAHADJ: Any other favorite games from back in the day?

KJ: A big game I played was Wizardry V.  The Wizardry series is similar to a Japanese RPG, but it’s a dungeoncrawler, and it has the most rudimentary graphics.  It has sticks that define a maze, just lines with a black screen.  If you look at pictures of Wizardry on the PC it’s seriously the most basic thing, with text. Another big game was originally called Hero’s Quest, but now it’s Quest for Glory.

Even though I’m not that old—I was born in 1986—when I was growing up there were games that came out in the early ‘90s that had pretty decent graphics, but I was still playing these ancient ones because my parents never really encouraged the computer side for me.  They never saw my passion for PC gaming and encouraged that by buying me a computer or games. A lot of the games I played were just games that they bought.

BIAHADJ: Me neither—I can’t think of a single person whose parents encouraged their video game playing when they were a kid. [laughs] Did any of that change once you got the N64?

KJ: It got worse, insofar as now I had a console.  My parents didn’t play the Nintendo 64 at all, nor would they, so I had free rein of that.  That was also when the internet started becoming more mainstream in the late ‘90s and early 2000s, when people like us were finding the internet and internet speed was getting to the point where we could use it.

BIAHADJ: I don’t know about you, but my first few times using the internet were definitely at school learning how to research for my seventh-grade research paper.

KJ: Back then it was a novelty, and you’d be happy to sit there for a couple of minutes while a website loaded.  But aside from that you couldn’t really get a community.  If you look at the old Doom communities for example, a lot of them were at universities, because the universities had the infrastructure to facilitate that, like having quick internet speeds, or at least relatively quick.  Communities weren’t really built from home, they were built from universities, initially anyway.  But in the late ‘90s we had faster modems—I was on…not even 56K at that point.

BIAHADJ: [laughs] Me too…

KJ: But we started using the internet anyway, and that’s when the communities started to be creative.  Even GameFAQs was a community—we had the message boards, so you began to find other people, and that was huge.  At pretty much the same time I discovered GameFAQs I found the Goldeneye World Records website for Goldeneye speedrunning.

BIAHADJ: When was that?

KJ: I found the website in 1999, and the only real communication I had with the community was emailing the webmaster and the person who actually ran the website, Wes McKinney, to get my times on there.  I think the first message board came around after Perfect Dark came out in 2000, and once the message boards were created for Perfect Dark and Goldeneye, and we had stuff like AOL Instant Messenger and MSN Messenger, the community started to build up, and I got kind of obsessed.

In the real world, I was…low on the social hierarchy, I had self-esteem problems—I think I had particularly bad self-esteem issues in the real world.  I didn’t want to leave my house, I was anxious to go outside…it was really bad.  But with this community I could interact with them and have friends online, and at that time in my life that was definitely the best thing for me, but my parents didn’t get that.

BIAHADJ: They didn’t understand the gaming community?

KJ: They didn’t understand how it was helping me through that difficult time.  And then they hated me being on the computer all the time, at least my stepdad did, so there was friction, and if I did something wrong they would take me off the Nintendo for a month, off the computer for a month, and that was terrible because I had nothing else, really, in the rest of my life—I was depressed, you know?  I couldn’t do the one thing that was keeping me sane and getting me through.  So that was pretty bad.

BIAHADJ: Did you start competing for Goldeneye World Records before you started writing for GameFAQs?  Or was it about the same time?

KJ: It was before.  Competing for fast times was a friendly thing between me and a friend in 1999.  This was before we even found the speedrunning side—we didn’t even know it was a thing, but as soon as we did it, I was hooked.  I remember specifically it was the level Frigate in Goldeneye on Secret Agent.  I don’t know what inspired me to do it, but I called my friend and was like, I got this time on Frigate Secret Agent, you want to see if you can beat it?  And he was like, OK, and a couple of hours later he called and gave me this time, and I was like, Damn, how’d you do that?  He beat my time by a lot.  Then he was like, Oh I ran through the level like this, I took this route and this path, and I thought that was so cool because I was doing it using a different strategy.

Then I remembered in one of my N64 magazines was a section where this person had gone through Goldeneye beating every 00 Agent level in under one hour.  It had a list of all his times for every stage, and I said to my friend, Let’s try to beat all of those times.  Then I looked online—I was getting to be more savvy with the internet, and I found the Goldeneye fast times, and those times were very, very good, and they had some videos.  They were very choppy videos—like, they were a couple of megabytes—but wow, that was some mindblowing stuff.  This was the time in history where people were first uploading top-level video game footage to the internet, and people were watching it.  It was very novel, and pretty crazy.

BIAHADJ: Agreed.  Posting times in a magazine is one thing, but you can’t enjoy or learn from the process the way you can with a video, so that leap you just described is absolutely huge.

KJ: It’s like the introduction of TV or something—actually seeing it for the first time is a very special thing.  It was very inspiring.

BIAHADJ: Did you branch off into speedrunning other games?

KJ: I was a lot more successful in Perfect Dark—I went to Perfect Dark later in 2002. I probably would have been successful with Goldeneye—between 2001 and 2002 I wasn’t as active with Goldeneye, and as I said, there were some issues where my parents wouldn’t let me play.  I got banned for a month when I was about to be Goldeneye champion, and that really took the wind out of my sails.  But in 2002 we moved, and then I had a TV in my own room and I started playing again.

 

 

Part II: Learning to Overcome Challenges

 

BIAHADJ: What were your other interests besides video games?

KJ: I’d been playing guitar since grade 7, and I was really good at guitar, however I stopped playing for a long time because I didn’t have a good guitar.  I didn’t have good communication skills, so if I could go back in time with my current communication skills, I would really communicate to my parents that I wanted to keep playing guitar, but I couldn’t play on that thing because it was terrible.  But I wasn’t taught how to communicate properly, so I just quit guitar and I wouldn’t play again until I was an adult and got a job and paid for my own guitar.  There was a many-year gap, even though I was very good.

BIAHADJ: What did you do after you finished high school?

KJ: I went to university for six months studying IT, but hated university.  I just didn’t find it interesting or fun.  I wasn’t interested in learning programming—it’s one of those things that would be nice to know, but the actual act of learning it was so boring.

BIAHADJ: Was it a difficult decision to leave college?

KJ: It was easy.  Super easy.  I’ve gone to university three times, and each time I lasted less than six months. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: So the first time was IT, and how about the second two times?

KJ: The second and third times were psychology.

BIAHADJ: Why psychology?

KJ: Because I had all my issues when I was a kid, and I’ve gone through a lot of change and I’ve helped myself.  I’m very interested in psychology and the act of changing yourself, like changing the way you feel through your beliefs and learning skills to overcome challenges.  I was never taught that by anyone, actually, growing up.  I had a lot of social problems and self-esteem problems, but no one ever taught me that I could proactively do something to make myself feel better.  It wasn’t until I was maybe 19, where luckily I was savvy enough to sort of use the internet.  I was also bad at dating, so I looked online for how to be better at dating, and that was a gateway to learning about psychology.

Probably the biggest thing for me was a guy online who taught about dating, David DeAngelo. His real name’s Eben Pagan, and he has a product called Deep Inner Game, and on it was a conversation between him and a psychologist—that’s probably the biggest change in my life as far as where I was heading, was this conversation with this very established psychologist.  He had a system that he designed to basically give you a road map to change how you felt, change your results in life, and he explained it all.

The biggest epiphany I had was when he said that every deal you make with someone should be win-win, so that if you’re winning, and someone does something for you, they should also win, and you should do something for them, so you both benefit.  And I didn’t know that.  I was never taught by anyone, Hey, if you ask for something from someone, you should also give them something back, you know?  I was very selfish—I didn’t consider anyone else, ever.  Maybe to a mature adult that seems like common sense, but I think you literally have to be taught that, and I never was.  And I was like, damn man, this seems like a really rudimentary principle that I wasn’t aware of, so if I didn’t know this basic concept, what else don’t I know?  So that was pretty big for me.

BIAHADJ: What happened after you had that epiphany?

KJ: I realized the difference between having a happy and successful life is how you interact with the world, it’s what you know, and it’s how you treat people, it has to do with choices you make and your level of wisdom, so I just went on a path of learning.  That’s why I like psychology, because when people are in a bad spot, they can go a long way to help themselves through education and learning new beliefs.  When I first got into that stuff, I would literally not sleep for days, I would just study the psychology, study everything I could and not sleep, because I was just so into it, and I realized how I could advantage myself by learning.  I’ve always been good at problem solving, so I extrapolated that if I learned this new knowledge and acted in this sort of changed way I could see the change and results in the future.

 

 

Part III: I Had to Do It Because I Wanted the Skill

 

BIAHADJ: What did the rest of your life look like during this period of intense learning?

KJ: I had to work—my mom went to Europe when I was 18, and my father has never been supportive.  I’ve had no parents, essentially, since I left school.  So I had to work, I was renting, I had to find my own way.

BIAHADJ: Were you living alone?

KJ: No, I was living with friends.  By that stage I was a little bit healthier—socially I was kind of bad, but I kind of learnt myself through high school, so by the end of high school, I was OK, and I did manage to have friends.

BIAHADJ: What was your first job during this time?

KJ: My very first job was a factory job that I got through my brother-in-law.  I worked at a leather spraying factory for two months, and then after that I had a job for three years in a chicken factory.  Luckily it wasn’t the killing plant, it was processing, so it was taking the meat and turning it into products.

BIAHADJ: Wow, I’ve heard that’s a crazy and often dangerous job.  What were the conditions like there?

KJ: Um, only one person lost a finger. [laughs] I don’t know what happened before then.

BIAHADJ: So you were there for three years, how about after that?

KJ: Then I quit my job because I wanted to get into sales.  As part of my psychological growth I was reading a lot of stuff from Rich Dad, Poor Dad by Robert Kiyosaki where he talks about door-to-door sales.  A lot of these salesmen talk about direct sales, face-to-face sales, as a crucial skill to learn if you want to be successful.  So I took that onboard and quit my job at the chicken factory and decided to get a job going door to door selling, I don’t know, something, so I found a company that did direct sales, and I lasted like two days.  It was the worst experience.  I’m just not cut out for it—I couldn’t handle the rejection.

BIAHADJ: I think quitting can be a good decision that takes courage, especially when you know you’re not cut out for something.

KJ: So I did that for two days, but luckily I did, because they had a very quick sales training, which I remembered, and after I couldn’t do that job because it was too hard, I went to some mobile stores with my resume and asked to speak to the manager about getting a job.  At one of the mobile stores the manager came out, and they must have been looking for people because I said I’d done some study in sales, and I basically gave her a structure of how sales should be made—Step One, Step Two, Step Three—I told her the structure of a sale, which I’d learned from this other job that I did for two days, and she must have been impressed by that because I got a job there. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: Wow, that’s an amazing example of leveraging job training.

KJ: So I got a job there for a couple of months, and I pivoted off that and applied for a job in their call center.  During the interview I used some experience I had in the store as the reason I should be in the call center, and I got the job there.  But again, these were all jobs that I hated, because I ultimately don’t like talking to customers, and all the jobs I had were sales-related, which is the opposite of what I really enjoy, but I had to do it because I wanted the skill and I felt like I could one day become successful.

BIAHADJ: And what did being successful mean to you?

KJ: At the time, it was becoming wealthy through my own business.

BIAHADJ: And it didn’t necessarily matter what it was?

KJ: Well, it mattered what it was.  It had to be something I was passionate about.  Mostly it was things I was terrible at that I learned myself to be better at.  One thing was dating and relationships, so I wanted to be a dating coach or a relationship coach or a self-help person.  These were my earliest dreams, then at some point I wanted to do music.  But that was never a serious thing even though I was good at guitar and I was playing again and I’d started writing music.  But creating a product and selling it through the internet was pretty much what I was planning on doing.

 

 

Part IV: Being Too Scared to Say Hello to Someone is a Big Problem

 

BIAHADJ: How did you go about fine-tuning your goals?

KJ: My career goal was always still to do something in dating or self-help.  I even wrote a book on Approach Anxiety, where I applied some psychological principles.  People in the public hate it, but being a man and being too scared to say hello to someone is a big problem.

BIAHADJ: Yes, as soon as I saw that project it reminded me of being younger and being nervous about talking to girls I was interested in, and feeling like I was the only one who felt that way.  I definitely didn’t have a name for it like Approach Anxiety.  One line in particular from your old website really resonated with me, where you say that a lot of dating advice tells you to go and approach the person, but the people giving that advice don’t consider that going up to someone can be really nerve-wracking because of all that anxiety.

KJ: People think that if you go up and approach someone, you’re bad, because their perception of someone who does that is a pickup artist—the sleazy pickup artist who lies and is just trying to get sex or whatever.  But that’s not the only reason you’d want to say hello to someone.  If you’re a normal, average dude and you want to meet someone, you have to go say hello—that’s not a bad thing.

BIAHADJ: And that fear of approaching people happens in non-romantic contexts as well—when you’re at work or you need to talk to a university professor, or even when you want to make friends or ask a stranger for directions.

KJ: I also feel like the inability to go up to someone and start a conversation is a psychological problem—it’s an indicator of some anxiety, some self-esteem issue.  At the end of the day, if you solve that problem it’s going to help you psychologically, in all areas of life, just being more confident and not having that issue.

BIAHADJ: What sparked the idea for writing a book about approach anxiety?

KJ: Because I had approach anxiety.  Everything I wanted to do was something I had a problem with and overcame, and I wanted to talk more about it. My stuff isn’t pickup artistry—I don’t teach people that kind of stuff.  It was funny—when the people in the pickup industry saw that material, they were like, This is stupid, because you’re not teaching people how to pick up.  It was considered beta, because it’s not trying to pick them up.

For example, I had exercises where you would go up and give someone a compliment and then walk away, and you would repeat that over and over.  That’s not trying to pick them up, it’s just an exercise to overcome anxiety, right?  And the pickup artists would look at that and be like, Why are you walking away, you should try and pick them up, that’s stupid.  And to the public it looked like you’re trying to be a pickup artist, because they didn’t understand what the point was.  So I realized there’s no place for this.  People who want to learn pickup artistry stuff want to be a pickup artist, and the public hated the idea of you going up and approaching someone.

BIAHADJ: Which is a terrible shame, because my understanding is that the pickup artist community teaches ways of manipulating people to obtain a goal rather than pursuing relationships that are win-win for both parties, like you described earlier.  And unfortunately that community gives a bad name to a lot of dating advice that legitimately aims to help men be better at dating, and to be better people in general.

KJ: I was part of groups that did pickup artistry stuff, and for example, some person would post this fake story that they came up with to get sex—like, I made up this story and I got laid from it.  And I would be like, You shouldn’t lie to get sex.

BIAHADJ: [laughs hard] Yes, that goes against the fundamentals of human relationships…

KJ: Lying to get a goal doesn’t build your self-esteem, it doesn’t create psychological health.  But if you have integrity and you’re honest, and then you get success, that actually does create a healthy psyche, it develops self-esteem by being just who you are.  The goal is to be truthful and honest to yourself and still find a way to do that and get results.  That’s healthy.

BIAHADJ: That’s very well said—I can see why the project was misconstrued.

KJ: I couldn’t really find the market for that particular thing.  Probably now I could—I marketed it as a pickup thing, and on the outskirt I appealed to more of the pickup artistry stuff.  I would do it a little differently these days, but maybe one day in the future I’ll talk about it again.

 

 

Part V: I Knew I Had a Winning Formula

 

BIAHADJ: What was your next step?

KJ: In 2012 I got a job with a credit card company doing more processing back end.  I had that job from 2012 until 2018, but over that time it evolved into more customer service—I was confirming income details, checking pay slips, making sure people could afford the credit card for new applications. The job really went downhill the more I had to talk with customers.  And then eventually my job became kind of redundant, and they wanted to put me in collections, which is calling overdue accounts and requesting payment.  I would find that to be worse than sales, to be honest.  So, I quit.  That was in August 2018.  When I quit, I didn’t have a YouTube channel—I had done some streaming, but it wasn’t huge.

BIAHADJ: When did you start streaming?

KJ: I started streaming in 2012, but it was very irregularly, and I didn’t have a huge following.  It wasn’t part of my goals—that was literally just having fun, because I wanted to speedrun. It was around 2017 that I really started streaming and going for a very high-profile world record, which was Dam 52 [beating the Dam level in Goldeneye on Agent in 52 seconds].

BIAHADJ: And how was streaming going?  Were you getting a lot of attention?

KJ: I wasn’t serious about it.  I was never serious about gaming or streaming or anything.  That didn’t factor in for my career.  For a couple years I was speedrunning a lot, but I was kind of on autopilot.

BIAHADJ: What does that mean, autopilot?

KJ: I had goals, but looking back on them, they weren’t really.  For example, in 2017 I created this project called Project Become Awesome, where I said OK, I want to play piano every day, play guitar every day, juggle every day, and I want to work out, and I created a YouTube channel to, I don’t know, inspire people to do stuff.  My philosophy was that if I can do all these things, then it should be relatively easy for you to just choose one.  I was trying to inspire people by doing heaps of stuff to show what’s possible, because doing one thing is even more than what most people do.  So I had that idea, but that was too difficult.

BIAHADJ: Why?

KJ: Because I was working.  And I couldn’t work a full-time job that I hated, and have a wife, and do all this stuff.  It was just impossible.

BIAHADJ: What inspired you to go for Dam 52?

KJ: I just saw it as possible, based on the strategy developments and the history of the record.  Dam Agent was the longest-lasting world record in the game’s history, and I knew that if I got it, it would be a big deal.  I started going for it in May, and I spent like half the year playing for it, and when I was streaming it I would get 100-something viewers on Twitch, which was the most I’d ever had, and I started to get some subscribers and all that kind of stuff.  Then I got the world record in December, and that went viral, so it was crazy.  News articles were posting about it, and even people I worked with heard about it on the radio.  There was a lot of buzz about it, I think because of my reaction to it. [laughs]

BIAHADJ: On the video your reaction’s so bright, and there’s something inspiring about seeing someone accomplish something like that and get so excited.

KJ: I think that was the most important thing leading up to me having a career in this field, because I’d never, ever in my life had the goal of having a career in gaming, it was always something else.  This got a lot of attention, but I didn’t keep streaming because I was working.  Working a full-time job and keeping anything up seriously is extremely, extremely difficult.

BIAHADJ: How did you find the time to do the streaming you were doing?

KJ: I was doing nighttime.  But speedrunning is fun, so of all the things I could have done and kept up while I was working, playing video games is one of the easiest.  It’s not like a chore.

BIAHADJ: How did you move towards a career in gaming?

KJ: Long story short, in August 2018, my job said, your job’s redundant and we’re going to put you in collections.  I knew I couldn’t do collections, so I said to my wife, I can’t do this job, that’s out of the question, so I have to quit.  The options are, get a new job, or try and be a streamer.  I’d been working a job since 2004, so 14 years, and I hated every single second of it.  It was always my dream to not work simply because I hated working so much.  So I thought, I was getting 100-something viewers on Twitch when I streamed, and that’s kind of a good foot in the door, and maybe if I learn about streaming and apply myself to streaming, I could learn how to be a streamer, just like any other skill.

So I told my wife I was going to quit and try to be a streamer, and to give me three months, and if nothing was happening, I’d get a job.  And she said, Cool.  I had to ask my wife because we have a mortgage, so I have a responsibility to pay that, and I couldn’t just expect her to pay the full mortgage and all that.

BIAHADJ: Very true—when you’re in a long-term relationship you have to make these kinds of decisions together.

KJ: So I quit and started streaming between 8-10 hours every day.  I was really getting into it—I was learning how to be a better streamer, looking at successful streamers, trying to pick up tips and tricks, and I was making some progress, probably enough progress to survive, but I wasn’t making a lot of money, maybe $1,000 [Australian dollars] a month.

BIAHADJ: How does that compare to when you first started streaming?

KJ: Oh, $100, $200 [Australian dollars] a month from streaming.  But $1,000 [Australian dollars] a month isn’t enough, and I was working 8-10 hours a day.  It was really exhausting.  Streaming 8-10 hours a day is harder, at least for me, than actually working a job.

BIAHADJ: Why is it harder?

KJ: Because you’re entertaining a crowd of people.  I’m an introvert, so maybe if you’re an extrovert it doesn’t really matter, but for me as an introvert, having to entertain people for that long is really draining.  While it’s not as depressing as working a job, it’s definitely more draining.

BIAHADJ: I can see that—I’m an introvert, and jobs with people definitely leave me feeling drained as well.  How did you transition to YouTube?

KJ: By December my stream was a little bit bigger, but it wasn’t enough, and at some point I wanted to try to make a YouTube video.  When my Dam 52 video went viral I realized OK, it’s possible to get viral videos.  I did actually have kind of a viral video back in 2014, where I played Goldeneye, Mario 64, and Zelda 64 at the same time and beat them all within an hour.  I was like, Man, if you could play three consoles at the same time, it would just be so stupid that it would be viral, you know?  It’s such a stupid idea that people would find it interesting.

BIAHADJ: Oh wow, I’m going to look that up right when we finish.

KJ: It ended up getting like 300,000 views or something, which at the time was decent.  That was it—I just dropped it, because my goal was never to have a career in it or anything.  Then in 2018 I wanted to get into making YouTube videos because another Goldeneye player, R. White Goose was making videos.  I never wanted to make content, I wanted to make tutorials, because again, I’ve always wanted to teach people.  In this case it’d be teaching speedrunning: teaching people how to speedrun, how to practice, or how to have the mindset.

I have a good friend I met back when we were fourteen, his name’s Matt Cook, and I met him online through Perfect Dark.  In 2009 or so I got him into self-development, and he really took that on and learned about being an entrepreneur.  Now he’s traveled a lot through the world, he has his own business, makes money online, and he’s very into success as well.  In 2018 he was staying with me for a week or so, and I mentioned that I’d wanted to start learning how to make videos, and he was like, Dude, let’s just do it.  He pretty much just sat me down and said, Just write the script.  So I wrote the script and made this video on the fundamentals of speedrunning, and that got a few thousand views or something.  The response was decent, but I was planning on using it to get my name out there for people to watch my Twitch channel.  I didn’t really know what my plan was, to be honest.

Anyways, then I made another tutorial video, and a few people were liking that.  Maybe I needed the confidence of doing another couple of videos to do what I did next, which was a content video that anyone could watch, so I did the Top 5 Biggest Skips in Perfect Dark.  I think you’ve got to have some confidence in yourself to make that kind of video.  What really inspired me after that video was that Kotaku did an article about it.  I thought, man, this is my first video of this type, and someone liked it enough to write an article about it.  That’s very inspiring.

BIAHADJ: Agreed.

KJ: Then I pumped out some Perfect Dark content and some Goldeneye content.  I think in March 2019 I earned like $1,300 [Australian dollars] just from YouTube, which was a lot, and it was only a few months in. But the big thing for me was the Doom video, A 20 Year-Old Doom Record Was Finally Broken. When I was making that video, I knew it was good—I look back on it now and I know the production’s bad, the audio quality’s bad, but the passion I put into it and the way I did the intro was fantastic, and I knew it was good when I made it.  That one went super viral, and got like a million views in five days.  There were plenty of articles about it and everything, and that was like, no looking back.

BIAHADJ: Do you mean that seeing that video blow up gave you the confidence to continue with YouTube, or it made you realize that YouTube was the way to go versus streaming?

KJ: That it was the way to go—that video wasn’t a fluke.  It was intentional enough so that I knew I could repeat this, I knew I had a winning formula.

 

 

Part VI: Money Definitely Creates Stress

 

BIAHADJ: What led you to get into the kind of investigative journalism aspect of some of your videos?  I’m talking especially about your videos about Billy Mitchell’s cheating and exposing Wata games for manipulating video game prices.

KJ: The reason I’m interested in Billy Mitchell is it’s such a fascinating story.  I watched The King of Kong and loved the documentary—he’s such a character, and I think it’s one of the most interesting stories in gaming history.  He’s such a villain that I like talking about him.

The Wata stuff—again, it all stems from my passion about gaming.  Through my research, I found some bread crumbs that weren’t right.  I heard some things and I watched some stuff, and I learned a little bit about the characters involved, and it was a bit suspect, so I wanted to learn more about it, and I just did my own research.  Generally if I find something interesting, I know other people will, and that’s generally my gauge for what I do videos on.

BIAHADJ: How was it getting sued by Billy Mitchell?

KJ: Well, the idea of it was funny.  The reality is a lot less funny.  I’m confident, but getting sued, no matter how confident you are, does create anxiety—it’s a scary thing.  Luckily I have a lot of support—I have some very wealthy friends who are helping me pay for the lawsuit, so financially it’s fine.  Notch has been very helpful, so thus far Notch has been paying my legal fees, and I have another supporter named Julian who’s sent me a lot of support.  So I’m in no danger, and in the worst case I could ask my community for money.  The whole experience is kind of weird—I’ve never shied away from new experiences, and I think all new experiences are valuable, so I’m kind of excited about the whole process.  If I’ve done something legitimately wrong, and I deserve to be punished, then I should be punished, and so be it.  If I did something wrong where I legitimately deserve to have to pay Billy Mitchell money, we should set a precedent for that.

Everything I say is backed up by evidence, so we’ll see what happens, but if I do win, it’s going to be fantastic.  Winning a lawsuit, I’m going to guess, has to be one of the greatest feelings you can have.

BIAHADJ: What other factors affect which topics you choose for your videos?

KJ: Well, I will throw out something, which is the money element.  Money, in my opinion, does kind of ruin creative flow, because the money is factoring into every kind of decision of whether I do this video or that video.  The question is, Which video’s going to make more money?

BIAHADJ: How big of a factor is that in the final decision?

KJ: It’s a big factor, because I have a family, I have a son, my wife doesn’t work because I’m earning enough to where she doesn’t need to work, and I’m trying to move into a family house.  I’m in a small townhouse right now, but we want to move into a big family house, in a good area we’re happy in.

BIAHADJ: So when you’re considering which topics to cover, what do you gravitate towards?

KJ: Cheating videos do well.  Generally I like cheating videos, but the backlash is that in speedrunning, some people don’t like it if you talk about cheating. They don’t want anyone to shed a negative light on speedrunning.

BIAHADJ: Interesting.  To me, trying to hide or ignore that some people in a community are cheating is deceptive.  All of your videos about cheating make it clear that this is something individual people do, and not the way the majority of the community behaves.  I think you do a great job of highlighting that, and explaining how being aware of cheating in these isolated instances can teach people what to watch out for and discourage other cheaters.

KJ: Thanks.  I agree with that.  I make fewer cheating videos than I would want to, to be honest, because I want to sprinkle in some positive videos too.  So I do consider everything, I consider money, I consider what I’m interested in, I consider what the rest of the community thinks, and all of these factor in.  But money definitely creates stress.  Whenever you have the goal of earning a lot of money, it creates stress.

BIAHADJ: That’s very well said—there are all of these factors you have to consider when you’re building a creative career.

KJ: What I realized about myself, and yourself, and I think a lot of creators, is that we were always doing it before there was money—we’ve been writing since we were kids.  YouTube’s a bit of a different beast, because I think people get into it just because of the money, maybe, but I think a lot of the time it has to come from passion.  You have to ask yourself, was I doing this for fun, before money was even part of the equation?  And if the answer’s no [laughs] then it’s going to be tough to overcome that.

I think the people who become super successful do it because they’re able to work so hard, because it was always just something they could do and get enjoyment from doing.  It’s pretty crazy, if you look at the FAQs that we wrote, they’re not short.

BIAHADJ: No, they’re not.  I look at those kinds of passion projects, especially from when I was a kid when I was just writing about video games for pure enjoyment and to help people.  I had no idea people were actually going to contact me at the email address I posted on there.  The notion of doing something for attention or fame or money at that point was beyond me.  It’s that pure essence of creativity you have when you’re a kid, and if you lose that, I really think it shows in the work.  Now I look at decisions I make about which projects to pursue, and I’m always trying to balance the ones that are likely to get more attention or more money with the ones I’m most interested in.

KJ: At some level though, you do have to set up a groundwork, or get a lot of attention so you can pivot.  There’s some long thought that has to go into it.  What I see a lot is that some people really like doing this thing, and they want to do it this way, but the reality is that no one’s really interested in it, or they’re not getting much attention because people don’t see the value, or maybe there is no value.  And I say you should probably start considering what people want a bit more, not just what you want, but what other people want.  A lot of people are resistant to that for some reason, but considering what other people want is always a healthy thing.  You don’t always have to make decisions based on that, but you at least have to consider it.

BIAHADJ: I agree—anytime you’re making art for people to either enjoy or not enjoy, you have to look at, maybe not what everyone likes, but what at least a subset of people like.

KJ: It’s in every artistic field.  There are some lucky people who do their own thing, and that becomes wildly successful.  The craziest example would be like Jackson Pollack or something.  The people who actually just go into something exactly how they want to do it, and it works out, is super super rare.  That ideal, is, in my opinion, immature, so being realistic in the world, you do have to consider the market, you just do, and if you want to do things your own way, you’ve got to be patient, and you’ve got to build an audience first.  That doesn’t mean you’ll never be doing your own thing, it just means you have to think more long-term, you have to compromise a little bit, learn what works, and then once you have a community or a support base, then start to integrate more of your own true stuff, and that’s probably the better way to do it.

 

You can see more from Karl Jobst on his YouTube channel, watch him stream on Twitch, or follow him on Twitter and Discord.

Like this interview? Check out the rest of the Day Job Interview series.