The Man You've Seen But Never Heard Of - Inside A Mind

this is nathan barnett probably one of the most famous individuals you've never heard of from appearing in popular gifts to pulling dangerous stunts to commercials and tv shows he's been around for quite some time and yet there was one moment where he almost lost everything this is the story of nathan barnett [Music] before we continue i have a question for you how many of you watching more often than not listen to my videos in the background while doing something else this is something that i do a lot with youtube videos too and that's why this video is sponsored by audible audible is the leading and largest provider when it comes to audio books each month you're given one credit which allows you to purchase any title in their premium selection meaning you can listen to the latest bestseller or slip on a classic you just haven't gotten around to yet in the background while doing something else in fact while i've been working on this video i've been listening to stephen king's 11 22 63. i've been wanting to get round to this one for quite a while it's about a teacher who travels back in time to try and stop the assassination of j.f kennedy a story that king himself has been planning to write since 1973 and only came out in 2011. if that sounds like something you'd be down to listen to you can get a 30 day free trial and download the audiobook for free by visiting audible.com insidermind or text insider mind to 500 500. once you have the audio book downloaded you can listen to it on any device online or offline again that's audible.com insidermind or text insider mind to 500 500. but like i'm that guy that everyone's seen but no one knows who they are it's like oh that's that guy that's that weird bald guy that's always dancing nathan barnett is a filmmaker a stuntman a dancer and a content creator here on youtube in fact he's been on here since the dawn of its creation my friend paul who's a director that i've worked with in the past uh he's like one of my oldest best friends from massachusetts then youtube came out and i loaded a video on his channel in 2005. it was a cartoon that i made called barricade and uh that was my very first upload like first year of youtube and then i started my channel in 2006 because he didn't want to keep loading my videos to his channel i just didn't i didn't make a channel because i didn't understand i actually mailed him a cd too with the quicktime on it to massachusetts from california and he loaded that as my very first video and then after that when i made my channel i started loading my videos in the santa monica public library on the computers at the public library because i didn't have a computer with the internet after uploading to youtube for only a month he found instant success his first viral video being a clip from a short film he put together called we've all got problems and it was me on a pogo stick with my brother timing with me with a stopwatch and then i throw the pogo stick and it hits a guy in the face and it's just kind of like a random moment that i thought worked as a video so i put that on there just because i was trying to load some of my older things on youtube and that got like over 300 000 views in 2006 and it had no audience it was like no subscribers and it was crazy to me i was like this is insane how many people have watched this so right right away it happened and i was like okay i'm gonna load everything to here and then i started doing more characters and i had a lot of characters i was performing at the upright citizens brigade so i was always workshopping things and then everything i did live at the theater i would then go and film in a video and put it on the internet um and then when it really started taking off was the character i did called trailer waus who was the self-proclaimed spokesperson for skittles and he can't even say the brand ray says skatel's so he's basically like a crazy guy in a back alley filming himself making commercials for a major company that doesn't need commercials but he just really likes the candy and those got a lot of attention and skittles actually made me the spokesperson for skittles for an entire year and uh i got a skittles vending machine a boom box that was a competition for a fan to fly out to la and be in a commercial with me they really jumped on board so that was pretty wild that and then from there that was like 2008 or something and then that commercial happened in like 2011. um so from there things just started kind of going crazy and a lot of the characters i would do would get more attention because there was more people watching one of his biggest characters today being keith abbakery a character that he's played so convincingly over the years that some people to this day don't even know that keith is a completely fictional character for a long period of time nathan preferred staying in character no matter the circumstances and in some cases he still does he had many videos on his channel where he would actively interact with the public and celebrities in character which not surprisingly has gotten himself into some trouble by doing it [Applause] okay everybody for like 2 days [Applause] he's been thrown out of comic con for climbing the building even shattering his foot after jumping off a 14 foot ledge probably a good time to say please don't do this yourself nathan is a working professional and has been doing this for the majority of his life nathan seemed to be riding at an all-time high and was even starting to make brief appearances in tv shows and commercials but around 2012 a shift started to take place on the internet the popularity of facebook and instagram kickstarted multiple accounts created by individuals that would dedicate their time to posting compilations of funny videos and images they found entertaining online problem is none of the content they shared would get credit and because this was a new thing there were no rules or places to report this content so these accounts would actively get a way of stealing content from other creators not giving them any credit and then making profit off of it too due to nathan's content involving extreme stunts and funny dancing in public he was one of the biggest targets for this when i started making music videos is when things get started getting stolen because bands and djs and different labels the music labels would take their own music and put it underneath my visuals and they'd load it to facebook where no one could really like copyright claim it and grab it and i started seeing them people would start tagging me in these videos from bands and there was one band that was it's over dj that's really big uh afrojack i think it was um had like 10 million views on a video that was all me and it was all my filming all my editing and these videos would take me a month sometimes to film and i'm trying to make a living off this and now these people are make taking them all my work and loading it to facebook and they're getting 10 times more views and i'm not even getting credited so they're not even like tagging me which would be amazing because then i would go up so many followers and they'd find my original videos and my other work and it was a real big bummer and there was a time where my manager and i had a an email list every time we found one or someone told us about a different video that was stolen we'd add it to the email list and there was like a hundred different like some of them were pretty small people with no views but that we added every single one i had my videos have been stolen i swear more than anybody and it wasn't even the dance videos it was just like my physical comedy montages gifs of me like falling down stairs my chip i have these videos called gymnasty where i'd throw myself around gymnastics studios and just get hurt people would take that and put music to it party hard is like the gif and then it's been used for many different shifts but it's a video i did called the no bones dance and actually fortnite ended up taking it and using it and calling it the boneless dance and even the music is the same from my video so my stuff started getting stolen a lot and that started around 2012 and it's still going on today while these videos were getting attention from all these other places nathan's main channel received the complete opposite and in 2014 youtube's algorithm began pushing his channel to the side and started favoring more fresh and upcoming content i feel like in 2014 to like 17 is when i was like really trying to i was struggling to like keep my nathan channel afloat like i would put videos out but no one would see them no one would get notifications and i'd make posts and i'd make posts on twitter and instagram and people would say like oh i didn't even know you were uploading still youtube didn't tell me so i was kind of like victim of the algorithm i guess of no one knowing i was uploading and people kept tweeting me saying when are you gonna do a new trail of house video and i was like i just did one this week and they were like oh i didn't know so nate i was really disheartened with putting effort into my videos and filming them and doing all this work to like not get any views i was just kind of like this isn't working and that i'm an actor so like i rely on like getting acting work and then making my youtube videos when i'm not you know getting work or there's no auditions so if there was a point in 2017 where i hadn't booked a job in a while and i had a thousand dollars left and my rent was fifteen hundred dollars i didn't know what i was going to do and i wasn't making anything off of youtube because no one was watching the videos and i was i actually bought a van i sold my car and i bought a van in anticipation of having to move into it in a couple months because i didn't have enough money to pay for rent anymore and i didn't know what was going to happen so and this was right when i was i had just filmed a batch of dad videos and i was editing them and i thought well i'll upload these videos and i actually thought about how i could just i might have to go to the library to like upload more videos because i'm always going to film stuff and edit things and load stuff even if i was homeless i would still do it because that's like what i want to do but i had had it all set up so that i could live in my van and my brother seth actually lived in a van for a couple years granted he parked in front of our apartment and would come in but living in a van wasn't like a weird thing to me because my brother did it and i saw how it could be easy to do if i needed to so i was fully prepared to move into my van i had a bed and i had everything ready to go in case i had to move into it while coming incredibly close to losing his home and having plans to move into his van nathan finally got round to uploading a project he'd been working on for a while i wanted to do something different and something that wasn't as comedy driven but i was also so frustrated with what these these people just taking my stuff i thought it was kind of a good concept for a story where people knew this is like my audience knew that my stuff was being stolen all the time it was like something i was always complaining about and they would help me you know tag me and things so i could at least get credit for stuff so i thought what what a cool way for me to start a story if i said hey guys it's still happening someone went really far this time and they started deep faking me completely and they're making a whole series with my face i thought that would make people really want to watch this series to keep their eye on it to be like whoa this is actually pretty impressive that they could steal this guy's face and uh i wanna watch it to see what they're gonna do the main focus of the project was around a stereotypical american family quite literally to the point where most of the characters don't actually have real names and are only referred to as their role in the family dad is called dad daughter is called daughter mother is called mother and sometimes wife the main story behind it all was that dad was a robot created by the wife cheryl to be her cash cow and make money online to fund her science experiments because she was the only one out of all of them that was real that and the neighbor originally it was going to be just nothing nathan had nothing to do with it it was going to be cheryl made these robots to you know be this like dancing monkey on youtube and this like wholesome up you know appealing funny guy like a sitcom like there's always like the goofy dad and then there's like the attractive wife and that's kind of like what they always do in sitcoms so i was using that mentality where i had my friend erica who's a really a pretty woman and i was like well this would be funny i'll just take the whole sitcom trope and angle and do that but then i had to add the nathan thing into the story because everyone was so confused by what my marketing ploy of them stealing my face so i added cheryl tried taking nathan and mind controlling him and uh it didn't work so then she had to make bots that looked a lot like him because nathan's mind was too strong after incorporating more cryptic stuff into the channel he was then covered by several other youtubers that talked about strange stuff online which brought the dad's story to a much bigger audience that nathan was not expecting there was more activity on the dad channel with 5 000 subscribers than there was on my nathan channel with almost 400 000 and then when i started like getting the full videos uploaded my ad revenue was going up and i had the nathan channel and the dad channel now and it literally saved my life and i didn't have to move out of the out of the house so that's uh yeah dad saved me dad's saved he's never gonna he's never gonna let you live that down you know nope not only has dad saved nathan's life but it's given him the platform to experiment with different projects that he's wanted to work on for quite some time now he makes music he live streams he's even started his own investigation series called reality which is the parody of videos like mine and game theorists where he makes up theories about other youtubers and other stuff that he's just finds interesting i get a lot of people saying they don't watch dad because it's too much story to keep up with but the truth is most of the content on dad doesn't really connect to each other anymore dad is more of a youtube personality that nathan has created for himself which is kind of genius when you think about it because now he can pretty much have that second chance that he's been looking for on a completely new channel paper coffee cup and eternal dedication to the corporation this may be my last video on nathan and dad as i don't feel like there's any more to really say i think dad is an interesting channel but i also feel nathan's life has been an interesting roller coaster that shouldn't go unnoticed we tend to hear a lot of success stories around youtube and while nathan's is still a success story it does kind of address some of the hard times that we don't always see people go through not every youtuber is in that one percent that makes millions some can struggle to barely make even i wish the best to any of the creators out there that are going through what nathan went through or worse i hope one day you get your second chance too take care everyone i'll see you in the next video [Music] so [Music]

Channel: Inside A Mind

Views: 661,996

Rating: 4.9679289 out of 5

Keywords: The Man You've Seen But Never Heard Of - Inside A Mind, The Man You've Seen But Never Heard Of, Inside A Mind, Dad, Dad Feels, Nexpo, Matpat, Film Theorists, Loey Lane, Skittles, Keith Apicary l, Nathan Barnatt Dad, Nathan Barnatt, Inside A Mind ARG, Inside A Mind Nathan Barnatt, The Original Podcast, Party Hard, Fortnite, fortnite boneless

Id: 6Hn0Yz4kytk

Length: 16min 41sec (1001 seconds)

Published: Sat Mar 13 2021