Kian and Jc

by Kian Lawley

  DEDICATION

  TO THE ONES

  WE LOVE

  —KIAN LAWLEY

  DEDICATED TO

  THE ONES WHO

  PUT UP WITH US

  FOR SO LONG

  —JC CAYLEN

  CONTENTS

  Dedication

  Introduction

  Kian Talks

  Kian’s First Car

  Jc Talks

  The Worst Day of Jc’s Life

  Kian and Jc Hit LA: We Make Our Move

  Our First Place

  Fan Meet-Ups

  How Did O2L Get 2gether?

  Then There Was That Time When Kian Was Taken by Ghosts

  Home Sweet Home

  Kian’s Best and Worst Pranks

  Kian and Jc on Tour

  Parting of the Ways

  Our Crazy Hollywood House

  Introducing Kian and Jc

  Hotel Hopping

  Pain Don’t Hurt

  7 Days on the Road with Jc

  Hey, Jc, Do You Want to Get Married?

  Lights! Kian! Action!

  Lightning Round!!!

  When We Get Old . . .

  Back Ad

  Credits

  Copyright

  About the Publisher

  OKAY, SO YOU PICKED UP THIS BOOK,

  which means you want to know more about it. Or us. Or whatever. So welcome to Kian and Jc: Don’t Try This at Home!, the greatest book ever written.

  Let’s start at the top here. We’re going to take you step by step through it all, through our lives, growing up, meeting each other, getting in with O2L, O2L breaking up, launching our own YouTube channel, going on tour, being in movies, and pretty much making a living just by being our nutty, stupid selves. So, you may want to know why we called our book Don’t Try This at Home! That’s easy. It’s because what we do is dangerous. We’ve shot each other with paintball guns, electrocuted ourselves, and waxed our eyebrows off. We’re professionally trained idiots. We can handle an ice bath challenge and not freeze our balls off. You might not be so lucky. So there’s that and, uh, would you really want to read a book called, Kian and Jc Talk about a Bunch of Stuff That Happened to Us in Our Lives and How We Got to Where We Are Today? Right? We didn’t think so. Also, there’s no way all that would fit on the front of the book.

  So, you’re probably wondering why we wrote this book. We wondered why we should write a book too. So we sat down and tried to come up with a list of reasons why:

  1.READING IS FUNDAMENTAL, YO! GOTTA READ SOMETHING, RIGHT?

  2.WE HAVE SOME GOOD STORIES.

  3.BECAUSE WE WANTED TO.

  Yeah, so it’s not the biggest list we’ve ever put together, but it got us to write this book, so . . .

  Now you may be asking, who did we write this book for? Who’s going to be reading it? That’s the cool thing: It’s a big party here, and everyone’s invited. Moms, dads, kids, teachers, postal-delivery guys—everyone. As long as you can read, this book is for you—and even if you can’t . . . we’ve got lots of pictures!

  Okay, so how should you read this book? First of all, from the top of the page to the bottom. If you go the other way, it’ll seem weird. But other than that, however you want to read it. If you’re going to join the party, you need to be open-minded. Our book isn’t like a regular book. It’s a lot more real than most of the books you read, and it’s a lot more fun. Oh, and you don’t have to read it in order. You can start from the back. You can read every other chapter. You can even just look at the pictures. It’s all cool. It’s your book now. You can even cross out our names and put yours in there.

  So, that’s about it. Go ahead and dive in, and by the time you’re done, we hope you’ll feel happy, get inspired, and know just a little more about us—or hey,

  MAYBE YOU’LL JUST THINK WE’RE A COUPLE OF DUMB-ASSES.

  I WAS BORN AND RAISED IN SAN CLEMENTE, CALIFORNIA,

  which is a town on the coast halfway between LA and San Diego. It’s a pretty chill place: really sunny.

  The earliest thing I can remember about my life was my first day of kindergarten. Man, I was so excited. My mom was like, “Okay, Kian, you’re going to school!” and I said, “What’s school?” (I had no idea what school was because I never went to preschool.)

  So she walked me into my class, and I saw a bunch of kids and I was smiling and all like, “Oooh, new friends! A playground! This is gonna be awesome!” And then I turn around and found my mom had just . . . left. Suddenly I got all upset. Why was my mom leaving me?! I started crying. A lot. That’s when I met my friend Colin. He was my only friend in kindergarten. He made me stop crying.

  I have a great family: two sisters (one younger and one older) and two older brothers, and I always got along with them really well. Okay, well, I did argue with my sisters a lot—it’s the thing you do with family, but I always looked up to my brothers.

  And I’ve always been really, really close to my parents. My mom has always been my rock. Ever since the beginning, she’s been there for me and my family. She’s the one who taught me how to blow a bubble and how to snap my fingers. Ha-ha. She also loves to cook, so there would always be a home-cooked meal that she prepared—but I’d never eat any of it because I’m a really picky eater. My mom would also always help me with my homework, since I was never really good in school. I have so many memories of us sitting at the table, spending countless hours—even staying up all night—trying to get my homework done.

  My dad hardly ever helped with my homework. But we would do other stuff together. My dad and I would go out deep-sea fishing together a lot. Fishing is one of those sports that can be kind of boring for long stretches of time. You’re basically out in the middle of the water and just sort of bobbing around. Hours can go by and nothing happens. But the waiting is also kind of the fun of it. Not only does it give you a cool excuse just to hang, but when the big one finally bites . . . man, it feels awesome. And whenever I went out with my dad, he would always end up catching something big—like tuna or sharks.

  I remember this one day in particular when we were out on the water, bobbing around, and all of a sudden my dad’s fishing line starts pulling like crazy! My dad calls me over and lets me reel in what he caught: an eighty-pound shark! That thing was huge! He had this big collection of jaws and teeth from all the sharks he’d ever caught—ten or twenty of them, hung all over the walls of his garage—and I thought it was so cool that I finally had my own set of shark jaws too.

  The funny thing is, I hate eating fish. I mean, I really hate eating fish. Except for smoked shark and those gummy Swedish Fish. Those are the only fish I’ll eat.

  As far back as I can remember, I was always trying to be funny. I remember when I was around five or six and my sister would have these birthday parties, I’d always be making her friends laugh by making faces, tripping myself, falling down . . . stupid stuff like that. I thought there might be a less painful way of making people laugh. That’s when I started learning how to tell jokes.

  Around that time, I started going to a Boys & Girls Club after school, and they had all these different activities for us kids: arts and crafts, gym, whatever. And one of the activities they offered was a comedy class. That’s where I learned my first joke: “What do you call a fish without an eye? A fsh!”

  In school I was totally the class clown. You know—the one who was cracking the jokes and doing stupid stuff just to get a laugh. I remember this one prank I played with my friend Jesse. What we’d do is, before class, Jesse and I would each take a huge mouthful of water from the drinking fountain. The goal was to see who could hold his water the longest. Every so often we’d look at each other and spit out some water to prove that we still hadn’t swallowed it. If the teacher asked me a questio
n, I’d have to try to answer with my mouth closed and get in trouble or swallow the water and lose the game. I was always doing dumb stuff like that. I never focused! My mind was always somewhere else. And I kept getting into trouble because I was always trying to crack myself up.

  My parents divorced when I was about eight. After that I got really rebellious. I was always in trouble. In fourth grade, I pretty much never got to go out at recess. The teacher always made me sit on the blue dot—this space by the back wall where she sent kids who got into trouble. I swear, I sat on that freaking blue dot every single day!

  I remember in seventh grade there was this one girl who would always pick on me. She was just plain mean. So I’d kick her under the table whenever I could, to try to get her to back off. One day I waited until the teacher was looking at us, and I kicked her really hard. She jumped up and screamed some words she wasn’t supposed to know, and got into trouble. . . . But then the teacher found out what I did, and I wound up getting busted for it. I probably spent as much time in the principal’s office or in detention or being suspended as I did in class. Like I said before, I didn’t like school—and school didn’t like me back! I’m pretty sure if you took a vote, you’d find that I was the kid most hated by the teachers. I would have been voted “most likely to be thrown off the roof by the principal.”

  I dropped out of high school in my senior year, just as my sister was starting. All the teachers were like, “Lawley? As in, your brother is Kian Lawley? We’re going to have to keep a close eye on you.” Luckily, she was really smart and a good student. She redeemed the family name. The funny thing is that even though all the teachers hated me in school, when I go back to visit them now, they all love me. Weird, huh?

  Honestly, I was such a bad kid, I even got kicked out of the Boys & Girls Club! There was this big welcome banner that said something like, Welcome to the Boys & Girls Club. I told my friends to get the banner, and I’d put it in front of the cubbies where everybody kept their backpacks. Then I’d go through the other kids’ stuff and steal their food. Hey, I warned you: I was a horrible kid! (I feel so bad about that one that when I tell that story, I usually just say I moved the sign in front of the cubbies and threw their backpacks around. This is our secret now. So don’t tell anyone, or I’ll come to your house and steal your lunch.)

  TO THIS DAY, I HAVE NO IDEA HOW I MADE IT THROUGH HIGH SCHOOL.

  No surprise, but I failed almost half the classes I ever took in high school. My grades were so bad that my mom would cry if I got a C. And not a sad cry, not those I’m-so-disappointed-in-you tears. A happy, joyful jump-around-the-house cry. I mean, I pretty much got Cs, Ds, and Fs (except in PE and, weirdly, science. I did okay in PE and science).

  That being said, I wasn’t without my tricks. In English, when it came to writing essays, when the teachers would give instructions like, “Your essay has to be twelve-point font, single spacing,” I would be like, “Okay, I’ll do thirteen font, one-point-five spacing.” No one was checking closely—and I hated writing. (Except, of course, this book. Which is superfun to write because I have an editor to fix my grammar, and there’s lots of cool pics in it—like this one. In school they don’t let you put in pictures, even though a picture is worth a thousand words. I mean, for most of my essays I should have been able to get away with two pictures and a title. But, nah, it always had to be twelve-point font and actual words.) I’d also do anything to get out of class. Whenever the teacher asked the class if anyone could run something down to the office, I’d be the first one to volunteer. I burned through all my bathroom passes in the first week, and I would have to beg my friends to give me theirs. Man, I couldn’t wait to get out of school.

  Even though I couldn’t wait to get out of school, I did do one good thing while I was there. I had these two friends who I always ate lunch with, and one day we noticed this kid who always ate lunch alone at the back of the cafeteria. So we decided to eat lunch with him. Two weeks go by, and my friends got tired of sitting in the back of the cafeteria with this kid—but I stuck with him. Over time, people started to notice him, and eventually he started to make his own friends. And soon enough, his friends are coming over to sit with us, and then suddenly he didn’t need me to sit with him in the back of the cafeteria anymore. I didn’t start out really trying to do something good. I just felt like this kid needed a friend. I sort of understood that. And I knew it wouldn’t take much from me to help him out. I know it’s a little thing, but I still think about it and feel like I put a little good into the world. I remember seeing him sitting at a lunch table full of other kids, and I felt like a momma bird watching her baby spread his wings. “Hell yeah, this kid has friends now!”

  Before there was even something called YouTube—or maybe just before I knew about YouTube—I was making videos. I started when I was about thirteen or fourteen.

  So, I started making these short videos and uploading them onto Kidzbop.com. They were just me and my best friend, Sam Pottorff, playing around, or me dancing in the mirror or me slapping Sam—random stuff like that. Then I found out about YouTube, so I started watching a bunch of YouTubers. I figured, “If they can do that, I can do that”—and that was what got me into making videos for YouTube. And back then YouTube was like one big family. No one knew what they were doing, and everyone helped everyone else out. We’d all get together on the collab channels and just toss around ideas and give each other advice. The cool thing is that some of my best friends are the guys I met on YouTube.

  The first video I uploaded was one of me just making stupid noises and then speeding them up or slowing them down through my friend’s computer. We were just screwing around, testing out different effects. It was completely ridiculous and sort of unwatchable, but that was the kind of stuff we uploaded back then.

  I’ll be honest: I uploaded a lot of weird stuff at first. My sister used to buy all these secondhand-store scarves, and she would ride on my back wearing all the crazy clothes she just bought—yeah, we filmed that.

  About a year and a half later I started getting some viewers. I put a little bit more effort into my videos then. (We actually planned stuff before the camera was going!) At the same time, I started meeting a lot of other YouTube creators online, including Jc. We didn’t meet in person until VidCon in 2012, but we were friends for a long time online before that.

  When I found out I could be making money on YouTube, I applied for a Google Partnership. Basically Google was trying to make YouTube happen, so they were offering money to people to create content and get viewers. I applied, and I got denied. The problem was that I only had around a few thousand subscribers back then. If I was going to make real money, I had to get more viewers. And that took a lot of work and forced me to post videos a lot more regularly. I had to start to take it seriously, funny as that may sound. Eventually I got my subscriber numbers up and applied again, and I finally got accepted. At the beginning it took a few months for me to make my first one hundred dollars—but I so remember when that first check showed up.

  I had made a promise to my mom that when I got the first check from my first “real” job, I’d give it to her. That first check wound up being for 136 dollars. I know it’s not, like, Bill Gates money, but at the time, to me, it felt like a lot. Especially since I made it doing what I love. And the best was that I kept my promise and gave her the whole thing. It wasn’t about the money; it was about the respect. Tough as she’s always been on me, my mom’s also always stood by me and believed in me. This was my weird way of saying she was right. The money started coming in slowly at first: 100 dollars, then 110 dollars, 131 dollars, 142 dollars. Plus, since I was making my videos with Sam, we’d split the money. It wasn’t much, but it was enough encouragement to keep me going. Mom and Dad still paid for most things anyway, but now I could buy some things for myself. Like what, you ask? Like candy. I bought a lot of candy.

  Here’s a true story: I never had a real job, but I did work at this drugstore once. I didn’t get paid
with an actual paycheck or anything. I got a twenty-five-dollar gift card to the store. And what did I buy with it? Hell yeah, twenty-five bucks’ worth of candy!

  My mom always told me that I needed to go to school to learn things and get a degree if I wanted to have a real future. My dad would say you don’t have to go to school to follow your dreams. They were both right in a way. I always knew that school is where you have to go if you want to learn all the things you have to know to do the things you want to do. But I already knew what I wanted to do. So why spend all that time and money just to figure out that I should have been doing what I was already doing? In fact, school was getting in the way of me following my dreams. All that time in class and homework weren’t helping me get ahead. So I decided to drop out of high school at the age of 17 and move to LA.

  MY FIRST CAR WAS REALLY SPECIAL TO ME.

  I’d just dropped out of high school, I had almost no money, and I needed a cheap way to get to LA and then to get around once I was there. I mean, I figured eventually I’d have chauffeurs and bodyguards and maybe even a butler—but at that point in my life, I could barely even afford a bus ticket and a candy bar.

  Anyway, my first car was this black 2006 Ford Focus. I was in such a rush. I bought it the night before I was going to leave, and I couldn’t really see it that well, so I just asked the dude who sold it to me if it ran and he said, “Yeah.” I bought it on the spot. No questions asked; no test drive needed.

  I remember my mom was worried. She was all like, “You should wait until tomorrow when you can see it during the day,” but I didn’t care. I was too amped to go. I bought it, went inside my house, packed up all my stuff, and drove it up to LA the very next day.