Do you to the YouTubes? If so, be sure to check out Jukka's new show Ultimate Expedition, debuting today on the YouTube Red label (not to be confused with John Lucero's Black Label). But that's just part of what you can read below, where Rick Kosick went into the depths of Dudeson psychology and the worldwide monster it grew into from its Finnish house party origins.
Rick Kosick: So what’s the life of a Dudeson like nowadays?
Jukka: Being 37 and being a Dudeson, you still have the same mentality and attitude you are born with that you do first and think later. Just kidding, but I still live off what always was my passion—to create something new, original, and unique and have fucking fun in life. Never forget that inner kid. I’m 37 and I think I’m the most childish person in my family and I've got a 5- and a 3-year-old.
So you’re always trying to out do your kids?
Jukka: I try to out do my kids and I always tell them that playing is a kid’s most important job. That’s my job, too. Actually, right before I came here, I spent the morning with my kids building a Batmobile out of cardboard boxes. So being a Dudeson there’s two sides to me: I’m going to constantly keep pushing my limits, keep learning new things and skills in life, and keep walking into every situation with the confidence I've always had. You know, I got this, and when I get to the place and I don't, I say, "Oh, I so didn’t have this." Haha... but that’s where humor comes from.
The other thing is, I’m running Rabbit USA here in the US, so we're producing a lot of shows. In Finland, we're the biggest independent production company. We do 15 shows a year. Outside the original and unique Ideas we do, we produce Saturday Night Live, Who Wants To Be A Millionaire, and Shark Tank Hollywood Game Night. Everything else is something we created and I take those shows and try to sell them here. We-re in post-production for the biggest non-scripted YouTube Red series, a show called Ultimate Expedition that will air in January.
Why did you decide to move to America, is this something you always wanted to do?
I’m from a small town in Finland that only has 500 people. My dad can’t read or write. I’m from a very poor family and I had never traveled before I was seventeen. I had this ambition inside me to do something big… I wanted to inspire people to live their life to the fullest and push their limits, and that’s what drove me to America. First of all, I’ve been traveling back and forth for 15 years now, and I spend more time every time I'm here. I just wanted to make something happen, because Finland isn't big enough for four crazy Dudesons. So I decided to move to the US and spearhead the Dudeson’s brand, running Rabbit USA here. You know, what’s actually scary, is you have a certain status, a successful company, great people working for you, and then leaving that all behind to come to the US and start from scratch and you take your family with you. But it’s worth it.
You were a big fish in a small pond in Finland and now you're in America.
It’s a fucking ocean and I’m not even a shrimp! Even though I have a shrimp—but not anymore. In Finland I had a shrimp, because it was so damn cold. Haha… but I love America. You know why? Every place has a good and bad side, that’s obvious, but I always concentrate on the positive. You come here, the dream still lives on, and it’s so freaking inspiring. Everyday you might meet somebody that can change your life. There are people who are self-made and had their dreams come true. You got Netflix, Google, and everybody in entertainment is out here. What I want to do is to make miracles. I want to preach about positive anarchy, so that the kids will know how to live their life and believe in their dreams. I think that comes from a skateboarding background. Skateboarders are so critical—that’s the biggest thing I got from being a skateboarder. Whatever somebody tells me, I don’t believe it. I challenge it. Until I see it myself, then I'll believe it. There’s so much BS people are trying to shove down your throat.
I always thought skateboarders were more creative, because they've always been on the forefront of fashion and what’s hip in today's culture. It always trickles out from there.
I think so, too. First of all, it’s a lifestyle. You go hang with your friends and you bust balls everyday skating at a mall. You constantly keep trying a trick and pushing your limits. You get hurt, but you get up and go again. That’s the mentality in life, because life will throw you down but you've just got to get up. Sometimes I thought skateboarders were a little too cool for school, but I see why. They don’t take shit. That’s what Iove about it. I had a blessing to grow up with one of the best skateboarders I know, Arto Saari. He was my next-door neighbor when I was thirteen. Later on, he bought a house for his mom across from my house. It was funny, he came over and knocked on my window like seven years ago. He goes, "Hey Jukka, I got a place for my mom across the way." Obviously he had way more skateboarding skills than me, but I was pretty good about falling off the board.
Let’s take a step back. How did the Dudesons get started?
The Dudesons have a similar growth story like jackass. We were a bunch of friends that all met in elementary school, but it’s the same cultural background we had coming from skateboarding and snowboarding that sort of made us film all the stuff were doing. We wanted to film and make something cool, like, "Look, this is what we're doing: we're blowing up mailboxes, we're pulled 80 mph behind a bus on a sled, pulling backside 360 flips on a snowboard, doing something at a ditch on a skateboard." So it’s a combination of all of that craziness and lifestyle. We were like the Power Rangers and needed all four of us to make that magic happen. Jarno filmed and edited all the footage, and every Friday when I was in high school we would throw a house party and get everybody around to show them what we did last week. That was our audience until '97 when we put out our first movie. We did it all ourselves and mailed the VHS tapes to all of the sporting stores, begging them to put it on their shelves, and ended up selling a few of them. Luckily enough, Jarno applied for a job at this small underground cable channel called Moon TV. It doesn’t exist anymore, but at the time he was like, "We've got to make our own show." So he threw out the idea, we sold the show, and it premiered January 2001.
Wow, that’s really cool. And then it snowballed into something bigger?
Yeah, the fun thing is, all these people started reaching out to us. These big producers in Finland said they wanted to produce the show. We were like, "No, we don’t want anybody to touch this," because we all came from that skateboarding background, saying, "No, we don’t take any advice. We're going to do it ourselves, because we know what the young kids want to see." When we first did the show, we thought, "Okay, it won't be the worst show on the network," and all the sudden it was a success on that little cable channel. The second season, Channel 4, the second biggest commercial channel in Finland, reached out to us and said they wanted the second season. From there it snowballed into where we should do something international. We started about the same time as jackass on TV in Finland, and we were like, "Jackass is doing this in English. We can speak good enough English. We should do something worldwide." The funny thing is, nothing was ever sold from Finland outside of Finland before—like nothing international had ever been sold. We were the first show ever to be sold outside of Finland. So we went to the biggest TV market in Europe and walked around with a trailer where I put my balls into a mousetrap. We would walk into Disney and I’m looking at a Mickey Mouse Club trailer playing in the background as I’m showing my trailer to the Disney executives. When they saw me put my balls in a mousetrap with all the aftermath and how much it hurt, right then they said, "We might not be the right home for this, but you should go talk to Viacom and MTV." So we just went around. We didn’t know what we were selling, but we wanted to get something out there. After a year, we sold the first season to Australia and 150 other countries.
How did you meet Jeff Tremaine?
First I meet Steve-O. And we knew Bam, because he loved Finland. We were doing live festivals at the same time, where we had a band playing in the background and I was shooting a shotgun with a bulletproof vest and other big, crazy stunts onstage. Steve-o was on his world tour then and he was coming to Finland, so I got ahold of him through his management. When Steve-O came to Finland to do press, we met up and shot a couple of things. We bonded and really liked each other. We were supposed to do a show the next day, but before doing that Steve-O flew to Sweden to do a show and was bragging about how he swallowed bunch of weed in Holland. The Swedish cops busted him and put him in jail, so the show never happened. We had all the footage we filmed with Steve-O, but I didn’t have any appearance release forms and we really wanted to put this in our new Dudesons movie. So I flew to LA and hit up Steve-O to show him what we wanted to use. He came to the motel I was staying at and he was like, "I love it, but I can’t really call the shots. It’s a Jeff Tremaine question." At the time, Jeff was editing a video for Turbonegro at Hollywood Sound and I had a DVD with me. I was like, "Can we go meet Tremaine?" This is how it felt for me being a 19-year-old little boy from Finland. So I came in and Steve-O introduced me to Jeff. I told him what I do and Jeff is like, "Let's watch the DVD." So I’m trying to make it play, but my DVD is in PAL mode and not NTSE, so it’s not working. Tremaine is standing on his ivory tower saying, "Time is money, boy." Finally I got it working and it’s a seven-minute presentation reel. When it was finished playing, Tremaine was like, "Hell fucking yeah. I love you guys, and go ahead, Steve-O." That’s when we got to use Steve-O in our DVD, and then we met Bam. Ever since then, Tremaine has become a dear family friend. He has definitely been a big inspiration, and it all started by meeting Steve-O. I love Steve-O. We’ve been friends for fourteen years now. I’ve seen him change and how he’s got that burning will to live and evolve as a person.
Now that you’re living in Los Angeles, do you miss seeing your fellow Dudeson brothers?
We all own the company together, so the Dudesons come here all the time. Jarppi just left, and Jarno was here just before that. So the way we look at is, I’m filming the Dudeson vlog for YouTube from my point of view, being the spearhead, and we try to have each guy come here for ten days throughout the year. So we still get to do things together, because it’s obvious we grew up together and can count on each other. There’s definitely a chemistry every time they come here. I do miss them a lot, but thank god I have the pleasure of having them come here as well.
That’s great. And it’s a good thing for them, too, because it’s warm.
Yeah, it’s warm. Palm trees, sunshine. Jarno lived here for a year. He came to help launch all this with me, but he moved back to Finland for family reasons.
So how gnarly is too gnarly? Are there any limits as to how far you will take a stunt?
You know what, it’s tough to judge beforehand… usually that’s a call I make too late. Haha... I don’t give up, I just always want to go at it. And if something is ridiculously stupid and will just kill you, you’re not going to go at it, but you’re going to change it in a way that you can do it. The most important thing is, whatever I’m going to do I believe in myself 100-percent, like "I got this." And rarely do I have it. Also, I think it's more about having a unique perspective or an original idea that you just freaking love, to go out there and do it in real life. Sometimes the funniest bits are the ones that won't end up breaking bones. Some of the things we’ve done, like during Dudesons in America, when Knoxville and Tremaine introduced us to bulls and bull-riding—walking into a bullring on stilts while wearing a red shirt was such a blast. You hear Gary Leffew, the legendary bull rider say, "Release the beast!" and you can see it eyeballing you. You can tell it’s thinking, "I’m going to take you down." Then it swept the stilts right out from underneath me and I fell on the ground. I could see the bull circle, and I’m like, "All right, here it comes." I just jumped a little bit, so he could give a little bump on my butt, but he ends up hammering me. I do a backflip over the bull and end up on my feet. If I didn’t end up landing on my feet, I would have been screwed—the bull would have done a headstand on me.
There are two things I love to do: one is where you need some kind of skills, like this year I set my goals to learn a double backflip and a full twist backflip on a trampoline, and I learned them at Tempest. So I love the things you need some skill, but I love also the fear factor, like on jackass 3D when I did the stunt with Johnny Knoxville where we climbed a huge tree while Jarppi and everyone else were sawing the bottom. We were waiting to fall down with the tree and I’m talking to Knoxville and I'd never seen him so scared. I asked him, "What are you afraid of?" He’s like, "Jukka, I don’t like heights. I like the kind of stunts where it’s not up to you if you screw it up, it’s just luck." So I love to go out of my comfort zone and take that leap of faith to do something crazy.
I also like to do creative builds. We duct taped an inflatable mattress on the side of a van and then I wore double-sided duct tape and I’m jumping on the trampoline waiting for the van to pass. Then I jumped on the mattress on the side of the van to see if it sticks, and it freaking stuck! That’s always crazy. Can we build a trampoline out of Saran Wrap and then jump from the roof onto the trampoline? There are certain times you are fucking scared, but then there’s that whole process of building it and seeing it come together and you're like, "All right, I’ll go for it."
With YouTube as big as it is now and kids creating content, making their own shows, how much can you make from doing this?
It's stupid money. If you’re successful on YouTube it’s ridiculous. First of all, I love YouTube in a way that I can shoot something today and post it tomorrow and everyone around the world will get it and the fans will comment on it. So I think the YouTube viewers are more engaged than anyone else. Plus, you get to see your product come out with a fast turnaround, rather than shooting a movie or a show and have it come out in nine months. Like you get to react to what you do and what people like and what you like. At the same time, so many people are doing it to be pranksters and I fucking hate the pranksters. They're just shocking the world for the sake of shocking and most of the shit is fake. What I love about jackass and how I grew up is let's keep shit real. Some of the YouTube videos aren't like that. I’ve heard people say things like, "Big influencers, why would we even try to do it for real, because fake shit does so much better for us." I was like, "Who said that and who do I punch in the face?" YouTube used to pay a thousand dollars per million views, but they want to become the next Netflix, so they went from paying not per view but minutes watched. So let's say you make a ten-minute video and 80-percent of your audience watches eight minutes of it. You’re going to make two- or three-thousand dollars per million views. So if Jake Paul did 400 million views, that’s almost a million dollars per month. That’s not bad for being a YouTube kid. I would say the rule is like if you get 50 million views a month you get between 50- to a hundred-thousand.
Maybe it’s because I’m older, but I just don’t think these new generation of YouTubers have a tangible quality and come off a little cheesy.
I think so, too. There are a lot of people that have potential, but there are even more people who have no charisma ad are used to talking to their cat. That’s the beauty of you and our upside, the strength in Rabbit USA and The Dudesons, we come from the 20th century of making content. We know how to tell stories from the beginning, middle, and end. We respect working with the crew, but we also understand how you have to do the digital content for the millennial audience, where you have to be intimate and talk directly at them. Whereas TV, you go directly to a lot of people, so how do you put those two things together? That’s the magic of it. I think a lot of these people have grown up with nobody telling them what to do, they just do their thing and found a niche audience and they're not willing to make any comprise. But they don’t even know how to work with a crew. They are very black and white, like TV is dead and YouTube is all there is. But they're also anal and going through the comments, looking at what somebody said negative and deleting. That becomes their whole little hamster wheel of living in that world and they’re not happy. They’re stressing because they have to put out content daily and the worst life they are living. I’m worried about that, all of the sudden, you have to tell a story in two or five minutes and the way you cut the footage in the first six seconds you have to have a cute butt and the next six seconds you have to have a funny face, where we're used to telling stories and giving something time to breathe. So I’m determined to find a way to make this work, and I think we just cracked it with this new YouTube show I did called Ultimate Expedition. I respect TV and the silver screen, and I know if you can reach that level of charisma you can have something successful. You’re set for life. These YouTubers will have an audience for a few years and then go away if they don’t have the charisma to step up to the next level.
So what can we expect to see from you in 2018?
We have a killer show coming out called Ultimate Expedition on YouTube Red. It’s a very organic show, where I take eight celebrities—all from the traditional world to digital influencers—to this mountain that’s 20,000-feet high. Eight people died trying to summit the mountain in the past, and all these celebrities have zero skills in mountain climbing. We got Steve-O, Chuck Liddell, the former UFC champion, Gus Kenworthy, the first openly gay athlete who is competing in the Winter Olympics… all of them trying to climb this mountain from zero to a hundred and every day only gets tougher. You’re so high up everybody is struggling with altitude sickness and running into the danger of getting liquid lungs and evacuated off the mountain. There are crevices and the possibility of avalanches.
This is the biggest non-scripted YouTube Red show they’ve ever done. It’s produced and shot in Peru, in the mountains called Tocllaraju, and I think that combines the filmmaking look. We have Emmy award-winning camera guys, a sound guy that sounded Mount Everest, and a great digital team that are building videos for Steve-O. They made 22 videos just for his channel, like getting choked out by Chuck Liddel to whatever, so he can have his own story. Throughout the ten weeks that each episode is coming out, the cast members are going to be uploading content on their own channels as well, so when you’re watching the show you can learn more about Steve-O and see what else he did during that episode. So it’s like this new ecosystem with the existing fans and the cast members feeding into the show and the show feeding into the cast members and collaborating with each other. It’s the first time YouTube has done something like that and I’m really excited on how the show looks.
I am a Dudeson for life and I believe in positive anarchy, but I also want to be the modern Indiana Jones that takes these people and keeps it real and pushes their limits with my own example. It was none of that Bear Grylls bullshit where he takes Ben Stiller to a jungle on a helicopter for a day and then they go back and stay at a 5-star hotel and then take a helicopter back the next day. On our show, everybody stays at the basecamp at 14,000 feet, struggling with sickness and everyone pooped at the same hole. What’s great about the show, we isolated everyone because there’s no cellphone service. You get away from today's noise and hecticness, you start asking yourself what you really want out of life. It really focuses you. You start asking yourself, "Am I happy?" Steve-O is battling with his addiction. Chuck Liddell, who’s retired from the UFC, needs a mental reset and wants to know what to do next. Then there’s Furious Pete, who had testicular cancer six months earlier and didn’t know if he was going to be alive. Then all of sudden he’s trying to summit a mountain, one of the most beautiful places Mother Earth has to offer. So the show is going to be quite an adventure.
On top of that, I’ll use the Dudeson’s vlog to set an example on how not to forget your inner kid. You can be 37-years-old and running a business, but stay fun! Laugh at yourself. You don’t have to become too serious, but at the same time push your limits. Learn new skills. I want to learn how to fly a plane this year and go diving with sharks. So I’m using my vlog as a vehicle to share the cool shit in life. At the same time, when kids are watching it, hopefully they get inspired and want to do something special with their life. I always say in my vlog, "What’s your Dudeson’s goal for the year. Say it out loud. What’s your dream? Say it out loud. What are you doing this week to get yourself close to your dream? How are you going to surprise yourself today or this week?" When they say, "I want to become a soccer player, or I want to learn how to play the guitar, or I want to put together a heavy metal band, or I want to learn a backflip," when they say that out loud, they are already part of the Dudesons and you're part of the family. You say, "What is a Dudeson?" A Dudeson is a feeling when you achieve something and feel alive—that’s what a Dudeson is.
Totally rad! ;)
Posted by: GuyH | 01/17/2018 at 10:55 PM