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Join James Petrossi in 'Leave the Feed: 30 Days of Disconnect' as he interviews creators and mental health advocates about their journeys, the digital quagmire, and tips to create a healthier relationship with social media.
[00:00:00]
James Petrossi: Hello and welcome to Leave the Feed 30 Days of Disconnect. I am here with Justin Leusner for day 16, something to believe in. Justin, welcome to the show.
Justin Leusner: Thank you, sir. It's so good to be with you, James.
James Petrossi: Rather than doing some canned introduction of all of your accomplishments, let's talk about like your journey as a creator and what it means to you, the spark of inspiration and the path that it's taken you down.
Justin Leusner: Yeah, it's a long story, but I'll start in January. 2013, this guy right here, me, I was 10 years old and I've been watching YouTube for I think a year or two. And I was obsessed. All I wanted to do was watch YouTube videos. It was Dude Perfect. I, Justine, all of the OG legends on YouTube and 10-year-old me [00:01:00] thought, hey.
I could be a YouTuber, I could do that. I like making little videos. You know, I would do lemonade stands all the time, you know, I'm a hustler at, at 10 years old, my dad always gave me entrepreneurship books. so I said, I'm gonna be a YouTuber. And so I, I asked my mom, Hey, can I, can I make a YouTube video?
And she was like, no. I'm like, whoa, wait, what do you mean? Let me make a YouTube video? I, I, I, it's, it's not bad. And she goes, no, it's unsafe. Da da da, da da. And so I had to really kind of educate her on what YouTube is, how it's not unsafe, how you could actually make money. And that was like, oh, you can make money.
All right, go ahead. Just don't do anything stupid. So I said, great, thanks, mom. So I borrowed her phone, went into my basement. My friends and I, we built a custom wwe e wrestling ring in our basement. We had an old mattress, four lacrosse sticks, bungee cords from our homemade gym and some duct tape, and we called it World Duct Tape Elite Wrestling.
And we did fake wrestling matches on that. You know, we're 10 years old. We're we're, we're just [00:02:00] having fun. And so I filmed them and I posted it to YouTube. I filmed four videos that first day and I posted one every single day, and the third video went viral, quote unquote. It got a thousand views overnight, which to me was wild.
I didn't even know. Maybe I probably knew a hundred people maximum at, at 10 years old. So a thousand people was like everyone in the whole world. A thousand people saw my video. Oh my gosh, wait a minute. I'm a YouTuber. I'm, I'm a YouTuber. So I got hooked and every single day I would make a video. I came home off the school bus every day.
It was the same routine right to the basement. And I would make a video about sports, just ba baseball, football, soccer, playing sports, doing trick shots, playing sports, video games. and I did that for seven years. Every single. Day, like over, you know, thousands of videos posted to YouTube. and so let's fast forward to six years into that journey 2019.
And I'm now a sophomore at, in high school, still obsessed with YouTube. And now [00:03:00] my dream is I wanna be a full-time YouTuber when I graduate high school. I'm not going to college, I'm just gonna make YouTube videos. and now at this time, I'm making money off of AdSense. I'm about to hit 50,000 YouTube subscribers.
I'm partnered with the NBA Playmakers program. You know, they're inviting me out to games and, and we have this, NBA live mobile coin dealership paying us thousands of dollars every month to promote their product. YouTube AdSense is paying us, everything's going great. January, 2020 rolls around. I'm now a junior in high school.
This is seven years into the daily content journey, and my views started to kind of go down a little bit. You know, at, at my peak, I would average maybe 10, 20,000 views every day. On, on my new long form video views started going down a little bit. 5,000, 4,000, 3000, 2000. why you might ask Fortnite.
Fortnite was blowing up. It was taking the market share. I was, my channel was built around sports video games and people were, were starting to really stop playing them. They were just [00:04:00] dying. They were getting boring after five, six years of, you know, my generation also just growing up and Fortnite is now the new thing.
People wanna fit in, play Fortnite, it's cool, it's a shooter game. Go do it. Honestly, that was me too. I was hooked on Fortnite and the games I was playing, I was just kind of doing it to post every day. and so March, 2020 rolls around and I stopped posting videos. I gave up, I, I couldn't bear with the thought of like my channel dying, so I kind of preemptively quit as it was on the way down.
And I was also really obsessed with Fortnite too personally. And so I just didn't wanna play that sports video game anymore. and so obviously the pandemic hits April, 2020 rolls around. I'm now a junior in high school. I gotta take the S-A-T-A-C-T, I gotta go to college. And I was crushed. I hated this.
I didn't want to be a normal kid. I worked so hard those seven years posting a video every day so that I could be a YouTuber when I graduate, when I finally graduated HO or high school, and I could be free and I [00:05:00] don't have to get a corporate job, don't have to go to to classes anymore. I just could move out to LA from New Jersey and make YouTube videos.
Summer 2020 rolls around and I'm so depressed. Obviously COVID is. Existing and, you know, this isolation, I can't see my friends. I'm really going through it because now I have to be a normal person and I can't be a YouTuber anymore. and it was a shock too. Every day for seven years, I would post a video.
I didn't know what it was. I didn't know life without that, right? Almost half of my life at this point was making YouTube videos. so 2020 summer rolls around and I'm so depressed that I like really, honestly, didn't want to exist anymore. I was pretty frustrated with how my life turned out. I had such high hopes, I had thought I'd, I, I thought I would have a million YouTube subscribers when I graduated high school.
And here I am with a dead YouTube channel and I quit. And I stopped posting and I'm now looking and touring colleges. And I never thought I would have to do that. And I hated school, hated the idea of doing four more years of school. and [00:06:00] so I was pretty down bad and, like I said, I didn't really wanna exist anymore.
So, you know, thought about. Maybe, you know, ending, ending my life or just kinda, you know, checking out and just doing whatever. And, that was a pivotal moment for me. So July, 2020 was kinda the buildup of all of this. And I was so desperate that I would, I was looking anywhere for answers. one of the things I was like, I'll just try it, right?
I went on Amazon and bought a Bible and I'm like, I'll just try it. You know, like, what's the worst that could happen? People talk about like this Jesus guy and he's great and maybe he could heal me from this depression and anxiety. And so I bought a Bible on Amazon. Ooh, right here, I think is the one that, that I bought, and this was July, 2020 I I'd opened.
I literally was like. okay here. I just like picked a random page and started reading it and I stayed up till 4:00 AM the first night just reading it, like super intrigued. and that led me [00:07:00] to like reading about Jesus and learning about that. I pretty much grew up like atheist and I went to Catholic mass maybe for church, but like church on Sunday for Easter or Christmas.
But that was it. And I learned about this Jesus guy, and I was like, dude, this kind of makes sense, you know? and it's like he's, it seems like he's speaking to me a little bit. Like he, this Jesus guy that apparently lived 2000 years ago, I don't know if he's made up or not. He like, kind of understands what I'm going through.
And there's bible verses about depression and anxiety and longing for more and love and all this, all these thoughts that I never really thought about. and it said like, all you have to do is believe in me and you will be saved and freed from all this depression and whatnot. So I was like, Jesus. God, like I, I believe in you. Like I, I actually think you could heal me from this. you know, I'm, at this point I'm desperate for anything. And I just asked. I said, Jesus, could you please like just change my heart? I hate how my, my heart is, I hate how my brain is. I hate how I think. I hate how much my heart aches.
Please just change it. And, and that was July [00:08:00] 29th, 2020. The next morning I woke up. Honestly, kind of forgot about that prayer. but everything. Felt different. even my as simple things as my music taste changed. I, I've been making a monthly Spotify playlist ever since 2016 and July, 2020 was like, you know, a ton of hip hop or rap music.
I just had a whole new music taste. I like, wanted nothing to do with that. I wanted nothing to do with, the things that was addicted to, whether that's porn or alcohol or, or girls. Like, I wanted nothing to do with that. And I was like, I just wanna read the Bible more. And that's what I did. And so that was the day where I like surrendered quote unquote.
Like who, who I was and like God got, I asked God to heal me from that anxiety and whatnot, and I had a new brain that next day. I also had a new heart to make YouTube videos. Again, I was like, I wanna make YouTube videos again. That's my dream. But this time I wanna do it as an act of service and love to others 'cause that's what Jesus would've done.
and so I wanna make content as a gift to my audience. And so that's when I started to enter back into the YouTube world. [00:09:00] And we could talk more about what that's looked like over the past five years. But I feel like that's a good place to put a pause in the story and, and, and chat more and, you know, reflect on that.
James Petrossi: Yeah. That's amazing. It's so interesting that went through this period of, it seems like creation for yourself, like just. Fun creation, no boundaries. Putting out content, having fun with sports. what all kids are doing, right? They're all having fun. They're all playing, and if they can capture it and monetize it, it's incredible.
But then to go through this huge Cataclysmic shift in what's happening and the exterior environment and what's happening in the social media landscape. Everyone's playing fortnight. It's like everything crumbles to the ground and you're like, what was all this for? What was it for?
and then unique to go through that type of depression because in the world [00:10:00] of creation and as being a creator, know. You have to have a reason and existence for what you create and an audience you're trying to reach. And it seems like moment of change, this, of biblical essence like touched you and then. Reawakens, like a different type of creator. And you mentioned like you were creating for other people and you wanted to bring creation to other people. How do you see the difference in what that first generation of creation was like? Verse the generation of creation that your essence is expressing now.
Justin Leusner: Good question, James. Yeah, for the first seven years, it was all about two things. Number one, how do I make the most money possible? 'cause I wanna be a full-time YouTuber and I need to make money, and I wanna be rich and famous, and so I need money. And number two, it was all about me. How do I make sure I look good?
How do I make sure people fall in love with me? How do I make sure [00:11:00] I'm famous? I'm the star of the show, right? And then in 2020 that shifted completely on its head. And so now my heart is, hey. money is a means to an end money, is, is a way to, just like literally, I all, I, people probably would be shocked at how much money I pay myself In our company.
It's literally like groceries, rent, which is super cheap 'cause I live in the middle of nowhere in Pennsylvania. taxes and that's it. It's like bare minimum. 'cause I, I just want to be able to do YouTube and with all the other money we have, we can invest it back into our team, you know, nonprofits and whatnot.
and then the other, thing that was flipped on its head was now the content is all about the audience. or it's about the creators that are, we are spotlighting in our, in our content. so it's all others focused. So previously it was self-focused and now it's, Hey, how can we love and serve others through social media?
James Petrossi: Obviously leave the feed is about disconnecting to reconnect with essential aspects of [00:12:00] life. I think earlier in this process as a creator, you know you are in it for the fame, right? Which is the. Counter to what Jesus would be asking you to do, when you're in that type of creation and that type of mode, did you understand how it was impacting your mental health or reflecting on it now, can you see how it was triggering maybe leading you down this road where this moment of anxiety and depression was inevitably going to hit?
Could you see the signs at all, like looking back.
Justin Leusner: No, I could not see the signs. I was totally blind to it. But looking back now, oh, what a good question. Looking back now, I could sense that there was just a bondage that I had to post a video every day, almost like I was a slave to my own YouTube channel and my own dream. I was not creating out of freedom.
It was I have to do. [00:13:00] This specific game, even though I don't really play it, even though I don't really like it, you know, this is 3, 4, 5 years in and it has to be one upping my competitors no matter what it costs. So I would spend money on the game, thousands and thousands of dollars so that I could break the record for the highest Madden Mobile Coin Shopping Spree video, buy 5 million coins, which is like 500 bucks, like petty.
And it would be me and this one other creator. And we would just like one up each other, one up each other. And we both. Hated the game. We would complain about it all the time, but we were in bondage to it. we even ended up making like disc tracks against each other, like 15-year-old kids, like just so stupid.
I made a disc track against EA sports because I hated the game so much, yet I kept playing it every single day. So I was, I was absolutely creating out of this bondage that I have to make a video every day. It has to be this specific way. There was no freedom.
James Petrossi: Now talk about where you are today and how do you maintain that balance of creation and disconnection, and making sure that you keep your mental health in [00:14:00] check, especially as you've gotten more and more success.
Justin Leusner: Such a good question. Yeah. This is, I don't know if I've ever said this online or on a podcast or whatnot. I say it all the time in State College when I'm talking in classes or whatnot. but I don't have Instagram on my phone. I don't have TikTok on my phone. And I, YouTube is the, YouTube and LinkedIn are the only two platforms I have on my phone that I allow myself to, to use.
And that's because I know that I can't really get. Doom scrolled on either of those. although LinkedIn algorithm is getting better and you know, it's getting scary where I, I'm like, oh shoot, did I just doom scroll on LinkedIn maybe. but yeah, so I don't have YouTube, or sorry, I don't have Instagram or TikTok.
We hired an assistant to post content for us on those platforms. And in our content, we essentially, our vision is to, make, you know, sports videos, short form, have people join our live streams and on the live streams. Like I literally say that, I'm like, Hey, [00:15:00] like I'm streaming on my, my computer. Like I don't even have TikTok.
Like if you guys, are sick and tired of doom scrolling, like go play outside. You don't go log off this video right now. You don't have to watch this. Like, I would actually prefer if you go outside and play soccer right now or hang hung out with your dad or whatever. So, yeah, it's, it's interesting now because, you know, I'm still creating, this is year 12, almost 13, of creating a video every single day.
But now it's out of this freedom of like, Hey, I just want to see other people be freed from this addiction to social media. And it, it's cool to see. Our viewers and even our friends in state college be like, yeah, you inspired me to delete Instagram or TikTok, and I've just been able to get so much more done or hang out or spend time outside, hang out with my roommates, meal prep, you know, exercise, go for a walk.
And I'm like, yes, let's go.
James Petrossi: That's awesome. That is incredible. Yeah. To find that balance is really unique and it's something that's different for all of us, but no one wants to be in a world of incessant scrolling, and I think far too [00:16:00] often. We don't realize how habitual actions come, whether we're waiting for a bus in an elevator, and all of these moments of scrolling catch up with us, right?
And we get into comparisons and we start to get sucked into an alternate reality when a lot of what we need to do is to stay more tethered to our belief systems. And that's what today's all about, is making sure that you have a belief system. Whether it's Jesus, another deity or some other spiritual leader or something that you make up for yourself, and two, that know, you practice it.
And it's so important that take time to practice and not just preach to people, but live the word that we want to go by. So as you've progressed even with your own spiritual belief systems, how have you stayed tethered and when do you become tested in your beliefs?
Justin Leusner: That's a good question. Yeah, [00:17:00] I'd say almost every. Hour of every day, there's a mini test, sometimes bigger tests, but most of the times mini tests. where I have a simple choice to make, I can either, spend time that I'm supposed to be working, watching a YouTube video, or I could read a book or I could respond a few emails, or I could FaceTime my fiance or call my mom.
I feel like every hour there's like a mini decision where I can choose the one I know I probably should do, or choose the easy route, which is like, oh, I could choose the easy thing. and so yeah, it's a constant daily. Every hour there's a test. You know, even before this podcast, I had 15 minutes and I could have watched YouTube video or, been like, you know, let me play a quick game of, I don't even know what, I don't play games, but like, oh, I played Flappy Golf or whatever.
But instead, I was like, my, my friend Rob and Danny are here in the room next to me. I was like. How are you guys doing? Just like talking to them. [00:18:00] 'cause that would be just to, you know, get fired up before the podcast. But also like, instead of just being in isolation, playing a quick game or watching a video, go connect with them and just see how they're doing today.
You know what I mean?
James Petrossi: Yeah. it's definitely making sure that. Throughout the day, there's so many distractions. There's so many things that are trying to creep into our consciousness, right? And a lot of those things can have ill effects without even realizing it. Like we're not aware of the ill effects and they compound over time.
And next thing we're a shell of who we used to be, and we don't have those connections and people aren't reaching out to us the way that we as humans. Those real authentic moments, that we
Justin Leusner: Yeah absolutely. Yeah. I think that's something my generation, generation Z and even Gen Alpha, the one below me, in terms of age, the one younger, I think we're all missing that, but we don't really know that. We just think maybe something in our brain chemistry is [00:19:00] off. and perhaps it is, but I'm sure there's, there's many out there that.
They just need, to disconnect for a little bit and enter nature or hang out with their family or hang out with their friends, and I think that would solve a lot of the world's mental problems. Honestly, not all of them, but I think it would solve a good amount.
James Petrossi: So let's talk about those that are taking this 30 day challenge or others that are just looking for some inspiration to disconnect. I know you've given us a lot of. nuggets so far, but what hope do you have for those that need to scroll less and appreciate more? And what are some tips and tricks that you do just to make sure that you stay ever aware of your habits?
Justin Leusner: Great question. Yeah. So me not having Instagram or TikTok. It wasn't always like this. Two years ago, I was obsessed. My screen time was horrible and it got in the way of doing what I actually wanted to do, which was create content, hang out with friends post on LinkedIn. and so my Kenzie, who's now my fiance, she [00:20:00] was my girlfriend at the time, we were like, Hey, let's do a 30 day social media fast together.
May 1st to May 30th. Let's both delete Instagram, YouTube, TikTok, LinkedIn, everything, even like Gmail and the ESPN app. 'cause we got, we caught ourselves like fidgeting and just clicking on that and like scrolling and it's like, wow, it's kind of crazy how we need to scroll. So we go on Gmail or ESPN, which is like, not really scrollable, but we still find a way to get our fix in.
so we would just delete those and what a 30 days that was, we both were. So, so much happier. We both got, we like track our steps. We got so many more steps. We were outside, we're getting tanned eating good food. It was, it was such a good month. And then June 1st comes around and it's like, oh, we're back.
And then we downloaded Instagram and TikTok again, and we're like, June 15th. We're like, wait, no, this sucks. Like, why do we even wanna do that? And so that was the moment where we were like, nah, let's just delete Instagram and TikTok for good, because those were the ones really that we felt like a slave to almost, where we had to check it every single day.
and so my tip and [00:21:00] trick as a social media creator, as someone who still wants to engage with the digital world, I just use it on my laptop, Instagram and TikTok. I don't even use TikTok on my laptop, but Instagram I do. as a way to stay connected. I, you know, check dms, respond to dms, but I've never, like brain rotted doom scrolled on my laptop.
It's so hard to do that. and most of the time I'm like, three minutes into using Instagram, I'm like, I don't even, like, I just, let's just text or here, here's my email. And I would prefer to be off platform. 'cause we, we get 10, 10, 20, 30 dms every day. From our connections, our community, our fans, like we kind of have to be on that platform.
but that, that's my tip and trick is like, use it on your laptop. It is so less addicting.
Awesome. Thank you so much. You've been such an awesome guest. Any
James Petrossi: other words of wisdom or what's next for Justin?
Justin Leusner: Yeah, if, if you're watching this podcast listening to this right now, and this is intriguing to you, this idea of, Hey, I don't want to be a slave, quote unquote, to the social media [00:22:00] system, algorithms, platforms, keep. Keep diving into that. Don't stop here. Listen to the other podcast, episodes on this podcast.
You know, read the Lead the Feed book. do your own research, like find out what about this intrigues you and, and dig in. Dive in. this will, I believe that this movement of disconnecting from social media, especially amongst Gen Z, will continue to grow. And if, if you can be one of the first to join that mission, you're gonna be a leader that others look up to.
Your friends are gonna look up to and respect you even more. I've never had someone. Not respect me more for the fact that I deleted social media. Everyone is always like, oh, wow, I, I respect that. In fact, I should do that. so if this inspires you, keep digging in. Don't stop here. Keep going.
James Petrossi: Words from a wise human. Thank you so much. Please subscribe to this channel. Leave a review, share it. Leave the feed with a friend and. Don't be afraid to disconnect. Thank you so much, Justin. Really appreciate you.
Justin Leusner: Thank you James. Let's [00:23:00] go.