You may have watched the "Evolution of Dance" on a clunky desktop computer in 2006. Here’s the story of the original viral YouTube star.
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CreativityTranscript
00:00I was the first video to ever reach a hundred million views and actually had the most watched video on YouTube for almost three years
00:07Until Justin Bieber hit puberty, but that's a whole nother story
00:30So when I first started my career as a professional speaker, it was in the 1999-2000 time frame while I was finishing up graduate school, everyone has different types of things and it's something that becomes kind of your signature piece. That's what people will remember you for. It doesn't mean that they forget everything else. That just becomes kind of the easiest way to say, oh, you're the person that blank.
01:00I figured out these are the 12 songs. I made a two and a half minute mix and this is in the, maybe the spring of 2000 and I went and I performed at once and it went over really well. So then flash forward five years later, I was known as the guy who did that evolution to dance thing.
01:30So I uploaded that dance to YouTube, copied and pasted the HTML into my Myspace page and closed my computer. And that was the end of the day. Now, what took place before the actual dance that you see was, you know, 14 minutes of me talking to 800 college students and then doing the dance in front of them.
02:01One day I woke up, opened up my computer and I had several email notifications from YouTube that said, such and such user has liked your video. And I was like, oh, okay, this is cool. Went and looked at the video and it had like 19,000 views and it was up to 30,000 views, 90,000 views.
02:19And there's a voicemail from a worker at YouTube. And it's just like, hey, the Today Show called us and asked us if we would give them your information. And I was like, what? Hell yeah. Called him back and was like, you can share it with anybody that you want. And at that moment, I think it was kind of that, okay, this is something that's not normal. This is something that is catching on. And by the time I went on, it had gone from like half a million to 30 million views in that short period of time.
02:49And I always wanted to be a speaker. That's all I've ever wanted to do. I was well on my way. And I just said, you know what, I'm going to ride everything that the video gives me. I'm going to say yes to as much as I possibly can that gets asked of me. And I'm just going to ride it out.
03:17And then I'll decide, okay, where do I want to go from here? And honestly, I'm still riding. The great thing about music is music crosses barrier languages. You know, you can go to another country that does not speak English at all and you can play a song that's in English and they'll go nuts and they'll dance to it because they'll recognize that song, even if they don't know all the words.
03:48The way dances make it into the mix is if you saw the dance with no music, could you still tell me what songs being played? There's no song to go with the floss. There's no song to go with all the Fortnite dances. There's no song to go with twerking. So those never made it in.
04:09So the newest song that's in, so the last song that happens is Hotline Bling. So when he was just like dancing around in a circle and like that. Some adults don't get it. The Stanky Leg, the Bernie, Single Ladies, Gangnam Style. There's a Call Me Maybe's in there for a second. And so those are kind of the ones that have come in in the last 13 years.
04:35Everybody's got to know what it is without hearing the song.