Cancer De Mana

hi guys this is athene, our trip is comingto an end. it was really an amazing experience traveling here. you have raised in concertwith razer 9.4 million dollars for save the children? that is a lot of money. it's reallyamazing to see how the gaming community is coming together, together with the industry.gaming for good it's called, you're literally helping save children in malawi also indonesia,bangladesh... looking back and seeing where we came from, the first video i uploaded aboutthe best paladin in the world and seeing where we're now, what we've managed to achieve togetherwith you guys really puts a smile on my face. gaming for good, what does it do and how didyou come up with it? it's basically just a website where developers donate their gamesand when people donate to charity they get

those games for free. thank you. the reasonwhy we're doing this for save the children is because you guys are one of the most effectivecharities in the world. people always tend to thank me for what i'm doing, what i'm doingis merely being a voice and trying to raise awareness and it's the gaming community thatis actually coming together and raising those funds. we've hit one million dollars! we'vehit one million dollars. you now the saying: it's better to give rather than receive. andyou really felt that, i saw you with the kids kind of gathering around you and you explaininggaming to them. it's the best experience you can have, we saved a child right there infront of my eyes. we even had a u.s. marine that donated his entire paycheck when he sawthe work we were doing, he was so touched

by it. you guys are my inspiration for doingwhat i'm doing, it's really what makes me happy. i've already said i'm really proudto be a gamer because of everything you guys have been doing. i know at any point throughoutthe journey that this wouldn't be possible without you guys. from the deepest of my heart,really thank all of you guys, i love you guys, thank you guys. the way i actually got toknow athene was through a very good friend of mine who a lot of fans might now as ian.i was at college/university, we call it hogeschool here in belgium, studying computer scienceswith ian and we always had a lot of conversations about philosophy and values and life and activismand... he once told me that he had a really good friend that i really had to meet if ilike having those kinds of conversations.

we were a family and there were 4 kids. ithink the childhood was pretty ok, athene and i are just one year difference. your brother,the first one and then was your sister chriffa and then was you and then habiba. he was helpingme, i am 7 years older than him and he knew things more than me when he was a little boyand i was bigger. my first impression must have been like... he was kinda hot... andhe was kinda funny... i didn't like his shoes. he came over in 1970 and married with my mom.i actually was there at the right point to see it evolve. as a group which included athene,his girlfriend tania, ian and myself, we quickly became really active and our first projectwas nee. bachir was 25, that was the time bachir and ian started with a political organisationcalled nee. nee became an actual thing here

in belgium that was talked about in the media,in the newspapers and stuff, pretty quickly. it was not even politically colored, it wasjust like you vote and then you have blank seats. here in belgium, you're mandatory togo vote so people that don't wanna go vote they go vote and they just vote extremist.so we said like you know what, we give people the ability to neutrally protest rather thanfriggin' vote for fascists. one of the first things that they did was visit all the housesof antwerp. the 9 districts of antwerp. antwerp has a population of half a million people.so what they did was ring at every door they could, introduce themselves and say who theyare and what they stand for. can you imagine what that means? it means that they worked12 hours a day. they went for it, we didn't

have any money to really have a real campaign.it was crazy and it was hard for me to see him like that because he would be gone reallyearly and he would come home late very tired cause they would walk like for 8 or 10 hoursa day and, talking all the time, it was very hard on them. it was batshit insane but itdid give them the creds and the right to say: look, we visited everyone in antwerp. andit gave us a lot of media exposure. after that, they also phoned every person of antwerpagain to say who they are. it's never been done in... in history, i guess. nee was thefirst project, the first activist project that we did together, not the first thingthat athene did because he was also in politics before that and joined big brother with theintention of addressing certain social issues

in belgium regarding racism. one aspect thatwe had to deal with a lot, being in the family we grew up in, is that there's a lot of racism.so when he was 16 he wanted to go into politics because he said when i'm in politics i havethe power to change things. so when he was 18 he went into a political party and he hada lot of votes. i was the youngest close elected person in belgium ever, not a lot of peopleknow that. and since i was the first follower, that's what they call it, i had to be in allthe meetings. when we were younger, bachir and his brother and franco, another friendof his, did a lot talking about things that are going wrong in the world. discussionsthat i had with your brother where you began to participate influenced you a lot. he likedto confirm everything in science, in fact

he wanted to explain everything logically.for me one of the most crazy points is big brother. bachir participated with big brother.when he said "i go in big brother", we always said "you are crazy". 30.000 or 60.000 peopleasked to come in the house so i thought they're never gonna accept him to go in the house.i don't know how he did it but they accepted him. so he told: "when i am in the house,i can tell the people my thoughts. he was 3 days in big brother and he turned them allaround. discrimination is the ugliest thing in the world. so when he came out of big brother,he said they only let see to the people on the television what they want, not his ideas.and then he wrote a book. after his experience in the big brother house, he was invited ina talkshow with filip dewinter and filip dewinter

is one of the most important persons in theextreme right party here in belgium and there bachir, he was 18 years old and he stood faceto face to filip dewinter, talking about the things that happened in the big brother houseand talking about the reasons why bachir was voted out and the reasons why bachir was invitedin the house in the first place. here in belgium, in antwerp, there is very much discriminationabout morrocan people. every day you wake up like a kid, you have to fight this withteachers and you are another person, you are not like them, you are different. it was veryhard, it was very hard to grow up like this. every year we went to morroco and we livedthere on a farm of the father of your father. no water, no electricity, no toilet. theylearned also the other side of a good life.

i think you liked the family because theywere very warm and very hospitality. so they knew the two sides of the life, i think itmakes you what you are. right after nee came a series of failures that a lot of peopleare unaware of, movie projects, film projects, we wanted to make a movie. dean and i werethe main brains behind the movie. and in order to work together as a team on these movies,we actually lived together, we moved in to this place that was actually under construction,it was franco's place. we were hardcore, as a film crew... zero budget film crew. tryingto construct our own rigs and dollies and... it was ridiculous. we slept here, we workedhere, our computers were there just like you saw em in the videos like the computer whereathene was sitting, normally next to it i

was sitting and you had ian and you had furious.and right after here like here there were mattresses we were just sleeping on the floorand this was our life... for like a year or so, this was it. so that didn't work, we thentried another incarnation of the movie which was a completely different movie but we gaveit the same title and fragments of that also ended up on youtube and people really likedthat one but it didn't get so many views and it didn't really go anywhere either. mostof the filmmaking stuff took place in the year after nee, now during that time we stilldid a little bit of nee campaigning because the year after the regional elections, therewere national elections. we parodied other campaigns in belgium, and we took this toan extreme extent when certain political parties

here promising insane amounts of jobs. theywere actually throwing with numbers like you know we're gonna give out so many jobs thisyear and then others would go like nonono we're gonna double that up. people were sortastarting to laugh at that and saying this is impossible so we wanted to give that dissatisfactiona voice. and we thought what better way of parodying that then to say that our politicalparty was promising also new jobs... 40.000 blowjobs for everyone who would sign up. stillgetting mails about that, there's no blowjobs. so while we were doing all the filmmakingstuff and trying to get that lifted off, athene had a certain idea about how we could makeit lift off. i had a genious plan, world of warcraft most popular game, 9 million peopleplay it, i just play the game, 5v5. we were

actually plotting that out, like: ok so weneed an audience, how do we get a global audience, how do we... this and that. this was the intentionfrom the get-go. and even though the athene person and the athene series didn't existyet, we were actually already doing these little update videos in which you sort ofalready had a version of the athene persona. and athene literally said: i'll just becomethe best paladin in the world, i'll just become the best world of warcraft player and thatway we'll have a massive audience because this is the biggest game. it's marketing!it's marketing. it's being brilliant. and this was on a different youtube channel sovery few people actually saw these videos. and while it sounded crazy, athene had beenone of the top and most infamous players of

ultima online. but the very first athene videowas actually sort of a joke, it wasn't a very calculated thing. hi everyone, this is athene,best paladin of the server, battlegroup but also the world. at the time athene was numberone in i think all pvp brackets and as a prank a friend of his who he would play togetherwith, who was known as jess or navarium, got a hold of his details, logged in on the wowforums and made this incredibly cocky post. it was just hilarious. that thread becameso huge. 15 pages, more than 10.000 views, in like... in like that, it's because theyknow i'm good. we were like... we gotta make a video response to this and get back at navarium.and that is why in the first videos furious is this very strange character who pretendsto be navarium. i'm gonna play with my boyfriend

here furious, playing navarium. after that,everyone thought that the weird shirtless dude was navarium. slick. slick. slick. slickyeah. it's slick. shhhhhhh shhhhhh. the athene series, the athene persona, that blew up prettyfast. that was our ticket to having an audience, which was the goal of the movie projects,we wanted to have an audience to do stuff like what we are doing now, we were activiststo the core so we wanted to be global. after the success of the first athene video, wekept on making athene videos like once or twice a week and what's really funny is thatwe always had this very improvised way of shooting and making the videos. never oncedid we script things or plan things ahead very much, most of the videos we just startedshooting and figured it out as we went along.

even when involving additional characterslike athene's mom, like athene's brother. and for years most people didn't really knowwhich parts of athene were an act and which parts were real. obviously some of it wasreal because really was a top world of warcraft player. we always made sure to have a littlebit of reality in the videos so that people were always not quite sure what to believe.it's my brother... my colleagues said come on, are you the crazy guy of the athene series?i say yeah it's me. they said i can't believe it, we can't believe. it's so real, it looksso real that i'm so crazy. the i guess initial idea to become world famous as being one ofthe best world of warcraft players and then using that stand to inspire people to becomeactivists themselves is something that's almost

unheard of. the first game that ever was boughtwas by my father, it was a machine, a small machine, very cheap, that you connect to thetv and you could play pong. i think i learned you chess, you remember that? you were verysmall. he was very good at it, he was obsessed by it. and the first console i bought thatwas in 1989 i think or 88 and it was the atari, atari 2600. he also played board games withme, he also likes to play chess, i have to admit i lost very very often. then in 1992or 91 your sister bought the sega master system with 3 games: ninja, kenseiden and fantasyzone. then the computer games started. you had cat, you had dig dug, you had lode runner,space invaders also. the first game you played was doom and then civilization and you alwaysfinished as fast as possible. you had command

& conquer, red alert, command & conquer generals,always playing as fast as possible and finish it as fast as possible. his extreme rationalityis no doubt what makes him so good at games. he's always been very eager to learn and honestlyeven compared to the teachers you were developed far beyond their own level. when he was alittle boy, when he was 7 years, 8 years, 9 years, the teacher is showing somethingin the class and he's telling no no, that's not true. and then he tell the teacher whathe have to tell and the teacher see that a boy from 6 years, 8 years, 9 years, 10 yearsis knowing more than the teacher. it was definitely athene's mental ability to break games andset all sorts of crazy records that fueled the virality of the videos the most, combinedwith the absolute absurdity of the characters

and one very crucial component: thumbnailgaming was a big thing on youtube back then, a lot of people on youtube would just getbig because they manage to use very catchy or provocative thumbnails and we were thekings of this mechanism. as with everything in our workflow, we were constantly evaluatingwhat we could do with what we have. how could we reach a bigger audience? how could we dobigger things? now, we were really early youtubers, we were there at the beginning so it was hardfor us to partner or monetize our stuff, that was nowhere near as accessible as it is today.we were not making any money off of anything we were doing. and a few months after thevery first athene video, we started working on a full-length athene movie. not all fansknow this but there is an athene feature film,

there's an athene movie, it's a full lengthmovie and it's really damn good. every few years or so i rewatch the movie and i'm likethis is a good movie, we spent just one month shooting this, on-the-go, completely improvised,no script and it actually turned into a good movie, it was amazing. this was uploaded about6 to 7 years ago so the quality isn't that great but wrath of the 1337 king is stillviewable for free on our youtube channel. very shortly after we did wrath of the 1337king, we also started the very first i power videos. i guess i paid the most attentionto athene during the i power i guess era of his youtube channel. i kind of noticed thatit was taking a little bit more of a serious tone. i power was a very interesting experimentbecause it is considered to be a self-development

thing and it is but the way we always sawit was: self-development is something that should lead to activism. i power was two things:it was a series on youtube and it is a community website that still exists, both of which arefocused on self-development and activism. we did some stuff with i power that was netneutrality related, very important, we were among the very very first net neutrality activistson the internet, we were talking about the issue before any newspapers or media outletswere really reporting on it. some people thought we were conspiracy theorists like alex jonesfor talking about net neutrality because no reputable huge media outlet was talking aboutit before we did. so we kept focusing on the athene stuff, we kept focusing on trying toexpand our audience and at the same time we

had many years that we were still doing thei power thing but also discussing and trying to figure out how we were going to make abigger and better difference. the reason that i'm not logging on a lot is because i'm playingat the moment poker. since we weren't making any money off of anything we were doing yet,a good friend of athene's, jess, was actually doing really well playing online poker. andwith athene's mathematical insight and skills he immediately said you know what, i'm gonnafix the money problem, don't worry, i've got your back. he was just going to go no-lifemode, play poker non-stop every day for a year straight, even longer if needed, to scrapetogether enough of a budget that we didn't have to worry about anything any more. thefirst time when he's playing pokerstars i

was thinking... oh my god, he's a gambler.and then he won very very much money with this. as a poker player myself, to prettymuch pick up the game from scratch almost just on a whim and to become supernova elitein the first year, to break the world record of playing one million hands in a month isjust completely remarkable, i don't think anybody to this day has ever achieved anythingeven close to that. come on give me some hands, give me some hands so i can own it up here.i got a hand? i bet. i didn't hit it? i bluff. you wanna go to the river? go to the river.you wanna call me down? ship in the dough. that's how i roll. i'm 24-tabling and owningit up. i made my own program, better than that table ninja crap. i made my own tableninja. you think you gonna bluff me out of

the pot? little bitch, trying to bluff meout oh you trying to, look look look what he's trying to do! trying to bet against me.shoved, bitch! king king against ten... ooooh boom! bring in the dough! so even though athenedidn't have as much free time because the daily poker grind took up every single minuteof his day, the whole poker thing sorta took the channel into a different direction wherethe athene persona was sort of transitioning towards online poker. and you would have thesecrazy achievements and records and wacky videos but in a poker context. so another thing thattook place during the poker era was the athene tv-series here in belgium. we actually hadan athene series here on tv in belgium. it was in dutch, well, it was in a very flemish/antwerpaccent kinda style and the characters were

also slightly different. it was some of thefunniest stuff we had ever made and we had a blast making those videos, it was reallyreally cool. in general, athene was very focused on keeping up the poker grind, making surethat we had a future budget to work with and the rest of were just sort of focusing oni power stuff. and unfortunately, as a result, some of the bond kinda faded and we saw ianand dean leave 'the crew' as it were. a lot of things happened. because i was playingpoker and because i had really very low contact, ian, daan and to a lesser extent, reese, wereactually experiencing a lot of pressure and stress because they knew that i was workingmy ass off to pay for their bills. and since we were all working in a very right-actionmindset, trying to make a difference, there

was a certain level of expectations that theyexperienced that was not always as real because there was no feedback loop. playing pokeralmost like some kind of machine, you have almost no contact, pokering 14 to 16 hoursa day. if you're on the other side and you're looking at the situation, you can easily createcertain thoughts and certain ghosts about that person because of the abscence of feedback.the reason why i'm explaining all of this so much in-depth is because it explains thedrastic event that took place and really affected a lot of our lives very drastically. wheni was playing poker, i got a message from i think it was reese saying they wanted totalk to me about something very serious. what happened that day is still a puzzle to me,reese came, daan and ian. reese was a bit

disoriented but basically what happened isthey came over and they said that they didn't wanna have anything to do with me any more,that i was not their friend any more and that i can keep my money, they don't need it. theconversation wasn't that long. i was confused, because i didn't know where it came from andi was also like but i'm playing all these poker hands, i'm getting supernova elite notbecause i wanna get rich, i'm doing this because i try to make sure you guys that we can workand make a difference in the world. they said to me like no you don't understand, we don'thave anything to do with you any more. i was first trying to figure out if i did somethingwrong, i must have done something or asked something or... but i was just very isolatedand working every day, i almost had no contact

with them and i tried to get back in touchwith them, the same day even, i also wrote a very big letter. reese came over the nextday, because he was also really confused, whether he wanted to do the things and stuff,he didn't really know. he told me that ian said that if they would come and they wantedto do their own thing, i would just try and pressure them and become aggressive. and hewarned them. they even changed the password from the youtube channel athenewins. but reeseimmediately saw that it wasn't true, because i was not going aggressive, i was just tryingto understand the situation and be rational about it. i just said to reese like i gottatalk to them. a lot of people would have heard this and go like man, fuck them but i reallyvalued the friendship a lot. it was so weird

that that happened, it was not thought throughat all, it was very impulsive. it was a burden that i carried for a very long time, becausei don't know how much people can identify with how much i valued friends. friends weremore important than my girlfriend, friends were more important than my family, friendswere just the people you choose to just make a difference, grow up, can trust each other,can back each other up no matter what and then that happened. it was paradigm-shiftingfor me, it was really shattering. i was wondering at that point even if i should keep goingfor supernova elite because i was like why am i doing this if it's not for them? i meani'm not playing poker because i wanna get rich, i don't care about money. but then idecided like still to go for supernova elite,

i was talking to reese and said like yeah,worst comes to worst, we just donate all the money, that's a lot of money, we can makea big difference with that. and even though reese was still trying to figure it out, hewas the only one from the group that could look at the situation and say like this isreally wrong what just happened and i don't wanna be part of this. i always try to reachout, to both of them because i know that we would be able to achieve so much more. thatwas a pretty turbulent era and even though we didn't hear anything from ian any morein a very long time and dean only appeared in a limited range of videos hereafter, atheneand i kept on going. next up was the pokerstars pca tournament. hello everyone, this is gloriabalding for pokernews at day one the pokerstars

carribean adventure. why, why are you so famous?because of the gaimz! you have stacks of those t-shirts under your chair and you're givingthem out to people. i'm giving them out because a lot of people asked. i'm afraid by goinga little bit too over the top that i would just get disqualified. going way too overthe top, so this is the subtle version of you? haha, i'm gonna play some pokers, i'mgonna stack some noobs! that was all a really crazy experience and we have some amazingvideos of athene meeting daniel negreanu and being the athene persona at the pca in bahamas.the online poker community definitely remembers athene, they probably remember him more aschiren80 which was his nickname in online poker but there's so many funny things thatwe did with that just like athene did so many

funny things in world of warcraft and becamesuch an icon in there, he also caused quite a stir in online poker, both in terms of reallyfunny stunts and videos and records, just like in other games. as we were sort of wrappingup the poker stuff we were asking ourselves what our next project would be in terms of:what could we do that would really make a difference or that would really inspire alarge audience in a positive way. we always firmly believed that even from a scientificangle, you can look at evolution and you can look at anthropology and just prove that humanbeings wanna help each other, it's how we've evolved. and we thought what if we make anincredible scientific documentary that focuses on the inspiring aspects of science, it wouldget a lot of people thinking, it would make

people aware. that was the idea behind athene'stheory of everything. the result of this was one of our most popular and most talked aboutvideos, that we released after almost a year of research and editing. it didn't do much,it didn't do much at the start, it inspired a lot of people, it had an effect especiallyon the i power crowd and such. it didn't go much beyond our own audience and a lot ofathene fans were very confused, they were like why is athene doing a science documentary?our audience was only used to trolling at that point, we had barely ever done seriousvideos outside of the realm of i power so it was very weird for them to see. we adaptedimmediately, we just went like ok, we have to keep building relevance though, we can'tlose our audience, we gotta go back and make

athene videos, athene has to come back. athene.athene is alive! is alive! you hear the drums? do you hear the drums of war? it was prettygood, we went all out making athene videos for a while and we really built that backup. other things of note that happened around this time were athene's crazy record-settingstarcraft stunts and kez coming over. this was the result of a video where athene announcedhe would be picking someone from the comments to be trained by athene to become a pro atgames and at life. it was a very concept that made for some great videos but kez actuallywas a great addition to the team for the time that he managed to stay. we actually startedworking much closer together with the help of franco, whose house we had lived in wayback in the beginning when we were making

movies or trying to and we were making thefirst athene videos. he said look if you ever need a place to work, you can actually usethe downstairs room as a studio. we were very creative on a lot of fronts to get back intothe game and it was a tough climate because botting was becoming very popular on youtube,people were botting their views. if you just got enough views fast enough to get on theyoutube front page, your botted views would then quickly translate into tons and tonsof real views because you're on the front page of youtube.com. this was something thatwe had to fight against and we did, we were very vocal about it, we made videos aboutthat. and we did everything we could to not just gain a bigger following but also to makethe youtube landscape a better place so aside

from fighting the botting and doing all wecould in terms of talking to people who work at youtube, we were also trying to give asmuch exposure as we could to people on youtube who were completely undiscovered and werenot getting any views and we called this idea 'together to the top'. he's embarked on avery ambitious project, he's helping us all y'know, together to the top right? and thephrase 'together to the top' was just something athene said at the end of a video somewherebut it became a movement. youtubers started using that phrase and saying like yeah togetherto the top! we gotta back each other up. and people started to use that as sort of themantra of the youtube community, at least among gamers. it was an insane thing to see.athene made a personal video for everyone

who would send him a private message on youtubeasking for it. this was one of the most insane things we did in terms of internet stunts.athene literally filmed thousands of personal videos, he would personally respond to whatsomeone's channel would be like. with the athene comeback, with together to the top,we were doing pretty well all of a sudden. we were in the top 100 youtube channels andwe were going up really quickly. at the same time the yogscast was growing very quicklyas well and we did our very first minecraft video together with them. and that was rightbefore swifty accidentally got banned from world of warcraft because of a fan event hedid that crashed their servers and out of that came the legendary support video thatwe made for him and we became great friends

with swifty and did a lot of videos togetherover the years. we also started going to cons and events, which is something we had neverdone before. our first one was gamescom 2011 and it was a revelation to us. we knew wewere big on youtube but we were nowhere near the biggest. yet somehow, maybe because weattract a more mature audience, maybe because athene has been around for so long as an iconin the gaming community, we get swarmed by more people than anyone else at conventions,it is the most insane thing. we saw it at gamescom, we saw it at blizzcon... and whatreally blew our minds is just how many fans we have in sweden when we go to dreamhack.and it was while all this was unfolding that we got in touch with former pornstar mia rosewho contacted us and really liked our videos

and who we've since been really good friendswith. we also continued to do science videos every now and then, often together with agood friend of ours who is a theoretical physicist, frederik van der veken. towards the end of2011 we sorta moved our studio again to a new place where we would all live under oneroof: athene, tania, my girlfriend vanessa and myself. and with the beginning of 2012came the epic announcement of our sponsorship with razer. we worked out a very unique setupwith razer, they would sponsor us purely in gear that we would be able to give out tothe community as we saw fit. from this point on, we had half a million dollars of razergear to our disposal. and we always made sure to use it in ways that stimulates the community,whether it's related to together to the top

or charity events. 2012 was in some ways evenmore eventful than 2011. as defenders of net neutrality, of course we were also part ofthe sopa/pipa blackout and we did our best to be as effective as we could. by livestreamingand having our entire community actually contact senators to try to make them see the importanceof not letting this bill pass. during that event we actually got tweets back from senatorswho told us that we made them change their mind. we also became a bit less active interms of spotlighting other channels in the together to the top fashion, because insteadwe were fighting a lot more behind the scenes, talking to networks like machinima and eventuallyalso curse to see what could be done for youtubers who are having a hard time getting into thescene or simply avoiding getting ripped off

by their networks. we eventually voluntarilyconsulted for curse to help them write a truly fair contract for youtubers who want to jointheir network and it was our decision to call the network union for gamers. even thoughwe were quite happy with machinima at the time, we always saw more competition and moreoptions for youtubers as a very good thing. later that year machinima became more andmore controversial as a lot of its partners started speaking up about how they felt ignoredor just flat out tricked into signing certain contracts without knowing what they were gettingthemselves into. at that point we ourselves joined union for gamers as well. what mainlyset union for gamers apart from other networks was the fact that while you were getting avery high cpm, you could also leave the network

whenever you like, while other networks wouldlock you in with contracts for 2 years all the way up to 7 years. but of course the realmilestone of 2012 was sharecraft. it was only after a small world of warcraft event thatwe organized to raise money for save the children that we started to realize just how much wecould achieve with online fundraising. and around this time you had the incredibly viralkony 2012 phenomenon, which quickly suffered an incredible backlash. we decided to do somethingcrazily ambitious and we took the opportunity to respond. i was really inspired when i sawthe kony 2012 video, to see how many people actually took the time to share it. but notlong afterwards, the backlash started. and the people that were supporting it were startingto get criticized for not doing their homework

and not researching the actual charity behindit. what i've learned from the kony 2012 video is not that whether or not we did our researchright or wrong, but rather that an inspiring idea to bring change and help other peopleout can go more viral than anything else. regardless of the debate surrounding invisiblechildren, the phenomenon of the film's virality shows that the common perception of beingpowerless against all that is injustice in the world and the idea that people tend tobe indifferent is obviously inaccurate. the internet has come to such a point that theonly thing we need to overcome this widespread belief is to collectively reach out for whatwe believe is right and often real change will follow. the whole way in which charitiesoperate is changing because it's not any more

just about sharing wealth but also knowledge,information, opinions and feelings. so i'm trying out a little experiment, i'm launchingoperation sharecraft. it's a project focused on charities that have been thoroughly researchedand proven to be efficient and effective. i decided to start by focusing on save thechildren's work in the horn of africa. it has not been covered so much by mainstreammedia and this is where millions of people right now are struggling to survive the worsthunger crisis in 60 years. whether or not this experiment is going to work will onlydepend on whether people believe that their actions will matter or not. that is how smallthe difference is between raising one million dollars or raising nothing. and i know i'msetting the bar high, but the goal of this

experiment is to set an example and show thatwe have come to a time where our drive to share things is the only thing required tobring real change. it was a goal so ambitious that we doubted many many times and we lostfaith many times in whether we'd be able to do it. every day we tried to raise $10.000and we had so many huge contributors, as well as thousands of donators who made sure tocontribute whatever they could. a lot of people will remember maral, a friend of ours whocame over from sweden and poured so much of her heart and soul into helping out and livestreamingwith us to try to get the one million. one sort of iconic moment that summarizes howemotional and tough it was to really stick to it and try to hit that one million goalover the course of a hundred days. we were

discussing about tomorrow what we're gonnado and then we saw people were saying someone donated $1250 i was like what the fuck that'snot true that can not be true. you donated so much while there's no show going, whatinspired you, what's the story behind this? i've been watching you for a couple of yearsnow, athene. so you've always been a big inspiration to me, you know you've been an idol in thegaming community for a long time. and this operation sharecraft is like your big thingso i just wanted to show my support for you and the gaming community. because you tookthe time out of your day to thank me for just doing what i do, i'm gonna go ahead and donateanother $200. no man... that's fucking badass man. it goes to them kids man. i really wannathank you man, you're a fucking boss man,

that's just crazy. maral are you crying? maralis crying here next to me. you made her cry. aw i'm sorry maral, i didn't mean to makeyou cry. it's no problem man, this is very intense... so yeah man... poor maral, she'svery touched here. he did give another $200 and someone else gave another $100. oh mygod. maral come you have to say thank you them, maral say thank you to them. maral youwant to say something to the viewers? thank you. hi dreamhack, hi sweden. athene's sharecraftproject is the most ambitious charity event in the history of e-sports. with the livestreamingand with how things have been evolving, basically almost all donations have been coming fromyou guys. this entire event has been carried by the shoulders of our community. i've justbeen thinking like what can we do in order

to spread awareness around this matter, whatcan i do? i've done research and it's gonna be done in a very responsible way. i'm gonnago on hunger strike. athene if you end up watching this, just be careful man. i'm alot weaker, you're easier affected by emotions and stuff. this is my fifth day today. weactually got international media with my hunger strike with all the people also joining, contactingpress, i want to do a big shout-out to everyone that's been helping out, it really makes mesmile to see everybody coming together. athene stepped up to really create a massive projectlike this. he's already more than $300.000 there. this is what you guys have raised thepast 80 days, almost $1 million for the horn of africa for save the children, for childrenfacing the worst hunger crisis in 60 years.

i wanted to hit that $1 million live on stage,do you guys think we're gonna hit it right now? if we hit the $1 million, i want youguys to go crazy. we've hit it! we've hit it? we've hit $1 million! we've hit $1 million!it was the biggest thing we had ever done and we had done a lot of things. and evenduring sharecraft, there were so many things that happened. for example, this was whenriot games updated league of legends with athene's unholy grail. an in-game item namedafter athene because of the amount of referrals that he brought to the game. we were absolutelyexhausted from sharecraft but we learned a lot. for the first time we had truly founda way to inspire a massive audience and make things happen that are truly significant andimportant on a global scale. it's the stuff

that we had always wanted to do but we justdidn't know exactly how. and with these new-found insights we focused more and more on charityinitiatives and finding ways to inspire. later that year we also made a bite-sized sequelto athene's theory of everything and what really ended up inspiring a lot of peopleand made it so that in the future we'd be able to really show our audience what kindof a difference they make is that in the second half of 2012 we were able to visit save thechildren's programs in mali. we went to a remote village in mali that doesn't have anyaccess to internet or electricity. we want to play some football but he says that hisball is broken. you see a lot of kids here that have never seen a computer, never accesseda computer. and i thought it would be a cool

idea to give them the possibility to do areddit ama. this takes the satellite connection through this. one of the questions was whethershe was happy or not and she answered that she actually didn't know. she also said thatshe thinks a doll would make her very happy. i'm not working for save the children, i'mactually independent, i'm just here by myself with my cameraguy from my youtube channel.we're driving around right now trying to find a shop. how many can we take? the reason whyi'm here is because we raised $1 million with operation sharecraft and save the childrenhas actually allowed us to come. we made the reddit ama, a lot of people were really touchedby it. and we thought it would be a really good idea to come back. this is the only dollin the entire market and it's gonna make a

girl very happy. we bought a lot of balls,all the children here will be able to play and we also have a doll and save the childrenhas a lot of food programs and medical programs for this area. last time when i came herethey brought me a ball, you can see it's completely broken. kujã© is her name and she's around10 to 11 years old, she doesn't know exactly. can you tell her that a lot of people sawher and were really touched by her and thought that they had to make her wish come through.2012 was a crazy year and what topped it off at the ending was a ridiculous experimentthat we undertook with our youtube channel. with changes to the youtube algorithms, itlooked more and more like youtube's system would favor the channels that put out morecontent a day. we thought we would put this

to the test. we did something that no youtuberhas done before, we went through a phase where we did 24 to 48 videos per day. we had a superoptimized workflow for this, people were flooding us with questions: how are you doing this?you are making 24 to 48 videos a day and they're not bad, these are good videos. it ended upnot really helping us much but it was an interesting experiment. moving into 2013, as we focusedmore and more on livestreaming, we also saw a lot of turbulence in that landscape. thesite we used to stream on for sharecraft was not doing well financially and it was gettingshut down, leaving no other competitors in the landscape aside from twitch. luckily,twitch was actually a pretty great partner for our charity efforts. they worked withus to set up a subscription system in such

a way that whoever would subscribe to ourtwitch channel would actually be donating to charity. so twitch actually never paysus one cent, all subscription revenue goes to save the children. now, we didn't reallyhave another sharecraft planned for 2013, we assumed we would not be able to top sharecraftin any shape or form. but we kept on streaming for charity and seeing where that would takeus. the twitch subscription system was a great help and a very cool way of raising donations.on the side we also were building up a website called gaming for good because we were workingwith game developers such as red 5 who at times had given us thousands of keys for theirgames. and over the course of the year we have featured more than a hundred games ongaming for good, all of them hand-picked because

we always wanted to feature games that peoplewould really like. but just as with sharecraft, the main thing that people donated for wasthe livestream. we expanded on the livestream concept quite a bit, we added a webcam thatwas pointed towards the street and if anyone felt compelled to donate a very large amountjust to see us run in our underwear in the freezing on the street, this was a servicethat we could provide. there have been so many crazy moments like that, i mean therehas been a moment where athene shaved his head bald. it was not our intention to makehim go bald, we were just saying look we'll cut a tiny piece of his hair for every personwho donates. it was like the internet suddenly conspired and it went viral and people said"we are not leaving until he is bald". we

were like no way that you guys can do this,we're just cutting very tiny pieces of hair for every donation that comes in. and it wasa $5 donation because it was a subscription. we didn't sleep that night, we kept cuttinghair. we raised $160.000. another new component we added to the livestream was the nightshifts.basically, we started streaming all day every day. and people would donate. but when wewould go to bed, donations would stop. so we thought, why not have a night shift andhave people from the community take over the moment we go to sleep. gaming for good sortof became the name of the whole operation. and the biggest gaming for good event of 2013was the siege. the siege was an event of an incredible scale, an absolutely massive rangeof well-known twitch streamers and youtubers

joined in for a whole weekend to see how muchmoney we could raise if we all teamed up together. blizzard was launching their siege of orgrimmarpatch and they had asked us to see if we could do anything special to promote it. littledid they know that we were about to launch the biggest community event that world ofwarcraft had ever seen. the goal was to raise half a million dollars during the weekendand we quadrupled that. sivhd alone raised $1 million with the matching included. wedid not expect to hit a total goal of $10 million raised in 2013. it was only as wegot closer to december that we started realizing that we might actually make it to $10 millionraised. as a result, the story of gaming for good was becoming so big that it even gotpicked up by outlets like cnn's headline news,

fox, the wall street journal and bloombergtv. two years ago, $1 million seemed nearly impossible but moving forward in 2014, havingachieved things have affected more than a million lives, we've come to learn that whengamers unite on a global scale, nothing is impossible.