Anthpo Closes The Yearbook
We learned why the creator is leaving his million-subscriber YouTube channel behind upon graduating from college — and met the true friends he made along the way (Photo by Salma HQ)
If we get to a point in the near future where everyone boasts, say, ten thousand followers across their social media channels (an arbitrary number, though for the sake of this scenario, imagine standing on a stage in front of ten thousand people), the concept of fame might simply evolve into a subjective matter, unquantifiable even. “We’re gonna end up in a world where 80% of people are famous, in one way or another,” uber-famous 21-year old creator Emma Chamberlain declared in a May episode of her podcast, Anything Goes. “And fame becomes a universal experience.”
Yet in the present, fame remains a peculiar thing. Fame is sprung up through For You pages, hoisted to a pedestal where winners’ medals are swapped for golden plaques and blue check marks – the ones that don’t cost $8 per month, of course. Fame can be sustained through yo-yo tricks and science experiments, through singular talents or absurd challenges or personable vlogs or nothing at all, really. Fame, propped up by the internet’s boundless landscape of never-ending niches, has seemingly never been more attainable, yet it’s picky in who it favors, and unforgiving in those it neglects.
Some become more famous upon their death, but the death of fame itself is a collapse into obscurity, a title bout with irrelevance. To gain an audience online – where fame is now almost certainly centered – is a hard-fought battle, a constant push-and-pull with attention and analytics, trends and tangible ideas. To give that up, to shelve that presence one fought tooth and nail for from the face of the internet isn’t just unheard of. It’s a bad business decision at best, a borderline cultural crime at worst, especially when a culture becomes less about how you achieved your fame and more about whether or not you still have it. It is, in all essence, the act of sacrificing one’s voice and its subsequent standing in a world where we can watch, read, and hear what everyone is thinking at any given moment, a little bit of everything, all of the time.
Listen along to the story here!
A certain variant of fame can be found in New Brunswick, New Jersey, incubated in the test tube of YouTube and cultivated right here at Rutgers University, where I’ve just arrived via train. Twenty-four hours earlier, I had caught up with a friend at a cafe in SoHo and explained why I was in town: to profile a college senior with one-point-five million subscribers who, exactly four-hundred-and-seventy-seven days before his graduation, uploaded a rather noteworthy video to his channel, in which he proclaimed that he would quit the platform once his commencement commenced. Whether the channel would remain, too, was something only he knew.
My friend, a creator themselves, balked at this notion. Even if the process of uploading had become exhausting, or the sponsorship money had dried up, common logic would dictate that keeping the back catalog of videos intact (and, thus, a declining-but-steady stream of AdSense revenue) was, at the very least, worth it, right? Isn’t deleting a YouTube channel like that essentially the equivalent of lighting hundreds of thousands – if not millions – of dollars on fire? they pondered out loud.
Though the question was rhetorical, I didn’t necessarily have a good rebuttal. I had my suspicions, which is why I’m here, after all. To learn more about Anthony Potero, better known as Anthpo, who talks about things like wanting to bring “Old YouTube” back and the process of closing chapters in order to write new ones and the “mitosis” of content groups and, most importantly, the (literal) friends he’s made along the way.
And even if someone like Anthony grew up online, in front of millions of people, none of these threads we pull over the course of several hours come off as vain, but, rather, observant, of modern fame and his place in it.
“My videos are a byproduct of me,” he says. “And I’m a byproduct of the internet, and culture.”
It’s a sunny day in September as Anthony shows me around his college campus. With the fall semester set to kick off tomorrow, students are out and about, setting up mid-afternoon club fairs and chatting over coffee. He’ll be helping first years move in tomorrow, he says, as he loves meeting new faces and supporting the community.
If I were to explain the creator’s content to my grandma – or even my mom, for that matter – I’m not really sure where to start. But for anyone under the age of 30, I’d describe Anthpo (the channel, and its protagonist) as a Vine compilation video come to life, a sentient meme who learned how to walk and talk somewhere along the way. His digital persona only paints a small portion of the picture, however, and I’m curious to get to know him a little better, along with the environment that’s nurtured him.
The fact that Anthony goes to Rutgers is probably his worst-kept secret, though even that label feels generous. In his videos, the creator jokes to sleuthing fans that he doesn’t exactly hide where he attends school, as evidenced by the next stop on our tour, a classroom where he and his friends often go to film. People are pretty respectful when they see him around campus, and while they keep their distance, they’ll sometimes DM him later to let him know they’re a fan. Some younger students have even mentioned that they applied to Rutgers after watching his channel.
The classroom is occupied, so for now, we head back down the stairs. Rocking a plain black tee, light blue earrings, and a well-kept mullet, Anthony fits right in with his college peers, trading other creators’ dueling appetites for lax streetwear or high fashion for something a little bit more practical. On second glance, however, I notice his Converses, clad in a bright blue and popping with GOLF le FLEUR* branding. When I ask him about his inspiration for rocking the sneakers, he mentions how he loves the brand and started working with them in recent years. “They [Converse] don’t want me to wear other shoes in videos and stuff,” he adds, before quipping, “I'm sure they wouldn't yell at me, but they’d probably be really upset, especially because they send me shoes so often.”
As we walk around campus, we talk about his own recent apparel collection, launched just several weeks prior to my visit. With a theme of “The Power of Friendship,” the three different pieces heavily featured photos of his actual college friends, who regularly appear in his videos; some of them have even become pseudo-internet personalities in their own right.
The merch drop, the first one he really put time into over the last three years, has been a success, selling well with a lot of positive engagement from his fans. In hindsight, Anthony says that there’s definitely some things he would’ve done differently, like planning more videos around release time in order to show off the collection. But he’s also not too preoccupied with it – there’s only so much time in the day when you’re balancing a career as a creator with the workload and responsibilities of, well, a full-time student.
“I think I'm kind of doing this whole thing in, like, hard mode right now,” he says, pulling out his phone to show me his packed, color-coded calendar. Classes are in yellow, club events are in purple, and time to relax and play music is in light red. An overwhelming amount of the screen, though, is filled with blue, reminding him about his creative responsibilities with notes like “ideate” and “upload reel” and “HOLD FRIENDS HOSTAGE IN MERCH” (I don’t press him about the last one).
Anthony pulls out his phone to display his packed, color-coded calendar (Photo by NGL)
Most of the days this week start at 8 a.m. (if not earlier), and he’s sometimes booked until after midnight, into the early hours of the following morning. Other than a video editor he works with sporadically, the only true member of his team is an assistant, Chelsea, a younger student at Rutgers who is his business fraternity “little.” She helps him organize things, though Anthony hasn’t relinquished control over most of the inbound emails and event appearances. It’s not like she can go to class for him, either.
“The stuff she’s doing is like, ‘Chelsea, I need to find a bed that looks identical to this [for a video]! Can you go find one?’” the creator shouts while mimicking a phone call with his hand. “And she spends an hour, and goes and finds one.”
Still, we both agree that as far as business fraternity internships go, you could do worse.
When viewing the Anthpo lore on a longer time horizon, there’s something that’s remained incredibly consistent: the creator’s inconsistency.
That’s not to say he doesn’t post often, because he does, with a high bar for quality at that. No, Anthony has proven his ability to reinvent himself on several occasions, not just through the format of his content but also the way in which he presents himself. There’s been three different epochs of his channel, from his original IRL comedy to a pandemic-induced stint with green screen parodies to his current, seasonless sitcom starring his college buddies as recurring characters.
I started following Anthony during the first epoch, at a juncture when most of his subscribers found him: in 2019, when he was a senior in high school and would run around in a Perry the Platypus onesie or hand out pictures of Fat Yoshi and generally just film the hilarious interactions that would emerge. These quick-cutting, two-to-three-minute videos were full of viral moments, and most of his fellow students who weren’t involved behind-the-scenes had fun making an appearance in them, even unintentionally.
Anthpo was everything YouTube viewers themselves had been conditioned to expect from fifteen years of the platform’s existence, featuring referential, amateurish-looking entertainment that was both accessible and didn’t take itself too seriously. In interviews, he’d claim his goal was “to bring the Old YouTube back,” refreshing the sketch comedy genre that he felt was increasingly being replaced by spectacle.
Though his early videos might’ve felt destined to blow up, writing off the millions of views as simple “luck” depicts an insufficient narrative. “He comes across a meme, or just, like, a character,” Hannah Bondalo, his friend and frequent collaborator (who, inspired by Anthony’s nickname, goes by “hanbon” online), observes. “But I think Anthony is very intentional about everything he does.”
Anthpo wasn’t even the first big foray into content by the creator himself. Growing up, he moved around a lot due to his dad’s job, ultimately living in seven different states. He describes his middle school self as a quiet kid who played video games all day, with “a ton of acne.” This period of constant upheaval in his life made it pretty easy to fall into the lonely character he often plays across social media, but don’t mistake it for inauthenticity.
“I don’t think a YouTuber inherently can be an extrovert,” Anthony says. “I think there’s some exceptions, like the Nelk guys, and they’ve just kinda fallen into place.”
“In general, though, if you’re any sort of creative, to have the gumption to sit down and make something and start from zero…you have to be introverted,” he continues. “Because it’s almost impossible to be extroverted and seek validation from something that doesn’t necessarily have an end in sight.”
Still, like many of his peers, the dream was to become a creator. He would gobble up content from YouTube veterans like Ryan Higa, jacksfilms, and Freddie Wong, and he started learning how to edit while attending a vocational high school in New Jersey. His classes there focused on information technology and digital communication. In his words, instead of reading about dead presidents, they “learned about what to do when Premiere crashes.”
Around this time, Anthony honed his filmmaking skills by creating over two hundred videos, most of which never saw the light of day. Keeping them private was by design; whether it was shooting in real life with other students or sending gaming videos over Discord servers, the real impetus was simply to share – and celebrate – them within his circle.
His first real taste of fame came when he and some classmates launched “The 1 Minute Talk Show,” which mixed man-on-the-street interviews with a Gen Z spin on current events, the latter which they filmed in a studio. Though the former format has now exploded in popularity for both consumers and creators, Anthony and his friends were posting their show in an era where you could still walk through Washington Square Park without being confronted by a semi-famous TikToking teen. Therefore, there was less competition, and more airspace for the taking.
Together, the group grew their Instagram account to over 400,000 followers. All of a sudden, Anthony went from sending his videos around for fun to being thrust into the spotlight.
“Everyone in the school knew us,” he says. “The administrators knew us. We were causing so many issues, in the best way. That was a way bigger flex.”
Administrators weren’t the only ones who took notice. A company called Alpha Media offered to acquire the show, and after some deliberation, the team accepted. Alpha put everyone under salary, bought them equipment, and even rented out a space for them to work.
That was around the point where Anthony decided he wanted something different. “I think we were growing apart in terms of what I wanted to pursue, my sense of humor and stuff,” he remembers. “I was like, ‘Ya know what, I’ve gained everything I can from this show. I’ve had this grandiose vision of what I think people want to see.’ And I just kinda dipped.”
He transferred to his local public school during the summer before his senior year, where he was able to meet people pretty easily due to the size of the student body. Though the Anthpo channel has been up since 2016, he started to take it more seriously – and gain some traction – around the time of the initial Fat Yoshi video, which he posted in January of 2019. Titled “Harassing people with fat yoshi,” it blew up relatively quickly, now sitting at nearly 12 million views.
As Anthony continued to put out projects in a similar vein – like “Bringing Feudalism to High School” (in which his friends dressed up as a knight and a horse, respectively) and “YELLING COMPLIMENTS AT STUDENTS” (in which he shouted nice things about his peers into a megaphone while passing them in the hallways) – he became a “quote-on-quote celebrity” as the waning months of senior year came and went, gaining hundreds of thousands of subscribers in the process. Given he filmed virtually all of the content at school, his peers tended to talk about it, though everyone seemed on board, and he never had a negative encounter.
Reflecting on his motivation to grow his channel at the time, the creator doesn’t mince words. Though he’s now on good terms with the 1 Minute Talk Show guys – collaborating as recently as this past August – Anthony felt like he had something to prove after branching out on his own.
“…it was a bittersweet thing. I didn't leave the show on the best terms at the time, and I was spiteful in a sense,” he recalls. “But then I started Anthpo, and it blew up. I got everything I wanted, but I didn’t feel really fulfilled.”
“Grass is always greener, I guess,” he adds.
Nonetheless, contrary to what some may wager, becoming “YouTube famous” isn’t what Anthony remembers most from high school. It was the “little things” he would do with his friends, the adventures and the late night conversations and all of those seemingly nondescript experiences of being a teenager from the burbs.
“I think the main thing people didn’t see was this incredible time I had outside of these very sensationalized videos I’d go around and film. As fun as those videos are, in the moment, it’s not like they’re the most fun thing ever,” he says. “It only tells a hundredth of the story. I spent 10 minutes during lunchtime running around in a Perry onesie – that was what you saw. Then there was the rest of my 99% of high school.”
With this in mind, Anthony decided to enroll at Rutgers, his nearby state university. While many creators on a similar trajectory – those who achieve a modicum of fame (and a decent chunk of cash) at such an early age – often skip out on college altogether in order to focus on a career in entertainment, he knew that the people and opportunities college introduced would be just as valuable as going all in on his content. It wouldn’t be easy to balance everything, sure, but he could always drop out if need be, an outcome that at times felt more than likely.
And it was here in New Brunswick that he relearned the same lessons from high school. Only this time, he decided to document it, wielding his college experience as part of his story.
As we head towards his off-campus house, which itself has become a central character in the world of Anthpo, the creator repeats something he had previously articulated to me over Zoom.
He stresses that while he’s always made videos because he “really liked making videos,” he feels like there’s a flaw in the approach many artists take with their work. “No one makes art for themselves,” he states. “That’s something that, like, art school students will tell themselves if their art isn’t selling well, or they can’t land a job. Art is inherently a shared thing.”
Now that we’re here in person, I want to continue this discussion with him. I mention something a friend had described recently: that in her day-to-day life, she’s not sure how many things she does because she wants to, versus how much she does “for the bit.”
She was mostly joking, but given how prevalent of a role memes now play in the way we think and even communicate, I’d wager she’s not alone in this feeling. And with Anthony’s penchant for incorporating memes – and creating new ones – in his videos, his million-plus subscribers probably place him in the 99th percentile of memeology experts. So, how does he feel about the idea of doing things “for the bit” as a way to interact with each other, and the world around us?
“I think ‘the bit’ is just a way to celebrate culture,” Anthony replies. “Going to the Minions movie in suits is feeding into, you know, capitalism. And we're kind of giving the big scary company exactly what they want.”
“But it's also really funny, you know?” he continues. “There's something funny about seeing a kids movie in a suit. And if you post it on the internet, then you’re doing it for the bit, sure. But you're also gonna look back on that in ten, fifteen years, and be like, ‘That was so fun.’”
I ask him to expand on this by connecting back to his point about artists. If we accept that art is a reflection of where we’re at, and that memes are a prominent part of contemporary culture, then it makes sense that we want to consume more meme-centered content from our favorite creatives, right?
Anthony thinks there’s a little bit more nuance to it than that. “A caveat to this whole thing is that sensationalized content is at a peak right now. And I think after peaks are valleys,” he says. “My videos used to be very meme-centered, and as fast as possible…I feel like the way things are headed is more relaxed, and more real. Because we’ve seen that MrBeast can only give out ten million dollars so many times.”
“And only so many people can give out ten million dollars,” I offer.
Anthony, at Rutgers, bringing back the Perry the Platypus onesie that made him famous (Photo via @anthpo)
This creative struggle was bubbling beneath the surface when Anthony first arrived at Rutgers back in 2019. He felt more than prepared for the academic rigors of college; from a social perspective, the transition went smoothly, too, as he says he did a good job of putting himself out there.
Yet even as his channel had grown in popularity through the summer months, figuring out what direction to take it in proved to be the most challenging aspect of university. “Content-wise, it was like a truck hit me. Because I had all these great ideas in high school, and I’d kinda done them,” he says. “And then the existentialism of, ‘Is this who I am? I’m just [known as] the Perry the Platypus guy?’ And I’m trying to come up with more great video ideas while trying to balance actually going to college, and joining this business fraternity.”
He confessed that he wasn’t “super proud” of most of the videos he made during his first year, though he could tell that when he was in a good headspace, he “came up with the bangers.” Nevertheless, things became even more uneven when March rolled around, as the pandemic forced him and most of his peers to isolate themselves indoors. All of a sudden, his trademark form of IRL comedy – which hinged on interacting with others – was thrown out the window.
Not one to be deterred, Anthony tried transitioning into filming by himself, monologuing in front of a green screen. “There were two points in my YouTube career where I contemplated quitting,” the creator says. “That was the point I was the closest…making green screen videos, talking to the camera. Not quitting necessarily, but putting a cap on the channel.”
Luckily, it was some creator friends he’d met over the years who got him out of his bedroom and shipped out across the country. After living together in a Los Angeles Airbnb, they found a brand who was willing to commit to a long term sponsorship. Thus, they relocated to a Las Vegas mansion in June 2020, forming a content group called “The House Nobody Asked For,” or THNAF for short.
Like many TikTok houses that emerged from the pandemic, THNAF featured several creators (eight, to be exact) with massive followings, appearing in each other’s videos and collaborating on group-wide sketches. However, it was their more self-ironical, less in-your-face vibe that attracted fans to their content, and even the likes of a brief Buzzfeed profile.
“That was probably the biggest I’ve ever been from a mainstream sense, though I think ‘mainstream’ is very subjective…there’s a subsection of TikTok that big, corporate America thinks is way more important and relevant than it is,” Anthony says. “I think we were just on the cusp of that in the best way, where we got to shit on things, and make fun of people, and curse, and we still got to work with Chipotle and Tinder and all that good stuff.”
It didn’t hurt, either, that he found a new format to pursue during this time, one that was repeatable, oft viral, and, quite simply, fun to produce. So began the second epoch of Anthpo, in which he would recreate popular television shows like Avatar: The Last Airbender or The Office, boiling down their key moments and tropes into low-budget, minutes-long parodies. The series was beloved, consistently averaging seven-figure view counts, and by September, Anthony had officially passed a million subscribers.
This was an unprecedented time, but he made the most of it, editing back-to-back with like-minded peers while showing up to his Zoom classes as required. “Creators, we all have this internal struggle where we want to just keep making things,” he says. “And people who don’t have that desire, it’s really hard to explain that to them. Like, ‘Why the fuck would you sit at home on a Friday night and edit videos when we’re going to bars?’ And I’m like, ‘I don’t know, I just want to edit this video.’”
The group was together for a little over a year, building a collective brand for six of those months. Their official TikTok grew to over two million followers before tapping out in December 2020. By the following March, they said their goodbyes and left without most of the drama content houses have become notorious for.
For Anthony, after a year away from New Brunswick, he was more than ready to return to campus. Still, he looks back on the house fondly. “It was the most ragtag, random thing ever,” he says, his voice picking up with excitement. “Yo, I love content groups. Join a content group if you are a creator, because you just learn so much. There’s so much mitosis, grabbing everyone’s creative energy…it can be such a thrilling experience.”
There was something else he learned from hanging around creator-heavy spaces, though, as he got a taste of the life he could’ve had if he never went to college in lieu of a full-time content career. With the people and brands popping in and out at a near-constant clip, he realized that while this period afforded him the opportunity to meet “everyone,” it was hard to truly get close to anyone, other than some members of the immediate group.
As the summer brought in-person events back in full swing, Anthony now had the chance to go back to the drawing board once again, determining where to take Anthpo next. And when the leaves started to change, the creator – then a junior, and feeling the inevitability of graduation fast approaching – remembered what he loved most about his senior year of high school: the little things.
So he hatched up a plan to film competitions and campus events and anything and everything in between, all featuring his actual friends from Rutgers. In the waning moments of college, it would give him an excuse to spend more time with them, while also serving a new purpose. He wanted to share these moments as a way to push his community – both online and offline – to do the same, with the people they love in their own personal lives.
“I feel like that’s what I’m trying to recapture with this last era of college,” Anthony says. “The part that you wouldn’t otherwise see. I would do a lot of the stuff I’m doing now [in the past], but I would’ve never thought to record it with people, and inspire them.”
Until, of course, he leaves the platform for good.
From the outside, Anthony’s house looks more or less like what you’d expect: old and a little run-down, paint chipping yet – due to its proximity to a major university campus – prime real estate all the same.
Like any college house, it’s provided a venue to form special moments and memories between its tenants. Unlike most college houses, a well-known YouTuber lives here. Some students steal road signs or paint tables; Anthony and his roommates hang props from former videos on the staircase, with the extras poking out from closets.
The creator takes me up to the attic, which features a small bedroom tucked away behind a larger den. It’s here that he spends the majority of his creative time, editing at his desk and rolling out his green screen when a shoot requires it. It’s also where he introduces me to his giant plush brown bear, Paul, who’s become a mainstay – and sometimes even a competitor – in Anthony’s videos (“Grrrrr,” Paul responds as I shake his paw hello).
Anthony's college house has become a character in his videos, in of itself (Photo by Salma HQ)
Ahead of our cover shoot, Anthony starts playing music over his recently-acquired vinyl player, and we settle into conversation in some bean bag chairs. Now that we’re here, in the physical manifestation of the world of Anthpo, we continue the thread about artistry from earlier.
“I think YouTubers do what they do for validation,” Anthony says. “I mean, that's what most people do – everything is for validation, right? But when you see numbers, it's an easy cope to be like, ‘Oh, I have affected this many people.’ When in reality, if you make a phenomenal piece of art that really, really speaks to a thousand people, a hundred people, even fifty people…it's probably doing more good for the world and the betterment of society than you making [a video where you say] ‘Oh my gosh, this is the craziest thing I've ever done!’ for tens of millions of people to see.”
With this in mind, I ask him to talk more about the intention he’s taken to build out his own little slice of the internet. While he’s welcomed so many people from all walks of life into this world, his goal, counterintuitively, is for those same people to spend as little time as possible in it.
“It should all feel very familiar, or like something that you’ll experience soon,” he says, pointing to videos from the last year-plus as examples. These include rather on-the-nose titles like “Holding a Nerf Tournament in a classroom” and “Can We Win a Volleyball Tournament in Anime Uniforms?” and “Perry the Platypus Ruins a Charity Event” (the latter which featured the return of the Perry onesie for Rutgers’ Dance Marathon). “I want people to watch my content and be like, ‘Oh, this is like my friend group,’ or ‘This is what I want my college experience to be like.’ And then they go make it.”
While he’s happy with his current trajectory, he thinks his true best art is yet to come. Later, after the shoot, we say goodbye to our photographer, Salma, and drive over to Henry’s Diner, a campus staple located next to the business school. We’re set to meet his aforementioned friend Hannah for a late lunch, and outside of the restaurant, we run into another member of the Anthpo squad, Enzo Ruta. It doesn’t take Enzo much convincing to join us for a quick bite.
Over cheese fries and omelets, Hannah picks up from where Anthony and I left off. “The duality of…my other friend group is a bunch of Filipinos,” she says. “I don’t know what the correlation is, but people who are Filipino or Asian also watch Anthony’s videos. And they’ll always talk about, ‘Oh man, I wish I did those types of things with my friends!’”
“It’s all very universal, I guess you’re saying,” I add on.
“Yeah,” she agrees. “But they don’t realize how close it is [all happening]. He’s literally like a five-minute drive away from these people, and no one really knows it.”
For the next hour or so, I ask Hannah and Enzo all about their front row seats to the Anthpo experience, from the embarrassing moments (“Everything that’s embarrassing, he’s already uploaded it,” Hannah says, to which Anthony replies, “I’m literally shooting the ammo directly into the internet”) to the more heartfelt memories. We bounce around topics like a pinball, quickly zipping from inside jokes to their respective finance internships to the time they got an audience to start barking at Anthony while he competed in a beauty pageant.
Sitting here alongside them, on a campus I’d never stepped foot on before today, it all feels so normal. Out of this trio, no one is acting, or pretending to be someone they’re not. These people genuinely love each other, in the same strange, inexplicable way that four short years of university helped me and countless others form lifelong relationships. Some of our conversations at the diner even feel and sound exactly like those I fostered with my college roommates in the not-so-distant past.
As natural as this group’s banter may seem, I get the sense that a lot of work has been put in to keep it that way. Something that comes up is how at every step, Anthony ensures that he’s prioritizing each and every one of their respective friendships over capturing the best piece of content. One way he does this is by making group chats with video participants, explaining how he plans to portray them; if they don’t feel comfortable with this portrayal, he asks them to message him privately so that they can figure out how to fix it. Another way comes after each shoot, when Anthony usually buys everyone dinner as a thank-you. He then proceeds to spend just as much time – if not more – with everyone away from the camera as he does in front of it, often in a more relaxed environment.
For Hannah and Enzo, this dynamic speaks volumes to the creator’s real-life character, and they stress that his viewers don’t always get to see the more genuine side. They still manage to lob in some jokes at his expense, though. “I remember we had a conversation where Anthony was like, ‘I’m not gonna talk to a single girl in college so that I don’t get in trouble like David Dobrik,’” Enzo laughs.
His friends believe these traits are also the bedrock for Anthony’s career in marketing, or film, or wherever his path takes him, really. The only certainty is their belief that he’ll be successful in whatever he does. “I think he’s doing well right now, but there’s so much more,” Hannah says. “There’s so many more mountains behind this one hill…I think he has more control over life than life has over him.”
Enzo views the decision to say goodbye to Anthpo as closing one chapter in order to move on, noting the variety of skills Anthony has gained as a creator while acknowledging all of the room for continuous growth. “It kinda goes along with this whole storyline of his channel…college kids hanging out and messing around,” Enzo says. “School and where you’re [spending time] with friends is temporary, and you have to make the most out of these types of things.” He also mentions that he can picture Anthony transitioning into more long-term media over the course of the next decade, noting how many established names like Jordan Peele cut their teeth in sketch comedy before moving on to bigger projects.
As the check comes, I notice Anthony beaming, ultimately turning in my direction. “Wow, you coming here…this is the nicest I’ver ever seen these two towards me!” he jokes.
I’m running late for my train back to Manhattan, so I hastily thank Hannah and Enzo for joining us, and Anthony offers to shuttle me over to the station. A quick five minutes later, we say goodbye, and I press stop on my recorder as I sprint up the stairs, jumping into the first open car I see.
Once I settle into my seat, I look down to see my hands clutching a package that I had almost left behind. In it is a picture book, Your Head is a Houseboat: A Chaotic Guide to Mental Clarity, that aims to make conversations around mental health more accessible through cartoon illustrations and simple journal exercises.
The book Anthony gifts me, which I begin reading on the train back to NYC (Photo by NGL)
Anthony had gifted me this book when we first got to his house. Not only is it written by one of his favorite creators, Campbell Walker – aka “struthless” on YouTube and beyond – he also said that he believes I’ll enjoy it. “It basically talks about your brain and the way you think in metaphors,” he tells me. “It’s really easy to grasp, but it’s also super existential and deep, so I love it. And I thought you’d be into it because you seem very introspective.”
It’s about a forty-five minute ride from New Brunswick to Penn Station, so with time to kill, I open the book and begin reading. Though I’ll go on to finish it a couple weeks later, I get distracted pretty quickly in the present, preoccupied with thoughts regarding the afternoon’s activities. So, while it’s all still fresh in my head, I whip out my notebook to begin outlining this story.
The first thing I reflect on is the presence of this book itself. Here I am, someone who Anthony just met over Zoom several weeks prior, and he cares enough to leave me with a gift he’d put some genuine thought into.
Was this a new copy he bought just for my visit? Or is he just recycling an old one he had lying around?
Does it really even matter?
Somehow, the person born out of the internet and meme culture and Vine compilations, this introvert who’s been in a constant state of transition for the majority of his life, has a weird humanistic quality of caring deeply about the people in his life that all feels so very real. I notice it when he asks our incredibly talented photographer for the day, Salma, if she’s open to helping him on future shoots. Or when he talks about making up with the 1 Minute Talk Show guys over a shared sense of “trauma bonding” in the years since the Alpha Media acquisition turned sour. Or when his friends glowingly mention how he got a brand sponsor to pony up tens of thousands of dollars to help his business fraternity win last year’s Dance Marathon fundraiser, roughly thirty-thousand more than the competition’s runners-up.
The latter might’ve made for good content, but it’s not like he had to do it, especially at the scale that he did. And while it was intentional in supporting a good cause, Anthony also did it simply because he wanted to create an exhilarating experience for his collective group, one that they could all share and enjoy together.
The second thing I reflect on is how – over the vast ground we covered today – I never really asked the explicit question I was looking to answer when I booked my ticket to come here in the first place. Why is he walking away from Anthpo? And what comes next?
We talked about the video, sure, the one whose title counts down until the day he graduates (Anthony built the code himself) and features a goodbye to all of his subscribers. But the discussion mostly centered around the guy he hired to help write the code, only for the programmer to dip when it kept breaking, forcing Anthony to figure out Google Scripts on his own (“I want to be, like, accepting an Emmy one day and name drop that [expletive], and I hope he's watching and I hope he's pissed,” he jokes).
Sitting on the train, I begin to appreciate that our conversation didn’t really focus on the subject because there is no tidy conclusion, and Anthony doesn’t really have a good answer himself. Maybe he will, in fact, scrub his face from the entire internet and go work a corporate marketing job – he’s certainly more than qualified. Maybe he’ll use his experience as a stepping stone into a career in more traditional entertainment, and keep his channel as a distribution tool.
Or maybe he won’t actually quit YouTube. He’ll reinvent himself once again, and the legend of Anthpo will live on.
Regardless of what he doesn’t know now, the ticking time bomb he’s set off, the end date he’s shared for the entire internet to see, has given him a clear vision as to how he wants to approach this final sprint. There’s a word, intentionality, that keeps rearing its head, through most of my conversations with Anthony and the others. Because it’s inescapable, from his proven, actionable track record to the way in which the trait manifests in those around him. It serves to enhance the experience as a viewer of his channel, as you watch and feel that intentionality deep in your bones, with every new upload that inches several days closer to its creator’s graduation. In that sense, it was cool being part of Anthpo’s world, if only for an afternoon.
Amidst my reflections, I start to think through how I myself could spin up a tidy conclusion for this story. I could wax lyrical about the trappings of newfangled fame, the emptiness of those golden plaques and blue check marks when one pursues fame for fame’s sake. And how when Anthony achieved his own niche fame – this supposed end goal of so many kids nowadays – the best thing it did was force him to spend more time with his friends, setting himself up for a longevity near-unachievable when going about it alone.
I could pretend that I actually spoke to Paul, the plush brown bear, about this very topic of fame, recording his thoughts while Salma and Anthony took photos for the cover shoot. “Grrrrrrrrr,” Paul had enthusiastically observed (Translation: “As the great American writer Ralph Waldo Emerson once said, ‘Fame is proof that people are gullible.’ Maybe Anthony has been stringing us along for the ride and we’ve all come under his spell, but I choose to believe in his transcendental ability to bring out the very best in people, which is why we gravitate towards him so eagerly,”).
I could tell you what you might not want to hear, that while college in its current form might be an imperfect, oft-expensive, and sometimes inaccessible route to take (especially for aspiring creators), it can sometimes pay off in ways you could never imagine. “...you break down what a content creator is to its littlest pieces, it’s a storyteller. And a storyteller is only as good as their experiences are,” Anthony explains, when reflecting on his time at Rutgers. “So if I had never gone to college…I’m at the most diverse college in the world. It’s a melting pot of people, and ideas. And just being here, and hearing their stories, it was just so enriching.”
I could convince you that today’s events were so transformative, so eye-opening, that they’ll force me to lead my own life with a new sense of purpose – “The Power of Friendship'' tattooed across my forehead – and that you should go touch grass and consider switching things up in your life, too. Or I could point to the younger fans and burgeoning creators who Anthony is already actively inspiring, the ones who messaged me over Reddit DMs and told me how the bright light of Anthpo helped them get through college, achieving Anthony’s ultimate mission to pass on what Ryan Higa and Freddie Wong once did for him.
Instead, what I will leave you with is a quote from the creator himself, one that emerges when he excitedly describes the various hijinks he’s planning for the final week of Anthpo. A week that will see him, ultimately, close the yearbook, forcing him to open a new page and move on, in one way or another.
“I’m a big proponent of ending things before they fall off. It’s a nicer story to tell, ya know?”
Physical copies of the magazine are available for a limited time here. Plus, coverage from Creator Mag.4 continues on.