hardest video I've ever had to make

What is discussed, and when

1. 5:00 – 10:00: Yes Theory
2. 10:00 – 15:00: Helena
3. 15:00 – 20:00: Stefan, Yes Theory

Notable quotes from "hardest video I've ever had to make"

• Going on. And at the same time, I had so many other things happening in my life with Yes.

  about Yes Theory · at 5:07

• That means your treatment is really helping. Oh, yeah. Clap it off for Helena.

  about Helena · at 10:02

• Motivated to do it at all. This channel would not be here today if it wasn't for my friends Stefan, Tommy, and Amar. They showed so much grace to me at times when I had to…

  about Stefan · at 15:51

Who and what is mentioned in this episode?

People

• Helena — Person · 1 mention · first at 10:06
• Stefan — Person · 1 mention · first at 15:57
• Amar — Person · 1 mention

Companies & orgs

• Yes Theory — Company · 3 mentions · first at 5:12

Full transcript with timestamps

0:10 I don't really know how to start this video. Um, I've never made a video like this in my life despite doing this for 10 years. Um, but over the last several years, I've been experiencing something deeply painful and personal in silence. I made the choice to not share it publicly because it felt way too overwhelming to speak about something like that as it was happening. And I also chose to protect the privacy of those close to me. But at this point, I have reached a place in my life where I'm not only ready, but I'm sort of craving sharing this and sharing a bit of my experience and maybe creating a space for others who have or are experiencing something similar. If you're reading the title of this video, you might already know where this is going. Uh, but if you will let me, I'd like to share with you the story.

1:18 We all do this. On March of 2023, my mom fainted out of nowhere. We had just celebrated my dad's birthday a few days earlier and had um I'd say one of the most peaceful and loving family dinners I can remember in my whole life. And it's the last memory I have before everything changed. But I got a phone call from my dad at midnight telling me he's taking my mom to the hospital. She fainted and um for a moment became paralyzed in the left side of her body which was obviously very concerning. Um she ended up celebrating her birthday at the hospital unfortunately.

2:03 And at the time we didn't really know what it was. We thought maybe it's a blood clot, maybe it's something else. Um, my dad who works in cancer diagnosis and has dedicated his entire life into improving cancer diagnosis to save people obviously had um maybe an intuition that this could be bad. She was eventually diagnosed with an incurable form of brain cancer. It is considered one of the most aggressive, if not the most aggressive cancer in the world. It's called the glyopblastoma. And most patients when they are diagnosed are given about a 10 to 12 month life expectancy.

3:04 It's still the top of the door. market short. As you can imagine, in the blink of an eye, my whole life was just flipped upside down. my mom who was the most loving, the most caring, the most amazing person that I knew and the person that I would call anytime I'd be sad, anytime I'd have be in trouble, anytime I would something amazing had happened in my life. She was the one that I shared my highs and shared my lows with. And

4:33 And now the person that I loved the most in this world was given a literal death sentence. The first few weeks were completely incomprehensible. It felt like living in actual hell. It felt like a nightmare that you just couldn't wake up from. Um I couldn't sleep. My mom had some panic attacks. It was um one of the most confusing weeks of my life. I I didn't even know what was going on. And at the same time, I had so many other things happening in my life with Yes. theory and now all of a sudden my whole life is just flipped on its head. In the weeks following my mom's diagnosis, we decided that we were going to fight. We decided that even though the odds were completely stacked against us and that nobody had been able to survive this diagnosis, that we were not going to give up. And so as a family, we split up each of us taking very distinct roles while my dad carried the heaviest burden of making

5:49 sure she gets the best treatment possible and calling family members, taking care of the tough conversations. My brother and my sister and I took care of making sure my parents had food. Uh we spent many nights with my mom at the hospital and we took shifts. We took turns to just make sure that there was always somebody there with her. And I think that's the mo one of the most confusing parts because everything happens so quickly. It's you barely have time to even process what has happened and you're already thinking about how to adjust your entire life for the foreseeable future to make sure that you can be there. I've never witnessed somebody who's been handed a literal impossible challenge and deal with it not only with courage but also do it in good spirit. She found ways to lift her spirit. She found ways to look for the positive even though she was literally stuck in bed and couldn't move because

6:56 she was paralyzed. She had surgeries. She had radiation. She had to take chemotherapy. She had to take all this medication that was making her feel horrible and keeping her stuck in bed. But despite all of this, she was doing it with a smile. And every time I'd come to see her, she'd react with joy. Even though I'd been there the day before.

7:24 Hello. Last day. Boom. Balancing. Yes. Theory became incredibly difficult and our channel became quite inconsistent. I prioritized episodes that were very close by and most of the time we ended up organizing many of them the day before leaving. film it in 2, three days and then come back so I could go straight back to the hospital. So in between episodes, even though in the past I always took time to rest and recover, I now would rush back, drop my bags off at my apartment and go straight to the hospital to spend the night there with my mom, which I will not ever regret having done for a single second. But it was taking a toll on me.

8:14 It was making it harder to know how to show up and we slowed down how much we traveled. We slowed down how much we posted. We had to stop a few projects that we had originally planned on on doing which was very unfortunate and we sort of found ways to to make it work but most of the time it was with a lot of pain. Um, there were many trips that behind the scenes I was crying in the hotel room. I was struggling with the ups and downs of my mom's well-being. And I know that those of you who have watched our channel for a while can sense when something is wrong, when something is in the air that you don't understand. And I was craving speaking about it and letting people know that this is my life. But I couldn't. And at the same time, I started to develop my own health issues from all the stress that was also making everything harder for me. And it really felt at one point that there was nothing else that could go wrong because

9:25 everything was going wrong. In the first few months, my mom reacted well to her treatments. She did a surgery which went well. She did radiation therapy which went really well. She did some chemotherapy which went really well. And after the first few months we received some really good news.

9:49 And he said your MRI is incredible. What? He said it's diminished 800%. What? 800%.

9:59 Wow. How can you diminish 800? That means your treatment is really helping. Oh,

10:06 yeah. Clap it off for Helena. Oh, this is too much. This is too much. And during this time, I'm watching my mom transform. I can see her develop practices of gratitude. I can see her find positives in her journey despite it being literally one of the most horrific things that a human can experience. Over time, her initial life expectancy of 12 months passed and it seemed like the combination of her treatments with all of the personal work that she was doing and a form of spiritual awakening that I was seeing her go through, it seemed like we were on a pretty good course.

10:51 And during that period, we were doing our best to soak in every single moment. I experienced intimacy with my mother in a way that I'd never had before. We would just sometimes lay next to each other in bed for hours. We would um hold each other. We would uh watch family movies of trips that we had done as kids or um my first steps with her in the background holding me. At the same time, it became easy in those moments to forget what we were really going through. It was so strange to experience honestly the most beautiful moments I'd ever had with my mom while she was laying there and counting her days. and for the rest of us to just have no clue how long we would have her with us.

11:48 On my 30th birthday, I remember being so happy to have so many friends, family, and people that I love to be there with me. But then I looked at my mom and I realized that this might be the last birthday that I'll get to celebrate with the person that brought me to this world. And when that thought hit me, I just didn't even know how to how to handle it. I feel immensely grateful to have the most amazing sister, to have the most amazing brother, and to have the most amazing dad who I saw all show up with their full selves. No matter what their energy was, no matter what was going on in their lives, no matter what they felt like they could bring, we showed up. In a way, when you experience something so deeply painful together, your bond gets so much tighter. It was a moment where we knew that none of us individually can do this by ourselves, and we have to take care of each other to be able to show up for mom. 2023 and

13:01 2024 and now 2025 have been the hardest years of my life by far. In 2023 and 24, I watched my mom navigate all of the changes and treatments. And by the end of 2024, her symptoms started coming back. Even though she had just learned how to walk again, she lost that ability bit by bit. She became paralyzed in the left side of her body once again. She fell and broke her hip and had to go into surgery and she was slowly starting to lose the ability to speak as well. The doctors told us at that point that she likely had very limited time left.

13:48 In October and in November of 2024, we decided to all stick together. We had an amazing team of nurses and caretakers that came by every single day and the rest of us as a family basically teamed up together to be a 247 caretaking team. And over those weeks, we painfully witnessed my mother slowly fading away. her beautiful and brilliant mind was becoming less and less coherent and she was becoming noticeably more and more confused. On November 29th, 2024, as my brother, my sister, my dad, and I all sat around my mother with our hands over her body, she cast her last breath on this earth.

14:51 In honestly what I think was the most spiritual moment I'd ever experienced in my life. We sat around her as her spirit arose from her body and we stayed there for hours holding her after she passed.

15:22 This year and the last few years, it's been harder to smile. It's been harder to show up as the positive yes theory guy in the videos that becomes friends with strangers everywhere around the world. It's been harder dealing with negative comments. It's been harder dealing with a struggling business that heavily relies on me traveling when some days it's been harder to feel motivated to do it at all. This channel would not be here today if it wasn't for my friends Stefan, Tommy, and Amar. They showed so much grace to me at times when I had to change plans last minute or just could not show up in the way that I wanted to. And they never made me feel bad for that. Neither did anyone on the Yesery team. There really are some amazing humans that you watching this aren't aware of bringing this channel to life. And I feel so grateful to have been able to lean on them. And although we have been struggling the last few

16:32 years and I want to be very honest about that, we are improving and we are slowly but surely making our way back to stability. This year, I've honestly been feeling a bit confused and I've had to ask myself some tough questions looking inward as I've been feeling very lost and unsure about where to go and what I'm even interested in anymore. I feel like I'm looking around after some war trying to pick up the pieces of my life and figure out what's left of it and how I rebuild from here. My mother's legacy is a legacy of love. And I think the greatest testament of that is that over 400 people flew in from four different continents to attend her funeral. And this wasn't because she was famous in any sense or because she was successful in some materialistic way, but mainly because of how she made people feel. She had this gift of making anyone feel seen and appreciated in a way that I wish the

17:41 entire world could experience. As a final story, growing up, my mom had a neon sign on our kitchen table with a word on it. And on her 50th birthday speech, she spoke about how this is her favorite word in the world. She spoke about how it opens doors. She spoke about how it helps you live a life without regret. She spoke about how it completely transforms life into being a much more open-ended experience and unlocks your potential and life's potential in a way that you could never have imagined without it. Later on, I would make the choice to make that word the center point of my life and the center point of my career. And her legacy now lives on through the channel and through the philosophy that she inspired, making the work that I get to do here and that we get to do here so much more meaningful to me than ever before. That word that she had put on our kitchen table that I looked at every

18:46 single morning as I ate breakfast for my entire childhood was yes. May it guide you as it has guided me. And may our universe now have the most loving and beautiful of angels that one could have asked for.

19:32 Arkansas the way that I do love you. Well, holy moly me. Oh my, you're the apple of my eye. God, I've never loved one like you. I don't mind my best friend. I scream into the nothingness. There ain't nothing that I need. Well, hot and heavy pumpkin pie, chocolate candy, Jesus Christ. Ain't nothing please me more than you. I hope let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you. Home, let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you la. Take me home by the rap I'm coming home. I follow you into the park, through the jungle, through the dark. Cuz I never love one like you.

21:09 and boats and waterfalls, silways and painful calls. I'll be here every hour with you. We're laughing until we think we'll die. Pepper on a summer night. Nothing new is sweet to land with you. And in the street we run free like it's only you and me. Jesus to see. Oh, let me go home. Home is wherever I with you. Oh, let me come home. Home is wherever I'm with you.

22:08 Oh, let me come home. Home is whenever I'm with you. Oh, let me come home. Home is whenever I'm with you.

Questions about this episode

What is discussed in "hardest video I've ever had to make"?

In order: 5:00 Yes Theory; 10:00 Helena; 15:00 Stefan, Yes Theory.

What is mentioned in this Yes Theory episode?

4 people, works and ideas are mentioned, including Yes Theory, Helena, Stefan, Amar. Each one on this page links to its own page with every episode that mentions it.

How long is "hardest video I've ever had to make"?

The episode runs 23 min; the transcript is about 2,732 words in 25 timestamped sections.

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