Adam Faze | Co-Founder & "Head Coach" of Gymnasium
Adam Faze | Co-Founder & "Head Coach" of Gymnasium
Adam talks about building his short-form production company Gymnasium, his hits Boy Room and Keep the Meter Running, and his decision to forego college for Hollywood
I first met Adam through my friend, Dartmouth classmate, and Adam’s Co-Founder Saheer Mathrani. Together, the two of them have been running Gymnasium, a production company for short-form video whose mission is to “make TV for the screen you actually watch.” In January, I buzzed into Adam’s Columbus Circle office — part editing room and part recreated bodega — and I picked his brain on content strategy for my work. Adam is easy to talk to. He’s smart, knowledgeable, and editing this interview transcript, I also realized he’s a great verbal storyteller. The way Adam and the Gymnasium team approach content is different than anything I had heard before. It was scrappier, it was completely content-driven, and it made so much sense. Over the years, Adam has produced viral TikTok shows like Keep the Meter Running and Boy Room. His work has been seen by millions, likely including you, whether you’ve realized it or not. My previous post was about the modern media industry. This conversation with Adam will help you understand the leaders behind it.
How did Gymnasium come to be?
I spent eight years working in traditional Hollywood. I was obsessed with making movies and TV shows. That’s all I wanted to do my entire life. I didn’t go to college. Everything I ever did was to become a producer.
Eventually, I got to a place where I was working in a traditional studio on the film team. It was 2021, and I realized my viewing habits had completely changed. I was spending three hours a day on TikTok. I wasn’t watching as many movies as I used to. It felt like there was an entirely new way to consume content that Hollywood was going to completely miss the boat on. I quit and moved to New York to work for a digital startup, and I had this sandbox to experiment with making short-form content. I had never made a TikTok in my life, but I got the startup to give me a budget of $25,000 to make three shows for the platform including Keep the Meter Running and Einstein Elementary. Collectively, those three shows got 150 million views and 600,000 followers in two months. The coolest part was watching the daily lives of my talent change. I couldn’t walk down the street with them anymore without people recognizing them.
That was sort of a lightbulb moment for me: “This is the modern-day water cooler conversation. This is what Johnny Carson used to be”. I wondered why no one had built a television studio making the best original shows for these platforms yet. So I quit my job and brought my two friends who made those TikTok shows with me to start Gymnasium.
I love Keep the Meter running because it’s such a New York show, which is funny because you grew up in LA. Can you explain how you came up with the idea for it and what the reaction was like?
With Keep the Meter Running, Kareem, who hosted it, was one of the first people I went to when I was looking at TikTok shows. I was like: “Kareem, I think TikTok is the new TV. Do you have any ideas for shows?” And he told me: “I’ve always wanted to get in the cab and tell the driver to take me to his favorite place and keep the meter running.” And I was like: “That’s it. That’s the best idea I’ve ever heard in my life. Let’s go shoot that!"
So two days later, we’re standing on Sixth Avenue pulling over cab drivers to ask if we can film the show with them. Most drove off. One guy’s meter was broken, and he was on his way home. He said: “If you want to pay me $400, I’ll do this.”
We ended up going deep into Queens to an incredible Pakistani restaurant. And when we were eating lunch with him, you could feel the magic. We posted the first episode a week later. He got a million views in 24 hours on an account with zero followers. The next morning, Kareem was in a bodega and someone looked at him and said: “You’re the cab guy!” The TikTok algorithm had naturally shown the video to a million New Yorkers so it felt like the entire city was watching.
It got even crazier when we got to London four weeks later and did a show with an English cab driver. We ended up watching a World Cup game with him in a pub, and kids were coming up to Kareem in the pub asking him for a photo and telling him it was their favorite show on the internet.
I had been calling Keep the Meter running a “show” the entire time but anyone I’d talk to would question me. “What do you mean this is a show? This is a TikTok account with video content.” And here were these 17-year-old kids who not only called it a show but called it their favorite show?
TV seems to be getting longer with streaming and HBO-style series. You’re going in the opposite direction. How do you take so much footage and turn it into short-form content that’s TikTok friendly?
It’s a nightmare, and I will say Ari Cagan who works with me and directed Keep the Meter Running legitimately almost lost his mind editing the first episode. Eventually, he figured it out, and it was the genius of what he saw on that show that made it work. Over time, we’ve tried to figure out how to avoid accumulating eight hours of footage to process. We think about the beats ahead of time now but some of the quality is lost in doing this.
Can you talk a little bit more about using TikTok as a distribution platform?
The beauty of democratized short-form content is that the good shit rises to the top. You couldn’t convince me to go back to Hollywood right now because no platform there can offer you real distribution. A show like Boy Room hosted by a comedian with 3,000 followers became an instant overnight hit because of democratized short-form content. If that show went onto Netflix, it would likely completely disappear. We have a once-in-a-lifetime opportunity to create a whole new generation of stars and stories, and that’s what we’re trying to do at Gymnasium.
The challenging thing is that you make a new TikTok account for each series so you’re essentially restarting again and again.
People look at us like we’re crazy for doing this, but this allows us to find out immediately whether an idea works. If the content doesn’t get natural traction (through the algorithm), we pull the plug on it. That being said, we’re hoping the Gymnasium brand eventually builds a reputation for creating amazing shows and this reputation inspires viewers to watch the first episode of all we do.
I know you and your Co-Founder Saheer Mathrani very much think of Gymnasium as business-first. Can you explain your approach?
We are conscious of the fact that we are living in the shadows of so many media companies that don’t exist anymore. And the biggest glaring difference is the amount of money they were able to raise and then spend in trying to achieve the same goal. We are not in the same fundraising market they were. It was very hard to raise the amount of money we did. (Gymnasium raised $750,000 in December 2023). As a result, we’re conscious of every dollar that comes in and out. Our sole priority is making this a profitable company. Knowing that we will never make enough advertising money from the social media platforms themselves, we're focused on off-platform monetization. Right now, we’re sticking with shows loosely tied to a CPG category so brand integration in content makes sense. In the future of Boy Room, you could imagine that a future season might renovate guys' bedrooms with furniture from an e-commerce store. With Bodega Run, it might look like working with a big CPG conglomerate so that all products mentioned in the game are owned by that company.
When you started Gymnasium, it was originally called FazeWorld. You had to change the name because of conflict from FaZe Clan. How did you settle on Gymnasium?
That was a debilitating process. I named the company FazeWorld originally because I couldn’t think of what to name the company. It was a cop-out. When we couldn’t use FazeWorld anymore, it gave us the opportunity to create a real brand through the name. That was really challenging. I started thinking about youthful, high school-related names. A gymnasium is a place where all types of young people hang out. That’s also where prom and spirit meetings are held. It sounds like the right kind of playful energy we want to encapsulate.
How do you view the media landscape broadly?
I think movies and TV will not go away. We’ll just watch less of them, but they will mean more to us when we do watch them. The things that we watch are going to resemble big cultural moments. I think in terms of your daily media consumption, it will be short-form, and it will be on your phone. Platforms like TikTok will become more highly-produced content. In my opinion, I don’t think TikTok will ever become more than 50% highly-produced content. I do think part of the beauty of these platforms is user-generated content. There are things that young people make on their phones that will be better than what we make when there are so many cooks in the kitchen.
Can you tell me about a phrase or idea — maybe from a book, a song, a life motto — that you repeat to yourself often?
One quote that has always stuck with me is George Bernard Shaw’s “We don’t stop playing because we grow old; we grow old because we stop playing.” That has always resonated with me because I was always afraid as a kid that I was going to grow up too quickly. And you realize that in certain respects, you never have to grow up. The same person that’s inside of you right now was inside of you ten years ago. You still feel like a kid. You’re sort of faking being an adult.
I know that you didn’t go to college in order to get a head start on your Hollywood career goals. How do you think about that decision now?
I was too driven. I had been fed one too many Forbes 30 Under 30 magazines. I was convinced I was going to sell my first company at 22 or 23 years old, win my first Oscar at 25 years old. There seemed like no time for college. I think what I didn’t realize is that you have all the time in the world. The college years happen regardless of whether you're enrolled in college or not. Those four years from ages 18 to 22, I was still screwing around and figuring out my life. The only difference was I had the added stress of no backup plan and everyone asking me how much money I was making. Those are questions you don’t get asked until you’re 22 or 23 years old.
I wouldn’t want to change anything because I feel lucky to be where I am today, and I don’t think that would be possible if I had gone to college. Even if I had gone to school, I wasn’t in the headspace to succeed. I probably still would have dropped out after a year. That being said, if I were to be the adult to my kid self, I would have said: “You have nothing but time, and the time you have right now, you will never have again. You don’t need to be this focused right now.”
When I was 17, I had a podcast, and I interviewed Jay Leno. I asked Jay Leno if I should go to college. And he said, don’t go to college because you need to. Go because you will have an excuse for what you’re up to for four years. He also told me not to go to film school. “You’ll learn how to make movies. It’s fine. Learn about the things that you’re going to make movies about for the rest of your life.” And I walked out thinking: “He is so wrong.” It wasn’t until a few years ago that I realized Jay was pretty right.
So, where do you go from here?
I’m still going to the same place I’ve always wanted to go. I’m driven by entertainment. I’ve always wanted to be the biggest producer of all time. Making things people enjoy makes me the happiest person on earth. I get such an amazing feeling when I tell someone what I’ve worked on and they say: “That’s my favorite thing.” I want the things that I make to touch everyone.
Short term, I am working to create a name for myself and this company. I’d love to watch Gymnasium grow for the next 30, 40, or 50 years and eventually produce other types of media, whether that be TV, Live, or Broadway. It only starts here.
P.S. Last week, Adam participated in one of Substack’s first ever live events in NYC, hosted by
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