Being Danny Duncan

 

The sun is blazing in early November in New York City, and Chief Creative Officer Danny Duncan and CEO Neil Hershman are hanging out at their 16 Handles store in the East Village. (The name stands for the 16 types of soft-serve that customers can serve themselves.) Wearing “I Heart Hot Moms” short shorts—he’s trying to buy that trademark to add to his “Virginity Rocks” line—Duncan has his entourage in tow.

There’s his business manager, Stefan Toler, his videographer, his photographer and a couple of other dudes who seem to be there to hold everyone else’s extra stuff. Duncan answers questions politely, jumping up only to snap a quick selfie or exchange a secret hand grip with fans who walk by, every few minutes, always a young male.

At one point Duncan’s videographer is recording myself and the New York City-based photographer I hired, Stuart Ramson, as I ask questions and hold the umbrella (to diffuse the sunshine) and Ramson shoots photos of Duncan and Hershman as they playfully toss sprinkles and pretend to eat their giant scoops of froyo.

It’s a fitting scenario for a story about a YouTube star, who describes how he became one, in thoughtful and unusual ways.

“Neil messaged me” after he posted about his first visit to 16 Handles and NYC last summer, and offered assistance. That naturally morphed into a partnership, which appealed to Duncan—he doesn’t like anything that’s forced or fake.

“I’m always trying to do big stuff. Any ideas I have, I wanted to let my fans know this exists out of New York City. I have millions and millions of people that watch me every week,” Duncan says.

“I have a good relationship with my fans. They know it’s not bullshit. I’ve really focused on that my whole career.”

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His rise to YouTube fame has been “very slow and steady” over the last decade or so, until 2017, “when I started becoming really famous.” He has more than 7 million YouTube subscribers, according to HypeAuditor, and 3.7 million on his personal Instagram.

Between 2020 and 2021, during COVID lockdowns, he sold more than $50 million of merchandise. And he sold out three world tours to over 95 percent occupancy, “with the market that everybody’s trying to get to know, Gen Z,” as Hershman puts it.

In those tours, Duncan tries to take his prank videos live on stage. “I do an old man haircut,” bald except for a little patch in the middle, “and kids will line up to get one,” Duncan explains. Or he’ll joust with kids wielding giant, blow-up lances. Or he’ll plunge into their arms. “They just want to go nuts. If you go to a rap show, they’re very mellow,” compared to the fans at his shows.

Has he done anything he regrets? “Yeah, hasn’t everyone?” he says, with a huge grin, his biggest all day. “I try to live my life so I don’t have any regrets,” however.

“I don’t want to be the guy who went broke. I look to my parents, they had nothing,” he says, and now he likes to give gifts to his mother and sister and friends. Is he buying his friends now? I ask. “We’re already friends. Like I gave my manager a car,” a Mercedes G-wagon. “I was making a million dollars a month in T-shirts for a while. I think he deserves a $250,000 car.”

He believes in the 19th century concept of “manifest destiny,” although he probably doesn’t know the origin, adopted by millennials today and translated roughly to: “If you can see it, you can be it.”

Did he know he’d someday be a rich YouTube star? “I was positive. I was 100 percent sure. I knew I’d be wealthy one day,” and he once put on his phone a picture of the house he wanted to buy his mother, for Christmas.

“I got a mortgage, put $150,000 down and paid 30 grand a month until it was paid off. That was 2017.”

And if he ages out of his core demographic, and they don’t like his pranks anymore? He says he’ll grow along with his followers. “No one wants to struggle financially as they get older,” and his investment in 16 Handles is about as adult as it gets. “I don’t just do dumb stuff every day. I will help people when I can.”

As for aging out, “I have a good gauge on what people like. I could go into an old folks’ home and figure out what they’d like in a week,” he says.

He takes critics in stride. “I don’t care. I could cure cancer tomorrow and there will still be people who talk shit. If you hand out free tacos to people, someone will say, why didn’t you give burritos?”

Above all, he is what he is, which is the only way for a social media influencer to be. “If you’re just yourself you’re different from everyone else,” Duncan declares.