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Let’s all pay attention to Kai Bent-Lee’s YouTube channel

By Steve Kupferman
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Susur Lee’s sons are in the process of building a lifestyle brand for themselves (witness their Drake-affiliated King West restaurant and their over-the-top Instagram accounts). Despite all that, they’ve shied away from media exposure, leaving the majority of the on-screen appearances to their dad—but no more. Kai Bent-Lee’s latest brand extension is a YouTube channel. It is hypnotic.

Kai, the second-oldest of Lee’s three sons, has been recording video blog posts for the past three months. He doesn’t plan elaborate shoots, and a lot of the footage is recorded while he’s driving with one hand and aiming the camera with the other. It’s all just day-in-the-life stuff, but it’s oddly compelling.

One video is set inside Kai’s obsessively organized walk-in closet, where he has an entire rack devoted exclusively to black hoodies. He shows off pairs of jeans from designers like Yves Saint Laurent that he had re-tailored for extra leg-tightness. It all seems very reasonable when he explains it:

Here’s a video of Kai having a lazy day—which, for him, apparently involves betting $2,000 on a basketball shot contest with his bros, and losing:

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Kai had never been to Wendy’s before this video. He and his crew order everything on the menu, all at once, unnerving some cashiers and the store manager, who are probably not jazzed to be extras in some guy’s weird Internet reality show. To their credit, Kai and his buds are not food snobs. Watching the son of a famous chef sincerely praise a Wendy’s triple-decker is somehow very satisfying:

This video starts with Kai showing off his secret trick for making left turns in downtown Toronto, which involves blowing past an entire lane of waiting cars and then cutting off whoever’s at the front before the light turns red. The Ferrari in the thumbnail isn’t his car:

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And here, in what may be the pinnacle of his on-screen career to date, Kai loses his shit when he can’t pay for bubble tea with an AmEx; has a low-key confrontation with an art store employee; eats at a Vietnamese restaurant and then does a Vietnamese accent; then arrives half an hour late for seafood dinner with Susur and the rest of the family. It’s a busy day:

The rest of Kai’s video treasures can be found on his YouTube page.

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