WASHINGTON -- Two hours before a live interview with President Barack Obama, Adande Thorne wasn't nervous, at all.
"I haven't even eaten yet," Thorne told Mashable as he stood in the White House East Room. "That's how that works."
"I actually had a lot of questions for the president, so I didn't have to prepare much. It was, make sure they're all on the cards, let's go," Thorne, better known to his millions of subscribers on YouTube as "sWooZie," said with a grin.
SWooZie was one of three YouTube stars invited to the White House to interview the president after the State of the Union, a final chapter in a years-long collaboration between the Obama administration and Google.
Each year since 2010, the White House has turned to Google to boost its message after the annual policy address, but this year's push was the most elaborate. The sets constructed inside the White House East Room included elements shipped from each creator's home, in order to give the interview a more intimate feel.
"The ultimate representation of the White House opening up the president to a different crowd of people is for them to literally get to sit down and interview him," Steve Grove, the director of Google's News Lab told Mashable. "The phenomenon of these YouTube creators who... really have more followers and audience members than any cable news station became really an interesting thing for us to think through. So we thought, 'Man, what if we brought them to the White House?'"
The YouTube interview with Obama also comes during an aggressive social media blitz from the White House. To reach out to Americans who don't watch the State of the Union or follow politics through traditional channels, the White House launched its Snapchat account and the president went live on Facebook to ask Americans to tune into the speech.
"What you've seen consistently from 2009 until now was sort of an ongoing effort to use new digital tools and platforms to meet people where they are, and to not just inform them on the issues... but to really make it into a conversation," Kori Schulman, special assistant to the president and deputy director of digital strategy, told Mashable.
Mashable got a behind-the-scenes look at the preparations for Obama's final State of the Union post-game with three YouTube stars that combined have 12.1 million subscribers to their channels.
Just chatted with @sWooZ1e here at the White House! He's interviewing Obama later today. #YouTubeAsksObama pic.twitter.com/vUJvlfJZod— Juana Summers (@jmsummers) January 15, 2016
sWooZie
Thorne, who interviewed Obama first, said he was most looking forward to talking to Obama about "the race thing."
"I get profiled a lot, wherever I go," he said. "Whether it's East Coast, West Coast, Vegas or Orlando... the South... I get harassed by the cops. I feel like they're just bullies with badges, you know?"
During his interview with Obama, he said that as "a black male who wears his hat backward from time to time," he's a frequent victim of racial profiling.
"I've learned to live with the harassment, but people are dying now," he told Obama.
Obama described himself as a "black man who sometimes wears his hat backwards," and said that "there have been times when I was younger that I was stopped for reasons that I wasn't always clear about."
The "overwhelming majority" of law enforcement officers, Obama said, "are doing a tough job and doing it well." He added, though, that there has "always been pockets of police misconduct around the country, and we have to take that seriously."
Destin Sandlin
The biggest thing on Sandlin's mind before he interviewed Obama was space.
"I want to know what the vision is," the engineer told Mashable. "I understand low earth orbit plans for the years ahead, but I don't understand what the deep space exploration plans are, and I'd just love him to lay out that vision."
During the interview, the two men shared a fist bump after Sandlin noted that NASA's budget is larger than it has been in the past 10 years.
"I'm a huge space fan," Obama told Sandlin. "Favorite movie last year is 'The Martian,' which to me just embodied that whole can-do... My favorite line in it I can't say... Science the heck out of this thing and just figure stuff out."
Sandlin is also a father and he's using the money from his YouTube efforts to pay for his kids' college education. His kids may not have been as excited about the interview as he was.
"Somebody asked my son today, 'Do you know your dad's interviewing the president? Do you know how big of a deal that is,'" Sandlin said of his 7-year-old. "He said, 'Is today grilled cheese day at school?' He didn't care."
Ingrid Nilsen
This was Nilsen's first trip to the White House, and as she prepped for her interview with President Obama her excitement was palpable. When she woke up in her hotel room, she said she turned on Spotify and listened to "a lot of upbeat music and pretty much stayed quiet."
Nilsen drew national attention when she came out to her YouTube fans in an emotional video last year. On Friday ahead of her interview, she said she wanted the White House to continue supporting the LGBT community.
"There has been a lot of progress in 2015, but there's still so much discrimination happening in our every day lives, and I think that's something really important to pay attention to," she said.
During her interview, she asked Obama about the Alabama Chief Justice who told state judges not to issue gay marriage licenses in defiance of the U.S. Supreme Court. She asked Obama whether "progress in the LGBT community was not here to stay in certain states."
"It's here to stay," Obama said. "Understand that the Supreme Court has ruled that under the Constitution everybody in all 50 states has the right to marry the person they love. That's now the law of the land. The fact that an Alabama judge is resisting is just a temporary gesture by this judge that will be rapidly overturned."
The thing that makes Obama the most hopeful, he said, is when he talks to young people.
"Their attitudes are some different and the notion that you discriminate against somebody against sexual orientation is so out of sync with how most young people think," he said. "This is an issue that is gonna be moving in the right direction."