Kenyon Lee, 18, has become a TikTok sensation in recent weeks for guessing people's heights based on just photos and math. Lee has 2.5 million followers and as many as 20,000 requests a day from people who want him to guess their height.
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It started when he spotted a TikTok user issuing a challenge to guess their height. Lee figured it would make for interesting content if he could solve that problem, and — like a good math student — show his work.
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By the evening after he posted a response, his video had one million views.
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"I experimented with some other content, but every time I did a 'guess my height' video it just kept going up and up to the point where I did one video that got 17 million [views] in two or three days, and I was like, OK, I need to just adopt this as kind of my thing," Lee told As It Happens guest host Helen Mann.
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His method involves a combination of detective work (by looking at their posted photos) and then calculations based on the established ratios of the human body.
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"What I typically do is I try and find somebody's wingspan, which follows closely a one-to-one ratio with someone's height. And so typically I just find posts next to where people have, like, random objects in their pictures, and I use that to find their wingspans," Lee said.
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Lee can't make money from his videos on TikTok, so he’s started a YouTube channel to see if he can build a presence on a platform where he can potentially earn some cash to help fund his education.
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And for now, he's simply having fun with this project.
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"Other people just see this as just, like, you know, really crazy, like I'm just some big celebrity," he said. "But, I don't know, it's like a hobby to me."
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To see some examples of the heights Lee has guessed, click the link in our bio
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Photo submitted by Kenyon Lee
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