Moving to Los Angeles to pursue filmmaking (as a Youtuber).

art is not life life is not art you know why because art is work there was a very telling comment from the youtuber hiding in my room so if you don't know who hiding in my room is the most recent video i made was actually about his his youtube channel and to give credit to hiding in my room he is very honest honestly he's a terrible human being horrible person ethically horrible person intellectually horrible person emotionally there are a lot of things wrong to do but he is honest talking about his talking about his life and i remember him saying very honestly on camera that because of his youtube channel and because of his fleeting fame on youtube he got above uh 100 000 subscribers at one point but of course the actual number of views per video he has is much much much lower than that he said that because of his youtube channel he had ruined his relationship with his wife who became his ex-wife he had ruined his relationship with his few friends and colleagues which i know to be true and he'd even ruin his relationship with his own mother and sister i think his his his few family members he was speaking to that really he had made enemies out of his friends and there are other ways in which he ruined his life and also he made it impossible to get a job made it possible for himself to get a job i should say he'd made it impossible for himself to get a new girlfriend because he's so notorious and he's spoken honestly about his sex life and internet blah blah blah um you know but then he wrapped up this series of recriminations by saying but if he had the money in the bank it would all be worth it because he'd be able to point to this pile of money in his bank account and say well i screwed up all your lives and to some extent he screwed up his own life but he has the money to show for it and in the end financially he really had nothing you know that actually he doesn't have a pile of money coming out if he had this fleeting period of fame and he has no money to show for it ah so on a really deep level this comes back to my first piece of advice in this video only do it if it is worthwhile for you even if you fail right like if you really feel it's worth it without making any money that's a whole different ball game right that's a whole different thing if you think it's really worthwhile to come on camera or you know to sing your song whatever that song may be or to create that that content and you are willing to embrace failure for the sake of that art form for the sake of that message uh for the sake of the short films you will be making because don't kid yourself youtube is filmmaking you know if you a really bad job you're just a really bad filmmaker but it's still filmmaking you can't escape that right now i think you know melissa might not have the same kind of lesson in mind when talking about dax flame as i do so i've made a few a few videos uh pointing the finger at dax flame um dax flame's initial success was effortless he was a guy who just came on camera and was shy and awkward and you know um said outrageous things about his own life and he effortlessly achieved a certain level of success and now his youtube channel instead is a terribly belabored failure no matter how hard he works he can't succeed and it's worse because of the effort he's put into it so look i got to think about this in my own life also right is this worth doing is this worthwhile for me to put in so many hours and get absolutely nothing out of it youtube is a job youtube is filmmaking if you put in minimum effort it's still filmmaking you're just doing really bad filming so are you willing to commit to doing this job where the outcomes are completely uncertain it's a really hard line to walk in some ways this is new and in some ways it's not imagine if you were writing a book in the 18th century what are the odds your book is going to be read by anyone other than your own friends and family now in the 18th century there was a lot of money in book printing it's very different from from printing books today but you can research and publish a book and during your lifetime absolutely nobody pays attention to it it doesn't change the world in any way a lot of people talk about copernicus all right when copernicus died when copernicus was on his deathbed during his last day alive he didn't think he changed the world okay copernicus published in latin okay and his book was not suppressed or censored by the catholic church there's an understandable assumption that it was nope it just wasn't successful nobody cared now after his death a small number of people uh primarily people who actually made their um made their living doing astrology so doing fortune telling based on the positions of the stars noticed his book and started caring about it and then a small number of people who were in a very very technical disciplines related to the positions of the stars because they saw that his book actually produced more accurate uh calculations that you could do math based on the movement of the planets the planets relative to the stars i believe that were more accurate using copernicus approach so a few dozen people kept this from being totally ignored and then as you as you may know eventually it was involved in a massive controversy with the catholic church by a guy named galileo um okay but copernicus died he didn't get money fame power respect within his own lifetime you know he didn't change the world did your parents tell you to be like copernicus you know don't be like copernicus nobody wants to be like a particular if you admit to yourself that youtube is filmmaking that it's work that it's a career even though it's a career with incredibly uncertain outcomes we can put in a ton of input and get absolutely no output then you've got to start making really strategic intelligent decisions about the extent to which you are living your life in order to produce content on youtube and the extent to which your youtube content is just a kind of side effect of what it is you're doing in your life anyway it's a tightrope it's a very i mean some of you may have never thought of this before and on the other hand some of you after hearing this might realize that your own job your own career may resemble this in some way we could say this with politics to what extent do you let politics take over your life to what extent do you live for politics what extent do you live for political activism and to what extent you just live your own life and you happen to own pasol you happen to in passing you know uh be making some kind of political change political difference occasion and political activism art is not life life is not art you know why because art is work filmmaking is work but in one of the simplest examples is uh the book review as a format so i already do book reviews on youtube and they're wildly unpopular so let's be real here this is another great example of failure on my channel but i feel it's really important so it's time to do it incredibly low numbers for my live stream from one week ago of uh who killed martin luther king jr okay it's a book review about the assassination of martin luther king jr so you know the level of detachment i have to have even by my own my own youtube channel standards that's a terrible failure so the video immediately before that i forget it was a day or two before but i upload so often you know a day or two before that i had a video with 1 100 views a day or two before that i have a video with 1 000 views okay but my book review on the assassination of martin luther king jr has 424 views now in addition to the hours that went into making that video the video was one hour and five minutes long there are the hours that go into reading the book and there are some number of uncountable hours otherwise building up my acumen knowledge and experience in politics and history okay and it is completely fair and reasonable for anyone to look at that and say no no my dude for 424 views it's not worth it it's not you know again it's not just about money right you you sing your song because you you want people to hear it you know how many hours are you going to put into recording your next rap album composing it recite reciting it rehearsing it all the instrumental parts the vocals going to the studio right how many i was going to put into that is it worth it if 424 people hear it there are people who are going to listen for 60 seconds and go oh this guy isn't left-wing or he's not left-wing enough and close it they're only interested in hearing a far left wing perspective and believe it or not there will be some people who click on that video hoping for a right-wing perspective hoping for some kind of far-right concern a significant number out of that tiny number of views out of 424 views a significant number of people still don't want to hear it they clicked on the video but they don't want to hear it if you upload your rap album to soundcloud even if you get 424 clicks how many of those clicks actually listen to your album how many of them thought they wanted to hear it and then figure out oh no this is really not what i want to hear the question you've got to ask yourself is um [Music] am i reading this book in order to present a book review on youtube or am i reading this book anyway and then as a kind of funny by-product i'm going to make a youtube video talking about it we had a question earlier on about my relationship with my girlfriend i've made a lot of videos talking about this uh just lately but what the one i'm thinking of in particular oh yeah stuff like ninety percent of people are stupid and malign uh stuff like our abusive relationship with the audience and seven years of sexual harassment on youtube okay like at my incredibly low level of fame right i i've said this many many times what i have is micro fame microfame has all the disadvantages of fame with none of the advantages [Music] [Laughter] [Music] can you tell what it is yet [Laughter] let's bring it out here oh that's good i shall call him mini-me dr evil and minnie me gaines it's a vegan cheetah so yeah hope you like it it's going on the wall even if you think you can rationalize doing youtube as a byproduct of the life you're living anyway it's an incidental thing you say okay well i'm going to take the time to read this book anyway so i might as well share my one hour my one hour lecture about this political issue uh as a byproduct of reading the book i might as well have the practice of talking through the issues raised in the book and share it and even if only a few dozen people appreciate it that that's still worthwhile well guess what it comes at a price it comes at a cost that lasts for the whole rest of your life you know what let's let's peel away real if you just go to my channel and search for the word only fans you'll get my videos talking about that it is it is fundamentally similar to doing pornography now i mean what i do is not pornography but anyway if you search for the word only fans in my channel you're gonna see a series of videos talking about this if you are basically a nihilistic atheist person you don't think there's anything evil about the naked body you don't think there's anything evil about sex okay so i do i do have a playlist for this so i'll share the playlist of you guys you know there's nothing evil about being naked there's nothing evil about having sex off camera there's nothing evil about having sex on camera i'm even gonna take a further step here i don't think there's anything evil about sharing a recording of you having sex with another person who wants to see it you know sharing it with someone unsolicited that's another you don't want to interrupt a complete stranger's lunch showing them an image of you or a videotape of you having sex but you know if it's all consenting adults right okay but the problem is right there are these terrible long-term costs there are these terrible long-term repercussions and there are incredibly few lines of work you can be in it limits what you can do politically also if you've been a porn star in the past what can you do in any industry even including hollywood even including the acting industry how can you any kind of legitimate work even as an actor let alone as a university professor or a politician um or a stock broker or anything else how many people in the united states of america are willing to have a medical doctor who was a former porn star i wish i could say we lived in a society where people would just be oh yeah you know it's funny you know my my obstetrician she actually used to be a porn star oh yeah do you remember where she used to go by the name dusty diamonds or something you know like whatever her name was oh yeah and now you know now now presumably she's not dr dusty diamonds presumably you know now she's the medical thought and obviously the amount of money people make doing porn could make it much easier to go through university and become you know so the point is um even an undertaking as humble and pious as this of saying hey i am going to read this book anyway so i might as well share what i know about this book or what i have to say about this book of the world just i totally support that right but in a lot of ways this is actually similar to the leap you are taking in deciding to become a porn star decide to do porn whether that's on only fans or on or on some other websites it has terrible long-term repercussions for you uh for the rest of your of your life you could upload content that's totally ignored you could upload content that's so successful that it changes your life for the better forever like you're in the tiny percentage of content creators like the amazing atheist or tana mongeau or something right but there's a middle range of success where you are successful enough to ruin your life you're successful enough to have all the disadvantages of fame but not to have any of the advantages [Music] do you guys remember aaron janus what is aaron janice going to do for the rest of her life you know what i mean she doesn't have anything okay i was going to say she doesn't have anything embarrassing on the internet i'm wrong there are some really embarrassing things she is not known for she is not famous for anything really really terribly embarrassing you know what i mean you know i i don't know how she's doing i genuinely don't know but is she now going to become a you know is she now going to become a bartender is she going to become a waitress you know what what is she going to do with the rest of her life is she going to become a medical doctor or a lawyer you know what how is she going to survive a great example that also is snl o'neill someone like s and o'neill again to my knowledge based on the interview she did she went from this brief period of fame and relative affluence that she said she was just scraping by to being uh completely ugly ignominious and um scraping by as a waitress doing i believe was specifically waitressing doing minimum wage jobs in her brief period as uh her brief period as a model and social media influencer so you know look um i hate to tell you this these are normal examples i i you know we talked before about well it's very improbable that you will ever be as successful as aaron janus it is very improbable you will ever be as successful as essen o'neill right but it's almost entirely certain that you'll have all the disadvantages in your life that aerojanus and estonia have you will have frankly the same level of sexual harassment you will have the same number of stalkers you will have the same number of people making up stories about you on the internet forever you know and it will haunt you and you will be punished um you know frankly by by large numbers of mentally disabled people for the rest of your life and you never you never get to escape just look at his channel there's no purpose to it whatsoever it's just him pretending to be an intellectual and talking about other people's lives and for whatever reason he puts bikini photos of female youtubers in his thumbnails as soon as i start holding back my finger immediately stops hitting the a button i don't know why if it is he would be doing videos about the vegan diet and stuff like that i mean vegan gains does videos about the vegan diet dr sean baker does videos about the carnivore diet and as for me i'm a feminist [Music] [Music] does videos advocating for women on my channel but with isil there's just no main purpose to his channel it's just him making generalizations about random topics so melissa please break up with this narcissistic sociopathic fake intellectual okay now i do not feel um any ambivalence about this decision i don't feel any ambiguity about it and there are a lot of reasons for that that have to do with direct experience of adding my own life the video i made again i can give the link again but the video i made about the assassination of martin luther king jr i have known so many intellectuals i have known so many university professors not a single one of them could have made that video not one like when i think back to the professors i had at the university of toronto i want to thank to the professors i knew in [Music] cambridge england where i think the professors i knew at uh psoas university of london i've known professors oliver i knew professors in asia obviously the professors i knew in thailand or cambodia or something you know what i mean by the way sorry i can also talk about the intellectuals i knew when i was working in the publishing industry started to mention i don't know a single person who could get on the microphone with or without preparation i mean you guys know i did that unscripted and could really break down those issues and talk about them in that in that useful way so i feel pressure on me i feel that it's like if not you then who i feel like if i don't take on that role i'm leaving something undone that nobody else can do or that incredibly few other people could do now sir another thing i mean i've said this to melissa lately about some of the content we made together we've collaborated listed on a bunch of videos and i've said to melissa again and again i don't know a single other youtube channel where i can hear anything like this like i i can't say to you oh this is a really great video just like this other channel makes or oh this video reminds me of the kind of thing i listened to on this channel or from this podcast or even from this book i don't know anywhere else on the internet where i can hear this kind of conversation the price is real the cost to your own dignity is real the negative impacts in every way and guys look so look sorry i could talk about this for hours some of you might be automatically thinking about my situation like five years ago conflict with freely and durianrider and famous youtubers okay i have conflict right now i have conflict with other people who rent apartments in the same apartment building i do we went up and had lunch with one of my university professors and he talked about how other university professors they all hate each other and hate me and hate themselves the kind of ridiculous teenage childlike conflict going on within that university department how do you think my youtube fame my micro fame this small scale of fame that has all the disadvantages of family under the defense how do you think that impacts how those university professors see me and how they talk to me and how they treat me and how they fear me that they really live in live in fear of me the way so this is going on right now most of the people who fear you most of the people who hate you most people who act in a vengeful and punitive way towards you they're never going to be public the way dorian writer was they're never going to be public the way freelee was they're going to be anonymous faceless people and i don't mean trolls on the internet i mean people living in the same apartment building with you working out at the same gym as you who will talk [ __ ] about you behind your back into your face i mean your university professors your university classmates the the backlash the price of doing that is enormous but if you think there's nobody who will hate you for making a youtube video about martin luther king jr or uh jfk you know uh john kennedy if you no people hate you people fear you for real when i started my youtube channel i knew right from the start that sooner or later i was gonna have to talk about pet ownership people owning dogs people owning cats and you know i kind of delayed it i was also just busy with university i was actually in university classes full-time at that point so i'm attending classes doing other stuff and people suggested it to me too people said oh well look you got to talk about the pet ownership issue and stuff you know and then the day i finally did it you could hear this cracking noise as my youtube audience split itself in half and 50 of them left like no kidding and the way youtube numbers worked at that time you could see it you could see that i had lost half my audience by being opposed coming out and saying openly i'm opposed to pet ownership i'm opposed to vegans pretending that petting zoos are morally a superior to real zoos pretending that sanctuaries and all this crap like like it's something other than us running a zoo you can call it a sanctuary it's still a zoo like all these different shades of you know animal exploitation that we pretend our animal liberation because it's us doing it not someone else when i took that that moral stand you know you could you could absolutely hear and feel um feel the audience turn against me or at least half of them i didn't want the largest audience possible i didn't want the ten thousand viewers it was like okay i'd rather have five thousand viewers if they're five thousand viewers who are really intelligent or really on the same page as me you really want to save the world and it's the same world i want to save and they want to save by the same means like this is this is what i'm looking for frida says quote many people take your videos as an insult instead of as an opportunity to question the topic well frida you know there used to be a youtube channel it was very successful and it was called get upset and the hosts were called the get upset girls so the youtube channel was called get upset and you know what i always have to say about that is you know some things are worth getting upset over nacho says nacho's female by the way funny the same thing happened when i came out as auntie pet owning but instead of an audience it was half the people in my real life disappearing so that's interesting she had actual friends i'm guessing friends relatives colleagues and co-workers uh turned against her uh just for being just for being anti-pet so if you've admitted to yourself that what you want is to succeed you've admitted to yourself you don't want this to be a hobby that you want to be a career these are hard things to be able to be honest themselves about a lot of people kid themselves about exactly these things for years right then we face the question of to what extent am i doing this as an art form as a job even if it's completely unpaid even if the outcomes are so uncertain and to what extent am i just trying to exploit my own autobiography as it unfolds right like as like an incidental art form no matter how lazy you are no matter how little work you put into making that youtube video the reality is that the punishment inflicted on you for being a public intellectual for just for just being a public figure no matter how you know no matter how little fame or money you may get out of it it's so severe that you you you can't possibly justify it that way you can't think oh i'm just going to live my life and then i'm going to make youtube videos with the books i happen to read no you have to face up to the fact that one way or another you've committed to the path of being a filmmaker even if you're a really lousy really lazy really low quality filmmaker and that you are doing something in making a book review even you're doing something that will be appreciated by some people it may be 10 people it may be 15 people but by the same token you will be hated for it and that's legitimate maybe by 10 people maybe by 15 people maybe by a much larger number of people you can't take that away from the audience so i've already said this like you know uh regarding the concept of get upset and some things are worth getting upset over okay what if people find what you have to say about martin luther king jr really egregiously offensive and what if they didn't understand you correctly what if they've misunderstood what you said you can't take that away from the audience right you would say the same about being a stand-up comedian or being a rapper people in the audience may intensely hate you it's not about probability this is a certainty this is an inevitability even if your videos reach just 400 people right a significant number of those people will hate you for having dare to produce the content that you have produced and that can include people who live in the same apartment building with you people who are at the same university you're going to people who are in a position of power at your workplace or at your university the way these professors are in a position to actually try to bully and intimidate and harass me and make my life worse so i'm saying that out of these two paths you really inevitably and inexorably have to commit to being a serious filmmaker and thinking of it as filmmaking so i'm going to come back to this example of doing a food channel and a lot of people a lot of people get into this oh they're going to do reviews of food products they're going to do reviews of restaurants and they think of it as this hobby that they're going to do on the side because they eat food anyway they eat in restaurants anyway right and they they're they're kind of making the wrong choice at every stage like oh and it's completely inevitable that they will become as famous as trisha paytas or nicocado avocado they think oh well you know there are a lot of these big successful channels and they only think about the positive outcomes and they they kind of commit to in their mind's eye a fantasy life where they're effortlessly going to get much more in the way of rewards than costs and disadvantages it never occurs to them once if you do one restaurant review that's negative do you know how many people will hate and resent you for that hate you intensely hate you we did one video about the restaurants of detroit and ann arbor vegan restaurants in detroit and melissa is laughing you forgot did you i didn't forget okay every single person who worked inside those restaurants saw the video and they wrote to us there was one uh dessert we were given and i just i just said it in passing you were talking about it and like i just said yeah that was trash that was garbage and the guy wrote he said well i am the baker employed in that restaurant and i made that cake or pie that you said it was garbage you think you don't make enemies doing food reviews you know you think you don't make enemies doing book reviews yes you do and some of those people who become your enemies they are the stupidest ugliest people on earth they're exactly the people you ignore every day at work every day at the coffee shop every day on the university campus i don't what i don't regularly watch abbas l concept i used to follow uh doing running regularly no i'm not being i just find this stuff i did find this stuff and staying but i don't really watch don't write it that much now but yeah at baseless ciel he comes from a wealthy background the skis are wealthy jewish background i think he can go anywhere he wants and he's also a lecturer courtesy of uh his family money you know with your connections you can go to uni you can have more opportunities of life than the average show like what i mean spouts on about stoicism philosophy language whatever whatever stuff that most people have the time to ponder and they just want to play computer games play well what's what's computer games about okay well gambling's worse drinking's worse doing drugs is worse um and if you're not wealthy you can't afford to go on holidays and if you're like from a lower class background and there ain't much to do apart from walking going for a jog you've got all you have is pub exercise and mirror games i'm gonna dwell on this for one moment okay when you deal with people face to face you disproportionately deal with people who have a very high level of self-confidence because otherwise they wouldn't step to you they wouldn't say [ __ ] to you face to face okay when i am on university of victoria campus the women who talk to me and the men who talk to me i mean i almost feel like i can deal with men separately because it is a little bit different but the men and women who talk to me are the most self-confident people on the campus they are the sharpest people like intellectually they're sharp they may not be deep they may not be like they may be incredibly ignorant and crass but they're sharp they have a certain kind of alertness or acumen right and they are almost without i just know i think without exception they're attractive people right and in the same classroom very often literally hiding in the corner of the classroom there are ugly stupid self-loathing people with no self-confidence and if you don't take the time to talk to every single person in the classroom you can do the whole class and you didn't even notice they were there you can do a year-long class at university and someone says oh hey man how did that class go was great it was great it was great it's great great great great class great class how many people were in that class uh about about 15 students oh yeah okay name them uh you know and you name all the oh yeah i remember this guy and this guy and this guy maybe don't remember their names yeah yeah there was the there was a tall guy and there was the fat guy who was always telling jokes there was this guy you're remembering the most intelligent most self-confident people those are the people who actually talked in class those people actually talked to the professor and those are the people who came over and talked to you no one says oh do you remember do you remember the mopey ugly stupid guy in the corner no oh oh you don't you don't remember no he never said one word he didn't say one word to the professor it didn't say one word to me oh well guess what he hates your guts and he is on your facebook profile and your instagram profile on your youtube channel every day for the rest of your life it is the people you don't see because they make themselves invisible with their own low self-esteem in real life in the workplace on the university campus who come on the internet and make themselves impossible to ignore those are the people who won't just open one fake account they'll open 10 fake accounts so they can keep sending you email and those people will start their own youtube channels just to hate on you and i am not joking it can literally be a dude you were you were in class with so that has happened to me too i mean you guys probably know a lot of my a lot of my haters are just people who discover me through youtube but there was one guy who was on a hate campaign against me for about five years who i knew in real life face to face at university back at the university of toronto now i could tell his whole life story if i wanted to but i remember and he deleted i think he deleted everything yet against me at the end of the internet but i remember writing him like dude it's been five years you know what i mean like what what what the hell is wrong with you that guy was pretty open with me he was very unhappy with his marriage he's older than i am uh he's very unhappy with his marriage he's very unhappy with his life uh he became vegan before i did but not that long like i don't know if you became vegan a year before me or like i forgot or two years before me or something but you know he really resented the fact that i was being celebrated as this kind of leader of the vegan movement and he was a nobody and he feels ugly and stupid towards it by the way this is not my analysis it's his analysis this guy i mean to his credit he was pretty he was pretty honest about his psychoanalysis of his own uh resentment now you know the funny thing was again i'm not saying too much about this guy's life there actually a lot of ways in which that guy's been very successful i could now list stuff a bunch of things he's done successful that i've never done in my life but i'm not jealous of him you know he's uh he's jealous of me i remember him saying to me this was in a different context this wasn't the conversation where i was asking him to delete this kind of hate campaign he had against me on a couple different websites um on the internet but you know i remember him uh saying to me something like he said oh what i would give to have one tenth of your charisma you know as i go through life and he was really he was really self-hating and you know he felt that you know uh nobody appreciated him in life but my point is this when i talk about this being a kind of invisible malevolent majority of people around you they're invisible because you don't see them they're invisible because they don't make themselves seen they don't make themselves heard i talk about the university as an example well some of you have never been to university how about the gym a lot of you go to the gym every day or a couple times a week so you recognize all the people at your gym right it's all regular people you see the same people again again no you don't no you know you recognize the most intelligent the most attractive the most self-confident people they only need to have two out of the three there could be someone at the gym who's really ugly but they're self-confident and intelligent and they chit-chat with you once in a while so you remember that person you don't have to be you don't have to be all three you know what i mean but there are self-loathing mopey shy people at the gym there are people at the gym who are really stupid there are people at your gym probably who are mentally disabled who have serious learning disabilities trust me there are people at the university even though it's a university who have serious you know disabilities that way and so mental disabilities you know okay okay and you don't remember them and you don't talk to them and the internet is their turf because it's the only turf they have to defend that is part of the pathos and the tragedy of the internet is that this is where the stupid and the ugly and the self-loathing among us take their revenge and it will never end so we told really briefly also the story of people melissa has known since university maybe in some cases they're people you've known since high school too it's just ridiculous sorry you know if you were a friend of melissa's in high school or university why can't you be happy for her why can't you be happy for you know why do you have to like really i mean in this case it's really hate it's really hatred like it's not it's not hate in the sense of like trolling comments or something why do you have to hate this person who's a kind of acquaintance of yours but someone you knew to some extent you know in high school university why do you have to to be this way towards you okay that's why okay it's it's real resentment it's real inferiority i said you before for me one of the reasons why i would make that book about martin luther king jr even if it is hated or even if it's hated by 10 times as many people who positively appreciate it like a thousand people hate it and 100 people see it and appreciate it over the next uh 10 years i feel i have to do that because nobody else can do it nobody else can give voice to what i'm going to give voice to and i know this is a for me this is a relatively low effort video but you guys can imagine there are some videos that reflect years of work and years of life experience so there's so much that goes into it okay that's another story you know that that too i feel i have to say that because nobody else can say it well guess what there are some really stupid people in your audience there are stupid ugly people who have no self-confidence who are sitting watching that video feeling they could never do this themselves they could never say this themselves they could never read the book or if they do read the book they could never understand it in this level analyzing this level get this lecture on this level right and guess what my own university professors are like that so right like at every level you know at every level there are people who are going to see this and respond to it that way i would not even call this jealousy i would not even call this envy i think neither one of those is accurate well the other thing that i was thinking is that similar to the man that you said had a campaign against you for five years or something like some of these people that i've interacted with like they've had more success in a lot of ways yes they've had study jobs right moved to big cities under whatever heading yep you know they've lived right right okay so i don't want to speak for melissa but melissa is saying that among her haters this way people who hate on her but who actually did know her in high school university just as with my example of this old friend of mine who actually has published some books and he's traveled around the world led interesting life in different ways that in some ways these haters they have had successful lives right okay now this is me speaking for myself that was me paraphrasing melissa okay right but this matters more period right the reason why they're jealous is that even if they can't analyze it or think about it right this matters more the life of the mind always matters more always hey hey guys who went skiing who went skiing last night who gives a [ __ ] if you went skiing yeah there were a lot of people i mean the people hating on melissa a lot of them have been on a whole lot of skiing trips and you know what reading aristotle matters more understanding aristotle matters more being able to come on camera and actually give a charismatic intelligent useful like a discussion of aristotle that's actually useful to people in the audience you know what that matters more and it always did and it always will and that's why they killed socrates and people live their whole lives in the shadow of the meaningful life they could have had all right that all their lives are haunted by the specter of the intellectual achievement they were capable of but that they never did pursue and that's why they're gonna hate you i am reading all of your comments guys thanks there's a lot of intelligent comments here that could lead in a number of different directions okay so james james mkhimping has this is a great great question sorry i mispronouncing your name james mcpine says quote if people have spent 10 years drinking or 10 years being addicted to social media or 10 years being addicted to video games how is it possible for them to change get rid of those desires and live an intellectual life you know james i'm just going to keep it 100 with you i feel like the exact opposite is the question you've got to ask if you've been doing this for 10 years if you spent the last 10 years playing this video games how can you not change how can you not grow how can you not have a desire for something better right and if you don't what does that say about you so if you're a supporter of mine on patreon you've seen the message i got i removed the person's name but a guy wrote into me saying that he's now 37 years old and after watching just one of my videos for the first time in his life he's thinking about quitting video games so he's obviously played video games since his childhood and he never saw it that way before he never thought of it as something he would ever quit and this is a big change in his life and one of my patreon supporters commented wow well you know it sure is one thing to quit playing video games at 37 but imagine if he had waited till 47 or 57 every year counts every day counts every every decade counts but it it may seem hard to change but it's really hard to to stay the same take it all the way back to the beginning admitting to yourself that you want to succeed admitting to yourself that you want youtube to be your full-time career i think step zero is to think about failure and to choose to create fair choose to create content that will still be meaningful to you still be rewarding for you to create if you fail not just fail in the end but you fail in the process again and again and again i think that's the the path you have to uh commit to to this to this extent on this level um in admitting to yourself that this is something that you want to do you then come to another fork in the road where the question is am i going to start living in order to create youtube videos or am i just living my life and i regard the youtube videos as an accidental byproduct if you do book reviews did you read this book so that you could talk about it on youtube or is it just a book you happen to read and i've explained to you at some length i think you're engaged in a kind of self-deception in thinking you can treat youtube as something incidental because of we talked about it in great depth and great length because of really the negative backlash side effects consequences that the decision to do youtube the decision to be a filmmaker however unsuccessful however lazily it is in some ways like the decision to make pornography something that fundamentally changes your life it changes your relationship with your own family with the other people who live in your apartment building with your employers past present and future it changes your life in such a fundamental way just like the decision to do hardcore pornography or something and to have your own name and your own face attached to your hardcore pornography that you can never justify that sacrifice in terms of saying oh well i'm just reading this book anyway so i might as well do a youtube video reviewing it no you have to take it seriously as you're committing to an art form you're committing to being a filmmaker however unprofessional and then you're setting aside part of your life maybe not your whole life but part of your life do that kind of filming if you do restaurant reviews are you going to that restaurant in order to review it or are you reassuring yourself that this is just a hobby because you would have eaten in that restaurant anyway so you might as well make a review about it okay so now the other uh we're gonna do this in less than five minutes the other big subject i wanted to open up it so you can see this is kind of a branching diagram and i'm telling you at several of the branches one way is right and one way is wrong so it leads to one one uh set of conclusions once you've you know made these decisions that i've outlined here just as you're not going to be happy making rap music that says the same things everyone else's rap music says again if you're embracing failure you know of course maybe you'll be happy making a rap song says the same things all the other rappers say if you're certain you're going to make millions of dollars and have millions of fans millions of burpees whatever it is whatever turns you on okay then you're gonna make a rap song that sounds the same as all the other rappers and a lot of them do but the point is if you were looking at the very real prospect of failing and failing and failing and even really your only success is going to be many years of failure for a very small audience you have to focus on making a rap song that nobody else is ever going to do something that is meaningful and rewarding enough in and of itself that it's still worthwhile for you to put in the time and effort to make that rap song if only 500 people ever hear it right so in in having uh said that and having uh disclosed that there's this higher level of commitment higher level of creativity higher greater importance of the uniqueness of the craft the filmmaking irrigation then this brings about another incredibly important strategic problem which is that if you're focused on only making the videos that feature your unique voice your unique perspective by definition you are narrowing down your audience to an incredibly tiny one both your potential audience and your actual audience so this is then the the balance that you have to keep in mind okay there is this issue of creating content that is unique enough and meaningful enough that it justifies your commitment to creating it even if you fail and then on the other hand there's the challenge of creating content that reaches out to new audiences reaches out to new viewers to people you don't already have people who don't already know you and respect you that make them unexpectedly get to know you and respect you and then builds up the number of people who are willing to hear you talk about the assassination of dr martin luther king jr or some other really unpopular topic so i'm certain the vast majority of people who saw that video they watched it because they respect me nobody has watched that video because they're like oh i'd like to hear some guy talking about the assassination of anybody anybody really you know no the reality is there were people who've heard me talk about politics for five years and they say oh okay if i if this guy if eyes little is gonna speak on this topic i'm interested enough right so that's a video that only my core audience is gonna appreciate my established audience then you get into this interesting contradictory uh step-by-step process of making videos that are either pitch to your core audience or that reflect your core mandate this sense of uniqueness of having your own unique voice of creating something so meaningful that you still want to do it if you fail etc etc and making videos that reach out to viewers who've never heard of you before who have no respect for you who have no interest in what you have to say you have no interest in you my own channel the moderate success or moderate failure that it is right why do you think i made videos talking about onision if you don't know who an scn is don't google it but you might be surprised to learn that i have made many videos with many thousands of views so i have one video that i made according to this one year ago i think it's closer to two years ago that has 13 000 views about an sdn it's a 14 minute long video talking about the love life of an isiah now that video is not stupid it's not pandering it's not dumb i'm not violating my sense of personal integrity i'm not lowering my intellectual standards to make that video but some people even if it's five people 15 people out of the 13 000 people there are some people who saw that video and thought whoa this guy is really more interesting i clicked on this video expecting a dumb video gossiping about an issue and instead this is what i got this is a really interesting different perspective on ethics or history or politics oh okay i'm going to look at the front pages youtube oh look at that he did a video about the assassination of martin luther king jr this could have happened today by the way because the old videos stay there and keep getting views someone could have that experience today they come to my channel they click on what they think is going to be a shallow gossip video it turns out to be a deep and meaningful video i think oh okay i have some intellectual respect to this guy i have some curiosity in this guy now i'm willing to listen to what he has to say about martin luther king jr and then they click on that video and maybe they're horrified and they hate the video they never come back again right but in this way you are so here's a great example frida is admitting she uh one of the first videos she saw my channel was me criticizing tim sheef melissa and i were just talking about tim sheef the other day right so you know there i have made i have struggled to make intelligent videos about some incredibly stupid topics some incredibly stupid topic and criticizing incredibly stupid people so you then get into this self-contradictory herky-jerky balance of creating uh content that is for your core audience that reflects your core mandate and content that is reaching out to new audiences again and again and again so that is it you know the title of this video reflects that is the way to succeed on youtube if succeeding on youtube is what you really want to do as we've said again and again it's hard to be honest with yourself it's hard to be honest with yourself especially with something as bizarre as saying to yourself i want to make a video about an issue i want to make a video about jacqueline glenn because i want people to respect me for and take an interest in what i have to say about aristotle what i have to say about politics what i have to say about history what i have to say about philosophy it's the most self-contradictory thing in the world right but the point is by the way another big example i know there are people in my audience still to this day because of the videos i made about game of thrones if you don't know what game of thrones is don't google it you don't need to know right so i forget my most successful video on that is has many many uh thousands of views i can't find it right now but anyway yeah so there's there's one example wow my what a title i have a video titled a-s-o-i-a-f barbary dustin and jon snow's father abandoned foreshadowing in the plot what a title i mean so that's a title only serious fans of the book would have any idea what the hell this this video is about what uh what a great title i'm sorry it's unbel talk about show business there i just gave you guys the title okay so this more than 9 000 people saw this video right okay why am i doing that okay the point is i'm not going to lower my ethical standards i'm not going to lower my intellectual standards i'm not even going to lower my emotional standards what i mean by emotional standards you could guys in some ways imagine i'm going to make a video that's really sincere and passionate about an issue about jacqueline glenn about this book about game of thrones about star wars i have i mean if you guys don't know i have made videos really philosophizing about uh star wars about the mandalorian okay this is an intentional strategy so what uh over 5000 views that one actually was a relative hit so this is uh this is about start the most recent star wars uh series the mandalorian i got more than 5 000 people to watch that video and maybe the vast majority of them hated it or thought nothing about it but a few people will watch them think hey this is kind of an unexpectedly intelligent or deep you know perspective on star wars you know and then they're gonna so okay this is the way uh to succeed on youtube and i think it's what's hidden within the success whether again it's very hard to learn from success right it's very easy to look at the meteoric success of people where you just see oh this person is successful because they have a personality people love them people are curious about them they come to watch their youtube videos because of their their personality well yes after like a snowball going on the hill after they've given a certain degree of size a certain degree of impetus okay yes at that stage that's how it seems to be and that's how it is but how did they build up that engagement with that audience right it's precisely by taking those kinds of risks it's precisely by making videos about it's by making content on the internet about things that's challenging to you in that way so we talked about the way in which content creation can be challenging intellectually philosophically in terms of doing research in terms of learning in terms of getting out of your own comfort zone taking on issues you're uncomfortable with about being really honest and challenging yourself in all kinds of ways emotionally intellectually in terms of creativity too okay so we've already talked about that right but it's also a challenge to try to reach out to audiences that are strange to you for you to try to make a video saying hey i'm going to reach out to the game of thrones fans i'm going to reach out to the star wars fans i'm going to reach out to i did a bunch of videos talking about transgender issues i know you might you might not see it this way but for me that's what it is i'm reaching out to a new audience i'm saying hey i think there's a small number of people who are kind of critical about social and political issues who are watching this stuff about transgender politics i am not an expert on transgender issues i'm going to challenge myself and get out of my comfort zone zone all these ways and more and i'm going to step into the ring and say what i have to say about about transgender politics and this is challenging yourself to reach out to to new audiences you have to admit to yourself what you want you have to admit yourself the series of things we've already reviewed and then you have to uh deal with the question of what are you willing to do to get it because as important as it is to be true to yourself and be true to your audience think about your core audience think about your core message think about what's uniquely yours to say what is it you can talk about nobody else can talk about if i don't make this video nobody else is going to nobody else is going to speak on this issue the way only i can nobody else is going to deliver this message and and if you don't have something like that go out and get your hands dirty and get something get some perspective that's worth changing you know what i mean i mean there's all this stuff in my life i feel like i have to share but you know whatever i may be delusional and you may be delusional too but you know that is important that's the most important thing and that's what makes youtube worth doing even if you fail and fail and fail and never succeed that is important but then if you've admitted to yourself that what you want is to be successful what you want to do is have a larger audience right then there's this question of what are you willing to do to reach out to that larger audience are you willing to challenge yourself and challenge your viewers by taking that extra step by by getting uncomfortable whether that's dealing with something as ostensibly shallow as gossip about an issue and gospel of jacqueline glenn the new star wars movie the new star wars tv show it's a challenge to say something meaningful about a seemingly uh meaningless topic to take on that challenge also and say oh well if you don't want to do this as a hobby if you want to do this as a career if you want a larger audience are you willing to commit 10 hours a week what's going to be 20 hours a week as a job as a filmmaker to take seriously that part of the game reaching out to new audiences all the time and knowing that with every single video like that no matter how successful at least 90 of the people will hate you and hate your channel and never want to watch your videos again out of the 5 000 people who watch that video about uh the star wars tv show the mandalorian do you think it's even one percent or two percent who became fans of my youtube channel out of the 6 000 people uh 6 300 people who watch my youtube video jacqueline glenn colon the lowest of the low how many of those people even agreed with me how many of those people thought oh this is somebody with an intelligent perspective and looked at other videos right you are going to be hated and rejected not by 50 of the viewers where you're reaching out to a new audience it's gonna be like 98 of those people but each time you make that effort and reach out there are going to be a few people who are intelligent enough or who recognize something in your content who recognize something new and say oh you know oh i now i'm willing to listen to what this guy has to say about the assassination of of martin luther king and then bit by bit you build a meaningful relationship with an audience and for that audience however big or however small your videos are part of them leading a meaningful life 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