Pandering to the Audience vs. Keeping it Real.

most of everyone would agree that if you
want to be successful here on YouTube you have to pander to your audience it's somewhat more depressing to reflect that to a large extent if you want to be successful in academia if you want to be successful in life in many different ways in many different contexts that challenge also may involve pandering to your audience no matter how well or poorly you may understand that is his desire and in my life the audience concerned has always been left-wing I have grown up surrounded by left-wing people and indeed even communists extremists on the left wing and my experience on YouTube has been surrounded by the left-wing growing up in Toronto and coint University my professors all the people who surrounded me ah yeah they varied from socialist union organizers to left-wing you know women's liberation feminist rights type people all the way out to communists and left-wing anarchistic it's that work there were not a lot of political political moderates around and if there were any conservatives they were hiding in in some other departments somewhere I'd never see them and again I didn't I didn't major in architecture I didn't major in Christian Studies or something I didn't major in medicine I'm sure there are other university departments where people were more moderate or even more conservative but that was that was not my experience so you know growing up kind of drowning in left-wing influence and trying to tread water and learn how to swim and learn how to learn how to swim against that currently define myself in contrast of that it's then very strange as an old man to come on YouTube and see a situation see a scene where likewise you know there's this predominant left-wing audience I guess and people have to cater to that audience bluff tap and redundancy ahead now of course meanwhile somewhere else on YouTube there's a right-wing audience that other people are pandering to I'm aware of this but by the same token like at my university my whole experience was being surrounded by and inundated by these left-wing extremists the fact that somewhere else there is a Christian University and there were many you know where all the professor's are conservative Christians and doing Bible studies and this campaign that that exists almost but it's not part of my experience so it's not really relevant to what we're discussing here but yes elsewhere on some other university campus people are pandering to right-wing inclinations somewhere else you're on YouTube there are YouTube channels talking about the difficulties of pandering to the right-wing audience that's not experience that's not it's not what I'm talking about here today so look the controversy at the moment and then the reflections that come out of this controversy that are somewhat deep and meaningful for me in my own life the controversy the moment is this I notice looking at mexi's YouTube channel so Mexi she has been masquerading as a left-wing communist extremists for years now it's a masquerade that's gone on a long long time and just four weeks ago she made a video in which she came out and admitted that she's not really such a left-wing extremist as she has been pretending to be all along so she's not really comfortable with emulating Joseph Stalin Mao Zedong Lenin she's not really into the extremists armed rebellion and for years she's been pretending that she was and right away she gets an avalanche of negative comments some of which I've seen on-screen as text and some what she just described in her own videos she talks about the negative backlash she's had when she's come out as being someone who's not in favor of a violent revolution for those of us the few of us who really have a long memory who've been on this platform for a long time whether due to vegan activism or whatever their interest those of us with long memories and long engagement can remember a time when Mexi was a Buddhist and she had YouTube videos up discussing her Buddhist spirituality let's let's pause here I can sympathize with her struggle on many different levels and sympathy is an analytical tool I don't sympathize the people just for the sake of wallowing in sentiment I sympathize to understand situation I was a tear about a Buddhist I was an Orthodox Buddhist for many years and I was a scholar of Buddhism for about 10 years and then I became an expert I rejected their religion and what my own way but Buddhism was a huge part of my life so if smexy had sincerely been an inherent to Buddhism then lost faith in religion moved on that's one thing I could sympathize with but on the other hand what I think you're looking at here instead is someone who was sincerely involved in are sincerely interested in Buddhism maybe only at a rudimentary stage and she started pandering to this left-wing audience on YouTube so the Buddhist videos all mysteriously disappeared that side of her life got erased that's not the only thing it's not that it was pruned in her creation of this public image of herself as the violent communist extremist revolutionary she she used to be a vegan activist who went to Thailand on vacation and meant durianrider in person face to face I don't know if she also met freely but there were photographs of her up on the internet that she posted herself of her meeting those people for going there and her being a little bit more of a typical hippy vegan YouTube activist who met other vegan vegan youtubers vegan b-list celebrities whatever you want to say where she was playing that game in chasing Klout that way and that's that's true of some of the other would-be radicals on her side and then just four weeks ago after building up this you know image of herself as a communist extremist four years after pandering to this left one audience for years just about four weeks ago she comes out in two myths that she isn't really such an extremist after all and right away she gets this huge negative ration audience the number of views on her most recent video from two weeks ago is about half of the audience in the video before that and this is a very small fraction about a quarter of her more successful videos from both five months ago so her whole situation is one I can sympathize with and it's instructive in many ways I had a moment you know sitting with my mom and my grandmother so it's just the three of us in the room nobody else and this was in my grandmother's apartment or condominium a very comfortable bourgeois environment she had a leather couch glass coffee table so on a nice view of the window and we were talking about politics of Asia I think this was right during the period when I was preparing to move from Canada to Asia and my mother kind of out of the blue just said something that's typical of diehard communist extremists she just stated out of the blue that she didn't see it as a big deal at all for the government of China to have murdered more than 1 million people in Tibet so we have three generations here my grandmother my mother and me and both myself and my grandmother we're just flabbergasted by this we're just both like kind of stuttering and still how can you possibly say what is the matter and you know I don't know to what extent you could say my mother was sincerely used to keeping company with people who would appreciate and reward and reinforce that kind of behavior of coming out and making excuses for mass murder under communist dictatorships these kinds of Comus regimes but there's there's a public for that there's a subculture that's doing that all the time in a sense they're honing and internalizing the profit and repeating and performing inform one another now this would be a shameful behavior under any circumstances but it's true that it is even more shameful because this behavior happened in the comfortable capitalist Democratic bourgeois conditions of my grandmother's apartment we're all sitting around comfortably on leather couches with this nice glass coffee table so on and so forth I mean one has to admit it would be at least more pathetic if the same statement about killing millions of people justifying the murder of millions people were made by someone hiding out in a cave with a machine gun someone in an active state of armed rebellion against the government someone who was hunting and being hunted this kind of situation but nevertheless like if I were hypothetically a journalist who went into a cave in Vietnam or Laos and met someone who held those views I would still do my best to try to talk them out of it so I said look you know I understand you're here in this cave there's this war going on maybe to you right now it makes sense to murder millions of people and to justify the murder of millions of people but can't I talk this through with you can't we philosophizes about this can we talk about this politically or personally I would have you can't I make my efforts try to help you to see that really really you're profoundly wrong that you've adopted a political view of the world that's you know misleading and ultimately evil mmm but obviously Mexi so this youtuber after some number of years of her playing that game for being surrounded by those people who were actively invoke aliy endorsing and calling for mass violence revolution mass murder here on youtube were these things go uncensored and unsuppressed while other ideologies are censored and suppressed something happened where she hit her limit something happened that made her want to stop pandering to her audience and I feel like she's a case study not just in the left-wing ideology itself but in the air SATs ideology that so much of us so many of us get drawn into in Pandurang so I'm saying that pandering itself becomes a kind of ideology that people get committed to though five years ago when my youtube channel was new when I was busy with University classes in Victoria Canada I remember I watch this YouTube video it was Pao Simeon talking to Ali Tabrizi they both had really big successful YouTube channels at the time and they were both considered very handsome eligible bachelors handsome available young men within the vegan movement that significant numbers of viewers on both and they did this staged Q&A so it wasn't completely spontaneous but they had questions sent in from viewers and they you know they answered them on camera and they got this question that was just straight up a prompt someone writing in to ask them do you share the stereotypical left-wing position on pornography and masturbation asking them to make a statement against pornography that pornography was evil and Exploited its own and there was just this awkward moment on camera where each of them kind of looked at the other I looked at the camera and weren't sure what to say and my interpretation of that was like this was the moment of uncertainty where they were deciding were they gonna tell the audience what they knew the audience wanted to hear were they gonna pander to the audience or not I knew both of those guys personally to a limited extent like Palestinian I had a few messages back and forth I knew Ali Tabrizi better I don't think either one of those guys was left-wing I don't think either one was left-wing the hell honey means not a hot shot but they both absolutely knew in that moment what the piece wanted here and the question is are you going to pander to that audience yes or no and I saw that moment of this weird awkward split-second before and all they said they said they've made a total evasive non answer to this question I remember you know I paused it I just sat there and reflected and I thought that is what I will never do you know that that right there that moment I'm never gonna Paris whatever is gonna happen with this YouTube thing for me and I know the commitment to keeping it real it means that today I have a tiny fraction of the audience I theoretically could have you know you get a smaller and smaller audience the realer and more honesty far every time you're keeping it real you're alienating people especially in the peculiar political conditions of this side of YouTube you know I mean look sir just really brief digression on that if I had to choose between voting for Joe Biden and voting for Bernie Sanders I would vote for Bernie Sanders if I had to choose between Bernie Sanders and Hillary Clinton I'd vote for Bernie Sanders so under spec I'm I'm far to the left in some ways I'm left-of-center I'm just not a communist I'm not a socialist I'm not a communist I'm on the moderate left right but just the unwillingness to pander further even even within that category I don't pander to Bernie Sanders supporters I read his book I have harsh criticism of the book and what's wrong with it the fact that I would vote for Bernie Sanders rather than Joe Biden doesn't mean that I only see the flaws in Joe Biden and I don't see the flaws and besides that I don't want to critique you know for so you know the commitment to keeping it real the decision not to pander that is more fatal if you like it's more fateful I should say it's more of a fateful decision than your commitment to any one political ideology so that's that's maybe the lesson of YouTube the greatest riddle of YouTube that a lot of people have yet to unravel if all you look at is success on YouTube then all you're gonna see is pandering but the more meaningful path forward here is precisely keeping it real is using the banner and you know I don't make youtube videos for me I don't I really do make them for the audience I mean the example the the YouTube video I put up today the YouTube video I put up today it's a little bit philosophical display the title Jaclyn Glenn is worse than an SEM do you video for today I'm delighted that it has more thumbs down than thumbs up I'm delighted for me to see a video getting more than 50% thumbs down I think oh good I'm really challenging people I'm reaching the audience you know people are seeing it people are hearing it and they're being challenged I'm not pander to the audience good I'm saying something that's meaningful to me but I'm not just speaking to myself that video it's a great example because obviously it's not like just an example where it's like oh wow I feel like talking about the philosophy of Socrates or I feel like talking about Aristotle or something it's not something I'm making for myself it's not something where I'm just talking about my feeling is about my divorce and my daughter or something it's very much made for the audience but it's not pandering Dynes it's refusing the parents it's keeping it real and it's challenging the audience and when it gets more than 50% thumbs down I'm thrilled I'm really positive of that when I made the video I still think I'm the only person to speak on that from that angle okay the only person in English there was a famous church in Paris France that burnt down in an accident the the notre-dame Cathedral in Paris right and I came out that day I came out and made a video than when the news was fresh and I said look I'm not trolling it was a hundred percent honest I came up with a critique saying look it may be an unpopular opinion but I'm an atheist I'm happy that it burnt down and I'm not happy at the suggestion that the government would use taxpayers dollars to rebuild it or that the government any involvement of rebuilding it if it's gonna be rebuilt would be by donations within the Catholic Church and even then I want to question the long-term morality of this I don't think it is a good thing arrests to be dominated by medieval church I'm because it's a shockingly unpopular opinion especially to come out with it that day at that moment when the tragedy is is new I hate when everyone's just react that's the first time to come on set and again I'm happy to see it as thumbs down I think it actually is more thumbs up and thumbs down which is kind of amazing but you know whatever even if that's 70% thumbs down would be like good I don't want to just reach the audience that agrees with my opinion it's a really good thing for me and a good thing for the audience and a good thing for YouTube if I can reach the people who don't agree and even I mean you know the decision that alienated the majority of audience I mean one decision where I was gonna keep it real talking about pet ownership tell you what the fact that morally I'm opposed to people owning dogs morally I'm opposed to people on in cats I'm opposed to people owning a pet owl in a golden cage whatever it is um I'm against pet ownership morally and philosophically and I knew before I put the video up that the majority of my audience would walk away and hate me and would send me hate mail I absolutely knew that was the consequence and I did it anyway I made that commitment to keeping every reviewers for video went way down got a ton of hate mail you know what again that's the riddle of YouTube that you're never gonna learn watching only the most successful channels alright there's a more meaningful kind of success that goes on here that's unique to this medium it never existed before on radio it never existed before on television it never existed before in the movie theater what we do here on YouTube there's no plot there's no special effects right honesty is the only currency we've got the only value we can breathe into these videos precisely begins and ends with that commitment to authenticity to keeping it real and that doesn't mean you may videos for yourself you don't make the news to please yourself you make videos for an audience but you also make videos to confront to educate to challenge that audience that in short is keeping it real