An Open Letter to Professional YouTubers: CrashCourse & Vlogbrothers.

good morning Hank it's Tuesday this
video is an open letter to professional youtubers but it's also for anyone who wants to understand the challenges of the fraught career of professional influencing okay fourth this did not happen because you work harder than anyone else or because you are more talented you are talented and you do work hard but you have also been fortunate you're fortunate to have high-speed Internet and access to editing software and you've also gotten lucky along the way in innumerable ways luck does not nullify hard work but hard work also does not nullify block v you are a person those who love your work will naturally be inclined to think of you as more than a person which can be intoxicating it's nice to hear that you're a literal God or the best fortnight or vlogger or whatever noun is currently being personalised but there will also be people who think you're less than human who say that your literal trash we don't talk about this much because it can seem like ingratitude but receiving online hate can be really scary and painful and I'm sorry if you have to live with it in my experience it's really important to find places where you can be a person whether that's an anonymous reddit account or god forbid offline because otherwise you can start to believe both those who think you're more than a person and those who think you're less than one lastly as my brother likes to say diversify your identity in this world so much of your life can become your job your friends and family can be involved in your job when you take a walk you're doing your job if you Instagram it your life and work can become so completely intertwined that you stop thinking of yourself as for instance John Green person husband father AFC Wimbledon sponsor avowed Hufflepuff etc and begin to think of yourself as just John Green youtuber the purpose of this video is not to ridicule the crash course world history channel it's not to ridicule the vlogbrothers it's not to suggest that we shouldn't take them seriously if anything I'd like to first insist that the audience take this channel and the type of misinformation it spreads much more seriously than they ever had before and then to condemn it and turn their backs on it the first time I ever encountered this YouTube channel is quite memorable to me because at that time I had very little contact with YouTube I'd been living and doing research in places like Cambodia where YouTube just barely existed the internet existed I used the internet for things like email but a high bandwidth application like YouTube at that time was more or less unthinkable unless you had some very good reason to try to use it and it occurred to me this is now about six years ago when I was first looking at YouTube and seeing the kind of range of content it occurred to me to check who in the world today was making an effort to talk about the history of the revolution in Haiti and right at that time they had indeed uploaded Haitian revolutions crash course world history number 30 now as I get older in this life I feel ever more keenly that the most precious and rare gift is to be paid to do research when I was a much younger man I was paid very briefly to do research on the history of Haiti specifically the history of the Haitian revolutions and I threw myself into that opportunity with gusto I did ten times more research than I needed to I did 100 times more research than I need to within the remit of the very simple assignment that was given and the research I did was ultimately for a museum of the African Diaspora and a very very tiny portion of that museum discussed the history of the revolution Haiti in watching that video now approximately six years ago I had the horrifying feeling as the minutes ticked by that I knew infinitely more about this topic than the people making the video that I cared infinitely more about this topic than the people making the video and then there was a much deeper sense of horror when I realized the extent to which people watching this video we're going to be very much misled very much misinformed and they would not in any way be aware of how misinformed they were I've watched very few of the crash course world history videos since then but I have always made it a point to only watch their videos in areas of my own expertise areas where I have done considerable research so I can tell you I can raise the red flag there videos on the history of China are garbage there videos on the history of Buddhism are garbage there videos on the history of Asia all that I have seen our garbage and I have to be honest with you they're dangerous why is it that we only an exclusively care when people lie about history in the context of World War two why is that the one and only topic that the world becomes excited about the history of China also deals with the deaths and mass murder of millions of people at a time in the period of Mao Zedong many tens of millions definitely more than thirty million the history of Cambodia the history of Indonesia even many of these countries there are chapters just as grave just as decisive with just as shocking a body count but even moving beyond that I admit for example the history of Haiti is in some ways small in scale but it's a microcosm of everything that was wrong with the world slave trade everything well that was wrong with both the old Empire of France and with the failed ideals of the French Revolution and the regime of Napoleon that came thereafter we can learn a tremendous amount even from studying a chapter of history like the history of haiti haitian revolution it's a tremendous instructive value and it really does hurt me to see it misrepresented and portrayed in the way that it is we have to take the crash course YouTube channel seriously because each of these videos reaches millions of people Haiti this must be one of their least popular videos is 2.3 million if you look up the videos on Buddhism history of Asia this year China India and so on and so forth you're getting into five million ten huge huge numbers I've been a critic of many university professors and the authors of books reasonably well some books that were covered in newspapers and I can say that probably none of my university professors ever reached an audience of so many millions of people the position that the vlogbrothers and crash course history have taken it demands to be taken seriously and also demands to be terror interrogated criticized and discarded very seriously if someone were to ask me which is a better source for the history of Haiti for the history of China for this tree of India which is a better source this YouTube channel or Wikipedia Wikipedia has people contributing to it who actually do the research and who actually care the crash course History Channel has none and point two on Wikipedia when errors are made other authors other contributors point out those errors and they get corrected tell me can tell me in the comments for this video do you know of any example on in their whole empire the crash course YouTube channel the puppets do you know of any example in which these two men realizing that they were wrong realizing they were speaking out of blithe ignorance and after a very casual they don't even read one book on most of these topics for making a video let alone a comparison of multiple sources do you know of any example where they went back deleted a video or amended a video added new information deleted errors in which they made corrections because Wikipedia as badly flawed as it may be is open to Corrections every day people like to disrespect my truth but the fact is that you know my name is I don't know