The Stigma of Being a Youtuber: My Neighbors Hate Me.

i know there are lies about me on the
internet and i know there are people with really bad intentions all over the internet all over the world and right here in my own apartment building people who see me face to face in the gym and who may bump into me when i take out the garbage or go to pay my rent i know there were people in this building who have bad motivations who are looking around the internet cherry-picking for just the most negative bs about me and what i've done with my life and they'll choose to believe that and they'll ignore everything positive and they'll choose to believe it no matter how ridiculous no matter how easily debunked or disproven those allegations where those rumors are last month in 30 days i reached more than 90 000 viewers all right and i appreciate the hell out of it i have a really deep sense of gratitude for the way in which youtube made it possible for my message for what i have to say about politics and ethics and history to matter in the lives of tens of thousands of people per month i am not ashamed of what i did with my life sincerely and genuinely but a lot of people a lot of people are in a position where they are ashamed or they have some level of shame of what they did with their life in the past what they're still doing with their life now just to survive just to earn a living and if you share an apartment building with them you have to actively treat them with dignity and respect let's say you're a left-wing american living in an apartment building in seattle you find out that a guy just down the hall living in the same apartment building as yourself is a full-time employee of the border control agency ice let's say that you've even read stories in the newspaper involving this guy and some of the raids he's made against illegal immigrants let's just say you've even read about the brutality or shall we say the ruthlessness of his attempts to drag illegal immigrants out of their apartments and put them in chains you got to live together you got to live together in harmony it's not even enough that you just tolerate him as your neighbor you have to make an active effort to treat him with some level of dignity and respect you have to and for me this is like the beginning of politics this isn't step two or three this isn't even step one this is step zero and we've all heard politicians say after they win an election i don't just represent the people who voted for me i don't just represent the people who support me implicitly they may be saying they don't just represent the people who pay bribes or who donated money to support their campaign right they say i represent everyone even my enemies even the people who voted against me did you ever stop to think through what that would mean if it were really true if it were sincere what it would be like for you to live that way right for you to have that kind of moral commitment to not just treat with dignity and listen to and care about the opinions of the people who were on your side but the people who were your diametric opposite your opponents let's say you're a right-wing american living in los angeles california say in your apartment building there's a doctor who performs abortions maybe it's even a doctor who's given interviews to the newspaper stating why they support abortions access to abortions talking about how many abortions they perform a year and you're a right-wing christian who lives in you know a bubble of self-reinforcing self-justifying hype and political hysteria probably the same way as that left-wing person lives in a bubble of all kinds of bad news about how terrible ice is how the whole world ought to be borderless and we have to have infinite numbers of illegal immigrants and that would be so wonderful this person's living in a bubble of information and misinformation about you know abortion anti-abortion propaganda and hysteria okay it's not enough for you to just tolerate them right you're living in the same apartment together right you actually have to make a positive effort to treat them with dignity and respect you know what in both cases you personally you as the hypothetical person in one case another you would actually stand to gain you'd stand to really become a better informed person and i really think morally a better person if you could relate to this border control agent or this doctor who performs abortions if you could learn to see them as a whole human being right and if you could learn to see the world from their perspective a little bit even if it were just you had a better understanding of what the difference was between you and them or even if it was just that you had the practice overcoming your own hostility i'm facing a lot of hostility right now from my neighbors from people who live in the same apartment building with me who work out at the same gym who get their mail from the safe mailboxes and honestly that's about the only contact we have with each other like if we didn't if we didn't have a gym inside the apartment building as it is i barely see these people but i would see you know even less of them you know read this comment from tyson and this is a comment made in response to my most recent youtube video if you haven't seen it it's a video where i make a big effort to be upbeat and constructive and positive in response to a ton of really insulting really hostile really vile messages i got on facebook from these same people my friends and neighbors people who live with me here in this the same part building quote man get out of here dragging us into your drama most of your posts are set in a tone and style that clearly shows you're not just quote within a quote hey man i have good intentions close quote your reputation has been dragged through the mud for years and it's so easy to see just by looking up your youtube channel name and then scrolling through the reddit posts i'm not here to dredge up all the stuff you're accused of but clearly your reputation not only here but in other parts of the internet across many years dating all the way back to at least 2008 he doesn't really finish that sentence but obviously he means to say my reputation is is bad or terrible give up on the good guy act and just accept you messed up by the way this isn't a negative tone because i'm tired of the drama now i'll just show you on screen without reading it out what my written reply to this guy was it's in it's in two parts this is the first screen but the main thing i'm emphasizing here again and again is look i am not ashamed of what i did in my life you can hit pods if you want to read every word of that here's the second screen of my reply which is brief but it provides a map of what i was actually doing with my life in those years i don't want to digress into it but i was just talking with my girlfriend about how she felt and how she reacted when she first discovered my presence in the internet she knew me on the internet before she knew me face to face in real life and these same accusations against me that were on the internet they were already there at that time and they were not credible and they're still not credible now primarily for the entertainment of my audience i have made videos answering those accusations and talking through them but any of them if you just quote them they're like self-refuting they're self-like it is so obvious that they're badly motivated and fictitious in nature anyone with any degree of literacy not even internet literacy can see through them and can see what the author is doing and why now many of those voices have actually deleted their youtube channels in recent years or deleted their their blogs so there used to be a couple of others that were from my perspective equally just laughable like how could anyone take this seriously you know remember vegan eva so her name was ava and today she's no longer vegan i remember her making up these lies about me and i did answer the accusations i did make responses but like all you had to do was quote the lie and it was so obvious how badly motivated it was and how to touch with reality and if you look at my written reply this guy the other thing i'm saying is yeah you know there are lies about me on the internet but there's also evidence of the extraordinary life i've lived since 2008 of the wonderful things i've done with my life and anyone who's even just looking at both of those like if you were stupid enough to believe the lies made up about me by people like veganeva by people like durianrider durianrider who's now deleted all of his videos that were denouncing me and he now has a ton of respect for me because of the history he went through with me where i stood up and did the right thing because it was the right thing to do even when it wasn't in my advantage like he really respects me and respects what i did when he was facing serious allegations of criminal conduct so a lot of the allegations that used to be up against me have disappeared and a lot of the people who made the allegations instead gained respect for me and agreed with me after they'd talked with me or if they made any effort to find out what the facts were just just to listen to me but if you were foolish enough to believe the negative things said about me on the internet but you also in googling around we're looking at all this very real evidence of positive things i've done with my life just looking at both of those hanging in two sides of the balance simultaneously like well this guy's lived an extraordinary life in terms of what he did in asia in terms of what he did in saskatchewan through what he did in all these different periods of his life and then on the other hand there were people who've made up some really stupid pointless drama about him that's basically about nothing that's of no substance whatsoever compared to the positive things so look i am not ashamed of what i did with my life sincerely and genuinely but a lot of people a lot of people are in a position where they are ashamed or they have some level of shame of what they did with their life in the past or what they're still doing with their life now just to survive just to earn a living and if you share an apartment building with them you have to actively treat them with dignity and respect at different times in my life i have known different women who were strippers i didn't meet them in strip clubs i met them through whatever weird connection some of these women were highly educated you know university educated women there were other interesting intellectual and political things about them the reasons that i knew them and then i later found out they were strippers or they talked about that side of their life all right um i knew one woman who did bdsm for a living was a was a dominatrix all right and each of those women had a different attitude lately i've been hearing from a lot of women who do only fans which is in some ways like being a stripper in some ways like being a bdsm dominatrix all right and these people some of them make a kind of ideological commitment that they're not going to feel ashamed that they refuse to feel ashamed they refuse to be intimidated right and you know my heart goes out to them some of them at least will say some of the times that they're at a family picnic and whether it's their brother or their cousin some jerk you know outs them somebody brings it up or makes a big deal of the fact that they're working as a stripper or they're all if they're doing whatever and it's not even necessarily that it's secret but it's like why did you have to ruin this picnic by you know by making that a kind of bone of contention you know and there are some who really do lead a double life or a triple life where they're concealing it like they say they're not ashamed of it but they're actively not letting their relatives or their friends or their neighbors the other people department building know that they're a stripper or that they're on only fans that they're doing bdsm for living whatever the case may be where they can say that they're not ashamed but in reality they do live a life that's hampered by [ __ ] and that it's tragic i'm not i'm not saying they should feel ashamed i'm saying this is a problem they have to deal with every day and then the worst part of all is most of these women they're in a situation where many of their neighbors hate them many of the people living in the apartment building with them regard them with the same disdain or the same hatred that a right-wing christian has for an abortion doctor right and of course not all their neighbors are christian some of them may be for example muslim immigrants you can imagine how hard it would be to live as a stripper or a porn star an only fan or someone working in bdsm what if you have traditional muslim neighbors what do you have traditional eastern orthodox or greek orthodox could be any religion but you know you can imagine sometimes the cultural divide is really deep by the way if you think if you think just people from communist china who are of no particular religion like they won't describe themselves as taoist or confucian they can be incredibly anti-abortion incredibly anti-stripper incredibly anti-sexual freedom of any kind you have ultra-conservative people coming out of a out of a chinese culture and religious background it's not just muslims these are the contrasts you have to live with within your own apartment building and then at the same time there will be some people there will be some of these people in this apartment building who are sexually obsessed with you who are trying to flirt with you who are leaving gifts on your doorstep where they're asking themselves should i try to get a restraining order against this guy living in my apartment building all right okay i deal with this also all right there are people who hate me there are people who fear me and there are people who are fascinated with me either because they have a crush on me like they're infatuated with me or they want to sleep with me or they're just fascinated in some weird sense where they've seen my youtube channel and they feel drawn to it you know whatever word you wanna you wanna put on it where there's a fascination and where you wonder you know should i be leading a double life you know should i be living under a false name or should i be concealing my location here and of course i don't i don't want to because i'm not ashamed of what i've done with my life i'm not ashamed of what i did back in the year 2008 doing humanitarian work i'm not ashamed with what i've been doing on youtube now in the last seven years all right i'm proud of it i really feel i've made an extraordinarily positive contribution to other people's lives and i've done something very positive with my own you know very very briefly i used to work in the publishing industry and i knew so many talented hard-working people who poured their hearts out to write a book maybe reached 50 readers maybe it reached a hundred eventually in the passage of decades maybe it would reach 500 readers okay last month in 30 days i reached more than 90 000 viewers all right and i appreciate the hell out of it all right i have a really deep sense of gratitude for the way in which youtube made it possible for my message for what i have to say about politics and ethics and history to matter in the lives of tens of thousands of people per month whereas i know traditional print media i know writing articles i know writing books reaches this pitiably small audience there was one elderly gentleman he was already past retirement age who would a series of peer-reviewed articles he had a phd and a career as a professor you know i made some youtube videos talking about the research in his articles and i sent him some friendly emails saying hey you know i hope this will bring some more readers you know to your articles i've made some some videos talking about this and he forwarded to me the most pathetic email he sent me an email from the editor of the magazine where he'd published the article and the editor of this magazine said hey this is really great can you believe it we got more than 25 people clicking on this article in a day thanks to the youtube video right like if it wasn't for my youtube video it would have been zero or would have been less than 25 would have been some pitiably small number and they said oh and they have a tracking service and we can see like those mouse clicks those readers looking at they're from all over the world like isn't this exciting isn't this great all right so like you know to me getting 90 000 viewers in a month all right it may be a failure like you know this may be in a very real quantitative sense or in an economic sense a failure but to me in a really meaningful sense it's a success all right this is something i'm not ashamed of all right i'm not a stripper i'm not a porn star i'm i'm not doing anything with my life i regret i know there are lies about me on the internet and i know there are people with really bad intentions all over the internet all over the world and right here in my own apartment building people who see me face to face in the gym and you may bump into me when i take out the garbage or go to pay my rent i know there were people in this building who have bad motivations and who want to hate me and who were looking around the internet cherry-picking for just the most negative bs about me and what i've done with my life and they'll choose to believe that and they'll ignore everything positive and they'll choose to believe it no matter how ridiculous no matter how easily debunked or disproven those allegations or those rumors are okay and you know what one option is for me one option is to accept all of it and to accept it warmly and magnanimously right so you know what i'll take the good with the bad because for me on a really profound level i know you do not choose to be loved or hated you choose to be known or unknown and me with my little political philosophy no matter how unpopular no matter how despised in the canadian cultural context in 2021 it may be i choose to be known [Music] maybe we can we can practice