Pump & Dump: James Aspey's Commodified Relationships.

when we're talking about social media if
you are living a great life a really great life a life that most people can't live you are going to uh you are going to attract vegans and countless non-vegans probably one of the best things you could do in terms of activism is get very rich and famous live it up and influence your tens of millions of followers to go vegan i'm striving to do that hello everyone on today's adventure of living our best life we're taking the floatie in the ocean you know this is why i i switched to pick up artist stuff because as soon as i am honest with a girl there's no game involved as soon as i am i'm straight and like uh straightforward with a girl it never works out for me but when i play some game it's it works out great and i hate that i hate being a manipulator i hate having to [ __ ] play a stupid game and like some some of my friends they're just like really really handsome or whatever and they don't ever need to try you know like they got natural game or whatever but for me it's like well when you're fat it's like playing the game of the dating game on hard mode you know you can still do it but you're going to put in a lot more effort you know and anyway that really hurt you know that really hurt like that was like the worst thing that i've heard in a while and then we went to like a movie and it was it was cool it was nice but you know the third time uh i was like hey let's hang out and like yeah she just uh she was dodging me you just said like oh i'm busy and i'm like you literally just said you haven't been busy for months i'm just like oh wow you got busy really quickly huh anyway i i tell her i was like okay like trump card there we go hey uh why don't we spend christmas together because christmas is a couple's day and uh she she immediately sends me back a message being like you know i told you this when we broke up but i see you more as like a family member or like you know somebody who i really care about but i'm not interested in romantically and i'm like oh bam at the same time i like if i want to go on adventures with people i got to lose some weight you know i've been talking about losing weight forever and i'm like you know what like i'm one of the reasons i'm going to the adhd pill doctor right now is to get those pills because like i have been [Music] for the most part been being a good boy like i still only eat once a day or whatever but i am drinking a lot of my calories with soda and everything like that and i know that if i have these adh pills they only they not only help me think clearly but they're also appetite suppressants so i'm gonna just show her like look i lost some weight i got some better views on youtube and it's not it's not like i need her approval i just want her to know i just want her to know that i did this like you know just to be like because she saw me recently she knows that like like she knows that i'm fat i mean i'm just saying like i don't want to lose weight just to get her approval but i want to see i'm like i have an actual deadline now i'm like okay i got some time before christmas let's do this let's let's try to make this happen you know i mean that's what i try to tell mark though i'm like he's never studied pick up artist stuff and if he if he had tried picklebart and stuff he knows that it's just a numbers game it's just a numbers game and also you can't let all this rejection get to you like i can't tell you how many weeks i spent over the last few months researching for some way to live in bali and in australia that was in my price range because almost nothing was in my price range and so i'm trying to like save 25 bucks a week here and there and i'm spending hours and hours on this every day for weeks if i was a little bit more comfortable i could have focused on a lot more productive things for the animal rights movement we grow up as children entertained by glittering images of adults and we find in these appealing illusions ideas about a possible future that we might live ourselves models for the type of adults we ourselves might one day want to be as children we find role models even in movie villains not just movie heroes little girls pick up their father's copy of playboy or the victoria's secret catalog and embarrass and horrify their parents by saying that's what i want to be when i grow up and little boys see movies about serial killers and finding them role models also this is a very fundamental human instinct some of us overcome it in later years and some of us hold on to this habit of mind right and whether we look at instagram or we look at youtube or we read the most refined philosophical and political literature imaginable we continue to find in those sources glittering images of someone we wish we could be think it's natural that a great deal of the response to and criticism of james aspie focuses on this gap between the illusion and the reality but for the purposes of this video although interesting that's a distraction from the major theme i want to discuss here okay and there is a gap there is a gap you just heard him explain to you that he aspires to present himself on instagram and on youtube as a multi-millionaire as leading a multi-millionaire's lifestyle and you heard him say also that he just spent several weeks scraping the bottom of the barrel to try to save 25 a week on rent because he can't afford to stay in a nice hotel he can't afford to rent an apartment he can't afford to stay in an airbnb he's telling you that his form of political activism as he understands it is to project this appealing image of himself as living a multi-millionaire's lifestyle and at the same time he's asking for your donations he's asking for your support and your help so that he can live that lifestyle that is fundamentally fake because he literally can't afford to pay his own rent and the other hand as he himself has said many times no quote him he does not want to buckle down and work a normal job he wants to devote all of his time to this very strange social role of being the purveyor of an illusion of an idealized adulthood somebody you might want to be i think what we ought to be directing our attention towards instead is the gap between the creator of that illusion and the consumer right we all know who's selling but who's buying and why now i am a content creator myself i am to a very real extent a creator of and a purveyor of illusions myself it's very easy if you are a creator to only relate to and care about other creators and to imagine your audience as if they consisted of people who are in that same category with you who just happen to not upload to youtube and instagram it's very easy if you're a fitness youtuber and you post pictures of themselves shirtless on instagram to only be paying attention to only listening to only getting feedback from other fitness youtubers other half naked instagram icons those are the people you may be emulating competing with communicating with right those are the direct messages you respond to and you start to think of your audience in that same way as if they relate to you the way that you relate to your own competition or your own colleagues in that category of content creators and that's not true at all that's not who's buying bread is not delicious bread only tastes delicious when you're starving hungry it's people like tkyo sam who i quoted there who are buying these illusions it's people who are desperately trying to lose weight and failing that become the followers of someone presenting them with this promise of a person they could be and a lifestyle they can lead it's people who have utterly failed to have this kind of seemingly stable relationship with someone else who's not afraid to walk around nine tenths naked in public someone who's objectively in good physical shape you know it's people who yearn for that it's people who lack that right they out of their pathos become your followers you are in a very real sense exploiting their misery and their failure even though from your perspective you think you're just sharing your success and most of what you hear back most of the voices you care about are other people in the same sales department generating and selling similar illusions on the internet who are giving you the thumbs up and saying good job hey i liked your video at the beach i just did one myself in hawaii oh hey i liked your cooking video oh hey i noticed you're now selling a pair of track pants along with your t-shirts check out my shop i did this so tell me who did you get to make those track pants i'd like to do something similar it's very easy to have this kind of selective blindness to who your audience really is because the people you're communicating with or other content creators in the same categories who share your same assumptions of convenience i did 210 push-ups yesterday and i went for a very nice walk with my girlfriend down to see the ocean hand-in-hand imagine how different my youtube channel would be and how different my relationship to my audience would be if that was exactly what i had filmed exactly what i had carefully edited and then presented both here on youtube and on instagram us cooking us smiling and walking hand in hand perhaps us seeing the ocean and the setting sun this can be done all right there are sides of my life that i consider shallow and meaningless but that are in a sense ripe for the same kind of exploitation that james aspie engages in with his own life now why don't i do that it's not just that it's no good for me and no good for my girlfriend i actually sincerely believe that it's no good for my audience what's remarkable and worth knowing about my life with melissa is not how she looks in a swimsuit or how we might look together hand in hand by the sunset filmed at just the right angle it's much more meaningful for you to know that i'm in a relationship with someone who read aristotle that i'm in a relationship with someone who read thucydides and that she read those books with me and that we learned that stuff together and that whatever it is we're reading and whatever it is we're discussing day by day and day after day we are learning about history and politics and philosophy and languages together not only would i say that the books i read yesterday are more meaningful than the number of push-ups i would even go so far as to say the books i didn't read yesterday the books i haven't had time to read the ideas about the future the research projects the reading etc that melissa and i have talked about doing but didn't get to doing even that is much more worthy of discussion and sharing with the audience than the details of what we ate how much exercise we got or you know hallmark card style romantic occasions such as walking along the beach together but my point in this video is not about keeping it real my point is not about closing the gap between that illusion and reality my point is to question if this is the illusion you're creating who's buying really think about who it is that lacks what you're selling and what the impact is going to be on their lives of you creating and sharing this illusion i'm trying to share with my audience the most profound and most meaningful parts of my life including the most meaningful aspects of my relationship with my girlfriend including the fact that someone who came into my life and immediately became like another mother to my daughter has this meaningful relationship with my whole family has this positive role my intellectual life in my creative life i'm trying to share that with you but in so doing i'm also concealing all kinds of shallow things that are equally real i really did do over 200 workshops yesterday we really do go for walks on the beach right it's not the difference between reality and illusion there's a role of selection here and what you end up with no matter how honest you are is nevertheless a kind of illusion and it is possible genuinely that james aspy has another much more meaningful side to his life that he has concealed to us that because he is on this benighted mission to try to market himself as a millionaire while being flat broke and asking for donations that while he is trying to feature and put forward this unbelievably shallow life it's certainly possible that he has read several books in the last few months and that he could have some kind of meaningful discussion about what he's been reading i actually do not presume that what james aspie is sharing with the public on social media is all that he has to share no i think he is consciously and intentionally making this decision as part of the money-making venture he has already described to you in his own words the problem is who's buying water has no flavor at all when you've already had enough to drink and when you're starving and thirsty it's the most delicious thing in the world there are people who are so starved for self-esteem there are people who are so starved for human love and affection that they look up to and worship people like james aspie and thousands of others who are playing the same game there are people who are so starved for any sense of hope in their own careers in their own economic situation so starved for the possibility of one day just taking a beach vacation that they reach out for and yearn for these illusions that he's presenting on the internet and that is the type of influence he is trying to yield as a so-called social media influencer and the most tragic part of this analysis of all is i know i can't escape from the same formula myself no matter how erudite or morally uplifting i may feel my relationship with my girlfriend is if i commodify it in the same way who is going to reach out for it it's going to be people who precisely are lacking those same things the equivalent things in their life that i am presenting to them that i have in abundance and so i'm trying to like save 25 bucks a week here and there and i'm spending hours and hours on this every day for weeks if i was a little bit more comfortable i could have focused on a lot more productive things for the animal rights movement james what if you're never going to be comfortable enough james if you're watching this video ask yourself seriously in the last five years were you never financially comfortable enough to take that next step you keep talking about you keep hinting at you keep alluding to and from our perspective for us sitting in the audience watching do you think we perceive you as someone who has just not been financially comfortable enough to take that next step to start taking activism seriously i know that from your perspective you just need the audience to support you a little bit more so that you can live this millionaire rock star lifestyle that you think will empower and enable you to change the world but i'm asking you to see it from our perspective because you keep saying if only people could donate more money so that you could be a little bit more comfortable there's this tremendous change you could make and from the audience perspective it's reasonable to say this man will never be comfortable enough if he's living a millionaire lifestyle he's going to want donations so he can lead a multi-millionaire lifestyle if he's eating with a silver spoon he's going to be out here looking for money so that he can upgrade to platinum and if not that then gold james if you're watching this video i want to ask you honestly what if you will never be comfortable enough what if you will never have enough fame what if you will never have enough money to suit yourself you have put yourself in a position where it never can be enough you're trying to compete with some of the richest and most beautiful and most shallow people in the world so that you can present an illusion so glittering so appealing to the hopeless and broken heart of the earth that you become in your own eyes an influencer