Is It Bad That Kids Want To Be YouTubers? - SimplyPodLogical #56

[Music] hey what's up super simpson welcome back to another episode of simply pod logical a simply nail logical podcast it is taco tuesday hello we missed you sorry for missing last taco tuesday but just so you know even if there's no podcast it's still taco tuesday taco tuesday lives on it exists regardless of our presence but uh we're happy to be back we had a good week right then it was your birthday it was my birthday we needed a little time off we had a little gamer moment on april 1st so right a lot going on we streamed we all streamed for ice cream we ate some banana ice cream too did you like my tech talk what tick tock oh yeah ben's not on tick tock i'm not on i made a tick tock christine is unsupervised on tick tock i got my friend to make some banana ice cream for your birthday but i didn't tell ben that i just let him eat it and see what he thinks and well i knew you didn't he knew it wasn't me but yeah i made a tick tock it has like 2 million views 2 million people watched you pick up ice cream from your friend yeah it's like a 40 second video is there just a low bar on tick tock for like what gets popular i don't know like i don't understand it um but yep did you do a little dance did you twist a little twist there's no dancing just eating ice cream all right well we're not talking about tick tock today christine yeah we're talking about youtube and how kids want to be youtubers or tick tockers or online celebrities i guess so yeah there was a tweet that went sort of viral a week or two ago that had a lot of people talking and we thought we could have a conversation around it leading from that so basically this guy tweeted out at zbulgur he goes how depressing our society has failed to provide ambitious role models to our children and he's got a picture of a chart for the top 10 kid jobs kids want and number one is youtuber at 34 percent and number two is blogger or vlogger at 18 percent then musician then actor filmmaker and then only at number six do you start seeing more uh traditional jobs like doctor nurse and then even after that there's tv presenter athlete and then writer and lawyer so god wants to be a lawyer well it's still the top ten right but yeah uh like there were two dominant reactions to this one is like what this guy's saying is like what a terrible thing that kids just want to be online celebrities and i feel like if this had come out a couple years ago i think that would have been overwhelmingly the discourse around it and the perception was youtubers were just uh vain young celebrities who blow money and that was sort of the broader perception or that it was a career that wasn't going to last sure i think is part of the perception yeah and but i think what i noticed when this went sort of viral a couple weeks ago was there was also the reaction of people being like oh kids don't dream of working you know 80 hour weeks as a lawyer boo hoo or hey maybe kids recognize that a lot of online celebrities are actually very hard-working entrepreneurial people so i think there actually is a substantive conversation to have about this but maybe first i think we need to entertain or question where this data even comes from and that's a good question you should always ask yourself when you see something like this right what is the source of what is the source of this data because some people notice that the chart looks you know not the most professional doctor is spelt wrong the percentages don't add up to a hundred it looks a little sus it looks a little sus so christine went down a bit of a rabbit hole trying to figure out where this data come from what do your results show us christine this is a very interesting research endeavor i had to take because i had to find the source of this and i don't really have any other keywords than other other than like jobs kids youtuber right and there's already a lot of media articles on that sure but i just stumbled across the exact same graphic with like the blue border exact same picture that we see used in this tweet so i i believe that this is sourced from a 2017 article in the sun which is like a newspaper like a british yeah i think it's like uk well there's also a sun in toronto i guess it's probably international i don't know okay but i saw that i stumbled across this exact same picture and it originated i i think as my research has found thus far from 2017 and it was a very short article that was just basically like kids want to be youtubers um and they cited their source for this data as a travel company named first choice who surveyed a thousand kids but normally newspapers will like link to said source and you'd find the actual report maybe written by whoever was commissioned to do the study but there was no link and when i searched for first choice survey kids youtubers and all those keywords i found absolutely nothing so i'm left with where is the actual survey what was the methodology all i have is the sun showing this exact table and saying it was done in 2017 of a thousand kids without ages specified by a travel company yeah so i guess uh the first thing to react to is the fact that like some dinky survey that was done three years ago somehow ends up like being captioned in a tweet and all of a sudden becoming a story in march april 2021 right yeah and i think it it this kind of thing continues to be recited by media because it's such a popular and clickable topic so we'll see the same thing like every year they'll be kids want to be youtubers when they grow up big reaction you know they just ask the audience to react yeah so this isn't the first time there's been a small scale survey done like this there was one done in 2019 i remember it going around in the news and it was actually commissioned by like lego i think like lego was a toy but the toy company lego was doing a survey i think in partnership or for some program with nasa just to look at what kids understanding of jobs and space were like it had nothing to do with being a youtuber or whatever but part of the survey like somewhere deep down in the questions was their career aspirations astronaut being one of them and then youtuber was somewhere in there i guess and that's what some media decided to pick up from that study and so where you see um uh like media reporting on how the uk and the us children want to be youtubers and none want to be astronauts but in china where the same study was also run apparently it's the opposite there's more kids who want to be astronauts and very few who want to be a youtuber that was also like a high level finding that the media picked up on and said like kids in china want to be astronauts and you know smart things but kids dumb american kids just want to be youtubers yeah i remember seeing that narrative too and yeah that lego study i remember seeing the articles coming out of it right i looked into it as well because you're right those questions it was asking kids questions like about space to gauge whether they understood like correct what sort of careers could sort of go into space exploration like there were questions about like agriculture on there yeah you remember this too okay so yeah the purpose of that survey wasn't to see what kids wanted to be when they grew up but the fact that there was one question and media found the results of the survey it's a much more clickable topic to be like kids don't want to be astronauts they want to be a vlogger and then the cultural difference like there's a whole can of worms to open up there whether it's you know there are legitimate cultural differences or media censorship but yeah i think that was just a much more exciting topic than five out of ten kids don't understand that agriculture is an important job for space exploration or something like that right it's useful for nasa and you know their future recruitment efforts i guess so at least the survey was a little bit better but in both cases i think i would just invite people to really question like uh what these data are really based on what the purpose of the survey was and often you'll see like was the first one like what like a thousand kids said a thousand kids yeah how much don't know where don't know who don't know how it was sampled no idea yeah so a thousand kids out there in the world are speaking for like every child in the world when you see headlines for like this right and we have personal experience working on surveys and yeah do you want to jump in here so when i saw this i was like i wonder if there's any real research sorry when i say real i mean like more robust research that has done something similar so there's something called the oecd which is like an international effort to look at jobs and occupations and there's a subsection of that that looks at students or kids aspirations specifically i think they they use the same survey across like 40 something countries so they can standardize it and there's something like half a million students that participate in this so i looked at that to see are there any is there anything like this about jobs kids want with youtubers on these like actually large large scale surveys and the answer is not really because they don't have categories that are this specific so the one i looked at the closest thing to a youtuber like a category would be actor which isn't the same thing like if you ask a kid today do you want to be an actor maybe that makes them less excited than youtuber it doesn't elicit the same uh kind of spirit as what you would have or like film is filmmaker on there something like that or i don't know because it wasn't at least in the top 15 categories so the the results study only tell you the top 15 but i guess the point is like these often longitudinal surveys that are trying to track these things over time in a very methodical way yeah they might have categories that are are built to last over time they're not just going to add you know twitter influencer just for the one time that becomes a relevant career necessarily right yeah that's interesting and i think the challenging thing with these long-term longitudinal studies is even though they're very robust and can you can get like really good data out of them and compare them across countries and compare them over decades is they probably don't have much flexibility in evolving those categories as time goes on because once you change a category or add it you can't measure a pre and post a before and after because it just doesn't exist so their top categories are still like doctor teacher lawyer veterinarian because those are things that have existed for decades and will presumably continue to exist for decades yeah and just a more general point like when surveys when like public opinion data like this is trying to get the opinions of young people that's often a particular challenge because uh a lot of these surveys are still done by just phoning people and how many young people are answering the phone i don't even answer my phone and i'm not young anymore from a number they don't recognize to tell them what they want to be when they grow up or just anything right like it's kind of it's very well known that when you're conducting surveys like this and we've done this in our professional life uh your old people answer the phone that is who still answers the phone in 2021 right and they like to talk to you and maybe they're home alone and lonely yeah and they'll answer your questions young people are not and that means so if you're trying to make your results represent a broader population that includes young people often the very few responses from young people you get have to be sort of extrapolated out to represent the views of many young people and the results aren't necessarily representative of the whole population you're talking about when you haven't stratified by like region by socioeconomic status or by background um or by exposure to social media like if you ask this question of a bunch of kids who live in remote communities it might look completely different so you you can't just it's very difficult i find for small scale surveys who like interview a thousand kids and give you no information about the methodology and like who these kids were were they all like friends from the same school because that's not an accurate representation of all kids in america right so just something to keep in mind that doesn't mean like we're not saying this to completely disqualify the sentiment of the results i just think whenever i see any research study where i try to find the root and it says like a thousand of someone were interviewed and there's no more information available i'm always a little skeptical yeah and it's also just important like there's debates in the social sciences about whether public opinion uh exists as a thing a real phenomena right because like you kind of create it by asking the question it doesn't exist until you ask it maybe this is getting a little no i like that though because this had the category youtuber to even ask whereas those larger broader scale like more robust studies that you see like governments funding um they don't have categories this specific so we're not going to get that information from the larger scale studies studies but when you you know commission a small survey company to do it and you specifically are seeking information on how many kids want to be youtubers then you're also in a way biasing the outcome because you know pretty much what you want to see right yeah but i think just more fundamentally sometimes the question even creates the phenomena so like a famous example is there was a u.s president that got diagnosed with cancer i think at one point and some newspaper published like how many people think he will survive cancer and like people answered yes or no and they printed this in the paper and it's like like what does that mean or represent right why is that yeah that's not anyways sort of a funny example to question like what what the data even represents anyway this was kind of a long tangent that kind of nerded out a little bit but i don't think we're actually questioning the results in a way because anecdotally i think we can accept at face value that a lot of young people now do aspire to be online uh famous people and it's it's not necessarily that they like say they want to be uh filmmakers like they'll say i want to be youtuber it's almost like their expression is that they want to be famous on the internet not necessarily that they even aspire or have an affinity to do the work necessarily that goes into that i also think it depends on the age group specifically so when we say kids are we talking like six-year-olds who are just on their ipad watching youtube kids and they watch like ryan's toy reviews and they're like i want to do what he does like he's he's still a child actually so that's a good question when you looked into these surveys is it clear what sort of age groups we're even talking about so the the more robust cross-country one was students age 15. so okay at that age so presumably they have a better you know understanding of what's realistic i guess because well maybe i i just mean compared to a six-year-old they have a better understanding of the world obviously and they're almost at the point where they're making decisions to start moving into a career path might be applying to university um the lego one i believe was like six to twelve or something six to twelve it was younger so like you're asking six-year-olds what they want to be when they grow up like when i was six i probably thought i wanted to be a helicopter when i grew up you know like what kind of questions i wanted to be donkey kong or something that's kind of ridiculous to ask kids that right i think yeah and just the the ethics of asking a child or even like a teenager who's still thinking about things and trying to make up their mind like what you want to be when you grow up is tough because i feel like just the question never mind like your parents or relatives asking you the same question like 10 times during thanksgiving dinner what are you gonna do after school um it can weigh a lot on you when you haven't made up your mind yet and when you're a kid or a young teenager you don't have to know the answer yet so sometimes i find that pressure that comes from usually older people asking you this like hounding you like where's the answer what's it gonna be like you need to decide like isn't helpful in helping that young person actually come to that decision most people i know didn't know what they wanted to do when they were at the end of high school and even the ones who did didn't end up doing the thing they really thought they were going to do and i think that's okay what did you want to do do you remember i think we've talked about this already i thought maybe i wanted to be a lawyer at one point i don't know because it's not that interesting and yeah actually so this is a good point a lot of kids are just modeling what they know so you'll see on any of these sort of polls teacher comes up a lot do you think they're especially for young girls yes yeah but do you really think that that many young people really are confident they want to be teacher or is that just a role model of something an adult does that they know that they can kind of imagine themselves doing whereas most careers are just so foreign like you don't really understand what that job could be right that's a really good point because most young people or all children will at some point go to the doctor you know they might see their doctor once a year and feel like oh they're so smart or whatever they're exposed to their doctor they see their teacher on a daily basis during school and more recently they see youtubers and social media stars as they begin to put themselves on social media and observe so exactly what are these six to 12 year olds being exposed to the teacher they see five days a week maybe over zoom and you know jake paul who they watch on youtube on a loop every night you know that's what they're seeing and if they're if a lot of what you want to do when you grow up is based off what gives you sort of financial success which i think is a huge part of it for a lot of people seeing youtubers who make content specifically about how financially successful they are of course that is going to make a bunch of kids just think that would be great i'd love to be mr beast and just give people cars but does this like i understand a you know 15 year old understanding that but does a six-year-old have an appreciation for that like if we're talking that young of kids i don't i don't think so for money for an idea that money is really important i think kids learn that at a very young age with the help of social media yeah but you know like you see what your parents do you see what teachers do you see what youtubers do right so basically these results are are just a reflection of what kids are seeing and this is one funny reaction i saw to this tweet specifically was this isn't what kids want to be when they grow up this is what kids think they want to be before like the harsh reality of the world hits them in the face right i mean isn't that always normal like when you you know a decade ago we asked kids what they want to be and maybe they said astronauts just cause space is cool man like that's what we think when we're in grade two but then we like learn oh you got to do all this math you got to do all the science and maybe i'm not actually interested in being an astronaut i just thought space was cool well i think it became like the go-to example like back in the 70s when like there's no coincidence that the few people that went to space and went to the moon uh was a very exclusive club of people they were like the most famous people in the world too so fame i think actually had something to do with it but i think where parents feel better about the astronaut answer is that you're right to qualify to be an astronaut i think you need a degree in stem and i think you need real practical experience in aviation or something like that before you can even apply to be an astronaut so you can make the argument fall back only a handful of people are ever going to be astronauts but if you have the qualifications to even apply to be an astronaut there's a whole field there's a whole bunch of different vocations that are available to you if you have the dream of being a youtuber i would argue that there are less job opportunities if you fall short of being a financially successful youtuber there are jobs in marketing and social media editing and social media so like i'm not trying to underplay that right but if you're really shooting for the stars of i want to be mr beast you know yeah that's tough i guess that's something that isn't really uh explained and why would it be so when you see like the top most successful youtubers you're not seeing the 99 of people who also want to be youtubers and aren't as successful so when a child says i want to be a youtuber they are thinking i i think of someone like mr beast jake paul david dobrik you know and all these people that have been incredibly successful but those people and their success are not an accurate representation of the average youtuber or the average person in this profession yeah it would like being it would like it would be like aspiring to be the top 0.001 of any field you were aspiring to be a part of right so if a kid's dreaming of being a doctor it would like be like them thinking i can be the best doctor in the world right yeah not that there's anything wrong i just want to make this clear with aspiring to want to be one of the top or the best or to cure cancer if you want to be a doctor oh no and and that's that's great and no one no one wants to discourage kids to not think that i also wouldn't want to discourage kids from pursuing jobs in the arts and not just want to work the more traditional jobs that maybe their parents want for them i think as you grow older you know you do have to grapple with the reality of like for me i thought i wanted to be a jazz drummer in high school and you know i could see my life having gone that totally different path and maybe i would have been incredibly happy with what i did like gigging at clubs i like i'd like it's very unlikely i would have been like financially successful in any way really right but maybe i would just would have loved what i do and i know people who don't make a lot of money but they love their job so much it doesn't really matter because they still have very fulfilling lives for me i made a decision that i i wanted to make some more responsible decisions and have a more secure job and then just have things outside of what i do for a living that make me enjoy my life even if i don't love what i'm doing from nine to five and i think you know it's just a very realistic conversation you have as a young adult i think that's a good point and it's a personal decision and we shouldn't discourage kids from jobs where you know they're less likely to be in the top one percent but at the same time i think it's important to give kids the information that they may need to help make that decision maybe not a six-year-old if they're you know a little young to come for him but certainly when you're getting ready to prepare post prepare for post-secondary school if that's a decision that you want to make if it leads you in the direction of a career that you want of course um i've always been way more like practical um in the sense that i wanted to secure a job that i knew was going to make me have a sustainable like living that i was comfortable with even though i knew i am like at heart a creative person so i i i made the decision to seek out like a field in criminology criminal justice i looked into what kind of jobs were there and while i was never 100 sure like exactly which job i would end up with i didn't know i would be specifically a data analyst like in a particular field of crime statistics but i just knew that there were jobs available in that field i was interested in that topic and that it was something that i could pretty much not guarantee nothing is ever guaranteed but i had a good chance of finding a good job in that field if i did everything to to meet the qualifications to get into that field and that's that was school in this case at the same time that didn't stop me from pursuing nail art and other creative passions that i had and i never looked at those as a way to make money uh it just i stumbled upon that when i realized after posing youtube videos for a few months that you could monetize them yeah you could watch our last video yeah find out more find out how much money was made there um that was a shock to me and was never my goal but i also don't want to undermine people who do set out in a creative career with the goal of making money because i also find that highly commendable in the sense that you need to work incredibly hard in any creative field right to ensure success and to find um longevity and some kind of like permanence and guarantee because it is a much more difficult career path to choose and to make sure you have some kind of security i acknowledge the challenge the harsh reality is a lot of people work hard and will not be successful and i know that's like successful though uh it's a good point it really depends what like kind of like i already mentioned right if you love what you do all day and you're making enough money to survive and be healthy then i guess that is success but i i guess i just i feel like often kids are sold this dream of like you could do whatever you want follow your dreams if you work hard everything will be fine a lot of people work hard and don't necessarily have the best lives and that's just sort of the harsh reality of the world we live in yeah okay that's got too depressing did you feel did your parents put pressure on you to follow a certain path when it came to things like a career yeah i think we've mentioned this before but i i did want to i did think about maybe going to college in in canada there is a difference i was thinking about college for something like arts or graphic design in particular because i really liked making videos on windows movie maker like 15 years ago 20 years ago my parents definitely encouraged me to go to university which was the more academic route because of i guess my grades because you needed a certain grade to get into university and they were like well you have these grades why would you waste them that was their logic and then also neither my parents finished university so so it was a big deal that you it was a big deal that i i was eligible to apply and would presumably get accepted and they felt like i should i should do that and i think the automatic response like hearing this story is like oh that's so sad that they forced you to university like they did not i was not forced into university i think i had a moment of like teenage angst where i just was contemplating like not doing what they want me to do but in the end i'm glad that they they said you know i should consider still going to university obviously i had their their help and support of my family to pay for university so i was lucky enough to have that and university was more than college but they were and my family was willing to help but i am glad with that decision because once i got there i realized like this is what i want to do yeah you you want to be careful not to not make the decision just because that's what your parents want you to do as well right because it's there is a sort of point in your life where i think you do want to rebel against expectations a lot of people experience this but uh for me like my mom really wanted one of me or my siblings to be a doctor is anyone a doctor no none of us became doctors too much to her disappointment but i i would say that a lot of that was her projecting like her thoughts about what a successful career would be right rather than it being about us what we wanted to do and i remember when i thought i wanted to go into the law maybe be a lawyer or whatever i had a really reasonable conversation with my dad about it and he sort of pointed out and maybe this is a useful thing for young people to hear is there are certain career paths like getting a degree in in legal studies or going to law school that doesn't mean like you have to be a lawyer who's like in a courtroom arguing things that is one path you could go down that actually opens a lot of different avenues i think a lot of people wouldn't expect with that sort of education right you could be legal for a you know it's like a social media company they need lawyers too yeah you could be private counsel there's a lot of interesting things you could do with a law degree and i would still argue that just having some education after high school whatever it is is valuable even if you don't do something that is very specifically tied to that degree program i'd like to think but i you know also want to acknowledge that a lot of people go into a lot of debt going to school particularly in some countries more than others right yeah so for if you were a parent of a kid right now and they wanted to be a youtuber do you think they should be concerned about this christine because that seems to be like a lot of the narrative around this at least on one side of the argument yeah um maybe a mad like okay if if your child is like six years old and they want to be jake paul and they say they're savage maybe you just hope they grow out of that right but maybe if your kid is 15 and they still are expressing that and when they do something wrong they say it's because i'm a maverick how concerned are you okay uh i am not a parent and do not plan to be a parent that being said somehow i've turned into like a mother-like figure to lots of people who watch me so i do have this kind of you know i worry about the realities of others as far as i can and and um uh sorry i don't mean to put you on the spot here you don't have to i know it's a kind of like an impossible question and i think maybe the answer is it would really depend on what you observe of your kid and their passion and interest in that thing because i could imagine a situation where you're you know your kid says i don't want to go to college or university i want to be a youtuber and you sort of see them not really being passionate about that thing and they just sort of think they want that success but not really the work that goes into it that would be a huge concern but if i would like to think if i was a parent and had like an 18 year old who was really considering what they wanted to do when they were super passionate about making videos and very invested in it emotionally and they were putting the work in i would like to think i wouldn't be the parent who would be like no you have to go get a traditional job yeah i think i would never put barriers or limitations on what they want to explore doing because remember as a kid you're still young you still like this isn't necessarily going to pan out yet right when um so i i would never tell a kid what they can't or are not allowed to do if they are interested in a career that i am worried about in terms of their financial longevity or security give them information about that career and it's not to be biased it's just you know you have to help guide them and do whatever you can so they can explore and come to their own conclusions because maybe they're okay with that risk of no financial um security and that's fine too right so i just think like being um to like a naysayer to kids never really works out because when you tell a kid no and you like don't even give a good reason other than you're just biased and have some old school traditional sense of success like they're gonna see right through that and be like well i'm not listening to you mom yeah there's definitely been a huge cultural shift to i think the kinds of things young people are looking for in careers like if you talk to business owners who have been hiring people for a long time they'll tell you or i've heard this for sure that like the kind of conversations you had with employees 10 20 years ago is very different than the conversations you have with kids now and one aspect of that is like young employees now want to understand like the value and like the why of what they're doing there's less of this sort of expectation of just like you're the dutiful employee who just does exactly what they're told even if you don't understand the context of it and i don't think that's a bad thing i think like like that is actually a good trend and i sort of applaud people who are more inclined to care about what they do and the value of what they do and aren't just looking for like i just need the secure job and the white picket fence and the red door house and good luck ever affording a house these days and i think that's a good point because to be a youtuber to want to be a youtuber isn't necessarily just to want to be you know like an [ __ ] throwing around money with girls on lambos or whatever there are a lot of great youtubers that kids maybe are looking up to and thinking i want to do that right so like some of mr beast's examples like are really good acts of donation or charity and you know giving back to others and maybe that's what kids are also looking to as something aspirational not just because you're so rich you can give away houses but because you're you get to do all these good things and there's a community that you can share in that with so i do think there's some positivity to come from the idea that kids want to be youtubers too because there are a lot of good youtubers who are good role models and influencers the problem with this tweet and the first response we saw meaning that like how depressing is that there's still an entire group or maybe generation of people that don't see that side of youtubers and the impact of social media celebrities how that can be incredibly positive on young people too yeah like when i think of the youtubers we know and respect and even some of the ones we don't respect i still think of them primarily as like business owners or entrepreneurs you know they're creating jobs for teams of people often they're you know very motivated people like there's a lot of things to admire about these people and even the ones who are like morally problematic actually still have a lot of that sort of entrepreneurial yeah spirit to them which isn't necessarily the worst thing you want your kid i mean like some of them sell scams so i wouldn't aspire to that but you can't deny that the work ethic and entrepreneurial aspect is there yeah and maybe this is a tangent i'd like to go down this road though like a lot of the popular people on youtube are what how do i put this uh a lot of the people on youtube that we sort of criticize or think are maybe problematic to some degree uh are popular with very young audiences and i would argue that a lot of that is like they are the version of what very young people think is cool so think of a guy like david dobrik who's going through some controversy right now right there's an article in insider by cat ten barge about how in one of his vlogs it involved a skit about how one of the vlog squad guys was going to bring a bunch of girls over to have a threesome and it is alleged that those girls weren't all of drinking age they were provided alcohol and one of them was assaulted sexually assaulted by one of them and that's an awful thing i would encourage anyone to read that story if you're interested in that that sort of case i think it's really important reporting going on but when i think about david dobrik's content for years and i've sort of always felt this way is we've sort of said this before and i think we got a little backlash for it he's basically acting like a frat boy and he's his whole group they're acting like the version of what like a 13 year old boy would think it is very cool for a young 20 year old to be doing yeah but when there are other adults in the room it is super bizarre and i bet if you played the average david dobrik video for someone in their mid-20s or 30s they would have you know been able to react and think like oh it's super bizarre that he's just making a bunch of jokes about offering uh women money to have sex and like that's just such a joke like a lot of david dobrik humor was just really low hanging fruit like stereotypes joke oh you're the short guy oh you're the black guy i'll make jokes about this and yeah if if i have any concern for the sort of kids wannabe youtubers thing it is because i worry that a lot of the role models they're thinking of when they aspire to be that are these sort of very juvenile kind of problematic examples of people and too often like the most popular youtubers kind of embody those values whether it's their behavior reinforcing stereotypes or participating in like flex culture look how much money i have i think you're right there is a trend that a lot of the most famous or popular youtubers um seem to have controversies kind of come up and maybe they fade away or maybe they stick but that is maybe another element of why this tweet and parents who may be concerned about their kids wanting to be youtubers have some valid reason to worry or think about that the possibility of just putting your kid or your kid later putting themselves on the internet can open up a whole world of risk um just in the sense of like you are now becoming a public face a famous person or if that is your goal that's not the same thing as like i want to have a long-term successful career in i don't know like merchandising or whatever like a traditional career path because fame is a whole added element that no one is prepared for no matter how much you think oh i want to be a celebrity that'll be so cool and fun it'll be easy like i could do that i could get on stage no problem no one is prepared for that until you you're there i think a lot of people become victims of their success in that way too and i think dobrik is probably a good example of this like this is kind of speculation on my part but when you surround yourself with friends who uh make a lot of money off of the fact that they are friends with you no one in the room is going to be the one to tell you you're kind of being an [ __ ] you know who in david dobrik's life is going to be like like hey dude like that was that was messed up like no he's just surrounded by people who only have livelihoods because of him and this is not just a youtube problem like you you'll see this with traditional celebrities too who just hang around with people who who tell them they're great and are on their payroll right yeah because everyone around you benefits from the fact that you're successful so they almost don't want to tell you when you're doing anything wrong unless it's going to ruin your career and then subsequently affect that but if we're talking about the david dobrik stuff specifically not that i really enjoy going into particular case studies about other people on this platform especially on this podcast that's not really what we do here but i i will say that over the years like i would occasionally come come across one of his videos and the type of content that he made although i'm not familiar with every single video it gave me this like sick feeling of it reminded me a lot of uh dealing with men young men in university in that kind of age group um i'm 32 now but it reminded me of 10 years ago in my life the kind of attitudes and behaviors that young men had in the way they talked about women in the way they spoke to their other friends about women behind their backs and the kinds of like stereotypical behaviors that have been so normalized for so long but they don't really get called out when you're the cool kids you know because that's the cool thing to do so like as an example um just the idea of of calling girls like a [ __ ] or a [ __ ] because you know they did something with your friend or because they won't do something with you it's another way that i've seen um did i did i ever tell you that someone made a facebook group about me this isn't like undergrad in undergrad um yeah because i i wouldn't sleep with them so they made a facebook group called christine is a [ __ ] or something like that and they thought it was funny and it was a bunch of boys like age 19 or something and you know they're all joining and trash talking and and i was hurt by it and they never really considered how that was mean and that was just like one example of so many things that i remember just being around a lot of young young men and young boys and you know there's things like they're talking [ __ ] about other girls and that i would witness this um about how like oh i'm gonna get this girl tonight or you think you can get her watch me get her first and things that are just really disrespectful and at the time i remember that being just like so normal that you know guys people i was friends with were just acting that way and i thought they're going to grow out of this and that was kind of the attitude i had as a young person so with that being said i i think like most of the guys i knew did grow out of this i'm not talking about like my past and accusing people um but it's just sad that when you're at that age you do these things to impress your male peers because it's like cool and still 10 years later that is still a thing like the kinds of behaviors and attitudes i see in in a lot of david stobrick's vlogs like from last year not from 10 years ago is the same spirit and that's why i've never really been a fan of like watching content that's just a bunch of guys laughing at [ __ ] because so often it involves like the humiliation or just making fun of like a woman in some way and that makes me uncomfortable yeah uh first of all no no i'm a little emotional i'm sorry you went through that that's terrible and i guess it's really tragic that a lot of women can probably relate to something like that that's the other thing is i don't have any female friends who didn't experience something like that or have like a close friend or someone they know who's been treated like that or talk [ __ ] about like that when they were in their teens or early 20s yeah and you just i guess it makes you or makes anyone who cares about this more sensitive to very popular creators with young people who had all sort of uh sort of support that sort of you know social dynamic or or have that sort of value or lack of values and are showing that to young people that it's okay to make jokes and things like that i think that's the one thing i think was missing from david dobrik's apology like i and well i can't appreciate but presumably the victims the people actually affected by the situation in particular were apologized to publicly i don't know what went on privately there's that sure but what he didn't say or express in a meaningful way i think anyways was like telling his young male fans that just in general never mind i mean yes it's important that particular situation victim was apologized to but outside of that there's such a broader impact of his like daily actions for years and his behaviors and treatments and his whole group and how they treat women that he didn't really like say guys the way i act and the way i talk and my friends do too and about women like it's not cool yeah like i wish something like that was said because there's so many young boys who still look up to him who are still a fan who will accept the apology that he gave to a particular person and then just continue on behaving presumably like kind of a dick yeah but that's not that this is a defense of dobrik but everyone expects uh creators in this situation to apologize right away and like every minute they haven't apologized is them like you know not responding right but to actually believe that authentically david dobrik has evolved as a person and doesn't think those things are funny anymore that he thought were funny a week ago i don't think i would believe an apology that just said hey all of a sudden i've had an epiphany and all of a sudden i don't think any of those jokes are funny anymore i think that sort of growth doesn't just happen overnight and it doesn't happen the day you lose all your sponsorships from the major companies that used to support you yeah and it's a repeated pattern of behavior i do believe that in general people can change and grow and i that's happened in my life absolutely there's people who've been [ __ ] that i've witnessed and then eventually they kind of grow up and they're not like that anymore and they turn out to be decent people and that happens and that's okay but especially when you're putting things like on the internet and you have an awareness of millions of people that are giving you feedback for what you're putting on the internet it it clouds but also substantiates your behaviors in a weird way because it's usually your fans that are encouraging you to do more and more and do more of this give us more so you tend to lose perspective i think as a famous person on the internet putting content out there so if we get maybe a little bit of a more lighthearted note to end on i'm not even sure this is like we don't know david dobrik we know you met him once or twice just in passing and he was very nice seems like a very charming guy in person but i'll never forget like the one david dobrik story i have is we ran into him at vidcon once said a quick hello and he was there with some of the guys in his crew and like we were just hanging out on in an area of vidcon where uh like the fans aren't allowed to gather so you have a little privacy and i i saw like in the dist like maybe he's not right next to us but i could see him and he pulls his camera out and he's with the guy in his group jonah who they just make fun of for being fat and i he's pull he has his camera out and it's like in that guy's face and i can he's like egging him on like he's saying something i can't hear what he's saying but eventually like the jonah just turns around goes like like stop i'm not gonna do that and then i just see david put his camera down and i'm like this was years ago and i remember ever since then every time i saw david dobrik video i'm just thinking in the back of my mind like he's getting this content by like basically antagonizing people into doing things that are entertaining for a four minute video and ever since then like seeing how this sausage was made i had a completely different perception of of what that content even is even if you don't go to the extremes of like the more awful things that were maybe done behind the scenes i just can't watch like a group of young boys anymore together making content like it's just like every time i tune into something like that there's a comment that just puts me off and i'm just like i'm annoyed yeah all right do you want to be a youtuber when you grow up still well why don't we talk about some good youtubers oh okay you want to end on a positive note yeah who's a good who if if there are parents out there with kids who want to be youtubers when they grow up but they're specifically mentioning these specific people you know anyone really come to mind for you um mark rober that's a good answer it's a is a good one recently he made a video well he's always done those like glitter bomb videos where he'll uh it's like for thieves he'll stage a package on a doorstep and a thief will come along and steal the package but when the they open it it's actually just a glitter bomb that exposes uh explodes and then there's a phone camera that records them yeah yeah so then he he did another video recently where they were actually trying to track uh where how did you want me to explain yeah so basically a lot of old people who answer the phone and answer opinion polls they also answer phone calls from scam artists mostly coming from india right and they'll often get tricked into sending money in the mail to temporary addresses that people pick up the money and like they split it like the money mule splits it with the call center back in india that tricked the old person into sending it there and there's some really clever ways they trickled people into doing this and it's not just old people right just just people who are computer literate i think fall for this sometimes but anyway mark rower teamed up with another uh youtube creator who is sort of an expert at uh kind of intercepting these scams like while this scammer is trying to get your banking info and trying to trick you into sending money he'll sort of reverse hack them so he can see what's going on on their side and he finds out where they are things like that anyway he teamed up with mark rober and the glitter bomb experiment of trying to catch people stealing packages off porches actually led to like a really fascinating investigation of uh what happens to these scam artists when the like they basically wanted to use that same mechanism they had for catching porch pirates to catch these money mules let's say so they figured out there was like a network of people and they rent an airbnb to send the money to but they just wait outside for the the delivery man to show up so they can intercept the package and they've got footage and like surveillance and cell phone footage and caught some of the people engaged in this sort of network of scam scams so mark rovers making literally fighting crimes like batman he's making entertaining videos he's being a great role model and he's literally helping the fbi and like that's a super high standard right like there are youtubers like you who can respect and aspire to be who aren't fighting crime or like even the educational aspect like that's great to be educational too but it's okay to like just be entertaining there are plenty of creators on this platform that i would you know be proud to call friends and you know i think are our are good role models like obviously have a bias i think you are a good role model to young women i think sophia is a good role model i you know mark rober is a great answer i don't know mr beast but yeah a lot of his philanthropic stuff is pretty cool yeah there there are good examples of youtubers i feel like in the past maybe people have this impression of us that we've been discouraging that other people should try and be youtubers i think in some older simply videos we've kind of joked like oh you know don't be a youtuber it's you're not gonna get anywhere like it's not a real career or it's not a real job we might have through jokes participated in that so i just want to clarify that um early on when i was starting out in youtube land i was absolutely not at the point where i could let's say like replace my future lifetime earnings from my day job with youtube like this was early on i realized there was a lot of money but i truly did not think that the money i was making when i first started making money would last for five years like to to current now i thought it was gonna be like maybe i'll be big for like a year or two and i remember there was other creators telling me like you're famous now you got two years make them make as much money make as many videos as you can because after that it's gonna drop it's gonna go away and i was like okay that sounds like reasonable advice and what i hear from the media and like discourse that you know fame is fleeting and you're going to be broke after this so you better save your money and think smart and think long term what are you going to do after youtube i was already thinking about all these things in like 2015. and it's true like a lot of people look at like the successful youtubers you know their peak success typically there are outliers there are exceptions to the rule but most people aren't very successful for many years so i think that's ultimately the message that i wanna underscore is the most successful people you see on youtube are set for life generally speaking the most i mean you see the most successful sorry the like the top tier of you and it also depends how they save their money like if they buy 800 lambos then they're not set for life well actually they could sell them but like i feel like you're right in old simply videos we used to sort of play devil's advocate i guess you could say because i think we were seeing a lot of youtubers give pretty irresponsible advice to young people which like i know it sounds great and it's like very aspirational to just hear like follow your dreams and do whatever you want but you know i just don't think that's necessarily realistic advice to give i don't think it's good advice just follow just like it's lazy advice it's uh an easy way out advice it's advice that makes people go like oh yeah you're so smart i can just do but it's not practical and maybe that's just me and my personality trait of a logistician i think like i need practical advice so if someone told me like just follow my dreams like i'm gonna roll my eyes at them because it's not real advice to me but like maybe some people mean that genuinely too but i also think our perception is some youtubers are just selling that idea to you part of their whole appeal and their content is about selling this sort of aspirational idea you're watching their videos dreaming of how you could be like them and they're telling you hey just sign up become a member of my fan of my family and maybe you could have the success too like anything like that creeped us out to the point where i think we really did sort of take very much the opposite stance that's exactly what happened that's how i feel like it was around the time when jake paul was promoting like ed fluence or yeah like he had these programs where you would pay money to sign up and you'd learn that like the tips and tricks to be as famous and rich as him on youtube like that's not selling anything of value i'm sorry like that's not that's not real he is incredibly lucky and fortunate he works hard not saying he doesn't work hard but you can't just tell kids sign up for 10 bucks a month and like you'll be me yeah that's not true and so i remember at that time when that was happening uh we didn't have a podcast so we didn't have a long time to talk about this but occasionally and simply videos yeah mom and dad i remember like us speaking on that mostly to offer a counterbalance to what was going on in that era which was people like jake paul saying you can be whatever you want you can be a youtuber [ __ ] school you know i didn't go to school look at me you can do this and i was like oh my god no no stop no stop like please think carefully there are things that matter um and that's where maybe some early ideas uh come from when it comes to like us suggesting that you it maybe isn't so realistic to just be a youtuber and we want people to think a little bit more about their futures and take it seriously when you consider your career options in education but that's no fun but i'm it's not to it's not intended to discourage and it is also not ever to suggest to people like you have to follow the same path that i did with education or job because everyone has a different desire and everyone has a different skill set and what they like want to do with those skills so like i apologize if i never fully fleshed that out because i feel like in my very brief like few minute conversations we might have had on simply years ago there was a few people who left with that impression that i was like dismissing you if you didn't go to school like me or you know wanted to be like a beauty blogger or something and i thought that oh like that was fleeting like i was coming from a place of trying to offer practical advice in the sense of being a counterbalance to all the opposite advice i was seeing on youtube that i just don't think is helpful yeah that's very well said you got that off your chest you can be what you want to set out to be but everyone should be informed about what requirements will they will need to get there what work is gonna needed to to get there and just the reality of it like try and talk to other people investigate what they the the day in day outs of that particular job and what you're going to need to to do to get them just have realistic expectations about what sort of implication that has for what sort of lifestyle you may live too all right apologies to cat ten barge we were going to have her on today to talk about her reporting i'm just kidding we weren't actually people still ask if i'm serious about these i have to point out i just say whatever name pops into my head then just says on this podcast but i do want to know it and appreciate there are a lot of young female journalists who are kind of covering the influencer space or just tech space now that are doing a really good job i think and facing a lot of harassment for doing their job as well well they're facing harassment from the fans of the people they're profiling fans i think just young female journalists too for some reason are just such a target of of mostly right-wing losers on twitter mostly mostly yeah yeah yeah so shout out shout out to all my women all the female journalists out there taylor lorenz new york times doing great that sounded condescending it wasn't supposed to be yeah i appreciate your reporting thank you man okay i'll be happy okay we're gonna stop now thank you guys for tuning in happy taco tuesday i'm glad you're back are you feeling refreshed for tacos i feel like eating tacos right now if that's what you're asking let's do that let's do that right now all right see y'all later thanks for tuning in see you later bye [Music] [Music] you

Channel: SimplyPodLogical

Views: 219,834

Rating: 4.9729872 out of 5

Keywords: simplypodlogical, simply nailogical, simplynailogical, simplynailogical podcast, simply podcast, nailogical podcast, cristine and ben, cristine & ben, simplynailogical boyfriend, pod logical, youtuber podcast, YouTube, career, kids, children, jobs, career aspiration, how to be a YouTuber, grow up, adult, David dobrik, apology, culture, YouTube culture, polls, twitter, when I grow up

Id: 1dBmLgg5NLI

Length: 61min 15sec (3675 seconds)

Published: Tue Apr 06 2021