Pickup Truck Guy: A Brief Psychoanalysis

for whatever reason my videos on pickup trcks generate by far the most comments of any of the videos I make mostly extremely high quality comments so clearly there's something I've managed to tap into here that I haven't taken the time to fully understand and today we're finally going to Grapple with it an exploration and psychoanalysis of pickup Trek guy coming up next this is City nerd weekly content on cities and transportation viewer suggested topics always welcome but really today I'm just looking for trouble so just to recap since I haven't touched this topic in like a year and a half and I do have a lot of new viewers since then I made a video about pickup trucks where I pointed out that they're expensive dangerous inefficient rarely used for their intended purpose and really just kind of look stupid it became my most commented on and disliked video ever to that point well fast forward a few months I made the possibly inadvisable decision to make a response video to All the hate I got in the comments on the first video well recently I went through my analytics and discovered that that response video now has even more comments than the original and even though I've made a lot of videos since then that have had a lot more views none of them has gotten nearly the amount of Engagement in the comments section so today's video is very meta it's a response video to comments I got on a response video to comments I got on yet another video and I'm sure this won't be the last I'm afraid to tell you that this this is likely to be an accelerating infinite regress until we finally reach the singularity a quick note about how I handle comments my current approach is about 24 hours after I release a video I read and respond to the 10 comments that appear at the top of the comment feed which is usually the highest quality comments based on engagement and they're almost always thoughtful or constructive or at least funny the really stupid and lazy comments sink to the bottom of the feed like so much Jets some but for this one I read all 4,183 comments which is a form of self- torture I can probably only submit myself to every couple years or so without requiring expensive therapy although some of you guys' comments on this last one were genuinely entertaining the F350s pedals are spaced far apart to accommodate the owner's enormous clown shoes I too enjoy extremely large vehicles with wide wheelbases especially the articulated ones that carry up to 60 passengers people love to take stuff in my videos very literally and I did joke in the last one that I do support a pickup drivers right to own and operate a very stupid vehicle just as I support their right to pile all their cash in the middle of the street and light it on fire but I was quickly informed that the right to light your cash on Fire doesn't actually exist and furthermore have I considered that the places where pickup truck drivers live often don't have sidewalks or paved roads where said incineration ation could possibly occur and I think if you look at the data you'll find that most pickup truck drivers only pretend not to live in urbanized areas another person wants to coin the term emotional support vehicle which I do support and really does get to the theme of this whole video and my personal top rated comment on this video I remember working at Home Depot and loading an appliance into the back of some lady's truck and she was terrified we'd scratch the truck bed lady it is a truck a okay in order for this video to make sense I have to give a short previously on City nerd recap because I have a lot of new viewers who won have seen either of the previous two videos yet or for a lot of you it's been a year or two so a major theme of the more recent video was the weird uniformity of the comments I got from a certain type of pickup truck Enthusiast like the lack of creativity is kind of stunning and almost suspicious and I'm sure I claimed not to know what the origin of the whole soy insult was which apparently signaled to my viewers that it was their job to educate me honestly YouTube should have a popup that warns you when you're making a comment that a hundred other people have already made I mean I guess people are just trying to be helpful but just a personal observation I think there are certain types of knowledge that actually make you stupider like knowing the Genesis of the soy boy insult requires brain cells that could have been put to better use meaning it literally displaces much more useful knowledge like I don't know knowing who the first person to lead the NBA and both steals and assists was mostly people wanted to refer me to an H bomber Guy video essay on the topic by the way did you know that H bomber guy can be found on nebula the Creator owned streaming platform and did you further know that you can get amazing deals on subscriptions using my custom links down in the description and you can get all my videos ad free promo free and like a week early I'm sure you had no idea finally I had people pointing out the irony that soybeans are a cash crop for the kind of rural Americans that pickup truck drivers pretend to be even going so far as to suggest that maybe that means soy boy is actually a compliment I'm skeptical and then the other category of comment I got the most bizarre variations on was the wife's boyfriend genre the best of which was this one which I won't even attempt to read Because I absolutely can't get through it without breaking I guess you were all entertained by misery and that's cool go ahead have fun at my expense wife's boyfriends who hit the notification Bell are cool but the thing is I feel like this particular brand of insult really goes to the heart of pickup truck guy's psychological profile I mean what kind of person is really that obsessed with the idea of their spouse getting out of bounds in the last video I joked about it being projection and it's funny but maybe it isn't actually a joke I mean you do have to wonder if there's some sort of systemic disorder these people are suffering ing from that makes them think it's a good idea to drop like 80,000 bucks on an unwieldy vehicle that just looks ridiculous the emotional support vehicle jab sort of gets at it but I do wonder if it goes deeper into things like repressed urges to the point where a pickup truck is really a defense mechanism not just literally in terms of how it might Faire in a crash but figuratively as well like I don't have expertise in Psychotherapy beyond having read like a bunch of Freud and Yung and college so before I try to get too metaphorical let's look at some of the use cases that were suggested in the comments in this last video like this guy uses his F-150 at his goat farm and looks a scance at the pavement queens that run rampant in a lot of urbanized Texas come to think of it this was the only actual legitimate use case that I even saw in the entire comment thread instead I got lots of documentation of extremely poor use cases for pickups like people who commute from a quarter of a mile away and complain about gas prices thanks for the 10 bucks by the way apparently Brazilians don't use pickup trucks in rural areas at all so this is all very confusing for them same in Argentina probably the red meat capital of planet Earth and pickups are just not a thing like is there really no valid purpose for these vehicles besides goat farms but people were all in on cargo vans I mean buying a cargo van and putting Punisher SK SK stickers and Tru nuts on it is probably a non-starter but at least people won't notice it's empty when you're driving it around this motorcyclist questions the intellectual capabilities of pickup truck drivers and thinks it's less than optimal that these kinds of people are driving a vehicle with a powerful engine and usually no payload in the truck bed which is extremely typical and ridiculous if you ever really look at the pickups that drive around your city well except this guy I didn't really like that argument the criticism that trucks aren't always being maximized for their utility seems one directional do you have all four or five seats loaded in your car wherever you go those empty seats are the truck's empty bed something to think about well that's Checkmate these people are just Master logicians eh I'll come back to these naysayers later I made the point in an earlier video that if you really needed a pickup truck on the rare occasion instead of owning one that you drive around empty 99% of the time looking like a complete idiot you could just rent one for like an hour or two from U-Haul or Home Depot for like 30 bucks no one really disagreed this guy even did a break even analysis that showed he'd have to rent a pickup thousands of times before buying one made any sense I mean the math here just isn't that difficult the huge irony here is these are people who fashion themselves as freethinking noons rugged individualists but their consumption choices seem to be entirely driven by Slick multi-million dollar ad campaigns that that link your choice of vehicle to your masculinity I'll come back to advertising in a bit but there were a lot of comments about the irony that people sitting high up in what basically amounts to an armored rolling Fortress thinking they're alphas and people who are actually physically fit and risk life and limb on their bike in traffic or betas lots of people in the comments recounted kind of harrowing stories of Reckless Behavior by the people who drive these vehicles I believe it but I would just say anecdotally it's not experience the one time in 20 plus years of biking where I actually got injured I cracked a rib when I crashed swerving out of the way of a car that had run a stop sign but it was like a Subaru with a bike rack on the back Portland but it does seem true that there's a certain type of person that just doesn't see people on bikes as humans worthy of consideration it's like if you're on a bike that either means you're a poor person who can't afford a car so Expendable or an elitist who can quote unquote afford to but chooses not to drive also completely Expendable it's like there's no middle ground and there's definitely no empathy and yeah maybe this all just boils down to some basic differences between people who inhabit different ends of the political Spectrum but I think all this goes a little deeper and probably can't be reduced to a left right thing people pointed out that part of what's at work here is a persecution complex or a sense of Oppression and that's what makes them defensive or often hyper aggressive and I think it's fair to to say people who actually live in rural settings are oppressed but the thing is what it is they're oppressed by is the inexorable advance of technology and industrialization and the fact that we don't live in an agrarian society anymore it's not the government or city dwellers whose votes count for less than people who live in rural areas but I think it's fair to say there's a bit of a crisis in how people who live outside Metro areas view their role in society and how secure they feel and I also think it's fair to say there's a bit of a crisis in the way men understand their role in today's world I mean very tiny viin right and this is beyond the scope of what I want to talk about today but the gender gap in partisan identification in the Gen Z cohort is getting wider than ever there are lots of theories for why this is but to me a lot of it is recursive like the more you wallow and self-pity at your inability to form a useful relationship with a suitable mate the less attractive you become to potential suitable mates it's just math there are just a lot more conservative straight dudes out there embracing cartoon versions of masculinity then there are straight women who want to be with a guy like that and I guess math is oppressive although people in the comments had all kinds of opinions on whether owning a stupid looking truck is a big hit with the ladies like one vote for yes Suburban women are looking for an expensive trik when they're dating which maybe a lot of this is self- selection and filtering a pickup truck guy wants to attract the sort of person who's going to be impressed by a pickup truck and that's fine but I just don't know that the candidate pool is as big as they've been led to believe and other people said it's a huge red flag but at least in some parts of Texas it's a major green flag I don't pretend to understand it but I do like this suggestion from one of my viewers which is that for a small fraction of what a truck costs you can do it the Japanese way and spend your money on cool looking outfits instead of shuffling around in a black hoodie with a Punisher skull on it okay in a minute I'm going to dig into the responses from actual pickup truck owners as well as some of the more disturbing stuff I saw But first you know what to do I am doing more live streams this year just because I like talking to you guys and doing extemporaneous stuff and hitting the Bell will keep you in the loop all the usual ways to engage and direct support via patreon is a great way of funding all the therapy of appointments I'm going to need after having waited through all these comments although to be perfectly honest because I never read more than like 10 or 20 of them my expectations for this were low and I anticipated a bunch of low effort spam but the truth of it is my viewers actually leave much much higher quality comments than I was expecting and honestly a lot of it is just people complimenting me which feels awkward but it's still cool if there's cash attached to it I'm honestly more interested in the criticism though guy who watches my stuff at half speed my hat is off to you I always assume that most people watch my stuff at at least 1.5 because I'm such a slow talker actually I prefer the term deliberate 0.5 though that's verging on self harm I'm concerned for you guy who thinks I Judge Too harshly there are a lot of YouTube channels out there that don't have opinions on anything you're free to watch those in the last video I told you that somewhat uninformed condescension is really kind of this Channel's brand well this viewer is telling me that that isn't something I should be proud of so you're really going to deny me my full self-actualization and this one I dislike cities and the urbanite lifestyle and sense of values in general so aside from this video I may find City nerd annoying to hang with well first of all pretty presumptuous to think I want to hang with someone with a mildly disturbing YouTube profile pick and second I promise you I'm super fun to hang with I'm always kind of wondering if I'm preaching to the choir with most of the stuff I do and I've got more to say about that but this viewer thanks the truck Bros for driving up the engagement on urbanist content which would be cool if it were true but I'm not sure that's the way this works what's definitely true though is that when I talk about pickup tracks no matter what I'm actually saying about them this app starts serving up lots of ads for pickup tracks especially the Chevy Silverado apparently which is funny and ironic because this Channel's audience has to be about the opposite of their Target demographic but but in a roundabout way because these videos end up attracting so much hate watching from truck Bros Chevy is probably getting it about right but I do wonder is the way AdSense serves at midal placements in my videos that simple that it just looks for keywords in the transcription in my video like if I start randomly saying the words Rolex or Lamborghini is that going to drive my AdSense auction prices way up guess we're going to find out but here's the really shocking thing I found once I'd gone through over 4,000 comments I was really looking forward to seeing a bunch of absurdly stupid replies from truck Bros but instead what there were a lot more of were pickup truck owners or former pickup truck owners who actually agreed with me guy who finally stopped buying trucks and now his car and his bike get him everywhere he needs to go guy who kind of misses his truck B lives in a city and just walks most places guy who can't wait to get rid of his Silverado guy who drives pickup trucks at work bet doesn't need an expensive gas guzzling F whatever to prove his manliness I tip my cap guy who strongly prefers a Subaru with a trailer over a pickup for his regular Goose Hunting Expeditions guy who can't wait to get rid of his truck and buy an ebike guy who dreams of getting rid of his track and prays fervently for my mediocre YouTube content to hasten the urbanist revolution guy who has a stated intention of getting rid of his track and credits urbanism YouTube and Safe Streets Twitter for not only helping him see things differently but his friends too it's almost too good to be true new subscriber 10 years ago I would have been one of the guys calling you a beta soy boy guy who used to own a huge truck and all that happened was everybody wanted to use it to haul their own stuff the downside of being the wife's boyfriend I guess not everyone is completely redeemable though I own a highly modified pickup truck that blows huge clouds of smoke and I also agree with every point you made in your video like I feel like this one is possibly sociopathic and is going to require a more complicated sort of intervention you know what though it's really strange that video where I responded to pickup truck guy comments is probably the most outright antagonistic thing I've ever done but for whatever reason it still seemed to resonate with the kind of people who can really grow and broaden the urbanist movement it kind of makes me wonder whether we should be bending over backwards to be super diplomatic when we're trying to change Minds sometimes I think we just need to be honest and blunt maybe people actually respect that more than when you just kind of coddle them and they're bad choices and try not to offend I don't want to sugarcoat this too much though because not everyone's on board guy who quote unquote upgraded to a Toyota Tacoma and is now living life to its fullest like did a Toyota Tacoma commercial write this comment a guy who has different politics for me and loves his pickup but enjoys the video and says I give him things to think about honestly I kind of love that guy who doesn't dispute that the vast majority of Americans live in urban environments but challenges me to consider where my food comes from I mean enormous aggra businesses are there people who go grocery shopping at Walmart and think all their food is being grown and raised at small independent family run Farms guy who thinks more CO2 is good because it's plant food I haven't heard this argument in decades but maybe I'm living inside a this guy I have a lifted track and I'm friendly and approachable LOL I don't know that LOL makes me nervous and I'm just not going to accept self-reporting on this distrust but verify I always say and the most common kind of guy that why do you care how people spend their money or what they drive guy you know as soon as modern pickup trucks stop being a health and safety hazard for everyone on the outside of the vehicle I'll start caring less I promise for the most part though felt like I'd avoided the full Wrath of pickup truck guy and I was feeling a little disappointed that I didn't have more idiotic comments to dunk on but also kind of good that maybe I'm not crazy and also optimistic like people you think of as being your polar opposite are actually persuadable but premature because of the moderation settings they use YouTube marks a whole bunch of comments potentially inappropriate and holds them for review and honestly why would I ever review those but I was fully committed to this bit so I gritted my teeth and reviewed all of them but plot twist there were literally only a couple hate posts and all the rest of them were basically people agreeing with me but just using more colorful language I don't know maybe pickup truck guys learned their lesson but I'd hate to jinx it the thing I kept thinking about is the fact that the type of people who drive these kinds of vehicles tend to be people who don't necessarily care what happens to anyone outside their ruling Fortress and either don't believe in the concept of human caused climate change or don't care because they don't think it's going to affect them personally and if this was limited to a subset of wackos in the US that would be one thing but several people pointed out that truck brain is infecting other countries too in Asia for example proliferating in countries where the streets are much narrower like Chile European countries where people are complaining about parking stalls being too small an onslaught of yank tanks rolling on Sydney and Melbourne as an American I kind of want to apologize to the rest of the world even the country that gave us rert Murdoch because like it or not the US is massively influential in all this stuff globally which means that it's just that much more important that those of us State side work to move our land use and transportation in the right direction in our own backyards and that's all I've got thanks for joining and thanks as always to the patrons for allowing me to transform the reading of thousands of YouTube comments into a full-time vocation keep the great topic suggest questions coming and the thoughtful comments I'll be back with a new episode next week and I'll see you [Music] then

Channel: CityNerd

Views: 264,570

Keywords: urbanism, urbanist, urban, urban talk, urbanism sociology, urban exploration, urbanism as a way of life, urbanism architecture, urbanist exploring cities, urbanist session, urban planning problems, urban planning, city planning, urban design, cities, cities skylines, urban planning career, urban planning degree, urban planning 101, sigmund freud psychoanalytic theory, sigmund freud theory of personality

Id: VLe94d2hzMA

Length: 21min 30sec (1290 seconds)

Published: Wed Mar 20 2024