Youtube

YouTube has now overtaken ITV to become Britain’s second most watched media service, beaten only narrowly by the BBC. Hardly surprising. For many of us, YouTube has become the answer to more and more of life’s questions. True, you may never want to watch a film which explains how to unstick the filler cap on a Volvo XC60. Until, that is, you rent a Volvo XC60 and find yourself stranded at a Portuguese petrol station in 100˚F heat. At that moment, the 30-second explanation by Olivia from York, Pennsylvania, is better than Martin Scorsese. If I were destitute, the last expense I’d forgo would be my YouTube Premium subscription. At £13 a month, it is cheaper than the BBC licence fee.

I follow the YouTube postings of a maverick young economist called Gary Stevenson, author of The Trading Game. Whatever you think of Gary, he is absolutely right about one thing. Economists, by using what are called ‘Single Representative Agent’ models, have taken a dangerous wrong turn. Such simplistic models, which contain the convenient but absurd assumption that what is good for the average person must be proportionately good for everybody else, have allowed economists to make confident pronouncements on policy while ignoring social and intergenerational inequality completely.

The day after Mark Zuckerberg said fact-checkers ‘have destroyed more trust than they have created’ I experienced why he has a point. I had done an interview with an evolutionary psychology podcaster, Paula Wright, about the origin of Covid. In it I said something that caused the entire interview to be banned from YouTube. Wright’s appeals were rejected. Some ill-informed, possibly underpaid, definitely over-confident youth at YouTube banned my remark What had I said that was so offensive? Was it a lie, a conspiracy theory, a mistake, defamation? No, it was a statement of historical fact that has been confirmed and agreed by mainstream scientific bodies, including the World Health Organisation.

How do you live with yourself when 179 air passengers are burned alive on a South Korean runway, and you’ve spent the last few weeks binge-watching YouTube videos about plane crashes? The obvious answer is that I need to seek help. I have a defence, but I don’t think any British jury would buy it. I started watching the air-crash videos to escape the anxiety caused by the American presidential election. Anxiety that Donald Trump might lose, that is. On YouTube there’s always someone listening. It’s an all-you-can-eat buffet for monomaniacs I can imagine Emily Maitlis and Rory Stewart’s reaction: ‘Self-declared Trump supporter chills out by imagining planes full of holidaymakers falling out of the sky. That figures.’ But I don’t care what they think.

My old mucker Donald Trump’s return to the White House has predictably sent the woke brigade into hysteria. From posting demented videos and shaving their heads to banning Trump supporters from having sex with them, it’s been a masterclass in the sore loser mentality they profess to despise so much in him. The Guardian is suffering a particularly embarrassing outbreak of PTSD (post-Trump-success distress). The editor’s email offer of support therapy to traumatised staff made me laugh out loud, as did the paper joining the liberal exodus from Elon Musk’s X in an equally comical fit of pique.

A right turn off Montauk Highway onto a leafy street in the Hamptons town of Water Mill brings you to a wooden gate, behind which sits a 12,000-square foot modernist estate that rents, with staff, for $75,000 a week. At the moment it’s the vacation home of Patrick Bet-David, an unlikely character to find in this area of New York. Over the last two years, Bet-David has improbably emerged as one of the most prominent voices in right-wing media. His prodigious influence is belied by the fact that around here, he’s more undercover heretic than acclaimed celebrity.