Goodbye (& Good Riddance!), YouTube

This will be the last upload to my Limitless YouTube channel...

I'm done uploading because YouTube sucks! And YouTube sucks so much that, like the swirling accretion disk of a supermassive black hole devouring a brilliant galaxy, it illuminates how much people (in general) suck these days. Strong words, I know. I'll elucidate and I've got some tough love for you here, but first, a little bit about my history with YouTube, you may find this interesting...

I've had a rocky relationship with YouTube over the past decade...

Once upon a time, I was kinda-sorta a YouTube star. I had over 10,000 subscribers (back when that was a respectable following!) I had videos that got over a quarter of a million views. I would travel to new countries, and random guys in cafes would approach me and tell me they knew me from YouTube. Pretty sweet!

Then came the #BiohackerBan - back in 2018, YouTube decided it didn't like Nootropics and terminated my channel, along with those of a few other prominent Nootropics YouTubers.

In the early 2020s, I decided to take another crack at YouTube and began uploading again here.

But after a few years of consistent uploading, I get pitiful engagement on YouTube! I have a little over 500 subscribers, and my videos often get few views. Sometimes, less than 10% of my subscribers watch them. 

Any YouTuber is faced with the quality vs quantity question; do you put a ton of work into producing a few high-quality videos, hoping that the audience and algorithm will reward you, OR do you do a bunch of lower-effort videos to play the Pareto principle, knowing that a few of them will go viral? The frustrating thing is I've really tried both approaches...

• For a long while, I've done daily uploads of older content which I refurbished and improved (cleaning up audio, polishing the presentation, cutting the fat, improving slides, etc). Like this older video (recorded in a really cool setting) about free speech.
• While also working long hours on new videos; researching, scripting, shooting, and producing. Like this recent video about common personal genotyping mistakes Biohackers make.

And the results are embarrassing, a tiny amount of views and engagement. I'm more than a bit concerned that this YouTube channel is hurting my credibility. Potential partners, collaborators, and coaching clients will look me up and see that I have hundreds of well-produced videos with appealing slides, with hardly any views. This doesn't make me look great!

In the +14 years that I've operated Limitless Mindset, I've really upped my video production game. I've gotten dramatically better at research, scripting, performing on camera, and post-production, yet my videos get a tiny fraction of the views of the awfully done videos I once put out on YouTube!

Perhaps, I'm shadowbanned because in many videos I include a call to action to follow me on one of the pro-free-speech YouTube alternatives, OR because once upon a time, YouTube did kick me out of their club. But I'm not really sure...

A lot of YouTubers would blame this failure on the almighty algorithm

But I think some blame falls on the shoulders of the audience (you, perhaps). Here's why...

In the past 14 years, I've gone on this amazing odyssey of personal development; I've tried over 200 smart drugs and Nootropics. I lived in several interesting countries. I dated a politician's daughter in Colombia and hung out with spies in Kyiv. I've tried a bunch of weird and wacky personal growth things with surprising results. I took psychedelics high in the Andes mountains. I cultivated myself as a tantric man and achieved a rare form of sexual sovereignty. I found true love and have remained deeply in love with my wife for eight years now. I'm happier and healthier than I have ever been. I became what I always wanted to be: an adventuring philosopher. And I've lived by these two passages from my all-time favorite novel...

I was young again, as if on the sea or in the air, made lively by having everything to lose and everything to gain, made content only by risk, for in the light of risk every earthly color catches heavenly fire. (p. 366)

In breaking the rules, I broke other things too, including the veils of falsehood that cover the truth like thunderclouds. Were the world perfect it would always be wrong to trespass, but as the world is not perfect, sometimes one must. And when you do, you live, you break free, you fly. (pp. 272-273)

And, particularly on YouTube, the general audience of folks into personal growth seems not that interested in what I have to offer. So, my uploading to YouTube is more and more becoming a "casting pearls before swine" thing. 

Years back, I read and reviewed this great book, The Shallows: What the Internet is Doing to Our Minds, which is about how Internet content has this dire effect, dumbing us all down. Consuming shorter-form content just hacks away at your working memory and attention span, giving you a goldfish's mind.

The Shallows

 

4.0

Category: Book

The way to counteract this and maintain your mind while enjoying everything the internet has to offer is Dual N-Back brain training and mnemonic memory training; which I've done a bunch of videos and podcasts about. If you use the internet for hours and hours every day and don't do these two things, you will, to paraphrase the philosopher Heidegger, invite the frenziedness of technology to entrench itself in your own soul.

And I fear that is what's happened to some of my YouTube audience.

My content is usually longer form, thoughtful, and challenging - it's not for stupid people. I fear it's just not the kind of content that there's much audience for anymore on YouTube. But, I'd love for you to prove me wrong about that by sharing this and following me elsewhere on the internet where I speak freely.

I'm still going to be producing informative reviews of Nootropics and anti-aging products, along with deep-dive book reviews and personal antifragility philosophy content. This will all be published on the YouTube alternatives - Rumble and Odysee.

Odysee is, I think, the very best pro-free-speech, pro-privacy, pro-respecting the user and the creator platform. Odysee has NO ADS (no pre-roll or mid-roll ads interrupting your viewing experience and no banner ads). The only downside to Odysee is that its load time is about a second slower than YouTube's. So, would you rather have free speech and no interruptive ads, OR that one second of faster load times? That's not a hard decision for me to make!

I'd really like to make a deep-dive, long-form philosophical documentary about why I'm optimistic about the future...

Not just personally, but the case for optimism about the coming state of the world and civilization. Given what's gone on in the world in this hectic decade - a pandemic/plandemic, the decline of democracy, authoritarian overreach by our governments, the revelation of how corrupt almost all our societal institutions are, the rise of AI, inflation, and the looming threat of nuclear war - most people have become pretty pessimistic about the future. But, I'd like to make a compelling case in a new documentary for being an optimistic accelerationist and lend you something in real short supply these days - hope. For its title, I'm thinking...

Beyond this velocipedic age, a golden Aquarian epoch beckons

Since I'd like to spread hope as far as I can, this documentary would be free to watch on Rumble or Odysee. But it would be a massive investment of my time to script, shoot, create animations for, and produce. And I need some audience buy-in to make that kind of time investment. I need your support of the kind of content you would like to see more of.

If you'd like to see that case for optimism about the future documentary made, please support me on Substack, which is a free-speech platform. On Substack, there are three support tiers...

$7 a month - You can support for just one month if you're ballin' on a budget, but would like to see this documentary made.

$84 a year - If you want to multiply your sunk cost motivation and get all the premium content I publish.

$244 Elite Membership - This includes a private 90-minute Biohacking/Lifehacking consultation with me.

Currently, about 10% of my Substack subscribers are supporters, which is not bad. But if I could achieve 10% of this channel's subscribers supporting my work, that would give me a huge amount of creative freedom to take some risks like putting in the huge amount of time it will take to make a documentary with a powerful message about a better future for mankind on this planet.

I'm not deleting the Limitless channel

It's going to remain on YouTube because I know that sometimes people search specifically for me on YouTube. However, I recently had to remove some of the Biohacking videos that were a bit "edgier" to keep the channel off the RADAR of YouTube's channel termination department. I removed...

• Some of the videos about the more potent smart drugs and Nootropics
• Some of the meta-analyses of the different peptides, like those Russian peptides that can have some pretty astonishing effects (yeah, probably not "YouTube-safe!")

Along with

• 10 Major MISTAKES Biohackers Make ⚠️ Costing them money, time, and health
• And some other stuff.

You can now find all this content uncensored and uninterrupted by ads on my Odysee channel, Substack, or LimitlessMindset.com.

STOP TOLERATING ABUSE

YouTube doesn't give a damn about your fundamental human right to free speech or privacy. YouTube habitually abuses both the creator and the viewer. And YouTube has made some very intentional, strategic decisions to dumb down billions of humans.

For years, I've been talking to you about getting off the big tech platforms and venturing back out onto the World Wide Web - connecting with me on the alt-tech platforms that are just about as easy to use as YouTube, Facebook, Instagram, and Reddit. You probably still spend a lot of time using YouTube. Like a crackwhore returning to her pimp who always beats her up, you keep coming back to YouTube because you are addicted. That's the tough love I promised!

And you're not a crack whore, you're a person who is into health and personal growth. But I bet that in some department of your life, you keep running into a glass ceiling. In some way, you can't seem to break free from the pain and pattern of the past. Might that be because you tolerate abusive, extortionate relationships that sabotage you in your life in ways subtle and not-so-subtle?

If you use YouTube for hours a week, there's at least one abusive, extortionate relationship you tolerate! I challenge you to uninstall the YouTube app (if you sometimes - like me - need to use YouTube, watch with the excellent GrayJay app that blocks all their ads) and connect with me elsewhere.

Or you can remain a passive consumer and let YouTube shove yet endless dumb ad down your throat. Your call! (I made this fun AI song about free speech if you need any more inspiration...)