The Worst Thing I've Ever Done in Japan.

0:00 So, the other day I received this comment from a viewer that I think sums up the experience of being a YouTuber perhaps better than any other. It was on a recent documentary we made on the Ishkawa earthquake, showing the scale of the destruction, interviewing locals, and exploring the risks of a potential mega earthquake in Japan. An important video, and the response from viewers was amazing, and no comment I received was as moving as this. Profound love and sadness and loss for the Japanese people. Much love for them. Time has passed. Beautiful, right? And uh Oh, there's more. Profound love and sadness. But bro, you look pregnant. What? Work out and lose your belly and stop standing like a girl. Laugh out loud. Profound love and

0:46 sadness, but bro, you look pregnant. That's a real comment written by a real person. It sort of broke my brain reading it. You know, it's like watching the D-Day landing scene in Saving Private Ryan and being like a profound and beautiful sacrifice. Bro, somebody on Omaha Beach had too many pork chops. Laugh out loud. When I first started YouTube, encountering much worse comments was a part of the job. You know, not like today where such words come with an offensive comment tag. And I hate to admit, but the first two years I did this, it really did get to me. Like a single nasty comment could sort of derail my mood for the day. At the time, some YouTubers I knew just said they didn't read the comments at all, which I felt was a bad idea because the community aspect is one of the best things about doing YouTube. And I was like, how the hell can I do this? Why

1:31 would I do this full-time when this is the sort of thing I have to put up with every single day? It's not normal, right? And around the same time, and this was exactly 10 years ago, I was going through a difficult phase. I was loving my life in rural Japan, living in Yamagata, but my time as a teacher was coming to an end and without a visa, I had to leave. And I fell into a really bad place for half a year. And amidst my search for something to cling to, some sort of hope, I encountered stoic philosophy. Stoicism wasn't that well known at the time. Wasn't mainstream like it is now. And I didn't know anybody around me who followed it or practiced it. This 2,000-year-old philosophy, courtesy of the Greeks and the Romans, and built around one powerful idea that we can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to it. It was practical, brutally honest, and exactly what I

2:18 needed to hear. And I absorbed it all like a sponge. You know, I jog around at night listening to it on audiobooks. I'd sit at my desk and read it. And there were three quotes that really stood out to me. People are not disturbed by events, but by the views they take of them. And if you are pained by external things, it's not the thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it. And a dog's got to eat. And the boss dog is going to show you how. Uh, maybe ignore that one for now. It was a sort of light bulb moment. I realized, hang on, I've been offended by these comments because I've chosen to be. We had the event, the bad comment. We had my interpretation. This is about me. I'm a loser. And we had a reaction or consequence. In my case, demoralization. But the twist was I was the one controlling the middle bit, right? The interpretation. That's where the real damage was happening. Not the words themselves. They were just some pixels on a screen. And Stoic

3:05 philosophy actually encouraged me to take things a step further and try and find the positive in each and every situation. And I soon realized hate comments are actually a blessing in disguise because let's face it, they're comedy gold. I took all these weird, disorientating comments and made my first hate mail reading video. Why does Japan attract bottom of the barrel white guys off? Come on now. I like to think I'm at least middle of the barrel. It was just the most amazing feeling taking something so negative and making it into something that made people laugh. Not only that, but it was a real hit with viewers getting hundreds of thousands of views. I think it made like $300 $400 and I put that towards like a weekend holiday in Taiwan. And the whole time I was there, I kind of thought, "Oh, I wish I had more hate comments cuz then I could do this more often." And in the

3:51 end became sort of a beautiful circle. Revenue that was derived from the lucrative hate mail series went towards funding more meaningful projects like documentaries. So, ironically, it was a comment telling me my face and accent were annoying that gave me the confidence to realize I could probably get away doing YouTube full-time. Still, I wasn't out of the woods just yet because something far more challenging was just around the corner. Something that would quickly dismantle my newfound optimism. [Music] I've been in a strange mood lately. It's the kind of mood where you stare out the window for an hour and then wonder why you're holding a spoon. H

4:37 I suspect one reason is it was my birthday recently and I'm now officially 53 years old. At least according to the birthday cake so generously gifted by Connor. The worst thing is I posted that photo online and I got so many comments from people who were like, "Oh wow, I didn't know you were 53 years old. You look great for a 53y old man." Oh god. But today, having turned 35 years old and wondering what the bloody hell I'm doing with my life, I want to do something I don't often do, I really want to open myself up and share with you some stories, personal things that I've never really talked about. Things that I've learned from doing this across 300 videos and the last 12 years. Now, I realize I may not be the biggest or the most bestest YouTuber, but I've been lucky to do an awful lot of stuff. I've got to meet people I never thought I

5:23 would meet. In fact, incredible. Yeah. see things that I never thought I would see, challenge myself in ways I never thought I would, and injure myself in ways I never thought possible. Ouch. And the story I want to share with you today is one that I've avoided telling out of embarrassment. It involves greed, money, desperation, and shame. And it's big because it involves the single worst thing that I've ever done at the single most important crossroads of my life and career. And I'm sharing it now because while I'm not proud of it all, I do think there are some useful life lessons in there. Hopefully for you and hopefully for myself because I fought really hard to get to do this full-time. Um, and I've

6:08 forgotten that. I forget that frequently. Diving back into the past can really help you to appreciate the present. Right. to gather around, hear the wisdom and mistakes of a pregnant 53 year old man and a story that I am really, really not looking forward to recounting. Some of my colleagues thought I was a bit weird when we used to go home 5:30 p.m. after working at school and instead of going out for a drink, I'd retreat to my apartment to start work again. This time making videos. The first three years I did YouTube, every video was a labor of love. Yeah. Oh, or insanity, depending on your perspective. It was an exciting time to be a YouTuber. You know, it wasn't called content back

6:53 then. It was just pure unfiltered creativity. People didn't worry about view counts or algorithms. It was just about having fun. And in my case, trying to find my way living in rural Japan. I would mostly sit awkwardly and just talk to the camera in my apartment. But there were top-notch special effects. Poisoned my Japanese friends with British food. Taught them to swear in English. I'm trusting you with the drug. Are you [ __ ] with me? And in one video, I even broke my table. Yeah, it wasn't so great. I always wanted to be a filmmaker, and YouTube kind of felt like the middleman. A way to cheat my way into the world. learn by doing and with a bit of luck eventually

7:39 get good at it. I didn't really have time to make videos. I'd have to sort of script, edit, and film the videos in the cracks between work. And so quality over quantity was a real necessity. And after 3 years, I'd made about 30 videos and had this amazing community of about 100,000 viewers. And for the first time in my life, I felt oddly confident about what I wanted to do. Uh I wanted to do this. But the job ended and so did my visa. And I went back to the UK for a few months to figure things out. catch up with my family and perhaps above all find the biggest cheese board name to science, which thankfully I was able to do. My plan to do YouTube full-time are two pretty big problems. Number one, I had no money. YouTube was bringing in maybe $200, $300 a month, which was cool, but it was like onetenth of my

8:25 teaching salary and certainly not enough to live off. It was sort of a chicken and egg situation. I needed to devote all my time to making videos so I could live, but I had no money with which to do that. So, I did something I never thought I would do. Uh, I went to my bank and asked for a loan of about £6,000, hoping that money could kind of support me through the first 3 or 4 months. Now, the bank manager was an older guy and he sort of treated the whole thing like an interrogation. When he looked at my bank account and was like, "Oh, you have no money. How will you pay this loan back?" I was like, "Oh, I'll do YouTube in it." And he was like, "I don't know what that is. Get out." But I was like, "Wait, wait, look at this." And I got my phone out and I was like, "Look, this is YouTube. This is the future. Here's a video of people calling me a [ __ ] who hate me. And uh look, look, I broke a table for views. And uh admittedly, it wasn't

9:12 going very well. But I had one ace up my sleeve. A few months earlier, I had a video go viral giving Japanese friends Marmite. And I showed these poor friends of mine dying while eating British food. And the bank manager like flipped and was like, "Oh gosh, oh my goodness. Isn't that marvelous? Wonderful. Wonderful." And that video actually featured on the BBC website. And when the manager saw that, he was like, "Oh my goodness, somebody who's been on the BBC must be good. Here, have a bank loan with lots of interest. Hurry up and pay it back." So, I finally had this loan. It was November. My goal was simple. Get back to Japan by December, start making videos, hit the ground running. But there was a second problem, a bigger problem, and that was I needed a visa. Can't go to Japan without a visa, right? One idea was to come back on a working holiday. However, it only lasted 12

9:57 months. and in a year I'd sort of be back at square one. But there was another option. A Japanese company got in touch with an offer that sounded too good to be true. They would not only give me a visa, but they would help me film, edit, and subtitle my videos into Japanese. They were a multi- channelannel network, a new business model that had sprung up to exploit, I mean, help YouTubers with their videos. And all I had to do was give them a cut of my ad revenue, and in return, they do all these great things. And just to be clear, this wasn't Tokyo Creative. This was at least 3 years before they even existed. And I don't want to paint all MCN's in a bad light. Modern ones are a lot better than back then, but back then it was the wild west. Every company wanted YouTube channels. They were trying to collect them like Pokémon cards because it meant they could inflate their revenue and make their companies look a lot bigger than they were. YouTube was changing as all of a

10:43 sudden businesses had realized you could make money. And Abro Japan was doing pretty well as it was one of the fastest growing channels in the country. I don't think even I appreciated how well it was doing with 100,000 subscribers. But this company said they wanted to work with me. But first, I had to prove myself, prove that I was worthy. And they said, "We're going to fly you to Japan. We're going to put you up in a hotel for a week. And all you have to do is this Abra Japan live show where you promote our brand new website in front of a live studio audience at the YouTube space in Tokyo. It'll be fun. You can do it with Natsky. And if it goes well, we could do great things together. We can get you that visa." Now, this was a big deal. I'd never done a live stream before. It was 2015. It was kind of like new, clunky, terrifying technology. And the idea of speaking in front of thousands of people online and also in front of a live studio audience of 150 people

11:29 absolutely scared the crap out of me. But I was desperate. I was really desperate to get back to Japan to get the visa and to claw back control of this rapidly fading dream. So against my better judgment, I said yes. 2 days before this big live event, they fly me to Tokyo economy. But man, did I feel like a real badass, sitting in the back of the plane, knowing that I hadn't paid for the ticket. The apple juice had never tasted so sweet. I arrive in Tokyo, jetlagged, destroyed, still smelling like Heather Airport, but excited to be back. And I thought, "Oh yeah, at least I've got my nice hotel waiting." Except I didn't because it turned out the staff in this company owned what can only be described as a shed in Saitama. And that would be my accommodation for the week about an hour

12:15 outside of Tokyo. I remember getting the keys, opening the door to this place. This dark, damp room that looked like something out of Silence of the Lands meets the ring. There was this ragged shy door. It looked like somebody had been clawing at it. Somebody tried to escape something unspeakably awful. And I'm sitting there alone, God knows where, you know, half expecting something to crawl out of the TV. But I'm a practicing stoic, right? I'm trying to find the upside, the good thing. And I'm like, well, at least uh at least this is free. words that I imagine will be chiseled onto my gravestone. But I'm really nervous about this event. Like, I'm not going to sleep tonight level of nervousness. As a guy who's filmed all their videos alone in their apartment, I'm not ready to do this in front of thousands of people. But at least Natki will be there, right,

13:00 to see me through. And I'm lying on this sleeping bag the night before, wondering what I'd gotten myself into because this really didn't feel like the glorious future of YouTube that I had been promised. [Applause] So the big day arrives and I've had like a solid 20 minutes sleep and I get on like four trains to get into Raongi to this monstrous skyscraper Mory Tower which is the home of the YouTube space where the live event is going to happen and I'm on the train like posting about this event promoting it as like the first ever a Braw Japan live event. Everyone's excited especially Natki who's messaged me like I'm flying down to Tokyo. Can't wait. It's going to be amazing. The live show is in the evening, so I've got like five or six hours beforehand. So, I meet with the

13:45 guys at the company in a coffee shop to discuss the game plan. And they're like, "Wow, you made it. You look well rested. That's great. It's going to be a big night." And across the table, they hand me this paper with the running order. And I look down and it is a script for an absolute horror show. All of a sudden, I realize just how absolutely [ __ ] I really am. What had happened is this company had realized how lucrative this show was going to be. Not just to promote their website, but to promote literally dozens of items from random companies, random products. This wasn't so much going to be an Abro Japan live show as a shopping channel QVDC style [ __ ] show stitched together with duct tape and lights and I was going to be the frontman for all of it. In exchange

14:31 for the flight and the shed in sight hammer, they had sold off every square inch of this live show to an almost impressive amount of sponsors. Now, at this point, the response is obvious, right? You say no, you walk away, you back out. A reasonable response, but this was an unreasonable situation. I'd already promised this show to thousands of viewers. The event space was quite literally filling up with a live studio audience. There were camera crews running around because this was going to be like TV show studio level of production. influencers have been flown in from across Asia to take part in this. There were so many moving parts that for me to cancel it would have blown a hole through my reputation in Japan, especially as this was at the YouTube space at YouTube's head office in Asia. So, as a guy trying to find their way through all of this, you know, I had no manager, no support, no

15:16 experience in this situation. I mean, this company was supposed to kind of be my managers at this point, and they obviously held off telling me about all this until it was too late for me to sort of back out. But they reassured me. They were like, "Don't worry. Don't worry. It be a lot of fun. We got all these influences. Just just read the script and have fun with it." But I had no time to process this act of betrayal because I had a live show to do. So, a few hours later, there I am sat on this big red sofa with a literal studio audience of 150 people staring at me. Right. My heart is thumping. I'm jetlagged. I'm tired. I don't know what I'm supposed to do. I've never done an event in front of a live audience. This is the imposttor syndrome speedrun spectacular with a [ __ ] bow wrapped

16:02 around it. And Natsky, who I thought would be here as my savior, has been shoved into the audience like an unpaid extra. They've told him he's not coming on stage. Now, on a technical level, this is very impressive. The studio lighting, the cameras, the high production values, which only made the ensuing disaster look even worse. And then away it went. Now, the show is simply too awful to show you outright, but I will share with you the highlight reel of awful because it was insane. Good afternoon, good morning, good evening. Hello everyone. Welcome to Tokyo Live. We're live here from the Tokyo YouTube space in a very, very big building in the middle of a very, very big city. First off, I didn't follow the script. It was bollocks. And instead, I sort of awkwardly closed my eyes while I was talking, hoping that if I shut my

16:48 eyes, if I reopen them, it would all go away. It'll be like it didn't happen. Meanwhile, literal wave after wave of influencers were thrown onto the stage like frontline troops in Operation Barbarosa. All nice people who I'd never met once in my life. Each one tasked with selling something utterly ridiculous. For example, their first product was this crappy Honda robot thing like a chair that you're supposed to sit on and it would like drive around. And it was great until I sat on it and broke it. It literally just fell over and that was it. Five minutes into the show. As the company running this nightmare were Japanese, it kind of had all the trappings of a Japanese TV show. There was a YouTuber called Deca King

17:34 who again really nice guy, massive YouTuber these days. He was sort of brought in as this slapstick court jester kind of figure who'd get his stomach out and sort of just prod himself periodically. And while I was speaking, the camera would like cut away to him, literally holding an ad, like an ad read on a bit of car and he held that up and that was the ad. It was in I didn't even realize it was going on. I like had to look around and see it was happening. This wasn't so much a production as the absolute theater of the absurd because I didn't know who Harvey sponsored rounds were. It became painfully obvious and I'm holding them like I don't know what this is. I've never had it or used it or eaten it. I have no idea. And I'm not going to sit there and lie and be like, "Oh, I love this thing." So, it's not an overly

18:20 flattering presentation for the sponsor products either. And while this is all unfolding, I'm looking at the comments from the 9,000 people watching this live and nobody knows what on earth is going on. Everyone's extremely bored and confused. And the crowd is so underwhelmed at this point, they practically have rigor mortise. Meanwhile, you've got poor Natsky, who's vanished to the sidelines doing halfbaked magic tricks like a drunken children's entertainer who's finally allowed to come on stage for all of 30 seconds to shock a cup of sake and still somehow become the highlight of this complete and utter trainer in the even though this was supposed to be like the Abor Japan show and I'm in the middle of the sofa surrounded admittedly by an army of influencers. I had to escape it. And I did that by

19:08 drinking like a bottle of sake, a sponsored bottle of sake, of course, that was placed before me in the middle of the table. I drank it. I quietly got drunk and I sort of just disappeared. Kind of pretending like I wasn't there. By the end of this thing, there were nine people on the sofa. Nine people. And about a dozen companies had been name dropped. I have to say if it wasn't for Martina who was a bit more experienced in the world of doing this, we would have been really stuffed. It was thanks to her she kind of helped keep it all together and for that I'm eternally grateful. Meanwhile, the MCN company that was running this like in the back room counting the money out like a scene from Scarface. And when it finally came to an end, I was just so distraught and disappointed and empty. I felt like a sellout even though

19:54 ironically I'd make no money from doing this. It was exploitation in its purest, most distilled form. I felt like I'd let a lot of people down, namely people that liked to abro in Japan, viewers of the channel. You know, for 3 years, I built this channel that I was proud of. I'd built a community I cared about. And what should have been a celebration of that, the first live show was this soulless corporate parade disguised as something personal. And as a naive, idealistic guy who just wanted to make videos and get creative, that was my first real lesson in business, you know, I'd been dragged kicking and screaming into the brutal world of business and reality. The next day, I had a meeting with the people, the MCM over coffee, and they were beaming. They were like, "Wow, you did great. What a success. It was so much fun. We'd love to work with

20:41 you and have you on board with the company, and we could get you that visa by Christmas." And unsurprisingly, I was like, "Nah, I'm I'm good." I thought, "If this is what I have to do to get a visa, I'd rather just burn the Abroad Japan channel to the ground." Now, some of you might be disappointed, like, "That's the worst thing you've done in Japan. I thought you'd put some chopsticks in the rice or slapped Kenwatanabi in the face." And indeed, those things would be pretty awful. But this went on a far deeper level. It's a hard emotion to convey when you feel like you've discarded your integrity. You know, in the case of that live show, nearly every single artistic principle that I held dear had been dismantled in the space of two hours in a very public manner. And yet, in hindsight, despite everything and drawing upon that stoic lesson I mentioned at the start of the

21:27 video, I am happy that this happened. The worst moments can lead to the best decisions. And that event essentially became the guiding star in what not to do. In the ashes of this disaster, two things happened. Number one, I did come back to Japan two months later on a working holiday visa and did things my own way. I found my own path and it wasn't easy. It really wasn't. I spent the first 3 months living out of budget hotels and that affforementioned loan evaporated quicker than a puddle in the Sahara desert. But I got to live through it all, making videos that I cared about, doing things on my own terms. And to this day, the good news is it really is the only thing I have regretted making and putting out on the channel. or maybe that and eating the biggest gyoza in Japan. My stomach has never been the same since, but that's a

22:13 different different matter altogether. The second thing is that company no longer exists. Turns out when you burn your bridges with everyone, it's not the best long-term strategy for a company to follow. And today, when I catch sight of Mory Tower looming over the Tokyo skyline, it's become a powerful reminder to me. It's a beacon of what not to sacrifice when the chips are down. And perhaps above all, it's a reminder to never again agree to something that involves the phrase, just read the script, it'll be fun. And finally, if you are struggling in any way, I do recommend the wise words of the Stoics. Maybe maybe not that one, just there. But these guys worked out 2,000 years ago. And much of the success that I've had in my career is thanks to knowledge and wisdom that I've absorbed from these books. I would recommend them more than anything. Check them out. and the Abro

22:58 Japan book which is almost as good and now available in German, Dutch and Polish, very beautifully translated as well. That's it though guys. As always, many thanks for watching. A huge thank you to all of you who have joined me on this journey over the last decade and a half. It sounds like I'm going somewhere and hopefully that's not the case, but I uh I am genuinely very very grateful to all of you. And of course to the Abro Japan Patreon community who have funded an upcoming documentary on volcanoes that I'm very excited about and which is coming very soon. Keep an eye out for it. As for me, I'm off to swap the wise words of the Stoics for the wise words of Snoop Dog. Uh, this is officially the only cookbook that I own. Somebody got it for me for my birthday. And uh, well, I think it's time for me to embark on my next culinary journey, cooking for Charlotte.

23:45 Oh, come on now. [Music]