The APA blog is working with Cliff Sosis of What is it Like to Be a Philosopher? in publishing advance excerpts from Cliff’s long-form interviews with philosophers.
The following is an edited excerpt from the forthcoming interview with Oliver Thorn which will be released in full next week.
So then how did Philosophy Tube get started? It’s enormously popular!
Thank you! A girlfriend of the time suggested that I start a YouTube channel for my standup, and although I didn’t think I had enough material to do a regular thing I liked the idea of starting a YouTube channel. I was also in the last year to pay the old tuition fees, before the government tripled them in 2012; the new fees affected everyone in the years below me. I thought that was deeply unfair. In 2013 I applied to a summer internship at Private Eye, thinking that would fill the summer nicely. One rejection letter from Ian Hislop later I was suddenly at a loose end for two months, so all the threads came together – I sat down, did some research, and created my first video! The plan was to just record what I had learned in lectures and give it away for free!
How has Philosophy Tube grown?
It’s now just under 6 years old and still going strong, which is unusual – most channels live and die in that time. Unlike a lot of channels it never really blew up, it just grew steadily, which, now that it’s reached the level where it’s brought me a little bit of relative fame, I realise was a really good thing because I’ve had time to adjust to that gradually rather than having it suddenly thrust upon me overnight.
One average, how many hours does it take you to make a video nowadays? What’s the process like? Hardest video to make? It seems like it might be a lot of work!
It can vary enormously. Filming can take days; editing can take weeks; research and writing can sometimes take months as I try to find out what the video needs to be. Some videos have started life as one thing and become something totally different way down the line. The hardest one to make from a technical standpoint was my one on Witchcraft, Gender, & Marxism: the costume took a long time to make, I hired musicians to write an original soundtrack, travelled to Oxford on a research trip to get the right feel for it, and filmed outdoors by firelight with coloured lighting. Overall though, the hardest one to make so far was my one on Suicide & Mental Health, for reasons that will be obvious if you watch it. I spent weeks and weeks crying myself to sleep during the writing phase of that.
Favorite videos?
I’d say I have two videos that I’m most proud of, for very different reasons. The first is my Philosophy of Antifa video, which I like because as far as I know nobody had made anything like it on YouTube before. There are lots of videos about antifascist action but I don’t think anybody had ever sat down and explained the whole thing, theory and practice, with proper citations and anticipated objections before. I got to plant the flag on that one, and my video on it has become one of the definitive resources for learning about Antifa, which makes me very proud! The second is my one on Elon Musk. I was in a bit of a rut with the channel for a while until I went to VidCon in June 2018 and came back totally inspired to try new things. Even though I think I’ve since surpassed it, the Musk video was like a renaissance for the show – the beginning of Philosophy Tube Season 2. I took a gamble in hiring a studio rather than filming in my bedroom and fully committed to making videos as art, rather than lectures. I really put a lot into it and you can see that from what’s on the screen.
The Antifa video is good. Cool take on a contentious topic. So, the videos are your full-time job, right?
Patreon is my main source of income, which is phenomenal. It didn’t exist when I started, and I got in at just the right time when it was still pretty new. Luckily what I’m trying to do with the channel really resonated with people in a way that made them happy to chip in. For a while I was making enough that Philosophy Tube was like a part-time job, and just before I went to drama school I made a video where I sat down and said to the fans, “I’m going to be an actor; every actor has two jobs; if you want you can help make this my second job because if I have to work in a pub or whatever to make ends meet then I probably won’t have time to make the show as well.” The response was unbelievable: the very next morning the Patreon campaign had doubled and suddenly I had full employment, so I kept making the show all the way through drama school and out the other side. The fans really supported me, which is incredible. If I was dependent solely on advertising I just couldn’t do that. I also hardly ever get brand deals, which is partly my own fault.
Why don’t you get brand deals?
A couple of years ago I was approached by a marketing agency on behalf of a major UK university asking me to make a video promoting their uni. They offered me £2500. So I made the video, and then immediately made a follow-up one saying, “I believe everything I said in that video, they are a great uni, but here’s what else is going on,” and I talked about how their cleaning staff were on strike, their teaching staff weren’t getting decent wages, and their students were paying £9000 a year while the uni was pumping money into hiring YouTubers to make ads for them. I couldn’t in good conscience take that money, so I publicly donated my fee to the student union and unsurprisingly almost no brand or marketing agency has touched me with a ten-foot pole since, haha!
Good form. Ever consider getting back into academia?
No way! I have not just one dream job but two, professional actor and professional YouTuber, I wouldn’t want to give up either! Why spend years and a fortune doing precarious, under-appreciated, backbreaking work when I can reach more people, have more fun, and be my own boss on YouTube? A lot of academics are starting to realise that now I think; I enjoy interacting with the institutional ones that maintain good social media presences, and quite a few are leaving the institutions and doing great work in the wider world. There’s also the safety concern: one thing I’m hearing again and again is that some universities don’t have a proper understanding of social media, especially harassment, and with my online presence it’d be tough for me to hold a job in academia I imagine. I’d be too much of an easy target. I’ve heard horror stories of academics being targeted by far-right harassment and going to their HR departments to try to explain why official inboxes are suddenly filling up with slander and horrific accusations and fake complaints, and the unis are saying, “What’s Twitter? What do you mean you tweeted a meme and now Nazis are trying to get you fired?”
How have people in academia responded to your stuff?
I learned the hard way early on that universities were going to be slow on the uptake with regards to what I was trying to do: in my final year of uni I wrote to every major uni in the UK telling them about the show and inviting them to sponsor me to keep doing it after I graduated. (These were the days before I got a bit more politically savvy and wouldn’t have turned down sponsorships from unis, the way I did later on like I told you about above.)
A lot of them just didn’t even seem to know what YouTube was, and I had to say to them, “Look, I reach more students in a week than your entire yearly intake for every subject. Won’t you even watch one video?” This was at the stage where three or four years of A-Level students had grown up watching me and I was starting to get fan mail from people saying they were going to study philosophy because of the show. But the unis just didn’t get it. Worse still, my own university led me up the garden path! I emailed them asking them to sponsor the show and they said yes, offering me regular money to put university branding on my videos. For about two days I was on Cloud 9, thinking I had a regular job for my year off after graduation that would mean I could go to drama school auditions worry-free. I even made the first video for them and then sent it with my invoice, at which point the university legal department sent me a strongly-worded email saying they had never agreed to anything, never been informed, never been told, “Nobody should have told you this was okay,” there is no such agreement. They even asked me to take the video down, and I had to re-explain to them how YouTube works and that no, I couldn’t just take it down because tens of thousands of people would have my head and at that point it had already been seen by 99% of the people that were ever going to see it so I had done advertising for the university for which I was expecting to be paid! I showed them the emails where I had arranged the deal but they washed their hands of me; the university was such an administrative labyrinth that it was impossible to get a straight answer out of them on anything.
I must admit, when I first encountered your stuff, I really wasn’t sure I was on board with what you were doing. I didn’t feel threatened, but I guess I wondered what made you qualified to teach philosophy. Are you qualified to teach philosophy, you think?
Truth be told, teaching philosophy is a bit of a headline – it’s a good hook, but what I really do is a bit more diverse and esoteric than that!
Fair enough! You say you are giving away your degree. Can your YouTube videos provide the same level of educational experience you received from Howard? Or at St Andrews?
They don’t try to. In fact, now that I reach more people that most universities can hope to, I’ve been deliberately trying to not just give the same kind of experience as people would get there. One of my recent videos was very much about that, and about me realizing at once the responsibility and freedom of my position.
Can academic philosophy adapt to the rapidly evolving media landscape? How?
We shall see… I’ve had some frustrating experiences trying to make this happen that sadly can’t be printed, but I believe it’s possible. It would be nice if mainstream academia, and indeed media, took notice once in a while – in terms of numbers, really we’re the mainstream now – but gatekeepers can sometimes be a bit slow on the uptake.
[interviewer: Cliff Sosis]
This interview has been edited for length. The full interview will be available at What Is It Like to Be A Philosopher?
You can get early access to the interview and help support the project here.
