Portions of this interview were published in this months issue of The Progressive - which I recommend picking up - it's in stores now! It's about 2000 words of a 7500 interview I did with Alex Winter... one that I managed to never ask him a question about Bill & Ted as I am a serious adult journalist and not a fan boy. (It was really really tough). The video version of this interview will be posted soon here - assuming I can post such a long video, I haven't tried yet.
This is our first episode of the New Year and we’re opening with a big one. I interviewed actor and documentary filmmaker Alex Winter - who you of course will know as Bill from Bill and Ted’s Excellent Adventure. For nearly as long as he’s been acting, he’s been directing - doing everything from TV shows like Ben 10 to documentaries like the incredible Panama Papers.
Winter’s latest documentary film, The YouTube Effect, delves into how YouTube, its parent company, Google, and the public need to come to terms with its far-reaching influence on society. It does this quite subtly by speaking with the people who know the site best—its founders and content creators. Winter told me that he did not want anyone on camera that “wasn’t embedded in the YouTube machine somehow.”
Winter speaks to content creators who have achieved Hollywood-level stardom—although you may not know them unless you are in their demographic. Ryan Kaji, of Ryan’s World fame, is an eleven-year-old with 33.6 million YouTube subscribers. Anthony Padilla was the co-creator of the Smosh channel, which had twenty-five million subscribers and over ten billion video views.
The influence and reach of these channels, especially with kids and young adults, is undeniable. But even as someone who covers online content for a living, I had never heard of them. Both are noncontroversial figures in the YouTube world, but there are many more on the site that create edgy content for views—and millions of dollars in advertising revenue. For some creators, that means becoming a gateway to the alt-right pipeline.
For years, YouTube’s algorithm pushed videos to viewers that it believed they would like, based on videos they had previously watched, which usually meant ones with a large amount of interaction and controversy. This would lead people from Joe Rogan to Jordan Peterson, for example, and then to someone like white supremacist Stefan Molyneux.
The film speaks to the wider issue of online polarization and the effect of social media on all of us.
YouTube is here to stay, so we will have to figure out how to deal with it. The YouTube Effect is an important documentary about a problem that so many of us seem to hope will resolve on its own. Spoiler alert: It won’t.
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