One YouTuber, Casey Neistat, sat down with another, Logan Paul, on Friday in an unedited conversation about Paul's widely-derided decisions and online persona.
Neistat, who carefully cultivates the opposite online personality to Paul -- as a videographer more than a brand -- aimed to shed light on some of Paul's most questionable moments.
The conversation focused heavily on the Japanese Suicide Forest video Paul posted last December. In the video, Paul and friends filmed themselves interacting with a dead body hanging from a tree in the Aokigahara forest.
Paul was quickly met with a backlash and the video was removed from YouTube.
"I forgot to be a human being in that situation and instead decided to be a content creator, and that's where I messed up," Paul said to Neistat.
Paul spoke of the validation he gets from his YouTube fans, and the pressure he feels to entertain them.
In response to claims he is "culturally insensitive" -- prompted, in part, by a video in which he filmed himself throwing Pokeballs at passers-by and running through Japan in traditional Japanese attire -- Paul maintained his innocence.
"There's a difference between being culturally insensitive — being insensitive towards a culture — and being insensitive," he said. "I jumped off a bridge in Italy, is that culturally insensitive? Is saying 'mamma mia' culturally insensitive?"
Neistat began the interview by trying to distance himself from Paul, and cast himself as a concerned representative of all those who have a YouTube following.
"Logan Paul has had an outsized impact on the YouTube community," Neistat said. "His actions affect the entire community. While this is true of all big creators, Logan Paul, in general, and the size of his audience, have amplified the consequences of his bad decisions."
He said that Paul's Suicide Forest video had evoked a sense of shame and embarrassment in the YouTube community.
Neistat said he had qualms about speaking to Paul. "There's a little bit of me that thinks maybe I'm enabling Logan," he said.
The conversation with Paul is not the first time Neistat has cast himself as an arbiter for the YouTube community. In February he interviewed Robert Kyncl, YouTube's head of business about the ethical and other dilemmas that have arisen on the growing platform, including monetization and the nature of the powerful algorithm which determines what users will be presented.
Uncommon Knowledge
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Newsweek is committed to challenging conventional wisdom and finding connections in the search for common ground.
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