That's it, I was like, my career is over. I had no confidence or no, I was like, a shell of blackness for myself. You don't often get to hear about the real human implications of cancel culture. You don't get to hear how it feels for the recipient.
You don't get to see how it plays out in the moment. My next guest, he can tell you, Jack Maynard was caught in the middle of a well-known, well-documented British cancel culture moment when something that he had said almost 10 years earlier resurfaced while he was at the peak of his powers, while he was fulfilling his dream, while he was in the middle of filming I'm a Celebrity, Get Me Out of Here a couple years ago. And the events that would unfold following that cancel culture moment would change him forever. PTSD, anxiety, depression, shame.
He even remarked today that there was a high chance he wasn't going to make it to this podcast because some of those symptoms still remain. I guess the question is, how do you pick yourself up from something like that? How do those moments feel? What actually happens when you're told, while you're in the middle of the jungle in Australia filming a show, that the outside world has turned against you?
These are the things you can only learn from hearing the truth from someone that's been through those situations. So without further ado, my name is Stephen Bartlett, and this is The Driver, CEO. I hope nobody's listening. But if you are, then please keep this to yourself.
So Jack, I did a lot of research on you and your background, what you're into, the work you do, and your professional endeavors are quite eclectic. You know, it's hard to pin down whether you consider yourself to be a YouTuber now, or a DJ, or something else. So I wanted to, despite all the research, I wanted to ask you, like, I'm not a fan of labelling oneself, but how do you classify yourself? I still do describe myself as a YouTuber, like to what I mean, I kind of say, oh yeah, I do YouTube, and you still to this day get a look of, like, do YouTube, that's your job.
But I think, like you said, it's kind of a collective of things I do, and I kind of break it down to everything I do that, yeah, I kind of fully understand now. Like, very recently, a lot of people have only decided to understand, like, what actually is in that YouTube and just social media itself can be, obviously, a job. So, yeah, I still go for YouTube. You don't post as much as you used to on YouTube, no, mainly because, literally, at the beginning of last year, I decided, right, I want to go, kind of, bigger productions, a lot of the music videos I've done, and things like that, and I just want to kind of get out there about other, I kind of really want to just get loads of, like, celebrities and, like, reality TV stars on my channel, and do loads of fun things in places, like, you know, all over the world with them, and then, obviously, when COVID came in, so I was just at a point where I was so, like, honestly, like, sick to death of filming videos at home, like, in my fact, you know, I was honestly just beyond bored, and I had so many other things I was doing as well.
I think it was four videos this year on YouTube channel. Not many, is it? No. Considering I was uploading once or twice a week before, but, yeah, like I said, I really just kind of couldn't face doing those kind of videos, and, for me, YouTube has been something I enjoy so much, and my best videos are, honestly, the videos I kind of enjoyed making the most.
What's it like, though, people will look at YouTubers, especially young kids, and think, oh, god, I'd love to be a YouTuber. I think I read a report that said, one of the, especially in the Western world in the UK, one of the jobs that people, young kids aspire to the most, Gen Z, is to become a YouTuber. Yeah. But I'm sure, I know, because I've spoken to a lot of YouTubers, that there's a lot of adverse side effects of the job.
Yeah, definitely. I think, well, the first thing is, people think it's easy, like, people do think it's easy, 100%. You know, you get to sit around making silly videos in their eyes. I think if you ask, you know, 100 people, probably 80 of them will probably say, oh, they're just going to sit around making, like, stupid videos.
They don't see a lot of stuff, kind of, that goes into it. But it's definitely not easy, you know, there's no guarantee that you're going to do well on it. You have no idea if you do well on it, how long that will last, and, you know, there's all those kind of things. It's just a lot of pressure, because it's not like a, cool, I know, I'm going to do these every week, I'm going to get paid, like, X amount, this is going to be my job, yeah, you can have a month where you do really bad, or you upload a certain video that you're really proud of, and it does really bad, and you're just like, oh, God, why is that?
And then you kind of fall back to your safety now, things that you know, maybe will do well, but you don't want to do those anymore, and it's just like a, yeah, it's very hard, and I think it does affect people in, like, many other ways. Some people kind of love that, they love the challenge, they want to keep on going, which is amazing, but, yeah, like I said, there are people who want to do this one thing, which can do incredibly well, and then it switches, and it suddenly doesn't do well anymore. Not through any fault of their own, but just because YouTube have kind of decided, yeah, we want to see more stuff like this, making push for that kind of content, and yeah, people get incredibly bad mental health from it, I think. People are very vulnerable.