Message to John Sutherland, Geriatric1927, and CEOs

Well, hi, it's Tom, and as followers of the True Talk blog know, every Friday is Featured Photo Friday. And one Friday, months and months ago, instead of a photo that I took, I actually posted a very short video blog saying, you know, we old people had to be able to learn how to do this thing to be able to stay up with the kids, you know. So I said, "Come on, let's go for it." And so in the ensuing months, you know, here has come YouTube and all that YouTube has come to mean in a very short time. About the way we're connecting with one another. Now today I was all set to start talking a little bit about why YouTube should be something taken seriously by people in a business context. And I hadn't really thought through what I wanted to say about that except that I knew— I know that there are more insights to be gained into more different markets by closely watching and listening to what's going on on YouTube than there are in hundreds of focus groups that you could hold all over the world. And that was going to be the general thrust of what I was going to say. But just before I started to record this, I saw that Geriatric1927 had just posted a couple of— few hours ago his most recent video. So I said, well, let me go check that out before I start recording my own. And lo and behold, what has Geriatric1927 created a video about today but a an article that appeared in The Guardian newspaper in England. And hang on, because I went and found it and I printed it out, and I want to get it because it's a great— it fits in very well with what I wanted to say about where YouTube fits in today's world. This is a piece from Wednesday's Guardian written by John Sutherland as Peter mentioned in his video, in which, you know, Sutherland— how can I put it graciously— arrogantly skewers Peter for being essentially a banal nobody who will— I love this one line— the Napoleon brandy of banal. See, the clever turn of phrase is always the sign of a trained mind. But the issue that is most interesting to me is really the first line of the piece. Sad to say, sad to say, but the next eBulletin of Geriatric, 1927, a.k.a. Peter of Leicester, Hello YouTubers. I love the way he gets Peter's signature line in there. May well be visited by more people than read this newspaper or The Sun even. So the implication there to me is that the people who watch someone like Geriatric1927 on YouTube are more of whom, as Mr. Sutherland says here, then will probably read his newspaper, um, are somehow trapped in some kind of fool's paradise of watching things that are banal, of no consequence, and unable to tell that what they're watching is banal and of no consequence. I think that's the part of it that I like the best. That not only are we trapped, but we don't know that we're trapped. What we need is the wisdom of publications like The Guardian to point out to us the folly of our ways. I don't know about you, but I'm grateful whenever that kind of guidance ever comes my way from a source as esteemed as The Guardian and Mr. Sutherland. This notion that people don't really know anything and that the people who know things are the people who are in positions that have been certified as knowing things— this idea is an idea whose time has really passed. We are past the time that it is possible to have authority bequeathed upon someone from outside. Authority rises out of what one does and says today. And that isn't to say that there isn't— any of us who have watched YouTube knows that there's all kinds of stuff on there, much of which is junk and crazy and stupid. But it's the crazy, stupid junk produced by people who today have a sense of their own power to produce such things. Now, you know, I'm sure that the very first stone tablet writings were not the classics. I'm sure that the first, you know, when we go back and look at the early silent films today, many of them are terrible. But there was Napoleon, you know, that film, that silent film, that classic. There was that. There was Charlie Chaplin. There were moments that indicated what the medium was going to become when it grew up, when it matured, when people learned how to use it and learned how to relate to it. There were indications of that early on in the use of that medium. I believe what we're seeing today is a very similar kind of emergence of a new way of people communicating to one another. If you are in business and you are not paying attention to the kinds of movement that's going on within this community— and it's not just YouTube, it's the entire creation of content. Content makes it sound like it's something that you put into something else. The creation of expressive material by people, any of us. If you're not watching that and you're not seeing that opportunity is about to be presented to you in your business that is unprecedented. If you're missing that, I think you're missing a very important boat. And someone like Peter, Geriatric1927, has done a marvelous job of demonstrating the power of the quiet, simple, banal voice that all of us who are not as highly esteemed as Mr. Sutherland, that all of us have, as opposed to just simply receding into the quiet nothingness of— how did he put it?— the nursing home, some such thing like that. So I know that I, along with hundreds of thousands, if not millions of other people, are very glad that Peter of Leicester, Geriatric 1927, has not simply faded away into that good night, but has left us with an indelible picture of what it looks like to be able to continue to live your life fully no matter how old you become. So that's my Featured Photo Friday blog for today. For all of you True Talk blog followers and YouTubers— I'm sorry, I shouldn't say YouTubers, that's really Peter's— all you YouTubes and YouTubettes, Have a great Labor Day weekend. Thanks. Bye.