New video: youtube reaps what it sows

BestEvidence opens a 2nd front it its war on corporate criminality

The first video in the BestEvidence Substack era is here.

Some backstory

A decade ago I decided to learn how to make videos with my own hands, which from my perspective offered a number of advantages over long-form written pieces like some of the blog posts that I’d been writing from time to time. For one thing, I could show the actual language on official documents, zeroing in on key passages with zooms and highlights. Showing the actual language would obviate needless disputes, I imagined.

For another thing, video has the capacity to capture a crucial dimension of truth that’s simply absent from the written word when someone is speaking or testifying, namely, the speaker’s body language, which is really a more reliable indicator of the truth than the spoken word. This is especially true for the highly compensated liars encrusted in the top mega-corporate layer, who invariably give themselves away when telling whoppers. Shifting to video, I thought, would supply readers with an additional tool for discovering the truth on important issues.

There was just one problem with making bread-and-butter youtube videos: most creators appeared on camera, which I hated. It’s unnatural to speak to a piece of glass. I’m still averse to it and procrastinate when it comes time to do it, but I’ve gotten better.

So from where I was sitting 10 years ago, my workaround for appearing in front of the camera and speaking “live” was to simply narrate video clips that I’d already created. I’d just generate clips with Keynote or PowerPoint—software that I was already familiar with—and then lay down an audio track and stitch things together in a simple video editor and presto—a new video would be born.

And so it came to pass on October 3, 2013 (the fifth anniversary of the TARP bailout’s signing into law) that I released “Bankster Baseball,” a huge riff on Sergio Leone’s “Once Upon a Time in the West” that casts JPMorgan Chase CEO Jamie Dimon in the role of Morton (played to perfection by Gabriele Ferzetti), the film’s dying corporate magnate. My first mini-documentary, “Bankster Baseball” proves that Dimon had lied to the Senate while testifying about the London Whale trades, falsely claiming that his bank didn’t need the TARP bailout money in 2008. (It’s an absurd lie I see repeated to this day—that the government “forced” the banks to take the money.)

What it reveals is that in a moment of anger, Dimon deviated from his attorneys’ finely crafted script about the TARP bailout and said what his huge ego wanted to say (a lie, namely, that JP Morgan didn’t need a bailout) instead of what his attorneys told him to say (a technical truth, that the bank “didn’t seek” the TARP bailout). Dimon’s ego-fueled slip revealed not only his dishonesty, but another interesting fact as well: Jamie Dimon isn’t good on his feet, certainly not nearly as good as one might expect from a CEO of his stature.

The feelings of power I felt from the possession of this vastly expanded range of expression when I posted “Bankster Baseball” to YouTube were addictive, and I dove full bore into learning how to produce videos.

It was a welcome change at the time. I’d been seriously writing for almost 20 years, since I joined a wildly successful Chicago patent litigation boutique in 1994. That boutique closed shop in 2004, and I’d been working in oversized global blandanoid law firms since, and I was just burnt out.

Pouring my efforts into making videos was exactly the change I needed. Yes, videos required writing too, but the writing that goes into videos, at least the ones I wanted to make, presented a set of unique challenges that made it seem like a whole new form of work, which it really is.

In any case, over the last 10 years I’ve really gotten away from straight-up writing. The difference between writing blog piece about, say, Citigroup’s criminality on the one hand and producing a video about the Federal Reserve’s lies of omission on the other hand is night and day.

Today, though, I find that YouTube’s systematic interference with my creative visual efforts, at least in their circulation and distribution, has metastasized to the point where I feel the need to reach for a new weapon. Or, better yet, just brush aside the mothballs on an old one.

What Substack represents now

Thanks to YouTube’s heavy-handed suppression of my videos, I’m dusting off my trusted old friend, the pen (as it were), for use in carving up corporate criminals on a more regular basis than a video production schedule will allow.

I was a writer first, before audio/video and before engineering too. That’s why the pen nib is the first symbol in the frieze on my new video banner.

In the new video that goes with this post, I talk about the various problems that substack solves with respect to my video channels (on YouTube, Bitchute and Odysee).

It’ll give you some idea about the direction that this space will take over the next months.

—John Titus