Name: My Most HUMILIATING Moment in Japan in 10 Years.
Uploaded: 2025-07-17T09:11:27.000Z
Duration: 23 min 59 s
Description: Thousands of YouTube videos with English-Chinese subtitles! Now you can learn to understand native speakers, expand your vocabulary, and improve your pronunciation...

So the other day, I received this comment from a viewer that I think sums up the experience of being a YouTuber perhaps better than any other.

Participle clauses

It was on a recent documentary we made on the Ishikawa earthquake, showing the scale of the destruction, interviewing locals, and exploring the risks of a potential mega-earthquake in Japan.

An important video, and the response from viewers was amazing.

And no comment I received was as moving as this.

Profound love and sadness and loss for the Japanese people.

Profound love and sadness, but bro, you look pregnant!

Work out and lose your belly, and stop standing like a girl!

That's a real comment written by a real person.

You know, it's like watching the D-Day landing scene in Saving Private Ryan, and being like, a profound and beautiful sacrifice.

But bro, somebody on Omaha Beach had too many pork chops!

When I first started YouTube, encountering much worse comments was a part of the job, you know.

Not like today, where such words come with an offensive comment tag.

And I hate to admit, but the first two years I did this, it really did get to me.

Like, a single nasty comment could sort of derail my mood for the day.

At the time, some YouTubers I knew just said they didn't read the comments at all.

Which I felt was a bad idea, because the community aspect is one of the best things about doing YouTube.

And I was like, how the hell can I do this?

Why would I do this full-time, when this is the sort of thing I have to put up with every single day?

And around the same time, and this was exactly ten years ago, I was going through a difficult phase.

I was loving my life in rural Japan, living in Yamagata.

But my time as a teacher was coming to an end, and without a visa, I had to leave.

And I fell into a really bad place for half a year.

And amidst my search for something to cling to, some sort of hope, I encountered Stoic philosophy.

Stoicism wasn't that well-known at the time.

And I didn't know anybody around me who followed it or practiced it.

This 2,000-year-old philosophy, courtesy of the Greeks and the Romans, and built around one powerful idea, that we can't control what happens to us, but we can control how we respond to it.

It was practical, brutally honest, and exactly what I needed to hear.

You know, I'd jog around at night, listening to it on audiobooks.

And there were three quotes that really stood out to me.

People are not disturbed by events, but by the views they take of them.

And if you are pained by external things, it's not the thing that disturbs you, but your own judgment about it.

And a dog's gotta eat, and the boss dog is gonna show you how.

I realized, hang on, I've been offended by these comments because I've chosen to be.

We had my interpretation, this is about me, I'm a loser.

And we had a reaction or consequence, in my case, demoralization.

But the twist was, I was the one controlling the middle bit, right?

That's where the real damage was happening.

Not the words themselves, they were just some pixels on a screen.

And studying philosophy actually encouraged me to take things a step further and try and find the positive in each and every situation.

And I soon realized, hate comments are actually a blessing in disguise, because, let's face it, they're comedy gold.

I took all these weird, disorientating comments and made my first hate mail reading video.

Why does Japan attract bottom-of-the-barrel white guys?

I like to think I'm at least middle of the barrel.

It was just the most amazing feeling, taking something so negative and making it into something that made people laugh.

Not only that, but it was a real hit with viewers, getting hundreds of thousands of views.

And I put that towards, like, a weekend holiday in Taiwan.

And the whole time I was there, I kind of thought, oh, I wish I had more hate comments, because then I could do this more often.

And in the end, it became sort of a beautiful circle.

Revenue that was derived from the lucrative hate mail series went towards funding more meaningful projects, like documentaries.

So ironically, it was a comment telling me my face and accent were annoying that gave me the confidence to realize I could probably get away doing YouTube full-time.

Still, I wasn't out of the woods just yet, because something far more challenging was just around the corner.

Something that would quickly dismantle my new-found optimism.  I've been in a strange mood lately.

It's the kind of mood where you stare out the window for an hour and then wonder why you're holding a spoon.

I suspect one reason is it was my birthday recently, and I'm now officially 53 years old.

At least, according to the birthday cake so generously gifted by Connor.

The worst thing is, I posted that photo online, and I got so many comments from people who were like, oh, wow, I didn't know you were 53 years old.

But today, having turned 35 years old, I'm wondering what the bloody hell I'm doing with my life.

I really want to open myself up and share with you some stories, personal things that I've never really talked about.

Things that I've learned from doing this across 300 videos and the last 12 years.

Now, I realise I may not be the biggest or the most bestest YouTuber, but I've been lucky to do an awful lot of stuff.

I've got to meet people I never thought I would meet.

See things that I never thought I would see.

Challenge myself in ways I never thought I would.

And injure myself in ways I never thought possible.

And the story I want to share with you today is one that I've avoided telling out of embarrassment.

It involves greed, money, desperation and shame.

And it's big because it involves the single worst thing that I've ever done at the single most important crossroads of my life and career.

And I'm sharing it now because while I'm not proud of it all, I do think there are some useful life lessons in there.

Hopefully for you and hopefully for myself because I fought really hard to get to do this full time.

Diving back into the past can really help you to appreciate the present, right?

Hear the wisdom and mistakes of a pregnant 53-year-old man and a story that I am really, really not looking forward to recounting.

Some of my colleagues thought I was a bit weird.

Subtitles ListPlay Video

My Most HUMILIATING Moment in Japan in 10 Years.

literally

sort

situation

profound