Important Message for All Joe Blogs Viewers

Hi, welcome back to the channel. In today's episode I need to address a very serious problem. It appears that some people are watching my videos despite not liking my videos. They don't like the subjects I discuss, my opinions, they don't like my voice, my clothes, my hair, my face, my delivery, my studio, my graphs, or in some cases any of the words that come out of my mouth. And yet somehow they keep coming back. Some of them have watched hundreds of my videos. So today I would like to make a number of important announcements which may come as a considerable shock to certain members of the audience. Announcement number one. Watching my YouTube videos is not compulsory. Now I realise this hasn't been made entirely clear before. There is no legal obligation to click on one of my thumbnails. You won't receive a fine if you fail to watch. Nobody from YouTube will come to your house and ask why you missed Tuesday's update on the Russian economy. Your passport will not be confiscated. Your bank account will not be frozen. And as far as I'm aware failure to watch Joe blogs is not currently grounds for imprisonment. Although obviously governments are coming up with new rules all the time so keep checking those details. But at the time of filming watching this channel remains entirely voluntary. If you see my face appear on your screen and experience an immediate surge of anger there is something you can do about it. Don't click on it. It's a remarkably effective system. I've tested it on hundreds of other YouTube channels and it works every time. You simply move your finger away from the thumbnail and continue with your day. There are millions of other videos available. You can watch gardening or football or somebody restoring a Victorian drainpipe. There are even videos of people walking quietly around supermarkets. They sound quite good don't You don't have to spend 15 minutes listening to a man you apparently despise talking about government bond yields. Now before we go any further today could I ask anybody that is liking this video to give me a thumbs up. Please subscribe to the channel and also hit the hype button if it's available to you. And if you absolutely hate everything I do make sure you leave a comment leaving considerable detail about it. It's fantastic for engagement. Which brings me to announcement number two. When you watch the entire video and then leave three angry comments underneath it YouTube doesn't interpret that as a protest. YouTube actually thinks you enjoyed my video. The algorithm can't detect sarcasm. It doesn't read your comment saying this man is an idiot and immediately convene an emergency meeting to have me removed from the platform. It sees that you clicked on the video, watched for 14 minutes and then interacted with it. As far as YouTube is concerned you're one of my biggest fans. Some of you are more supportive than my own family. You never miss an update. You watch right to the end. You leave multiple comments. Sometimes you even come back several hours later to argue with somebody that replied to your comment. That's extraordinary dedication. So to everyone who regularly watches my videos purely to tell me how much you dislike watching my videos thank you very much. I genuinely couldn't do any of this without you. Announcement number three. I'm aware that I do have hair. This has been brought to my attention. Some viewers don't like my haircut. Other viewers think that I need a haircut. Occasionally these two groups appear under the same video. One person says get your hair cut. The other person says that haircut looks ridiculous. So I'm now trapped in a very difficult situation. If I don't get it cut I'm wrong but if I do get it cut then I just can't suit everybody. I can't please everyone. I have considered going completely bald but I'm confident somebody would then complain about the studio lights reflecting off my head and distracting them from the graphs. My hair is currently undergoing a full strategic review. You'll be pleased to know. Consultants have been appointed. A public inquiry may well follow. Until then I'd ask viewers to remain calm. I can also confirm that I do dress myself. Nobody at YouTube selects my shirts. There isn't an international committee deciding whether I should wear blue or grey or black. If you don't like something I'm wearing don't worry. The video will end and I will eventually take it off. Probably not immediately but at some point down the road. Announcement number four. This channel contains my voice. Again I appreciate this may not have been obvious when you clicked on a video featuring my face and my name. I've received comments saying I speak too slowly or too quickly. They don't like my accent. I'm simultaneously too loud, too quiet, too dramatic and completely monotonous. One viewer recently announced that they couldn't stand the way I pronounced a particular word. Unfortunately they'd already listened to me pronouncing it around 20 times in the one video. That feels like a problem we could have identified slightly earlier. If my voice produces a physical reaction in you, YouTube has a volume button. If you move it all the way down to the bottom the noise stops. Admittedly this may make the economic analysis slightly harder to follow but based on some of the comments that ---- may have already sailed. Announcement number five. I've occasionally been wrong. I know I was shocked at that as well. Over thousands of videos discussing economics, politics, markets, wars, businesses and events that haven't finished happening yet, not every sentence I've spoken has turned out to be a sacred prophecy. This is partly because I'm a bloke on YouTube and I'm not an all-seeing oracle living on the top of a mountain. I discuss risks, I look at data, I talk about what might happen and explain why it matters. Sometimes a risk becomes a reality, sometimes it doesn't. That's how risk works. If I say your house is at risk of being burgled for example and your house isn't burgled, it doesn't mean burglars have ceased to exist. It doesn't mean the locks that you put onto your house were a waste of money. It certainly doesn't mean that you should post the comments six months later saying another failed prediction Joe blogs. My television is still on the wall. Forecasting the economy is particularly difficult because the economy is made up of billions of people making unpredictable decisions. Governments intervene, central banks change interest rates, wars begin, wars end, markets panic, markets recover, Donald Trump posts something on social media at three o'clock in the morning and several trillion dollars changes direction before breakfast, things develop. I try to explain what the available information is telling us at that point. If you require somebody who's right about the future 100% of the time, I'm afraid YouTube might not be the best place to look. Although there are plenty of channels claiming to provide exactly that service, usually just before asking you to buy their cryptocurrency. Announcement number six. Sometimes I discuss stories that other people have already heard about. This is known as the news. Several viewers like to announce this is old news, I've heard about this yesterday, blah blah blah Joe blogs, I've heard it all before. Congratulations, you have won the news. Your medal is in the post. The fact that you personally encountered a story before I made a video about it and then posted it onto YouTube doesn't mean that everybody else on the planet has received the same information at precisely the same time. Some people have to go to work, some people might be asleep, some people don't spend 11 hours a day refreshing financial news websites, and some people may know that an event happened but would like somebody to explain why it matters. That's where I come in. I'm not claiming to be reporting live from the scene. I'm not standing outside the Federal Reserve with a microphone shouting over the top of a helicopter. My job is to take the information, pull together the numbers, look at the wider picture, and explain what it might mean for you. If you already know everything, I'm going to say once again I must draw your attention to the revolutionary don't click system that I mentioned earlier. You don't have to watch the videos. I know that is big news but that's probably the big takeaway from today's video. Announcement number seven. The title and thumbnail are intended to make you interested in the video. This practice is known as marketing. Now I know that sounds sinister. YouTube is a platform containing several billion thumbnails all competing for attention. If I title a video a moderately interesting discussion concerning recent movements in selected international financial indicators, it might not perform as well as I want it to. Although it might be extremely accurate. So yes the thumbnails are designed to attract attention but the subject discussed in the thumbnail probably is what I'm going to talk about in the video. That's the way it works. You don't have to like the wording. You might think it's too dramatic but typing clickbait in capital letters underneath every video doesn't cause the thumbnail police to arrive and place me under arrest. It merely tells YouTube that the thumbnail successfully encouraged you to click and to post a comment. Announcement number eight. You don't need to announce your departure. Every now and then somebody posts a comment saying that's it I've had enough Joe blogs. I've had enough of your videos. I'm unsubscribing. It always feels very final like the last scene of a romantic film. I imagine them standing at a railway station in the rain holding a suitcase looking back at the channel one final time. I'm sorry Joe this just isn't working anymore and then the train pulls slowly away. You are allowed to unsubscribe quietly. There's no paperwork. You don't have to serve a notice period. You don't need to arrange an exit interview. There's no leaving presentation and we won't be having a collection for you for a departing gift. You simply press the button and vanish into the digital wilderness. Although quite a few people announce that they're unsubscribing and then return to comment on the very next video so presumably the separation didn't go that well. Announcement number nine. Saying you know nothing is not quite as devastating to me as some people might imagine particularly when it's followed by no explanation whatsoever. If I've made a factual mistake in a video then please tell me what it was give me the correct figure or explain why the conclusion is wrong that might be useful for future videos. I do read the comments and viewers sometimes spot things add context or make excellent counter arguments but you're talking out of your bottom is not really an economic thesis. It's very difficult to put that into a graph. There's no real comparable historic figures. The International Monetary Fund doesn't currently publish a talking out of your bottom index although if it did I suspect several countries would be performing extremely strongly. And finally announcement number 10. It's perfectly acceptable not to like me. I'm not everybody's cup of tea and to be fair some people don't even like tea. You may find me boring. You might disagree with my opinions. You might think I'm too negative or too positive or too dramatic or not dramatic enough. That's absolutely fine. I make videos for people who find them useful informative and thought-provoking. I don't expect every person on this planet to enjoy them but repeatedly watching somebody you can't stand seems like a very expensive time to use your limited amount of time on this planet. Imagine re-seeing the end of your life and discovering you spent six months of it furiously sending me messages about my haircut. Go and watch something that makes you happy or instead maybe read a book or call a friend or even better go outside. The sky can be quite impressive at times and if you decide that you do want to stay on YouTube and watch my videos then you're very welcome. Whether you agree with me disagree with me or are simply monitoring the situation until my hair reaches what you regard as an acceptable length. So hopefully you found today's video useful informative and amusing. That's the whole point of today really. A little bit tongue-in-cheek. I just thought it would be quite funny to address some of the comments that I get. I mean I've been on YouTube for five or six years now so I've had literally tens of thousands of comments. The vast majority of them have been really positive and supportive so thank you so much if you're one of those people. I do get some negative comments like all the time every day. It tends to be the same sort of themes of people you know disagreeing with me or just saying I'm useless or whatever it might be and so I thought I'd post this sort of slightly amusing video addressing some of the issues and hopefully it's put a smile on your face. It put a smile on my face making it. Hopefully it's put a smile on your face watching it. If you liked it please give me a thumbs up please subscribe. Hit the like button if you can. I'll see you again next time.