Crazy YouTubers

YouTube is an awesome tool, and it's also a huge waste of time, depending on how you use it. It can be wonderful for education; there are tons of free instructional videos. I've learned a lot about software and web development just from watching YouTube. Also, if you're learning a language or a musical instrument, you can find a lot of information and practice material through YouTube. And it's also great for listening to music and discovering new artists.

The risk is, when you just scroll through your feed. There are so many interesting things being recommended – most of them are entertaining, but some can be such a waste of time. Like, I didn't need to watch five videos about someone's pet wolf the other day. But it's so easy to just look down at your phone and load a video, and then your brain releases some dopamine, and it makes you want to do it some more, so you do it some more. 

That's the world we live in; YouTube is more popular than TV for most, and there are a lot of people taking advantage of that and making their living through YouTube and other social media apps. 

And like I said, there's a lot of great stuff that people are doing; education, music, entertainment. But there are some bad trends too. One of those trends is where people film themselves doing really dangerous stuff. Recently I read an article about a guy who posted a video of himself riding his motorcycle. He did a drive between two cities that would normally take an hour – he arrived in 20 minutes. In the video, you can see him dodging in and out of traffic, and riding on the shoulder of the highway – really dangerous driving. Police say he was driving at 150 miles per hour, which is almost triple the speed limit there.   

An even crazier stunt happened last year, in California. There's this YouTuber who's a pilot, who had his own plane and filmed videos of himself flying. In order to make a viral video, he attached cameras to his plane and himself, put on a parachute, and deliberately crashed his plane during a flight. He made it look in the video like the whole thing was an accident, that there was a problem with his engine. He jumped out of the plane before it crashed, and filmed it on his phone while he was parachuting down. I don't know how he thought he could get away with it, but authorities figured it out pretty quickly that he planned the whole thing. He only got 6 months in prison though. 

As for the motorcycle guy, there's a warrant out for his arrest. I don't know if he's turned himself in yet or not.

Listening Homework |
by Homework Cat

Listening Homework
by Homework Cat

Warmup

How does he say you can use YouTube?