Dear Company Man,

“All in a day’s work,” I believe, saves many more souls than merely praying on their behalf will. God only knows providing a service and not being greedy is enough to stave off lurid assumptions driven by envy and powerlessness-fueled impotent rage.

If you’re wondering about where you’ll be in the next couple of years, then you should consider how others at YouTube have confronted years of engaging with the audience at large. Miles Beckler eventually tapered off with his daily videos–just to understand how to do it and achieve a respectable rhythm. Razorfist incorporated politically oriented rants until his original multi-media approach–a metal-headed knock-off of AVGN but with a twist of appropriate positivity–was set by the wayside. These guys are still fine–it’s the quitters you forget about. The ones who forsake their original vision or accidentally corrupt it (or let someone else do that for them) are the ones we remember in the worst ways possible, such as Cinemassacre–still resplendently recovering from the Slobwave era designed to let him devote time to his family.

Considering you’ve been at this for seven years and I don’t even remember if I subscribed from the start or what precipitated that, I believe you have a relative degree of longevity. The format needs no changing; the stock videography and patient narration still work and the topics are always cool. The “Decline” videos are naturally going to pull more attention because everyone loves a juicy bit of corporate gossiping. We’re primed to zone in on the negative, so there’s always demand. Fortunately, you temper those with an unbiased analysis without stepping on thumbtacks.

The videos about how and why companies succeed, especially those that do under their own merits, are far more nutritious from an edutainment and mental health standpoint. I was particularly fascinated by the regional brands like Wawa, which then inspired my inclusion of it in my video game design document, an Eastern-styled RPG inspired by AVGN & Cinemassacre, which is located in or around New Jersey & Pennsylvania. You would use Wawa as a facility and plot point as an optional if occasionally useful in-game function. You won’t see dance routines straight out of Mac & Me, but it’d be on-point and respectful.

Without the added information on Wawa–something that I’ve seen Mike Matei imbibe in on more than one occasion–I would never have considered its inclusion in the game. If you want something to be regional, you have to incorporate regional flavor. I imagine real-world product/company placements, regardless of controversy, are nowhere near as reprehensible as people think. It needs to make sense and be integrated into the game’s mechanics. Kids around a table playing D&D while drinking Pepsi-Cola after ordering Pizza Hut for delivery? Yeah, that was a scene from E.T. back in 1982. The video game Parasite Eve II had several nods to Coca-Cola. It was released in a time when Squaresoft was struggling to gain a foothold in America via a Honolulu-based render farm. We have enough raw data for devising ways of integrating promotional cash without being sleazy or satirical.

Back to the schmoozing-up of a cherished channel. If you’re thinking about slowing down due to the occasional drain of effort into a very controversial topic, say Victoria’s Secret (you got the balls, now try scrutinizing something like Playboy or Sports Illustrated!), then step back, take stock, and remember what happens whenever someone achieves a certain number of posts in their blog–something you can do alongside YouTube without eliminating YouTube: write a book.

Let’s face it: nobody video-blogs about companies and corporations in a balanced, even positive manner. Most people write them off as money-hogs and scold them even when they’ve done nothing immoral (i.e. straight-up against a moral, as opposed to being amoral, or operating in the absence of morals in a way that might not actually infringe on them). You, however, can illustrate a book that describes where and when companies decline and how an aspirant entrepreneur can avoid the obvious errors that contribute to a decline without going to some “risk aversion” firm like Blackrock and sink capital into something that the public will never let you hear the end about.

I bought this book called “Mess Effect” by the late Shamus Young, a programmer and blogger who played through every Mass Effect game up to Andromeda and catalogued what he believed was the falling-from-grace points and how one could avoid such ribaldry (or use whatever workable tropes wound up mangled on accident). It’s entertaining, detailed, and overall very thick. By now, you have a lot of material to work with and plenty of YouTubers can pull this off without a hitch.

Within the span of maybe one or two years on YouTube, organizational/industrial psychologist Karlyn Borysenko wrote Actively Unwoke and is working on another. She insists that “woke” is another term for authoritarianism and a rather virulent one. She wrote a guide on surviving things like cancel culture (which is declining, thank God) and has a personal touch to it. If your assessments on companies and brands tell me one thing, it is that our general dismissal for them once they reach a threshold of “bigness” is about as bigoted as a wingnut’s assessment of political rivals.

Jessica McCabe of “How to ADHD” managed to orchestrate a guide that distills lots of information about attention deficit hyperactivity disorder in a very contemporary and casual fashion. I didn’t know she not only plays D&D, but took up sword-fighting in a bid to enter Hollywood as an actress with reasonable athletic chops. It didn’t pan out–she ended up a homebody in her thirties living with her mother–but she uses her videography and magnetism towards exploring and humanizing a severe condition. Somewhere in your day-to-day analysis is a personal story somewhere in there, be it working for a big company and seeing the innards while contemplating the means of creating and advancing business savvy or entrepreneurship with a good faith approach.

There’s also a dude named Keith who wrote a trilogy of programmers’ guides to assembly machine language, which he developed by goofing around in them and figuring out how to make his game program work under up to fifteen variants thereto. Do I really need to explain the value of these books?

You get the idea (assuming you took pains to read this “singular” comment); writing a book isn’t too far off the mark if you’re already researching, writing and narrating your own material. A non-fiction book (or series thereto) is trickier to formulate, but it serves as the benchmark of greatness for any intellectual pursuit. It’s also a little more durable or long-lasting, considering you’ve been at the Company Man channel this long, there is a lull in engagement, and many companies have a dismissive attitude about their reliance upon server structure. It’s nothing new–Squaresoft’s staff did not preserve the actual source code for Final Fantasy VIII and redid it from scratch when it came time to re-release it to other systems–so, don’t sit on your work for long; put it in another medium while you’re wondering what to do next.

Thanks for making this channel after all these years. I hope you don’t quit and become forgotten, because someone has to set the record straight about business, entrepreneurship, and managing a corporation. Take care, and may God follow you where you want to go!