Lean into Love

Recently my friends and I went on a trip and stayed in an AirBNB. In the evenings we'd hang out, drink gin and tonics, and generally shoot the shit. Over the years we've done this trip, we've started watching a documentary TV show that occasionally features people we work with. We initially started watching it because, like most TV shows, they chose to highlight some of the dumbest parts of our jobs. Now every year we do this trip, we watch the most recent season of the show and mostly just yell at the TV.

This year, the show was shockingly good, and it involved actual professionals, and was really, really sad. We knew none of the people involved this time around, and after the five episode season concluded, we knew, we needed to watch something that was more uplifting.

And then we realized that someone who'd been in the AirBNB before us had forgotten to log out of their Premium YouTube account. Not only that, but this person's user name for YouTube was their first and last name, and while, according to Google, there are about 890,000 people with the same first name in America, the last name was highly unique. And after a quick online search, we located a photo of the person with that name. We'll just call him Andrew.

The photo split the group. Half of us figured Andrew was just from a place time forgot. The other half the group thought he was a closeted man in a Red state.

Looking at Andrew's YouTube feed we saw he was watching mechanical repair videos (which fit with our online stalking; he was a roof repair man), Fox News, and football.

And we realized, we needed to expand Andrew's universe.

It was time to fuck up his algorithm.

We spent a week on his account watching the following categories of videos:

• Mongolian Throat singing
• Sumo wrestling
• Bob the Drag Queen
  • RuPaul's Drag race
  • Chappell Roan
  • Pattiegonia
• Boodog preparation (a Mongolian dish that involves cooking soup inside of a goat after burning all the hair off. We watched a lot of those.)
• Olympic Artistic Swimming
• German EMD death metal music
  • J Pop
  • Early generation Doja Cat
  • A music video whose only lyrics were POLLO BANAN-AH!
  • Italian EDM
• Hours of train sounds
• More sumo wrestling
• Llama attacks (thanks Earl)
• Funny animals
• Hobby Horse competitions
• Human and dog dancing competitions
• Historical food mini documentaries
• Bull riding wrecks
• And we concluded with a long video about Palm Springs Pride and what it meant to be in a city where you could finally be yourself and love yourself.

I personally felt the final video about Palm Springs, featuring men who came out decades into their lives and finally accepted themselves, was the perfect way to end our world-wide journey on which we took possibly-closeted Andrew.

The weirdest part of all of it was that Andrew was actively watching his YouTube feed while we were at the AirBnB. We would come back for the evening, fire up his YouTube account and see he'd watched a football game that day. But he wasn't logging us out. His algorithm was suggesting more drag queen videos, a super healthy dosing of sumo wrestling videos, and some obscure music videos involving severe haircuts. Yet, Andrew never logged us out.

Did our meddling do some good? Was Andrew watching Bob the Drag Queen videos, J Pop videos, and Artistic Swimming videos and thinking, you know, I think I might like this?

We will never know. But I hope, wherever you are, whoever you are, Andrew of YouTube, you lean into love.