Too Many Celebrity Passing Recently

[00:00:00]Sorry if I'm the way you figure out about this, but Taykeith has passed away. Yeah, he's gone. He was 28 years old and he is no longer of this earth.

[00:00:09]Just want to point out that he is completely out of here. A little bit of a sad moment here. He was a producer. He is is very sad. He made Sicko Mode if you if you don't know what's what who he is. He made Sicko Mode if that that helps you out that jots it down in your memory. And a lot of people wanted me to make a video about this. They were like, "You got to report on this and talk about it." I don't know what more you really want me to say, right? I saw the headlines, same as you.

[00:00:34]It's same with Oliver Tree. Oliver Tree passed away to a helicopter crash. So, I'm I'm talking about both of them at the same exact time. And I feel as though everybody wants me to talk about this stuff, but what do you want me to add? The only thing I really want to add actually, there is something I want to add. I I do want to talk about this actually for one reason one reason alone.

[00:00:48]Cuz every time a young creator dies, I find myself watching the gears turn into a mixture of like this exhaustion and people coming up with crackpot like Tik Tok theories. Cuz here's what happens every single time, right?

[00:01:03]Here's the initial shock, the headline, breaking news, floods of people from people who know them, work with them, love them, or just, you know, simply admire them from a distance. I get that.

[00:01:13]That part makes sense to me.

[00:01:15]Uh you know, it's appropriate, you know, for the sudden erasure of life that is not yet finished its sentence.

[00:01:21]We grasp it.

[00:01:22]But then things get murky, right? Cuz Taykeith was 29. Oliver Tree was 32.

[00:01:29]Very young.

[00:01:31]Very young.

[00:01:32]They still had decades of mornings ahead of them, so much time ahead. They woke up last week, made coffee, checked their phones, and had arguments with their partners, laughed at stupid videos, worried about their careers, made plans for summer. They were still planning out their life. They still had so much so so much ahead of them. Like a wild amount ahead of them.

[00:01:52]They They had text messages sitting in their drafts unanswered. Like they had so much. They had songs they were working on, collaborations they were probably excited about. One Aubrey had tours he was planning on, right? Like they were still in the middle of building lives.

[00:02:07]29 and 32. Keep thinking about those numbers cuz I'm I'm I'm 29 and I'm about to be 30 in August.

[00:02:14]So, that's that's interesting. And then and then as soon as this happened, as soon as this happens, comment sections open his mouth. Oh my god. There is I I can only describe this to a species of human being that emerges from the woodwork every time someone dies.

[00:02:31]They're not hard to find.

[00:02:32]They crawl out from beneath the digital floorboards with a certainty a certainty is just so religious in fervor. They've been waiting for this moment. They've been sharpening their judgment for years, storing up their grievances. Oh, they're like like a squirrel holding nuts for winter. Oh, this is good. Now, finally, their moment arrived.

[00:02:53]They type their verdict with trembling fingers. They deserved it.

[00:02:58]>> [laughter] >> They deserved it because they did something bad 7 years ago. They deserved it because they did something bad they had a bad take a while back. There's people that's saying that Billie Eilish deserves death because she thinks that you can't love animals and be vegan or something of that variety or can't eat meat and love animals or something.

[00:03:16]Stupid take, dumb take, idiotic take, obviously. But, she doesn't deserve death for having an opinion.

[00:03:23]Uh right? It reminds me of what was going on with Frankie Frog Bait. Frankie Frog Bait just had bad opinions. I think that's it. Just one unresearched opinions. That's like everybody on Earth. Most people have unresearched opinions. Well, they deserved it because they were annoying. They deserved it because they were successful.

[00:03:40]That's it.

[00:03:42]I It leaves me breathless.

[00:03:44]It leaves me so breathless. 30 seconds.

[00:03:47]That's all it takes. 30 seconds after a news breaks and someone has constructed a moral framework designed to justify the death of a stranger.

[00:03:55]They're not They're not even like They're not mourning or processing.

[00:03:58]They're just demonstrating their own superiority by retroactively assigning blame to someone who no longer has the capacity to defend themselves. That's it. It's like the ugliest form of virtue signaling I have ever witnessed. It is a purity test administered to a corpse.

[00:04:14]It's like the internet's favorite game.

[00:04:16]Well, find the flaw, exploit the flaw, declare the flaw terminal, move on to the next tragedy. That's it. That's the It's so disgusting. I hate this.

[00:04:25]I It's the It's like I think of the cuz there's like fiction versus reality, right? Let's do that. Cuz we live in a culture saturated with these redemption narratives.

[00:04:35]Right? Zuko from Avatar: The Last Airbender had a beautiful redemption story. At Endeavor is my favorite in redemption story because he doesn't even get redemption. He just wants retribution. He wants to know that He wants people to know that he is sorry, but guess what? He's not going to get the forgiveness he wants. It reminds me of a a pastor I said to me, "It is our We should Everyone is worthy of forgiveness, but it is not our job to give that forgiveness. It's very important. Every movie you have ever loved, every television show you have binged, every video game you have completed, every anime that made you cry, they're all built on the same foundation of redemption. Naruto got redemption.

[00:05:13]Sasuke got got redemption. The Each characters in Bleach got redemption. People are complicated.

[00:05:19]People make mistakes. People learn.

[00:05:20]People grow. People become better versions of themselves through struggle and and failure and the painful process of of self-examination.

[00:05:28]And audiences eat it up. They demand it.

[00:05:31]Audiences will reject a story where the protagonist does not change over time.

[00:05:35]Because we love the art. We love the transformation. We love watching someone crawl out of the wreckage of their own worst decisions and build something new.

[00:05:46]Then a real human being dies. And all that storytelling wisdom that you've accumulated over the years, all that that's is that vanishes. You don't even care about it. The same person who or the same people, let's just do people, who weep over a fictional character's redemption will say, "Oh, the real person cannot be forgiven for a mistake they made a decade ago."

[00:06:08]Growth is something we celebrate in art and refuse to extend to each other.

[00:06:13]We want the journey, but the to honor the destination.

[00:06:18]We want people to become better, but we do not want to let go of the person they used to be.

[00:06:24]We want redemption for ourselves and eternal damnation for everyone else. And I I despise that this wild mindset overall.

[00:06:34]The the conspiracy ecosystem is such a disgusting thing. It thrives in the space where this uncertainty breeds a strange anxiety, and that anxiety will breed a desperate need for answers over and over again. Someone dies, and immediately this narrative engine starts turning. Well, there was a secret organization that took him out.

[00:06:53]Oliver Tree had a cabal. Takeoff died because he knew about the music industry. He was going to expose Drake as a as a predator. That's what's going to happen. See, he worked with Drake. He actually made Family Matters and stuff like that. That's the whole thing now.

[00:07:03]It's hidden documents. There's a shadow government. And there are There is a shadow government, obviously. But this isn't like a Epstein thing. This is a guy. It's like some guy.

[00:07:13]Like, what is this mysterious silencing operation that you guys think are going on? This secret knowledge that that only the theorists somehow possess.

[00:07:21]I I don't get it.

[00:07:23]I don't get it. I I don't get Well, that official explanation is how the two helicopters crashed into each other.

[00:07:28]What was Takeoff doing? What was Takeoff doing? I I hate it. I I really do. It's such a strange impulse. Humans have always struggled with the randomness of tragedy. I'll give you a fun example. Oh my god, this is so fun." Cuz everybody wants patterns or causations. You want the universe to make sense. I'll give you a fun thing. These past 3 years, I've been in like six car crashes.

[00:07:54]Right? I've been run off the road, I've been annihilated, I've been destroyed, I've been held at gunpoint. And people are saying, "You have the worst life ever." No, [ __ ] Let's just jot this down for like 1 second. I don't have the worst life ever. That's just life.

[00:08:07]Okay?

[00:08:09]Have you considered 10 just 10 seconds and that is just life? That is what happens. You don't need causation, you don't need an explanation for everything. That is just life. Very recently, my foot I I got attacked going home.

[00:08:25]Boom, I got attacked. Okay?

[00:08:27]Right?

[00:08:28]Probably a hate crime. Realistically, more than likely a hate crime cuz they call me fruity boy and they held me down and my foot it got covered in hot oil.

[00:08:35]And my foot has nerve damage because it got covered in hot oil. Took off my shoe and covered in hot oil. It was horrifying. I hated every single second of it. It was disgusting. People were saying, "You probably just dropped something in the kitchen. Uh who knows if this actually happened?" I am in pain.

[00:08:49]Right?

[00:08:50]I'm just explaining what happened.

[00:08:52]That's reality of what happened. My car got stolen from in front of my house. I live in Detroit. Car got stolen from in front of my house. We tried to capture it on camera. My camera malfunctioned for some odd, indescribable reason.

[00:09:03]Don't know what happened there. They didn't catch the guy. Didn't even catch the kids that messed up my foot. Want to know why? Because police reports sometimes don't work and sometimes tragedy is just random. That's just life.

[00:09:14]That's the reality of what life happens.

[00:09:18]That's it.

[00:09:20]Sometimes you're in the wrong place, wrong time and it can happen over and over again. When it rains, it pours.

[00:09:24]That's the reality of life. You don't always get a clean-cut explanation.

[00:09:27]"Well, there's got to be a reason it keeps happening to you."

[00:09:30]Maybe I just talk about my tragedies and you guys don't talk about your tragedies. Sometimes life just sucks.

[00:09:36]Okay? There are good things happening in life, great things happening in my life, but there's also horrifyingly bad things happening. That's life. That's reality of it. So, wanting these deeper explanations for all this stuff is so asinine.

[00:09:50]The problem is that we have built an entire digital infrastructure designed to reward the most elaborate and paranoid interpretations of events. You do suck.

[00:09:59]If you just want a simple explanation, nobody cares.

[00:10:03]However, a conspiracy theory we actually should keep our wisdom teeth because they they mess they they the dental industry is messing us up.

[00:10:12]The algorithm only cares about engagement. Even if you're saying the theory is stupid, that's engagement.

[00:10:19]Nothing engages people like the feeling that they are in on a secret that everyone else is blind to see, you flat-earth dummies.

[00:10:26]It it I think but this does so much damage.

[00:10:31]The real damage is the erasure of the person who died. Alber tree, well, he becomes a plot point, a piece of evidence in someone's homemade mystery novel. Take Heath. Just well, he's he's a clue, a puzzle piece in the Drake fiasco.

[00:10:46]Their music stopped mattering. Like, their creativity stopped mattering.

[00:10:50]Their friendship stopped mattering. The only thing that matters is whether a death can be contorted into another theory that generates likes, views, or engagement. They are no longer people, just raw material, fuel for an engine that does not care about them at all, and I cannot stop thinking about what that must feel like for the people who actually knew them.

[00:11:08]I've heard I've been at funerals and heard false things said about the departed.

[00:11:13]It pissed me the [ __ ] off. I so it agitated the hell out of me.

[00:11:16]For their families, for their friends, for the collaborators, for the people who shared meals with these people, who argued with them, who laughed with them, who loved them. Those people are grieving a loss that cannot be measured in theories and headlines or conversations and comment sections. They are trying to process the the of someone who has who was supposed to be there tomorrow.

[00:11:35]This impossible geography of a world that no longer contains the person they expected to see again.

[00:11:40]Somewhere within all these margins of grief, they're watching strangers turn their loved ones into a story they never consented to. They're watching conspiracy theories claim secret knowledge about the death of their family member. They're watching comment sections debate whether the person they loved deserved to die because of something they said years ago. They're watching the world reduce a human being into a symbol, a lesson, a cautionary tale, a piece of evidence in an argument that has nothing to do with who that person actually was. It is a form of mass psychosis, obviously, to me.

[00:12:09]I do not know how else to describe it.

[00:12:11]Don't say psychosis. That shut the [ __ ] up, okay?

[00:12:15]You're a psychopath. You can't use that word. That's disrespectful to Don't care.

[00:12:19]Have you considered that? Have you considered I don't care? Go to hell.

[00:12:23]Have you considered that? Shut up. Thank you. We have become addicted to narratives to make us feel powerful. We have become addicted to the feeling of uncovering hidden truths, of seeing through the lies, of being the one person who figured it all out. Every tragedy becomes an opportunity to overpower or perform that power. It's disgusting. Every death, a chance to demonstrate our superiority.

[00:12:45]Over what?

[00:12:46]Take Keith.

[00:12:47]Helped shape modern hip hop hip hop.

[00:12:50]He produced tracks that defined a generation of sound. He was young and talented and ambitious and had so much more to give. Oliver Tree was a singular artist. He built a career on being unapologetically himself, on refusing to fit into categories, on creating a persona that was equal parts performance and genuine self-expression. He made people laugh and think and feel. He was strange and brilliant and had so much more to give.

[00:13:17]Two young men lost their lives.

[00:13:21]That's it.

[00:13:22]We don't need to invent this conspiracy around it. We don't need to debate whether they deserved it.

[00:13:26]We do not need to turn their deaths into content.

[00:13:30]We probably we need to sit with the sadness.

[00:13:33]We need to acknowledge the loss. We need to remember that they were human beings with families and friends. That's what they were.

[00:13:39]The theorizing, the judgment, the performance of certainty, that is not about them. That's about us.

[00:13:46]That is our discomfort with the randomness of life. That is our desperate need to impose order on chaos.

[00:13:53]That is our refusal to accept that sometimes horrible things happen without meaning.

[00:13:58]We have forgotten how to grieve.

[00:14:01]We have forgotten how to simply say this is sad and I do not understand and that is okay.

[00:14:07]Two young men, 29 and 32, too young, too talented, too full of everything that makes life worth living.

[00:14:16]Gone.

[00:14:18]That's it.

[00:14:19]Have a lovely day or night wherever you're at. And I'm out. Peace. Bye.

[00:14:23]>> And I'm beyond your naked eye. Be [music and singing] my lover.

[00:14:27]Happy to try what you need.

[00:14:31]Your world I love to live in it.

[00:14:34]I love [singing] to ride when you're free.

[00:14:38]>> Uh.