Ryan Chapman

Hello and thanks for checking out my Patreon page! If you're curious what the deal is with my channel, here's the explanation:It's probably best to start with a bit about me. I went to college with the goal of becoming a professor. This was around 2005-2008. I saw myself teaching English, but having an enthusiasm for philosophy and political theory. A favorite hobby of mine, at the time, was getting a group of people together, cracking open a bottle of wine (or more realistically a box of wine), and hashing out opinions on whatever intellectual or political subjects came to us, regardless of how close everyone was ideologically. I called them DPC's: Deep Political Conversations. You learn a lot about people that way. There were some uncomfortable moments, but we had an open, warm atmosphere, and overall they were very positive. I ended up going in a different direction with my career, unrelated to politics or education, but I still had an intellectual interest in politics running in the background.I noticed that somewhere in the middle of Barrack Obama's presidency things started getting weird. People around me were becoming more political, and political people became more outspoken. Debates ran across society, opinions rallied into camps, and over time, those camps started shifting away from one another. Some moved right and others moved left. I lived in predominantly leftist cities, so I experienced more of the latter. Conversation became increasingly edgy and difficult. There was a point where a local law was being proposed, and I stood in a room full of close friends debating it. I said something they didn't like, and I found myself being shouted at and called 'the enemy.' That phrase stuck with me.I'm sure we're all familiar with the story at this point. America polarized. With that polarization came intolerance and instability. Protests in the street, campus disruptions, firings, contested elections, even talk of secession and civil war. That instability rippled out and manifested itself in its own forms around the world. Democracies in particular became fraught, and autocracies sprung up, strengthened, and began speaking of a new world order. Talk of world war slowly sharpened and came into focus. I started developing a sinking sensation that I shouldn't have taken the world around me for granted.It all finally became enough to make my other career look unimportant. I then did something that people around me thought was crazy. I put my other career on hold (now abandoned) and jumped over to politics to see if there was something I could do to help.I developed two assumptions which inform my work. At first they were a little fuzzy but now they're quite clear. Social media is quite clearly causing much or even most of the issues I've described, but no one serious is considering banning it. Moderating it may help, but it hardly seems like a comprehensive solution. Too much moderation and people revolt or go elsewhere. That leaves me with a broader issue that we can plausibly focus on productively: education. Not selective education that helps people deliver better talking points for 'their side,' but comprehensive, serious education. I basically want to give people the education we should have all gotten in school. Providing and spreading that seems, to me, a fundamentally useful step in the right direction. Something that would make us better-equipped to deal with the moment we're in, and whatever else might be around the corner.My second assumption is we have an urgent need for objective political material. Material that gives people information, but is crafted in a way that teaches them how to think, not what to think. Respect and trust people, and give them the information they set out to find. My channel has essentially become a project to do that. For example if you're against socialism, my channel should help you better articulate what it is and why you're against it. The same for democracy, populism, liberalism, Trump, Biden, Taiwan's claim to independence, etc.If you want to support what I'm doing, a donation really does help. That being said, if you do choose to donate, please go into it with a patient mindset. Presenting a video to the public in order to explain something important is, I think, a significant responsibility. I try to meet that by carefully preparing and considering what I'm going to say, which takes time. My standards in doing that have only grown over time. Assume my upload schedule will be quite slow and donate accordingly. As a little perk and a thank you, I've made it a habit to upload a private video to to this page after every main channel video. I didn't set up any pay tiers (since people from around the world watch my content and paying something like $5-10 a month for many of them is impossible), so a donation of any size will unlock that extra content.Either way, I appreciate you watching my material and being interested in my channel. I'm already beyond flattered by how much this has grown (my initial career goal was 50k subs, and now I don't know). So thank you, and if you do choose to donate feel free to drop me a message and say hi.Cheers,- Ryan

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