Moog became a Youtube megastar — and it messed with his mental health

Blair Joscelyne: In those early days, we'd been making the show for maybe a year or so, and we organised a fan meet in a park and we said, hey, if you really like the show, come down.

Sana Qadar: Blair Joscelyne, aka Moog, a YouTube creator from Sydney. He's been making videos with his best mate since 2007, and their channel, Mighty Car Mods has over 3.8 million subscribers.

Blair Joscelyne: Welcome to another episode of Mighty Car Mods! (theme music playing)

Sana Qadar: Early days he was surprised anyone was watching at all.

Blair Joscelyne: Went down to the park and I reckon there was probably about 12 people there, maybe 12 to 15 people there. And I remember I saw this child start coming over to me to say hello, and I was like, oh my God. Like I'm like, what do I say? Like, what do I do?

Sana Qadar: It's been a journey learning how to be a public figure. Blair has had to adjust to the idea of strangers feeling like they know him.

Blair Joscelyne: And then he came up and and goes, oh, I really love your show. And I'm like, thanks, man. I'm glad you like it. High five. Let's talk about cars. And I realised, like, that's actually the way that I wanted to interact with him. That's, you know, that's the genuine way that it was.

Sana Qadar: Most of us are more likely to be on the fan side of that kind of interaction, right? We have favourite actors, musicians, and now just as commonly favourite social media stars like Moog. It's a weird kind of relationship to be a fan of someone because it can be so intense, so comforting. But unlike other relationships in our lives, it's almost always non-reciprocal.

Gayle Stever: The definition of parasocial is non reciprocated. I know the person, they don't know me back. And if you think about it and, you know, go back to, you know, network TV in the 70s, soaps were on every day, news shows were on every day. So if you were interacting daily with your favourite celebrity, there was a tremendous potential to develop an affinity for that person that felt personal.

Sana Qadar: I'm Sana Qadar, this is All in the Mind. And today we ask, how is this possible? Why do we feel real emotions and attachment to people we've most likely never met? And what's it like to be on the receiving end of millions of parasocial relationships?

Blair Joscelyne: I just became really teary, to be honest. I just burst into tears because I felt like it was my responsibility to try and help all of these people that had been through absolutely horrendous circumstances and had said, you know, your show is getting me through.

Sana Qadar: Producer Rose Kerr has this week's story.

Rose Kerr: I remember scrolling through Instagram one day and seeing pictures of someone I follow getting married. I was genuinely so happy for them that I sent the photos to a friend, and we spent the whole afternoon discussing how exciting it was. But the thing is, I never met the bride or the groom. The couple were YouTubers who made skits and videos about their daily lives. I might have never spoken to them, but I had been following them for the better part of a decade. That afternoon, there was definitely a moment where I thought, am I a bit weird for getting excited about a complete strangers wedding?

Gayle Stever: Parasocial interaction happens while you're consuming the media. They're talking to you from the screen, and you're listening and it feels like they're talking to you. You know, if I asked, you say, no. Of course I know they're not talking to me. And we refer to that as the illusion of intimacy that we feel like they're talking to us.

Rose Kerr: This is Gayle Stever from Empire State University, a professor of psychology and human development.

Gayle Stever: And for the last 35 years, I've been engaged in what is known in common verbiage as fan studies, although the technical term for it is parasocial theory. There's an illusion that I'm having this intimate conversation that late night talk shows are a good example. Jimmy Fallon, Stephen Colbert, where they're on TV, but they're looking at the audience and they're talking to the audience. And so you experience that as them talking to you, and therefore it feels personal.

Rose Kerr: This is replicated on social media, too. In videos, you'll often hear someone address the audience like their friend. Gayle says, a defining aspect of a parasocial interaction is when someone speaks to you directly on camera.

Gayle Stever: We talk about eye gaze and direct address as the as the two elements that most focus the parasocial interaction. You can pair socially, interact when they're not talking to you. I mean, you know, obviously Joey on Friends is never talking into the camera. He's talking to other characters. But then we do something which is called identification, where I sort of identify with one of the characters, and I'm sort of looking at the story from the point of view of the character I identify with. So now Joey's talking to my character, and I again, it's a parasocial interaction. I feel it feels personal, it feels intimate. And so the parasocial relationship grows from that mediated interaction. You walk away from the TV and you're still mentally interacting with the character or the actor or both, and it becomes a parasocial relationship.

Rose Kerr: As parasocial relationships develop, we might find ourselves feeling comfort and security from it.

Gayle Stever: We talk about parasocial attachment that this person has now become. I mean, attachment was a term that was defined in terms of infant caregiver relationships. The infant forms an attachment to the caregiver. They seek proximity to a caregiver. They're comforted. And I began to observe in the 90s, as I was doing more and more of this work, that people were deriving this sense of comfort from their favourite celebrities, and the proximity seeking was virtual. But to think about somebody with their favourite show and they're going to seek proximity, how do they do that? Well, I watch the show every week and I never miss it. Or I go on YouTube and I search on their name, and I watch all the videos on YouTube that have been put up there.

Rose Kerr: The concept of parasocial relationships has been around since the 50s, at first focused on late night talk shows.

Gayle Stever: The early talk shows did something that the that today's talk shows do, which is okay. So they're seated in and there's a chaise lounge next to them, sort of in a little bit of an implied semicircle with the idea that the people at home complete the circle. This is a mechanism by which they create this illusion of a conversation with the audience. And so Horton and Wohl in 1956 and TV was a really new we're talking about this interaction people were having with these late night talk show hosts and their guests and saying, look, these people are in your home.

Rose Kerr: Then in the 70s, research on the issue really picked up. At that point, the two things they were looking at were soap opera stars and newscasters.

Gayle Stever: And if you think about it in the, you know, go back to, you know, network TV in the 70s, soaps were on every day, news shows were on every day. So if you were interacting daily with your favourite celebrity, there was a tremendous potential to develop an affinity for that person that felt personal.

Rose Kerr: In the 90s, psychologists like Gayle got involved.

Gayle Stever: Up until that point, it was almost exclusively mass comm and communication discipline people.

Rose Kerr: Now, psychology offers a whole new layer of understanding for why and how parasocial relationships occur. And Gayle says those relationships develop pretty much in the same way our reciprocal face to face relationships develop.

Gayle Stever: When we develop a personal relationship. When you meet someone new, um, at the beginning of that relationship, you make a decision about, gee, is this someone I'd like to meet again? Is this someone I'd like to do something with again? And then, you know, I mean, you know how a friendship develops. You go out for lunch once and that you you got along really well. And so you go out again and you become friends, and then you become best friends. It progresses. Well, if I watch a new TV show and here's a, here's an actor and I'm really moved by their performance and I think, wow, that person is really, really good, I'm going to find their other work. I want to meet them again, you see. But it's in a parasocial realm. And so you can eventually, you know, seek out their other work. And if the connection is really meaningful to you, I mean, if it's a singer, you know, go to one of their concerts, if it's an actor and they're going to appear at a convention, you can decide you want to go meet them. But it progresses very much in a similar fashion to a regular social relationship. It starts at a place where at every at every level, you make a decision, you know, I want to know this person better, or do I want to go get to know somebody else? That happens socially and it happens parasocially. And, uh, Riva (Tukachinsky) Forster and I wrote an article about this where we talked about stages of development of parasocial relationships, and we felt that the progression was very, very similar to normal social relationships that we develop with people we actually meet face to face.

Rose Kerr: But what draws us to a celebrity in the first place? Gayle says there's three main motivations for people to form a parasocial relationship. The first is based on talent.

Gayle Stever: This person's the best fill in the blank singer dancer actor I've ever seen.

Rose Kerr: Alternatively, we might be drawn to someone's personal qualities. This is where my appreciation for that YouTuber couple came from. They were mostly known for being funny, but long time fans like myself admired their genuine nature and kindness.

Gayle Stever: This person's a role model. They're they have some really fine human qualities like kindness, compassion, philanthropy and so forth.

Rose Kerr: And the final motivation, perhaps unsurprisingly, is attractiveness.

Gayle Stever: You know, certainly fans look at someone who's nice looking and develop, maybe a crush on that celebrity. There's a whole literature in and of itself where we talk about, you know, the crush, the feeling you get for someone that you're attracted to. And one of the misconceptions about this is that this is an adolescent thing.

Rose Kerr: (laughs) I was going to say.

Gayle Stever: But Riva Forrester, who is a prominent researcher in parasocial romantic relationships, she wrote her book in 2021 about that, and she found that she had participants in her research of all age groups, from teenagers up to people in their 60s and 70s, and that developing a crush on a celebrity is a kind of a common, lifelong thing. And most people, it's just a fun thing that they do, but it's usually broadens if they're going to stay in a person's fandom for a number of years, if they've just got an attraction to them as an attractive person, that doesn't usually last. It's the attraction to the talent and to the quality of person. One of my biggest case studies was Josh Groban, and I started looking at him in 2005, and he was very young then, and one of the things people really liked about him was that as at a very young age, he started a charity foundation and was very invested in youth arts education. And so that's still his Find Your Light foundation. That's still an emphasis in his philanthropy. And a lot of his fans are very committed to his charity. So, you know, I've asked fans, why did you join this fan club and why did you stay in it? And they will say, well, I got better access to concert tickets. That's why I joined. But I stayed because of the Charity foundation and in the process of working on his charity, I made friends with other like minded fans who've become my my good close friends. And so a lot of people stay in the fandom for both the charity work and their friends that they've made.

Rose Kerr: If we, the audience, are forming these non-reciprocal relationships with celebrities, what's it like for the object of our affection? How does it feel to have potentially millions of people who know you but you don't know them? Blair Joscelyne is a YouTube creator based in Australia who's experienced this first hand.

Blair Joscelyne: I'm a musician and a composer from Sydney, Australia, and I'm also a YouTube creator and I am the co-creator of a show called Mighty Car Mods. Uh, on the show I'm known as Moog. Uh, and I make that with my best mate Marty. And it's a show about cars and automotive adventures.

Rose Kerr: Blair and Marty have been making YouTube videos together since 2007.

Blair Joscelyne: Which was just really soon, actually after YouTube had started. So it's been going for almost 16 years. Originally it was kind of a DIY channel or showing people how to fix their cars themselves, but over time it's kind of morphed into a bit of a, uh, an adventure show. So we are typically might go and buy a really cheap car in a country somewhere in the world, and then we'll fly in and then road trip in that car, learning about the culture, meeting people. It's completely unscripted.

Mighty Car Mods video: And the perfect day to go hunting for cars....

Rose Kerr: If you're not into cars or don't watch YouTube, you might be thinking how big could a car channel be? Well, at the time of recording, Mighty Car Mods has over 3.8 million subscribers.

Blair Joscelyne: We passed 1 billion views of our videos, uh, making it the most watched Australian car show in history, which we're really proud of because we make it in this tiny little suburban garage that's just big enough for two cars.

Rose Kerr: And a bunch of those viewers have formed parasocial relationships with Blair.

Blair Joscelyne: In those early days, we'd been making the show for maybe a year or so, and we organised a fan meet. So we organised a meeting in a park and we said, hey, if you really like the show, come down.

Rose Kerr: More recently, these small meetups have become national tours.

Blair Joscelyne: A few years ago, we decided to take Mighty Car Mods on tour, and we did a bunch of shows all around Australia, and we'd get between 3 and 5000 people in each city, and they were just people who were so lovely and so kind and so enthusiastic about the show. And one of the couples that we'd met had met at a previous fan meet years earlier. They'd met there since got together, got married, had a kid, and they introduced us to this child who of course was wearing Mighty Car Mods merchandise, and we were like, this little kid exists in some kind of strange way because we uploaded some videos to the internet and that was very strange.

Rose Kerr: This is something Gayle mentioned about parasocial relationships. People sometimes want to meet the people they follow.

Gayle Stever: My friend, the actor who does a lot of sci fi conventions, yeah, told me a very wise thing. She said, people come to a convention to meet me. They want me to meet them. They want me to witness what my character did for them.

Rose Kerr: Wow.

Gayle Stever: And and I and I, I've sat at a lot of autograph tables at a lot of science fiction conventions. This is one of the things I've done to observe fan celebrity interaction. And let me tell you, there's a lot of that. People will walk up to the table to get their autograph and they'll say very quickly, oh, your character inspired me to become an engineer. Oh, your character really meant a lot to me because blah blah blah. I've probably been to over 100 sci fi conventions over 35 years, and I see an awful lot of kindness by celebrities shown to fans. And they don't have to do that. They're there to sign autographs and have photos taken and do a Q&A, and they can just put in their little bit and go home. And, um, I had a friend in 2004 who was dying of cancer, and I went to her last convention with her, and she met with each of about five different celebrities she'd become friendly with over the years, and they sat backstage and cried with her.

Rose Kerr: Aww.

Rose Kerr: But that is a lot of emotional labor.

Gayle Stever: Each celebrity makes up their own mind about the way they want to interact with their audience, and they go from there, and it's very different from person to person. For 35 years, I've been looking at this and I get to see two that were alike. You know, they're very unique individuals involved.

Rose Kerr: For Blair, this meant drawing a line between public and personal life.

Blair Joscelyne: There was a period of time that, for me, it actually felt like it was fairly invasive when I was going out and people were saying hello to me and asking for photos. I would always do it and I would always say hello, but sometimes I felt like maybe I didn't want to, and particularly if I wasn't feeling well or I was at a hospital with someone or something like that. Those things I found a bit of a struggle, and I really didn't know what the best way to deal with that was. And I realised there's probably lots of people that don't know how to deal with that stuff as well. And so after I had, um, I'd done a fan meet in Australia and a lot of people had come up to me that had significant mental health issues, and I wanted to hear their story, and I wanted to honour what was going on for them, but I couldn't deal with it during a fan meet. And so I said, you know, I'll just speak with them afterwards. And, uh, afterwards there was probably about 10 or 15 people that were kind of waiting to have a chat with me after everybody was left.

Blair Joscelyne: And I tried to kind of help them with some encouraging words, um, and tried to put them in connection with each other so they could look after each other and maybe check in on each other. But I flew back home, and when I got home, you know, I was having a shower before I went to bed and I just, um, I just I just became really teary, to be honest. I just burst into tears because I felt like it was my responsibility to try and help all of these people that had been through absolutely horrendous circumstances and had said, you know, your show is getting me through, and watching your show each week makes me feel a, b, c and those things to me. I went, I really felt the pressure of kind of keeping going. And so, um, that was a time that I definitely thought, you know, I think I need to get some therapy for myself to get some tools on how I can better deal with that, because if I can't really cope with that, then I'm not going to have much longevity in here. And it also I just need to be able to protect myself.

Rose Kerr: Blair decided he would try therapy.

Blair Joscelyne: I went and, um, spoke with a psychologist and I said, you know, I'm kind of struggling a little bit with how I kind of take on the needs of these people without without it weighing me down too much. And I told him my whole story. And then he said, you know, like full disclosure, I was at your fan meet a few weeks ago and we got a photo. And so I kind of went, well, you know, and is that a problem for you? And I went, absolutely. It's a problem for me because I'm trying to I want to try and work something out. That's not that. I went to see another therapist and this is not even a joke. He suggested that I watch some YouTube videos about it. Uh, and, um, so I wasn't super keen on doing that either.

Rose Kerr: No

Blair Joscelyne: And then, um, uh, finally I found a therapist that just fully got it. Like, he was just fantastic. He's appeared on this show before. He was unreal. But I did have a chat with him last week, and we decided not to share his name publicly. He became my psychologist and I spoke with him and I said, you know, this is going on in my life. This is happening, this is happening, this is happening, this is happening. I feel exhausted, I feel tired, I, I don't know what to do.

Blair Joscelyne: And he said, why shouldn't you feel exhausted and tired? And I said, what do you mean? And he's like, why shouldn't you? I mean, one of these things that you've just told me would be really hard to deal with. You've just told me 5 or 6 things, including that you kind of live your life publicly on the internet. You've got people coming to, people coming to my house, people coming to my work, people following me around, people chasing me in their cars. I mean, it's it's one of these things would be troublesome and you've got all of them. And so that was a real turning point for me, that I stopped expecting that you can kind of live your life and take the benefits of YouTube, but at the same time, you don't get any of the flip side of it as well. The flip side is people are going to recognise you. People are going to come and say hello and I need better strategies for that. And my strategy for that was to be as authentic with anyone that comes up to me as I can with the time that I have, but also let them know that I have got other things going on, and I can only spare a minute or two, and I'll talk to anyone that comes and says hi.

Rose Kerr: That makes so much sense that you needed to hear that empathy that you don't have to just give, give and give and give. That's yeah.

Rose Kerr: Despite accruing over a billion views on his channel, there's a part of Blair's life that he's never shared publicly before. It was inspired by his experiences on YouTube and with fans.

Blair Joscelyne: When I finished high school, I was enrolled, uh, to do psychology at university, and at the last minute, one of my friends said, you know what? You should have a crack at music. And it was really good advice. You know, it turned out that I could create a career of music that I really loved, but I always like finishing things that I set my mind to. So 20 years later, on the anniversary of that, uh, in 2016, I went back to uni to do my postgrad, and I did that for three years, part time, because I was also working and kind of living my life. I had enough credit points to exit with a graduate diploma of counselling, uh, which is where I finished. And my interest in studying that was because I was really interested in the psychology of social media. I was really interested in what happens to the brain. But most of the bias and interest on social media and mental health has always been on the consumption, whereas my real interest was the mental health and longevity of the creators of social media. And certainly when I went into my master's class for the first time and everybody had to introduce themselves and you've got, you know, trauma nurses and people working in hospitals and people working in jails. And I said, I'm really interested in famous people and the psychology of their brain. Uh, and, um, and I felt a little bit embarrassed saying that. But I remember the doctor who was running the class. He said, that's the I've never heard someone say that before. I've never heard somebody say that before in this class. And I think it's actually a really interesting field. And so that was that. And I was really interested in working specifically with some of the giants of social media to help them and help some of the users of those platforms.

Blair Joscelyne: Something that I've been really passionate about over the last few years is working with other content creators. And certainly there's a lot of therapists out there and there's a lot of YouTubers out there, and there are some YouTube therapists, but there's not many people that have kind of got their feet in both sides at the same time. And so for me, that was something that I was really interested in working with younger people. So, uh, YouTube asked if I could help them by appearing at an event that they were doing over in Korea. I did some seminars and did some small groups where we just kind of deal with how you can be healthy as a creator. And most of these creators were fairly large scale, you know, cumulatively, I mean, tens of millions of followers. And we were really looking at this base level stuff of, yes, we're kind of looking at what was going on in the brain and what was going on in your body, but also looking at what is the best way of moderating comments. What do you do when there's people, you know saying hurtful things about you? How do you sit? What is your posture? How do you eat? How do you breathe? Um, really, really simple things like this.

Blair Joscelyne: And for a lot of people that are creating content for social media, they are controlling their life and the way that they're perceived to such an extent that they're really, really uncomfortable with ever having something that is not going to plan. And it turns out that for a lot of people that exists in their life as well, they do not like being uncomfortable. And there's this preconceived idea or a misconception that content creators are all these extroverts. Um, I would say it's mostly the opposite. A lot of them are introverts. And they found this little, this little kind of crack in the glass where they can kind of get some of their get some of their personality out, but a lot of them are really struggling. And when you speak to them the first time about basic things like sleep hygiene, they haven't heard it before. They're up all night editing. So I'm certainly not an expert, and I consider myself a Swiss Army knife in this field as well. But just to be able to give them some basic skills and say, we need to make sure that your comment moderation time is not 24 hours a day. We're going to set an alarm for 15 minutes, and you've got some friends that you do YouTube with. You're going to meet up at a cafe every two days, and you're going to meet up together, and you're going to go through the comments, simple things like that.

Rose Kerr: Does everyone have parasocial relationships, whether they know it or not?

Gayle Stever: I would argue that they do. Now, remember I said a parasocial attachment is I'm deriving comfort security from my favourite celebrity. Not everybody does that, but we all have social relationships with a lot of people. We don't think about the fact that, you know, what do you know about your next door neighbour? Maybe you've talked to them three times and you wave to them when you go outside, but that's still a relationship. Yeah, it's not an attachment, but it's a relationship. I have parasocial relationships with a lot of people that I don't realise I have a relationship with, and usually what it takes for me to recognise that is for something to happen.

Rose Kerr: Yeah.

Gayle Stever: I would point to the recent death of Matthew Perry and a lot of people who didn't realise how much friends had affected our culture, how, you know, the feelings we had for that character and the actor by extension, and his untimely death, I think sort of made people go, oh, wow, he's gone, wow, that's terrible. I mean, you know, you can't you don't say, that's terrible and grieve a loss if you didn't have a relationship to start with, that would be my argument. So whether you knew it or not, you had a parasocial relationship. If you watched Friends at all, you probably knew those characters. You knew qualities that they had. And so that's a parasocial relationship.

Rose Kerr: A few weeks after recording our interview, Blair decided to release a video that shared a personal story he had previously kept private from his audience. It's called The Hardest Thing I've Ever Done, a film about life, loss and exercise.

Blair Joscelyne: And I kind of spoke about it for the first time. Uh, what it was like to kind of go through some hardships and deal with my own mental health, and also the struggles I had, um, trying to help look after my dad, who was terminally ill. And I made this film, and it's a story about me kind of competing in this CrossFit competition, and I really wasn't sure whether I'd release it or not. And I spoke to my mum about it, so I just I absolutely adore my mum to bits. And obviously, you know, she kind of lost her husband. And I felt like that story was not just my story, but it's a story of hers as well. And I showed her this film and the film is pretty raw. And, um, yeah, she just said to me, look like, if that film can help one person, it is absolutely worth it. Um, and you should release it. And so I released that film out in the wild, and I literally hit public on the video, and then I just closed my computer and went to bed. I was too scared to kind of see the comments or see what was going on there. And the next day when I woke up, I was just overwhelmed with the amount of support that I'd received.

Rose Kerr: Since release, it's had over half a million views, and the comments are flooded with people thanking Blair for sharing something so personal and responding with their own experiences of loss.

Blair Joscelyne: But what was really interesting was a lot of comments of people that had kind of been saying, look, I've been watching you on YouTube for 15 years, and it never occurred to me that you're like a real person that's going on with real struggles. And while those comments came across as really supportive and also made me even more acutely aware of how the consumption of social media can kind of blunt the real senses of, you know, that is a real person on the other end. But the comments there were just so overwhelming, and so many people shared their stories of maybe losing a family member or going through some tough times. And, you know, I spoke about my anxiety in that film and I kind of felt really supported. And in fact, it was some of the most overwhelming comments I've ever seen anywhere. And, and I do go back and check that film sometimes, um, just to kind of have a read and see what's going on. And I think it was always kind of part of doing this interview with the ABC that made me think, you know, like, what are the reasons that I share or don't share certain things? And I just decided, I'm just going to tell the truth. I'm just going to make a film about the struggles that I went through. And, um, yeah, it was it was a very hard thing to do, but I'm really glad that I did.

Rose Kerr: What's your relationship with being a public figure now?

Blair Joscelyne: I think studying counselling and psychotherapy has kind of fundamentally changed the way that I do interact with people. And for a long time, I guess I didn't really know what to say when someone came up on the street and said, hi, I just didn't like I didn't really know what I was meant to do. But there's this idea in therapy of unconditional positive regard. One of the pillars is this idea to try and support and accept a person, regardless of what the person is kind of saying. I guess it's kind of removing the judgement and just listening. And I think while, you know, I'm kind of not doing therapy when I meet someone in the street, but I think that listening is really the best gift that you can give someone. And if someone comes up to you in the street and they've been watching my videos for the ten years or 15 years, or maybe they've bought merch or they've kind of come to a live show, I think the least that I can do is give them a really authentic interaction. And you do that by listening.

Sana Qadar: That is Blair Joscelyne, also known as Moog. He's the co-creator of the YouTube channel Mighty Car Mods. You also heard from Professor Gayle Stever from Empire State University in New York. This episode was reported and produced by Rose Kerr, and it was mixed by sound engineer Roi Hubermann. And that's it for All in the Mind this week I'm Sana Qadar. Thank you for listening. I'll catch you next time.