Shane Dawson has been in the Youtube game for ten years and just finished his series, “The Mind of Jake Paul” which has been his most viewed series to date, reaching a collective 132 million views (and counting). Over the past 10 months, Shane has come out with a few different series, branching away from his old brand of posting videos everyday. Some of his series include his documentations of exploring haunted places with his friends, interviewing other Youtubers like Trisha Paytas, Molly Burke, Tana Mongeau, Grav3yardGirl, and Jeffree Star, among other fun series with his friends.
He got a lot of attention with these series, but not as much attention as he got with the Jake Paul series. The world was not ready for “The Mind of Jake Paul.” The series was eight parts long. It went into depth by looking at who Jake Paul was, exploring the idea of him being a sociopath, looking into his family, friends, and enemies, getting a look into what his everyday life is like, interviewing Alissa Violet, who is his ex-girlfriend, and also an interview with Jake Paul himself. A lot of ground was covered, showing who Jake was without his vlogging camera shoved in his face.
Each part was no less than 35 minutes long, the longest being an hour and forty-five minutes. Many other Youtubers, like Dwayne n Jazz, The Rewired Soul, amongst others, have posted reaction videos after each part was released, stating their opinions on it. A lot of them were mixed reviews, either picking apart the video itself or praising it.
So, since everyone else is giving their two cents about the series, I felt obligated that I had to as well.
I, myself, am not a fan of Jake Paul. In fact, before I watched this series, I thought he was a selfish kid that was only doing these crazy stunts for money and only using his friends for money. I honestly hated him because of the things that I saw in the media about what he did to the Martinez Twins, what he did to Alissa Violet, and just all of the scandals that he was involved with. To me, he was very arrogant and didn’t necessarily deserve the sudden fame that he got.
However, I wasn’t going to boycott Shane because he was making a video on him. A lot of others were, but I was actually curious as to what the series was going to consist of. I’m a fan of Shane, so I was going to support him, even if it meant having to suffer through eight parts about Jake Paul.
I thought that the series was a little long, but at the same time, I felt like it was necessary. I wasn’t fully convinced that Jake was a sociopath like Shane and the therapist had discussed in Part Two. However, since his brother Logan admitted to having sociopathic tendencies the next day in a response video, it wouldn’t have surprised me.
I, unlike a lot of other people that gave Shane backlash about Part Two, thought that it was interesting. It was a little over dramatic and misleading, but it still held legitimate information that even I didn’t know as a psychology major, such as every 1 in 25 people are sociopaths. I didn’t know it was that common!
The series was really well executed in my opinion. Shane has a tendency to make people feel bad for the ones that he interviews, which I was hoping wouldn’t happen. I didn’t necessarily want to feel sympathy for someone that I didn’t particularly care for, in which I didn’t other than one time, which was concerning the situation with Alissa Violet having a sexual relationship with Logan Paul behind Jake’s back.
What I really liked about the series is that we got a lot of insight from people who knew him personally. It was really interesting to hear from Jake’s old business partner and friend, Nick Crompton, who never discusses other people without them knowing, which he also states in the video. Being that he was the co-owner of Team 10 alongside Jake and had left just a few months ago, it was definitely a point of view that was necessary to have included in the series. It was also answering the question of why he had left Team 10 in the first place and what the supposed “internal changes” were.
The one topic that was covered, but I would’ve liked to see more of was the issues with the Martinez Twins. They had posted a video, claiming that Jake had bullied them and mistreated them. I would’ve liked to have some of those questions answered. Being that was one of the big scandals that all of Team 10 had been involved with, I think it would’ve been vital for Shane to have interviewed them and dedicate a part of the series just to that entire situation.
Jake flew out to Spain to meet the Martinez twins before he signed them onto Team 10. In the final video of the series, Jake states that the twins didn’t have much of anything and lived in a bad section because they were poor. Jake didn’t sign them out of pity; he signed them onto Team 10 because he saw that they had potential. Because of that, the Martinez family was able to get out of poverty and live a comfortable life because of Youtube. Why would they lie and back stab someone that had brought them out of poverty? It doesn’t add up and I feel like there was something more that was going on with that, but the world may never know.
Overall, I really liked how the series gave a deeper look into who Jake Paul actually was. By the last video, you were starting to see that Jake wasn’t this big bad wolf that everyone had made him out to be. He was taking responsibility for his idiotic behavior that happened over a year ago and you could tell from the things that he had said that he was working on becoming a better person.
I can’t say that I’m a “Jake Pauler,” but I can say that I no longer think he’s some big bad monster.