Isaac Peltz and the Search for Literally Any Fulfilment

Have I contributed to everyone's brain rot?

I started making social media posts in 2020 when me and my bandmate, Blue Jay Walker, were building an audience for the specific purpose of making music. If you watch the early days of our work (please don’t, dear God I implore you not to ever look it up) it’s a novice attempt at figuring out the platform. Of course, it’s fun in retrospect, and it got us our start. Somewhere in Nova Scotia, while we were driving on Cabot Trail (we were homeless), Jay had the idea to create a series where you “asked a hobo” about anything, and we would impart the sage advice of a hobo to the viewer.

It was for normal, everyday audiences that couldn’t possibly have the knowledge or wisdom of a couple of hobos in their mid twenties.

It was fun for a time, until I became my disillusioned self and got tired of an arbitrary grind, which admittedly got us started, but didn’t seem to be progressing. Jay and I split up, he’s out there doing the best work of his life in my opinion, and I took a year off to work in a bar. Then I started in journalism by coincidence because Christopher Curtis, the editor and chief of the Rover, moved in upstairs.

A survey last year showed that 57% of Gen Z want to be influencers. I have now done it twice. The first time for music, my greatest passion; the second for journalism, inspired as a pragmatic approach to an industry that is struggling. I assumed that using my experience I could probably quickly create an audience and become well known. I didn’t want to create something divisive, although I also did not want to patronize my audience.

I felt that people deserved information that they could engage with in a real practical sense– they could look at me and understand who I was, see that I was a human with flaws, and they could understand my bias. I hoped that I would bridge the gap between humans and information. I hoped that my presence could be a mild sedative to the constantly divisive society we live in. I’ve never cared if someone is left or right wing, I’ve only ever cared that they have humanity, and I will respect them.

The biggest effect I wanted to have was that other, more experienced and smarter journalists got online. I’m not by any metric the best journalist– There are so many others who do a better job than me. A ton of other journalists in Canada are now making news content online. In French and English. I think I contributed significantly to that. That’s a good legacy, and if that’s the end of it for me, I’m content with what I’ve done; I moved the clock forward a bit for an industry that hates change.

In that time, since beginning this journey of being a newsfluencer, I have received a hundred different death threats, I have been called ugly and stupid thousands of times. The internet is a hostile, no man’s land, and I’m saying this as a bilingual white person from Montreal. I don’t envy how hard women and people of colour have it.

These messages don’t stress me out. However– they disappoint me. It doesn’t matter how well you can present something, the internet, and specifically social media, has damaged our society to a degree that I am still reckoning with. I don’t know how to fix the, seemingly, irreparable damage that I’ve watched occur to many people’s minds over the past ten years.

I have watched Christians become angry and resentful to a degree that could be irredeemable, and is certainly irreconcilable with Jesus’ teachings.

I have watched the right wing drag their views further and further, turning the United States into a neo-fascist state.

I have watched left wingers abandon reason to give way to cynical rage directed more at other leftists than at the systems that cause injustice in our society.

This is, in my view, entirely because of one minute clips on tik tok and social media, or 140 character tweets in reply to someone on twitter. People who take advantage of others by stimulating an emotional response that will garner fame for themselves at the expense of others' sanity. A big statement on social media that seems so grand, a hook that will make them seem impressive.

Did I do that exact same thing?

Seeing these insane replies to my videos has been making me question the validity of what I have been doing. Am I, through attempting to communicate facts, causing further division? I’m critical of people who are doing news journalism on social media who court controversy, but by the very nature of being on there am I courting that same controversy?

I also wonder about the nature of my participation in the social media economy. Gab and I had the idea of building this name for ourselves on social media and creating a unique little journalism team to do deep investigations. We went ahead to create videos for journalism partly as a promotion of our ideas and investigations, and to get national attention to the work that we were doing.

Do I think we deserve national attention for our work? Yeah, definitely. Is that arrogant? I dunno; our housing investigation is some of the best work I feel I’ve ever done, thanks in large part to my partnership with Gabrielle. I couldn’t have done half of this without her.

Yet my participation in the social media economy makes me question whether or not I’m doing the right thing. Most people do not remember the reels they saw– and those who do will not be able to withhold the information that was fed into their brain at an incredible tilt. The question is: am I teaching, or am I people’s entertainment? I am obviously both, yet significantly more of my most popular videos are big, bombastic things– me making fun of the crown and Donald Trump, me making a list tracking political investments (The list is available here for every province and the feds. Although the new government hasn’t released their info yet.)

Every year, usually in the summer, I need to collect my mind and wonder what my motivations are. Am I serving people, or myself? Because if I’m serving myself, I’m not likely doing the right thing in my work.

If my social media is all about my brand, it’s not what I’m interested in doing. What I want is to make investigations that matter, not make commentary. I want to master subjects, and build cases. I don’t think I’m the best analyst– I think people watch me and are charmed by a superficial, quick wit.

What I want is to create something beautiful, with staying power. I could make endless short form content, I would probably get tons more work from that as well. Thanks to my presence online, I’ve been able to sustain a living off of journalism. It’s unbelievable, and I’m endlessly grateful. The incredible Christopher Curtis told me that my greatest strength is my writing skills. That’s insane– Christopher Curtis is one of the most well known writers in Quebec and he thinks my writing is my strongest skill.

If that’s the case, I want to capitalize on that. I think understanding extremely complex topics and relaying that through simpler language to people who have less understanding– that’s my strength. Give me the hardest topic of all time, let me figure it out, and I’ll be able to communicate it in a way that a child could grasp, but without making someone feel patronized. Give me a research project, and I will learn every detail possible.

I have felt an incredible pressure to create, to be exceptional, to be the fastest and best person online for every piece of information. I’ve accidentally broken news on social media several times without meaning to, simply because I’m quick on the draw. I found out about the High Speed Rail first; I was one of the first in the country to talk about Bill C-2’s privacy concerns and Bill C-5's environmental concerns.

Truth is, I’m not interested in just “breaking news.” That’s useless– all it does it enable a competitive atmosphere that I don’t want to participate in. I’m also not interested in being perfect, or perceived as such, and I don’t think a single (sane) person wants me to put that pressure on myself.

I don’t want to participate in an economy of work that polarizes and makes people hyper sensitive, angry, or divides the world. I love this world, and I love the people in this world. Now the question is whether I think that I can overcome this economy of fast-food-information, or whether I will be another voice drowned out in the noise of an endlessly forward flow of noise.

Can I innovate again, and push myself further? So, except when I have an article to make or something like that, I won’t be posting on socials. Instead I’m going to be planning, and thinking, and writing on substack. Instead I’ll be trying to master film skills, writing for a script, and different creative skills. I’ll be here for those who want to find me. Don’t know where I’ll get my money from, but I’ll figure that out as I go.

And if I get drowned out by the endless slew of new content, if people don’t remember that I ever made things on socials, it doesn’t matter anyway. This life and this work was never about getting a following, it was about informing people and engaging with people. If I’m forgotten, I hope I inspired a couple people to do better.