Flying to California to pick up my new roommate!

Estimated read time: 1:20

    Summary

    In a warm and engaging video, the creator shares his journey to California to pick up a new roommate, who is none other than a longtime internet friend he met on Discord. The video reflects on past experiences of forming online communities and friendships, highlighting the intriguing yet sometimes unpredictable nature of virtual relationships. Both creator and friend embark on a cross-country road trip back to the creator's home, capturing the excitement and nuances of meeting online friends in real life.

      Highlights

      • The creator travels to California to meet an internet friend from Discord. 🌴
      • They plan to drive along the southern border of the US together. 🚗
      • The journey explores the blending of online and real-life friendships. 🤝
      • They recount past experiences of building online communities. 🌐
      • The road trip offers a leisurely exploration with no strict schedule. 🗺️

      Key Takeaways

      • Online friendships can be just as meaningful as real-life ones. 🌐
      • Meeting internet friends in person can be both thrilling and nerve-wracking. 🎉
      • Real-life meetups often feel like a natural continuation of online interactions. 🔄
      • Traveling with friends is a great way to bond and create lasting memories. 🚗
      • It's important to embrace spontaneity during adventures. 🌟

      Overview

      In this video, the creator takes us on a journey that begins in California, where he's meeting an internet friend who has decided to become his new roommate. The excitement of meeting someone previously known only online is palpable, and it marks the start of a memorable adventure. The friendship which started in a Discord server now steps into the real world as both individuals gear up for a significant road trip across America.

        The video delves into the creator’s history of forming online friendships, kicking off with childhood experiences on platforms like Club Penguin. Online communities have always been a safe and engaging space for the creator to meet new and interesting people, eventually leading to offline meetups. This episode offers a reflective narrative on how digital interactions shape our social lives, often mirroring the experiences of actual communal settings.

          Throughout the cross-country drive, both friends encounter new environments and relive past memories, sharing anecdotes about the unpredictability and thrill that come with forming connections through the internet. The road trip unwinds as a relaxing retreat from daily obligations, reinforced by the spontaneous nature of their travel - where each destination offers a fresh perspective, both in landscapes and camaraderie.

            Chapters

            • 00:00 - 01:00: Introduction and Arrival in California The chapter introduces the narrator arriving in California for the first time. They reflect on their history of making friends online, starting at a young age on platforms like Club Penguin, and discuss moving to California to live with a new roommate met through internet chat rooms. The chapter highlights the evolution of online social platforms and the narrator's continued enthusiasm for forming online connections.
            • 01:00 - 02:30: Online Communities and Friendships This chapter, titled 'Online Communities and Friendships,' explores the dynamics of digital communities, comparing them to physical social venues like bars or clubs. The emphasis is on the importance of inviting 'real, genuine, and interesting' individuals to build a worthwhile internet circle. The chapter highlights the role of 'regulars' who form the core of these communities, much like repeat patrons in a bar. The metaphor extends to liken community management online to roles such as owners, bartenders, and bouncers, underscoring the relevance of maintaining order and fostering engagement, even among thousands of transient participants.
            • 02:30 - 05:30: Meeting David Lunch and Social Interactions The chapter delves into the significance of regular community members who frequently return, highlighting their value not just to the community but also to one's personal identity. These familiar faces play a pivotal role for newcomers who often encounter these regulars before meeting the community founder. This context is set against the narrator's first visit to the West Coast as a backdrop.
            • 05:30 - 09:00: Traveling and Exploring New Areas The chapter titled 'Traveling and Exploring New Areas' seems to focus on a community or group with a specific mention of an individual, David Lunch. The transcript highlights David's significant presence and contribution to a Discord server over a period of five years, sending over 200,000 messages. His influence is noted to be as substantial as that of the server's creator, indicating his importance in the community.
            • 09:00 - 12:00: Reflections on Online Connections The chapter explores the idea of online connections turning into real-life interactions. It describes a scenario where someone flies across the country and plans a road trip across the southern border of the U.S., ultimately to live together for an undetermined period. It reflects on the depth and unpredictability of relationships formed online.
            • 12:00 - 15:00: Impromptu Trip and Meeting Online Friends The chapter titled 'Impromptu Trip and Meeting Online Friends' begins with a casual conversation with David Bunch about his drive, which wasn't too bad. Plans are made to visit various locations such as Del Taco and Venice. Additionally, there is a desire to show David around Peave and to drive along the coastal side, highlighting that it's a very nice drive.
            • 15:00 - 18:00: Exploring New Environments The chapter "Exploring New Environments" debates the definition of meeting someone, emphasizing that it typically involves a face-to-face interaction that leaves first impressions. The discussion turns to online platforms like Threads and Instagram, where interactions take place differently. The narrator shares their experience of being banned from Instagram and how they prefer using YouTube instead, due to their opinion of Mark Zuckerberg.
            • 18:00 - 20:30: Travel and Reflections In this chapter titled 'Travel and Reflections', the narrator discusses the concept of a message they've been trying to convey, which is 'beware, fire beware'. Originally, not many people listened, and they were even discouraged from spreading this message. However, now the message has gained popularity, with hundreds of thousands of people echoing it. Despite initially reaching a select few, the narrator feels a sense of vindication seeing the widespread acceptance of what they were once blacklisted for discussing. The chapter reflects on the journey of this message and the narrator's personal experiences with being silenced and eventually validated.

            Flying to California to pick up my new roommate! Transcription

            • 00:00 - 00:30 Oh, are you filming already? Yep. I'm in California. I've never been here before, but it's time for a new roommate. It's me. But as a North Carolinian, where did I find this guy? Well, the same place I've met just about everyone. Internet chat rooms. I made my first online friend when I was around 8 years old on Club Penguin, of course. And over the past 17 years, what platform I use to meet people has always changed. But one thing that stayed consistent over the years is my obsession with building online
            • 00:30 - 01:00 communities. It's always my number one priority to invite real, genuine, and interesting people to my little like internet circle. The most important aspect of these circles are the regulars. Building these communities is much like what I imagine opening like a bar or a club to be like, just with slightly more autism, because there's the owner, the the bartender, maybe a bouncer. And these guys are important, especially if you have thousands of patrons cycling through your building. But what matters above all else are the
            • 01:00 - 01:30 regulars who come back time and time again because not only are they your most valuable members of the community, but in a way they become part of your personal identity. New people trickle in and will be face to face with these familiar faces often before they even meet you, the one who brought everyone together. And so that is what brought me to the West Coast for the first time ever. [Music]
            • 01:30 - 02:00 [Music] David Lunch. First joining 5 years ago, David has sent over 200,000 messages on my Discord server. You could argue he's the one person who's been as influential as the creator of this
            • 02:00 - 02:30 [Music] Now, you might be thinking, "Okay, that's cool and all." Actually, it's quite possibly the exact opposite of cool, but why fly cross country and then plan to drive the entire southern border of the United States together so he can live with me for an undetermined amount of time? Man, you ask a lot of questions. Thank you. I appreciate it.
            • 02:30 - 03:00 Hello, David Bunch. Did you have a fun drive? Oh, [Music] that wasn't too bad. Onward home. We'll go to the Del Taco. We'll go to Venice. I want to drive you around Peave. It's very nice. And we'll drive south. That way you'll be on the coastal side coast. It's a very nice drive.
            • 03:00 - 03:30 To meet someone has a debatable definition. The obvious being a face tof face interaction where you give and receive first impressions of each other. What's the reason they gave you? Um, they said, "Oh, you weren't choosing to share your uh profile." What platform was this? Threads. Oh, Instagram. Yeah. I actually also got banned from Instagram. Yeah. Yeah. I just do YouTube. because Mark Zuckerberg Yeah. and the
            • 03:30 - 04:00 whole crew don't like my message. What's the message? Um, beware. Fire beware. So, that's why. No, it's just um, you know, just general knowledge. I've just said right when breaking news happened. They didn't want me to be the first one out there. Now there's hundreds of thousands of people saying the same message that I'm the one who told a few people and then they like cut it off. I see. Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. cuz this one's already been blacklisted, right? Oh, okay. It's off my cell phone. Yeah. Cuz
            • 04:00 - 04:30 they're like, "You have to go to a laptop." Mhm. Or something like that. What's your name? Alex. Yeah. With two A's. With triple A. Yeah. Alex. Yes. That's what's your name? McMack. Cool. Nice to meet you. Nice to meet you. Yeah. I like I liked how you downplayed me. No excitement. Okay. And no curiosity. Yeah, it's all cool. I mean, Alex and two A's. You don't hear that every three A's. I think two. Two
            • 04:30 - 05:00 is better. Okay, I got two cuz you can always see like this. Yes. Okay. Okay. Nice to meet you. Yeah. Nice of you. Yeah, for sure. Come here. But what if you can't see each other? What if you can't online? David Lunch has always been. So, meeting him IRL was a more unique experience than usual. We've
            • 05:00 - 05:30 had when we actually have to speak up. Do you have a lot of feelings of doom? Like random paranoid thoughts? Like, how does your mental sickness uh manifest? Like someone walks up to you and you think they're going to shank you or something like that? You thought McMack was going to shank us? Not especially, but there have been times when something like this happened. She did get between us. For some reason, she split us up. That was very interesting. Yeah, it was a very interesting. We We should have recorded it once. I was recording. Oh,
            • 05:30 - 06:00 you were? Yeah. So, we just met Mick Mac. That's my first California second California resident I've met. Did you know what she was talking about? Not at all. Okay. Never. I was just spitballing. You've met Mick Max before. You've watched Mick Max before online or her specifically. You may have quite literally watched MCM. many such cases. And that was her child, right? She had a kid with her. Who knows? It could be her child. Could be a random child. I'm surprised she didn't hit us up for money. I thought that was coming. I did think she was going to ask for money and then I thought she was going to like
            • 06:00 - 06:30 she'll solicit something. Mhm. Yeah. There was no real solicitation other than just uh this information. It was a pleasant pleasantish Yeah. conversation. Uh and she seemed surprised that we listened to her. Mhm. I'm pretty sure most people just let her off. Oh, that's sad. Well, it's the kind of thing where there's there's a million crazy people around here. When I'm in New York, people I'm with get frustrated if I talk to people. They like if they come up to us and I actually listen to what they say.
            • 06:30 - 07:00 Apparently, you're not supposed to do that usually. No, that's true. Why? I'll actually give you a very concrete example. Uh, when I was at the park this weekend, there was a schizophrenic man and I kind of gave him too much attention cuz he talked to me a little bit and I stood there and listened for like a second. The second time I encountered him, he physically assaulted me. So, that was fun. So, yeah. Uh, be be careful. He was so like methed out that it really didn't do much. He was messed up. He was messed up in the head. I didn't know you actually gave that guy attention. Yes. I thought he just came
            • 07:00 - 07:30 up and just randomly pushed you. No, I had I had uh encountered him before. I couldn't understand what he was saying. What race was he? I can't believe that. It's also one of those cases where there's there's no real logic going on. You're just kind of uh hoping that you get good rolls IRL. You don't get the bad RNG. What is RNG? Uh random number generator. My fear is if I don't give someone at least a little bit of attention, then they're going to attack me. I I feel like you shouldn't be mean to people who have nothing to lose. You have to kind of split the
            • 07:30 - 08:00 difference. Sometimes you got to give a little, sometimes you don't. It's It's one of It's one of those things where you have to switch it up so that you're not predictable. That's something that happens in like uh like poker. You want to bluff sometimes, but you also don't want to bluff all the time. And I guess it's good to maybe practice the different scenarios so you can probably not probably one one of the things you just want to let happen. You probably don't want to seek out random homeless. Oh, well, okay. 9 years ago, there was this kid that commented on a few of my videos. I started doing the same on his channel and we literally connected on
            • 08:00 - 08:30 Google Hangouts. A few months later, I was getting frozen yogurt with my mom when the kid from the internet walked into the same fro yo shop with his mom. Meeting was a complete coincidence and it broke the barrier of a screen for good. What if I decide to stay? Oh, what if I tricked you? Well, you did kind of already message me. You're like, I changed my mind. I'm staying. And I was like, what do I do in that case? I think I probably would have come to your house and killed you. It'll be fun. I'm looking forward to it. There was this one kid I met on Minecraft when I was
            • 08:30 - 09:00 12. I'm not sure exactly why we were so gravitated towards one another, but I added him on Skype and then we quickly began to video call every day after school. He was in a different time zone from me, so I'd have to wait like an hour after getting home. But we'd carry each other around on our laptops from around 300 p.m. till our moms called us for dinner. So, we'd go AFK, we'd eat, and we'd hop back on call until late into the night until our parents noticed and told us to like get rested for school the next day. The two of us grew a digital click of about a dozen kids
            • 09:00 - 09:30 between the ages of 10 and 15, spanning five or six time zones. I had just built my first of many online friend groups. We were seen as loners to our classmates, but only because the majority of our schools banned us from communicating with each other during the day. My earliest online friends and I would just fantasize over the first time we meet in person. Our plan was to fly out to a Minecraft convention, probably get a hotel together, eat a bunch of pizza, and just have a lot of fun, like
            • 09:30 - 10:00 the 13-year-old's idea of having a good time. But it it never happened. We didn't have any money. And our parents weren't ecstatic to travel thousands of miles so their child could meet a stranger from the internet. [Music] David and I spent the day in Los Angeles and got dinner with another Californian online friend who I got to meet for the first time as well who also happens to be the second most active user on my Discord server. He wished us safe travels and well actually he didn't. He
            • 10:00 - 10:30 instead recounted a vision he had of David and I losing traction in the rain and veering off a bridge, killing us both before we even make it to the east coast. Thank you, George. I appreciate that.
            • 10:30 - 11:00 This is not bad for 60 bucks. We've arrived at stop one for night one. I'm a bit tired. Of course, I'm also 3 hours behind because of the time change. Tomorrow is mostly going to be a driving day because it's going to be raining. But I got a very quick tour of Los Angeles today. After getting the cheapest motel on the border of California, it was time to get some of these 3,000 mi behind us. David owns the
            • 11:00 - 11:30 same car I do, a standard range plus Tesla Model 3, which means this 46-hour drive will turn into an estimated 56 hours after you account for supercharging stops. But the good news is that David and I are both unemployed. I've always been like this. And David recently quit working at a sweat shop. We have no deadlines and nowhere to be. We can take detours. We can get hotels. Or we can just cover miles. But why? Why did I ask David specifically? And why did he accept my offer? Also, what if
            • 11:30 - 12:00 someone online is not who they claim to be in person? I guess I'll cross that bridge when I get to it. I don't know. I've met nearly 20 people from Discord alone, and they're almost all exactly the same in person as they are online, just fully threedimensional. It seems people who aren't who they claim to be, uh, they know it themselves, and so in turn, they generally refuse to meet. But there are, of course, those people who are purposfully being deceptive, and this video is definitely not a tutorial in internet safety. There's been people
            • 12:00 - 12:30 I've met online that I knew for years, and yet I still never learned their names. [Music] [Music] It's the start of day two. It feels like it's been more than a day of travel already. We We actually got very very little travel in. But also, it doesn't
            • 12:30 - 13:00 feel like I was in North Carolina yesterday. Feels more like it was three or four days ago. Oh yeah, this is the Colorado River in Colorado. It's a nice rock. If you get that rock from this angle, kind of looks like a bear dragon. Oh, and that was a picture.
            • 13:00 - 13:30 [Music] This is the first time on the trip where I I truly feel like I'm in a foreign place. It's all so unique. Like I keep just looking at the same mounds of land, but I don't know. I mean, look at it. It's like It's all like It looks so crunchy. It's making me hungry. [Music]
            • 13:30 - 14:00 Fresh jerky. That's just neat. Wonder at what point the Carl's Juniors become parties. Michigan mentioned. Developing an anonymous connection with someone while only being able to identify them by at most like a scrambled username is very interesting and sometimes it just got a bit
            • 14:00 - 14:30 addicting. There have been people that I've met using anonymous identities where we'll talk for sometimes just hours but other times weeks or even years and then one day one of us just disappears. To avoid this, sometimes people will offer to disclose their real identity or give you an additional form of contact. But there's been times where I asked them just not to. The mystery and the scarcity of these relationships often just makes the conversations much more interesting and more valuable in
            • 14:30 - 15:00 real time. But I would be sad to not have those consistent connections, those people that I interact with every day and that I get to know on a personal level and that I eventually do want to meet in person. Now, you might think that a man I've never seen before, pulling up to me in his car, three time zones away from my home, and then getting in the car with him should be like relatively off-putting. But for some reason, it just isn't. You could argue it's just from the exposure of meeting people from the internet multiple times before, but I must say that the excitement of the experience is
            • 15:00 - 15:30 never any less each time. And honestly, getting in the guy's passenger seat and being driven around was the first moment I felt like I could truly relax. I was going to say the planning and preparation was all behind us now, but we sort of didn't really plan this at all.
            • 15:30 - 16:00 What is their logo supposed to be of the the little fellas? I think it's like a p of butter. I like no part of running food. Last year, I asked David to move in with me, but he said no. I asked him again a couple weeks ago and he said yes. I asked when and he
            • 16:00 - 16:30 said, "So, we did some impromptu planning. Then I bought the cheapest one-way ticket I could find. And a couple weeks later, [Music] [Music] [Music]
            • 16:30 - 17:00 You want to see me touch snow for the first time? I've never touched snow ever. Oh, that's fun. It's the tiniest little amount. Tiniest snowball. Wow.
            • 17:00 - 17:30 Throw it a little snow berry. So, you've never been in 36°. Never. It's actually not that bad. I think it's because it's very dry, so it's not all moist. Yeah. This doesn't feel that bad. Well, also it's not windy. If there was a wind right now, we'd be dying if there were wind. Yeah. Well, you'd be dying. [Music]
            • 17:30 - 18:00 How are we doing? I think pretty good. We're on day two. I was just in North Carolina not that long ago and we've already traversed around Los Angeles and now we're into Arizona. So, second uh new state for Maine. The nice thing is we're not in a rush on this trip. Like normally I feel like every time I'm going somewhere, it's it's always to accomplish a mission. And the fun thing
            • 18:00 - 18:30 is even the places that we're just covering miles. That's still interesting because of all the terrain. I got to see snow for the first time and you could see cactuses for the first time. Yes. You have you're having a way more first than I am. So, it's your first time out of California in the US. Uh I've been to Hawaii and that's about it. California, Hawaii, and now Arizona. Hopefully, we got some good footage. First time cinematographer, so hopefully it works out. I think it's good. I think people like it. I got some nice shots. A lot of people find it weird to go uh meet up
            • 18:30 - 19:00 with someone that you haven't met and then do something kind of intensive with them, I guess. Like, it never really feels like meeting someone when I do meet up with someone online because we kind of already know each other. It's just like a continuation. I feel like people have a very false dichotomy of online versus IRL when it it's really it kind of really is the same thing. Even though you've never met me, you you have met me. We know each other. The one difference I always say is you never know how the person's going to smell. True. But you don't seem to smell like anything. It's very neutral. That is
            • 19:00 - 19:30 good. In the car. No. Okay. The one difference with David is you pretty much never voice chat. I very I've heard your voice until two days ago like for an hour max over a few years of Discord. It was only really weird for maybe the first like half hour hour just when someone was getting started and it was also very uh well not very a somewhat traumatic uh exit. Very emotional. It's like leaving.
            • 19:30 - 20:00 Yeah. Leaving for the first time. Did you have hesitation uh the very last day like yesterday? Not really. You were just kind of There was stress, but there was no real hesitation. I knew what I wanted to do, but I just I was just worried that it wouldn't work out. And so far, it's worked out. [Music]
            • 20:00 - 20:30 [Music]