That's one way to look at it, I suppose. What I see is someone who travels around a country that is unfamiliar and inaccessible, and who focuses on showing us what life is like there. And that may not be incredibly spectacular, but I admit to greatly enjoying seeing such a unique and unfamiliar part of the world and the people that live there. I could travel there myself (and I have), but I don't speak Russian so I could never make the connections he makes and hear the stories he hears.

Is he rude? Well, he is certainly much more extraverted than I could ever be, and I suppose he crosses the line at times, but he talks to real people about their real life, rather than putting up a bit of a tourist show with only highlights. I find it fascinating, just like I find "yeah Russia" (youtube channel) fascinating.

I do wonder how his Ethiopian adventure ended though. I'm sure there's a story there...

> check-in to a hotel; go on a short walking tour within a few blocks of the hotel while acting like an asshat; the end.' And this gets millions of views and subscribers.

he lived in india for couple of years and learnt passable hindi.

I think your impression is right - there's some indications that guy might be at the very least have questionable morals, or might even be a straight up sexual predator - https://old.reddit.com/r/BaldAndBaldrDossier/comments/judnlm...

tl;dr internet sleuths have connected him to a since deleted account on a "pick up artist" forum where that person has bragged about going to Eastern Europe to find desperate women to have sex with, using very questionable methods

There's another solo youtube traveler with nearly the same vibe. In both cases I think part of the issue is that they are too connected to the camera and not to the people around them, so they just seem disinterested.

It bums me out because I'm looking at doing quite a bit of solo traveling in the next few years and would like to capture some of it for my family and friends, but if I come across anyway like this it's going to be a major fail. I posted some from a recent trip and didn't appear or say a word in any of the videos and it was received reasonably well, but the audience isn't exactly like to say 'bro stop being a douche' lol.

I understand where you are coming from but there are some pearls in there such as this one about the Beslan tragedy:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=D0knAQL9WtM

That's interesting about bald, it's a neat channel.

I used to be one of a group of people who other people thought were spies. I was living abroad at the time. At first this aspect was extremely irritating. Some locals would point at me and say "spy".

But the more I thought about it, the more I met people like me who I thought would make terrific spies, and the more I met local friends who I thought I could probably recruit as spies to have local culture on my side.

Then I started to casually explore the countryside like a dumb tourist, and I would emerge from a random forest to see locals' gaping mouths, later to learn it was a sensitive area. I started to think--no wonder they think we're spies!

Later on I went home and found out that a LOT of people who did what I did were recruited as legitimate spy-types. One of them was a childhood friend who apparently drank some magic government potion and became a CIA officer who went on to be extremely visible in US national politics.

It's a fascinating lens on life, superficially at least. Misdirection works for you and against you. You can make just about anything seem true or false. And weirdly while supposedly a hyper-objective effort (go $my_country!) I understand it often has a tremendous personal impact on those who are deeply involved.

> But there are some more Youtubers who seem to travel around to hotspots

These are the ones I'd recruit for a modern-day BRIXMIS. If you watch the BRIXMIS videos, the officers interviewed had a tremendous psychological overlap with traveling Youtubers who are very curious about things, to the point where _touching_ or _going to those things_ feels like a victory of its own. Digging up poop near an encampment because Soviet soldiers used log pages as toilet paper--they did that.