When I was at a technology press do a few years ago, some of the older hacks like me were talking to the younger types about why we don’t watch vlogs to obtain information. One apparent reason was that we could read faster than we could listen, and the other was that most vlogs were a crock of shite.
Part of the issue is that most vlogs are made by people with no media experience, who like the sound of their own voice and think others will be blessed by hearing it. They are usually interviewing those who are keen to showcase themselves, their latest book, or who expect things to go easily for them.
The result is a lengthy interview in which the interviewer does most of the talking and never challenges their guest with tricky questions. As a result, the interviewee gets away with murder, and the audience becomes confused as to what or who they are.
I was watching one in which an academic discussed a famous occultist. They spent the first 40 minutes padding out their talk with stories about the subject, told in an over-dramatic way and full of pretentious long words. The interviewer indulged them with this boring dissertation of information that could be found easily in the famous occultists’ books; in fact, the interviewee did little more than read excerpts, accompanied by overly stretched and, in some cases, incorrect personal remarks.
Then she ran out of material and clearly was floundering.
Normally, a professional interviewer should use open, challenging questions to elicit more information from the interviewee. In this case, perhaps because of a lack of experience, or worse, due to self-promotion, he helped by providing long, narrative stories of his own. When he asked them a question from the public (which sounded out of context), rather than saying “I don’t know,” the interviewee implied that she did know but that the information was secret or should not be discussed.
The result was that the audience knew little about the subject matter presented, and a lot about the two people who talked at them for a good hour and a half longer than necessary.
There are some excellent occult lecture blogs out there. Justine Sledge’s Esoterica blog offers visitors well-informed lectures on occult subjects that are worth sitting down to listen to. But the art of the interview is mainly lacking, because those being interviewed have it far too easy.
Someone being interviewed needs to have their knowledge or ego challenged, or they (and the audience) will drift into boredom. Interviewees should be relieved when the interview is over, and they have not made a mess of it.
I once attended a press conference for a Microsoft server product in the US, where the American trade press was giving one of the Microsoft executives such an easy time that he was bored. He was talking in management bullshit and providing one-on-one answers that the press office would have been proud of. When it was my turn to ask a question, I opened with, “Why is Microsoft holding a loaded gun to network managers’ skulls with dodgy locked-in licences?”  The executive suddenly woke up. He had been trained to answer tricky questions like that, but he never had to, and suddenly he had a real challenge. I got my story, and while the manager (and their press officer handler) might have crapped himself, he came out of it well, and I had a story which was different from everyone else.
Everyone on the occult scene has things that they want to avoid talking about. But in many cases, those are the things that an audience wants to know about. A good thing to ask masonic-style occult groups is, “By what authority do you initiate?” It is a boring question, but it has been the source of most of the “wars” in the occult community, with people setting up groups on the back of books rather than within the rules of that tradition.
Interviewers should be looking for holes in the ideas of the people they are interviewing, as some who are trotted out as experts on a subject have no direct idea what they are talking about and are certainly not connected to the orders they claim to represent. There is one Italian person who claimed (falsely) that he has lineage from Whare Ra because some bloke in the US gave it to him. Because you have studied YB Yeats for your doctorate, you are not an expert on the 1-10 Zelator grade of the Golden Dawn.
If you ask those sorts of questions, then you can watch these sorts of people squirm, or at least get indignant.
That is the function of an interview—to knock these self–possessed experts off their perches. It is not to assist them in flogging a few books, peddling courses or celebrating conferences where a group of similar vacuous egos gather to indulge in mutual admiration for the applause of sycophants.
Research about interviewees can go a long way, too. I have written books about the Golden Dawn and set up a Hermetic Order of the Golden Dawn temple in the UK. This means interviewers inevitably ask me Golden Dawn questions, even though that part of my life is less interesting to me than others. Ask me about the work of paganising magic, and you might not get me to shut up, and there will be material that viewers might not have heard.
Once, in a public press conference, I was stuck with the cream of New Zealand’s music press interviewing Genesis. I had the advantage of being a fan, but it became pretty clear that the people in the room knew nothing about Genesis beyond the fact that Peter Gabriel had once been in the band. You could see Phil Collins getting sarcastic with his replies. What stopped him short was when I asked him, “You started as a child actor… have you ever considered getting back into that?” Collins “woke up” and said he had just done Miami Vice and he was going to do a movie about the Great Train Robbery called Buster.” A story which had not been reported anywhere in the world suddenly became real.
This alternate line of questioning is always good for Vlogs, particularly asking the “names” in the occult industry. What would happen if you asked Lon DuQuette if he ever thought something other than Thelema would suit him, or Chic Cicero if he ever woke up at night and wondered what would have happened had he given OTO more of a chance? Someone could equally ask me why I don’t consider MOAA a Golden Dawn order.
All these would give a vlog an interesting story, rather than the mechanical information peddling that we are getting.
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