There's Something Wrong With Suburbia (The Orange Pill)

Yes, this was filmed on an actual CRT sitting in an actual pile of garbage at the side of an actual stroad in actual Michigan. Edit: this was not edited or filmed by me. I gave my editor, Broderick Steele, a voiceover file and a budget, and with the help of Samuel Crick (Assistant Camera Operator) they came up with this masterpiece. 👏 This is mentioned in the description, but obviously nobody reads the description.

In my childhood I knew something was wrong. I HATED where I grew up because i couldn't go ANYWHERE without a car. I would see cartoon shows of "Hey Arnold" of kids taking the city bus to go places and I was envious.

"My legs, why do they hurt?" "You've never used them before."

My car is orange. Riddle me that Neo

I never realized how bad the suburbs were until I looked back on my childhood and realized I couldn't have friends who lived too far away, I couldn't maintain high school relationships, and I couldn't go downtown or see anything meaningful without a car. It was just normal to me, but after seeing how other people live without car dependency has helped me to realize how much of a bondage we are used to here. We just casually accept that without a car you can't go anywhere or do anything. This sums up many kids experiences throughout middle and high school, since you want to go places but don't have a car and can't get your parents to drive you everywhere.

this is fantastic. But seriously sometimes art can reach people when normal videos cant :)

This should be the channel trailer, I think its pretty accurate to the transformation that new viewers will go through watching this channel

This opener, the phrasing from the matrix, all of it, is EXACTLY how I felt my entire life! I could never explain in a simple, single sentence why I hated the city I grew up in, and why I was always drawn to places like Chicago, Pittsburgh, Kalamazoo, etc, but there was always something wrong, and I couldn't figure out the core of it. I could tell you all the individual things I hated: the constantly empty parking lots that do nothing for nobody, the giant road-adjacent curbs they called a sidewalk, the antisocial and overly suspicious nature of suburbanites, the stupid driveway requirements in suburban neighborhoods which require you to drive over a LITERAL CURB AT THE END OF YOUR DRIVEWAY INSTEAD OF A GRADUAL SLOPE ALL IN THE NAME OF SOMEONE'S STUPID IDEA OF WHAT CURB APPEAL MEANS TO THEM!!!, etc. But this opening was my entire, depressed childhood with nothing to do, and nowhere to go. I hated everything about the city I lived in, except for a few, tiny specs of land that made it feel... slightly more bearable... It wasn't until I went, in May of 2022, to Greece where my wife is from, and saw how I could walk everywhere, that I started to figure out the nature of the problem: the car. And it was shortly after I got back into the US that I stumbled upon Not Just Bikes video telling me what a stroad was that I finally had words to describe what I always knew was wrong! Literally, everything clicked with the viewing of that video. I instantaneously became an anti-car urbanist, with a goal to destroy the car centric nature of the city I now live in. I'm literally in the process of buying up abandoned properties that were turned into soul-sucking seas of asphalt and concrete and turning them into proper, person oriented land use. I'm working on acquiring a parking lot with an abandoned strip mall less than one tenth the size of said metal box storage desert, and turning it into a walkable mini neighborhood with office, retail, residential, and other use. It's also attached on the backside of the whole area, to a park that's over a mile long. If I can pull this off, it'll be on the YouTube channel I'm working on starting, showing actual land use changes. Stay tuned everybody!

So far I've orange-pilled three people: My mother, one of my best friends, and a random internet stranger. This is becoming my life, and I am absolutely loving it. I'm planning to write to my city council soon, simply to try to make a change, though I know that most things I do will have little to no impact, but that's okay. I will continue to try to make a difference, any difference. I would like to thank you, Jason, for everything that you have taught me from the moment that I found your channel, and for everything else I've learned from research I've done myself, other channels that you have recommended to your viewers, and also interviews you have done with other people, as well as a couple of podcasts that you went on, most notably This Sustainable Life, and the Eric Norcross podcast. From the bottom of my heart, thankyou.

This is absolutely hilarious, and a little creepy how well it actually works.

Moves to Netherlands and makes fun videos about cycling and quality of life. Flash forward. Welcome to the cult.

It’s funny how, as a car enthusiast, I watch a lot of car videos, and then come back to this channel and agree with all the car hate. Edit: it’s been almost a year since I posted this comment and I still receive notifications, so please consider that if you will defend about how it’s not about car hate but fighting car dependency, about 15 people already said it before you. If you will say that this same argument has been presented by NJB in other videos, I have seen plenty of his videos and never seen this argument being made, in addition to the fact that the way he talks about cars at any given time is always negative. So if such a video exists, please give me the title so I can watch it. That said, I agree on the argument that car dependency sucks.

I have lived in the Netherlands for all of my life. And I felt quite happy here. But it took some Canadian from Fake London to make me realize how 'lucky' I really am to have lived here all of my life. And apart from all the other things you explain very neatly and convincingly in your video's, I have to thank you for opening my eyes to that one fact. You make great videos that should be watched by city planners all over the world. Because we don't need cities that are in some kind of economic schedule; we need cities that people want to live in.

I have been orange pilled. I simply cannot unsee or forgot how car dependency makes my city miserable. Now my friends are sick of hearing about bike lanes, train service, and walkable neighbourhoods, but it has actually become an issue I'm super passionate about now. All thanks to stumbling upon NJB

Finding your channel really was like a red pill / blue pill moment for me. I can’t unsee the absurdity and injustice of my car dependent city.

As an American who lived abroad in Switzerland for several years, this channel has verbalized every single issue about American cities that I started to realize after living there. This has made me understand why America feels like a third world country with a gucci belt, as opposed to an actual functioning industrialized society.

Living in Tokyo was such an eye opening experience to what living can and should look like. It was the first time without a car for me in my life and after a year there I did not miss it. Not once. In fact I felt I had better access to food, culture, people than I had ever had living in suburban Ontario. Now we live in downtown Vancouver, intentionally, to experience the same things.. no car, my kids have more independence, access to events, nature, art, food that they could never have in barren Suburbia. When I leave the city core and come across a parking lot, it just looks so… wrong.

Until I found this channel last summer, I couldn't put my finger on why I hate American cities so much (having lived here my whole life.) I never knew what to call the hellscape where the businesses congregate, so I just called them commercial districts. Endless asphalt and pedestrian hostility as far as the eye can see, dotted by every soulless fast food joint and bank institution you could dream of. I couldn't take it anymore, and moved to a lesser populated area. Yes it's still stroads here, but with less congestion and high blood pressure. Many intersections are extremely dangerous in the US, and 2 years ago, I nearly had my car totaled at no fault of my own. Stroad, stroad, go away, come again some other day.

Two fish are swimming side by side. One says to the other, "Nice water today." The other replies, "What's water?" That's car dependency. We "swim" in it everyday in the US, but we don't know what it is until our mind has been opened. Thanks NJB for opening minds. I wrote a song years ago about car dependency in Sacramento. Sammy Rice on Sound Cloud and it's called "The Streets of Sacramento."

I was “orange pilled” in 2017 when I went to Taiwan… I have never been the same since just seeing the free flow of people and transportation without vehicles. Coming back to America had never been so depressing. You really have to experience the other side yourself to fully understand what we’re missing.