The business of YouTube and the blurry PYREX incident

Hi, I'm yesterday's internet cookery sensation, Adam Regusia. And like many people who talk over mass communications for a living, I've said and done a number of things through the years that have pissed off a lot of people, some more legitimately than others. I'm going to talk now about one of the odder objections that's ever been raised about something that I published because there's actually a lot that we can learn from this incident and it's a good little lesson in epistemic humility. even if you don't care, you're going to get a lot of like industry insider knowledge on how professional YouTubing works, how sponsor deals work, etc. So, the video in question is from 2021. It's an iced cream sandwich recipe that I did, and here is the offending clip. A stick of butter, fully melted, 4 oz, 113 g. Yes. Yes. I blurred the logo on the Pyrex jug that I used to pour the melted butter into the bowl. I blurred the Pyrex logo. And like almost all of the comments on the video are about the blurring of the Pyrex logo, I want to talk about that at the risk of blowing this minor incident out of proportion. perhaps blowing it up as big and fluffy as a mattress from Helix Sleep, sponsor of this video. It's back to school season. We're waking up in the inky blackness again. Love that. We got to get serious about quality sleep. All our premium mattresses in the house are Helix mattresses. The newest one is the Helix kids mattress that we got. The 10-year-old was complaining about how his old mattress was too hard. He sinks a little more into the Helix mattress and he really prefers it. It's naturally hypoallergenic and stain resistant. And like all Helix mattresses, they just shipped it to me in a box free in the US. Break the vacuum seal and it inflates like a stupid internet controversy. They're not air mattresses. They're real super premium mattresses. I love sleeping on our king-size Helix Dusk Lux that we have. It sinks yet supports. If you want to upgrade your sleep for back to school or your kids sleep, Helix has you covered. Their mattresses come with a 100 night trial period to make sure it's the right one for your body and your sleep habits. Take the Helix quiz to get matched with a model right now. Helixleep.com/reusia. They've extended their Labor Day sale for now, so you can get 27% off sitewide with my link or scan that QR code on the screen. Thank you, Helix. Anyway, my blurring of the Pyrex. A stick of butter fully melted, 4 ounces, 113 gram. Lots of people were amused by it. Some people were agitated. Some were just confused. And enough years have gone by that I don't think anyone involved in this particular story is going to get mad about me telling it. So, here's why the Pyrex logo got blurred and why you might see similar things in other people's content. I have an agent who books all of my sponsorships. His name is Colin West. His company is called Solaro. He's the best. People ask me a lot about how you get an agent to book your sponsor deals. And the answer is when you have a big enough audience to attract such deals, agents will find you. Very similar to sports. If your kid is good enough to play professional ball, all they have to do is play well in school and scouts will find them. The only trick is not falling in with some exploitative or incompetent representation. I'm represented in these ad deals by a really great talent agency called Solaro. Companies, brands that want to pay me to do ads for them. They have their own agencies that represent them in these deals. Influencer marketing agencies. The way it usually works is the brand's agent emails my agent. Hey Colin, I've got this much budget for this campaign next month. Who do you have who could reliably get views at least in the high tens of thousands in this particular demo that we want? Colin writes back. He says, "I've got this YouTuber available that month. I've got that YouTuber available that month. And I've got Adam Reusia." They haggle a little over the details and then they get to signing contracts. This whole influencer marketing business was still really underdeveloped when I first blew up on YouTube in 2019 and it used to be kind of a pain in the ass. We would get brands coming into the deals with all kinds of unrealistic expectations. Brands used to handle these deals inhouse a lot instead of outsourcing to an agency with expertise. Lots of brands with products to advertise used to talk to my agent directly instead of going through their own agent and that sometimes went poorly. When you work with the brands directly, they tend to want to micromanage you a lot more. They don't really know how things usually work and they can make some unusual requests. Now, in 2025, that whole business is much bigger and more standardized. There's a way of doing things that has been collectively established by all of us who work in this biz. And now the deals go incredibly smoothly most of the time. Everybody knows what they can realistically expect out of a deal. An agency usually approves my ad instead of the brand itself approving my ad. And the agencies understand the process so much better than the brands used to. For my part, I am much better at anticipating what brands will want me to do in the ad, regardless of what their written brief may say. That's the normal way that I get sponsorships. Some brands agent calls my agent, they work out a pretty boilerplate deal, I make the video, we send it over for approval two business days before publication. Obviously, the brand or the brand's agent only has a say over the like minute long ad break. I've never in my career had a brand that tried to interfere with my editorial decision-making. I've never had them try to change my content meaningfully. They only ever want to change the ad. And even when it comes to the ad, there's often lots of like reasonable good faith back and forth. The brands are in no position to dictate terms and I am in no position to dictate terms to the brands because there's lots of other brands out there and there's lots of other YouTubers out there. We don't need each other that much. Sometimes a brand will ask me to say something in the ad and I will say I'm not totally comfortable making that claim. How about I just say this instead and it almost always goes over just fine. That is my basic most common kind of video that I am describing. That's how most of my videos go. There are some exceptions and the blurred Pyrex vid was a different kind of deal. The sponsor was Sensidine, the toothpaste brand, and so I'm going to refer to it from here on out as the Sensidine video. The Sensidine deal was an offer that came directly from YouTube. YouTube brand connect. It's called YouTube would really like their own percentage of the brand deals that us YouTubers do. So, they made their own influencer marketing agency and they integrated it into YouTube's like creator backend. They can message me in my YouTube studio panel. They can offer me a brand deal right there. I can accept it right in the interface. I can sign all the contracts there. I don't have to send the brand any of my channel analytics because YouTube already has those. And when they pay you, they pay you directly through the system that pays you all of your normal YouTube partner program money. It's just direct deposit right to me. Sounds like a great system, right? And maybe it is for some people, but I've had mixed experiences. I think the whole point of YouTube Brand Connect is to cut the independent agents out of the loop and I don't really appreciate that. Colin is my man. I will be loyal to him to the end. And much more importantly, I still want him to review any deal that I do. I need him there to review the contracts to protect my interests. I need him there to chase down the money if the brand doesn't pay, which he's had to do for me a few times. I want Colin there to have awkward phone calls with the brand on my behalf because I'm a recluse and I don't want to talk to anyone ever. I need Colin. I want him. Not all middlemen are bad. So when I used to get direct offers to me inside YouTube from YouTube Brand Connect, I would have to be the middleman between Brand Connect and Colin, which was a pain. I think it got better in subsequent deals that we did with them, I should say. The other thing that's a little tricky about these uh Brand Connect deals is that when you send in your video for approval, they run it by a YouTube lawyer. a Google lawyer, an alphabet lawyer, or whatever the parent company of YouTube is called this year. Lots of my ads get reviewed by lawyers all the time, but these are lawyers for the 11th largest company in the world by revenue, and they are cautious. I think every time I've done a YouTube brand connect deal, I've got notes back that clearly came from the legal department and not the advertising department. One such note was to blur the Pyrex logo in the ice cream sandwich video. It wasn't my idea. It was some Google lawyer's idea. Why would they ask me to do that? Because fair use in trademark law is completely different than fair use in copyright law. Fair use is the legal doctrine under which you or I can publish someone else's work without their permission. A classic example would be somebody who analyzes music or reviews music. If I make a video about Van Halen's music, as I did that one time, I can play a reasonable amount of that music for the purposes of presenting my analysis, and I do not need to get permission for that. That's how it works in legal theory. In practice, of course, fair use is whatever the hell YouTube says it is this week. And that is a real problem for everyone. But that's a conversation for another day. Go listen to Rick Biato about that maybe. In trademark law, fair use is far less expansive. The point of copyright is to make sure that authors and musicians and game developers, etc., can make money off of their intellectual property. Without copyright, somebody could legally republish my videos in their entirety and make the money that should go to me. The point of trademark law is to create clarity in the marketplace so that you know who's who. It's so that if I buy a can of CocaCola, I can be reasonably assured that it was made by the Coca-Cola company and not somebody else. Copyright expires after some years. Trademark is forever as long as you keep renewing it with the trademark office in your country. Coca-Cola will own that trademark for Coca-Cola for as many centuries as they want to, assuming society doesn't collapse. Pyrex is a similar case. Pyrex is a brand of heat tolerant glass. The name and logo are trademarks owned by the Corning Glass Company in Corning, New York. It's Western New York State. I do not need permission to show the trademarked Pyrex logo in my videos. Nor do I need permission to show the Coca-Cola label because trademark law pretty much only applies to marketing, to advertising. If I get on YouTube and I hold up a can of Coke so that I can tell you about like the weird history of Coke, nobody thinks I'm selling Coke. Nobody thinks I am the Coke Company and therefore the trademark law is simply irrelevant. Now, if I made and published my own unauthorized advertisement for Coca-Cola, that would be a trademark violation, unless, of course, it was clearly a parody or some such. The point of trademark law is not to protect anyone's rights to their intellectual property or whatever. It's just there to make it clear who is selling what. Therefore, in practice, trademark law is usually only applicable to the ad breaks in my videos, not to the rest of the video. When I know I have to do an ad on camera, I always have to be careful to put on a plain shirt with no other brand's logo on it, or I have to cover up that shirt with like a text bubble or something. But when I'm doing the rest of the video, I can wear whatever shirt I want. It is generally considered legally inadvisable to show a trademark in an ad without permission. There are exceptions, of course. If I am with permission making a Coca-Cola ad and I want to argue that Coke tastes better than Pepsi, then it is perfectly fine, perfectly fine for me to show a Pepsi can to the screen. That is classic trademark fair use. It's a product comparison. Because if I'm arguing that Pepsi sucks, nobody is going to think this ad was paid for by Pepsi, it is totally clear to everyone the ad is for Coke. And the point of trademark law is to make it clear who is selling what. If I make an ad where people are like standing around a cooler on a hot day enjoying their colas and the camera shows both Pepsi and Coke in the cooler. And if nobody ever says, "Yeah, Pepsi sucks. Coke is better." Imagine it's just a bunch of people enjoying their bubbly brown sugar water in the sun. And in that case, it really could be confusing as to which company is pitching you, Pepsi or Coke. and that would be a meaningful trademark infringement. Now, in practice, that would never happen because Coke would not want to give their rival free positive advertising. Nor would the Coca-Cola people want to associate themselves with Pepsi Cola. Clearly an inferior product when compared to Coca-Cola. And I say that as a big-time diet Pepsi drinker. Love a DP. I can look in the mirror as well as anyone and I can say that Pepsi is trash. Coke is king. Am I just saying that because I live in the American Southeast where they might literally kill me if I said that Pepsi was better than Coke? Who's to say? But assume for the moment that Pepsi is clearly the inferior product. It's certainly the less popular product, right? So, Pepsi really might want to make an ad that associates their product with Coke because people like Coke more and Coke might not want Pepsi to do that. So, they might sue if their logo appears in a Pepsi ad without clear fair use justification. Here's a more realistic scenario. If I'm like a crappy small-time lawyer in my town, I might want to go film my lawyer commercial in front of the building of the biggest baddest law firm in town to give the potential clients of mine the false impression that I am with that big bad firm. That would be terribly meaningfully deceptive. And that's why the law would demand that I blur out the building or at least blur out the name on the door. If I didn't, that law firm would have every reason to sue me for trademark infringement. And they'd win because my ad makes people think that I work at their law firm even though I do not. And say it with me, kids, the point of trademark law is to make it clear who is selling what. Would the fine people at the Pyrex brand feel similarly agrieved if they saw their trademark being used in an advertisement for Sensidine toothpaste? Probably not. Especially if it's really clear that the ad is for toothpaste and not for heat tolerant glass. But we could imagine some scenarios in which the Pyrex people might be upset about their brand appearing in someone else's commercial. Purely hypothetically, let's just imagine a world in which a malicious employee at the Sensidine factory sneaks some arsenic into a batch of toothpaste and it kills hundreds of people in a multi-state outbreak. Censidine becomes slang for mass murder in the popular culture like postal service did for a while after some you know postal workers shot up their colleagues. When I was a young person we used to say I'm going to go postal to mean I'm going to go violently crazy. Imagine that happening to censine's brand. Let's use it in a sentence. My mom is so fed up with my dad. I think she's going to censine him. Obviously, that has not happened and probably will not happen. But if it did happen, Pyrex might not be really wild about their brand name appearing in an ad for Sensidine. Even if that ad is years old, it's still on the internet. They don't want to be associated with the poison company. One of the Pyrex lawyers just circles back to it and sues Sensidine for trademark infringement. Does that kind of thing happen often? No. Have things like that happened before? Oh, absolutely. So, the lawyerly best practice is to never show a third party's trademark in your advertising unless you have a fair use justification, like if you're doing a product comparison. It's very unlikely that anyone at Pyrex would have been mad about that video of mine. But because the lawyers at the Google company are extremely cautious and no doubt very highly paid to do stuff, they have a bias toward caution and a bias toward action. And in this case, their action was to ask me to blur out the Pyrex logo. I'm pretty sure that I've used my Pyrex in other ads that I've done and the lawyers representing those brands were not as cautious or as thorough or as pnicity or however you want to consider it and they just let it go and it was fine because it doesn't really matter if something is against the law. What matters is if anyone actually cares. It also matters if someone wants to use your mundane, benign lawbreaking as a pretext to harm you for some other reason. Perhaps for political reasons. That's a thing I think about sometimes. By the way, the US Federal Trade Commission regulations concerning influencer marketing are absurdly unworkable. Nobody follows them to the letter. For example, the regulations tell me to say this video was sponsored and paid for by Helix. That's ridiculous because sponsored means paid for. It's redundant. So, nobody says that. But just follow me down a little thought experiment. I know it's far-fetched, but just imagine for me a world in which the US government might want to retaliate against a YouTuber who is, say, critical of the president. They could go after one of us for violating the letter of the law, even if we are honoring the spirit of the law. I'm not worried about myself. I'm insignificant. But, you know, if Mr. beast decides to go anti-MAGA, I will legit worry for him. Might even worry for Rogan, but anyway, that was neither here nor there. Lots of commenters on this old ice cream sandwich video of mine speculated that Sensidine just didn't want to give the Pyrex company free advertising. That ain't it, even if it is also true. The Google lawyer was just being extra careful about not violating trademark law. I can see something right now. I can see particularly bright bulbs lighting up out there in the audience. The particularly bright bulbs among you are thinking, "But Adam, you used the Pyrex in the recipe part of the video, not the toothpaste ad part of the video. Why would you need to blur the Pyrex in the recipe part? Indeed, that is the question that I asked myself when I got the email requesting that I blur the Pyrex. This was the first and only time I can recall when a sponsor asked me to change something about my content outside of the ad. I would normally consider that a big ethical no. I mean, they can ask all they want, but it it would be unethical for me to change my content purely at the request of a sponsor. I might schedule different topics that I want to cover to coincide with different sponsors. You know, I want to match sponsors with videos in ways that feel natural and avoid any obvious conflicts of interest. For example, I try to avoid advertising any health products in a health related video. I've made that mistake before and I regret it because it might not be clear to people which health claims I'm making are from science and which health claims I'm making are from the brand. So, the sponsor may influence how I schedule my topics, but they never get a say in anything beyond the ad break. I would never let them pressure me into changing the actual content. And yet, that is exactly what I did in the Sensidine video when I blurred that Pyrex logo at some overcautious lawyer's request. Why did I do that? Well, two reasons. One, it just didn't seem like a big enough deal to me. It's not like they were trying to suppress my political speech or anything. They just wanted me to blur a logo, a logo that had no editorial significance to the video at all. The logo was irrelevant to the content. If the nature of the video required me to mention Pyrex by name, if I was doing like a science explainer of Pyrex glass, that would be a different story. But this this just struck me as too inconsequential to bother getting into an email fight about it with a Google lawyer. I try to pick my battles in this life. The other reason that I did not push back against their blurring request is that theoretically this was supposed to be a fully sponsored video. meaning the whole thing was theoretically an infomercial, a paid program, which is something I've historically done a couple of times a year. You know, it's an infomercial if at the very beginning of the video I say this video is an ad for Sensidine, which I did in that case. I was certainly paid as if it was a fully sponsored video and not just a 60-second paid ad break, but for various reasons, this Sensidine video didn't really end up feeling like a video long ad. The brand wanted me to do a recipe, and I obviously wasn't going to use toothpaste in the recipe. So, naturally, most of the runtime is just the kinds of normal recipe content that I always make. The only difference is I chose to cook something cold to provide a smooth transition into an ad targeted at people with temperature sensitive teeth. So, because the Sensidine video was theoretically an infomercial, that also gave the Google lawyers purview over the entire video, not just the part where I'm directly explicitly selling toothpaste. Even then, I'm sure I still could have pushed back on the blurring request. I just didn't because I didn't think it mattered like at all. Pick your battles. But maybe, just maybe, it doesn't matter that it didn't matter. The blurring of the Pyrex obviously distracted people and much more importantly it subtly undermined viewers trust in me. Now I've done far worse things to undermine people's trust in me, but this is the one that we're talking about right now. Most of the comments on that video are people speculating about the blur. Why would Adam do that? He's never blurred his Pyrex before. that trying to figure out why I hid something from them. And that's not good. Public integrity is about style in addition to substance. It's not enough to be not corrupt. You must also avoid the appearance of corruption if you want to maintain the trust of a lot of people. That's why old legacy media codes of ethics existed, flawed as they were. That's why old media had ethics codes to avoid even the appearance of, say, a source manipulating a reporter to write something more favorable about them. Here we are now in new media and we are speedrunning all of the hard lessons that old media learned and then wrote rules for. We now have to write new rules for ourselves. So that's the lesson that I can learn from lair pyrex. Pyrex gate would be the American formulation I suppose. What lessons can you learn from it? Apart from all of the industry insider gossip I just gave you. Epistemic humility my friends. All of us probably know a whole lot less than we think we know. And I am struck reading back through these Pyrex comments how so many people there are 100% certain they know why Adam blurred the Pyrex. And some of them get close to the truth. But I think this is an example of what you could call sophomoric savviness. Sophomoric means of or relating to college sophomores, second years. More specifically, sophomoric describes someone who has learned a little bit about how the world works in their freshman year and now they think they know everything. Or at least they know not to trust anything because in freshman year they learned how lots of things are not as they seem. That's the savvy part. Savviness. Savviness in this context means the perceptive ability to avoid being fooled, to consume content critically as opposed to just swallowing it like a baby. Sophomore savvy is when you have learned enough to think critically about something, but in your overconfidence in your desire to expose the real truth, you end up leaping to conclusions that might not be entirely correct. Would you like a timely example? The one that comes to mind to me is the Jeffrey Epstein scandal. The American rich guy who attracted powerful people around him while he was sexually abusing hundreds of low status girls, some of whom he allegedly trafficked to some of the aforementioned powerful people. The government story is that Epste hung himself in his jail cell. A lot of people find that hard to believe. There's a lot of details to Epstein's death that could look fishy. I think the details look kind of fishy. Lots of people think some of those aforementioned powerful people had Epstein killed to protect their own reputations. If you are sure about what happened in that jail cell, then I think you are being sophomorically savvy. You don't know what happened in that jail cell. No one knows unless they have access to inside information not yet published. Assuming you're going off of the published record and open- source intelligence just like the rest of us, then you do not know what happened in that jail cell. There are so many things that could have happened that fit with the pattern of the facts we have. It strikes me as entirely possible that Epstein just killed himself as reported. He had every reason to kill himself. Very, very bad things tend to happen to well-known sexual predators in prison. Maybe Epstein was just trying to do it himself before someone else did it for him, much more painfully. But right there is another plausible possibility. Epstein might have been murdered by other inmates who wanted to get him for the same reason they want to get the other sex pests in prison. It's for the sake of justice and perhaps an excuse to hurt someone. It's also entirely possible that some rich powerful person paid the guards to look away and just let Epstein kill himself like he wanted to. Or maybe somebody paid the guards to straight up kill him. Maybe somebody paid the guards to kill him, but before they got the chance to, Epstein killed himself. Or another inmate killed him like freelance. Reality is weird. This is what historians call contingency and normal people would call randomness. Very often things just happen that do not fit into a clean logical story. Conspiracy theories usually fail to account for this. Conspiracy theories tend to imagine a world in which everything that happens is the choice of some puppet master. Rich people have a lot of power, but not nearly enough power to eliminate historical contingency. Evil plans go sideways all the time. happens, as the old saying goes. Reality is weird and often not as you would expect. That's why common sense only goes so far in understanding the world. It's good to be skeptical of the media that you consume. That is awesome. question things absolutely but don't go and make up your own answers as so many of us are prone to doing. I mean it's fine to speculate responsibly about multiple different possible explanations for something that you're scrutinizing. But don't settle on one of those explanations until you have enough evidence to settle on it. Be open-minded in every sense. If someone is lying to you, you got to be careful not to invent another lie to replace it. Yeah, you outsmarted the liar, but that's all you did. You're still dumber than everyone who knows more than you. For more of my thoughts on this particular topic, listen to my song, Feel Smart, which is literally all about this. only ever going to be brighter than the biggest liar. Brighter than the biggest liar. Yes, my self-promotion is as shameless as it is feutal. Anyway, if this little essay that I just did gets a whole lot of clicks, I might start sharing more war stories from the YouTube trenches, things that I'm freer to talk about now than I was maybe a few years ago. We'll see. Make good choices. Talk to you next time.