‘Serious’ Discourse

The Secret Satanist and Clickbait Intellectualism

The Laughing Fool (1540s) - Anonymous Artist from the Netherlands

“Jubilee Media is a digital media company that pushes boundaries, tackles taboos, and breaks the rules. We believe discomfort and conflict are pivotal forces in creating human connection. In short, we’re not afraid to go there. - Jubilee Media”

Jubilee Media is a Los Angeles based, YouTube production company that is best known for their Surrounded series. If you have never heard of it before you have probably at least seen the clips of Jordan Peterson looking incredibly foolish, losing multiple debates to a bunch of kids who look like they should be in a mid 90s United Colours of Benetton commercial. While incredibly inane and vapid, Surrounded does do big numbers. In fact, pretty much all of Jubilee Media’s programs do pretty big numbers. They even claim their ODD ONE OUT gameshow is the most watched gameshow on YouTube, and it is that gameshow that we are going to zero in on.

On July 11th, 2025 a new episode of ODD ONE OUT premiered. The premise of this episode, like all others, is that you have an in-group and an outsider, an alien. The alien is usually framed as the pop-culture opposite of the in-group. Previous episodes included 6 Star Wars Fans vs 1 Secret Hater, 6 Teen Girls vs 1 Secret Boy, and 6 Asians vs 1 Secret White Guy. This new episode, unlike all the other cringe inducing premises, caught my attention because this time the cringe was directed towards my community. The episode was 7 Christians vs 1 Satanist. To say I took issues with this premise would be an understatement, and we’re going to go through them together.

The first issue I want to start with is the one raised by a user on r/SatanicTemple_Reddit (this is where I learned about the video) where a user started a conversation under the title “TST has Christian values”. They proceeded to quote the Satanists in the video during the reveal to make an argument that The Satanic Temple aren’t real Satanists. And while the participants in the video didn’t really do a good job of espousing the beliefs of The Satanic Temple, or Neo-romantic Satanism in general, I’m not really sure that Jubilee Media is selecting for quality. ODD ONE OUT seems to book participants through an open casting call. Right now (July 14th as I write this) you can apply to be part of an episode that is recording in less than two weeks. Availability, proximity to LA, charisma, and comfort on camera seem to be the priorities here, not a strong and diverse historical, philosophical, or theological understanding of either Christianity or Satanism, nor was it a priority to get a diversity of viewpoints. Why else would you have nothing but relatively mainline Protestant Christians and two self-identified Temple Satanists? It’s a bad YouTube game show, not a formal debate. Personally I don’t think anyone came across great for  but when you select for clicks the most important thing is shocking, attention grabbing titles and thumbnails are not credible deliberation. Jubilee has figured out that. So while the OP’s critique is real, it is nearly as vapid and inane as the show itself as it relies on so many assumptions that it comes across as foolish to anyone who stops and thinks for a moment. I am honestly not sure if the OP was tricked by the framing of the video or trying to use it to push their own narratives about what true Satanism is. I’ll leave that to you all to discuss.

With what I consider the worst argument against the video out of the way, I would like to move to the more substantive issues with Jubilee and their show ODD ONE OUT, which are perpetuating the fear of hidden enemies, entertainment masquerading as meaningful dialogue, and what I consider to be Jubilee’s weak ethics.

Personally, I think the strongest argument against ODD ONE OUT, and all of Jubilee’s content, is that it is all based on conservative fear-mongering. The July 11th episode is a perfect example of this as the premise is that there are hidden Satanists lurking among you, but you can see it from their other episodes, too. 6 Teen Girls vs 1 Secret Boy leans into the trans-panic of boys, and men, going into girls bathrooms and locker rooms. 6 Asians vs 1 Secret White Guy, and the numerous other videos around race, play off of the anxieties around white people claim a racial heritage they don’t have for various benefits (check out The Passionate Eye’s Identity Wars for more on that) as well as every reactionary weirdos claims about Western Culture, Judeo-Christian Heritage, or as we Canadians called them “Old Stock Canadians.” They even have a number of videos around “fake” vs “real” body parts which, if you look at the uniform look of the current far right influencers and politicians, even plays into their weird aesthetic cult, accepting the right-wing perspective as the normal. (See The Recount’s The New Republican Look Explained by a Plastic Surgeon to fall down that rabbit hole.)

7 Christians vs 1 Satanist builds off this pre-established formula to loop in an old Satanic Panic trope about Satanists lurking among us. And while this group of photogenic Gen Z and Millenials, and maybe the one token Gen Xer, engaged respectfully there were definitely hints of the spiritual warfare aspects of extremist Christianity presented a few times, most notably to my mind when Angel Numbers were brought up. They were seen as numerology, and numerology is the work of demons and spirits in many denominations. This fear of anything supernatural that isn’t properly Jesus coded, while quickly dropped in this episode, is a key theological plank for a number Christian extremists. Some of whom hold key positions within government or other powerful civil positions who use their positions of power to root out the un-Christian amongst us as part of this ultimate war of good versus evil. Given the incredible harm that the policies and preaching these people do I don’t think that accepting conservative framing as entertainment is very prudent. In fact, it is actively harmful.

The next issue I take with this episode, and the format in general, is that it in no way actually furthers Jubilee’s stated belief that “discomfort and conflict are pivotal forces in creating human connection.” There were no boundaries being pushed, no rules broken, nor were any taboos tackled. Despite Jubilee’s claim, ODD ONE OUT did indeed seem very scared to go there. Anytime something even a bit spicy came up, Angel Numbers and Trumpism, people moved on from it very quickly instead or all just agreed. There was no actual breadth or depth but boy, oh boy does Jubilee want you to think there is. They tell you right up front, in their mission statement, marketing and presentation, that this is a deep, serious topic. It is, but they don’t treat it that way. It’s a clickbait gimmick that draws in people with the illusion of meaning when it is nothing more than second screen drivel.

Bottom-shelf content marketed as top-shelf isn’t a new thing by any stretch of the imagination, but I find this particularly egregious given that Jubilee Media has positioned itself as a thought leader and thought disruptor. The point of ODD ONE OUT appears to be getting people to challenge their preconceptions of “others” but none of that happened. The Christians who were eliminated simply stated that they were Christians while the Christians who eliminated them never seriously grappled with why they eliminated fellow Christians nor did anyone actually interrogate what they saw in the Satanist who made it to the end that made them think he was a Christian, at least more than the Christians that some of them helped eliminate. I’m sure the little one-on-one segments were supposed to be this reflection and introspection but if so they greatly missed the mark. I also think they missed the mark if they were hoping people would deeply reflect about the game because outside of this essay, I haven’t seen anything. The comments on YouTube and Reddit are the same kind of shallow thoughts that were shared by the participants on the show. Now, to be fair to the participants, it seems pretty obvious that a lot of stuff didn’t make it to the broadcast that was recorded so much of this faux-intellectualism could be the editor’s fault, but that brings me to my final point.

Jubilee Media really doesn’t seem that trustworthy. While I have never found their content compelling or particularly useful, I generally just thought of them as a high production value content farm but since the Jordan Peterson Surrounded debacle I am a lot less sure. It was advertised, and apparently streamed as 20 non-believers against one Christian but that Christian was Jordan Peterson. For any of you that know about JPB’s thoughts on religion (first off, I am sorry) are not anywhere near what a lay person or a theologian would readily identify as a Christian. This resulted in a bunch of very frustrated confused guests arguing in circles on points that had not prepared for while Jordan Peterson steadfastly refused to identify as a Christian, or even take a position on anything. It was a glorious trainwreck that filled commentary channels for weeks.

Despite this moment of incredible schadenfreude, how could this happen? There are only a handful of possibilities.

1. Jubilee didn’t know what Peterson’s position on Christianity was.

2. They didn’t tell or know who the “Christian” was and misled the other twenty other guests.

3. The guests knew who they would be debating Jordan Peterson but they took zero time to learn anything about his positions.

4. A combination of the above.

Each and every one of these factors Jubilee’s responsibility to get right and they failed in a way that is, in my opinion, inexcusable. They failed so hard that they not only hurt their credibility but their integrity, too.  That is why when I saw their claim about being the most watched YouTube gameshow and looked into it. According to their playlist description “ODD ONE OUT is YouTube’s number one game show, currently averaging over 6M+ views per episode.” The truth is a fair bit different.

Their 7 Christians vs 1 Secret Satanist was their 171st video added to the series playlist. About three days in, it only has 294k views so far. Given that most videos get the vast majority of their views in the first few days to the first two weeks. This seems like a pretty low total for a series that averages more than 6 million views so I looked a bit deeper. The previous video, 6 Exes vs 1 Secret Couple has less that 500k views after three weeks. The two before that are less than 700k each. In fact, if you look at the previous 50 videos in the series, starting with 6 Exes vs 1 Secret Couple and ending with 6 Girls v 1 Secret Boy, only two videos had more than 6 million views. The average view count is actually only about 2.2 million views, after generously rounding when I shouldn’t have. Now, YouTube isn’t super specific on video views when looking at a play list compared to clicking on the video directly but there is no conceivable way that we can find another 3.8 million views on average in a rounding error. It seems that Jubilee is relying very heavily on their incredible early success, where videos routinely hit 10 million or more views, to gloss over the fact that their recent videos in this series are bringing the average way down, to less than half the advertised average over their last year of episodes. While Jubilee isn’t lying they are definitely not accurately presenting the truth. This means that each ODD ONE OUT video is only bringing in an estimated amount of $2300USD to $13800 (Thinkfic, August 2024) on average. That’s not a lot of money for them to produce a polished YouTube series while meeting their lofty objectives of creating empathy and challenging ideas. Building empathy is hard. Challenging ideas is hard. And hard costs money. But the simulacra of empathy and the simulacra of challenging is easy. You just need the right gimmick, the right marketing, and the right demographic. 

At the end of the day Jubilee Media is a Trojan horse to sell you their dating app and online therapy subscription. They stage a faux intellectual discussion that allows everyone to agree their side won, owning the other with superior facts, logic, and feelings. This allows them to position themselves as more trustworthy than they are because they make you and your side feel smart even though you are really only hearing what you want to hear. It’s better than AI slop but not much. Even if everyone on screen is kind and genuine, which I truly believe these folks were, Jubilee’s primary goal is to play at being a thought leader, a civic healer to sell you the same kind of scammy products that you’d find on Alex Jones or Joe Rogan. It’s not that deep when you know what to look for, which is why surrendering to right-wing framing is so damn disappointing. Then again, interesting is another thing that’s hard and Jubilee Media seems unwilling, or incapable of doing actually hard things.