In an exclusive interview with Dexerto, YouTube star MatPat revealed that he was prevented from testifying to Congress about creator rights due to being “too bipartisan.”
In January 2024, Game Theory founder MatPat announced his retirement from the channel and life as a content creator after thirteen years on YouTube, sending fans reeling.
We got the chance to speak to MatPat about what he’s been up to since stepping back from Game Theory a year ago. He told us that he’s been quite busy behind the scenes, working with the American government to make things better for his fellow content creators.
First, he told us that some fans have been theorizing he’ll run for US President in 2028 — a proposition he found “a little bit terrifying” — before delving into his time recently spent advocating for creator rights and educating policymakers about the content creation space.
“Since retiring from the channel and retiring off of YouTube, we’ve been working behind the scenes with Congress to advocate for the creator economy and creator rights,” he told us.
“Congress, in a lot of ways, despite their best efforts, tends to be a bit behind the ball on where they get their information from — you know, news headlines or less-informed sources. With the additional time that we have, Stephanie and I have been working to kind of educate lawmakers about this space.”
MatPat says government rejected push for creator rights because he wouldn’t take sides
However, he’s run into some roadblocks in his quest to make US politics more creator-friendly, telling us that he was recently denied a spot as an expert witness for the Small Business Administration.
“We were one of the final contestants to potentially serve as expert witnesses for this committee, but we weren’t selected because we were too bipartisan, which is fascinating,” he revealed. “You know, the party in power gets three expert witnesses, and the party in the minority gets one expert witness.
“We weren’t selected because we were too ‘general information,’ and we weren’t arguing on behalf of one way or the other. We had a general spread, and that was a bummer. It really made me sad.”
To MatPat, creator rights are a bipartisan issue that affects influencers on all sides of the political spectrum, but this outlook ended up preventing him from getting involved to make a difference.
“There are a lot of systems built where it is just ‘us versus them,’ ‘red versus blue.’ And there isn’t room for education for education’s sake. People will disagree about what the solution is, but the information that’s being input into the system isn’t being treated in a neutral way,” he said.
“On one hand, it’s like, ‘Hey, I love the good that’s being done,’ but it’s a lot of effort and there’s a lot of entrenched feelings, and a lot of egos and bureaucracy that you have to overcome to make that sort of positive change.”
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