Today in Jake Paul–adjacent news: YouTuber Shane Dawson has accused Paul of stealing one of his video ideas. Dawson, who, if you’re not familiar, was among the earliest generation of YouTubers and is probably best known for “Fred Is Dead” and lending the video intro “Hey, what’s up you guys” to the YouTube vernacular — says that after he posted a video interviewing his ex-girlfriend in a car, Paul did the same. Dawson says his “Confronting My First Love” video bears more than a few similarities to Paul’s “A Conversation With My Ex Girlfriend.” Dawson lays all of this out in a video posted on his ex-girlfriend’s — YouTuber Blair Fowler, the two are still friends — channel, “Our Drama W/ Jake Paul.”
“I think Jake Paul doesn’t know who I am,” Dawson says in the video. “I think he saw us on the trending page at No. 1.” Later in the reaction video, Dawson says he just wanted a little credit. “When you steal somebody else’s concept — which is fine, it’s YouTube, everybody does it — you have to throw in a little, like, ‘I saw somebody named Shane do this and his was pretty cool, so I wanted to do it myself.’” Paul does not mention Dawson in his video, which if you want to watch in full will take you almost 30 minutes. Admittedly, the two videos are similar … in that the men each have conversations with former paramours in moving vehicles. Which, frankly, sounds like Paul and Dawson both owe a hat-tip to the great-grandfather of the “We Filmed This in a Car” genre, Cash Cab.
In the video’s description, Fowler writes that they don’t “actually care” that Paul allegedly copied their video, but were just “having fun with the situation and decided to film a reaction video before we went to the movies.” Which, sure, filming a video for your millions of fans with an “OH NO HE DIDN’T” thumbnail is certainly the way to convince people that you don’t care. This has been the latest in Jake Paul–adjacent news.
