From the off, it’s clear that YouTuber Kurt Caz has yet to be convinced of London’s charms. He opens his 38-minute video about the capital with a decidedly unpromising introduction: ‘Welcome to one of the most messed-up cities I’ve ever been in.’
The travel ‘vlogger’, who has millions of followers followers on social media, proceeds to take viewers on a whistlestop tour of ‘the infamous Oxford Street’ as he outlines the woes of London life: homelessness, knife crime, drug dealers operating openly on the streets, pickpockets, phone snatching… the list goes on.
South African Caz’s tone is sneering, his delivery confrontational. But he often hits the nail on the head regarding London’s shortcomings, even if he is pointing out something that would be glaringly obvious to anyone who has spent longer than five minutes in the capital.
His videos are part of a booming new genre on social media: ‘decline porn’, where aspiring online stars – often young males such as Caz – prey on a general sense of despair among young people who feel their hometowns are falling victim to soaring immigrant populations, rampant crime and antisocial behaviour.
But it’s not just London – recent weeks have seen Caz turning a critical eye on Manchester (‘the UK’s craziest city’), Luton (‘the UK’s worst town’), Frankfurt (‘Crackfurt’), Rome (‘pickpocket centre’), Barcelona (‘crime-ridden’) as well as excoriating dispatches from gritty cities in Africa, Asia and Latin America.
But London emerges as a particular target for the 27-year-old, even though, at times, he gets it spectacularly wrong.
‘It’s already kicked off’, he exclaims as a blaring siren cuts through the calm of a largely deserted Oxford Street. A closer look shows the noise is coming from a fire engine rushing to the scene of a daytime emergency rather than a police car. But Caz is undeterred. ‘I feel a certain energy in the air, like something is brewing,’ he remarks.
Not that he’d be at risk. For Caz is shadowed throughout his excursion by the swaggering figure of his bodyguard Leonardo Queiroz, a martial arts expert who holds a fifth-degree black belt in jiu jitsu.
According to Queiroz’s LinkedIn profile, he has more than 20 years of ‘dedicated service as a Close Protection Officer’ and has ‘successfully protected celebrities, executives, diplomats and dignitaries’. He has even completed ‘firearms training’ in Poland and his native Brazil.
He sticks by his boss’s side as Caz films a homeless person asleep in a side street (‘the degradation in the alleyways is prominent’) shortly after visiting Soho’s gay quarter. Spotting a rainbow, he remarks: ‘It’s to impose, to tell you who rules – and if you disagree, you get put in a societal gulag.’
Nobody is ever going to accuse Caz of being woke, but he isn’t exactly subtle either. Wearing black Ray-Ban sunglasses and a camouflage jacket from his own range of merchandise, he moves on to Trafalgar Square where he finds – naturally – a pro-Palestine rally. Once there, he goads the assembled mob by calling them ‘dirty Communists’, advises one protester to ‘take a shower’ and says of another: ‘Good God, some Listerine [mouthwash] would work wonders with that one!’
Yet in recent days, this same video has swept Caz’s YouTube empire up in a storm of controversy.
For, in the footage, Caz not only vists Oxford Street but Croydon, too – where he films himself walking down a high street, past a sandwich bar clearly signed ‘Everyday’s’ and a beauty salon called ‘New Ace’.
Eagle-eyed viewers have pointed out in the YouTube ‘thumbnail’, which users click on to watch it, Caz has edited the shot to make the two premises appear as though they have Arabic and Bengali signage – presumably to inflame criticism about immigration in the capital.
One viewer opined that Caz had ‘definitely lost a lot of credibility’ as a result of the misleading image. Another remarked: ‘I used to watch him a lot, was a good travelling YouTuber. Couple [of] months ago he switched focus to this type of slop.’
All that said, there seems little doubt that some of his remarks about Croydon, where fewer than half of the 390,000 residents described themselves as ‘white’ in the 2021 census, would be echoed by many ordinary Britons. ‘If you had dropped me off here without knowing’, Caz says at one point in the video, ‘I would not think this was the UK.’
The vast scale of mass migration to this country in recent years means many may identify with his concerns.
Caz perhaps overstates the case when he remarks at one point that British town centres are becoming gathering points for people who are ‘just ticking timebombs waiting to erupt’. There are, he says of Croydon, ‘lots of – how would you put this – ethnic supermarkets and stores… you won’t find a British pie shop around here’.
Earlier in the video, he speaks about ‘two-tier policing’ – and how the authorities often fail to arrest proper criminals because, he says, ‘they’re too busy arresting people for tweets on X’. Brushing past him in the street, an elderly woman snaps: ‘You’re talking absolute rubbish.’
Judging by the 91,000 ‘likes’ on the video, many would disagree with her.
It has certainly been an eventful journey for Kurt Caz. It all began in Jeffreys Bay, the picturesque surfing mecca of the Eastern Cape province, where he was born in 1998. At the age of 14, he took a life-changing trip through Botswana, Zimbabwe, Namibia and Mozambique with his late father and older brother. Shortly afterwards, the family moved to his father’s native Germany.
He admitted in an interview two years ago that he ‘didn’t really fit in’ with his schoolmates in Berlin and, by the age of 15 or 16, was working on building sites after class. ‘That’s basically what I was doing when other students were going to house parties or drinking or smoking weed with their friends,’ he said.
Details are sparse about Caz’s life in the years after he left school, although he did work in a Berlin hotel and is also understood to have worked in both Britain and France. He started his YouTube channel in 2016, but it was another four years before a series of videos he filmed in Egypt started clocking up substantial views.
His first major success was a video called ‘$4 Haircut and Facial’, which was shot from the chair of a backstreet barber’s shop in Cairo. Recalling his breakthrough, Caz later said: ‘When I first started with this, I said to my brother, “You know what would be boss [cool]…if I could make $50 out of this”.
‘And when I saw that $100 mark on YouTube, I was like, “that’s insane”. I called my brother and said: “Do you remember a couple of months ago I said to you if I could just earn $50, I’d be happy… I’ve got $100. If I can earn $1,000, I can live off this.”
‘And then that came a month later. And then it just started going insane, it just blew up.’
From there on, Caz embarked on a globetrotting lifestyle that has seen him post footage from Argentina, Haiti, Germany, Bangladesh, Peru, Iraq and countless other countries. Their titles (‘Inside Germany’s Zombie Hood’ and ‘Escaping a Brothel in Peru’s Narco Zone’ among others) give some insight into their tone and content.
Speaking two years ago, Caz insisted that he ‘can afford almost anything I want these days’ and has treated himself to luxuries such as ‘a better apartment, a better Airbnb or a better hotel’ when travelling. By then, he had relocated to Medellin in Colombia.
Rough figures suggest Caz is making up to £3,000 per day from his YouTube channel, which now has 3.9million subscribers. He also has more than 1million followers on Facebook, TikTok and Instagram.
Views aren’t even Caz’s only source of income. He has also signed sponsorship deals with male grooming firm Manscaped and digital data service eSIM.io.
Meanwhile, his range of branded streetwear, Conquest, includes camouflage jackets for £61, hoodies at £53 and bucket hats for £22.
Some insiders have suggested that Caz has now deliberately focused his attention on European cities due to the opportunity for higher advertising revenue.
So it would be unwise to count on Caz’s latest controversy being the end of his British despair tour.
