Good morning, John. It's a very busy week here.
I was out of town a bunch and now we're having our
Senior Staff summit for Complexly,
which means I have very little time to make a video.
So this is what you get and that's fine. Right?
When I first got sick, people sent me a bunch of hats
because I was losing my hair and I was like, it's summer.
But now I still have them. Oh, see--
That's cold. Getting together with people at Complexly,
which is the company that makes SciShow and Crash Course
and Eons and Bizarre Beasts
and Microcosmos and Study Hall
and lots of different shows, is always really wonderful.
I had to give like a presentation. I started it out by saying that
I kind of feel like ultimately there's like two kinds of content getting made on the internet.
There's like haters and there's fans. And making hater content works well and is easy.
It's pretty easy to make people mad about stuff.
Making stuff that gets people positive emotions and is accurate is more work and takes more time,
but you build a much stronger and more stable foundation.
During our meeting,
somebody brought up the fact that the BBC had recently done a piece
on just fake content being made on YouTube, largely with the help of AI.
And that content gets watched by a lot of young people,
including Preteens, and they end up believing it.
A lot of it's about aliens or climate change not being real, etc.
But in the video, they started out by watching
a bunch of videos that they said were good and credible
and all of those videos were SciShow videos.
Trouble is, if you start out with our content,
you still end up getting these other videos recommended to you because they have
very exciting and interesting titles about how aliens are real.
In a world of stuff that I'm not like super happy exists,
there's a lot of stuff I don't love.
I think a lot about Taylor Swift and how it is true that it is easy and fast
to make content that outrages people and makes them sort of like their world
and each other less.
But just because it's harder doesn't mean it's not actually better to do
the other thing where you make things that people love and you create
strong foundations and build upon them
until you take over the whole damn world, which is what Taylor has done.
I don't know why she did it.
She had a lot of opportunities to say,
this is enough and I'm done. But she kept on pushing.
That's amazing to me because I'm sure that there were lots of moments
where she dealt with some stuff that was not fun to deal with.
I know I make educational media and that's different from Pop songs,
but I feel like everybody's got a lot to learn from Taylor Swift.
And the big piece is even though it's harder,
it's a better way to do stuff. To make things
that will give people positive emotions rather than negative emotions.
And that's different from only ever talking about happy stuff.
Like not every Taylor Swift song is happy.
You could talk about how messed up the world is but not be sort of driving people
toward hopelessness because that's the easiest way to control them.
I'm almost to my destination. So the last thing I will say
is that right now you probably need a calendar because it's about to be
a new year and we got a bunch of those at complexlycalenders.com
We got one for Eons and for Bizarre Beasts and for Microcosmos and for SciShow.
And I think that's it.
You can go to complexlycalenders.com and pick the ones that you want.
That helps support what we're doing at Complexly. And it also will be like a nice little thing
with some beautiful art
and some cool information that is accurate and fact checked and vetted.
Thanks to everybody working to make Complexly a thing
and make it work and make it good. I'm so proud of it.
So happy to be a part of it. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.
I would prefer the wind to stop. Also, we were having our summit at the
Arts Community Center and I saw a fabric
scrap and I was like, I recognize that P
It was from the company that manufactures our shirts.
They sometimes obviously will just do to make sure it works
and they do several of them on the same shirt.
And I just spotted a Pizza John shirt. It was actually a dual Pizza John shirt
with Three Wolf Moon and Pizza John on it.
Weird, just weird.
I can spot a Pizza John from a mile away. Should definitely have done this with gloves on,
you guys. Faaaaa...