Ten Years Later

[patriotic instrumental music, Edison Records phonograph cylinder - Rule, Britannia!]

Hello Internet. Well, here we are. One decade later. Ha! I wish that was how it worked, but it is not. No, YouTube still feels like my new job even though I've put in almost twice as many YouTube years as teaching years at this point. What can I say? Brains are weird. Sure.

[fingers snap] Actually, back when I was a teacher, I always kept a lava lamp on the desk for students. Because when I was a student, I always found it easier to listen and to think without also having to make eye contact the whole time. But you'd get chastised for looking up at the ceiling. Not fun. I figured I couldn't be the only one like that, so I didn't correct kids for looking away from me, but also ceiling gets boring after… thirteen years of compulsory schooling. Thus came onto my desk the endlessly hypnotizing lava lamp as a focal point. If you're a teacher watching this, give it a try. It's good for a certain kind of student and really chills the vibe of the room, man.

Thinking about impact over the long run of human history, it's pretty clear that impact tracks with tech and tech with time. Ten thousand years ago, there was very little you could do to impact the world. So I do expect the next ten years will be more impactful than the last. And I will bet they're better than the last. I'm less confident about that second part than I used to be, but I still think it holds that, on average, each decade is an improvement. That is, until we accidentally stumble into an existential threat. Which is game over. Which is pretty... pretty bad.

If there's anything I've learned from thousands of spoken words, it's that human communication is hard. Way harder than people think. Precisely because people think it's easy. You just say the words and the other person hears them and bam! Understanding! Alas, no. Words are fuzzy things and you don't realize how poorly you string them together until you are forced to listen to yourself saying those words. And even if you're happy with your string of words, you just don't know how those fuzzy patterns of sound will pattern match in someone else's brain. Human communication is a dance, and a dance requires partners.

We all create content, and I think we should all keep that in mind and be much more willing to work with the intended intention of our interlocutors. This is my biggest "I liked that band before they were popular" opinion, but it finally dawned on me recently that Internet culture is the culture now. Even just two Q & A's ago, I showed the Internet as The Wild West, but those days are long gone, thrust aside by content mines or suburbs with homeowner's associations fixated on real estate values.

I think Past-Grey was super naïve to imagine the Internet he loved could possibly both 1) explode in size, and 2) remain the frontier. Fantastic! I thought that UK video would forever be my albatross, like: So I was very happy when The Solution to Traffic topped the UK. And if the day ever comes where something newer beats out Traffic, I will be thrilled again. Not really.

My YouTube colleagues are forever telling me to be more strategic in the selection of topics. To target content for growth and views and dolla dolla billz. And I know I should, but I just kind of can't. Because the videos take so long from idea to completion, the only thing that really matters is a topic that I can stay interested in for months, and that just doesn't work with for me with strategic selection or trying to have an underlying theme.

But I guess if you're looking for what's similar with all the videos, one human personality slider is how much you are interested in things versus how much you are interested in people. Most people are "people people," but if you look at my videos, one common connector is the near complete dearth of people. What holds my interest tends to be very thing oriented.

Uhh, I hadn't thought about that possibility until now. But if there are people who have watched my videos for the majority of their life, uhh, say "Hi" in the comments? Lots of people ask questions about sending letters forward or backward in time. I wouldn't want to mess with the timeline going backward, and sending letters forward is boring, which is why I've never done that sort of thing.

Okay well actually that's not true, no. One of my teachers in school had us do this. To write a letter to ourselves for when we graduated high school and when I got it, High-School-Me did not care about anything Grade-School-Me had to say. And so it goes now. I'm confident that Ten-Years-From-Now-Me would be positively meh to get a letter from Current-Me, in the same way Current-Me couldn't be more meh about what Ten-Years-Ago-Me thought about anything.

The nighttime driving that I did in my road trip video! I was at that point years out of practice driving. I hadn't slept well the night before and had already driven all day and then attempted to tackle both a super fast highway and then a pretty sketchy road. Statistically, it is without doubt the most dangerous thing I've done in the last ten years. Even though people watch the video and go, But the reality of Death is banality. And it's not always visually obvious when Death is close.

For example, I was on an Indian Reservation for... a project exploring a canyon and filming. And it wasn't 'til a few days later, when reviewing the footage, that I saw the solid ground I was standing on was actually a bit of an overhang. It didn't fall, obviously, but it's going to fall at some point, and had it done so, well, the reservation was off the main path and the canyon off the path from that, and the path I was on was off the path in the canyon. So an untimely crack would doubtlessly have been Game Over.

[flippantly] ¿Por que no los dos? I feel like that's more for the audience to decide what is, for them, the blue period of Grey, or whatever. Because the public perception of creation can often have very little to do with the perception or intention of the creator. Again, human communication is difficult and also art is not the artist.

But for me, there's really only one important era shift and that's pre-Project Liberty and post-Project Liberty, which was [wait for it] the Statue of Liberty video. Which, I think almost no viewer would pick out as a big deal video, but to me, it's the biggest. It's the video where I feel like I finally really got my own writing process, personally accepting its advantages and disadvantages. That may sound strange because I'd been writing videos for seven years at that point, but I think this is just part of what happens when you do something for a long time.

[pensively] ¿Por que no los dos? Two clear trend lines: video games up, books down. I've learned there's a huge number of books I just can't read, because I'll want to turn them into videos and I can read books faster than I can make videos, so reading those would be just creating a huge pile of guilt for myself. And, when your job is mostly writing and reading, it's nice to turn that off and video games are basically the only thing in my life that truly shifts my brain into neutral.

All that said, I think the drop in books has gone too far in the last, eh, five years. I don't like making promises or predictions for my future self, but one of the things I'd like to be able to say ten years from now is that I've inflected the reading curve.

The most frightening video I've uploaded this decade was the one where I asked you to support the channel directly through membership instead of having sponsors. Clicking "Upload" that day, I didn't know what would happen. But I trusted in you and since then, together we have learned the trouble with tumbleweed after flying across an ocean, we've talked like a pirate, gone through the Tekoi trilogy together, and, of course, revealed the perfectagon of the hexagon and more.

It is you who let each video flow from start to finish without me needing to pause and tell you about our sponsor in the middle. It is you who supports me, my family, and my team. It's you who allows me to explore the Forest of All Knowledge and share what I've found. You sponsor my videos.

And thank you. Thank you for everything, Internet. Thank you for my whole life. It's been a wild ten years.

[cheerful electronic music]