Good morning John. 5 months. 5 months Of using only titles that appear in Smash Mouth’s All Star. 5 months!

And as of this title, not the best one in the history of the channel, we have now used all of them. Every word in the song.

It’s so good to be done. It’s so good, it feels good. It means nothing!

But regardless, we assigned value to it and now I am so, I’m amazed. I’m proud of us. We began this stupid idea on April 21, 2020, a moment where we were all starting to get used to the idea that there was a big deal occurring and that our lives would be changed significantly for a long period of time.

It has been nice to have the constancy of this meaningless endeavor throughout that somewhat difficult time. This isn’t just a thing that didn’t make sense. It made negative sense.

It made things worse. Not only because occasionally the creator of the work that you are meme-ing on top of will do something dumb. But also because Youtube titles matter.

Ask any Youtube creator, they think about them a lot. It’s one of the main tools we have for getting people to watch our content. And giving away that power.

It makes no sense. No one would do that. But John, we were excited about doing it for 2 reasons.

First, constraint is inspiring. Not like every constraint. But adding constraints can actually really juice up the creative process.

So while I occasionally hated myself for making this decision, also there were moments where I was like “ah I can’t believe that this is such a good idea and I never would have had that idea without this constraint.” Second and more importantly, I think we both wanted to prove to ourselves something that we think that we believe but we weren’t sure if we believe. And that’s that we don’t want to grow this channel anymore. We’ve said it to each other, we’ve said it out loud.

But that’s different than actually enacting a policy that intentionally limits growth. I like growing stuff. But I think it’s very important to understand your goals and how your goals inform your strategy.

And a lot of times, the easiest goal to have is to grow, get bigger. With Crash Course and SciShow, that’s what we want. We want to reach more people with more stuff so we can educate more people and have more people be passionate about learning.

That’s the goal there. The goal here is not that. This is about creating a community.

There’s a size at which that feels less real. This place is a breeding ground for ideas, for weirdness, for community, for change. It’s about enabling other things that could be big deals, like Crash Course.

And so in a really real way, this is more about connection and engagement than it is about the size of the audience. And I think after a certain size, you actually get less of those other things. How do I know that this is really what this channel is about?

Well John, we gave up the ability to title our Youtube videos, one of the main ways we have of reaching audiences. So an important metric is over the last 5 months, how far have we fallen? Not at all.

No drop. No drop. This makes no sense.

It just doesn’t. That’s how I know that this is a different thing thing, that’s how I know this is special. This has been a 5 month long dumb experiment that has actually taught me a lot.

And has also really inspired me for some new things that I think we could do together. Regardless of the reasons, I enjoyed it. I am ecstatic that it’s over.

And remarkably considering how poorly planned this was, we have completed the project the video before Pizzamas. So for the next 2 weeks starting on Monday, John and I are going to go back and forth making videos like we did back in 2007, one every week day. I can’t wait.

I’m very excited about it. And also the titles of those videos are going to just be anything. They could be anything.

That is exciting and terrifying. John, I’ll see you on Tuesday.