Good morning, John.

It's a very busy week here. I was out a ton 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. I--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. It's always really wonderful. I had to give, like, a presentation, and 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. Like, you--it's pretty easy to make people mad about stuff. Making stuff that gives 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 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, like, pre-teens, 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 it 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, uh, and makes them, like, 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, uh, 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 'cause 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, uh, you probably need a calendar 'cause it's about to be a new year and we got a bunch of those at complexlycalendars.com. We got one for Eons and for Bizarre Beasts and for Microcosmos and for SciShow and I think that's it. But you can go to complexitycalendars.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 be a part of it. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

I would prefer the wind to stop. Also, we are having our summit at the Arts Community Center and I saw a fabric scrap and I was like, "I recognize that P." It was, uh, from the company that manufactures our shirts. They sometimes, like, obviously will just do test runs 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. You should definitely have done this with gloves on you guys, by-.