Good morning, John. We are really, really lucky. Here's a thing that's kind of hard for me to think about: Over the last ten years, we have had 1400 chances to try something new, and in one way or another, sometimes big sometimes super super tiny, we have tried something new every single video.

Sometimes I humped things, sometimes you ate toilet paper, sometimes I sang songs, sometimes we went to the developing world. We've done this publicly, with an audience of varying sizes, and the success of those attempts has been judged. Judged by the number of views those things got, what kind of audiences they attracted, whether we liked doing them, how our friends and families felt, whether we thought those videos were interesting and good, and also by people telling us what they thought in the comments.

In those 1400 chances, a lot of those ideas were duds, but some of them were amazing. I made a video with a person I met at a weird, tiny research museum in Missoula, which led to The Brain Scoop becoming a thing. And you and I made videos on the French Revolution and on the circulatory system that led to Crash Course.

It's impossible to underestimate the effect that this has had, not just on the kind of stuff I make, but who I have become as a person. If you count SciShow and Crash Course, I've had thousands of chances to try and figure out who I am in front of good people who I respect. And the kindness of their judgement, their empathy and compassion and their wit and silliness, and of course my own affinity for those things, has made me a kinder, more enthusiastic, more compassionate person.

We've had thousands of chances to evolve our content, and thousands of chances to evolve ourselves, and this has helped me clear up the murky waters of what it is that I really care about. It's helped me find me. And a lot of themes have emerged over the years of us doing this, like areas of fertile soil where I found stuff that I like making, that I'm good at making, and that I feel like is good for the world, and that people like watching.

Sometimes those are formats, like kinds of videos we can make. Sometimes they're just ideas. Ways to consider the world.

For me, the most important time that happened was when you distilled so much of what the world needs right now into three words when you said "imagine others complexly." Because it's really hard, but whenever I do it, I feel better, and I am better. A lot of the projects that we have created have Wikipedia pages, but this idea has a Wikipedia page.

It's part of Wikipedia's essays on civility. That is unusual, and it's amazing. But of course, it isn't just other people, it's the whole world.

We have to imagine the world in its complexity as well, and not see that as a burden, but as an opportunity. Like, a wonderful wonderful thing that we get to spend our whole lives doing. And when I look back at the kind of content that we make and that we've helped other people make, that thing is always there in all of it.

And when I think about what I want to make in the future, if that isn't there, that appreciation for and excitement about the fact that the world is not as simple as it might seem, I find myself not wanting to do that thing, and sometimes I don't even know why until I check in, and I'm like, yeah, it's just 'cause it doesn't do the thing that I want to be doing. That thing, imagining complexly, has become a really big part of what we do and who we are. Now, most of the people watching this probably don't know that we have a company that produces a bunch of different content, and it has a name, and it's called EcoGeek.

And it's called EcoGeek because I started a blog in 2005 called EcoGeek, and it's the reason I started my first company, and when I did that, I had an LLC, and I figured I might as well make all of my other stuff happen under the same thing, and it's been so long now that I've been using this name that it doesn't really apply anymore. So this week, after years of thinking about this and never being able to settle on a name, we are changing our name of the company that produces the content. We have called it Complexly, because the world is not simple, and we will never truly understand our universe or each other or even ourselves.

The process is as powerful as the outcome, and the more you know, the more wonderful knowing becomes. Because we want to imagine things complexly, and because we want to help other people do it, too. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.