Good morning, John. It was October 26th, 2007, and you were explaining the political situation in Nepal while eating toilet paper. Nobody has balanced rebels anymore. And it set the tone for a decade plus of us doing explain-y-type videos on this channel. Brazil? Absolutely. Israel and Palestine? Yeah, we got that. Serious. Since it started existing, 100% let's do it twice. Also, why not take on stuff in our own country? Mass incarceration, net neutrality, Benghazi, tax plans. This has been a thing for the whole life of our channel. Some of our most successful content. People like it. We're pretty good at it, but we have kind of stopped doing it. And I started to wonder why that happened. It wasn't a thing. We didn't talk about it. It just stopped. Now, you could say that your recent video about textbooks wasn't explainer. You could say my recent video about copyright was. But here's why I think those aren't explainers. Because they don't have the word explained in them. And they are clearly our perspective. The word explained to me says, This is going to be my honest, God-best effort attempt to actually explain this thing, not to just tell the story that works best for me. Because that's the thing about explainers. If you are tasked with giving somebody the whole story of this thing up until now, there is a huge amount of information you have to pick from. You are only going to pick some of it. And there is going to be a strong urge to pick the bit that tells the best story for you. It is the ultimate opportunity to shape a narrative. And the story that's going to be most compelling is probably going to be one that meshes well with your values and your biases. And also those of your audience. It's an extremely easy thing to do badly. And also have people not notice how badly you did. I am not saying explainers are bad. Honestly, I'm a little bit proud of whatever role we had in the rise of this format. Because I think it's really important. This is an age when we are asked to have a lot of opinions about a lot of things. And I think that explanatory journalism can help a lot with that. Because I don't know how to feel about today's Brexit news unless I have some kind of refresher on the last five years of Brexit. But this channel is very clearly personal perspective stuff. Like, I can hit myself with a book. It's completely... it's time quaked by Kirk Vonnegut. Do I say Kirk? I'm not doing that take again. I've been thinking a lot more clear in the last couple of years that we as a society and a world have a really hard time telling the difference between journalism and opinion. And I don't want to be part of blurring the line between those two things. The other thing is that people started to do explainers really well. Like, better than we could with editorial control. With expert interviews and highly trained journalists who've spent their whole lives working on them, not just Tuesday. And actually some of our later explainers, we started to do the same things. Introducing those same controls and standards. It turns out though that that's really hard and takes a lot of time. It's almost as if we as a society need highly trained people who are dedicated only to the task of explaining reality to us. But worryingly, it seems like what people want is headed in the other direction. We don't want complicated editorial structures. We want individuals who we feel like we can trust. Because like they just mesh with us on a values level and they're very charismatic. Trusting a source based on charisma rather than like, rigor is bad. It's bad. And looking back over the last couple of years and why we stopped doing so many explainers, maybe it's because we started to feel like we were part of that. I do think that we're good at them though. I do miss them. But like, I think that if we do them again, we have to be very careful about what we're doing and how to present it. So I guess it's a lot of stuff. But like down at the foundation of it, it's that I don't know that I trust myself to conjure the level of objectivity that I think the word explained implies. So I think that's the thing. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.