This One's Not About Food— It's About Us.

As much as the youtube algorithm is derided and maligned, it usually does about as good of a job we could ask at its main task: deciding who wants to see which videos. And this one that you’re watching now, is gonna self-select for the type of folks who care about this less-relevant-than-usual topic. That means it’ll have a relatively low view count, but today, that’s the point. Here’s a good example of what I mean: a few months ago I posted a video explaining what white people tacos are. It did well, It got suggested not just to my regular subscribers, but to a wider newer audience, and that wider newer audience started all sorts of stupid arguments about race in the comments. For a week or two, whenever a video does well enough to attract a new audience, one that’s outside my usual demographic of well-adjusted adults, I’m reminded how bad this job would be if I was making videos for teenagers or illiterate psychos. So this low-reach post algorithmically targeted only at those most likely to see it, is a thank you note for all of you normal, sane, reasonable people in the audience that make vid-posting an enjoyable habit. Thank you. While I’ve got you on the horn, it’s been almost three years since one of my little life slash channel updates, so I’ll catch you up on what’s been going down. 1- the baby is 2. Very cool very fun little toddler who eats a lot. 2- I have a lot of little projects taking place online, and I haven’t done as much as I should to spread the word. Barkley is still going strong. We still sell plates and bowls and mugs that are made by hand right here in Tempe Arizona. I thought I did a good amount of self-promotion for Barkley, but multiple people have reported not knowing it was even my brand, despite being a long-term subscriber. Even though I wear a Barkley branded apron in every video I post. What else? In the past three years I’ve started two separate channels: One is called Extranet Shaquille and it explores some non-food topics on a wildly infrequent basis. And the other is Eater’s Digest. It’s a weekly recap of my three favorite food news stories that week, and that goes live every Friday morning at 7 AM Arizona time. I hired a co-host named Willow and she does all the hard work of looking into each story in detail so I just get to react to it in real time. Yes, each episode costs almost $400 to produce and makes zero money in return, I never pretended to be good at business. These are the benefits of having a dedicated safety net on Patreon to provide a level of income that allows for riskier more experimental stuff. The last little note I’ll leave you with is that even though I never take a little celebratory moment for subscriber milestones (mostly because subscriber count was never a meaningful metric to me), I did get into this YouTube business with one secret unspoken blue sky utopia goal in mind, and that was 700,000 subscribers. When I was more of a viewer than a poster, I always felt like 700k was the sweet spot for people who posted high quality stuff without totally dedicating themselves to profitmaxxing, and I also liked how “seven hundred thousand” was the round number between zero and a million that took the most syllables to say out loud, which sounds all the more impressive. “A million”… “700,000”… I’m past that now, in the 800k zone, but it would be a shame if that big beautiful 700,000 number came and went without acknowledging my appreciation for getting there. So, if the algorithm deemed you to be the type of person who should watch this video, and then you turned out to be the type of person who watched this whole video, thank you for watching this whole time and I will see you again in one week.