93: Thanks a Million: Year End Wrap and Story of The Why Files
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Hey, it's your buddy AJ from the Y-Files. And Hecklefish. Right, and Hecklefish. We just wanted to tell you that if you want to start a podcast, Spotify makes it easy. It'd have to be easy for humans to understand it. Will you stop that? I'm just saying. Spotify for Podcasters lets you record and edit podcasts from your computer. I don't have a computer. Do you have a phone? Of course I have a phone. I'm not a savage. Well, with Spotify, you can record podcasts from your phone, too.

Spotify makes it easy to distribute your podcast to every platform and you can even earn money. I do need money. What do you need money for? You kidding? I'm getting killed on guppy support payments. These 3X wives are expensive. You don't want to support your kids? What are you, my wife's lawyer now? Never mind. And I don't know if you noticed, but all Y-Files episodes are video too. And there's a ton of other features, but... But we can't be here all day. Will you settle down? I need...

Well, the first thing I want to do is thank you. A few days ago, somehow, the Y-Files hit a million subscribers.

And that is something that I never expected. Yeah, would have lost that bet. I know, it was very unlikely. It sure was. I just said it was. Well, think about it. You got no background in any of the stuff you talk about. You're middle-aged, so everyone younger than 30 thinks you're an idiot. You got

No journalism training. The fact that anyone watches the show is nothing short of a miracle. Gee, thanks for the vote of confidence. What? I'm just telling it like it is. Yeah, but you don't have to be so condescending about it. Well, you don't have to be so sensitive about it. I mean, I think you need to acknowledge that I worked really hard to get this bar. Can't be some kind of pansy.

It all started in 2020. We were living in LA and running a successful studio called Betterbox. We had a big audience, popular podcasts, and a great location on Sunset Boulevard. Hold on. What is this? Some kind of retrospective? This is the Y-Files origin story. Oh, this is going to be painful. Here we are, live, Betterbox Studios, Kill Tony, the number one, formerly the number one live podcast in the world. ♪

The problem was we weren't making any money. Podcasts don't make money. Yeah, well, we didn't know that at the time, so we decided we'd go out and pitch investors.

So, factoring our huge audience, Ideal Hollywood Location, and... Freddie Prinze Jr. Huge audience, Ideal Hollywood Location, and Freddie Prinze Jr., we truly believe that Betterbox is well-positioned to be the premier comedy production company in the industry. Thank you. So... I think we're ready to pitch. Once we start this...

Guys? Ken? We actually had some investors interested, a couple of big agencies too. But then we hit a snag. A snag? Wait, wait, wait. When were you pitching investors? Well, this video we're watching was shot in April 2020. Oh no. Yeah. Something happened that we didn't see coming. Something that nobody saw coming. You might want to put on the news. Okay. Watch out.

The Golden State is in shutdown mode. That requires of this moment that we direct a statewide order for people to stay at home. How are we supposed to pitch investors during a pandemic? This is a moment we need to make tough decisions. I can't hear him. Can you hear him? No. A little louder.

Hang on a sec. With our huge audience and our celebrities, maybe the deck speaks for itself? What are you saying? Maybe we don't need words? Maybe we don't need words? What are you, an idiot? What? It's an idea. I think it's positive. I'm positive you're an idiot. Guys, we have to come up with something. Guys! We need words. Okay, Gino, next.

Oh, dear God. So we tried to make the best of it and pitch anyway. Now, at this point, it's late May 2020, and we actually have some investor meetings. But you remember how meetings were back then. The entertainment industry is built on intellectual property. The Better Box Federal trademark was recently... Gage, seriously? Sorry, sorry. That's my fault. It's fine.

L.A. was a ghost town, but we tried to make the best of it. Damn it.

Anything? Okay.

So, yeah, it didn't work. Even though we had some great meetings, investors told us the same thing. They're interested, but before they put money into something, they wanted to wait until the lockdown was over. Two weeks to flatten the curve, huh? Right. So, Nick, how are people there coping with these new ground rules, transformational ones?

But as we got into the summer, the situation in L.A. somehow got worse. So after 20 years in the City of Angels, Jen and I moved to Scottsdale, Arizona.

That's when I decided I wanted to start a YouTube channel. It would be about science, mysteries, and conspiracies. But we'd keep it lighthearted and fun, and I'd have a wacky co-host. Yes, truly. And that's when Nerdy Sexy Cool was born. Wait, nerdy what? Nerdy Sexy Cool. My YouTube channel, Nerdy Sexy Cool. More like Nerdy Cringy Cool. Thank you for watching Nerdy Sexy Cool.

Where we talk about the stuff that you didn't learn in school. If you're digging our vibe, please click like and subscribe. But when posting in the comments, please don't be a tool. Don't be a tool on Nerdy Sexy Cool.

Please, please stop the barbershop quintet. I can't take it. Oh, you'd rather have a ukulele? No! Nerdy, sexy, cool is coming to you. With science, history, biology, and conspiracy theories too. If you want to learn in a lighthearted way, just click like and subscribe today. We might be right, we might be wrong, but you can still sing along.

So I had the name of the channel, got all this branding, and was ready to get started.

But then it turned out the name Nerdy Sexy Cool was taken. Oh, you didn't check that first? No, I didn't think of that. Well, you dodged a bullet. Yeah, I did. And Jen came up with the name The Y Files, which was awesome on several levels. So it was time to get to work. I'm going to do something that's never been done before ever in history. And you are going to witness it.

Now, I knew this channel was going to work. My thinking was, I've been a professional writer, producer, editor, and host, so how hard could it be? Simple bastard. Yeah, turned out it was much harder than I thought. I put up my first video, Welcome to the Y-Files, where smart folks like us get together to talk nerdy. And nobody watched. And today we're talking about math facts that... And I have no idea why with this high production quality. What is that? What is what? You look like a one-man show.

one-man boy band who got old. But I stuck with it and slowly over time and many, many mistakes, the videos got better.

I eventually found a format that worked and people started watching. Just not very many people. On the first anniversary of the channel, we had 5,000 subscribers. And these 5,000 people were the best. They supported everything I did. And if you're one of those subscribers, I can't thank you enough. But if the channel was going to survive, 5,000 subscribers a year wasn't going to work. At this point, Jen and I were living off savings. I kept posting videos and it wasn't working.

But then we got some luck. People started watching? No. Jen got a job as chief operating officer of a big animation company, Explosum. You might know them as Cyanide and Happiness. Yeah, I know these. But this job was in Texas, so we packed up again.

Over the next few months, the channel continued to grow, not quickly, but steadily. By April 2022, we were at about 15,000 subscribers and videos were getting about 5,000 views in total. We weren't blowing the doors off, but I felt like the channel had real potential.

By May 2022, my brother Gino had been nagging me for months to upload short videos to TikTok. I always thought TikTok was a stupid idea. Unless you're the Chinese government. Right. But the channel was still growing so slowly that I needed to try something. I created a couple of short videos about coincidences and uploaded them to TikTok.

Within a few days, I had 50,000 subscribers and 2 million views on TikTok. Whoa. I know. I was excited and annoyed. I didn't want to create short videos, but people were coming over from TikTok to find the main channel, and we started picking up a few hundred subscribers a day rather than a few dozen, which is what we were averaging for two years. And then TikTok shadow banned me. So the subscribers stopped.

And? And nothing.

That is a good one. Yeah, I like it too. Whoa! Woohoo!

Yeah, it was amazing. Problem was, nobody was watching the main videos. All the new subscribers were teenagers. Ugh, not teenagers. I know. They don't watch anything longer than 60 seconds. And the comments they leave? They're just awful. So I had a nice base of subscribers, but the views were still low. And here's some inside baseball about YouTube. It doesn't matter how many subscribers you have. That's a vanity number. What matters to the algorithm and to sponsors is views.

and I wasn't getting any views. It was frustrating. Then a viewer left a comment on one of my videos, and I wish I could remember his name, and if I find it, I need to give him a shout out. He recommended that I live premiere videos. Since I was posting at the same time every week, he said it would be a fun way to engage with the audience. So in preparation for our first live premiere, I produced a video that I thought would appeal to everyone, to the science nerds, the conspiracy crowd, and the mystery fans. Simulation Theory.

And to this day, it's one of my favorite episodes. Wheeler's experiment showed is that even though the electrons started as waves but behaved like particles after being observed, at the moment the decision to observe them was made, the electrons recorded themselves as having passed through the slits as particles. The electrons changed their state by going back in time. Folks, this is just staggering stuff.

Again, I've become obsessed with this. By the way, that's the Y-Files. That was a YouTube video. It's really amazing. It got about 5,000 views the first day. And that was a lot for the channel. Now, keep in mind, when Simulation Theory came out, we had 250,000 subscribers. Yet 5,000 views was a good day. So all those subscribers, they weren't watching. But

there were 150 people in the live premiere. I couldn't believe it. So simulation theory kept performing well and I followed it up with the hole to hell video, which also did well. In the meanwhile, I kept pumping out YouTube shorts. I hated doing them. I still do, but I kept at it. Circleville letters was next. It didn't perform that well, but it was still well written and well produced and it brought in true crime fans.

Then we premiered Operation High Jump, the story about the UFOs in Antarctica. That got 50,000 views in the first day. That was bananas. And that was July. We got 150,000 subscribers that month, and YouTube finally started pushing the long-form videos. So our graph went from this to this.

Now, we still had some clunky episodes, and we still do, but eventually we built a solid viewer base. Now videos get a few hundred thousand views within the first week, and the good ones hit a million in a month.

But what I'm most proud of is the community, the people in the comments who are so encouraging, the fans who buy Y-Files merchandise, which is still bizarre to me. Not to me. Look at his handsome face. That only a mother could love. Hey, leave my mother out of this. She was a saint. She'd have to be, wouldn't she? Fair point.

That's the biggest strength of the channel. It's not the writing. It's not the production. It's... It's hecklefish. No, it's not. It's the audience. It's you. And I literally mean you watching this right now. Because I know that this video is going to be one of the lowest performing videos of the year. It doesn't have a clickbait title, no catchy thumbnail, no fancy production, no mysterious story. The only people who'll get this far in this video are the people I've been talking about.

the members of our community. This past year was incredible. If the next year is only half as good, we're onto something special. And it's because of you that all this was possible. Me, I'm just along for the ride.

So that's a wrap on the year. We'll be back next week with a new story for you. Again, I can't thank you enough for all the support this year. And special thanks to everyone who's supporting the Y-Files on Patreon. You guys are the ones who make this channel work. Original Jim deserves the credit for giving me the push I needed to launch Patreon and the Discord server. And speaking of Discord, thanks to the moderators who made the community work. Victoria, Daniel, Xanithos, Lulikins, Jacob, and JohnnyBGood.com.

You guys are the heart of the channel. Would now be a good time to plug Hecklefish t-shirts? It would not. Yeah, I figured I'd ask. Now, if I time this right, I'll be streaming live later, so please come check it out. If not, please have a safe and happy new year, and we'll see you next week. Should old acquaintance be forgot and never brought to mind?

Happy New Year, everybody.