 Okay, before we get into this thing, I want to make sure everyone's up to speed on how we got here. January 2018. John Green starts a podcast called the Anthropocene Review, in which he takes a critical look at a wide array of things and experiences that exist for and slash or because of humanity. Episode 1 featured reviews of Canada Geese and Diet Dr. Pepper. Two discussed Halley's Comet and cholera, etc., etc. I do not know about it. June 2018, I'm sitting in Sunday service at the Fourth Universalist Society of New York and listening to a guest minister talk about something. I conceive of the idea for the week I review, in which I would take a critical look at whatever I found most interesting the previous week. The channel goes live two months later. April 2020, boredom resulting from COVID quarantines pushes me to start live streaming every couple of weeks. A consistent group of people begin to interact during these, a weirdly large proportion of whom are based in the United Kingdom. Number one week I review Superfan and eventual merch designer Willow tells me I should go on tour. March 2021. Hank Green appears on my TikTok 4U page and mentions that a book version of this podcast I did not know about will be released in a couple of months. I decide immediately that I will review it, both because I find the title The Anthropocene Reviewed amusing and because I think I'll have a unique perspective on whatever it is John Green has done. I plan to have this review posted within two weeks of release. May 18, 2021. The Anthropocene Reviewed hits bookshelves. I begin reading it and immediately realize it's going to wreck me. I start taking notes fully aware that I will not have this review posted within two weeks of release. May 30, 2021. Beau Burnham's surprise release is a 90 minute Netflix special called Inside, which completely overtakes my particular section of the internet. I put the Anthropocene Reviewed on pause so that I can talk about that for an hour. June 2021. I realize that the only way I can review the Anthropocene Reviewed is to replicate the Anthropocene Reviewed. I give myself a few months to do this, planning for it to effectively replace my three year channel anniversary retrospective. Perhaps it may even be the series finale of the week air review. August 2021. I'm nowhere near complete. I decide to take more time off from the channel to focus entirely on reviewing the Anthropocene Reviewed. My channel numbers already trending down completely flatline and minus a small bump resulting from the film adaptation of Dear Evan Hansen pushing people towards my review of the stage show They Never Recover. October 2021. I have finally completed a draft. It's 22,000 words. I read it start to finish for the first time and I don't like it. I feel bad. I don't know what to do. December 2021. I turned 30 on camera for content. I announced that the Anthropocene Reviewed Reviewed will be reworked and released in May to mark the one year anniversary of the book's release. January 2022. I release a video every single day. I do not work on the Anthropocene Reviewed Reviewed at all. I realize I don't want to make a two and a half hour review that very few people will watch. I decide to rework the script into a live performance that even fewer people will watch and call Willows Bluff by locating it in London. May 18, 2022. The Anthropocene Reviewed has been out for one year and I finally feel good about where my review is at. May 31, 2022. Bo Burnham releases an hour of inside outtakes. I briefly get distracted and wonder if it would be possible to make a video before I leave for Europe in hopes of it renewing interest in the channel. It isn't and I don't. June 11, 2022. I enter the Bertrand Russell Room at Conway Hall in London and a dozen people cheer. I talk for the next two and a half hours about myself with the occasional allusion to John Green. I give his book a 10 out of 10. A dozen and one people cheer. It is over. I will never read it again. July 3, 2022. I shoot this video. I am unhappy with how it comes out largely resulting from I forgetting the lessons of how to use a green screen from my film classes. I post it unedited for patrons, many of whom are at the show. July 6, 2022. I develop bronchitis as I'm gearing up to reshoot this video for the masses. I more than temporarily lose the ability to do this for more than the 60 seconds required for the YouTube shorts I started doing before I got sick. August 15, 2022. With mere days before the channel's fourth anniversary, I'm finally reshooting this thing. Let's fucking do this. With this video, I am finally closing an odd, needlessly lengthy and frankly exhausting chapter of my creative life. It is time for me to do something else that keeps me from the regular YouTube upload schedule that I decided on in February. Maybe I'll write a stand-up set or a television pilot. I don't know, but before I can comfortably say goodbye, I need to do one final exorcism. Get some things off my chest. I need to talk about the why of the Anthropocene Reviewed Live in London. Because sure, in the pre-intro timeline I said it's because I didn't want to make a video and that's true. In the announcement, I said it was a bit and that's true also. But what's there to say about either of those things? I want to talk about headier shit than that. Performance, art, their intersection, but not their combination, because I have done performance art. And this wasn't that. But the Anthropocene Reviewed had something important in common with my one-man shows. Nobody's idea of a good time and it's follow-up. Nobody thought this needed a sequel. Which I discussed at relative length in my review of Derrick DelGaudio's In-N-Out-Itself if you're curious about them. It was only done once, though for very different reasons. I have taken to calling T-A-R comma R colon L-I-L a show, because if I called it a performance or reading, I'd have to call my YouTube videos the same thing. Outside of a few specific jokes, it wasn't really performing and it's only a reading in the sense that I made a choice not to memorize the script. And memorize this one either. Ted Talks are also done with teleprompters and it had something in common with those, but it also wasn't trying to impart meaningful information. So neither talk nor lecture feel quite right. My girlfriend told me that the photo I have now turned into my general internet profile picture makes me look like a motivational speaker. While that dealt some psychic damage for sure, the Anthropocene review does not textually motivational. Though some may find it contextually motivational, so we go with show. But there's nothing about the show that requires the one-time-only status. Like, the nobody duology could only have been done once each by their very nature. They were reactions and an honest reaction can only be had once. An honest reaction in front of an audience even more so. It didn't matter how many people showed up, once I'd done it, the moment was gone. The lightning was unbottled, the metaphor was un-metaphor, whatever. I could do the Anthropocene review, reviewed, live in elsewhere if I wanted to, and though the London specific bits would have needed to be reworked, it would not be inherently diminished by the repetition. But from the day it was conceived as a video, it was only ever intended to be read once. That the audience changed from my camera to actual people only sort of mattered. I just wasn't interested in reading it again, and I'm still not. Now, were I to live a whole new life that I could make a show out of, I would absolutely consider doing an equivalent project intended from the outset to be done live and then tore that. Hell, not only would I consider it, I would actively want to do that if I thought I could pull it off. And by pull it off, I mean, get people to come. Maybe I'd stop off in Brazil where another unexpectedly large contingent of vocal fans are located, though due to the obvious size differences of the country, they are much further away from each other than even Werner and Sebastian, who hail from the Netherlands and Germany respectively, were from Conway Hall when they made their trek westwards, meaning actually getting that audience in one place would be much more logistically complicated. Because in every other way, pulling off a live show is actually easier than the filmed equivalent would have been. The Anthropocene-Reviewed Live in London is different in many ways than the Anthropocene-Reviewed-Reviewed edited for YouTube would have been, and many of those changes simplified the production. Take, for example, my review of the Highline. That was intended to be filmed vlog style as I walked along the park, and that would have been a cool thing to do. But would it have been better? Not really, unless you're comparing it to a recording of the live show. The live-recorded review of the Week Air Review's 100-point rating scale is less visually stimulating than one recorded in this living room would have been. At least four times as many images would have played over my shoulder, and I would not be moving around like I'd been doing it for nearly three hours because I wouldn't have been doing it for nearly three hours. But in that different setting, attention works differently. I am sure that I could have gone from 142 slides to 1,420, but to what end? Each new slide distracted from what they were really there to see. Me, and I only wanted to distract on purpose. The day before the show, Sebastian asked on the Discord if I would be doing that thing I do where I put a little message on screen that leaves faster than anyone can actually read it. I deleted the question because I didn't want to spoil the moment when that first wall of text would be moved past mere seconds after showing up on the screen. The laugh of recognition and frustration that followed was a highlight of the afternoon. But I was also unsurprised when during the little talkback we did afterwards, one of the first questions was, are we going to get a copy of that PowerPoint? And like, no? Obviously. I sometimes get the impression that people think I'm unaware of how quickly my editor's notes go by. I typically can't read them that fast and I know what they say. I do that for a reason to force you, the viewer, to make a choice. Either you pause the video and read it, or you let it keep going and live in blissful ignorance of something that ultimately doesn't matter very much. I don't want you reading a message instead of listening to me talk. And so you have to pause or not. But a live show is different. I have a video coming at some point where I'm going to talk about immersive theater since while I was in London, I saw the new show by the folks who did Sleep No More here in New York, which I will discuss a much more meaningful version of this idea. But in my own little way, I wanted to create a choice. What do you focus on when you can only focus on one thing at a time? I wanted to render this largely static entity into something a little more dynamic. And it's not just about the notes. There's a non-zero chance you have paused one of my videos in the past or rewatched a bit because you either missed a line or wanted to think more about something I had said. But what if you couldn't? What do you do when you hear a line like, you never forget your first animated penis? Do you mentally disconnect from the show to reflect on it and think about what your first animated penis was? Or do you keep going and hear about mine? Do you try to actively remember each line that meant something to you? Or do you just let it wash over you and hope that in the end the gems are still visible? What happens if you just black out for a few seconds? Honestly, most people don't even realize they do it. Our brains try to make connections whether we're there or not. I guarantee you people think I said things I did not say because they went into a fucking fugue state at the end of one thought through the beginning of another and just accepted whatever the resulting mishmash of disconnected starts and stops was. And I think that's cool. More than half the folks who attended the show were on the Week Air Reviews Discord and following it a few of them were joking about trying to piece their memories together to crowdsource the review in its entirety. And I would have loved it if they had actually done something like that. Honestly, I would have posted it to this channel because even though it was recorded it would have still fit into the show's larger ideas. Although I never discussed this in the review itself or did I? The show is fundamentally about memory because it's a show about memories. Stories that span the last 22 years with a substantial portion happening half my life ago or more. Now, I've got a pretty good memory but it's no total recall. So I guarantee that I got some facts wrong there and probably here and also in everything I've ever made. The broad strokes of my personal stories will be correct but the small details change as my synapses access and overwrite the originals. My mom has told me in the past that I have gotten things wrong or at least that our memories of certain events differ. In general, those small details are just there for texture. It doesn't matter if they're exactly correct. With a show that is basically a memoir though it's not really the case and so I like the idea that there remains no clear record of these events that we have continued the oral tradition of storytelling by having my stories live only in the heads of those who are in that room and that as the years pass even if someone had managed to catch every word things would get hazier and hazier. The elephant of course is that I did actually record one of the show's 11 sections and I'll be honest there wasn't some grand philosophy to the decision that wasn't the original plan but as it drew closer I realized that my review of my review scale was always meant to answer one of the most common questions I've received in my now four years on this platform and it would be pretty weird to answer questions asked by people outside the room only to people in it. It just made sense to film that section so that the next time someone asks me what an 8.4 is I don't have to repeat myself but the knowledge that it would be out there in the world changed how I approached rewriting that review specifically. If you pause to read some of the on-screen notes you'll notice that I explicitly mentioned clarifying things for the audience at home. There are more hedged comments in review number six than the rest of the show combined. Hell there was only one in the rest of the show that first one which was there to set a stylistic precedent rather than actually clarify anything because I trusted the people in that room to understand what I meant in that moment. They came to see me in person they weren't going to take what I said in bad faith but I don't trust you the viewer at home to do that and so a couple times I felt like I should clarify something that only needed clarifying to people who wanted to misread my words. And there were lines that I just framed differently that I would have otherwise. It's something I do in all of my scripts and it's probably the thing I find most frustrating about writing for an audience even though I have pulled back from active engagement with that audience at large but I'll gladly engage with this audience. You know they're cool. Most of us got Indian food after. The one Indian person among us judged the heck out of everyone else. I'm sorry for the way I ate the orange stuff Willow and also for just now calling it orange stuff. Some of us went to a pub after that and argued about forms of representational government. Some drunk guy asked Werner who is Dutch if it's illegal to open a driver's side door with your right hand in the Netherlands. Pretty sure he voted leave. My favorite thing about the post-show hangout sessions was that they weren't really about me. Like obviously everyone was there ultimately because of me and a lot of the folks wanted to talk to me at least a little bit and I tried to make myself broadly available for conversation to those who wanted it. But some of them just didn't seem to care much about my presence and preferred to talk to everyone else. And that's kind of fucking cool. It helped that they were all cool and only weird in fun ways handing out useful life advice like if the police ask you for your name after you deface a statue of some old racist you don't have to give them your legal name and if they don't question what you give them well then your legal name won't have an associated criminal record. Now will it? I am not a lawyer, please do not treat that as actual legal advice. At least a few of them were talking about meeting up again later without me and I hope they do. Like genuinely the development of even a small community of people like that means so much more to me than basically anything else I have done on or with this YouTube channel. And it's wild to me how international the close-knit group of fans is. London is a cool place. I have a specific vision of European city typified by the other two places I visited during that overall trip Lisbon and Vienna and London felt distinctly unlike that. And in retrospect it makes sense that a city in England would be familiar to someone who grew up visiting cities in New England but sometimes I just don't think very hard about things, you know? I mentioned changing the presentation in my review of the Highline earlier but that review changed in other dramatic ways between video and show. Originally it featured a lot of words about New York and how New York made the channel possible and I cut nearly all of them. Both because I think the how is frankly pretty obvious because folks across the pond ain't got to hear about that. I initially thought to make some audience specific tweaks like discussing the relative amount of theatre in the two most theatrically fulfilling cities in the world but when I really thought about it, fucking why? The thing was already multiple tens of thousands of words it needed less, not more and it also would have been like an intellectually dishonest move to pass judgment on a place I hadn't been as it turns out I really liked London. If someone offered me a job there, I would very seriously consider it in a way that I wouldn't really consider most cities in the world though I will admit the list has gotten longer as 2022 has dragged on. Like, I definitely resent paying $63 for what should have been an $8 pack of Tums but much like the poorly printed programs I got from the literal cryptkeeper at some Hellshack in Brixton, I got a story out of it. On that note, I got the programs reprinted by first color print room Soho who helped me with proper spacing and printed on much nicer paper for literally less money than the fucking Waco who asked me whether I was planning to work this year and also how much water I drink every day so like if you're in London and need shit printed all nice like big recommend those guys and that's important because I need to have more experiences so I can tell more stories so that I can continue to talk about new shit in every video and I could have easily turned both of those into openers had I not just told them here speaking of jokes, the only thing about the show that I was actually like worried about was whether people would laugh you can hear from the recording of review number six that there were some solid chuckles from an audience in a country notorious for its people's subdued reactions an American audience would likely have been more vocal but the reality is I'm not used to any laughter I will occasionally pause for what I consider a laugh line but I haven't the faintest fucking clue if it actually lands right I did two dry runs each for an American audience of one and they both got overall stronger reactions than I did on the day but I was honestly really happy with what I got because the most important thing is that people enjoyed it yes, this was all self-indulgent and whatever but I never set out to waste anybody's time with anything I'm doing and that is triply true when I'm putting them in a position where they can't do anything else and no one felt that their time had been wasted even those who traveled a pretty significant distance to be there I like public speaking and performance much more than I like being here alone in my living room in some world where I was extremely famous and people were clamoring to see me I would do regular reviews like this too, you know that would be fun as hell there's an energy to a live audience an excitement to being in a place where things can and almost certainly will go wrong and the knowledge that you just gotta roll with it literally the first thing that happened after I entered the room and took that selfie was my iPad refused to open the script that I had left waiting for me before I left the room at doors for some reason the files app just wouldn't open fortunately I was able to open it with a different app at which point I went too far ahead in the PowerPoint and it was just kind of a messy fucking introduction to the introduction but that's okay and I know that they say first impressions are the most important but also when you follow that bumbling with two and change hours of dense scripting that is guaranteed to overwhelm and overload people who actually remembers that all that happened and anyway just as I got it all resolved our final audience member came in and so their arrival didn't actually interrupt things as it would have had it all gone a little more smoothly so it all worked out few things are better than being in a room dedicated to an experience and getting it in its intended form no Netflix stream will ever match an IMAX screen no concert film will replicate a screaming crowd no recorded lecture will hit with the immediacy of bearing witness to it and returning to these places has been one of the true joys of the past year for me as theaters and theaters and the like have reopened and refilled I missed it so fucking much and I wanted to bring just a little bit of that into the world myself and since I'm not going to invite you into my living room I gotta go somewhere a little more appropriate so I did and I'm grateful for that and for the people who came this could have been a colossal failure but as far as I'm concerned it was a near unmitigated success it's a shame that three of the people who got tickets didn't end up showing but that's really just a loss for them you know for those of us who were there it was something special and pretty dang cool and though I'm sure John Green has no idea that I've done this because any sane celebrity would not check their Twitter mentions and I haven't reached out directly or whatever I want to thank him for making this thing I spent hundreds of hours over 13-ish months and also some not insubstantial amount of money trying to do this book justice and I think I did I'm proud of the Anthropocene Reviewed Reviewed I didn't do precisely what I set out to do but I did something a lot more interesting and I was right for this I'm so glad that I found this book and read it and finally eventually reviewed it because it has changed the weekly review forever and though my analytics may not agree I believe that has been for the better so thank you John for writing a really fucking good book I look forward to never talking about it again Thank you so much for watching and thank you particularly to my patrons my mom, my cat Kat Sarkata Benjamin Schiff Anthony Cole Christina Kojo Phil Bates Willow I am the sword Liam Knipe Claire Bear Taylor Lindies Andrew Madison Design and the folks who'd rather be read than said If you liked this video great if not don't care if you want to see more subscribe hope to see you in year four