I Published a Book... Am I Quitting YouTube?

It's official. I'm a published author in the United States. My book, my adventure memoir, The Wilder Way, is now officially out in the US, and you can get it as an ebook, a hardcover, and an audiobook. You can also order it in Canada, in the UK. It's out in all these wonderful places.

There's also a Dutch translation that's already available, and there's a German translation and a Polish translation.

Both of those are coming in September. I cannot begin to describe how writing this book has changed my life. And I just want to take a moment to share some of those thoughts with you.

For the last 9 years, [music] I've been very present on social media, sharing my travels, my adventures, you know, the stories of other people and places across my channels, on YouTube, on Instagram, [music] on Facebook.

It's been a life-changing journey, a true dream come true. It's given me opportunities that I never really dared to dream of.

But, I feel like there is a new chapter that's coming up for me, and I can't quite put my finger on it, but publishing the book and knowing [music] that so many of you have actually held this physical manifestation of my story in your hands and spent hours immersing yourselves in in my words, knowing that you guys were

there, reading that book, not just watching a video passively, but actually reading a book, I think rewired my brain in all the right ways, and it's given me a really difficult thought that I've had to confront and that I'm really thinking about very hard right now.

Yeah, we live in a world where short-form content is king, and then, you know, we're swiping and scrolling is something that we all do without really thinking about it much.

And over the last few months, I have become very jaded with the idea of creating content for social media. I still do it. It's still part of my job.

But I'm feeling a sense of distance growing between me and the platforms. And having published the book, I know how reading important is to our brains.

I know the wonders that it does to our powers of reasoning, our focus, our attention. And having put the book out there into the world, into a world that is so noisy, so confusing. To put a book out into that world feels like a small miracle to me. And when I think about the life force that I

want to be sharing with the world and giving into the world, it's not the swipey scrolly content. I want to help make the world a slightly better place.