I got banned by WaitButWhy

It’s no secret, I’m a big fan of the blog WaitButWhy.

WaitButWhy is the brainchild of Tim Urban and now one of the most popular blogs on the web.

His posts are very long and can take Tim several weeks, even months to put together.

Then just over a year ago I came up with a great Grumo idea.. ta chan!

I would create grumo animations of the most popular blog posts on the Internet.

I searched Google and Quora.com and made a list of about 50 different posts.

Then I went ahead and created a dedicated YouTube channel for these type of videos and called it Grumology.

The first two episodes we produced were “Why is soda cheaper than water” (Quora) and “How to find your passion” (Oliver Emberton).

Although they never became viral videos they accumulated several thousand views in just a few weeks (The soda one surpassed 100K views recently)

For our 3rd video we decided to animate one of the most popular WBW posts to date titled “Why Procrastinators Procrastinate“.

Tim’s humorous style and simple but clever stick men drawings were perfectly in line with our favorite grumo style.

But before animating Tim’s post I got in touch with him and asked for permission.
We offered him to direct/write and would only publish it after his approval.

He loved the idea since he was already thinking to do something similar. So he gave us the green light.

We created the storyboard and a test clip with the monkey jumping on the ship steering wheel and we got his approval to move forward.

After a couple weeks we finished it and he loved it! yeah! party! lalala! cookies galore!

But..

… time went by and WBW become bigger and bigger, so big that even Elon Musk noticed and flew him over SpaceX to have lunch with him and witness the first successful first-stage rocket landing in history

…so popular that TED asked him to give a talk on WaitButWhy where he chose to speak about no other than the Procrastination post!

And then on Feb 23rd, 2016, just before his TED talk was published, Tim emailed me and asked me to take down the Procrastination video from YouTube… ahhh.. oohhh nooo!

Apparently he was concerned that the video was sucking some of the traffic to his blog because it appeared high on search results and that it would confuse his fans even more when his TED talk went live.

I suggested Tim some alternatives to make it more obvious that it was not an official WBW video but finally agreed to make it private so it wouldn’t show up on search results.

So to this day that video is hidden from Google, shelved for life into oblivion, like a museum artifact, collecting digital dust where it cannot be of any help to the procrastinators of the world.

But today (for your eyes only) you can procrastinate a little longer and watch the aforementioned banned digital artifact HERE.

Sniff.. and that’s how Grumo got banned by WaitButWhy.

Peace, Love, and WBW cookies,

Miguel

P.S: Tim later emailed me that he would be open to reconsider after the TED talk was published. Which reminds me, I should follow up with him soon!

P.2: Is there an awesome blog post/article you would love to see animated? Let me know and I’ll put it on the list.

P.3: Why did I stop producing more episodes? good question. This was a fun pet project and as usual got distracted with other shiny objects but wouldn’t mind producing more if enough people request them. Vamos!