Where I've Been, and What's Coming

I've been quiet for a while. Longer than I planned. Some of you have been asking what I'm working on, so I figured I'd write something down.

Both my daughters are home right now, which doesn't happen often anymore. Julie is back from Australia for the summer and sleeping in the cabin, which is what she does when she comes home. My younger daughter is back too. The house is full again. It's a good time of year here. Spring took its time but summer arrived this week, properly, and I've spent the last few mornings outside in the garden instead of inside at the desk.

The raised beds you've been seeing me build in recent videos are almost done. We're filling them with soil this weekend and putting vegetables in shortly after. There's something about finishing a build and then immediately covering it in dirt and seeds that feels right. The whole point was always to grow things in them. The build was just the part I could film.

There's a video coming soon. I want to tell you what it's about, because I've never really made one like this before and I'm a little nervous about it.

If you watched the last video, you'll remember it was about how woodworking YouTube has changed. I posted it expecting a few hundred comments. It's at over four thousand now. I read most of them, slowly, over a few weeks, mostly in the evenings with coffee. And the thing that surprised me is that almost none of them were really about woodworking. They were about something else. People kept using the same words, independently, without coordinating. Calm. Peace. Therapy. Refuge. Soul. They were telling me, in four thousand different ways, that my videos had become a place they came to be quiet for a while.

I did not know that was the job. I thought I was making woodworking content.

So the new video is about that. About the feeling almost everyone seems to be carrying right now. The slow exhaustion of too many screens, too many notifications, too much content that wasn't really made by a person. About AI a bit, but only a bit. AI is part of it. It's not the whole thing. The whole thing is something larger and quieter, and I think it has to do with what we've stopped paying attention to. Wood being stained. Hands working. A voice that's actually a person.

I'll spare you the rest. You'll see it when it's out.

I want to mention something else, while I have you here, because I'd rather you hear it from me than be surprised by it later.

There's another video coming after this one. A long one. It's about a trip I made to Germany, twice, and what I found there. The reason I'm being vague is that I don't want to give it away, but I also know that some of you are going to see Festool in the title and assume the worst. So let me say this clearly. I went to Germany the first time at their invitation. I went the second time at my own expense, with my own questions, because something about the first trip didn't add up and I needed to find out what it was. The video I'm making is the result of that second trip. It's not a sponsorship. It's not a tour. I went in skeptical and I came out with a story I couldn't stop thinking about. That's all I'll say for now. You can decide for yourself when you watch it whether I made the right call. Until then, I'd ask you to trust that I know how this looks, and that I've been careful with it.

This video has been the hardest thing I've ever written. I've rewritten the script three times. The first version was fine. The first version was, honestly, the kind of video most YouTubers would have just posted. But there was a story underneath the story, and I knew it was there, and I couldn't post the surface version while knowing the deeper one was sitting right next to it. So it's taking longer than I wanted it to. If you've been waiting, I'm sorry. It's coming. It's better than it was a month ago. It will be better still by the time it goes out.

There's a third video on the way too, eventually. I'm rewriting the cabin film. New footage, plus what's already on the channel, recut into one longer piece. That one is further out. I'll say more about it closer to the time.

I want to thank the four thousand of you who commented on the last video. There's a 65-year-old woman in Minnesota who wrote that she has a bad shoulder and watches woodworking videos to, in her words, come along for a vicarious ride. There's a man who told me he doesn't even own a saw, but watches because I remind him of the grandfather he never met. There's a guy who works in tech and called the AI moment an earthquake, and said that watching wood being stained is what he does to survive his week.

I keep thinking about that one. Watching wood being stained brings peace to the mind. I've been making these videos for five years and I'm only now starting to understand what they are actually for.

Anyway. The cat is back to her usual nine-meter exclusion zone. The garden beds are almost ready for soil. Julie is at the cabin. Both girls are home. The video is nearly done. The Germany video is being rewritten one more time, in a good way. Summer is here.

It's genuinely a good time.

I'll see you when the video drops.

Jesper