Reflections on Roote
Shutting Down, How Everything Evolved, and The Roote Fellowship
Hello Rhys’ Pieces!
It’s been a year since my last post. I’ve been wrapping up Roote, which is officially shutting down.
Roote has been my job for the last 4 years, so I want to reflect on this chapter.
No pressure to read, of course. But maybe my reflection will help you reflect too! Reflect-ception.
Life is full of chapters. I’m curious why we move through them.
Four sections:
Why I’m Ending Roote
Gratitude & What’s Next
1. Why I’m Ending Roote
Why end Roote? The simplest answer is that I’ve run out of money.
But the deeper answer is that Roote is no longer aligned with my life. This is a new thing. For many years, I loved Roote. But I have changed and the world has too.
There are two flavors of misalignment, social and financial.
First, social misalignment. Roote was isolating. Every day at Roote was just me and my screen. (And my cat.) Roote was built for a pandemic—Zoom fellowship calls and personal content creation. This solo dolo hermit life was lonely.
Especially because I live in San Francisco! A city! With people! My people!
Unfortunately, I moved here right before COVID. So I’ve done a 6-year detour towards isolation. I want to return to why I moved to SF in the first place. Ambitious nerd energy. In person.
It’s a bit embarrassing to have vestigial COVID isolation. The pandemic began more than six years ago. We got vaccines five years ago.
But I’m still a house cat. I want to be a Rhys dog. It’s like I have social-emotional Long COVID. Begone!
I’m curious what you’re still carrying from COVID. And I wish you the agency to release it.
Second, financial misalignment. Roote was great as a lean nonprofit, but I’m 35 now and could use a real salary.
As a CS major who was early to crypto, it’s both impressive and embarrassing that I’ve never made much money. I’ve been a do-gooder for a decade, so it’s (well past) time to switch.
This is especially true in the Bay Area. lol imagine me trying to outbid my OpenAI or Anthropic friends for a house here.
Thus far, I’ve been able to live a full, rich life without much money. I didn’t need much. I’m a bit late, but I’d like my next chapter to be my Dad Era. That requires money. I’m excited to make it.
I’m curious what your version of a rich life looks like. And how it’s changed.
***
This makes it sound bad. Like Roote sucked. It didn’t!
Roote was such a good container for me. (And hopefully for others.) To research everything and teach it. To coach young folks around the world. These things filled my cup. I’m grateful for them.
But now that Roote is dead (rip), we can give its eulogy. It wasn’t perfect, but I’m proud of the life it lived. What did it do?
Two main things:
Let’s look at each.
2. How Everything Evolved
Roote made educational content on humanity's long-term trajectory.
I’d had moderate success with Marriage Counseling with Capitalism and The Wisdom Age. So I tried to create an illustrated book. This mostly failed.
2023 was an unpublished rough draft. 2024 was book proposal rejection. 2025 started with Ada & Locke, which never got above 100 subscribers.
The book wasn’t working. So at the end of 2025, I switched from a book to a YouTube series. Lean into my enthusiasm more.
Then I spent the last nine months creating 89 videos on How Everything Evolved (HEE). We got to 17,000 subscribers, so I’d give it a stamp of moderate success! Everything in moderation, even success. ;)
***
Upon reflection, I think it’s the hardest work project I’ve ever done. There are three reasons why: understanding the content, teaching it, and then YouTubing it.
First, it’s difficult to understand everything.
A lot has happened from 14 billion years ago until today! There are so many juicy questions. How do stars produce the elements? Why did the Cambrian Explosion happen? Why did homo sapiens get big brains? How do machines learn?
It’s a lot to get right.
If I’m generous, I got 75% of it 75% correct. If I’m more realistic, I covered 10% to a depth of 10%. Reality has a surprising amount of detail.
But AI knows 99% of 99%. We’re lucky to have a world-class tutor in our pocket. One who patiently spends days teaching me about the Iron Age or the Industrial Revolution.
Why, as a puny human, even attempt to learn 10%? You cannot outsource your understanding.
So I tried to remember it all. Below is my Anki graph of 20,000 notecards I created over the last few years. Like Duolingo for books.
Studying this many notecards takes a lot of time. 722 hours to be exact. I had a love-hate relationship with Anki. Like a constant obligation for intellectual stimulation. A strange version of purgatory.
Second, it’s difficult to teach all this.
Take the origin of life, for example. It’s complicated. For books, there’s Nick Lane’s The Vital Question. And Eric Smith’s The Origin and Nature of Life on Earth. (One of my favorite books of all time.)
How do you collapse 1100 pages of abiogenesis into a 20-minute YouTube video? You can’t. But I tried, here.
It’s an ok attempt. Maybe a B. But the internet only rewards A+ content.
YouTube is a humbling place. Before this, I thought I was a pretty good teacher. But HEE showed me that I’m not a top 1% teacher. I’m not Hank Green or Geo Girl. I’m just a guy. Just a dog on the internet. Just Rhys.
In my quest to make better content, I physically printed images. 1500 of them.
Again, I had a love-hate relationship with this aspect of HEE. No one wants an 11x17 printer in their studio apartment. But also, I loved finding or creating that perfect visual.
Third, it’s difficult to be good at YouTube. Not just teaching the content, but winning at social media. Getting clicks.
As Mr. Beast says, “if they don’t click, they don’t watch.”
You get clicks with great titles and thumbnails. I improved at this, especially after going through Paddy Galloway’s accelerator. But I was never able to consistently produce viral videos like the one below.
***
Still, as difficult as it was, I made it all the way from 14 billion years ago to the present! 89 videos! It felt so good to ship that last video.
I could finally go Office Space on my printer.
All things considered, HEE was a moderately cost-effective use of funds. It cost $200,000 to produce. The series got 700,000 views and 60,000 watch hours.
That’s about $3 per learning hour. HEE is in the same range as a university MOOC but 10x less cost-effective than Khan Academy (donate here).
HEE is quite different from Khan though. Not SAT prep, but a theory on the Evolution of Everything. (In theory.) So it’s tough to compare them. Don’t be the best, be the only.
***
If you’d like to get started with the series, I recommend the most popular videos or checking out this playlist—the Full Timeline of Universal Evolution.
Grateful to have worked on this. Curious what you think.
3. Roote Fellowship
The other half of Roote was the Roote Fellowship (RF).
Aka Free Therapy With Coach Rhys. Aka shoving ambitious folks together into Zoom breakout rooms. (Giving water to dying plants.)
Like HEE, I think RF was a good thing but not a great thing. We spent $200,000 to serve 250 fellows, around $1,000 per fellow.
That buys you a strange distribution of counterfactually dubious outcomes, from Stanford full-rides to YC acceptance to homesteading in northern Canada.
Education is notoriously difficult to track. This was especially true for Roote’s wide age range (mostly 15–30). We couldn’t just track college acceptance rates.
Plus, I was focused on cultivating deeper habits of life success and wisdom. Things like self-awareness and self-belief. Increasing their surface area of serendipity and relating to others.
In terms of rough outcomes, I’d say Roote had:
Little impact on 50% of fellows
life not meaningfully differentModerate impact on 30%
raised ambitions, met great people, realizations in 1:1 coachingStrong impact on 20%
large positive change in life trajectory
But these impacts never really scaled. 250 fellows is a lot, but it’s not really making a meaningful dent in human capital.
If nothing else, I think coaching for ambitious young people is still dramatically underserved. Roote gave its fellows executive coaching a decade before they could afford it.
I’m proud of that.
***
I’d love to highlight all the Rootie successes. But there are well over one hundred of them! I won’t force you to read that list. So here’s a gif of their headshots and their current impact.
Proud of every one of them. Amazing what a set of ambitious frontier people can do.
Plus, many Rooties are still in school. They’re finding their interests and their people. Finding their future entry in this list.
There are also many fellows focusing on non-work stuff. Caring for their health, their newborn, or their parents. Traveling. Resting.
All chapters in the book of life.
I’m excited to see Rootie Mafia’s impact in the decades ahead. 🫡
4. Gratitude & What’s Next
Thank you for reading.
Thank you to the fellows for your relentless energy and curiosity. To my video editor, Abdul, for speedrunning 89 videos.
Thank you to the other amazing grant programs that help young people. And to the other educational YouTubers who satisfy viewers’ curiosity.
A huge thank you to Roote’s donors for supporting this work. Thank you for your belief in me to try something new. For your patience with me as I tried to find product-market fit for the fellowship and the research. And for your understanding that I’m stopping even though we have momentum. Shout out Shingai Thornton, Yaniv Tal, Philip Stehlik, Protocol Labs, and The Graph.
Thank you to my Patrons for your support from 2017 to 2026. It gave me the freedom to follow my curiosity and search for impactful niches. Shutting the Patreon down now. (Full list of supporters here.)
Thank you to Roote’s full set of board members: Jasmine Wang in 2022, then Stephanie Bachar, Sophia Roman, and Taylor Want (2023–2026). Thank you for watching my overly long Loom videos and for your feedback on this very email. And rest in peace Vanessa Slavich, our first board member and a beautiful, thoughtful soul.
Thank you to all the Roote employees in 2022 for being game to jump on a weird ship. I’m sorry I sank it. Thank you for understanding as I figured out myself and what Roote should be.
Thank you to all my coaches. To my accountability coach, Rob. To my life coach, Nadia. To my health coach, Jill. To my PT, Jaimie. I need all the guidance I can get.
Thank you to my family for everything. To my dad & stepmom and to my brother & sister-in-law. For supporting me when I’m down and challenging me when I’m up. (And of course, love to the extended fam too.)
Thank you to my friends for laughter and vulnerability. I am so glad that playfulness begets playfulness and connection begets connection.
And of course, to my cat, Diego.
I am blessed.
…
I’m not sure what I’ll do next.
I’ve been working through a nerve pain saga for the last 6 months. It’s been intense. I could write a whole separate post, and I might. But suffice it to say, I do not wish chronic nerve pain on my worst enemies.
So I’ll start with my health.
Then I plan to start looking for a new job in July. Not sure what exactly.
Maybe I’ll invest with a VC firm or grant with a nonprofit foundation. Maybe I’ll help the societal impacts team or data team of a big AI lab. Maybe just cook with a cracked startup.
The most important thing is people. I want to work for someone I respect & admire and who believes in me. I’m looking to have fun too. Almost certainly in San Francisco.
Likely in an AI-shaped hole, with a large token budget, managing infinite minds with a thin harness and fat skills. Leverage.
Excited to see where I can help. There’s a Rhys-shaped hole somewhere. Please reach out if you’d like to chat!
Thank you to all the teachers who came before me. To all teachers in all realms. To all beings in all realms. I give it all back.
ॐ ॐ ॐ गुरुर्ब्रह्मा गुरुर्विष्णुर्गुरुर्देवो महेश्वरः गुरुः साक्षात्परं ब्रह्म तस्मै श्रीगुरवे नमः
Warmth,
Rhys ❤️