A Bunch of Friends 🏠
They did not, in fact, move out
blog.sixty-six // Something I’ve been debating is whether or not to share our longform stories—the ones we, you know, spend months reporting and writing—online.
Take my recent profile on John and Hank Green. On the one hand: I want to make the experience of reading it special, and unique. That’s why the full story has only appeared in the print zine so far.
On the other hand, it does feel like there’s an audience out there that might prefer reading our stories online. Plus, we’ve been hankering to make a beautiful website, anyway.
What do you think? I’d love to hear your take.
Anyway, scroll down for our second review from Neighborhood Watch. And for more on our mission with this new weekly series, check out our first review here.*
— NGL
P.S. Last blog, we wrote on the underrated value of speed—and reflected on our full-day storytelling event. You can read it here.
Sponsored by Fourthwall
This Guy Sold 1000+ Bottles of Hot Sauce in Five Minutes 🥵
But even if you’ve never heard of him, Will Neff is no overnight success story.
The improv-comedian-turned-gaming-personality began streaming in 2018—and has since grown a core audience among League of Legends fans.
As it turns out, they’ve enjoyed his hot sauce recs over the years, too. So when Will announced his own product line in September 2023, fans happily followed along as the streamer shared behind-the-scenes updates and initial taste tests with other creators.
Then, come January 4, Will’s hot sauce went live on his Fourthwall ecommerce shop…and it sold more bottles in 5 minutes than most retail stores do in a month.
Itching to launch your own niche brand? Get started on Fourthwall today—and receive $25 in free sample credits, on us.
Video: “5 people making a pizza with 5 hand grabbers” (2025)
Creator: bunch of friends
Review by: Nate Graber-Lipperman
I recently listened to YouTube CEO Neal Mohan’s appearance on The Town, arguably the de facto podcast for those interested in the business of Hollywood.
This review isn’t about that podcast. But it was funny hearing Mohan say, point blank, that YouTube is the culture. Our creators set the culture.
We know this. The thesis around Creator Mag resides on this, on both celebrating and evaluating what’s emerging from the Internet.**
But it also made me think about what that culture is. And it made me think about “bunch of friends”—a channel previously called “we move out soon.”
The original concept of this channel was simple. “We just moved into a house together, and our lease ends in May,” one of the roommates, Anthony Po, proclaimed last fall. “So we’re just gonna vlog.”
Hannah Bondalo ran things from the jump—coming up with silly ideas, while filming and editing the group’s misadventures around New York City***. The titles of each video pretty much sums up what happens in it; previous uploads have included “we hosted a kai cenat lookalike contest” and “harassing my roommates with 200 pictures of chill guy.”****
In other words, it’s like a friendly, neighborhood “Vlog Squad”—if David Dobrik’s gang was a heckuva lot more whole wholesome.
Which brings up to “5 people making a pizza with 5 hand grabbers.” Yup, one night, the group needed to cook dinner, so Hannah pitched a novel concept. They set out to conjure a pizza pie using just dough, cheese, sauce, and those cheap plastic things you get at a carnival.
Along the way, a chaotic, quick-cutting, five-minutes-and-fifty-six-seconds vlog emerged. One participant almost died of food poisoning; another debated whether they should also bake a roommate’s cat alongside the pizza.
And it’s…kind of great?
Some may label it brainrot. But when I think of YouTube setting the culture (at least, the culture I’d like and subscribe to) I think of “bunch of friends.” A group of adult kids using a shared project as an excuse to go do silly shit together, creating their own bubble of magic around the memories they’re creating. And there’s no secret (marinara) sauce—anyone can follow suit and host these same exact things with their friends, too.
Hannah does, however, have a full-time finance job. While that allows her to not stress about monetizing their videos, in order to keep the channel running, she passed it over to another roommate, Kieran.
There’s a broader conversation here around the art of documenting our lives. Whether we should embrace our camera-filled world or, well, solely touch grass. If the burden of appearing on users’ homepages on a consistent basis should ever match our commitment to showing up for each other in real life.
Nevertheless, we’re already all in these digital spaces…and most contemporary digital spaces use us, taking our time, money, and energy while selling off our attention to the highest bidder.
Why not use them, setting a culture of intentionality—and, for lack of a better word, fun?
Nate’s Score: 4.5 / 5
Thanks for reading! Shoot us a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—we respond to them all.
* We’re also rolling out short video reviews in tandem with each written one. Follow along on YouTube and Instagram!
** Content strategist Eric Villa even made a good point about this in a recent conversation we had with him.
*** Mostly the house in Jersey.
**** For a lore dump: Note that “bunch of friends” is an extension of the Anthpo Cinematic Universe, a group that (in turn) was responsible for putting on the Timothée Chalamet Lookalike Contest—and setting off the global lookalike competition trend.
The document vs touch grass dilemmas pretty tough, think that there is some fear in sending out things that you do with friends to the entire internet. What I usually end up doing in my friend group is just making those videos but just keeping them private or like showcasing them only to my friends but it's still a bit weird to push a camera into into a friends meetup