On Weird Rabbit Holes 🐰

Everything clicks for Jordy McNeill

Commentary creator Jordy McNeill joins our “25 Calls” lineup / Photo illustration by Moy Zhong

blog.twenty-five // Twenty-five blogs feels fitting. I’m writing this on Saturday. By the time you’re reading this, I’ll be twenty-six.

Objectively-speaking, it’s been a weird quarter-century to be alive. So much seems to happen every day that if you blink, you might miss it—it being the latest unhinged Elon Musk tweet or A.I. slop. This might be a sign of my increasingly old age, but I still remember the days when the threat of a TikTok ban seemed like a quaint meme.

As of today, that app is finally experiencing its long-teased Viking funeral, setting sail back across the Pacific Ocean while Mark Zuckerberg gleefully films the flames from his Ray-Ban Metas. The “For You” Page may have disrupted our means of communication many moons ago; still, uncharted Internet waters await us. If early indicators are to be believed, the World Wide Web is set to shift a whole lot more to the right.

I’m getting ahead of myself, however. During my quarter-century on this spinning globe of ours, there’s been plenty of grass touched. And as I wrote in November, while the Internet is real life, it doesn’t have to be. It’s past time we built our communities—and ourselves—back up by re-investing in civic life. At the very least, that’s the world I’d like to live in.

Which brings us back to “Twenty-Five Calls for 2025.” To recap, this series emerged from our mission to Make the Internet Feel Smaller. Through the zines we drop, the journey we document, and the gatherings we host, we’d like to extend an invitation into this little creative neighborhood we’re building. By the end of our “25C” series, we hope you feel inspired to pick up the phone and catch up with a friend, too.*

You can follow along @powderblueworld on Instagram and YouTube, where we’ll be rolling out our audiovisual conversations from this project. In the meantime, here’s my call with Jordy McNeill.

— NGL

P.S. Last blog, we shared our convo with lifestyle creator Linh Truong. We talked brutalism, being reincarnated as a cat, and visiting “the motherland.” You can read it here.

P.P.S. No “Five Things I Think (I Think)” column this week. I’ll be back next Sunday.

Photo via Jordy McNeill / YouTube

Jordy McNeill is a commentary creator and video producer based in Plainfield, Illinois. She shares deep-dive videos that explain pop culture phenomena—and sometimes even answer life’s greatest unsolved mysteries, such as “Is The Tinkerbell Movie Problematic?”

The following conversation has been edited and condensed for clarity.

Nate Graber-Lipperman: Hi Jordy! What was your biggest creative win of 2024?

Jordy McNeill: At the beginning of 2024. I had no idea what I was doing, really. I feel like a lot of people say that. I had found success with my channel in the past, but I still didn't understand why or how or where I was going to go with it in a way that felt fulfilling.

And so I feel like 2024 was the year of me just thinking of an idea, doing it, and learning. Did I like this experience, or did I not like this experience—and why?

In September, it was so weird. I'm sitting in my childhood bedroom, the place where these dreams started. Maybe that's where it all aligned and clicked. I said to myself, oh, I know exactly what I want to be doing, and I feel confident in what I'm doing. That's the first time ever in my life, even as I’ve been making videos for so long.

NGL: Sounds like you were able to let go of some of the external pressure, too.

JM: When it comes to numbers, subscribers—How fast am I growing? Am I getting the views that I want?—I let all of that go and really just focused on fulfilling that desire I had, aligned with the little click that happened. That just, like, changed the way I felt about making videos and my entire experience with my audience

Right after I had this realization, I was watching Drew Gooden, who is one of the reasons I started my channel. I’m watching this video that he posted two minutes ago while working on one of my videos. And then I look over and I'm in his video. I’m like, This is the craziest thing that I've ever experienced.

He was talking about YouTube and how it’s a platform built on people just talking about weird things they love—people just being their authentic selves. Things that you would have never known about if you didn't watch this video.

The video of mine he referenced…I loved making it, but it wasn’t a good video, you know? But I had that moment of, Wait, I feel really good about what I'm doing—even though it isn't about rocket science or anything super serious.

And these are things that were important to the ten-year-old version of myself. So I guess we make our own meaning in the world. That was just a really cool thing that happened externally to sort of solidify the feeling that I had.

Yeah, that's amazing. I know Vicky loves watching Drew and the other members of that commentary crew—Danny Gonzales and Kurtis Conner. I can see how they were inspirations for you.

That was literally like seeing…you're a writer. You have your inspirations, and if one of your inspirations told you, Hey, what you did was cool—it’s a crazy thing to experience. It had never really happened to me before.

It's so easy to say that you don’t want to be someone who has to rely on other people to feel confident. But when it's people you really respect, sending you love…that is such an amazing feeling or a sign that I'm going in the right direction.

You’ve expressed this a lot throughout our conversation, but to be more specific: What learnings are you bringing into 2025 as you look at the year ahead?

I feel like I've developed a solid foundation of confidence in what I'm doing and who I am as a person in general. I am really excited now to creatively experiment with my videos. I feel like I've sort of figured out my personality and how I can express it in my videos and my editing, but now I want to learn new things and bring those things into my videos.

I don't know what those are going to be. Maybe I'll learn how to produce a song and put that in a video. Or how to animate something. So I'm excited to just be creatively free this year and not let myself feel that barrier of I shouldn't do that, people might not like it.

Photo via Jordy McNeill / YouTube

When I talked to Daniel Steiner, he mentioned this idea that he feels like he completed Phase One—proving this thing works. Now, he’s onto Phase Two.

Sounds like there's a little bit of a similar sentiment there.

Daniel and I have had very similar journeys. I feel like our coming-of-age, creatively-speaking, is intertwined.

Any last thoughts or comments?

I guess I'm just excited to see where Creator Mag's going to go. I think it’s really unique, and just all the work that you've done so far is just, like, super important. The way you do it is very well done and fun to read.**

I appreciate that a lot. You didn't have to say that.

Well, it’s true. I get really excited about people who are doing really cool things, and you're doing really cool things.

Thanks for reading! Shoot me a reply, comment, or DM if anything resonated with you in particular—I respond to them all.

* I’ll stop repeating this come next blog. There’s just a lot of new faces here!

** We didn’t pay Jordy to say this. Pinky-promise.