Happy New Year everyone!
We are so excited to be returning to this special community space. This newsletter is where we share meetups and events, stories, and unique opportunities with you. It is constantly evolving and growing, thanks to your continued feedback and support.
We have so much in store for 2023 and bet that you do too! We look forward to sharing our upcoming projects and adventures and hearing about yours, but first, we want to reflect on some of our biggest moments from last year.
We still can’t believe the number of things we have achieved in 2022!
Over the last year, we managed to film episodes in Italy, Ghana, Cameroon, Somaliland, Syria, different parts of the US, Moldova, Poland, Nepal, France, Denmark, Russia, Costa Rica, the UAE, Austria and Ireland. Wow!
In addition to filming episodes and sharing stories from around the world, we also launched our Team Ukraine Love and Project Iceman projects.
With Team Ukraine Love we have raised nearly 800, 000 Euros and continue to collect donations. Funds have been used to purchase supplies including generators, food, medical supplies, and toiletries that have been distributed to local refugee centers.
With Project Iceman we premiered our first feature-length documentary film in Copenhagen (Denmark), Amsterdam (the Netherlands), Berlin (Germany), Paris (France), London (UK), Los Angeles (USA), New York City (USA), and twice in Toronto (Canada).
Now let’s take a look at the videos we put out: One of the most viewed videos on the Yes Theory Channel this year was Hunting Nepal’s Mad Honey That Makes You Hallucinate - HONEY HUNTERS with 9M views! We honestly couldn’t believe that one of our longest videos of the year was also our most successful, so thank you to all of you for supporting our long-form storytelling. Funnily enough, the most successful video on the Seek Channel was I Tried Nepal's Rare Hallucinogenic Honey, so we guess that you guys just really like honey 🍯. What impressed us the most is that the city of Kathmandu had the highest number of views for that video (200 000 views). If we put that into perspective, if one view equals one person, 14% of the city has watched the video. How crazy is that!?
In 2022, we expanded our Yes Theory Team welcoming 3 new hires to the team, Mélida, Diezaval and Aidan. Mélida is based in Paris and she joined the team in July as our Production Coordinator. Diezaval, or as we call her, Dez joined in September as our Social Media Editor and she is based in LA. Finally, our most recent hire is Aidan who is based in Kansas City and joined the team in December as our second Seek Discomfort editor. With our team being spread out on 3 continents and 4 time zones, it can be very difficult for all of us to be in one place. But…this year we finally did it! We got the chance to meet in Paris and attend the Paris Project Iceman Premiere.
We are excited to share with you what our ambitions are for 2023 and all the cool projects we will be tackling!
In case you missed it, just before Christmas, we uploaded a video where we got to sit down and reflect on all the things that happened over the last year. If you watch the entire video, you should be able to find a little surprise from us. 😉
2022 would not have been this successful if it wasn’t for the support that you, the community, gave us.
So let’s check out all the cool things that took place this year:
⏪2022 Newsletter Recap:
Here are some fun stats of the newsletter from 2022:
Released 19 editions of the newsletter since August
Shared a total of 50 meetups - from 22 different countries!
Introduced you to 15 people from the community that live the Yes Theory
From the 50 meetups that we shared, we want to highlight 3 that we believe embody perfectly what a Yes Theory Meetup is all about (click on the titles to read their full stories): Pizza Picnic (UAE Yes Fam), Barefoot Walk (German/French/Swiss Yes Fam) and Capture the Flag (DMV (USA) Yes Fam).
We hope that the meetups that we’ve shared in the newsletter have inspired some of you to host meetups in your local communities. If it has, please let us know because we love reading your inspiring stories!
We will soon share what our plans are for the community for 2023. We can’t wait to see how you guys get involved!
Over the last few weeks, the team took a break to rest and reset for the New Year. We are now all feeling refreshed and can’t wait to share all the plans we have for 2023! Here are some photos of how we all spent our break:
If you went on break too, tag us on Instagram (@yestheorymeetups) so we get to see how you spent your break!
With the theme of this newsletter being a recap of the year, we want you to sit down and think about:
What is one thing that you are proud of that you achieved this year?
What is something you failed at?
Share with us in the comments or reply to this email with your thoughts!
1. What is one thing that you are proud of that you achieved this year?
I learnt more about myself my strength and weakness.
2. What is something you failed at?
Communicating without reacting :-(
1. My achievement this year was simply me just being able to get to the end. This has been the hardest year yet, but (with the help of your videos) I managed to have a bright mind and stay with it. Cheers
2. I definitely failed by not being grateful for the moments that i should have. I realise now that everything is better than you think.