What happened to Brad Traversy?

I've been dealing with vestibular migraine, which is basically 24/7 dizziness, vertigo. Some days are are so bad I can't even walk. You know, I've been getting a lot of questions about my health and stuff. Just know that I'm not I'm not dying. I'm not like deathly ill or anything, but I'm I'm making it through and uh it's bearable and and that's, you know, that's all I can ask for right now is is to be able to function. I think that it's it's even more complicated for someone that already has like depression and anxiety like myself. It's really isolating. I mean, I like being by myself, but it's not healthy. It's not good for me. All right, it's time to address the obvious question. Where the heck is Brad? And who the heck is this guy talking to us? Me. I'm referring to me. We've seen your comments and we love that you love Brad. Some of you have made that abundantly clear. Well, let me put your minds to ease and explain what's going on with Brad, where he's at, and of course, what's going on with the channel. So, Brad is very much alive and well. And no, he did not sell off the channel. Well, not exactly. It's a little bit more complicated than that. So, let me explain. Brad is still very much active and working on videos and courses. After all, it hasn't been that long since he's posted his last video. But, there are going to be some changes made to the channel that are going to be good for everybody who's been a supporter for some time, and of course, Brad himself. So, for nearly a decade, Brad has dedicated his life to putting out high quality videos. From in-depth series to crash courses and full-on projects on YouTube, totaling over 224 million views to date and also being one of the top Udemy instructors in the world with over 500,000 students. All of this while raising a family and dealing with personal issues that Brad has been very open about. If you've been following the channel for some time, you've probably already noticed that Brad isn't posting as much as he used to with longer gaps in between these videos. And one of the things that people don't realize is that Brad has been a one-man operation for years. So it shouldn't come as a surprise to anyone that dealing with all these courses and having to work on the content, update them while managing hundreds of thousands of students and still maintaining a YouTube channel with all the production that goes into it would cause someone to burn out. So this has been the reason for the change over the last couple of years and the pace in production. The good news is that Brad has made impressive steps in his personal life and in his health and is doing much better. He's changed up his diet. He's hitting the gym and honestly looks like an entirely new Brad. But just because things got better doesn't mean that it's a good idea for him to go back to the same old schedule. And this is where I come in. If you haven't seen my videos on this channel, I've done several guest posts already here dating back to over 5 years now. And I also run a personal channel called Dennis Ivy where I make very similar content to what Brad is doing here. I also have Udemy courses. In fact, Brad and I have actually collaborated on a course together. And Brad was actually one of the main inspirations for me creating my personal channel, and this has been something that we've really bonded over from our first collaboration. Brad and I really just kind of hit it off and become good friends since that time. We've even met up in person one time when I flew out to Boston to visit him and we just went out for a couple of drinks, had a great time. But we've really got to know each other in this process. And over the last 2 to 3 years, we've constantly stayed in contact. We've always shared different things that we were working on and always discussed what's been going on in our life, our YouTube channels, and always just shared ideas along with personal struggles that we were both going through. It was during these conversations where Brad expressed the desire to change something and even floated the idea of potentially quitting YouTube altogether. And this was because it was getting unhealthy to constantly try to keep up with the latest YouTube algorithm changes while still trying to manage his courses. Well, we both realized that we actually shared a lot of the same challenges where we both loved making videos. We loved teaching, but it was just getting too much. For Brad, it was trying to keep up with YouTube and courses. And for me, well, I still have a full-time job that I have to maintain. As these conversations continued, we both realized that combining our efforts actually made a lot of sense and we got serious about the idea of partnering together and running the channel as a team and not just in a collaborative effort, but really strategizing and running it together. One of the things that made us nervous about this decision was the response that we would get from you, the viewers. After all, the channel doesn't exist without your support. And what made us more confident about this was looking back at my past collaborations on this channel, those videos that I've posted seem to be received quite well. And at this point, one of the top videos on the channel is still my 7-hour Django course from over 3 years ago now, I think. And we've read the comments, we see how those are received, and it seems like a natural fit. The style that I teach in, I try to keep as similar as Brad as possible. After all, I did learn from him a lot. So, I try to keep that same format, and it seems like the right fit. So, the decision was made to officially partner up and take the channel to the next level. And that's where we're at now. So, what's changed and where do we go from here? Well, for starters, Brad is still going to be posting videos on the YouTube channel, so don't worry about him going away anytime soon. What we decided on was to hire a few people to help out with the daily workload here at Traversy Media. So for starters, we added Soloma as a developer advocate and community manager. And her job will be to follow along with courses, see where the common issues are, and provide support to the community, and also make sure that she's watching the Discord server and staying engaged there. So, we're going to see a lot more involvement in the community. With that, we're also going to hire a couple of developers and a few interns to make sure that production goes a lot faster with the project. So, anytime Brad makes a video of some sort or if I'm making that, it takes a lot of effort to build a demo and we're going to get some assistance with that. So, the production could be much faster, course content can be written faster and we can speed up the entire production process. So, the result of this is going to be a massive reduction in workload for myself and Brad and of course less stress in making videos. Now, on the channel, you're going to see a collaborative effort between myself and Brad. We'll both be posting videos and we're even going to collaborate on some courses together. So that means that future courses will be produced by myself and Brad. We'll both work on the content, decide on what's good, and then modules will be shared between the both of us and we'll see what the response is like. In a future course, you might see Brad teach one module, then I'll jump in and teach the next section, and we'll just alternate between us. And this way, it's going to take a lot of the stress off of both of us and hopefully get the production done a lot faster. In some cases, one of us will go a little bit quieter on the channel when we're working on a course or maybe making some updates. For example, over the last two months, Brad has been working on the modern React course, which is going to launch within the next few days here of posting this video. So, me making videos here and filling in this gap on YouTube has allowed him to dedicate 100% of his effort to that specific course. So, that'll be linked up in the video description, by the way. Make sure to check that out. Another big change that you're going to see is bringing back the guest creator series that was so popular in 2020 and 2021. So, for those of you that weren't following the channel at that point, this is where we had a lot of other tech YouTubers and just experts in their space join the channel and teach on their relative topics. So, we want to go ahead and kick things off, bring that series back on. And I'm hoping to have Aaron Francis come on here as the database expert and teach about Postgress. And I'm also talking to Danny Thompson, hopefully getting a video out of him about interviewing in the age of AI. So, I want to kick things off with those two and then hopefully bring on a lot of other creators. So, if you have creators you want to recommend and topics you want them to talk about, make sure to leave that down in the comment section. I would love to see what your recommendations are. So, that's the new direction of the channel. More videos, improved courses, a slight change in style, but you'll still have the same old Brad. Now, I know some of you won't like this, but I hope you understand this is a change that needed to be made in order to first of all keep Brad healthy and also keep the channel thriving. I know some of you will unsubscribe. Totally get it. This is not what you maybe originally subscribed for, but I hope to keep the channel thriving. And with that being said, we'll see you all in the next