Move over cat videos, YouTube has a new series that’ll satisfy our need for midday adorableness and make us smarter. “Explain Like I’m Five” is a new web series from the wildly popular content aggregator, Reddit, that explains topics, such as existentialism and the Syrian war, through giggly conversations with five year olds. Watch the first episode on Nietzsche’s existentialism, below
The hybrid of animation and live-action narration is part of a broader experiment in creating original YouTube videos out of Reddit’s most popular content. That YouTube is sponsoring (i.e. paying for) the videos is likely related to its previous $100 million foray into original premium content. In the past, YouTube selected top-notch creative talent, such as The Office‘s Rainn Wilson. YouTube appears to be taking the opposite approach with Reddit, creating multimedia content out of what’s already popular.
While the videos don’t move beyond the basic facts about each topic, the material is memorable enough that I’ll probably actually remember it. Indeed, it was Einstein who said, “If you can’t explain it to a six year old, you don’t understand it yourself.”