As a self-professed perfectionist, the important thing wasn’t necessarily quality, but quantity…and the fact that he was finishing something. In 2014, he forced himself to make a song every day, five days a week.

His website, which launched that same year, looked like it was made in the late ’90s. It contained everything he ever made, all the way back to the early 2000s. He posted everything exclusively on his site until a friend suggested he try YouTube.

“I don’t really like streaming, actually,” he said on the H3 Podcast. “I like to be able to pause [videos] and horse it around and see what you’re dealing with, so I didn’t really like YouTube.”

Despite his reservations, he did it anyway. He joined Vine, too, where he posted ultra-short gems, such as “still a piece of garbage,” and gained some popularity there. Since then, he’s maintained his strict schedule which means he doesn’t “have time to do anything but make music,” as he said in his H3 interview.

Things really changed for Wurtz in early 2016 when he posted a video called “history of japan,” which boils down the entire history of the country into a 9-minute long, frenetic, animated masterpiece.

It took him 14 weeks to create, and when it came out, the piece blew up online. Wurtz’s video now has more than 44 million views on YouTube.

In May of the next year, Wurtz posted a sort of sequel about the history of the entire world, which took even longer to create and racked up even more views. The internet went wild, the video made YouTube’s list of top trending videos of the year, and Wurtz’s internet fame was cemented.