I'm hungry and I want to teach chemistry.

This is crash course game crash course, Economic crash course astronomy.

It's a free educational tool for for everyone crash courses.

Vision was so big, but I do remember thinking how man, it is fun.

This is fun.

It was so fun.

If I had had this material when I was studying, it would have changed the way I learned it was being explained in this way that I actually understood it.

This is crash course government crash course, intellectual property.

Crash course.

Sociology was wild.

We were just trying to figure out what it waas Crash course.

Film history, Crash course mythology.

Crash course computer.

Fine.

I remember just having a huge smile on my face while I was watching this video.

We want to be useful to schools and teachers and students, but we also want to be useful to people who are just excited about learning because it's possibly the meaning of life.

Way back in 2006 my brother and I communicated almost exclusively over a well instant messenger.

John was a fan of weird Internet shows sports racer race in sports.

What's your power move?

It's interesting.

God bless you.

And he thought, Hey, we should do that.

Hey, John, I guess you've heard by now.

I don't power off still some glitches to work out.

I'm not going to be good at this.

When you're making is many videos, as we did.

Sometimes you just don't have any good ideas.

1230 so we decided at one point to make some educational videos.

Morning tickets Friday.

Today I share with you a story about guns, indoor tennis courts, guillotine, humorous outfits and competing historical narratives.

That's right.

It's time to learn about the French Revolution.

Hank and I got really interested in the problem of educational video online like it was expensive to make, which made it kind of impossible to make on the YouTube of that era.

Our audience would always respond very positively, and we would enjoy doing it.

It's just that it was way too much work on.

We had to pay people to do what little graphics there were, and so it just there was no way to make it work from economic perspective.

At some point, I think it may have been 2008.

John made a video about the American healthcare system.

We came upon this vlogger who had a really great rant about why, um you know, health care reform was kind of like this fat pig that he had met at this fair.

So what do you do when you have a pig that's so big you can't walk?

Either kill him, put him on a diet or keep feeding him, which is more or less with the health care debate boils down to Wow, we could really just use this voice over, make a really awesome motion graphic video, and it explains it all right in this in this narration thio us.

At that moment, he was just a really intelligent guy who was able to describe this issue really, really well.

On top of that, the audience that they have naturally been curating is a really good fit for the type of audience that we think would appreciate the work we're doing.

So we found Thought Cafe because they just decided to make an animation of a video that John made that got a lot of use, and that was really good summer summary of American health care system, and we reached out to the men were like, Can we do more of this?

And they were like, Yes, here's our budget and we were like, No, we can't For years we held on to this dream that someday we would be able to make, like, high quality educational video with cool production values that, you know, looked like YouTube but at the same time was rigorous and intellectually engaged in nuance.

Ultimately, the reason that we have to know that the square root of four is too is because it helps us to build cathedrals and think about space and make out with people.

But more on that, in a second, YouTube came to us because they wanted some more professional looking content on the site with some grant money to like get channels started up.

And we said, Well, that's awesome because we really want to make these two educational YouTube shows, size show and crash course.

John pitched me crash course and on I knew that it was an amazing idea, but it to me sounded too hard and I pitched him size show Well, hopefully YouTube will pick one of these, but I guess our ideas were significantly cheaper than some of the Hollywood production studios ideas.

So they felt like it wasn't that much of an extra risk to fund both.

Like all truly meaningful relationships, my relationship with Crash Course began with the Craigslist ad.

It was constantly looking for work.

Reading The want ads goes on Japanese television.

Once, in a roller coaster show, I found this job listing that said, Looking for an Assistant slash video assistant for New York Times, best selling author on video.

Blogger and I called my mom, who's a high school English teacher instead of you heard of this John Green guy?

She's like, Oh, yeah, he's he's the real deal Hank mentioned that he was starting a production company in Missoula, and he asked me if I wanted to work there.

And I was like, Okay, so two months later, I packed my bags into my Mustang in the winter and drove through some very snowy conditions to get myself to Missoula, Montana.

Well, I heard about crash course, I think just threw blood Brothers.

It's being a long time for a fighter on.

Then I heard about the job.

When John tweeted about it one time in 2014 and dis applied on a wind, it happened to get it.

So I had been working as a teacher and as a freelance videographer.

And then I got an email from Hank's assistant at the time, I had had a bad day or something and decided, OK, I'll respond because the sounds interesting to me.

I was a fan of John and Hank, um, in high school, And so in college, I thought that John was gonna be speaking locally and I went to that.

I was very excited and I actually met him beforehand, and we I kind of got along.

And luckily he offered me the internship.

And I've been here since.

Stan had uh, was looking for help for you, for other producers and editors, and we set up an interview, and, uh, it ended up being with John, even though I didn't realize it was gonna be with John, and I panicked a little bit, but I guess it went well enough that they hired me.

So I saw this job listing on Tumbler, and I made a green screen in my brother's bedroom and made it a very silly video explaining why they should hire me.

And then I sent it off and thought nothing would come of it.

But they hired me.

So now I'm here.

The first thing I worked on for crash course flows crash course biology, which I loved.

It also was incredibly hard because we were building the car as you're driving it.

We had the script and we had a general idea of how we wanted it to be used, but not necessarily what it was gonna look like.

Specifically, we were testing a lot of things, and it was scary, terrifying, really.

John had lots of ideas about how it should be shocked.

I kept saying to stand that I wanted it to look, um, like I was in heaven on E.

I wanted everything to be super crazy white and my face to be way over exposed and my shirt to be overexposed.

And I was like, Trust me, this is what YouTube looks like right now stand, you don't understand on.

And he was like, I think this is gonna look very blue and weird, and I was like, Stan, we're gonna do it this way, and it looked very blue and weird.

The way Hank describing to me once is that I asked him who were trying to reach because I was used to working for these online operations where the answer is always everybody just as many clicks as possible.

And he said, First, I want to make sure that people who need to know this stuff, we're going to need it and watch it and also people who are just interested in it are going to watch it.

And that was very clarifying for me.

You know, we didn't have to, uh, be click baby about it.

It was so fun to be working with Stan, working with someone I liked so much, who I respected so much and also working on something that felt bigger than me.

And in September 17 74 a group of delegates from 12 of the 13 colonies Georgia.

This is actually a memorial, a or moral A.

At least according to this guy, E.

I wonder what's in today's secret compartment?

Oh, shocking.

It's a golf club.

The writing nine find is often the hardest part.

Once we've got scripts and have shaped them up something that sounds right to us.

Wolf schedule are out of town talent to come in, Shoot the thing.

There's a very small community of science communicators on dhe.

I've been presenting science and technology for quite a number of years now in television.

Thing came to Missoula and met the team, and I just completely fell in love with the whole concept and everyone working on it for me, Brandon, Nicole and Stan.

We each you're sort of masterminding the production process of a crash course.

Siri's.

It takes us around.

An hour per episode to Film Episode 19 Mr Science Episode 21.

Take four.

The editor.

Whoever it is for that Siri's takes footage, cuts it.

The consultant then looks that make sure that we didn't say anything that was egregiously wrong or problematic.

Once we get the okay from the consultant, we send that off to thought Cafe, and they do their magic way Got the deal from Google to make start making crash course.

The first people I thought of were Thought Cafe because they're passionate because they love learning because they love to make funny little jokes in their animation.

You know that attention to detail, I think, is what makes the cafe so special.

When we were brainstorming, you know, early on about passports, we wanted to come to a style that would be easy to reproduce, and that would still be able to be expressive.

So you crash course had this thing where it was really educational and really serious, but at the same time didn't take itself seriously and has this witty, humorous side to it.

They're not just doing graphics.

They're not just realizing the script there, also inserting their own personalities into the script and adding jokes and adding teachable moments.

You have a script with a description of what should happen and then that gets passed on to an illustrator and then that all that stuff gets thrown into the animator.

So while there's the instructions, you still have this element of not so much broken telephone.

But you've got the possibility of each person sort of inserting their own their own ideas.

I think working on crash course has helped show me how difficult it is to teach people things.

Most teachers will tell you that the most effective teaching is done when students have really close personal bond with people who are teaching them, and you wouldn't think that that's possible in an online medium.

But Hank and John have proven that it is possible crash courses used by students and teachers at every level of who those people are, where they are.

It's like I'm consistently surprised to find out that there are like 10 year olds washing crash course because it's pretty complicated stuff.

But like kids are smart.

And then we have a ton of people who watch the courses just because they want to learn, not because they're trying to do well in a tester because they're trying to get a job.

They just want to learn about stuff.

I really don't think there's another resource out there for high school and college students that's free.

And as easily accessible is, most people, at least in the U.

S, can access you do.

I think, crash course still something very serious and very important, which is to provide education for everyone We knew coming out of our period of Google funding, that crash course was going to become kind of unsustainable.

Overnight equipment is expensive, people are expensive.

Talent is expensive There's just a lot that goes into making a quality product and on educational content.

You want it toe have a long life, not not just making it correct, but also making it accessible and fun and enjoyable.

All those things have a lot of work that go into them to effectively make good educational content.

I think it requires people to edit people, to write people to research people.

Thio be very engaging in camera.

You know, when you look at the budget, there aren't that many things that are like This is the big lion share of the budget.

It's a bunch of things that are all very valuable and that we need to be putting resources toward in funding you one and not lose the integrity of the videos that you're making.

So making really smart funding choices takes a lot of energy and a lot of research and trusted partners.

Crash course and PBS, to me is the most natural partnership that I could imagine.

PBS calls itself America's largest classroom, and I think crash course has the potential to be the world's largest classroom.

So Digital Studios has been around for about four years and we started because PBS on television really had an audience problem.

They had kids locked up, of course, and then it really dropped off until about 65 plus.

So we saw a real opportunity to build an audience of kind of loyal, engaged fans of PBS that probably never watched on TV.

It's a natural partnership.

It feels like, of course, we and they should be working on the same thing.

And really, we were inspired by a lot of the work that John and Hank were already doing in the education space, and we saw that people were really looking for content that was both smart and entertaining, So we jumped in.

So before we went into Crowdfunding, we had kind of two ways to get a crash course.

Siri's off the ground.

The first was obviously ad revenue.

But then there's also partnering, and we partner with PBS.

As we know, ad revenue can be very volatile, so it's up and down and you can't really depend on it.

Um, but what we can depend on is turns out crowd funding.

The biggest surprise for me when we launched our Patriot was had it worked.

I was just astonished and relieved that people valued crash course and that they were willing to support it on a monthly basis.

Anybody who has elected to give us money to produce crash course.

Mike, I'm so glad that we proved to you that we're worth that.

I don't think there is a way to adequately communicate to the people who have given money to this how meaningful and important that is.

We have brainstorming meetings, were trying to figure out how best to give back to the patrons, and mostly what we keep coming up with is that people just like crash course in there, just like supporting us.