Hi. I'm Hank. Five years ago, I decided that I wanted there to be a show on YouTube about science, a place where people could be excited about understanding reality. I wanted it to be passionate, but accurate and skeptical as well. That idea has become SciShow, and in the face of long odds, this independent effort from a small team of creators has become the biggest outlet of science, news and information on YouTube, and one of the biggest in the world. Not to be too cocky here, but we want to do more.

But before we talk about what we wanna do, let's talk about what we do now. We, uh, film SciShow in this little studio in, of all places, Missoula, Montana. This is where we shoot all of it. If we go down this hall here, we will see the SciShow production team. Our offices, ya know, not that much to look at.

And here, we have all of the people who make the things - do the animations, upload the videos to YouTube, make it shiny so people will like it a lot. And if we go upstairs... we have Blake, who is in charge of all the content for SciShow. He writes a lot of it, and he also manages all of the freelancers that we have who are all over the world. Do you wanna say anything to our patrons?

Blake: Yes! Thank you for making SciShow possible, and not just because, you know, it keeps me out of the sun.

Caitlin: I want the patrons to know how much we are always thinking about you guys and wondering what else you want us to be working on, and what else you want.

Sam: Thank you for letting people like me and everybody I work with do something in Montana that we would usually have to move to, like, New York or L.A. to do.

Sarah: I really appreciate the level of conversation that's going on.

Megan: Your enthusiasm to learn with us is, just, so inspiring. Without you, I wouldn't be able to do this full-time and might not eat food.

Sarah: I'm glad that it's not just us. It's all three million of you subscribers.

Louey: You're gorgeous. [he blows a kiss] You're beautiful. Thank you so much.

Hank: In our first ever video where we started crowd funding, - you were off to the side of the green screen,

Stefan: I got fired, yeah.

Hank: and they threatened to fire you. But they saved you.

Stefan: I was saved! Science! We wanna make a bunch more stuff.

Hank: We wanna make a podcast and we wanna call it "Holy F king Science" We want that podcast to also be available as a new show on YouTube. We wanna share more of how we work behind the scenes with you. We also want to increase the number of SciShows and hopefully make a new one every day of the week, some in new formats like interviews, some covering new topics like psychology, either in devoted mini-series or as ongoing new episodes.

The quality of the episodes will never go down, but we hope that the number of them will go up. And with that, I would like to announce that we will be hosting a 12-hour Patreon Fund Drive Live Stream right here on the SciShow channel next Wednesday, March 2nd, from 8 am to 8 pm, Mountain Standard Time. We'll be talking about science, bringing in guests, both human and non-human, doing experiments on ourselves and our world, and doing our best to push SciShow onward into the future.

And yes, this is where you come in. Now, I wanna emphasize that if you can't, or you don't want to give, that's totally okay. There are perks to being a Patreon, and we do want to grow a great community on Patreon, but SciShow itself will always be freely available for everyone to enjoy. But, in order to grow and sustain the success of SciShow, to focus on the reality of the marvelousness of our world, and not just click-bait and sensationalism, we need help. We're a small team, and there's a big world of big media corporations out there hungrily eyeing what we have created, but we wanna remain independent and keep making accurate content centered on the reality of the awesomeness of the world, not just what's going to get the most clicks.

As always, thank you for your support, whatever form that support takes. Thank you for watching, for sharing, for subscribing and for being a part of our mission to help increase understanding of, and excitement about the world. If you wanna help us out, go to patreon.com/scishow now, and/or join us next Wednesday for our twelve-hour marathon stream.

Stefan: Thank you for allowing us to do what we do.

Caitlin: Thank you.

Louey: Thank you.

Sarah: Thank you.

Hiroka: Arigatou.

Sarah: Thank you.

Megan: Thank you.

Blake: Thank you.

Michael: Thank you.

Hank: Can you do it as if it's a lover?

Sam: Thank you... No! That's not right!