Good morning Hank, it's Tuesday. So listen, I've been helpin’ out with some of your jobs on account of the chemotherapy, and I kind of can't believe that you do all of this. Like it just sort of strains the imagination that you are the CEO of our educational media company Complexly and of dftba.com and the founder of the Awesome Socks and Coffee Clubs and Sun Basin Soap. And also that you're the host of CrashCourse, SciShow, Journey to the Microcosmos, vlogbrothers, and a bad advice podcast. As we used to say in French class back home in Alabama, “Ce n'est pas possible.” 

Like Hank, you often credit me for coming up with the idea for CrashCourse, which is fair because I did come up with the idea for CrashCourse. I loved making educational videos on vlogbrothers, but I wanted to do it in a bigger and better way, and I recognize that we couldn't do that alone. But the thing is having that idea did not get CrashCourse 15 billion YouTube subscribers, over 1.8 billion views, and a place in many American high schools and colleges. Because ideas, to borrow a line from W.H. Auden, make nothing happen. Or at least they make nothing happen on their own. Ideas matter but for things to actually happen, logistics and systems have to build up, people have to collaborate. There's often even a need for, and I-I struggle with how hard this word is for me to say, but there-there's sometimes a-a need for meetings. So yeah maybe I came up with the idea for CrashCourse, but I-I didn't make it happen, and in fact, I couldn't have made it happen. Not only because I really dislike a meeting.

For CrashCourse to become real, and especially for it to remain real, it needed you Hank and also thousands of other collaborators who you could welcome into that process. Writers, editors, curriculum consultants, animators, teachers, and the thousands of people who support CrashCourse every year which allow us to keep making it free for everyone forever. Now some of those people support us by Patreon, but many support us via, drumroll please, the CrashCourse Coin, which was your idea Hank. And usually it would be Hank talking about the CrashCourse coin, but this year you get me: Great Value Hank Green. This year's crash course coins, which are available only for the next 11 days. were minted in Arkansas from hand-engraved dyes, and gosh are they beautiful. This year's engraving was inspired by this photograph taken by the JWST. if you held a grain of sand at arm's length, that's about how much of the sky we're seeing here, and yet it is vast, teeming with galaxies that we’re only just learning how to see.

And for me, the coin image represents how learning can illuminate unseen areas of ourselves and our universe, and it also represents how acquiring and building knowledge can lead to ever more acquisition and building of knowledge. And I think that's how breakthroughs in technology and understanding really happen. Not with one brilliant person having one brilliant idea, but with many many people having ideas and working together. Like a few human lifetimes ago, we didn't even know there were galaxies, and now we know that smudge is a galaxy.

This year we're minting four CrashCourse coins: One for three-year patrons, one a $100 coin that supports 2,000 CrashCourse learners, a limited edition $500 coin that supports 10,000 learners, and an even more limited edition $1,000 coin that supports 20,000 CrashCourse learners. Each of these coins is minted on a different metal and some come with signed thank you notes, but the main thing is they're all amazing and incredibly important to CrashCourse's ability to fulfill its mission. And I mean that. This is not like some tiny slice of a massive corporate pie. The Patreon and coin campaigns represent the single largest slice of the annual CrashCourse budget. Like this year, thanks to support from the coin, we launched CrashCourses in Black American history, botany, biology, and CrashCourse on español among many others. I've been the reluctant and temporary CEO of this enterprise for about 18 days, and so I feel like I can say with some authority that this just would not be possible without support from our viewers. So thank you. If you can afford to get a coin, and of course no worries if you can't, crashcoursecoin.com. 

Hank, after a couple weeks of having a small portion of your jobs, I am of course impressed by your astonishing productivity and your commitment to bring beautiful and interesting things into the world. But I do think I've begun to at least glimpse how you do it, which is that you don't do it alone, or even anywhere close to alone. You do it with a huge array of colleagues and collaborators, and together you're able to make something that none of us would be able to make alone. That's the story of CrashCourse, it's the story of JWST, and it's the story of how almost everything worth doing gets done, together. So you can help us reach more learners with CrashCourse's resources, crashcoursecoin.com.

Hank, I will see you today, actually. So that'll be nice.