Hello, what the heck is going on?

Hello. It's Hank, this is my office at home, if you've never seen it before.

And I have some things that I'd like to say and a weird idea I'd like to pitch. I woke up on January 1, feeling a few things: tired, certainly; hungover -- actually, for once. No.

Mostly though, I was feeling grateful. A lot of you probably know that over the last year, I was diagnosed with and treated for Hodgkin's lymphoma, which is a kind of cancer, and I am now in remission. So yeah, grateful is definitely a thing that I'm feeling.

And the reason that I'm in remission is you guessed it: good, strong science. And I'd love to tell you the whole story of the science of my cancer treatment. And I'm sure that I will do that eventually.

But suffice to say, for now, I would be doing a lot worse if it were not for the care and progress of science. But you know, what happens when you do a lot of chemo is you also watch a lot of YouTube videos. So I've done that.

And I've found out there's a lot of amazing good stuff on YouTube. But I was not always happy about the sciency rabbit holes, I ended up going down. There are a lot of videos on YouTube that are just not doing the work -- like they plagiarize they don't fact check.

They exaggerate. Sometimes they straight up misinform. They never retract stuff when they get things wrong.

And they do all of it under the banner of science communication. I see this to some extent as a call for other people who are doing it well to do it better to compete with those people. And we're certainly going to be doing that in every way we can.

But there's a couple of reasons. I'm grateful around this, which is one SciShow is, in terms of audience size and viewership, still beating most of those people. Even though of course, our costs are much higher than those channels, and our team has -- there's a spider.

It has landed on the camera, which unfortunately, I cannot film for you because it -- the camera is the device that we use to do the filming. This is why I don't vacuum. I don't -- I can't -- I don't have it in my heart.

So yeah, our content costs more to make than that stuff. And our team is spending more time not less working hard to make sure we get stuff, right. I am also grateful that there are people who want to help SciShow do the work that we do.

And they find ways to do that. And we want to give them more ways to do that. More about that in a sec.

I mean, he is now on the lens, I'm going to try and take a picture. He's like sitting there watching me making the video. But SciShow right now has around 3600 people who give to the channel directly.

One thing that I know as a person who is familiar with the budget of SciShow is that we could not do the work without those 3600 people. Because of that support we have full time people writing and researching and editing scripts and editing video and doing the graphics and managing the content. He's now headed further away.

He's he's done with me, he's not interested anymore. Last year, more than 60 million individual human beings watched a SciShow video. That's not the number of views.

That's the number of unique humans. And that is more than 10,000 people for every person who directly supports us financially. One in 10,000 -- .01%.

That is a rare human. Is that a rare spider? No, it's a fairly common spider, but it is hiding in the crevice of my camera.

Those people who are doing that, because they like SciShow, and they want it to exist for themselves, certainly, but also they're doing a solid for like millions of other people who I would wager probably don't think about them that much. But I think about them all the time. And I know that that is the case for the other people who work on SciShow because we know that y'all are paying our bills.

So to start out 2024, to all the people who have ever supported SciShow. Thank you so much. We've been doing this for 12 years, and it is getting a little bit harder to compete on this platform with folks who are not, I would say, putting in the work of good accurate science communication.

I know that people want to help us do this work. And so we want to create two ways for you to do that. First, you can become a patron just like always patreon.com/scishow The lowest tier is $2 a month, which is literally 1000s of times more than we would make from you as an ad supported or YouTube premium supported viewer.

And yet, I think we can for the most part agree that it isn't like a ton of money. And so what you can do is you can just give us $60 and I will send you a signed postcard. I will put the stamp on it myself and I will take it to the post office. $60 is definitely too many dollars for a postcard, but it might be the right number of dollars depending on your situation for making sure that there is good, accurate captivating science communication available through youtube.com/scishow for everybody, not just the people who can pay, but everybody.

You won't just be paying for you. You'll be paying for 1000s of other people who probably aren't going to be grateful to you. But does that matter?

It's just just putting good out into the world. I'm going to sign 3600 of these postcards. Is that too many?

I -- probably? Probably? I don't know.

I don't know. Maybe surprise me! But if 3600 People buy them, then we will have doubled the amount that we make from crowdfunding.

So do it? The spider wants you to! Also in the comments name the spider.

I have no idea what kind of spider. It's a jumping spider. I don't know the kind we have in Montana.

We are, of course going to figure out ways to keep doing this. And to compete in an environment that has a lot of different kinds of qualities of stuff. But to have a little bit of help from the community would be super huge and would allow us to better support our team.

And to try out some new things that we are very excited about hopefully trying out in 2024. And you can get one of the postcards at the link in the description. It should be very straightforward.

You are clearly a person who cares about SciShow because you clicked on this video and you watched this far through the video. So thank you so much. I am extraordinarily grateful to you for your interest in and excitement about science.

Throughout my treatment (which obviously sucked) I kind of had the chance to think: like what do I like most about life? And wildly enough just like seeing people learn things about their world and understand it better? It's like, really high on the list.

I was shocked! I like took time off but then I found myself like writing blog posts about gravitational waves because I can't stop myself and I'm glad that you love it too. Thank you so much.

And thank you of course to the entire SciShow team who works so hard to make this show happen. What a wonderful first 12 years. Let's do 12 more, and let's see if I can get this spider to come say hi, hold on.

I have a little USB microscope. He's like, "I don't love this. You're kinda freaking me out man." He's like "no, I'm going to be on your thumb." One thing you cannot do you cannot go up my sleeve come over here.

There he is. Success. Look at this beautiful guy.

Success. I kind of can't believe we did this. So let me know what kind of spider you think that is.

And also let me know what you think its name is and then we can have a new mascot. little guy. OK I gotta edit this video so you can go back to the floor where I'm sure there's lots of stuff to eat. I won't vacuum for a while.

OK.