Hello.  So.  It's Esther Day, but in addition to being Esther Day, a thing you didn't know, why would you is that it is the 6 year of anniversary of the first person I ever hired.  We do a bunch of stuff and we certainly don't do it alone.  Six years ago, a little bit before six years ago, six years and a couple weeks ago, I put an ad on Craigslist that was like, hey, I need an assistant, somebody who can, like, get coffee and do dry cleaning but also has experience with bookkeeping and with management of people, maybe hiring people, 'cause this was the first time I did that and it's the only time I did it alone.  Somebody who could consult on strategy, who could run a warehouse, who could write really good letters and communicate really efficiently, maybe even somebody who'd drive a tour bus, if that came up.  I remember asking, could you drive a tour bus?  I don't know, I was just like, I need somebody who can do everything, and I got a lot of applicants, some really interesting people.  This town is full of great people.  One of the people you've heard of, maybe, Emily Graslie, who we ended up doing some other stuff with, but didn't hire her for this job, but the person I ended up hiring was named Michael Gardner, and he was, you know, not just had a lot of the experience we were looking for and a really effective communicator, really enthusiastic, high energy person.  Not only had he briefed himself on all the cool stuff we had done and was really excited about it, but he'd had this attitude of like, I see what you've done and we can do such cool things with that, and it's like, you gotta kinda be a dangerous thing, like, you don't necessarily wanna go in for the person who's feeding you the best line, so that wasn't the only reason, but it was a really good line he was feeding me, and it turned out to be a very like, a real one, a fruitful one, we kept pulling it in and there kept being fruits on it.  

Just a few weeks after I hired Michael, we got some grant money from YouTube to make SciShow and CrashCourse and so immediately we were already hiring more people after that and there's no way I could have figured out how to do all that stuff if it hadn't been for Michael.  People ask me all the time, like, how do you do so many things.  It's not just me and Michael has always been pretty behind the scenes.  I don't think many people know his name who are aware of the work that we do, and while at the moment, a ton, like, dozens of really amazing effective cool smart wonderful people help make all the things that we make, the first step that we, that I took, was Michael, and one of the most important steps I've ever taken and he has continued to move, like, starting at assistant and then he  ran our production company and then he's helped with everything and now he's basically leading VidCon.  
We have done so much stuff together in the last ten years.  Michael is now been a partner in this stuff for the most of the time that I've been on YouTube.  I cannot believe how much cool stuff we've done.  We've both been through some fantastic amazing highs and some pretty low lows through this whole process, so we've been through these hard times together, and somewhere along the process he went from being like, one of my most important business partners and strategists to being one of my most important friends.

So in the spirit of Esther Day, I'm saying this out publicly, I'm saying it on the internet, I am so lucky to have a Michael Gardner in my life, and  I hope that we are all super grateful to have the wonderful friends that we have in our lives.  Michael, I love you, you're the best.