Good morning, John.

One thing I think people sense, but I don't say that often, is that I feel a pretty strong obligation to do good and interesting things with the tools that I have. And probably the two most impactful, uh, things that I have easy access to are one: this audience, this group of people, this community, who have supported a lot of very good and interesting things over the years. And the second probably most powerful tool is the people who work at and the things that have been by Complexly. All of the things I have been referring to as tools are human beings, but ye- I hope you understand what I mean. Crash Course, in particular, has become a pretty interesting thing in the world of educational media which has resulted in lots of people, like, knockin' on our doors to see if they can invest or partner with us in various ways a lot.

And to figure what to do with an asset like that, all you really have to do is to sort of understand the entire problem landscape of all of global education. So that should be fine. But a few years back, we did decide to start walking down a road like this and it did start with a lot of trying to figure out what the problems that students in the U.S., in particular, face. How to imagine those barriers and how to lower them. Obviously, I don't know much about that. I'm a YouTuber with a background in biochemistry. So it involved talking to a lot of people who are actually in higher education because we wanted to have a kind of thing that sort of supported on their bridge from high school to college in the U. S.

So for a little bit of context: Right now at a state school, it costs about $1,200 for a three credit course. You can also get credits while you are in high school, but sometimes those credits don't transfer, indeed, lots of these credits don't transfer easily from school to school, and figure out when and how they do is a big messy mess. And that is just one part of the big messy mess that is the entire education bureaucracy that is more complicated if you have fewer resources and also you probably have less access to information or fewer people who are around you who've been through the system before. So as we were doing our research, we identified that as actually one of the main barriers that some people just don't know a lot about how this system works, and that can result in costly mistakes. The other, like, main big barrier though, which is the one that people most often cite when they drop out of school, is cost. It's just that it costs a lot of money.

At some point in the last five years, some folks at Youtube introduced us to some folks at Arizona State University, which is a large public research university with a specific goal of judging itself, not by, like, its rejection rates and how exclusive they are, but by how many people they can include in their school. So after a lot of conversations and a lot of work from a lot of people, we ended up with a thing that's called Study Hall.

Study Hall has, like, four main parts right now. There's Fast Guides, which is like a guide to what different college majors are about, what they do for you, what people end up doing usually once you get them; How To College, which is just a Crash Course on how college works; College Foundations, which are videos that cover foundational college courses that tons of people have to take; And finally a thing that just launched this week at gostudyhall.com, which is a way of going from those college foundations course to an actual course that you're taking online that you can get transferable college credit for from Arizona State University. The videos are, of course, still free on YouTube, but if you wanna take the course, you start out by paying $25.

Once you've signed up and the course begins, the first one begins on March 7th, you could take the class with a cohort with students with faculty support, and at the end of the course, if you think that the course did a good job of teaching you and you like the grade that you got, you can pay $400 for a transferable college credit. So basically we're providing an option to get foundational course knowledge and transferable credits from a major research institution with more flexibility and at a lower cost, and, like, I kinda can't believe that's real.

The goal is not to replace college with YouTube videos. It's to look closely at the barriers and lower the ones that we can. I wish we could fix the whole system with one sweeping action, but as long as we can't do that, we gotta do what we can with what we have. So if you know folks that might be interested in this, please tell them about it. And of course thank you so much to the dozens of people who have been working on this in one way or another for years now who are at Complexly or ASU or at YouTube.

I'm so proud of the work that we've done and I'm so excited to have it out there. John, I'll see you on Tuesday.

Not making a video next week. Instead I'm gonna get a colonoscopy, so just you know tha-.