Hi I'm John Green and this is not Crash Course. Instead I'm here to talk about why we're hitting the pause button on our Human Geography series to go back and re-work it.

In the last few months, we've been trying to grow Crash Course - both on the curricular side of things and in terms of the number of videos we make per week - without increases to our budget or staffing and that was a mistake. It led to a rushed production schedule, inadequately edited and vetted scripts and the Human Geography videos had factual mistakes as well as too strident a tone. We wrongly lumped Jared Diamond in with racist colonial geographers and we did a bad job of explaining what environmental determinism was, before saying that it had been wholly debunked which is not accurate.

Crash Course needs to have a point-of-view but it also needs to be intellectually rigorous and to acknowledge the diversity of opinion and research within a field and we didn't do that, so we've taken the videos down and we'll be back with the Geography series in the future, that better reflects the diversity of contemporary approaches to the study of Geography.

Our biggest takeaway from this experience is that Crash Course needs to work with a larger team of educators and experts and spend more time vetting scripts so that's going to be the first change we make. That will slow down our production schedule but ultimately I think it was also improve our videos.

I also want to say thank you to the many people who have shared reasoned, thoughtful and constructive criticisms of Crash Course videos. You make the channel better for us and for all those who watch it. Snarky or abusive comments that don't come from a place of generosity are really hard to respond to with anything but defensiveness but we've been very lucky at Crash Course that there are so many kind and careful critiques and we're very grateful for them. 

Last thing, I want to be very clear that the fault for this lies with Stan and me, not with anyone else who works for Crash Course and certainly not with the presenter of the videos, Miriam. This one is entirely on us, mostly me, so I am the person you should be mad at.

I want to thank all of our staff and hosts for doing everything they can to make high quality educational videos quickly and on a tight budget and thanks to all of you for watching. Human Geography again will be back in a few months, in the mean time, there's still lots of great Crash Course to watch.

Thanks.

Bye.