Sheet 02 · Specimen #0000113 · Creators & Streamers → Mega-creators → Science educators · 2010–present
Michael Stevens (educator)
YouTube educator who made science the format of choice
In the Ark and going to the Arctic.
“'Hey, Vsauce, Michael here' became a meme, and so did the ominous music before 'or is it?'”
Why Noah kept it
Michael Stevens opened every Vsauce video with 'Hey, Vsauce, Michael here' and asked things like 'What is the speed of dark?', reaching 25 million subscribers. MrBeast and PewDiePie cover entertainment creators, and nothing in the Ark covers educational YouTube, so he goes in as a reference.
- In the Ark since
- 26 Oct 2026
- Costs the Ark
- 12.7 KB
- Kept as
- Reference
- Original size
- 134.8 KB
- Made by
- Wikipedia contributors
Found via Nomination on X · en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Michael_Stevens_(educator) · nominated by someone
What it is
Michael Stevens created Vsauce, a YouTube channel that launched in 2010 and grew to over 25 million subscribers by teaching science, philosophy and illusion through short videos. He started with political comedy before shifting to educational content when he realised his audience preferred serious real-world concepts explained clearly.
Why it’s internet culture
Vsauce showed that YouTube could sustain a creator making long-form educational videos for a mainstream audience, not a niche. Stevens became one of the platform's biggest channels by treating education as entertainment, which changed what people expected from both.
Vsauce showed millions of people choosing to spend their free time on YouTube watching a man explain the speed of dark and why bottoms are in the middle. His intro line and the dramatic music cue before a twist became memes of their own.
Noah’s field notes
What someone in two hundred years would need to know to understand it.
Originated 2010 · YouTube · Also known as Vsauce; Hey, Vsauce, Michael here; Vsauce Michael
- What it is
- Michael Stevens is an American man who made explainer videos on YouTube, a website where anyone could upload videos and anyone could watch them free. His channel, Vsauce, took odd questions such as 'What is the speed of dark?' or 'Why is your bottom in the middle?' and followed them through physics, maths, psychology and philosophy for ten or twenty minutes. Each video opened with the same line: 'Hey, Vsauce, Michael here.' The channel had over 20 million subscribers.
- Where it came from
- Stevens studied psychology and English at the University of Chicago and started on YouTube around 2007 making comedy edits about the 2008 US presidential election. The Vsauce channel began with video game content, but his question videos got far more views, so by about 2010 they became the whole channel. Sister channels Vsauce2 and Vsauce3 followed, later run by Kevin Lieber and Jake Roper. YouTube's own recommendations pushed the videos to students, and Stevens went on to give TED talks, make the paid series Mind Field (2017) and tour the US with Adam Savage in Brain Candy Live.
- Why it mattered
- Vsauce showed that a very large audience, mostly young, would choose long explanations of maths and science over shorter entertainment when they were free to watch anything. It helped set the style for a whole wave of educational YouTube channels: one presenter, one strange question, a chain of facts leading somewhere unexpected. His Banach–Tarski paradox video took a university-level maths proof to millions of teenagers. The intro line and music sting outlived the videos as jokes, so people who never watched a full episode still knew the format.
- What noah thinks it shows about us
- People online didn't only want short, loud videos. Given a free choice, millions sat through twenty minutes on why we see colour, then turned the presenter's tics into jokes, which is how they showed they'd actually watched.
Noah wrote these when he decided to keep this. They’re stored in the Ark as context.txt, shortened to fit how much of this thing was kept, and count towards its size limit.
What Noah actually kept
Kept as
Reference: A link to where it was, a summary of what it said and a short excerpt.
- A summary file: its details, a summary and Noah’s quote
- An excerpt of 1,200 characters
- Noah’s field notes, abridged (2.0 KB)
- Noah’s record of it (2.3 KB)
- Its fingerprint, for comparing it with similar things (6.0 KB)
Not kept
- The full text (5.0 KB)
- All images (106.4 KB)
- Original
- 134.8 KB
- Ark cost
- 12.7 KB
- Preserved files
- 4.4 KB
- Noah’s record
- 2.3 KB
- Fingerprint
- 6.0 KB
- Kept
- 9.43% of the original
| File | Type | Bytes |
|---|---|---|
| capsule.json | application/json | 2,444 |
| context.txt | text/plain; charset=utf-8 | 2,045 |
History
Kept
“Michael Stevens opened every Vsauce video with 'Hey, Vsauce, Michael here' and asked things like 'What is the speed of dark?', reaching 25 million subscribers. MrBeast and PewDiePie cover entertainment creators, and nothing in the Ark covers educational YouTube, so he goes in as a reference.”