Help Me Bring Now I Know to YouTube

Hi!

It’s Thursday afternoon, Eastern (U.S.) Time, at least. Which is weird because Now I Know usually comes out in the morning. But today — today is different.  The short version, if you don’t want to read my pitch below, is simple:

• I want to start a Now I Know YouTube channel.
• It’s expensive!
• I’m asking you to support a Kickstarter campaign to get it, well, kickstarted.

Sold already? Great! Hit the button below to help out. (If not, read on!)

I’ve written more than 1,000 surprising, strange, and interesting stories over the years and I’m always looking for other ways to spread the fun. Like the two books and even one of those fact-a-day calendar things. But video? That’s been a struggle. I’m not a video producer and in any case, it takes a ton of time to publish the email newsletter. So I can’t do this myself. I’ve talked to a lot of promising collaborators over the years, but those would-be channels all fizzled.

Except for this one — if you help out. Here’s a video about the channel, and you’ll see that it isn’t me hosting. That’s Matt Silverman, a friend of mine who makes awesome videos on the Internet.

I’ve known Matt for years and a few months ago, we started talking, and then we started working. Now, I have a model that works. It just needs a push. Writing emails, that’s not so expensive (and I can do most of it myself). Making videos? Yeeeeeeeeeesh.

My goal: I’m hoping to raise $8,750. That funds the creation of ten videos and covers the fees Kickstarter charges me to use their platform. And the videos are going to be good. I know because we have some done already! Here’s the first one — click here if it doesn’t come through in your email.

Convinced? Great! Here’s another chance to hit the button. Not ready yet? No worries! I have some cool rewards lined up for people who back the project.

Rewards are simple: pledge enough money, you get something back. Something cool, I hope, but a lot of it is to taste. Here’s an incomplete list of things you can get via the Kickstarter campaign:

• Gratitude!
• Signed copies of my books
• The first chapter of a fiction novel I’ll almost never certainly be finishing.
• A shout-out in the video from Matt.
• My grandmother’s baked ziti recipe. To be clear, it’s the recipe only — I’m not offering to cook for you. And really, it’s not the original recipe, but an adaptation of it that we use now.

If we get to $8,750, we’ll make more videos. If not, we probably won’t. If we get to a lot more than $8,750, we’ll make a lot more videos. If we get to $3.5 billion, I’ll try to buy the Mets. And yeah, we’ll make more videos, too. So, once more….

Thanks!

Dan

(I’ll be back with a Weekender tomorrow.)