I'm Alan Alder and this is Clear and Vivid. Conversations about connecting and communicating.

We're not doing science education. You're not an expert on anything after watching all

videos but hopefully you can appreciate something more. You're like having fun watching

it and your curiosity is sparked and you then go on to read a book or watch more videos

to get more in depth of it but sparking curiosity and making science palatable for big

general audience. That's like the goal.

That's Philip Deutmer. His goal of igniting the curiosity of a general audience has succeeded

in a huge way. On his YouTube channel called Courtskizakht, we'll get to that name in a minute.

His videos are on topics ranging from the immune system to climate change and they've

been viewed over a billion times. So many in fact that on the day we talked that was already

way out of date on Courtskizakht's actual viewership.

This is really great. You are a premier science communicator. Is it true that you have over

14 million subscribers on YouTube and 1 billion views?

No, I'm afraid it's by now at 17 million subscribers and 1.6 billion views.

17 million subscribers. That's amazing and you do it by making difficult things clear.

So I think for my sake and anybody else who doesn't speak German, what does Courtskizakht

mean?

It's two words, Courtskizakht and it's bait like the one-to-one translation would be

in short but like the more colorful translation is in a nutshell.

So this premier explainer of science started out as a high school dropout, is that true?

That is true actually. I didn't care for school in particular. I didn't have a good time

at school. So as many people I compensated by being a bad kid I guess. My voice got

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