John Oliver has spent a lot of time talking about Donald Trump. Oliver has finally––it seems––ripped Trump to enough shreds that he doesn’t need to talk about Trump anymore. So Oliver has turned his attention to Mike Pence. Some people believe that if Trump were to be removed from office, a Pence presidency might be worse. Hard to believe? Oliver makes the case that Pence’s hardline stance on social issues could be very problematic indeed.

We’ve all seen them before: someone tries to eat five saltines in a minute, or eat a teaspoon of cinnamon, or eat God only knows how many ghost chilis. Why do people put themselves through these things, film them, and then put them on the internet? And why do they seem to go viral? It has a lot to do with the stages of development of the human brain, according to scientists. Teenagers are especially susceptible to these challenges because their brains aren’t finished developing. 

Make the world a better place doesn’t have to be a pain in the neck. Usually altruism means sacrificing a benefit for yourself in order to benefit someone else, but this video makes the case that improving the world is, for the first time in human history, in everyone’s best interest. That’s because, until recently, resources were a zero sum game. If I get a resource, you don’t. But now, it’s possible to get resources by helping others. 

You’ve probably heard pundits and critics bash social media all day long. But that doesn’t stop you from logging onto Facebook every time you have a free moment––and then you stay logged on. Then you browse over to Instagram, and then you hit up Twitter…and then it’s back to Facebook. But maybe this video will convince you to take some time off the social media. This videos combines a bunch of a footage of social media execs (and former execs) describing how they intentionally designed their product to hack your brain. 

Green screens are the source of most internet video humbuggery. You might have seen the video of the cloak of invisibility from China. Even though the video maker himself said the video cloak wasn’t really an invisibility cloak, people still believe it and asked Captain Disillusion to prove it wrong. Since the task was so easy for him, he opted instead to give a quick historical overview of the green screen technology and explain how it works. 

A movie’s ending defines its success. A movie you enjoyed all the way though can be ruined by a bad ending. Likewise, a movie you didn’t really like can be salvaged with a good ending. Movies that stick with you have endings that are hauntingly ambiguous. In Bruges, Total Recall, Get Out, Fargo, and Shutter Island are all movies like that––they leave some wiggle room in their endings that leave us wondering. Take a look at this video which might help you might sense of those endings. Don’t worry, you don’t need to worry about liking the movies less. You’ll like them more after this.

The Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, commonly called the Mormon church, practiced polygamy until 1904 shortly after Utah was admitted into the union as a state. While the main LDS church abandoned polygamy, some offshoots maintained the practice. The Fundamentalist Church of Jesus Christ of Latter-day Saints, or FLDS, emerged in 1929 precisely because of the LDS’ abandonment of polygamy. This video tells the story of one family––comprised of many wives––who are trying to rebuild their lives after their husband was arrested. 

In the wake of Jonestown in the 1980s and 1990s, Americans were terrified of “cults.” Sociologists worked to understand why people joined “cults” (a poorly defined, polemical term whose technical meaning is far different from the colloquial usage). These scholars suggests that people who joined cults were lacking something in their lives––this was called the relative deprivation of religious affiliation. But you’ve probably already spotted the problem: everyone is lacking something. And when you actually look at the people who join religious groups that society deems extreme or inappropriate, you see that those people are incredibly normal. This video explores how the everyday Jane or Joe can find her or himself in an extreme religious group.

Cycling is popular in many European cities, but not in London. In fact, if you ask most Londoners if they would bike on their fair city’s streets, you’ll probably get quite the “you’re nuts” look. So why don’t people cycle in London? Well, in a word, it’s terrifying. The city streets were designed for cars––literally. When cars became economically viable for many people, the city was redesigned with cars in mind and not bicycles. 

The Death Star was the Galactic Empire’s greatest weapon. Minus that one flaw that enabled a one-man ship to destroy it, but that’s not the point here. This video examines what it would cost to build and operate a Death Star. For starters, the steal for the space station alone would cost 852 quadrillion dollars. That’s 852 followed by fifteen zeros. And that’s just to produce the steal. The daily cost of running the Death Star, in terms of its energy only (that means not man power or food or anything else) would be 7.8 octillion dollars. 

Watching the Blue Angels or the British version, the Red Angels, is one of the most incredible things most of us will ever witness. The amount of training that goes into their formation flying is insane: seven months before a public appearance and four months of the exact same routine. This video explains how the pilots keep in such close formation with a POV, fly-along experience and with helpful comparison to things we all have experienced, like driving on the freeway. 

Have you ever noticed that we tend to depict aliens in the same kinds of ways? Even the most incredible, fantastical depictions of aliens look vaguely human or vaguely terrestrial animal. There’s a reason for that. Science fiction movies are about exploring the human condition through the mirror of alien civilizations and alien contacts. We need aliens to look kind of like something that we know so that we can vaguely see ourselves in those creatures but with enough distance so things don’t hit too close to home.