Hello friends — I was (as usual) fashionably late, but we kept this livestream super chill because it was a 1M celebration. I finally unboxed the Gold Play Button on stream, read the YouTube letter out loud, and got to say a real thank-you to you for making this happen. It still feels kind of unreal — five years on YouTube, basically the better half of my 20s — and I talked honestly about the self-doubt I still feel every time I post. The comments you leave are what make the “number” feel like actual people. Then we switched into hackathon mode and announced the prizes and top projects (shoutout to Joy and Angel for helping screen everything — and yes, they made slides at midnight). We had submissions from ~16 countries, and I walked through the top finalists, why they stood out, and how I hope they’ll use the prize money to actually ship: deployment, scaling, finding first users/clients. Highlights included an AI Pictionary game (real-time drawing recognition), a voice-based family cookbook that preserves recipes in someone’s authentic voice (multilingual + AI measurement help), and a nonprofit-focused “AI trolley problem” explorer that turns ethics into practical 30/60/90-day implementation plans. The whole theme: build useful things, keep it practical, and use AI to amplify what you can do — not to sit around worrying about replacement.