- A bunch of you have been asking how is my head doing?
Am I fully healed yet?
And the short answer is I'm doing really really well.
But I think it's worth going back to the beginning.
I think it's important to tell the whole story
'cause I think it might help some folks
that might be going through similar struggles.
And if you've been following me for a while,
then this is an update on how things have been going
over the past year.
About 16 months ago, (tense music)
I got hit in the back of the head
by an aluminum pipe that tipped over
while I was shooting in a warehouse.
It was my own damn fault.
I put the pipe there a few weeks earlier
and probably forgot about it.
It clocked me pretty good
but I didn't really lose consciousness.
I didn't have much other than a lump to show for it.
But I knew pretty quickly I had a concussion.
I was pretty dopey and bum headed
and I had a massive headache brewing.
And while I could see,
my vision wasn't working that great.
A CAT scan at the ER
confirmed that I didn't have a skull fracture
or a brain bleed or anything serious like that.
They pretty much just told me
go home and rest in a dark room,
don't read, don't watch TV, don't do pretty much anything,
should go away.
So I did just that,
which (tense music) I know now is the absolute worst advice.
It's at least 20 years outta date,
and studies show it leads to way worse outcomes.
You should rest like that for 24, 48 hours max,
and then start getting out and trying to do things again.
(saw whirring)
But I didn't know any better.
With every day I spent laying in bed doing nothing,
my brain was just stagnating.
I don't know that it was very obvious
exactly how bad it was looking from the outside.
We're not actually building a single robot,
we're building two complete robots
with enough parts for three.
And the reason there is we,
I don't know what I'm saying.
Versus defense versus maneuverability.
And you have to have enough battery
to make it through a three minute fight.
That was recorded a few days after my injury.
It was so bad that after every take my brain was just mush.
And I was having to go take breaks between takes
in a dark room to recover so that I could do it all again.
(saw whirring)
I had a headache pretty much all of the time
and everything I did made it worse.
Reading, watching TV, driving,
even riding as a passenger with my eyes open
totally messed me up.
Any exercise, even just walking around the block
gave me a massive headache.
And it wasn't just the headaches, it was the brain fog.
It was like I was swimming through molasses.
I don't know, everything seemed so far away.
It was like looking through somebody else's eyes
10 feet away the whole time.
I was irritable and pretty quick to get angry.
Any form of planning was pretty hard
and I couldn't read very well
nor could I keep track of what I was reading,
so researching how to get better was super difficult.
When things got really bad, I started to slur my speech.
It was sort of like being somewhere
between drunk and hungover, but only the bad parts.
After a few months of this, I knew something wasn't right.
I was getting a little bit better, but not much.
I knew I needed help,
but finding it proved to be so much more difficult
than I ever could have imagined.
I couldn't get in to see a doctor in New Mexico
to save my life.
And getting into a specialist
was a four to six month waiting list.
(metal clinking)
(machinery whirring)
I didn't have months to wait.
It was clear that waiting wasn't working
and I was ready to get back to work
and get back to the rest of my life.
(vacuum whirring)
Eventually I left New Mexico and came here to Colorado.
My folks live here.
My dad had a pretty good relationship
with a concierge doctor
who was willing to take me on and help me sort things out.
By this point I knew enough
to know what modern concussion treatment looked like,
but putting it into practice on my own
was proving pretty difficult.
The biggest turning point
was when I released the video titled
"I have a Brain Injury"
letting you know what was going on with me
and why I hadn't posted in so long.
And I'd (Scotty sighs) recorded that video
about six weeks earlier when I was leaving New Mexico,
but I was so afraid to even watch it, let alone release it.
This video turned out to be the turning point in my recovery
in ways that I have a hard time even imagining now.
(soft music)
A number of people reached out to me
offering all sorts of help and advice
and introductions to concussion specialists and whatnot.
It was all pretty overwhelming at the time,
but all super valuable and unexpected.
If you were one of the people
that reached out and I never responded, I'm sorry.
Reading and replying to lots of email
was just outta reach for me at that point.
One of those people was Chance Hansen
who is the marketing and content manager at Cognitive FX.
Which turns out is one of the top concussion clinics
in the nation.
He said that he had been a fan for a long time
and wanted to see what he could do to help.
And so he went to the partners of the clinic
and he convinced them to offer me treatment for free
as well as to get me in as quickly as possible,
in return for telling my story, telling an honest account
of what the treatment was like and how well it worked.
And he said, "if it doesn't work,
"we want you to say that."
I knew I'd be a fool to turn this down, (Scotty laughs)
but I was also pretty skeptical.
How could they cure in five days
what I had spent months trying to heal from?
And honestly the results on their website
seemed too good to be true.
I told Chance about my skepticism
and he said, "good, come try it out.
"Our results will speak for themselves."
And I figured, you know (Scotty sighs)
what did I have to lose?
So I went for it.
I hired a local camera operator
since I didn't feel up to filming myself
going through such rigorous treatment.
Boy am I glad I did. (Scotty laughs)
By the end of the first day, I was just toast.
By the end of the third night
I was having vivid nightmares,
which while not particularly pleasant was a sign
that something was changing. (Scotty laughs)
And I realized I hadn't been having dreams
since before the concussion.
Something in my brain was changing.
(light music) By the end of the week I was exhausted,
but I was also really excited
because (metal clinking) while I was tired
I wasn't having the same level of symptoms or headaches
that I was at the beginning of the week.
It was more like a normal kind of tired
rather than my brain just totally shutting down.
But the most significant indicator
was the brain scan results.
- Goal obviously is we'd like you
to look more like a normative healthy population patient.
- Wow.
- And there we go.
Normative bell curves are good.
(doctor laughs)
- Wow.
That's substantial.
I was blown away.
I went from a significantly abnormal FMRA brain scan
at the beginning of the week
to a completely normal one at the end of the week,
in five days.
(light music) I drove back to Denver
completely full of energy,
which was good because I moved into a new house
the following week and immediately started renovating
the garage into this workshop.
I have since learned (Scotty laughs)
that you are supposed to take some time off
and rest after treatment, but I didn't know.
My recovery after treatment wasn't overnight.
It took months, but there was a slow and steady improvement
day after day after day.
Cognitive FX sent me home with homework.
An hour every day
split between 30 minutes cardio intervals,
and 30 minutes of cognitive exercises,
and eye exercises that were intended
to stimulate my neurons, encourage neuron regrowth
and blood vessel regrowth in my brain.
The one thing that was really holding me up was my eyes.
They still weren't working quite right.
You know anything that required
a lot of visual attention (saw whirring)
gave me a headache pretty much right away.
Editing, using the computer pretty much in general,
and driving at night were the worst offenders.
They said that vision was the slowest thing to recover,
which was frustrating.
But I kept at it and I did (Scotty laughs)
endless days of Brock stringing exercises, (Scotty mumbles)
shining flashlights in my eyes
to get my pupils to dilate correctly.
But it gradually got better. (metal clinking)
(drill whirring)
And here I am today, more or less fully recovered.
I'm not perfect, I still have headaches from time to time.
There's a a few specific things that will still set me off.
Even a small bump can give me symptoms back for days.
But I can think clearly again, I can see clearly again,
and most importantly, I'm back to work
(tools whirring)
which feels amazing.
I can't even tell you.
(tools whirring)
(tools clinking)
I wasn't sure whether I was gonna heal,
it wasn't a guarantee, which is a really depressing thought.
(metal clinking)
I had visions of giving up on YouTube,
and honestly giving up on engineering entirely.
(saw whirring)
(tense music) I even spent a particularly dark evening
researching warehouse jobs in the area.
(tool squeaking)
I've always made my living off my brain,
off my ability to think really hard,
and for long periods of time.
It's a core part of my identity.
(tool rattling)
What would life be like without that?
It was super depressing to think about,
and at times made me want to give up entirely.
(metal clinking)
It's a little hard to look back
and appreciate exactly how far I've come.
Alexa, turn on the lights.
- [Alexa] Okay.
- To remember (footsteps clinking) what it was like
when I didn't know when or if I'd ever get better.
(tools clinking)
But I'm happy to say it's possible.
(soft music)
And if you're suffering from a concussion,
don't give up hope, or let anybody tell you
to just wait it out and sit around in a dark room.
Keep at it even when it feels like nothing is changing.
Just like this workshop,
it's a matter of making things better
one small step at a time, one day at a time.
That looks pretty good.
I wanna make more videos.
I'm talking ambitious iPhone modifications,
building and modifying other consumer electronics,
and restarting factory tours.
But (Scotty sighs) here's the thing,
I'm spending way too much of my time
doing stuff that's not this.
It's not working on cool projects
or figuring out what stories to tell.
It's things like wrangling cameras and lights
and camera footage, answering email, and having meetings.
So I wanna hire some people to help me
so that I can focus on the stuff that I'm great at
and that ultimately leads to great videos that you enjoy.
I want someone here with me in Colorado
to help me film and edit projects in the shop,
and I really wanna hire a producer and a camera operator
to do factory tours with me.
Plus, starting factory tours again means traveling more.
And the economics of travel
have changed a lot in the past few years.
Not to mention I'm not living in China anymore.
And (Scotty sighs) well all of this costs money.
So I need your help.
I'm starting a Patreon.
It'll help me focus on engineering and storytelling,
and it'll make me less dependent
on stressing out about brand deals
to support me and the rest of the Strange Parts team.
I'm sure you already know the deal with Patreon.
You give a few bucks to support me and Strange Parts
and you get some cool benefits like behind the scenes stuff.
Just to be clear, if things are tight right now
and you can't afford to support,
please don't sweat it, really.
I wanna mention some of the benefits
which you might find interesting.
So at the first tier you'll get behind the scenes access
to early cuts of my videos.
We'll share with you rough cuts that we're still working on
and you'll be able to give us feedback
and help us refine the videos.
Plus you'll be able to submit projects and story ideas
and vote on polls about what video or project
I should work on next.
For a few more bucks the next tier
gets access to design files from my projects,
whether that be circuit boards, CAD files,
3D printer files, or something else entirely.
You'll also get a Strange Parts T-shirt,
which right now is the only way
to get a Strange Parts T-shirt.
And at the top tier you'll get your name included
in a Strange Parts video.
It won't be that like fast scrolling
list of a bunch of names, I don't think anybody reads those.
I wanna do something cooler.
It'll be an Easter egg
hidden somewhere in the B-roll or the background of a shot.
And I'm only gonna do one or maybe a few max per video,
starting with whoever's been a patron in the longest.
So sign up now if you'd like your name in a video.
You'll also get a Strange Parts hoodie.
And again, this is the only way
to get a Strange Parts hoodie.
Now, you might be asking,
Scotty you've been recently talking
about putting videos on Nebula,
are you still gonna be doing that?
And the answer is yes.
And here's the distinction.
So think of Nebula like Netflix.
It's where I'll put finished videos,
both videos that appear on YouTube
but without any ads or sponsors.
But also exclusive videos that I make just for Nebula.
Patreon is different.
It's where you get access to behind the scenes stuff
before things are finished,
whether they're going up on YouTube or Nebula,
or maybe even things that never see the light of day,
and there are more than a few of those.
I love Nebula too, but Patreon allows me to do things
that I can't do on Nebula and vice versa.
So you can sign up to Nebula in addition to Patreon,
or you can do one or the other or neither.
Both really help me keep Strange Parts running,
so no worries if only one appeals to you.
So if you'd like to support me and Strange Parts
you can go to patreon.com/strangeparts,
or you can click on the link down in the description.
I'm really excited about the year to come,
and I hope you'll join me.
And finally, I wanna give a quick shout out to Cognitive FX.
They're not paying me to say this,
my obligation to them for my treatment
ended a long time ago.
But if you've had a concussion,
whether it's recent or even if it's been decades
and you're still feeling the effects,
please reach out to them.
I really really believe in their treatment,
and I'm proof that it works.
You can schedule a 30 minute phone call with them for free
to see if you're a good fit for their treatment.
And if you've had a concussion recently,
they have a second newer clinic that most insurance covers.
And lastly, if you're having cognitive symptoms
from long COVID you should also reach out to them.
It turns out that a lot of the symptoms of long COVID
are very similar to concussion symptoms,
and they're piloting a new treatment protocol
that is showing great results so far.
I put links to both clinics in the description below.
Please let them know that I sent you.
And take care of yourself and that brain of yours.
You won't know what it means to you until it's gone.