Hank Green hosts this run of SciShow Chemistry episodes, each one built around a single substance or story. He opens with gold, tracing why a shiny, mostly useless metal has obsessed humans for millennia, then moves to nitrous oxide and what makes it more than a party gimmick. Rare earth elements get an episode built around the environmental and labor costs behind the electronics that depend on them, and Dmitri Mendeleev gets one of his own, covering how a Russian chemist organized the periodic table before some of its elements were even discovered. Sugar and caffeine each get a segment on where they come from in nature and what they actually do to the body, while a separate episode takes on high fructose corn syrup and the competing claims made about it. Marie Curie's work on radioactivity is covered as its own story, and a final episode explains the chemistry behind cannabis sativa's effects. Each segment runs a few minutes and stands on its own.