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1:11

My feeling when I was watching YouTube in

1:13

two thousand six was this isn't

1:15

something that was made for me is something

1:18

that is being made with me. And

1:20

as is often the case in Hank and

1:23

I's relationship, Hank sees the future coming

1:25

and I am astonished by it. Yeah. Thought

1:27

we were doing a project for a year that was really

1:29

fun and it was gonna help us be closer

1:32

to each other. Whereas I

1:34

was, like, looking at my camcorder and thinking,

1:36

this will be enough. You see him

1:38

something. Like, I was over the

1:40

line. This isn't like TV. This is

1:42

like the printing press. Yeah.

1:45

You did say that. I remember you saying

1:48

that to me. Welcome

1:58

to how I built this, a show about

2:00

innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists,

2:03

and the stories beyond behind the movements

2:06

they built. I'm

2:10

Guy Raz, and on the show today how

2:12

Hank had John Green turned

2:14

their brotherly banter into a YouTube

2:16

hit and grew it into complexly,

2:19

one of the biggest educational content

2:21

companies on the Internet.

2:27

In December of two thousand six, Time

2:29

Magazine's annual person of

2:31

the year cover story came out. And

2:33

on the cover was a computer monitor

2:36

with one word in the middle.

2:38

You And below, it said,

2:41

you control the information age.

2:43

Welcome to your world. Now

2:46

just two months before that cover came

2:48

out, Google acquired YouTube

2:50

for about one point seven billion

2:52

dollars. And right around this time,

2:55

so roughly early two thousand seven,

2:57

Hank and John Green saw on the potential

3:00

of what was about to happen in the world

3:02

of media and they decided to

3:04

leap right into it because

3:06

with no barriers to entry YouTube

3:09

seemed like a pretty interesting place

3:11

to explore. And like many people

3:14

we've profiled on the show, Hank and

3:16

John Green didn't set out to become

3:18

Internet entrepreneurs. The

3:20

two brothers started a YouTube channel as

3:22

a way to keep in touch. Hank

3:24

was living in Montana, John was in

3:26

New York, and they missed talking to

3:28

each other. So every day, one

3:30

brother post a video to the other

3:32

brother. And the videos might include

3:34

things like what was going on in the world

3:36

or a cool science discovery or

3:38

maybe a new song or them wrote. At

3:41

the time, John was an aspiring, if

3:43

slightly struggling writer. He'd written

3:46

a few well received Neva, but only

3:48

sold a few thousand copies. Pank

3:50

was thinking about becoming a science writer.

3:53

But because they were smart and

3:55

funny and relatable, their video

3:57

diary started getting views. At

3:59

first hundreds and eventually

4:01

thousands. Today, that

4:03

YouTube channel, vlogbrothers, has

4:06

three and a half million subs

4:08

drivers. But that's actually a drop

4:10

in the bucket when you consider how

4:12

big their overall audience is.

4:15

Because what began as a video diary

4:17

eventually led the Green Brothers to build

4:19

a business so sprawling.

4:22

It's almost hard to wrap your head around it.

4:24

Let's start with their production company.

4:26

It's called Complexly, and it

4:28

has over a dozen different YouTube

4:30

channels, mainly educational videos

4:32

with a combined thirty million

4:35

subscribers. Hank and John

4:37

also run a business that makes and sells

4:39

merch for other content creators.

4:42

They founded an annual convention for

4:44

YouTubers called VidCon. They

4:46

founded another one for podcasters. They

4:48

also have their own podcast They

4:50

have a nonprofit that sells socks

4:52

and sweatshirts and a bunch of other things

4:54

and they donate all the money to

4:56

charity. And did I mention

4:58

that both brothers are hugely successful

5:01

authors? John Green's young

5:03

adult novel, default in our stars, has

5:05

sold more than twenty three million

5:07

copies. And the thing is that

5:09

almost all of these things I mentioned,

5:12

Hank and John still have an active

5:14

hand in them. They still appear

5:16

in a lot of their own videos. They have

5:18

not stopped being the vlogbrothers. They

5:20

still create a lot of content

5:23

every day. And as you

5:25

will hear, even though they run a

5:27

for profit company, almost

5:29

all of the content they make is entirely

5:32

free and unlike many people in

5:34

the business, they want to keep it

5:36

that way. Hank and John grew

5:38

up mostly in Orlando where

5:40

their dad headed up the state nature

5:42

conservancy, and their mom was a community

5:44

activist. As boys, they

5:46

played a lot together, but John,

5:48

who is the older brother, was

5:50

kind of an anxious kid. And when he

5:52

was a teenager, he needed

5:54

a change of scenery. How old were

5:56

you when when your parents sent you to boarding

5:58

school? My parents

5:59

didn't send me boarding school. I asked Chiggo.

6:01

You asked me really sorry. He sent himself

6:04

away. I was fourteen. Fourteen.

6:06

Okay. And this is a school outside of

6:08

Birmingham, Alabama called the Indian

6:10

Spring School. Mhmm. And

6:12

tell me why you wanna to go. I

6:14

mean, you were far

6:15

away. And were you having

6:18

problems or you troubled did you just want a better

6:20

school? Like, what why? I was

6:22

a troubled kid I would say,

6:24

in a bit of trouble. Academicly, I

6:26

was really struggling at the

6:28

public school I attended, and then also

6:31

just socially. I had a really

6:33

difficult time. It was bullied a lot

6:35

in middle school. And

6:38

so I really wanted to go to this school

6:40

because it seemed like a

6:42

place where people

6:44

like me could feel

6:46

included and it it

6:48

was a really transformative experience for

6:51

me. I was with peers

6:53

all day long. It's really where I

6:55

became myself I continued

6:57

to be a terrible student, but I

6:59

I started to find an interest

7:01

in learning even if my grades

7:04

didn't quite reflect it. Yeah.

7:06

You've written about this a little bit and you

7:08

described yourself as almost

7:11

kind of like trapped that you were

7:13

super nerdy BITP super awkward,

7:16

insecure, you couldn't have like

7:18

normal social interactions with people that you

7:20

just couldn't What did that mean that you

7:22

just couldn't like, taking me back to fourteen year old,

7:25

John Green, if I went up to ten, I was like, hey,

7:27

hey, how you doing? Like, it would just be a weird

7:29

interaction. Yeah. I

7:31

think that looking back, a lot

7:33

of it was probably shaped by

7:36

having OCD and

7:38

struggling a lot with anxiety.

7:41

And so a lot of the conversations I would

7:43

have would sort of be filtered through

7:45

this sieve of anxiety. And

7:47

so I I would laugh too late

7:49

you know, when somebody said something funny or I

7:51

would respond awkwardly or

7:53

inappropriately from not fully understanding

7:56

the context because I wasn't really able to

7:58

fully listen to them. And

8:00

when I got to high school,

8:03

I started to have friends who

8:06

really understood me and

8:09

were okay with me if that makes

8:11

sense. Like, I had this amazing

8:13

best friend, Todd, and

8:16

he was like a guide to the universe

8:19

of interacting with other

8:20

humans. So --

8:22

Mhmm. -- like we would go to a party together

8:24

or something, and then we would be driving home

8:26

after or the party. And he would

8:28

be like, hey, listen, man. That was

8:30

great. That was such a fun night. Couple

8:32

notes. Mhmm. When you're

8:34

talking to somebody and you sort of lean forward and they

8:36

take a half a step back and then you lean forward

8:38

more. They're actually trying to communicate to you that

8:40

there's not enough space between the two of

8:42

you? Yeah. And he would just he would

8:44

just in a very kind loving

8:46

way help me understand how

8:49

to be a social person in the

8:51

world. Yeah. Alright. And

8:53

so Hank so your brother's

8:55

away. You grew up in Orlando.

8:56

Mhmm. So you were basically kind of

8:59

an only child when he was away. Yeah.

9:01

Yeah. He'd come back for the summers, and I

9:03

remember those summers as being sort

9:06

of like being very glad to have my

9:08

brother back for two days and then

9:10

the rest of it being quite a lot. A

9:12

lot of conflict during during

9:14

those years. Were you I

9:16

mean, this sort of foreshares what both of you

9:18

would kind of focus on later on professionally. But

9:20

were you more of a

9:23

science kid? Because I know John, you

9:25

have talked about not being good at math, not

9:27

being good at science, not generally, not being a

9:29

great student. But Hank, did you, like,

9:31

with science a thing that you just kind of gravitated

9:34

towards as a kid? Yeah. Yeah. Even quite

9:36

young. And I I expressed that interest

9:38

early on and my dad would, like, take me out on

9:40

field visits. In the nature

9:42

conservancy, like, work that he was doing. And

9:44

I get to see, like, the, you know,

9:46

normal boring work of science. But

9:48

what it emphasized is that it's a job

9:50

that normal people have. You know, I

9:52

remember doing a science fair project, and it

9:54

was just a very boring catalog

9:57

of the species that lived in a

9:59

waterway that connected two lakes

10:01

and it did not get a single award

10:04

among the dozens of different

10:06

awards they had created so that the maximum

10:08

number of kids could get something. No

10:10

one thought that this was interesting research.

10:12

Are you still bitter? You sound Yeah. Yeah.

10:14

Yeah. Yeah. Yeah. Bitter. Very a hundred

10:16

percent. I remember, like, five of the kids

10:18

that won and and how their

10:20

projects were not as interesting as

10:22

mine. So John,

10:24

when you you left the college, you went to --

10:27

you know, IO and you studied

10:29

English. And while

10:31

you were there, John, you start to

10:33

sort of think more deeply about what what

10:35

you might wanna do or what you thought you

10:37

would do?

10:38

Yeah. I loved writing. I loved writing

10:40

stories when I was a kid and it would have

10:42

delighted me to learn that I could be a

10:44

writer, but I never thought I could. I thought was like being

10:46

an astronaut or something.

10:47

Yeah. Mhmm. But Kenyon is

10:50

well known for its English department. And I went

10:52

there thinking that I would love to

10:54

learn more about how to write

10:56

good stories But

10:58

then there are only two fiction

11:00

writing at the time anyway. Two fiction

11:02

writing classes at Kenyon intro,

11:04

two fiction writing and advanced

11:06

fiction writing. And I I didn't get

11:08

into the advanced fiction writing

11:10

class. There were like fourteen applicants in

11:12

twelve spots, and I was one of the two people

11:14

who didn't get in. Did not get it.

11:17

Yeah. I mean, if you're not in the in the

11:19

top eighty five percent of of

11:21

writers at your tiny little college in

11:23

Ohio, it's hard to imagine how you

11:25

become a writer as a

11:27

job. And so it BITP was really

11:29

devastating to me. I was embarrassed.

11:31

I felt some shame. And

11:35

it really made me rethink

11:37

my professional life. And

11:39

the plan I eventually

11:41

developed was to go to

11:43

divinity school. Mhmm. Because I also

11:45

majored in religious studies to

11:47

become an episcible minister.

11:50

So this was your plan, maybe, you

11:52

know, a good divinity school. I

11:54

guess, you kind of worked as an apprentice to

11:56

a chaplain at a Children's Hospital.

11:58

Yeah. I was a student chaplain at a at a children's

12:01

hospital for several months

12:03

when I was twenty two. Right before I was

12:05

supposed to go to divinity school, and

12:07

then my time at the

12:09

hospital, I think, helped me understand

12:11

that I didn't want

12:13

to become a minister. I've heard a

12:15

little bit about your time there.

12:17

I mean, you've described it as a

12:20

a very sad period in your life. I mean,

12:22

being around, say, kids, I

12:24

can't imagine what

12:26

that was like. Were were the kids

12:29

there? You know, were

12:31

were mostly kids are gonna be

12:32

okay? Or or or a lot

12:34

of them gonna die.

12:36

A lot of them were

12:39

gonna were gonna die and and a lot of

12:41

them did did die while I was

12:43

their

12:43

chaplain. And

12:45

I'm not the main

12:47

character of that story. You know,

12:49

the the people who were

12:52

in those rooms, who were

12:54

at the center of that

12:57

horror and and suffering were

13:00

not me. But

13:02

even so, it was really difficult.

13:06

I was really young

13:08

I certainly had never encountered so

13:10

much death, so much unjust

13:13

death. And, you

13:15

know, like a lot of young people who read

13:17

a lot of theology. I had a

13:19

lot of, I guess, like,

13:22

somewhat sophisticated ways

13:24

of making sense of suffering and How

13:26

do we solve this problem of a

13:28

good and loving god? Who who

13:30

allows such unjust suffering

13:32

to occur in this world? And

13:35

then when I was faced with the reality

13:37

of it, it was very

13:39

different and much

13:41

harder for me to reconcile. And

13:43

then entered a very long period where I just

13:47

I I was only very tangentially

13:50

connected in any way to

13:53

my religious tradition. And

13:55

so I I set out on a on

13:57

a different path. So

14:03

when that time ended at the Children's

14:05

Hospital, I guess you moved to

14:07

Chicago and eventually

14:09

he found a job at a magazine called book list,

14:12

which I guess for people who aren't aren't

14:14

familiar with it, it basically reviews books

14:16

to kind of help librarians and bookstores

14:18

decide what to to buy. And

14:21

what did you just apply and get a job there

14:23

like as an editorial assistant? Yeah.

14:25

I started out as a temp because they needed

14:27

somebody who could type in ISBN

14:30

numbers and not to brag, but I'm

14:32

a very fast typist. And

14:34

so I just did data

14:36

entry for years. Ninety nine percent

14:38

of my job was data entry. Yeah.

14:41

That's a job, by the way, that doesn't I don't think

14:43

it exists anymore. Right? Well, I was

14:45

very aware of the fact that they were

14:47

one barcode scanner away from

14:49

automating my job the entire time I

14:51

was there. Obviously, it would not have

14:53

been a great job for fifty years,

14:55

but it was an amazing job

14:57

for that period of my life, for a lot of

15:00

reasons, one of which is that it was very

15:02

meditative, especially coming from the

15:04

Children's

15:04

Hospital. Like, I'm an

15:05

extremely anxious person. BITP

15:08

when you start working at a magazine, after

15:10

working as a chaplain at a children's

15:12

hospital, it's pretty hard to get

15:14

excited about any of the stuff that's

15:16

happening. Right? Like, Right? What's

15:18

gonna happen? The the magazine won't come

15:20

out? Oh, no. It's

15:23

okay. Like,

15:25

It was such an awesome place to work. I've had

15:28

a stupidly lucky professional life,

15:30

but the greatest professional luck of

15:32

my life other than being Hank Green's brother is

15:34

getting that job. And eventually, did you get

15:36

to to review books as well?

15:38

I did. I was surrounded by

15:40

people who read hundreds of books every

15:42

year, some of whom had been reading hundreds

15:44

of books for every year for decades.

15:46

And slowly, they also

15:48

began to offer me opportunities to

15:50

review books myself and then that

15:52

became a bigger and bigger part of my

15:54

job at book list over the six years I was

15:56

there. When you were at book list, were you I

15:58

mean, I guess, maybe a spoiler alert.

16:00

You published a book in two thousand five looking

16:02

for Alaska. This is your first but

16:04

I have to assume that, I mean, you're

16:07

working on it where you Tell me

16:09

how you got the confidence to start

16:11

writing your own book. Were

16:13

you doing it secretly at the beginning? Were

16:15

you not, like, how did

16:17

you even start that process?

16:19

Well, I was always writing,

16:22

but I think your question is a really good one

16:24

because I think it does take a certain

16:26

amount of confidence to

16:28

think, well, I could write a book.

16:30

Yeah. And I think what gave me that

16:32

confidence was working

16:34

at a magazine that reviewed four hundred

16:36

books every two weeks. Yeah.

16:38

And I would think, you know, I'm

16:40

not that good of a writer, but Four

16:43

hundred of these things did come out in the

16:45

last two weeks. So

16:49

maybe -- Yeah. -- and a lot of them

16:51

weren't that good. Nothing personal.

16:53

I mean, but the thing

16:55

about books that aren't that good is you can see

16:57

the strings of the puppets a little

16:59

easier. Yeah. And I

17:01

had a wonderful mentor, one of my editors at

17:04

book was Aileen Cooper, and

17:06

I took her out to lunch one

17:08

day. And said I'd really like to write

17:10

a book about a kid at at a boarding

17:13

school who's grappling

17:15

with with guilt and

17:17

grief. And she said, that sounds great, but

17:19

you have to write it.

17:20

And about a year

17:23

later, I handed Aileen

17:25

forty single spaced pages

17:27

of text with no margins and

17:29

no paragraph breaks. And

17:32

to her immense credit,

17:34

she read it. And

17:36

she said, you know, there's

17:38

something here. And I worked on it over

17:40

the next two and half years with

17:43

her. And was that really the first

17:45

time since college that you let somebody

17:47

see your writing? That's

17:49

that's a very personal thing. I mean, that

17:51

it can be really scary

17:53

because they might say this sucks.

17:56

Yeah. It's a tremendous sleeve vulnerable

17:59

thing. I never feel more like

18:01

my body is on the outside of my

18:03

skin than when

18:05

I'm sharing writing with people. Of

18:08

the forty single space pages,

18:10

Aileen read, I think probably,

18:12

I don't know, six

18:14

or seven sentences from that are

18:16

in looking for

18:16

Alaska. So it did have a long

18:19

way to go. Right? And

18:21

when you I mean, you hear the scriptwriters all the

18:23

time. Which is to be a good writer. You have to be a really good reader

18:25

first. You've got to learn how to be a good

18:27

reader. Yeah. I don't know if that's universally true,

18:29

but I had to get better at reading

18:32

for sure. But I

18:34

mean, the truth is I

18:36

have no idea how to write a book.

18:38

Like, I I like in this

18:40

interview, I feel like I'm trying to talk as

18:42

if I know how to write a book when

18:44

the evidence is overwhelming that I don't

18:46

based on the fact that the last time I

18:49

wrote published a novel was five years ago.

18:51

I mean, I have a very inefficient

18:53

process in the sense that I write a draft and

18:55

then I delete almost all of it.

18:57

And that's the only way

18:59

I know how to write a story. I'm

19:01

sure I am unconsciously responding to lots

19:03

of other writers and I am

19:05

unconsciously learning from everything I

19:08

read. But in terms of what's happening consciously, I'm

19:10

only at war with myself. The

19:12

only real obstacle in my path is me

19:14

and the only way out

19:16

is me. At what

19:19

point were you able to get an

19:21

agent? I mean, did Aileen, it was her point where she

19:23

said, yep, it's ready to go. Let me make

19:25

some calls and How did that happen? There was

19:27

a point where Aileen said,

19:30

I think this is ready to go out

19:32

to publishers And then

19:34

I I sent it to several

19:36

publishers. I actually didn't have an agent at the

19:38

time. There's a little bit of a different era

19:40

in publishing, at least YA

19:42

publishing. And one of the

19:44

editors called me back and said

19:46

that they wanted to publish

19:48

the book. Well, That was not the

19:50

end of the story though. Like, that was a lovely

19:53

day. Yeah. And I I went ahead

19:55

and bought a sushi dinner with

19:57

if I recall correctly, three percent of

20:00

my advance, and

20:02

it was a lovely dinner. But

20:05

I spent another year and a half revising the

20:07

book with my editor at Penguin Julie

20:09

Strauss Gable. And

20:12

that's really when the

20:14

book came to have the kind of shape and

20:16

texture that it has now. Alright. So that

20:18

book gets published. We were published Arthur

20:21

in two thousand five, and

20:23

I mean, reception was really great. It won

20:25

Wondery one the best buy book of

20:27

the year award, this award,

20:29

Michael Prince award, and, like, that was

20:31

it. You were writer. I mean, that

20:33

you were now an oblast. Yeah.

20:36

Did did it feel that way to you? I mean,

20:38

you quit your job at book list. So clearly,

20:40

you you, I guess, are thinking, okay, I

20:42

gotta go all in on this now.

20:45

Well, sort of

20:47

I actually didn't quit my job at book

20:49

quiz because looking for Alaska got published.

20:51

I quit my job at book quiz because

20:55

while writing looking for Alaska, I had

20:57

fallen in love with the

20:59

woman who is now my wife, and

21:01

she got into graduate In

21:03

New York, which meant that we were moving to

21:05

New York if we were going to continue our

21:07

relationship. And so I would have stated book

21:09

list very happily BITP it

21:11

did change my life, especially after Alaska

21:14

received such generous reviews and then

21:16

started to win awards, it

21:18

did I mean, the the numbers are probably

21:20

very different now. But in that first year, how

21:22

many copies did looking for Alaska sale?

21:25

Seven thousand. Seven thousand.

21:27

Yeah. And it's important to say that number because

21:29

I think something like two or three

21:31

percent of books published every year, some

21:33

more than five thousand copies, like ninety five, ninety eight

21:35

percent of books, so fewer than five thousand

21:37

copies. Yeah. I mean, seven thousand copies was

21:39

great. Yeah. I turned out my advance.

21:42

I was able to sign

21:44

a deal for a second Neva,

21:47

and the people who read it, liked

21:49

and that was my definition of

21:51

success at the time. You published your

21:53

second book in abundance of Katherine's, I think

21:55

a year later, how did that book do?

21:58

Similarly, I think Katherine

22:00

sold a hundred twenty five copies the week

22:02

it came out. So not

22:05

great. But it also,

22:08

slowly, over time, found

22:10

an audience. Got it.

22:13

In in meantime, Hank, while

22:15

John is basically becoming an author, you're sort

22:17

of on a path that's gonna take you towards

22:20

science writing because

22:22

after college, you did a master's degree at the

22:24

University of Montana, you did it in environmental

22:26

studies. And by the way,

22:28

while while John is moving around

22:30

the

22:30

country, right, like he's to Chicago

22:32

and then into New York. Where are you guys keeping

22:34

in touch? Yeah. A

22:37

bit. I remember a lot of

22:40

instant messaging. And at this point,

22:42

I was and really had always been

22:44

very enamored of my older brother and

22:47

thought that whenever I could kind get his attention, it was very

22:50

cool and very good. And

22:52

whenever he had an an interest

22:54

in a new kind of music

22:58

or movie or something. I was,

23:00

you know, I very much believed

23:02

deep in my soul when I've very unquestioned

23:04

way that that in fact was the

23:06

coolest thing. And so we were in touch and

23:08

I was always, I think, trying to

23:11

impress him, but also, you know, obviously very caught up in

23:13

my own stuff. Alright. So

23:15

we get we come to two thousand six.

23:17

You are living John in

23:19

New York. Right. you're in Montana

23:21

because you'd finished your master's degree.

23:24

Mhmm. And you are doing a lot of

23:26

writing. You had your own blog and you

23:28

were writing a lot about, like,

23:30

environmental issues I think you even knew

23:32

of, like, NPR dot org and about National

23:34

Geographic. Right? Yeah. Yeah. Really

23:36

focused on technology.

23:38

So so during my Raz school times,

23:40

it became very clear

23:42

that learning about the sort

23:44

of future of our

23:46

earth was a very easy way

23:48

to feel sad all of the time

23:50

and get burned out. And the

23:52

only thing I could do is couldn't go home and

23:54

search Google for any

23:56

solutions. That were being proposed.

23:59

And I transitioned that

24:01

into as kind of freelance

24:03

career, both blogging on my own and for a number

24:05

of other publications writing

24:07

about everything from electric cars to

24:09

wind turbines to electronic

24:11

paper. Right. Alright.

24:13

So two thousand six, this is

24:15

a pivotal year in

24:17

what we've not called a creator economy because that

24:19

was a year I think that YouTube was bought by

24:21

Google. Yeah. That's right. So there's

24:23

this thing YouTube and there were clearly

24:25

people who were kind of starting to experiment with this

24:27

and doing these

24:29

weird these weird things.

24:32

Tell me a little bit about this

24:34

idea that that you

24:36

had John to start playing

24:38

around with YouTube and communicate

24:40

with your brother over

24:41

it. What was that about?

24:44

Well, I think I wanted to be closer to Hank. I

24:46

think that was the biggest thing. We lived on

24:48

different sides of the country, but also

24:50

we never talked on the phone.

24:52

We only communicated over instant messenger.

24:55

And I felt like I didn't know

24:57

him that well and that felt like a big

24:59

hole in my life. Mhmm. But

25:02

then also we were both really interested

25:04

in online video and

25:06

the way that online video was

25:08

being used as path

25:11

into building community. And

25:14

so we would have these conversations

25:16

on instant messenger about how much we

25:18

love to show with say Raz how much

25:20

we love the lonely girl fifteen and

25:22

how interesting it was and how new

25:24

and different and thrilling it felt And

25:26

then one day those conversations just

25:29

transitioned to us

25:30

saying, well, we could do that.

25:33

Why don't we try something like

25:35

that? I mean, what was it about those videos? Because this is I

25:37

mean, this stuff on YouTube in two thousand

25:39

six, two thousand seven was like, you look at

25:41

it now and it's BITP seems

25:44

weird or, you know, like, there

25:46

was this, like, redhead guy

25:48

used to scream. Oh,

25:55

and I wonder why he thought my voice was

25:57

weird. Well, whatever. I'm gonna hit

25:58

was his name. Kids used to watch

26:00

him. What was his name? The screaming Redhead kid.

26:02

Redhead guy used to scream.

26:05

Are you talking about Fred? Fred.

26:06

Are you talking about red. That's amazing.

26:08

Oh, god.

26:09

What a great Please leave that in. Please describe

26:11

Fred

26:11

as the Fred had guy who

26:14

used to screamed. I don't think he has

26:16

red hair, but okay. I'm

26:17

sorry, Fred. I

26:18

don't think he has red hair. I think but

26:21

Hank, it's incredible that Hank still got there.

26:23

Even though he doesn't have red hair. I don't know. I'm sorry

26:25

for red hair. Yeah. But this screaming guy

26:28

so so it was, like, what

26:30

was on YouTube at the time was

26:33

what was it about those videos that appeal to you before

26:35

you guys decided to make your

26:37

own?

26:37

So I I have at that point, I'd

26:40

already had like, a number of

26:42

weirdly successful Internet

26:44

projects. Right. You know, starting in high school

26:46

when I had, like, a Mars website

26:48

that got way too much attention for

26:51

someone who knew nothing and had read two

26:52

books. He had, like, one of the first

26:55

websites about Mars In

26:57

the nineties, the early nineties? Yeah. It

26:59

was just sort of like, here's information.

27:02

But this is not this is not like a

27:04

money making venture. This is just something

27:06

you

27:06

did. No. I don't think I made any money off

27:08

of that. But then in the transition between

27:10

college and grad school, I started a

27:12

blog about how bad I four

27:15

was. Interstate four and I I like spray painted

27:17

signs and put them on the side of

27:19

the interstate in Orlando that

27:21

connects Orlando and Tampa. the

27:23

main interstate in Orlando, and it's very

27:25

bad, and everyone hates it. And so I

27:27

started to kind of a transportation policy

27:29

blog, and I did make money with

27:31

that. I remember you made, like, two hundred dollars.

27:33

Yeah. I was selling an ad.

27:35

Just one ad. And I was, like, wow.

27:37

Two hundred dollars for a website

27:40

and website

27:40

ad. Yeah. And, like, the news came over. The

27:43

local news came to interview me in the house.

27:45

Oh, it was that big. Wow. And

27:47

so, like, the Internet just seemed to

27:49

have all of this energy. Like, you could do

27:51

anything and people would notice. And

27:53

YouTube was very much that way, where there

27:55

it was very experimental and the

27:57

thing that was driving people forward

28:00

was impressing their peers and

28:02

connecting with people and having

28:04

a a good time. Alright.

28:06

So January two thousand seven,

28:08

you guys decide. I guess, John,

28:10

this is your idea, but you guys

28:12

decide to make like a YouTube

28:15

diary to each other. Like, you would send a video

28:17

to your brother or your brother would send a video to you,

28:19

but of course it's on YouTube, so it's public.

28:21

And this is what would become

28:24

Vlogbrothers. And John, when you

28:26

proposed this idea of your brother, what did you how did you

28:28

describe it? You say, hey, I'm gonna write you a

28:30

letter or I'm just gonna send you a funny

28:31

video. I'm just gonna we have to go back and forth.

28:34

How is it gonna work? I think I

28:36

said, what if we made videos back and

28:38

forth to each other every weekday for

28:40

a year instead of instant

28:42

messaging. Every weekday,

28:44

every single day. Yep. One of

28:46

us made the video on Monday and then

28:48

Hank would reply on Tuesday and I would

28:50

make a video on Wednesday all through the

28:52

year. So

28:53

a lot of work. At the

28:56

time, I didn't know how

28:58

much work it was because I never owned a video

28:59

camera. We did not

29:02

know what we

29:03

were signing up for for

29:05

sure. I remember calling Hank on Christmas

29:07

Eve and being at at the camera store and

29:09

being like, which of these do I

29:10

get? There's a bunch of them. Yes.

29:13

We got the same camera so we could help

29:15

each other work through our various

29:17

technical difficulties. And this was

29:19

when annuity was like a camcorder,

29:21

right, and connected to your computer and

29:23

through a peripheral and It was on tape. It was on

29:25

tape. Right? And then you had to, like, upload it and

29:27

-- Yeah. -- but what were the

29:29

videos like

29:31

what did you say John and you described them to

29:32

Hank? He said, I'm gonna make

29:34

a video of what? Like like a

29:36

day in my life, like a

29:39

letter, like guy, there was no

29:41

idea. There was no idea. I did

29:43

not get that far. The idea

29:45

was if you don't make

29:47

a video you will be punished.

29:49

That was it. Okay. That was a that was a deal.

29:51

Yeah. That was it. So, like, whatever

29:53

you can come up with. Yeah. And then it

29:55

was just like two brothers trying to impress and one

29:57

up each other for fifteen

29:59

years. The channel that you

30:01

guys created was called vlogbrothers.

30:02

Yeah. Right. I think the first video was The

30:05

first video was sort of Hank laying out the rules.

30:07

Is that right, Hank? Yeah.

30:09

Exactly. And you were like at a New Year's

30:11

Eve party. It was a very cool video

30:13

actually. Yeah. It it it had b

30:15

roll. Hello, John. By now, you have received my

30:17

message that we will no longer be communicating through

30:20

any textual

30:21

means. Only video

30:23

plugging. Does that make us crazy?

30:27

Probably. This wasn't

30:29

just talking to the camera and just uploading

30:31

it. No. Although We

30:33

had a lot of videos that were talking at the

30:35

camera and uploading. Yeah. And our almost

30:38

immediately, we were

30:40

conscious of the community too. And

30:42

so almost immediately, I wasn't just

30:44

making it for Hank. Even though I was

30:46

making it too Hank, I became

30:48

aware of the fact that it wasn't Only

30:50

four Hank. Right.

30:51

But it was a small group of

30:53

people initially. It was like a few hundred people. Yeah. I

30:55

have no idea how anyone even ever found us.

30:58

Probably a lot of friends or relatives or

31:00

just people he told about. Like, hey, we're doing this

31:02

thing. Yeah.

31:02

Yep. I remember posting around

31:04

in, like, the Raz. forums

31:07

and that I think John must have told some

31:10

librarians about us because we had a lot of

31:12

librarians early on. Oh, thank God

31:14

for those early librarians. They did

31:16

such a good job of modeling community

31:18

--

31:18

Yeah. -- for us.

31:19

So, yeah, that was huge. Neil

31:22

Gaiman, the author mentioned us on

31:25

his blog a couple months into the project? Did that that brought

31:27

in a fifty or a hundred people? What would

31:29

you

31:29

talk about? I mean, you you mentioned a couple of examples, but

31:31

you had to come up with something every

31:34

day. And I know there's a

31:36

famous one that kind of this is the one that kind

31:38

of really helped

31:39

to take off, which was a Harry Potter song.

31:41

Mhmm. Hank wrote it. Hank wrote it. Okay. So I know

31:43

as

31:43

I didn't seeing it. Because I need

31:46

Harry Potter like a Glendula who

31:48

needs water and as Saturday approaches

31:50

my name grows. Oh,

31:53

I Zio. Deathly How

31:55

is it Cynthia? Book sales and barbers, it'll

31:57

be like Phoenix, tears on a

31:59

broken nose. Back

32:03

then, the front page of YouTube was

32:05

curated by a human. Yeah. And

32:07

I wrote that song when the final Harry

32:09

Potter book came out. And so it was

32:12

actually now a tried and true

32:14

tactic of getting views on YouTube is

32:16

to make content around whatever

32:18

is in the zeitgeist. And so they

32:21

picked out my video to feature on that

32:23

day and that brought in the

32:25

Harry Potter fans. Yeah. And it's

32:27

very charming and lovely and it's

32:29

funny. But like there

32:31

was no purpose to it other than

32:33

just to amuse

32:34

yourself. Like, he wasn't This

32:36

is gonna become a business one.

32:38

No.

32:40

I think we were very fortunate to have jobs is what

32:42

I would say about that. Yeah. I did

32:44

not think of it as a business

32:47

than but I thought of it as

32:49

important. Like, there was

32:51

no peace of my mind

32:53

that didn't think that this was going to

32:55

be a big, big, big deal, and that it

32:57

was gonna be really cool to

32:59

have been involved in the beginning of

33:00

it. You knew that already in two thousand

33:03

seven. I've I've seen you you were quoted

33:05

around that time basically saying,

33:07

you know, it's, like, early television. Mhmm.

33:09

There might be, like, the I love Lucy

33:11

creators making the YouTube channel right now. And then

33:13

twenty years, two

33:15

thousand seven, you're thinking this. So twenty

33:17

twenty seven, you're right. I mean, we're gonna look back

33:19

and say, wow. Yeah. I

33:22

mean, That was

33:23

amazing. But you already felt that

33:26

early on? I felt it for I think

33:28

two reasons. One is that my big

33:30

brother thought it was a big deal. And so whatever

33:32

John thinks is a big deal, even today.

33:34

I'm like, he's right. I don't have to

33:36

think about that. The other thing

33:39

was that you know, I watched cable happen.

33:41

And then this was gonna be

33:43

so much bigger than that, so

33:45

much more ability for

33:47

the barriers to be very very low and

33:49

the gatekeepers to just not exist anymore.

33:51

Yeah. My feeling when I was watching

33:54

YouTube in two thousand six, watching

33:56

early online video projects was

33:58

this isn't something that was made for me.

34:00

This is something that is being made

34:02

with me. It is aware of

34:04

me. It is responding to my presence and to the

34:06

presence of the audience in really interesting

34:08

innovative ways. Yeah. I

34:10

didn't, as is often

34:12

the case, in Hankin' his

34:14

relationship. Hank sees the future coming

34:16

and I am astonished by it. I

34:18

thought we were doing a project for a year that

34:20

was really fun and it was gonna help

34:22

us be closer to each

34:23

other. Whereas

34:23

I was, like, looking at my camcorder and

34:26

thinking, this will be in a

34:28

museum sometime.

34:29

Was over the

34:30

line. This isn't like TV. This

34:32

is like the printing press. You

34:36

did say that I remember you

34:38

saying that to me.

34:40

When we come back in just a moment,

34:42

how a failed deal creates

34:44

an opportune ready for Hank and John to

34:47

turn their growing YouTube channel into

34:49

a real business. Stay with

34:51

us. I'm Guy Raz Raz you're listening

34:53

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Raz Raz. So it's two thousand seven, two thousand

37:29

eight, and John Hank has started a

37:32

YouTube channel called vlogbrothers.

37:34

And at

37:36

this point, It's just a fun thing they're doing on the side,

37:38

but that is about to

37:40

change pretty soon. At

37:42

what point into

37:44

this project, We're either of you thinking, you know, we have a

37:46

business here. We have some kind of

37:48

business idea here. Because I have to

37:50

imagine the

37:52

first year you know, I don't

37:54

know if YouTube was monetized. I don't know

37:56

how it worked at that

37:57

point, but was was it making any money for

37:59

you? Was it generating any revenue for men?

38:01

Yeah. I think that we got into the

38:03

partner program right at the end of the first year,

38:05

but it was fifty dollars a month

38:07

or something. Right. And that

38:10

year, I very nearly

38:12

sold my blog for

38:14

what would have been, you

38:16

know, life changing money. Yeah. Was

38:19

the blog that called it was called EcoGeek? Yeah. For, like, low six

38:21

figures, but it would have come along with a job that

38:23

I very much wanted. Can

38:25

you tell who who was gonna buy

38:26

it? I think I probably can. It was

38:29

scientific american. Wow. Yeah. I mean,

38:30

it was honestly for me, it was more that

38:33

I was gonna to be a writer for scientific american, which was a

38:35

dream for me. So you get a

38:37

six figure payout and a job at

38:39

scientific american they'd own the blog.

38:41

Yeah. And that not happening

38:44

because of the financial crisis

38:46

is the thing -- Oh, they pulled out and -- Mhmm. --

38:48

that made, like, the whole rest of all of this

38:50

happened, I think, to some extent. Right.

38:52

So because the financial crisis,

38:54

basically, you are close to

38:56

maybe closing that, but then they came

38:59

back and they're like, you know, we can't

39:00

do it. Yeah. They basically they had a a freeze on all deals.

39:02

And then

39:03

that's kind of when I was

39:06

like, oh, think

39:08

about the ways in which this could

39:10

be a business. But at that point,

39:12

YouTube had started paying us. Mhmm.

39:15

Enough, but that was very different from starting

39:17

a business. So like -- Yeah. -- John and

39:19

I making videos and getting

39:21

paid ad revenue. Was

39:23

very different from, like, we wouldn't have ever had

39:25

to hire anyone. We could have just kept doing

39:28

that. And the Wondery paid by

39:30

YouTube was probably what couple thousand bucks a

39:32

month? Yeah. It was getting up toward

39:34

that. Yeah. Alright.

39:34

So, I mean, hadn't and by the

39:37

way, how many, at that time,

39:39

two thousand eight? Yeah. You know, when when this deal with scientific american

39:41

fell through, how many subscribers did

39:43

your YouTube channel have do you remember?

39:45

I mean, we we've made two hundred

39:47

videos before we had our

39:50

200th YouTube subscriber. Wow.

39:52

And then by late two thousand eight,

39:54

we were at seventy or

39:56

eighty

39:57

thousand. Which was, you know, one of

39:59

the bigger channels on YouTube. I'm

40:01

curious about about something because both of you guys

40:03

are Gen Xers, like Gen Xers,

40:05

And as you know, as I know,

40:08

our generation is one

40:10

that prised

40:12

sarcasm. IRD. Mhmm. And you guys were in our earnest.

40:14

You even kind of called your

40:16

whole crew, like, nerd fighters, and

40:20

like, that was your tribe. Right? I mean, or did you guys just

40:22

never get that that part of

40:24

being a a Gen X or never, you know,

40:26

get back into your

40:29

We were never terribly sarcastic young people.

40:32

Yeah. That

40:32

was Hank. That was such good sarcasm that I

40:34

couldn't read it myself. I see. Okay.

40:36

We were super snarky.

40:39

Both of us. Incredibly. Yeah. Like, III don't I'm

40:42

I hope that the things I wrote and

40:44

published will never see the light of day --

40:46

Yeah. -- because you I I hear you. Oh

40:49

my god. That's also I was brought

40:51

there by our audience. I don't think that

40:53

people responded well to it -- Yeah. -- to

40:55

the sarcasm and the snarkiness. Yeah. When

40:57

we did stuff like that. Yeah. And I also don't think

41:00

I liked it. I didn't like how it made me

41:02

feel to make content like that. Like, I I made

41:04

a very

41:06

popular video a few years into our project that was just like things I

41:08

hated about the world, which was kind of in

41:10

that Gen X vein. It was just a a

41:12

bunch of rants

41:14

very quickly. And it did

41:16

really actually did quite well,

41:18

but I went and I sort of looked at the

41:20

comments and the kind

41:22

of audience it attracted

41:24

and I also thought about how it made me feel to be thinking

41:26

about my next rant video. If I was

41:28

gonna make another one of those, I had

41:30

to look at the world and find the things I

41:32

didn't

41:33

like about Yeah. And then I was

41:35

like, ah, this is making me much less happy. Well, this

41:38

gets at something really important, though, Hank, which

41:40

is that optimizing

41:42

for views and

41:44

optimizing for revenue does

41:46

not optimize for the

41:48

health of one's community necessarily.

41:52

And we had to learn that the hard way

41:54

several times. Mhmm. I

41:57

always used irony

42:00

in citizen as a form of armor, as a way of

42:02

protecting myself against

42:04

having to reckon earnestly with

42:07

the world, which felt terrifying and felt

42:09

like I was gonna be

42:11

devoured by the world if I ever,

42:13

like, exposed my soft

42:16

belly to and it was only in seeing

42:18

Hank's work and the way that people

42:20

responded to it generously that I

42:22

started to realize that actually even

42:24

though it's scary, you have to try

42:27

to be earnest. Like earnestness is

42:29

the most underrated thing in

42:32

contemporary experience, I think.

42:34

Yeah. In the meantime,

42:36

John, I mean, you were in in,

42:38

like, two thousand five, six, and then

42:40

eight. You cranked out three books,

42:42

BITP novels -- Yeah. -- in

42:45

that time. And so you

42:47

are basically spending a percentage

42:50

of your time making these videos and a percentage

42:52

of your time writing the book

42:54

paper towns? Right. Well, I'm

42:56

curious when paper towns came out, we're gonna

42:58

talk about the fault in our stars in in a

43:00

moment when paper towns came out. Was there

43:02

any impact on book sales? Was

43:05

it different? Yes. It was different

43:07

than the previous two books. I think that

43:09

paper town sold about fifty thousand copies in its first year. And

43:11

how much of that was connected to what you

43:13

guys were doing on YouTube?

43:16

I think a lot of it was connected

43:18

to what we were doing on YouTube. Like, I remember feeling kind of guilty because

43:22

Hank didn't have something

43:24

like that.

43:26

You know, like, yeah, I'd gotten this really

43:28

significant payday and it felt kind

43:30

of like at least it was

43:33

partly because of Vlogbrothers,

43:36

and there was no equivalent for

43:38

Hank. And then I, over the course

43:40

of years, capitalized on that guilt in

43:43

every way

43:44

possible. No. It it didn't even honestly,

43:45

it didn't occur to me. Yeah. Yeah. We've had

43:48

a very lucky brotherhood in that

43:50

jealousy hasn't really played much of

43:52

a part. It's

43:54

kinda how you built your personal and professional relationship also, which

43:56

-- Yeah. -- maybe by design or

43:58

by luck that happened. So when

44:01

paper towns came out, John

44:04

you had vlogbrothers, so you had an audience of eighty thousand subscribers.

44:06

Right. And so all of

44:08

a sudden you have this your

44:11

own direct channel. You don't have to

44:13

beg. I mean, of course, you still you

44:15

wanna go on fresh air, you wanna

44:17

go on to today's show, you wanna go

44:19

on. But I didn't. I didn't get on any

44:21

of those shows. But you didn't have to because you had your

44:23

own marketing you had your own

44:25

channel, right, essentially. Yeah.

44:28

That is exactly right. And I don't think I totally

44:31

realized that until paper

44:33

towns came out. Alright.

44:36

So we have this deal fall through for your blog

44:38

Hank. Mhmm. Paper towns comes out. I mean,

44:40

I know the timeline is is It's actually almost

44:43

it was almost the same week. Oh,

44:45

wow. Okay. And now you're

44:48

kind of leaning into the YouTube thing. And

44:50

and tell me a little bit about what that

44:52

meant in two thousand eight, like

44:54

leaning into a YouTube business.

44:56

Because if YouTube was paying you a

44:58

couple thousand bucks a month, that's great,

45:00

but it might not be enough to build

45:02

a sustainable

45:04

business So what correct me if I'm wrong, but, like,

45:06

Hank, you kind of drove this business

45:10

thinking. And John, you were interested

45:12

in it, but it wasn't really that

45:14

wasn't how you thought about things

45:16

initially. Yeah. Definitely.

45:17

I mean, I don't have I

45:19

don't I don't have a spreadsheet bone

45:21

in my

45:21

body. I've got a

45:24

bunch now.

45:24

Hank is more naturally entrepreneurial than you,

45:26

John. Oh, for sure. Even when we were

45:28

kids, Ank was naturally

45:32

entrepreneurial. And I was very focused

45:34

on aligning myself with

45:36

powerful in institutions that could provide me with stability and health

45:37

insurance. Right. Yeah.

45:40

The so that the first thing that

45:42

looked like was starting a

45:45

merchandise company with my friend, Alan Wostafa, who was also

45:47

a YouTuber. This is the company

45:49

called DFTBA, which

45:52

stands for. Don't forget to be awesome. Right. And so we

45:55

I had earned CDs and sold

45:57

them at Harry Potter Conventions, and I

45:59

was like, people are buying these. Like,

46:01

I can't make enough of them. CDs of your song?

46:04

Yeah. Of my music. Oh, you would burn your oh,

46:06

and what are the music was on there? Oh, I just

46:07

made a lot of,

46:10

like, nerdy like, sometimes it was about science, sometimes what? You're so under

46:12

I I don't mean to cut you off, man. But

46:14

that is such an underplay

46:16

of how awesome your

46:20

music in two thousand eight. Like, Hank wrote this song about

46:22

quirks -- Quip. -- I still sing

46:23

to myself whenever I have to think

46:26

about what the different

46:28

types of quarks are, which happens all the time and a person's

46:30

natural everyday life. It happens

46:32

regularly. I know what they are. I can still sing the

46:33

song, up

46:36

down

46:36

strange charm top bottom if you don't know what?

46:37

What is it? Don't matter. You still got a member

46:40

of Lecan's and Lecan's and

46:42

Lecan's mistake.

46:45

Yeah. So so I had I had sold some

46:48

CDs and and there were a bunch of YouTube

46:50

musicians who I knew who were

46:52

much better and bigger deals than

46:54

me. And I was like, what? Why aren't

46:56

we doing this? There are people who can

46:58

make CDs And so we'll take care of

47:00

the hard parts for you, me and Alan -- Yeah. -- and we'll sell shirts and posters and CDs.

47:02

And we were really a record label

47:06

for YouTubers in the

47:07

beginning, but very much without any

47:09

knowledge of what record labels actually

47:12

did. Right. Yeah. Yeah. So you would basically say, hey,

47:14

if you're a YouTuber and you wanna record music, we'll

47:16

distribute We'll handle the business. I'm sorry. That

47:18

was the

47:19

idea. And you'll get so much

47:21

more of every sale because -- Yeah. -- the

47:23

idea here is you're doing the marketing,

47:25

you're producing the music. All

47:27

we're doing is paying for the

47:30

CDU to get made and and shipping it out

47:32

and handling customer support.

47:33

Right. And so it started out as a

47:36

label and eventually morphed into what it is

47:38

today, which is basically

47:40

a a shop, a merchandising shop for

47:42

-- Yeah. -- YouTube creators. Anybody really

47:44

who wants to sell t shirts or

47:46

-- Mhmm. --

47:47

products, bags, Yeah. We work with podcasters and and YouTubers

47:50

mostly. And,

47:52

I mean, was it sustainable? Did it did

47:54

it make money? Right. Yeah.

47:56

Oh, yeah. I

47:58

mean, we've never taken on substantial investment

48:01

for any of

48:04

our things. Everything that we do has been profitable from the

48:06

beginning. It's grown with its own, I

48:08

guess, they call it

48:10

bootstrapped, where you you take the

48:12

profit and you start to grow the company rather

48:14

than trying to

48:16

attract Raz investment, but let's scale it with

48:18

a bunch of money. We go slow, we go easy,

48:20

you know, we're not trying to make the biggest things

48:22

ever, and we're just trying to solve problems

48:25

for people. Yeah. Alright. So this is the beginning

48:27

of where this interview becomes really

48:30

really like a crazy

48:32

roller coaster ride on speed

48:36

and other impediments because the number

48:38

of businesses and things that you guys

48:40

will do from this point forward is

48:44

mind boggling so I'm gonna try

48:46

to get to most of them, but I'm just warning listeners that there's a lot

48:48

coming now. I'm not great at focus.

48:52

Oh, man. You give Hank Green five minutes

48:54

and he gives you a limited liability corporation. I

48:57

mean, you'll probably annoy the

48:59

limited liability corporation. Like

49:02

registration office. Because you're in there all

49:04

the time. They're like, oh, god. Here he is again.

49:06

But this BITP you've

49:08

got this kind of grown community and

49:11

you you're tapped into this world of people who

49:13

are clearly engaged, which leads you

49:15

to the next venture that you found,

49:17

which is called VidCon. a

49:20

conference kind of around youtubers.

49:22

Tell me how you came up with

49:24

that idea. I love conventions and had

49:27

been to a number of them

49:29

like anime conventions, nerd conventions, Harry Potter

49:31

things. And I I had become friends

49:33

because I was a

49:36

performer at them with sort of a team of people who had created

49:38

Harry Potter convention. And I'd

49:40

also been to Penny Arcade Expo,

49:43

Pax, which was is

49:45

is a video game convention that like

49:48

combines enthusiasm for it

49:50

and also the actual industry

49:52

of video games. And I thought that that

49:54

was a very good

49:56

model because it allowed

49:58

the industry to see the fans and the fans

50:00

to see the industry. It let the fans go deeper because they could see

50:02

how these things were being made.

50:04

Yeah. And so I said, what

50:06

if we

50:08

could do YouTube convention and, like,

50:10

some people who work at YouTube would

50:12

be there and people who work at advertising industry would

50:14

be

50:14

there. But, like, the core of it's gonna

50:17

be that YouTubers and their audiences will be there.

50:19

Mhmm. And

50:20

it was sort of like the economy was still

50:22

getting its legs under So

50:25

there weren't a lot of conventions happening, so it was easier

50:27

and cheaper to start one than it is

50:29

now. And this was, I think,

50:31

you're the first one two thousand

50:33

ten -- Mhmm. -- in Anaheim. I think they're all

50:35

in Anaheim. Right? No. That was back in Century BITP,

50:38

actually. In Century

50:38

City. Okay. Mhmm. And you had twelve

50:40

hundred people will come out. But before we we

50:43

get there, like, tell me, like, where

50:45

did you even how did you

50:47

even it is such

50:50

a massive undertaking. How

50:52

did you start it? Where did you go? Who did

50:54

you ask? I mean, there's like this whole

50:56

companies that that --

50:57

Yeah. -- businesses around these things that are massive. I mean, the first

50:59

thing that I had to do was reach

51:01

out to a bunch of people who make

51:03

YouTube videos -- Yeah. --

51:06

and say, would you show up if we did it? We

51:08

aren't gonna be able to pay you, but we'll pay for

51:10

your hotel rooms. We'll fly it in

51:12

California, which

51:13

you didn't know but that you could. But I

51:15

did a budget. You know, you know, we had

51:18

something against it. You took a

51:20

loan out.

51:21

No, we had to sign a piece of paper that said

51:23

we will fill up this many hotel rooms

51:25

in your hotel. And if we do

51:27

not do that, then we will go

51:29

bankrupt. Wow. What hotel was it? Oh, the Hyatt

51:32

Regency Century Plaza, which probably has a

51:34

different name now. But right across the street

51:36

from CIA,

51:38

actually. So what was the next step? Did you have to bring a

51:40

staff on? Did you have to I mean Yeah.

51:42

So we partnered with the company that

51:44

produced this Harry Potter Convention that

51:47

I had died. And so they they

51:50

did a lot of that. I did all of the

51:52

guest management. You know, it was to the

51:54

point where, like, the night before the event

51:56

I was we need to sign at the bottom of

51:58

the escalator telling people which way to go and as it can goes

51:59

and, like, you know, just really just

52:02

making it happen one way or

52:06

another. I mean, we were on the phone with YouTube telling

52:08

them what sponsorship number we

52:10

thought made sense, and and they were

52:12

telling us

52:13

no, we will sponsor this banking convention. Wow. They

52:16

wouldn't even sponsor the first one. Not the

52:18

first year. I remember the actual

52:20

difference between making money

52:22

and not making money that first year was that

52:24

I said on a vlogbrother's video.

52:26

If anybody knows anybody who would like to

52:28

sponsor an online video convention, please

52:30

email me and the

52:32

daughter of an executive

52:34

at Cisco was like,

52:36

here's my dad, maybe And

52:39

they came in for twenty thousand dollars, and that was it.

52:41

That was the thing that pushed us over

52:43

the line. Like Cisco, the

52:46

networking company. Yeah. Because I think at that point they own flip cameras

52:48

-- Mhmm. -- which was a thing. Yeah.

52:50

Wow. But even

52:52

so, like, much does it cost by

52:54

the way to go? Oh, gosh. Sixty

52:56

dollars maybe. I don't remember. Sixty dollars. And

52:58

then you got you got to pay it for your hotel, but

53:00

-- Yeah. -- that's I

53:02

mean, how did you cover your costs? Well, that's

53:03

that's how we did it. Sixty dollars at a time.

53:06

Barely. But I

53:08

remember there were a lot of YouTubers there

53:10

who who weren't

53:12

there as, like, guests of the conference,

53:14

but were just there. Oh, yeah. Yeah. Like,

53:16

I remember Tyler O'Cley was there

53:19

BITP as an attendee, not as a mhmm, not

53:21

as

53:21

a YouTuber. That's the VidCon

53:24

story. You graduate from being in a paying

53:26

attendee to being a featured creator. Yeah. every

53:28

year. And how did it go?

53:30

It was so good. Awesome.

53:32

Like, to go from seeing

53:34

the numbers on the screen, to

53:36

seeing the faces in the audience is really important. And it

53:39

was also really important, I think, for

53:41

the industry to realize that it was

53:43

an industry, to get together and

53:46

to know that this thing matters and also

53:48

is, like, at the beginning. Yeah. It

53:51

was really important to us to have it

53:53

across the street from CIA because

53:56

CAA did not represent any

53:57

YouTubers. Well, that's a

54:00

great story, but I think

54:02

that we took the cheapest hotel.

54:04

You know, I'm curious because

54:06

in the previous era, right, guys

54:09

like you would not necessarily

54:11

be able to break through

54:14

the through the gatekeepers. Right?

54:16

I mean, both of you are very

54:18

handsome and charismatic Raz all

54:20

those things, but there was a maybe

54:22

a certain look or a certain

54:25

voice or a certain type

54:27

of person that, you know, would

54:29

be allowed on television. Yeah.

54:31

You know, We got into this without wanting to

54:33

be in television that was never a

54:35

dream of either of ours.

54:38

And so wasn't like a stepping stone. It was where

54:40

we wanted to be. Yeah.

54:42

Alright. So VidCon, the first

54:44

VidCon kind of, we're able

54:46

to come out of that

54:48

with some profit. I mean, they're hard. The margins are the on these things can

54:51

be really thin. Yeah. I think it was

54:53

like ten thousand dollars of profit. So

54:55

basically, broke even. Yeah.

54:58

And at this

54:59

point, twenty ten, twenty eleven, would you describe your

55:02

overall business like your overall

55:04

revenue as

55:06

massive? Was it it was a sustainable? Like, where were you

55:08

kind of financially in life? Media

55:11

and American household. Yeah.

55:14

Right. Which was awesome. Yeah. I mean, that's all we needed. And as she mentioned,

55:16

John, you had moved by this point too --

55:18

Right. -- Indianapolis. Yeah. I moved Indianapolis.

55:21

In two thousand seven. And you moved to Indianapolis because

55:24

your wife got a job at the art museum

55:26

there. Exactly. Yeah. So from my

55:28

perspective, as I told Sarah when she was applying

55:30

for jobs, all basements

55:32

are essentially identical. And so it

55:34

doesn't really matter to me where where I'm

55:36

writing. Yeah. And Hank,

55:38

you were still in Montana, so are there now?

55:40

Yeah. And

55:42

at this point, really, I think two thousand

55:44

eleven is just another turning point, which is

55:46

when you you worked

55:48

with YouTube to launch who would crash

55:50

course. And any middle school

55:52

and high school kid knows, and even

55:54

adults know crash course. But

55:58

really, like, did you John see the

56:00

video work and the YouTube work

56:02

as, like, what you or

56:04

did you still see yourself

56:06

as a

56:08

novelist? I saw myself primarily as a novelist because how

56:10

I made a living. Yeah.

56:12

But the biggest thing is that Hank

56:15

and I had always wanted to

56:18

make educational videos. And

56:20

we would talk about it all the time. We would

56:22

have these hours long conversations where

56:24

we would discuss different paths toward achieving this dream

56:26

of being able to make educational video with

56:28

a team that had really good animation and

56:32

was fact checked and all that

56:34

stuff that we just weren't in a

56:36

place to be able to do from our our

56:38

basements. So

56:40

when you kind of launched crash course. And this, I guess,

56:42

there was some funding from YouTube.

56:44

The idea that you guys

56:46

had was we're gonna make

56:50

videos about a variety of topics that

56:52

would essentially be like free free

56:54

school that will get kids or people excited

56:56

about science or history or was sort idea

56:58

behind it. We wanted to make learning

57:00

fun. We wanted to make it feel the

57:02

way that it feels for us in adulthood,

57:06

which is thrilling. It's so exciting to

57:08

be able to better understand the universe

57:10

and our place in it. That's

57:12

so Wondery.

57:15

And funny. And so

57:17

our our initial idea was

57:19

really we wanna take the

57:21

best of YouTube culture and the

57:23

best of educational approaches to

57:25

content and bring them

57:27

together. Because one of the things that

57:29

YouTubers are extremely good

57:32

at is holding on to people's attention in an environment

57:34

where there are many demands for

57:36

your attention. And it is increasingly

57:38

the

57:39

challenge, I guess, that teachers

57:42

face. Yeah. And you

57:44

John John, you'd handle humanities. Thank

57:46

you handle the sort of

57:49

sciences. And in that By the

57:51

way, I'm just curious, can you talk about how much YouTube gave you to start

57:53

that? Yeah. I think they gave us four hundred

57:55

and fifty thousand dollars. Yep. But

57:58

you would own the IP, they would not own

58:00

it. Right. Exactly. So sort of in advance

58:02

against advertising royalty. they

58:06

recouped via advertising revenue, but

58:08

we got to own the IP.

58:11

And here now with four hundred and fifty

58:13

thousand dollars from YouTube, what are

58:15

that mean? Like, did that mean you

58:17

could hire you could hire a team

58:19

of people around you to help you?

58:22

Because was it just the two of you

58:24

up until that point? Yeah.

58:25

We had just hired our first

58:28

people executive assistance slash

58:30

operations people right before

58:32

that money came in.

58:34

Right. And so

58:36

what it meant for the humanity

58:38

side of crash course was that

58:40

Stan Mueller could come on

58:42

full time and be the

58:45

producer and director and editor

58:48

of that show. And also

58:50

that we could hire

58:52

animators and people who made the videos look

58:54

really good. Alright.

58:56

So two thousand twelve,

59:00

obviously, this is the

59:02

first time a lot of, I should say, older people, let's say,

59:04

parents, here the name John Green.

59:06

Because all of a sudden this book comes out, the fault in

59:08

our stars.

59:10

And this one is different. Very different from your previous books

59:12

in that it doesn't sell a hundred and

59:14

fifty copies in the first week. It was the

59:16

number one book on Amazon six

59:20

months before it was published. Yeah. The first the first run was

59:22

a hundred and fifty thousand copies. I think I think

59:24

it's sold worldwide more than twenty

59:28

million copies. That book. Yeah. Yeah.

59:29

It's crazy. By this point, by twenty twelve,

59:32

you know, you had probably, like, two

59:34

million subscribers on your YouTube

59:36

channels. Probably

59:38

about and people knew you, John, from the videos,

59:40

but great books. It's so

59:42

hard to break through. Right? Oh, yeah.

59:45

How did this book become number one on Amazon six

59:47

months before it was even

59:50

published?

59:50

Well, I think the short answer

59:53

is that I don't know. And when I was writing the book, I

59:55

did not think that it would

59:57

be successful. I mean, I remember

59:59

writing the book I

1:00:01

was at the Starbucks at eighty six in Ditches where I wrote most

1:00:04

of it Starbucks in Indianapolis.

1:00:06

And I would come into

1:00:08

the Starbucks and I would write for three

1:00:10

or four hours and I would be

1:00:12

crying, and then I would think to

1:00:14

myself, I

1:00:16

am really grateful to be writing this book, but

1:00:18

I can't imagine that anyone is ever gonna

1:00:20

wanna read it. About two teenagers in the

1:00:23

cancer support group. Yeah. About

1:00:25

about kids living with really

1:00:27

serious illness -- Yeah.

1:00:29

-- and having to face mortality

1:00:32

at a really young age. I wonder

1:00:34

how you came up with such a

1:00:36

complex world.

1:00:38

Right? It's kids two characters and they meet in this

1:00:40

support group and they're both, you know, in

1:00:42

remission, Wondery struggling with bladder

1:00:44

cancer. And may I think about your time

1:00:46

as a

1:00:48

chaplain, a children's hospital and presumably that, you

1:00:50

know, experience informs some of your

1:00:52

knowledge, but, like, where did they

1:00:54

come from? I do think that my

1:00:56

time at the hospital was extremely important

1:00:58

to me, you know, learning from

1:01:00

listening to young people

1:01:02

living with cancer, I think the most

1:01:04

important thing though was

1:01:06

my friendship with a young woman named Esther

1:01:08

who was a fan of her videos.

1:01:12

Yeah. And Ester and I and her

1:01:14

family and her her friends, we were

1:01:16

all quite close in

1:01:18

the last six

1:01:20

months or so of Esther's

1:01:22

life. Mhmm. She died in two

1:01:24

thousand ten, and

1:01:26

I'd written a lot of stuff set

1:01:28

at a children's hospital over

1:01:30

the ten years since I worked there.

1:01:32

But after Esther died, I

1:01:34

started to rethink all of it You

1:01:36

know, I I wrote the book in this,

1:01:38

you know, intense period

1:01:40

of of grief and

1:01:42

anger. I was trying to

1:01:44

explore and for myself as

1:01:46

as much as anyone the

1:01:48

question of how can

1:01:50

a short life be a full

1:01:52

life be a rich and

1:01:54

good life because I

1:01:56

I did and do find it so hard

1:01:59

to understand

1:02:01

why Esther and so many

1:02:04

young people like her aren't here with us. Yeah.

1:02:07

You obviously had

1:02:09

an audience and

1:02:12

a lot of young people are on YouTube or on

1:02:14

YouTube and a lot of young adults. And so that

1:02:18

book, of course, blew

1:02:20

up, but what do you

1:02:22

think it was about that book that just

1:02:24

resonated in that way? I mean,

1:02:26

you have to be had to have been

1:02:28

and probably still are stunned that that

1:02:30

twenty four million copies of book or

1:02:31

sold. Yeah. I mean, it's just

1:02:34

it's Honestly, it sort of

1:02:36

feels like it happened to somebody else.

1:02:38

But when it became an

1:02:40

Amazon bestseller months before it

1:02:43

came out, That was for two reasons. One was that I announced

1:02:45

that I was gonna sign the entire first printing

1:02:47

of the book. So that was

1:02:49

a hundred and fifty thousand

1:02:51

copies. Yeah. And then the second reason was that

1:02:54

I read the first two

1:02:56

chapters in a livestream, like, on

1:02:58

a vlogbrother's

1:03:00

livestream And the reaction

1:03:02

to those first two chapters was very

1:03:04

different from anything I had ever experienced

1:03:07

before. Mhmm. And So I I did have a little bit of a

1:03:09

clue after that that it was gonna be different. And the

1:03:12

other clue I got that it was gonna be different

1:03:14

was when Hank read the

1:03:16

book and

1:03:17

he called me after he finished, and he said, I think

1:03:19

your life is about to

1:03:22

change. Let me come back in

1:03:24

just a moment. How Hank and John

1:03:26

balance time and money to

1:03:28

keep growing the video business and

1:03:30

why they don't ever wanna charge

1:03:32

money for their content. Stay

1:03:34

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ten percent off. Borough dot

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com slash built. Hey,

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welcome back to how I built this. I'm

1:06:00

Guy Robbins. So it's twenty

1:06:02

twelve, and Hank and John Green have

1:06:04

just launched a new educational video

1:06:06

series called crash course. In

1:06:08

John's novel, Neva fault in our stars,

1:06:10

is already shattering expectations. Which

1:06:13

is something he can't

1:06:15

fully

1:06:15

explain. I still don't understand BITP, to

1:06:18

be honest with you. Mostly it was

1:06:20

extremely surreal. Hank went on tour with me

1:06:22

for, like, five weeks and we were driving around the country. And then

1:06:24

I got home and I called my agent

1:06:26

and I was like, when does this end?

1:06:29

And she was like, I don't I don't know. It might be

1:06:31

a while. And you were still making videos

1:06:34

while you were touring. Oh, yeah. Yeah. We

1:06:36

never stopped making videos. Like for

1:06:38

us, it is a

1:06:40

way to have ideas.

1:06:42

Even if I was only making the videos

1:06:45

for Hank, I wouldn't wanna give it up

1:06:47

because I really like that practice of looking

1:06:49

at the world that way. Yeah. I mean,

1:06:51

it's interesting because in almost

1:06:54

every

1:06:54

case, on the show, the person of the people who

1:06:56

make the business are making it because they

1:06:58

love it or they have a good idea and they

1:07:01

they wanna keep doing it even after they made lots

1:07:03

of money because they love it. Right? And

1:07:06

so, like, you also have

1:07:08

this YouTube world that you're part of

1:07:10

with your brother, which is a real thing. It it's becoming at this

1:07:12

point when the fault in our stars is

1:07:14

released, it's becoming a business, a

1:07:16

real business, which which would

1:07:18

be fooled into a big

1:07:20

production company called

1:07:21

Complexly. Yeah. We were actually

1:07:23

on tour for the fault in our stars

1:07:25

when the first crash course world history video

1:07:27

came out. And the way

1:07:30

I thought about it

1:07:32

was it's great that this

1:07:34

book is successful because

1:07:36

now I don't have to write a book for a

1:07:38

year or two, and I can

1:07:40

focus on crash course. Right. It turned

1:07:42

out to be a little bit harder.

1:07:44

Focus on crash course than I expected it to be. Yeah. So there's

1:07:47

this this this is where sort of

1:07:49

the part of the interview, what

1:07:52

we really have to talk about compartmentalizing because, you

1:07:54

know, not just your personal and and

1:07:56

emotional lives, but the professional lives. Right?

1:07:58

You've got really the fault in our

1:08:02

stars created a whole world of people who

1:08:04

are connected to it and you are at

1:08:06

the center of that. And then there is this

1:08:10

increasingly growing world of

1:08:12

complexly -- Mhmm. -- it becomes your

1:08:14

business. And I don't we don't have enough time to mention all

1:08:16

the shows. That

1:08:18

complexly produces it's like crash course and size show. And how many

1:08:20

shows total is

1:08:23

under the complexly banner? Complexly.

1:08:27

I think that it's probably around twenty something. These are

1:08:29

just the video shows, not

1:08:31

the podcast. I probably counted the podcast

1:08:33

in there. Yeah. Okay. Yeah. But

1:08:35

then you're also in four podcasts?

1:08:37

Yeah, probably. Let me ask about the business model, which

1:08:39

is all content. It's all free

1:08:41

content. This was basically was

1:08:44

self financed. Right?

1:08:46

You got the YouTube investment, but then time, it sounds you built it you know, and now you've

1:08:49

got a

1:08:52

pretty sustainable business.

1:08:54

But -- Mhmm. -- there are

1:08:56

other companies that sell subscriptions to

1:08:58

content that you offer for free

1:09:01

Mhmm. I'm sure over the last many years, you had

1:09:03

lots of maybe unsolicited advice with people saying, you gotta

1:09:05

turn this into

1:09:08

a scripture You have to have a a

1:09:10

freemium model and a freemium model. You've gotta charge people because you're not gonna make enough money

1:09:12

from ads alone, but

1:09:15

your model basically depends I

1:09:18

think primarily on advertising. Right? Yes.

1:09:20

That's definitely the biggest piece

1:09:23

of the pie. And

1:09:25

then the rest is crowdfunding

1:09:27

and grants. So organizations that are like,

1:09:30

hey, you're making this and you're

1:09:32

making it for

1:09:34

free. Like, we'd like you to make an up like a series

1:09:36

on this particular topic, and we'd do

1:09:38

that with their

1:09:39

money. And then we

1:09:41

also ask people to give us money that we

1:09:43

can do it. Mhmm. Definitely, if that money

1:09:44

were not there, this would not be a

1:09:46

sustainable business. But the thing that strikes

1:09:49

me about complexly

1:09:52

is that it may not generate the kind

1:09:54

of money. I mean, if you look at like the top twenty or thirty, the biggest

1:09:56

YouTubers in terms of revenue, you

1:09:58

guys are not on that list, which

1:10:02

their YouTubers are making tons of money

1:10:04

of videos that are

1:10:06

pranks or challenges of

1:10:09

basically seven to twelve year old

1:10:11

boys who are watching their videos and

1:10:13

like crazy money, like fifty, sixty

1:10:15

million dollars a year. And

1:10:18

you guys are making educational content that is not making that kind of

1:10:19

money, but your

1:10:23

stuff is evergreen. Raz mean,

1:10:26

the value in what you're building is the content lives

1:10:28

forever. It can be sold one day. Well, there's I mean, there's,

1:10:30

you know, we mostly think about that value through

1:10:35

the lens of anybody who's in business. You gotta

1:10:38

understand that, like, what your actual business

1:10:42

is is creation of value. Yeah. And that always

1:10:44

a majority of that value that

1:10:46

isn't being captured by you. It's

1:10:50

being captured elsewhere. Like I buy my iPhone because

1:10:52

it delivers to me more value

1:10:54

than it costs me. Right. And

1:10:56

I think that that's how I think

1:10:59

about the value that complexly provides is that we want the

1:11:01

value we deliver to be way

1:11:03

more than the value that we

1:11:05

capture. That's the goal. And

1:11:07

that's not you really

1:11:09

the goal. But in order to do that, it's not about capturing us value. It's about

1:11:12

creating more.

1:11:16

But the reality is that, I mean, I made Ken Burns

1:11:18

on the show earlier this year, and he's sitting on an archive

1:11:22

that he owns, that might be worth three hundred, four hundred million dollars.

1:11:24

Right? I mean, there are artists who

1:11:26

are selling their music archives for

1:11:29

hundreds of millions

1:11:32

of dollars. I mean, is there a world

1:11:34

where you could imagine selling all this stuff one day to, you

1:11:36

know, linda dot com sold the LinkedIn?

1:11:38

Right. I mean, is there a world

1:11:40

where or you would

1:11:42

even consider

1:11:43

that? So obviously, I think that there's a lot of value that it creates, but I don't know that it's that valuable because

1:11:45

you can't pay a

1:11:47

wallet. Right. Because that's

1:11:51

outside of the promise that has been

1:11:53

made. All of the content is

1:11:55

free. Mhmm. So it's creating the value,

1:11:57

but you can't capture it in the

1:12:00

same way. It's like an easement on

1:12:02

a property, you know. If you can't turn it into a bunch of houses, the land is worthless.

1:12:04

And like, I'm

1:12:07

not saying like acquisitions the

1:12:10

table. I just don't think that it's as valuable

1:12:12

as it would be if we hadn't made that promise and I but

1:12:14

I just feel like I think that that's the right promise to make.

1:12:16

Yeah. Complexly

1:12:20

has today between the two

1:12:22

sort of main offices in

1:12:24

Montana and in the

1:12:26

atmosphere about fifty employees. I think it's a little over sixty now.

1:12:28

Yeah. But, I mean, at least for you,

1:12:30

Hank, I mean, you are also the CEO

1:12:32

of this. Mhmm.

1:12:35

And we haven't even to what the other

1:12:37

companies that you will have founded. But how do you organize your time?

1:12:39

How do you how do you time to do

1:12:42

this podcast? I don't know. You know, it's definitely something that I could not

1:12:44

do without a lot of

1:12:46

support because I am like

1:12:51

my first job kind of remains being a vlogbrother.

1:12:54

Yeah. You know, I I listen to

1:12:56

your show and I hear a

1:12:58

lot of people who are, like, seem

1:13:00

very on top of it. But

1:13:02

I definitely feel like I am not and am always

1:13:05

a little bit on a tight

1:13:07

rope and maybe like that feeling

1:13:10

a little too much, and I'm very glad

1:13:12

to have the support of people

1:13:14

who don't want that feeling. And

1:13:17

as much as I think that

1:13:19

I've been really effective at helping complexly be a sustainable business

1:13:21

despite the fact that its business model is a little nutty,

1:13:24

you know, I

1:13:27

have for the majority of my professional career, and this

1:13:29

has changed a little bit. But I've really

1:13:32

organized myself around

1:13:34

sort of like what's

1:13:36

succeeding just head in that direction. What's

1:13:38

exciting? Head in that direction. What's causing you the most stress? Head in that direction. But

1:13:41

I don't think

1:13:44

that it's I think that the company

1:13:46

is now of a size and has been for a while where we've had to sort of change how we see that and be

1:13:52

I wonder what you think

1:13:54

of where the creator economy has has

1:13:57

come to now. When you see

1:13:59

these YouTubers who are making tens

1:14:02

of millions of dollars on

1:14:04

challenges or playing

1:14:06

video

1:14:07

games, unboxing video opening toys. Mhmm.

1:14:09

What do you think about that? The first thing I'd say is that there are some people who get paid

1:14:11

tens of millions of dollars a

1:14:14

year to play act like

1:14:16

children and

1:14:19

we call them movie stars and we don't think of the

1:14:21

money that they get

1:14:23

paid as being

1:14:25

wild or weird because we have become accustomed

1:14:27

to this world where if you're exceptionally

1:14:29

good at play

1:14:30

acting, you can make tens of

1:14:33

millions of dollars doing it. And so if

1:14:35

they're creating that much economic value and

1:14:37

they're capturing some portion of

1:14:40

it, that's not really for me to

1:14:42

judge. I feel like And as far as, you know, the the thing to

1:14:44

remember about the people who are making fifty

1:14:46

million dollars, which I think are probably in

1:14:48

a very edge case if that's even

1:14:50

a real number. I don't know if

1:14:52

is, is that the vast majority of

1:14:54

people who are working really hard to make interesting content that

1:14:59

entertains people educates people or captures people its attention are

1:15:01

making less than, you

1:15:04

know, fifteen dollars

1:15:06

an hour something. Yeah. We don't talk about that. It's not

1:15:08

interesting. It's not front page news. But

1:15:10

it's actually a, like, a substantial

1:15:13

part of the economy now. And I want

1:15:15

people to have the job that I have in love. And in order for that

1:15:17

to happen, you have to have more money in the ecosystem.

1:15:19

You have to have more robust

1:15:22

advertising and and crowd funding and different tools for creators. And when

1:15:25

that happens, it means that the

1:15:27

big people are gonna get

1:15:29

bigger, but it also means that the people

1:15:31

who are twenty thousand dollars a year and making forty thousand now. And that seems

1:15:33

like a huge

1:15:34

win. That's a much bigger deal to us.

1:15:37

Yeah. One of the million companies that Hank

1:15:39

started that we haven't talked about is subable, a company that was eventually acquired by Patreon and

1:15:42

it was a This is a company that you

1:15:44

started to help people

1:15:46

subscribe to content that they

1:15:49

liked and they could pay for it or

1:15:51

not pay for it. Right. And the reason Hank started

1:15:53

subbable and the reason that we've been really interested in businesses

1:15:56

like that is

1:15:59

because we we know from experience

1:16:01

and we've seen in the lives of the

1:16:03

people we work with and the people

1:16:05

we're friends with, that what

1:16:07

really transforms the lives of

1:16:09

people is not going from

1:16:12

making three hundred thousand dollars a

1:16:14

year to fifty million dollars a going

1:16:16

from making twelve thousand dollars a year to

1:16:18

sixty or eighty thousand dollars a year. Right. And

1:16:20

so our interest

1:16:23

is really in those tens of

1:16:26

thousands of creators who will be on that journey if

1:16:28

only we have

1:16:31

better monetization tools. Let

1:16:33

me ask you, I know I'm gonna

1:16:35

sound like a complete horrible jerk to lots

1:16:37

of people listening, but I hate the fact

1:16:40

that most kids,

1:16:42

a majority of kids, my kids age, say they wanna be YouTubers. And they're not they're not kind of being Hank and John Green

1:16:44

YouTubers. They're talking

1:16:47

about being famous. And

1:16:51

I worry that we that

1:16:53

human species cannot sustain

1:16:55

a world where everybody

1:16:57

is famous. I mean,

1:17:00

right now, who knows how many millions of

1:17:02

TikTokers and Instagramers and YouTubers have more than five hundred thousand

1:17:04

subscribers a ton --

1:17:07

Mhmm. -- tons. And I

1:17:09

get your point about, you know, wanting

1:17:11

to create an ecosystem that employs

1:17:13

people, and that's really great. But is there any part

1:17:15

of you that is worried or sad

1:17:19

that most kids, at least in the US today,

1:17:21

wanna be YouTubers and they grow

1:17:23

up? There's no part of me

1:17:25

that's sad that most kids

1:17:27

wanna be YouTubers In the eighties, if

1:17:30

you'd asked my classroom, we'd all wanna be rock stars or basketball players. I'm not particularly

1:17:33

concerned about kids

1:17:36

who want to have,

1:17:38

like, have jobs that bring attention and status. I think that that's pretty typical. But I

1:17:40

am concerned about

1:17:43

whether those jobs actually

1:17:47

provide value to the people who

1:17:49

end up having

1:17:49

them. Damn. We've been doing this for so

1:17:52

long. We've seen a lot of

1:17:54

young people get a lot of attention

1:17:56

and build big audiences

1:17:58

really quickly and then

1:18:01

really struggle. Yeah. Yeah.

1:18:03

And that is something that Hank and I are both deeply concerned about. That

1:18:05

there are not a lot of

1:18:07

systems for support you

1:18:10

know, it it's almost like a career as

1:18:13

a professional athlete. It lasts a couple

1:18:15

or three years, and then

1:18:17

you're thirty years old.

1:18:20

And you've only ever done one thing and you

1:18:22

it's hard to figure out what to do next.

1:18:26

Mhmm. Yeah. But I also think it's important to recognize that

1:18:28

we don't get to choose

1:18:31

what teenagers want. And

1:18:33

so deciding whether it's

1:18:35

good or bad, feels a little unnecessary.

1:18:37

Yes. It feels like a jerk thing to say. Just say it. Well, I it's a little no.

1:18:39

I don't think it's a jerk thing to

1:18:41

say. It's more like if you're

1:18:43

you're standing out side,

1:18:46

and the wind is blowing in from the west. And you're like, I really think the wind should come from wind

1:18:48

is like, I

1:18:51

don't really care. Yeah.

1:18:54

There's something about the way your business worked. I think it's really important to point out,

1:18:57

which is

1:19:00

a significant maybe

1:19:02

the majority of the profit from all the

1:19:04

different businesses doesn't go to Hank and John, it goes

1:19:06

to pay the staffs and then to charity. So

1:19:09

BITP before we get there, I

1:19:11

wanna understand the revenue stream. So there's Complexly,

1:19:14

of course, is your sprawling media

1:19:17

empire of shows. Subbable was acquired by Patreon, and I

1:19:19

know that is part of

1:19:22

Patreon now. VidCon eventually was

1:19:27

acquired by Viacom. Mhmm. But you also

1:19:29

have you got a sock

1:19:31

club. Don't laugh at the sock club.

1:19:33

It's by far the most successful thing we've

1:19:35

ever done. It's true. So give me a sense

1:19:37

be between complexly and all of

1:19:39

the, like, all

1:19:41

the businesses that you guys oversee now.

1:19:43

Which is how how many? Oh, it's really only two. Only two day to day. Okay. So

1:19:46

some of them some of them are spun off

1:19:50

or sold or merged. And -- Mhmm. -- so between all

1:19:52

the revenue that comes in every year,

1:19:54

how much is it? What's your

1:19:57

estimate? Thirty? I don't know. It depends

1:19:59

on the account too. Do you have to be as

1:20:01

a strange business? Because --

1:20:02

Mhmm. --

1:20:03

a lot of money is royalties.

1:20:05

So, like, we

1:20:06

so we never see it. We sell the product, but,

1:20:08

like, the majority of the money from that product

1:20:10

is going to the creator, not to us. Right.

1:20:12

So you can say that

1:20:14

DFTBA is a you know, twenty

1:20:16

five million dollar company, but a lot of that

1:20:18

money is going back. Right. And it's very narrow margin business

1:20:22

Raz is complexly. How much roughly of whatever's left

1:20:24

goes to you guys? I think

1:20:26

I make

1:20:27

twenty seven thousand

1:20:29

dollars a year. Yeah. John takes a very small

1:20:32

salary. I I take a normal salary.

1:20:34

Oh, I didn't know that. He didn't

1:20:36

know that. No. But most

1:20:38

of the income goes to different

1:20:41

charities?

1:20:41

Yes.

1:20:42

We're two employees. You know, you guys are

1:20:45

now in

1:20:48

your forties and you're still young and you

1:20:50

have I'm pretty sure, like, forty more business.

1:20:52

I mean, I hate to

1:20:54

use a term hamster wheel because

1:20:57

doesn't sound like I mean, I know

1:20:59

you love what you do, but when you think about

1:21:01

the next sort of ten, twenty years, in twenty years, are

1:21:03

you doing all this stuff? Still?

1:21:06

Are you writing books? Are you, you

1:21:08

know, making all these shows,

1:21:10

making all this content, hosting

1:21:13

these events, gathering people together and

1:21:15

launching other businesses? I

1:21:16

don't know.

1:21:17

I don't think about

1:21:20

it. He doesn't think about it.

1:21:22

That is literally true. I think about it. Yeah.

1:21:24

I think about it enough

1:21:26

for both of

1:21:27

us. Let's we are a

1:21:30

good team. Sometimes they'll be like, hey,

1:21:32

yeah. How is Vlogbrothers gonna

1:21:34

end? Have you thought about

1:21:34

it? And he'll be like, no, not really. It's not gonna end this year. Right. Right. Maybe

1:21:37

it doesn't have to end or

1:21:39

maybe you won't know

1:21:42

like like the fault in our stars. You don't even know how it

1:21:44

ends. Yeah. I think that is the truth. Right? Like,

1:21:46

no matter how much I plan, I don't know

1:21:49

how it's gonna end. The thing that I've come

1:21:51

back to over the years, because there have been

1:21:53

a number of times where I thought I might

1:21:55

be close to done. I'm

1:21:57

pretty tired. I'm pretty burn out. I

1:21:59

love working on the stuff that we work on,

1:22:01

and I love working with the people we work

1:22:04

with. But I

1:22:06

also wanna be conscious of my

1:22:08

limits. John Wesley once said to do

1:22:10

all the good you can, in all

1:22:12

the ways you can, in all the places you

1:22:14

can, to all the people you can, for

1:22:18

as long as you can. And

1:22:20

that was like my

1:22:22

guiding concept about being

1:22:24

alive was

1:22:25

like, I'm not alive

1:22:27

to be I'm not alive to be fulfilled. I'm alive

1:22:29

to do as much good as I can, as fast as I can for

1:22:31

as long as

1:22:34

I can. And man, that is not a as not a sustainable

1:22:36

strategy. It's not a good way

1:22:38

to live a life. So I've

1:22:40

had to rethink it in the

1:22:43

last few years for sure. But it's

1:22:45

hard to imagine wanting to

1:22:46

stop. Yeah. I will say that this for

1:22:49

me. I don't see

1:22:51

myself as that I'm not the kind of

1:22:53

CEO who's like, I am really the only person who could possibly do this job.

1:22:56

Yeah. I

1:22:59

could definitely imagine and that there number who would be better at

1:23:01

this than me. Yeah. And I

1:23:03

would never wanna not be involved. And

1:23:05

I still love being involved in VidCon.

1:23:07

You know? Like, I

1:23:10

I still love it when there are problems that they have to come to me with, and I'm like, yeah, I know a lot about this and

1:23:13

I can

1:23:16

help. And I

1:23:18

love to start things as well as to keep them going. And right now, I really can't. I am functionally at

1:23:20

the edge of what

1:23:23

I can do and I

1:23:26

can't do anything new and that's okay, but I would like to be able to someday sure. Hank,

1:23:31

what? Are you treating this

1:23:34

episode of how I built this the way that you did that vlogbrothers video

1:23:37

before the

1:23:40

first VidCon? Where you were like, hey, does anybody have

1:23:42

a kid who works for Cisco who wants to are you is

1:23:46

anybody wanna lead a really fantastic educational media

1:23:48

company. I love it. You listen.

1:23:50

It's another platform. You might as

1:23:52

well use it. The listeners at this

1:23:54

podcast are perfect for you. And so you're just you're

1:23:57

just throwing out the line and see it

1:23:59

if anybody's like my email

1:24:01

address. Yeah. We'll

1:24:04

post it.

1:24:04

I love it. Guy, you want a job? I

1:24:06

agree. Oh, yeah. Guy, do you want a job? I mean, I agree with Hank, by the way, that

1:24:09

neither of us

1:24:12

deep down is

1:24:14

made of CEO stuff. Yeah. Sometimes I listen to people on this podcast and I'm like, are you joking me?

1:24:16

You

1:24:16

seem really, really together. Oh,

1:24:19

gosh. They're so together. But

1:24:23

they wake up so early. When you guys think about

1:24:25

all that's happened to you, because you

1:24:27

are you've really had a

1:24:30

huge impact, you

1:24:31

know, a cultural impact But when

1:24:33

you think about all that you built and all these teams and this content

1:24:35

and where you are now, how much of of this

1:24:37

do you attribute to, how hard you

1:24:39

work, and how do

1:24:43

you think it has to do with just being lucky, being in the

1:24:45

right place, the right

1:24:46

time? We've been

1:24:47

waiting for this question.

1:24:49

I've

1:24:49

listened to the pod fast guy. We talked about

1:24:51

it for, like, forty five

1:24:54

minutes yesterday. And my

1:24:56

feeling is that

1:24:58

it's it's so a hundred percent luck

1:25:00

that it's impossible to

1:25:02

even explain how a hundred

1:25:04

percent luck it is. But

1:25:07

within luck, we have to remember way that that luck

1:25:09

is not like rolling dice. It's

1:25:11

a series of

1:25:14

structures and power systems

1:25:17

that make paths easier for certain

1:25:19

people. Mhmm. Yeah. I I

1:25:21

think all the time

1:25:24

about how While I was

1:25:26

in grad school, I was diagnosed with

1:25:28

ulcerative colitis and initially had a very inexpensive medication.

1:25:30

But by the time we started making vlogbrothers

1:25:33

I needed to get on a

1:25:36

new medication that was five hundred, six hundred dollars

1:25:38

a month. And I was able to just do that because

1:25:40

I had

1:25:43

support for my family. I was able

1:25:45

to just, like, pay another

1:25:48

rent to my

1:25:50

colon so that could keep making vlogbrothers videos, and that

1:25:52

was just was just not an opportunity for

1:25:54

a lot of people. So, like, even those

1:25:56

little things, those little pieces

1:25:58

of luck, it's so hard

1:26:01

to see them sometimes. Yeah. Like, I can't even attribute it to

1:26:03

skill because I'm

1:26:03

not even that strategic. I just sort of go towards what's

1:26:05

working. Yeah. That was I thought that

1:26:07

was a really answer

1:26:11

Hank because, like, there have been a few moments in our career where we didn't,

1:26:13

like, fly blindly toward the light like mods at

1:26:15

night for reasons we didn't understand.

1:26:17

Like, there have been a

1:26:19

few tactical decisions just like three or four.

1:26:21

Yeah. But ninety nine percent of the time we've been flying to the light and then

1:26:24

you, like, go on an interview show

1:26:26

and people are like, hey, how'd you get

1:26:28

so successful and you're

1:26:30

like, oh, I flew to the and the I also the Yeah. Seems

1:26:32

like maybe there was a

1:26:34

lot of luck involved in you

1:26:39

ending up on the moon. That's

1:26:41

Hank and

1:26:43

John Green, vlogbrothers

1:26:45

authors and co

1:26:47

founders Complexly. By the way,

1:26:49

if in like five hundred years from now, right, aliens come to our planet and

1:26:51

start digging around,

1:26:55

they come across a time capsule one viral video that could

1:26:57

explain the whole thing, like explain everything

1:26:59

about YouTube. What what would

1:27:01

you guys put in that

1:27:04

time capsule?

1:27:05

My answer is Mark

1:27:07

Rober's video where he invented a

1:27:09

really beautiful and

1:27:12

complicated ops difficult

1:27:15

course for squirrels. Wow.