Complexly: Hank and John Green

In 2007, brothers Hank and John Green lived thousands of miles apart, so they started posting video blogs to each other on a strange new platform called YouTube. People began tuning in, and the daily Vlogbrothers posts became an early viral hit. Over time, the brothers grew that single channel into a sprawling collection of businesses, including a production studio—Complexly—that makes some of the most entertaining educational content on the internet. They’re also both hugely successful authors; John’s young adult novel The Fault in Our Stars is one of the best-selling books of all time. With every success, Hank says he’s asked himself, “What’s exciting? What’s causing you the most stress? Head in that direction.” See Privacy Policy at https://art19.com/privacy and California Privacy Notice at https://art19.com/privacy#do-not-sell-my-info.

Speaker names marked ? are inferred from speaking time and the show’s known hosts — they are not voice-verified.

• 0:00Guy Raz?

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• 4:23Guy Raz?

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• 5:07Guy Raz?

  Visit mobili fuels.com for details. Hey, it's Guy here with a quick message about another podcast I think you'll love. It's called The Great Creators, and you can find it wherever you listen to podcasts. Check out my latest interview with Tom Hanks. You might think you know him until you hear this interview. You'll find out what Priscilla Presley told him about his portrayal of Colonel Tom Parker in the Elvis movie. Tom talks about his own self-doubt and a moment of clarity he experienced in a chance meeting with baseball legend Joe DiMaggio. Check out The Great Creators podcast wherever you listen to podcasts. It's always free and available one week early on the Amazon Music app or by subscribing to Wondery Plus.

• 5:55Speaker 01

  My feeling when I was watching YouTube in 2006 was this isn't something that was made for me. This is something that is being made with me. And as is often the case in Hank and I's relationship, Hank sees the future coming, and I am astonished by it.

• 6:10Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 6:10Speaker 01

  I thought we were doing a project for a year that was really fun, and it was going to help us be closer to each other.

• 6:16Speaker 02

  Whereas I was like looking at my camcorder and thinking, this will be in a museum someday. Like, I was over the line. This isn't like TV. This is like the printing press.

• 6:29Speaker 01

  You did say that. I remember you saying that to me.

• 6:41Guy Raz?

  Welcome to How I Built This, a show about innovators, entrepreneurs, idealists, and the stories behind the movements they built.

• 6:53Guy Raz?

  I'm Guy Raz, and on the show today, how Hank and John Green turned their brotherly banter into a YouTube hit and grew it into Complexly, one of the biggest educational content companies on the internet.

• 7:10Guy Raz?

  In December of 2006, Time Magazine's annual Person of the Year cover story came out, and on the cover was a computer monitor with one word in the middle: "You." And below, it said, "You Control the Information Age. Welcome to Your World." Now, just two months before that cover came out, Google acquired YouTube for about $1.7 billion. And right around this time, so roughly early 2007, Hank and John Green saw the potential of what was about to happen in the world of media, and they decided to leap right into it. Because with almost no barriers to entry, YouTube seemed like

• 7:53Guy Raz?

  a pretty interesting place to explore. And like many people we've profiled on the show, Hank and John Green didn't set out to become internet entrepreneurs. The two brothers started a YouTube channel as a way to keep in touch. Hank was living in Montana, John was in New York, and they missed talking to each other. So every day, one brother would post a video to the other brother. And the videos might include things like what was going on in the world, or a cool science discovery, or maybe a new song one of them wrote. At the time, John was an aspiring, if slightly struggling, writer. He'd written a few well-received novels, but only sold a few thousand copies. Hank was thinking about becoming a science writer.

• 8:36Guy Raz?

  But because they were smart and funny and relatable, their video diary started getting views. At first, hundreds, and eventually, thousands. Today, that YouTube channel, Vlogbrothers, has 3.5 million subscribers. But that's actually a drop in the bucket when you consider how big their overall audience is. Because what began as a video diary eventually led the Green brothers to build a business so sprawling, it's almost hard to wrap your head around it. Let's start with their production company. It's called Complexly, and it has over a dozen different YouTube channels, mainly educational videos with a combined 30 million subscribers. Hank and John also run a business

• 9:21Guy Raz?

  that makes and sells merch for other content creators. They founded an annual convention for YouTubers called VidCon. They founded another one for podcasters. They also have their own podcasts. They have a nonprofit that sells socks and sweatshirts and a bunch of other things, and they donate all the money to charity. And did I mention that both brothers are hugely successful authors? John Green's young adult novel, The Fault in Our Stars, has sold more than 23 million copies. And the thing is that almost all of these things I mentioned, Hank and John still have an active hand in them. They still appear in a lot of their own videos. They have not stopped being the Vlogbrothers.

• 10:03Guy Raz?

  They still create a lot of content every day. And, as you will hear, even though they run a for-profit company, almost all of the content they make is entirely free. And unlike many people in the business, they want to keep it that way. Hank and John grew up mostly in Orlando, where their dad headed up the state nature conservancy, and their mom was a community activist. As boys, they played a lot together. But John, who is the older brother, was kind of an anxious kid. And when he was a teenager, he needed a change of scenery. How old were you when your parents sent you to boarding school?

• 10:42Speaker 01

  My parents didn't send me to boarding school. I asked to go.

• 10:45Guy Raz?

  You asked to go, sorry.

• 10:46Speaker 01

  He sent himself away. I was 14.

• 10:49Guy Raz?

  14, okay. And this is a school outside of Birmingham, Alabama, called the Indian Springs School. And tell me why you wanted to go? I mean, you were far away and were you having problems? Or you just want a better school? Like, what, why?

• 11:05Speaker 01

  I was a troubled kid, I would say. In a bit of trouble academically. I was really struggling at the public school I attended. And then also just socially, I had a really difficult time. I was bullied a lot in middle school. And so I really wanted to go to this school because it seemed like a place where people like me could feel included. And it was a really transformative experience for me. I was with peers all day long. It's really where I became myself. I continued to be a terrible student, but I started to find an interest in learning, even if my grades didn't quite reflect it.

• 11:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You've written about this a little bit, and you described yourself as almost kind of like trapped, that you were super nerdy, but super awkward, insecure. You couldn't have like normal social interactions with people, that you just couldn't. What did that mean? That you just couldn't, like, take me back to 14-year-old John Green. If I went up to him, I was like, hey, how you doing? Like, it would just be a weird interaction?

• 12:13Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that, looking back, a lot of it was probably shaped by having OCD and struggling a lot with anxiety. And so a lot of the conversations I would have would sort of be filtered through this sieve of anxiety. And so I would laugh too late, you know, when somebody said something funny, or I would respond awkwardly or inappropriately from not fully understanding the context, because I wasn't really able to fully listen to them. And when I got to high school, I started to have friends who really understood me

• 12:51Speaker 01

  and were okay with me, if that makes sense. Like, I had this amazing best friend, Todd, and he was like a guide to the universe of interacting with other humans. So, like, we would go to a party together or something, and then we would be driving home after the party. And he would be like, hey, listen, man, that was great. That was such a fun night. Couple notes. When you're talking to somebody and you sort of lean forward and they take a half a step back, and then you lean forward more, they're actually trying to communicate to you that there's not enough space between the two of you.

• 13:26Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 13:26Speaker 01

  And he would just, he would just in a very kind, loving way, help me understand how to be a social person in the world.

• 13:34Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. And so, Hank, so your brother's away, you grew up in Orlando. So you were basically kind of an only child when he was away.

• 13:44Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah, he'd come back for the summers. And I remember those summers as being, sort of like, being very glad to have my brother back for two days, and then the rest of it being quite a lot. A lot of conflict during those years.

• 13:59Guy Raz?

  Were you, I mean, and this sort of foreshadows what both of you would kind of focus on later on professionally, but were you more of a science kid? Because I know, John, you have talked about not being good at math, not being good at science, not generally not being a great student. But Hank, did you, like, was science a thing that you just kind of gravitated towards as a kid?

• 14:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, even quite young. And I expressed that interest early on, and my dad would like take me out on field visits in the nature conservancy, like work that he was doing. And I'd get to see like the, you know, normal, boring work of science. But what it emphasized is that it's a job that normal people have. You know, I remember doing a science fair project, and it was just a very boring catalog of the species that lived in a waterway that connected two lakes. And it did not get a single award among the dozens of different awards they had created so that the maximum number of kids could get something. No one thought that this was interesting research.

• 14:56Speaker 01

  Are you still bitter? You sound a little still bitter.

• 14:58Speaker 02

  Very, 100%. I remember like five of the kids that won, and how their projects were not as interesting as mine.

• 15:07Guy Raz?

  So John, when you you went to college, you went to Kenyon in Ohio and you studied English. And while you were there, John, did you start to sort of think more deeply about what you might want to do or what you thought you would do?

• 15:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I loved writing. I loved writing stories when I was a kid and it would have delighted me to learn that I could be a writer, but I never thought I could. I thought it was like being an astronaut or something.

• 15:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 15:32Speaker 01

  But Kenyon is well known for its English department and I went there thinking that I would love to learn more about how to write good stories. But then there are only two fiction writing, at the time anyway, two fiction writing classes at Kenyon, intro to fiction writing and advanced fiction writing. And I didn't get into the advanced fiction writing class. There were like 14 applicants and 12 spots and I was one of the two people who didn't get in.

• 15:59Guy Raz?

  Who did not get it.

• 16:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. I mean, if you're not in the in the top 85% of writers at your tiny little college in Ohio, it's hard to imagine how you become a writer as a job. And so it was really devastating to me. I was embarrassed. I felt some shame. And it really made me rethink my professional life. And the plan I eventually developed was to go to divinity school because I also majored in religious studies to become an Episcopal minister.

• 16:32Guy Raz?

  So this was your plan, maybe, you know, I'll go to divinity school. I guess you kind of worked as an apprentice to a chaplain at a children's hospital.

• 16:41Speaker 01

  Yeah, I was a student chaplain at a children's hospital for several months when I was 22, right before I was supposed to go to divinity school. And then my time at the hospital, I think, helped me understand that I didn't want to become a minister.

• 16:58Guy Raz?

  I've read a little bit about your time there. I mean, you've described it as a very sad period in your life. I mean, being around six kids, I can't imagine what that was like. Were the kids there, you know, were mostly kids are going to be okay or a lot of them going to die?

• 17:21Speaker 01

  A lot of them were gonna, were gonna die and, and a lot of them did, did die while I was their chaplain. And I'm not the main character of that story. You know, the, the people who were in those rooms, who were at the center of that horror and, and suffering were not me. But even so, it was really difficult. I was really young. I certainly had never encountered so much death, so much unjust death. And, you know, like a lot of young people who read a lot of theology, I had a lot of,

• 18:04Speaker 01

  I guess, like somewhat sophisticated ways of making sense of suffering and how do we solve this problem of a good and loving God who, who allows such unjust suffering to occur in this world? And then when I was faced with the reality of it, it was very different and much harder for me to reconcile. And then I entered a very long period where I just, I, I was only very tangentially connected in any way to my religious tradition. And so I, I set out on a, on a different path.

• 18:46Guy Raz?

  So, so when that time ended at the children's hospital, I guess you, you moved to Chicago and eventually you found a job at a magazine called Bookless, which I guess for people who aren't, aren't familiar with it, it basically reviews books to kind of help librarians and, and bookstores decide what to, to buy. And what, did you just apply and get a job there, like as an editorial assistant?

• 19:07Speaker 01

  Yeah. I started out as a temp because they needed somebody who could type in ISBN numbers and not to brag, but I'm a very fast typist. And so I just did data entry for years. Ninety-nine percent of my job was data entry.

• 19:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah, that's a job, by the way, that doesn't, I don't think it exists anymore, right?

• 19:27Speaker 01

  Well, I was very aware of the fact that they were one barcode scanner away from automating my job the entire time I was there. Obviously, it would not have been a great job for 50 years, but it was an amazing job for that period of my life for a lot of reasons. One of which is that it was very meditative, especially coming from the children's hospital. Like, I'm an extremely anxious person, but when you start working at a magazine after working as a chaplain at a children's hospital, it's pretty hard to get excited about any of the stuff that's happening, right? Like, what's gonna happen? The magazine won't come out? Oh, no. This is okay. It was such an awesome place to work. I've had a stupidly

• 20:12Speaker 01

  lucky professional life, but the greatest professional luck of my life, other than being Hank Green's brother, is getting that job.

• 20:18Guy Raz?

  And eventually, did you get to review books as well?

• 20:21Speaker 01

  I did. I was surrounded by people who read hundreds of books every year, some of whom had been reading hundreds of books every year for decades. And slowly, they also began to offer me opportunities to review books myself. And then that became a bigger and bigger part of my job at Booklist over the six years I was there.

• 20:40Guy Raz?

  When you were at Booklist, were you, I mean, I guess, maybe spoiler alert, you published a book in 2005, Looking for Alaska. This is your first novel. But I have to assume that, I mean, you were working on it. Were you, tell me how you got the confidence to start writing your own book. Were you doing it secretly at the beginning? Were you not taught, like, how did you even start that process?

• 21:03Speaker 01

  Well, I was always writing, but I think your question is a really good one, because I think it does take a certain amount of confidence to think, well, I could write a book. And I think what gave me that confidence was working at a magazine that reviewed 400 books every two weeks. And I would think, you know, I'm not that good of a writer, but 400 of these things did come out in the last two weeks. So maybe.

• 21:33Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:34Speaker 01

  And a lot of them weren't that good. Nothing personal, I mean, but the thing about books that aren't that good is you can see the strings of the puppets a little easier.

• 21:43Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 21:44Speaker 01

  And I had a wonderful mentor, one of my editors at Booklist, Eileen Cooper. And I took her out to lunch one day and I said, I'd really like to write a book about a kid out of boarding school who's grappling with guilt and grief. And she said, that sounds great, but you have to write it. And about a year later, I handed Eileen 40 single spaced pages of text with no margins and no paragraph breaks. And to her immense credit, she read it. And she said, you know, there's something here. And I worked on it over the next two and a half years with her.

• 22:27Guy Raz?

  And was that really the first time since college that you let somebody see your writing? Cause that's, that's a very personal thing. I mean, that it can be really scary because they might say this sucks.

• 22:39Speaker 01

  Yeah, it's a tremendously vulnerable thing. I never feel more like my body is on the outside of my skin than when I'm sharing writing with people. Of the 40 single spaced pages Eileen read, I think probably, I don't know, six or seven sentences from that are in Looking for Alaska. So it did have a long way to go.

• 23:03Guy Raz?

  Right. And when you, I mean, you hear this from writers all the time, which is to be a good writer, you have to be a really good reader first. You've got to learn how to be a good reader.

• 23:12Speaker 01

  Yeah, I don't know if that's universally true, but I had to get better at reading for sure. But I mean, the truth is I have no idea how to write a book. Like I, I, like in this interview, I feel like I'm trying to talk as if I know how to write a book when the evidence is overwhelming that I don't, based on the fact that the last time I published a novel was five years ago. I mean, I have a very inefficient process in the sense that I write a draft and then I delete almost all of it. And that's the only way I know how to write a story. I'm sure I am unconsciously responding to lots of other writers and I am unconsciously learning from everything I read. But in terms of what's happening consciously, I'm only at war with myself.

• 23:56Speaker 01

  The only real obstacle in my path is me and the only way out is me.

• 24:02Guy Raz?

  At what point were you able to get an agent? I mean, did Eileen, was there a point where she said, yep, it's ready to go? Let me make some calls? And how did that happen?

• 24:11Speaker 01

  There was a point where Eileen said, I think this is ready to go out to publishers. And then I sent it to several publishers. I actually didn't have an agent at the time. It was a little bit of a different era in publishing, at least YA publishing. And one of the editors called me back and said that they wanted to publish the book.

• 24:32Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 24:33Speaker 01

  That was not the end of the story, though. Like, that was a lovely day.

• 24:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 24:37Speaker 01

  And I went ahead and bought a sushi dinner with, if I recall correctly, 3% of my advance. And it was a lovely dinner. But I spent another year and a half revising the book with my editor at Penguin, Julie Strauss-Gabel. And that's really when the book came to have the kind of shape and texture that it has now.

• 25:02Guy Raz?

  All right, so that book gets published. You're a published author in 2005. And, I mean, the reception was really great. It won the best YA book of the year award, this Michael Prince Award. And like, that was it. You were a published writer. I mean, you were now a novelist.

• 25:19Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 25:19Guy Raz?

  Did it feel that way to you? I mean, you quit your job at book lists, so clearly you, I guess, are thinking, okay, I gotta go all in on this now.

• 25:28Speaker 01

  Well, sort of. I actually didn't quit my job at Booklist because Looking for Alaska got published. I quit my job at Booklist because while writing Looking for Alaska, I had fallen in love with the woman who is now my wife. And she got into graduate school in New York, which meant that we were moving to New York if we were going to continue our relationship. And so I would have stayed at Booklist very happily. But it did change my life, especially after Alaska received such generous reviews and then started to win awards. It did.

• 26:02Guy Raz?

  I mean, the numbers are probably very different now, but in that first year, how many copies did Looking for Alaska sell?

• 26:08Speaker 01

  7,000.

• 26:09Guy Raz?

  7,000?

• 26:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 26:11Guy Raz?

  And it's important to say that number because I think something like 2% or 3% of books published every year sell more than 5,000 copies. Like 95, 98% of books sell fewer than 5,000 copies.

• 26:21Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, 7,000 copies was great.

• 26:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 26:24Speaker 01

  I'd earned out my advance. I was able to sign a deal for a second novel and the people who read it liked it. And that was my definition of success at the time.

• 26:36Guy Raz?

  You published your second book, An Abundance of Catharines, I think a year later. How did that book do?

• 26:41Speaker 01

  Similarly. I think Catharines sold 125 copies the week it came out. So not great, but it also slowly, over time, found an audience.

• 26:55Guy Raz?

  Got it. And meantime, Hank, while John is basically becoming an author, you're sort of on a path that's going to take you towards science writing. Because after college, you did a master's degree at the University of Montana. You did it in environmental studies. And by the way, while, while John is moving around the country, right, like he's in Chicago and then he's in New York, were you guys keeping in touch?

• 27:19Speaker 02

  Yeah, a bit. I remember a lot of instant messaging. And at this point, I was, and really had always been, very enamored of my older brother and thought that whenever I could kind of get his attention, it was very cool and very good. And whenever he had an interest in a new kind of music or movie or something, I was, you know, I very much believed. Deep in my soul in a very unquestioning way that that in fact was the coolest thing. And so we were in touch and I was always, I think, trying to impress him, but also, you know, obviously very caught up in my own stuff.

• 27:59Guy Raz?

  All right, so we get, we come to 2006. You are living, John, in New York.

• 28:03Speaker 02

  Right.

• 28:04Guy Raz?

  Hank, you're in Montana because you'd finished your master's degree. And you are doing a lot of writing. You had your own blog and you were writing a lot about like environmental issues. I think you even, you were like npr.org and a bunch, National Geographic, right?

• 28:18Speaker 02

  Yeah, yeah, really focused on technology. So during my grad school times, it became very clear that learning about the sort of future of our earth was a very easy way to feel very sad all of the time and get burned out. And the only thing I could do was kind of go home and search Google for any solutions that were being proposed. And I transitioned that into this kind of freelance career, both blogging on my own and for a number of other publications, writing about everything from electric cars to wind turbines to electronic paper.

• 28:55Guy Raz?

  Right. All right. So 2006, this is a pivotal year in what we now call the creator economy because that was the year, I think, that YouTube was bought by Google.

• 29:05Speaker 02

  Yeah, that's right.

• 29:06Guy Raz?

  So there's this thing YouTube, and there were clearly people who were kind of starting to experiment with this and doing all these weird, these weird things. And tell me a little bit about this idea that, that you had, John, to start playing around with YouTube and communicating with your brother over it. What was that about?

• 29:27Speaker 02

  Well, I think I wanted to be closer to Hank. I think that was the biggest thing. We lived on different sides of the country, but also we never talked on the phone. We only communicated over instant messenger. And I felt like I didn't know him that well. And that felt like a big hole in my life. But then also, we were both really interested in online video and the way that online video was being used as a path into building community.

• 29:57Speaker 01

  And so we would have these conversations on Instant Messenger about how much we loved the show with Zay Frank, or how much we loved Lonely Girl 15, and how interesting it was, and how new and different and thrilling it felt. And then one day, those conversations just transitioned to us saying, well, we could do that. Why don't we try something like that?

• 30:19Guy Raz?

  I mean, what was it about those videos? Because this is, I mean, this stuff on YouTube in 2006, 2007 was like, you look at it now, and it's, it seems weird. Or, you know, like, there was this like redhead guy who used to scream.

• 30:38Speaker 03

  Oh, and I wonder why he thought my voice was weird. Well, whatever. I'm gonna text you.

• 30:42Guy Raz?

  What was his name? Kids used to watch him. What was his name, the screaming redhead kid?

• 30:46Speaker 01

  Redhead guy who used to scream. Are you talking about Fred?

• 30:49Guy Raz?

  Fred, Fred, that's it.

• 30:50Speaker 01

  I think he's talking about Fred. That's amazing. Oh, God, what a great, please leave that in. Please describe Fred as the redhead guy who used to scream. I don't think he has red hair, but okay.

• 31:00Guy Raz?

  I'm sorry, Fred. I don't mean to describe.

• 31:03Speaker 01

  He doesn't have red hair, is there? But Hank, it's incredible that Hank still got there, even though he doesn't have red hair.

• 31:09Guy Raz?

  I don't know. I'm sorry, Fred. But the screaming guy. So, so it was like, what was on YouTube at the time was, what was it about those videos that appealed to you before you guys decided to make your own?

• 31:21Speaker 01

  So I have, at that point, I'd already had a, like, a number of weirdly successful internet projects.

• 31:28Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 31:29Speaker 01

  You know, starting in high school, when I had like a Mars website that got way too much attention for someone who knew nothing and had read two books. He had like one of the first websites about Mars in the 90s, the early 90s? Yeah. It was just sort of like, here's information.

• 31:46Guy Raz?

  But this is not, this is not like a money-making venture. This was just something you did.

• 31:50Speaker 01

  No, I don't think I made any money off of that. But then in the transition between college and grad school, I started a blog about how bad I4 was.

• 31:59Speaker 02

  Interstate four and I like spray painted signs and put them on the side of the interstate in Orlando that like connects Orlando and Tampa. It's like the main interstate in Orlando. And it's very bad and everyone hates it. And so I started a kind of a transportation policy blog and I did make money with that.

• 32:14Speaker 01

  I remember you made like $200 from selling an ad, just one ad. And I was like, $200 for a website?

• 32:23Guy Raz?

  A website ad.

• 32:25Speaker 02

  Yeah. And like the news came over, the local news came to interview me in the house.

• 32:29Speaker 01

  Oh, it was epic.

• 32:30Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 32:31Speaker 02

  And so like the internet just seemed to have all of this energy, like you could do anything and people would notice. And YouTube was very much that way where there, it was very experimental. And the thing that was driving people forward was impressing their peers and connecting with people and having a good time.

• 32:48Guy Raz?

  All right. So January 2007, you guys decide, I guess, John, this is your idea, but you guys decide to make like a YouTube diary to each other. Like you would send a video to your brother, your brother would send a video to you, but of course it's on YouTube, so it's public. And this is what would become Vlog Brothers. And John, when you proposed this idea to your brother, what did you, how did you describe it? Did you say, hey, I'm gonna write you a letter or I'm just gonna send you a funny video or I'm just gonna, but we have to go back and forth. How was it gonna work?

• 33:18Speaker 01

  I think I said, what if we made videos back and forth to each other every weekday for a year instead of instant messaging?

• 33:26Guy Raz?

  Every weekday, every single day?

• 33:29Speaker 01

  Yep. One of us made the video on Monday and then Hank would reply on Tuesday and I would make a video on Wednesday all through the year.

• 33:36Guy Raz?

  That's a lot of work.

• 33:38Speaker 01

  At the time, I didn't know how much work it was because I had never owned a video camera.

• 33:44Speaker 02

  We did not know what we were signing up for, for sure.

• 33:49Speaker 01

  I remember calling Hank on Christmas Eve and being at the camera store and being like, which of these do I get? There's a bunch of them.

• 33:56Speaker 02

  Yeah. So we got the same camera so we could help each other work through our various technical difficulties.

• 34:01Guy Raz?

  And this was when, and you had to use like a camcorder, right? And connect it to your computer and through a peripheral and-

• 34:07Speaker 01

  It was on tape.

• 34:08Guy Raz?

  It was on tape, right? And then you had to like upload it and-

• 34:11Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:12Guy Raz?

  But what were the videos, like, what did you say, John, and you described them to Hank? You said- I'm gonna make a video of what? Like, a day in my life?

• 34:21Speaker 02

  No.

• 34:22Guy Raz?

  Like, a letter, like-

• 34:23Speaker 02

  Guy, there was no idea. There was no idea.

• 34:26Speaker 01

  I did not get that far.

• 34:27Speaker 02

  The idea was, if you don't make a video, you will be punished. That was it.

• 34:33Guy Raz?

  Okay, that was a deal.

• 34:34Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was it.

• 34:35Speaker 02

  So, like, whatever you can come up with.

• 34:37Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 34:38Speaker 02

  And then it was just like two brothers trying to impress and one-up each other for 15 years.

• 34:43Guy Raz?

  The channel that you guys created was called Vlog Brothers.

• 34:46Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 34:46Speaker 01

  Right.

• 34:46Guy Raz?

  I think the first video was, uh-

• 34:49Speaker 01

  The first video was sort of Hank laying out the rules, is that right, Hank?

• 34:52Speaker 02

  Yeah, exactly.

• 34:53Speaker 01

  And you were like at a New Year's Eve party? It was a pretty cool video, actually.

• 34:57Speaker 02

  Yeah, it had B-roll. Hello, John. By now you have received my message that we will no longer be communicating through any textual means, only video vlogging. Does that make us crazy?

• 35:10Speaker 02

  Probably.

• 35:12Guy Raz?

  This wasn't just talking to the camera and just uploading it.

• 35:15Speaker 01

  No, although, we had a lot of videos that were talking at the camera and uploading.

• 35:19Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:20Speaker 01

  And I, almost immediately, we were conscious of the community, too. And so, almost immediately, I wasn't just making it for Hank. Even though I was making it to Hank, I became aware of the fact that it wasn't only for Hank.

• 35:35Guy Raz?

  Right. But it was a small group of people initially. It was like a few hundred people.

• 35:39Speaker 02

  Yeah, I have no idea how anyone even ever found us.

• 35:41Guy Raz?

  Probably a lot of your friends, or relatives, or just people you told about. Like, hey, we're doing this thing.

• 35:45Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 35:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 35:46Speaker 02

  I remember posting around in like the Z-Frank forums. And then I think John must have told some librarians about us, because we had a lot of librarians early on.

• 35:57Speaker 01

  Oh, thank God for those early librarians. They did such a good job of modeling community for us. So, yeah, that was huge. Neil Gaiman, the author, mentioned us on his blog a couple months into the project. And that brought in a 50 or 100 people.

• 36:12Guy Raz?

  What'd you talk about? I mean, you mentioned a couple of examples, but you had to come up with something every day. And I know there's a famous one that kind of, this was the one that kind of really helped it take off, which was a Harry Potter song.

• 36:25Speaker 01

  Hank wrote it.

• 36:26Guy Raz?

  Hank wrote it, okay.

• 36:26Speaker 01

  God knows I didn't sing it.

• 36:47Speaker 02

  Back then, the front page of YouTube was curated by a human. And I wrote that song when the final Harry Potter book came out. And so it was actually now a tried and true tactic of getting views on YouTube is to make content around whatever is in the zeitgeist. And so they picked out my video to feature on that day. And that brought in the Harry Potter fans.

• 37:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And it's very charming and lovely and it's funny. But like, there was no purpose to it other than just to amuse yourselves. Like you wasn't, this is gonna become a business one day.

• 37:21Speaker 02

  No. I think we were very fortunate to have jobs, is what I would say about that. Yeah. I did not think of it as a business then, but I thought of it as important. Like, there was no peace of my mind that didn't think that this was going to be a big, big, big deal. And that it was gonna be really cool to have been involved in the beginning of it.

• 37:44Guy Raz?

  You knew that already in 2007. I've seen you, you were quoted around that time, basically saying, you know, it's like early television. There might be like the I Love Lucy creators making a YouTube channel right now. And in 20 years, this is 2007, you're thinking this. So 2027, you're right. I mean, we're gonna look back and say, wow.

• 38:05Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 38:05Guy Raz?

  I mean, that was amazing. But you already felt that early on?

• 38:10Speaker 02

  I felt it for, I think, two reasons. One is that my big brother thought it was a big deal. And so whatever John thinks is a big deal, even today, I'm like, he's right. I don't have to think about that.

• 38:20Guy Raz?

  Hmm.

• 38:21Speaker 02

  The other thing was that, you know, I watched cable happen. And then this was gonna be so much bigger than that. So much more ability for the barriers to be very, very low and the gatekeepers to just not exist anymore.

• 38:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:35Speaker 02

  My feeling when I was watching YouTube in 2006, watching early online video projects, was this isn't something that was made for me. This is something that is being made with me.

• 38:46Speaker 01

  It is aware of me. It is responding to my presence and to the presence of the audience in really interesting, innovative ways.

• 38:53Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 38:54Speaker 01

  I didn't, as is often the case in Hank and I's relationship, Hank sees the future coming and I am astonished by it. I thought we were doing a project for a year that was really fun and it was going to help us be closer to each other.

• 39:07Speaker 02

  Whereas I was like looking at my camcorder and thinking, this will be in a museum someday. Like I was over the line. This isn't like TV. This is like the printing press.

• 39:20Speaker 01

  You did say that. I remember you saying that to me.

• 39:24Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how a failed deal creates an opportunity for Hank and John to turn their growing YouTube channel into a real business. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 39:49Guy Raz?

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• 40:55Guy Raz?

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• 41:40Guy Raz?

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• 42:24Guy Raz?

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• 43:07Guy Raz?

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• 43:28Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2007, 2008, and John and Hank have started a YouTube channel called Vlogbrothers. And at this point, it's just a fun thing they're doing on the side. But that is about to change pretty soon. At what point into this project were either of you thinking, you know, we have a business here, we have some kind of business idea here? Because I have to imagine the first year, you know, I don't know if YouTube was monetized. I don't know how it worked at that point, but was it making any money for you? Was it generating any revenue from ads?

• 44:04Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think that we got into the partner program right at the end of the first year, but it was $50 a month or something.

• 44:11Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 44:12Speaker 02

  And that year, I very nearly sold my blog for what would have been, you know,

• 44:20Speaker 01

  life-changing money.

• 44:21Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 44:22Guy Raz?

  This was the blog that called, it was called EcoGeek?

• 44:24Speaker 02

  Yeah, for like low six figures, but it would have come along with a job that I very much wanted.

• 44:29Guy Raz?

  Can you tell me who was, who was going to buy it?

• 44:30Speaker 02

  I think I probably can. It was Scientific American.

• 44:33Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:34Speaker 02

  And yeah, I mean, it was honestly, for me, it was more that I was going to get to be a writer for Scientific American, which was a dream for me.

• 44:40Guy Raz?

  So you'd get a six-figure payout and a job at Scientific American, they'd own the blog.

• 44:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, and that not happening because of the financial crisis is the thing

• 44:50Guy Raz?

  Oh, they pulled out and

• 44:51Speaker 02

  That made like the whole rest of all of this happen, I think, to some extent.

• 44:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 44:56Speaker 01

  Right.

• 44:56Guy Raz?

  So because the financial crisis, basically, you were close to maybe closing that, but then they came back and they're like, you know, we can't do it.

• 45:03Speaker 02

  Yeah, they basically, they had a freeze on all deals. And then that's kind of when I was like, oh, we should maybe think about the ways in which this could be a business. But at that point, YouTube had started paying us enough. But that was very different from starting a business. So like, John and I making videos and getting paid ad revenue. Was very different from, like, we wouldn't have ever had to hire anyone. We could have just kept doing that.

• 45:32Guy Raz?

  And the money you were paid by YouTube was probably, what, a couple thousand bucks a month?

• 45:36Speaker 02

  Yeah, it was getting up toward that. Yeah.

• 45:38Guy Raz?

  All right. So, I mean, and by the way, how many, at that time, 2008, you know, when this deal with Scientific American fell through, how many subscribers did your YouTube channel have? Do you remember?

• 45:49Speaker 01

  I mean, we'd made 200 videos before we had our 200th YouTube subscriber.

• 45:55Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 45:55Speaker 01

  And then by late 2008, we were at 70,000 or 80,000.

• 46:00Speaker 02

  Which was, you know, one of the bigger channels on YouTube.

• 46:04Guy Raz?

  I'm curious about something, because both of you guys are Gen Xers, late Gen Xers. And as you know, as I know, our generation is one that prized sarcasm, irony. And you guys were in our earnest. You even kind of called your whole crew like nerd fighters. And like, that was your tribe, right? I mean, or did you guys just never get that, that part of being a Gen Xer, never, you know, make it into your?

• 46:33Speaker 02

  We were never terribly sarcastic young people.

• 46:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, Hank, that was such good sarcasm that I couldn't read it myself.

• 46:39Guy Raz?

  I see. Okay.

• 46:40Speaker 01

  We were super snarky, both of us, incredibly.

• 46:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, I don't, I hope that the things I wrote and published will never see the light of day.

• 46:50Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I hear you. Oh, my God.

• 46:53Speaker 02

  That's also, I was brought there by our audience. I don't think that people responded well to it.

• 46:58Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 46:59Guy Raz?

  To the sarcasm and the snarkiness.

• 47:00Speaker 02

  Yeah, when we did stuff like that.

• 47:02Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:02Speaker 02

  And I also don't think I liked it. I didn't like how it made me feel to make content like that. Like, I made a very popular video a few years into our project that was just like, things I hated about the world, which was kind of in that Gen X vein. It was just a bunch of rants very quickly. And it did really, actually did quite well. But I went and I sort of looked at the comments and the kind of audience it attracted. And I also thought about how it made me feel to be thinking about my next rant video. Like, if I was gonna make another one of those, I had to look at the world and find the things I didn't like about it.

• 47:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 47:38Speaker 02

  And then I was like, ah, this is making me much less happy.

• 47:42Speaker 01

  Well, this gets at something really important, though, Hank, which is that optimizing for views and optimizing for revenue does not optimize for the health of one's community necessarily. And we had to learn that the hard way several times. I always used irony and cynicism as a form of armor, as a way of protecting myself against having to reckon earnestly with the world, which felt terrifying and felt like I was gonna be devoured by the world if I ever, like, exposed my soft belly to it. And it was only in seeing Hank's work and the way that people responded to it generously

• 48:25Speaker 01

  that I started to realize that actually, even though it's scary, you have to try to be earnest. Like, earnestness is the most underrated thing in contemporary experience, I think.

• 48:37Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And meantime, John, I mean, you were, I mean, like, 2005, '06, and then '08. You cranked out three books, three novels-

• 48:46Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 48:47Guy Raz?

  -in that time. And so you are basically spending a percentage of your time making these videos and a percentage of your time writing the book, Paper Towns?

• 48:58Speaker 01

  Right.

• 48:59Guy Raz?

  Well, I'm curious, when Paper Towns came out, we're gonna talk about The Fault in Our Stars in a moment. But when Paper Towns came out, was there any impact on book sales? Was it different?

• 49:08Speaker 01

  Yes.

• 49:09Guy Raz?

  It was different than the previous two books?

• 49:11Speaker 01

  I think that Paper Towns sold about 50,000 copies in its first year.

• 49:16Guy Raz?

  And how much of that was connected to what you guys were doing on YouTube?

• 49:19Speaker 01

  I think a lot of it was connected to what we were doing on YouTube. Like, I remember feeling kind of guilty because Hank didn't have something like that. You know, like-

• 49:30Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:31Speaker 01

  I'd gotten this really significant payday and it felt kind of like, at least it was partly because of Vlogbrothers and there was no equivalent for Hank.

• 49:42Speaker 02

  And then I, over the course of years, capitalized on that guilt in every way possible.

• 49:49Speaker 01

  It didn't even, honestly, it didn't occur to me.

• 49:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 49:52Speaker 01

  Yeah. We've had a very lucky brotherhood in that jealousy hasn't really played much of a part.

• 49:57Guy Raz?

  It's kind of how you built your personal and professional relationship also, which

• 50:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 50:01Guy Raz?

  maybe by design or by luck, that happened. So when Paper Towns came out, John, you had Vlogbrothers, so you had an audience of 80,000 subscribers.

• 50:10Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:11Guy Raz?

  And so, all of a sudden, you have this, your own direct channel. You don't have to beg. I mean, of course, you still, you want to go on Fresh Air, you want to go on The Today Show, you want to go on...

• 50:23Speaker 01

  But I didn't.

• 50:24Guy Raz?

  Huh?

• 50:24Speaker 01

  I didn't get on any of those shows.

• 50:26Guy Raz?

  But you didn't have to, because you had your own marketing cha- you had your own channel.

• 50:30Speaker 01

  Right.

• 50:30Guy Raz?

  Essentially.

• 50:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, that is exactly right. And I don't think I totally realized that until Paper Towns came out.

• 50:39Guy Raz?

  All right, so, we have this deal fall through for your blog, Hank. Paper Towns comes out. I mean, I know the timeline is...

• 50:46Speaker 01

  It's actually almost, it was almost the same week.

• 50:48Guy Raz?

  Oh, wow, okay. And now you're kind of leaning into the YouTube thing. And tell me a little bit about what that meant in 2008, like leaning into a YouTube business. Because if YouTube was paying you a couple thousand bucks a month, that's great, but it might not be enough to build a sustainable business. So what, correct me if I'm wrong, but like, Hank, you kind of drove this business thinking. And John, you were interested in it, but it wasn't really, that wasn't how you thought about things initially.

• 51:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, definitely. I mean, I don't have a, I don't have a spreadsheet bone in my body.

• 51:26Speaker 01

  I've got a bunch now.

• 51:27Guy Raz?

  Hank is more naturally entrepreneurial than you, John?

• 51:30Speaker 01

  Oh, for sure. Even when we were kids, Hank was naturally entrepreneurial.

• 51:35Guy Raz?

  I was.

• 51:35Speaker 01

  And I was very focused on aligning myself with powerful institutions that could provide me with stability and health insurance.

• 51:42Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 51:44Speaker 02

  Yeah, so the first thing that looked like was starting a merchandise company with my friend Alan Lestefka, who was also a YouTuber.

• 51:53Guy Raz?

  This is the company called DFTBA, which stands for?

• 51:56Speaker 02

  Don't forget to be awesome.

• 51:57Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 51:58Speaker 02

  So I had burned CDs and sold them at Harry Potter conventions. And I was like, people are buying these. Like, I can't make enough of them.

• 52:06Guy Raz?

  CDs of your song?

• 52:07Speaker 02

  Yeah, of my music.

• 52:08Guy Raz?

  Oh, you would burn your... Oh, and what other music was on there?

• 52:11Speaker 02

  Oh, I just made a lot of like nerdy, like sometimes it was about science, sometimes what?

• 52:14Speaker 01

  You're so under... I don't mean to cut you off, man, but that is such an underplay of how awesome your music was in 2008. Like Hank wrote this song about quirks.

• 52:26Guy Raz?

  Quirks?

• 52:27Speaker 01

  That I still sing to myself whenever I have to think about what the different types of quirks are.

• 52:32Speaker 02

  Which happens all the time in a person's natural, everyday life.

• 52:35Speaker 01

  It happens regularly. I know what they are. I can still sing the song. Up, down, strange charm, top, bottom.

• 52:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, so I had sold some CDs and there were a bunch of YouTube musicians who I knew who were much better and bigger deals than me. And I was like, what? Why aren't we doing this? There are people who can make CDs. And so we'll take care of the hard parts for you, me and Alan.

• 53:04Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 53:05Speaker 02

  And we'll sell shirts and posters and CDs. And we were really a record label for YouTubers in the beginning, but very much without any knowledge of what record labels actually did.

• 53:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah, right.

• 53:15Speaker 02

  Yeah. Yeah.

• 53:17Guy Raz?

  So you would basically say, hey, if you're a YouTuber and you want to record music, we'll distribute it. We'll handle the business side for you. That was the idea?

• 53:23Speaker 02

  And you'll get so much more of every sale because the idea here is you're doing the marketing, you're producing the music. All we're doing is paying for the CD to get made and shipping it out and handling customer support.

• 53:36Guy Raz?

  Right. And so it started out as a label and eventually morphed into what it is today, which is basically a shop, a merchandising shop for YouTube creators, anybody really who wants to sell T-shirts or products, bags.

• 53:51Speaker 02

  Yeah, we work with podcasters and YouTubers mostly.

• 53:55Guy Raz?

  And, I mean, was it sustainable? Did it make money right away?

• 53:59Speaker 02

  Oh, yeah. I mean, we've never taken on substantial investment.

• 54:06Speaker 02

  For any of our things, everything that we do has been profitable from the beginning. It's grown with its own, I guess they call it bootstrapped, where you take the profit and use that to grow the company rather than trying to attract investment.

• 54:20Guy Raz?

  Blitzscale it with a bunch of money.

• 54:22Speaker 02

  We go slow, we go easy, you know, we're not trying to make the biggest things ever. We're just trying to solve problems for people.

• 54:29Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right. So this is the beginning of where this interview becomes really, really like a crazy roller coaster ride on speed and other amphetamines, because the number of businesses and things that you guys will do from this point forward is mind boggling. So I'm going to try to get to most of them, but I'm just warning listeners that there's a lot coming now.

• 54:54Speaker 02

  I'm not great at focus.

• 54:55Speaker 01

  Oh, man, you give Hank Green five minutes and he gives you a limited liability corporation.

• 55:00Guy Raz?

  I mean, you probably annoy the limited liability corporation like a registration office, because you're in there all the time. They're like, oh, God, here he is again. But this, but you've got this kind of growing community and you're tapped into this world of people who are clearly engaged, which leads you to the next venture that you found, which is called VidCon. This is a conference kind of around, around YouTubers. Tell me how you came up with that idea.

• 55:29Speaker 02

  I love conventions and had been to a number of them, like anime conventions, nerd conventions, Harry Potter things. And I had become friends because I was a performer at them with sort of a team of people who had created a Harry Potter convention. And I'd also been to Penny Arcade Expo, PAX, which was, is a video game convention that like combines enthusiasm for it and also the actual industry of video games. And I thought that that was a very good model, because it allowed the industry to see the fans and the fans to see the industry, it let the fans go deeper because they could see how these things were being made.

• 56:07Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 56:08Speaker 02

  And so I said, what if we could do a YouTube convention and like,

• 56:14Speaker 02

  Some people who work at YouTube would be there and people who work at advertising industry would be there. But like the core of it's going to be that YouTubers and their audiences will be there. And it was sort of like the economy was still getting its legs under it. So there weren't a lot of conventions happening. So it was easier and cheaper to start one than it is now.

• 56:34Guy Raz?

  And this was, I think you had the first one 2010 in Anaheim. I think they're all in Anaheim, right?

• 56:39Speaker 02

  No, that was back in Century City, actually.

• 56:41Guy Raz?

  In Century City, okay. And you had 1,200 people come out. But before we get there, like, tell me, like, where did you even, how did you even? It is a, such a massive undertaking. How did you start it? Where did you go? Who did you ask? I mean, there's like, there's all companies that, businesses around these things that are massive.

• 57:03Speaker 02

  I mean, the first thing that I had to do was reach out to a bunch of people who make YouTube videos. And say, would you show up if we did it? We aren't going to be able to pay you, but we'll pay for your hotel rooms. We'll fly you to California.

• 57:16Guy Raz?

  Which you didn't know whether you could, but.

• 57:18Speaker 02

  I did a budget.

• 57:21Speaker 01

  You know, we had something against it.

• 57:23Guy Raz?

  You took a loan out?

• 57:24Speaker 02

  No, we had to sign a piece of paper that said, we will fill up this many hotel rooms in your hotel. And if we do not do that, then we will go bankrupt.

• 57:33Guy Raz?

  Wow, yeah. What hotel was it?

• 57:35Speaker 02

  Oh, the Hyatt Regency Century Plaza, which probably has a different name now. But right across the street from CAA, actually.

• 57:42Guy Raz?

  So what was the next step? Did you have to bring a staff on? Did you have to, I mean?

• 57:47Speaker 02

  Yeah, so we partnered with the company that produced this Harry Potter convention that I had done.

• 57:51Guy Raz?

  Ah, I see.

• 57:52Speaker 02

  And so they, they did a lot of that. I did all of the guest management. You know, it was to the point where like, the night before the event, I was like, we need to sign at the bottom of the escalator, telling people which way to go. And as it kink goes and like, you know, really just making it happen, one way or another.

• 58:09Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, we were on the phone with YouTube, telling them what sponsorship number we thought made sense. And.

• 58:15Speaker 02

  And they were telling us, no, we will not sponsor this janky convention.

• 58:19Guy Raz?

  Wow, they wouldn't even sponsor the first one?

• 58:21Speaker 02

  Not the first year. I remember the actual difference between making money and not making money that first year. Was that I said on a Vlogbrothers video, "If anybody knows anybody who would like to sponsor an online video convention, please email me." And the daughter of an executive at Cisco was like, "Here's my dad, maybe." And they came in for $20,000 and that was it. That was the thing that pushed us over the line.

• 58:46Guy Raz?

  Like Cisco, the networking company?

• 58:49Speaker 02

  Yeah, because I think at that point, they owned flip cameras, which was a thing.

• 58:53Guy Raz?

  Wow. But even so, like, how much did it cost, by the way, to go?

• 58:58Speaker 02

  Oh, gosh, $60, maybe? I don't remember.

• 59:00Guy Raz?

  $60? And then you had to pay for your hotel? But that's, I mean, how did you cover your costs?

• 59:07Speaker 02

  Well, that's, that's how we did it. $60 at a time. Barely.

• 59:12Speaker 02

  But I remember there were a lot of YouTubers there who, who weren't there as like guests of the conference, but were just there. Oh, yeah, yeah. Like, I remember Tyler Oakley was there, but as an attendee, not as a, not as a YouTuber. That's the VidCon story. You graduate from being a, paying attendee to being a featured creator. Yeah. It happens every year.

• 59:32Guy Raz?

  And how did it go?

• 59:34Speaker 02

  Oh, it was so good. Awesome. Like, to go from seeing the numbers on the screen to seeing the faces in the audience is really important. And it was also really important, I think, for the industry to realize that it was an industry, to get together and to know that this thing matters and also is like at the beginning.

• 59:55Speaker 01

  Yeah, it was really important to us to have it across the street from CAA, precisely because CAA did not represent any YouTubers.

• 1:00:03Speaker 02

  Well, that's a great story, but I think that we took the cheapest hotel.

• 1:00:10Guy Raz?

  You know, I'm curious, because in a previous era, right, guys like you would not necessarily be able to break through the, through the gatekeepers, right? I mean, both of you are very handsome and charismatic and all those things, but there was a, maybe a certain look or a certain voice or a certain type of person that, you know, would be allowed on television.

• 1:00:33Speaker 02

  Yeah. You know, we got into this without wanting to be in television. That was never a dream of either of ours. And so it wasn't like a stepping stone. It was, we were where we wanted to be.

• 1:00:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah. All right, so VidCon, the first VidCon, kind of, were you able to come out of that with some profit? I mean, they're hard, the margins on these things can be really thin.

• 1:00:56Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think it was like $10,000 of profit.

• 1:00:59Guy Raz?

  So basically, you broke even?

• 1:01:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:01:01Guy Raz?

  And at this point, 2010, 2011, would you describe your overall business, like, your overall revenue as massive? Was it sustainable? Like, where were you kind of financially in life?

• 1:01:14Speaker 01

  Median American household.

• 1:01:16Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:01:17Speaker 01

  Right. Which was awesome. Yeah, I mean, that's all we needed.

• 1:01:19Guy Raz?

  And as you mentioned, John, you had moved by this point to

• 1:01:22Speaker 01

  Right.

• 1:01:23Guy Raz?

  Indianapolis.

• 1:01:23Speaker 01

  Yeah, I moved to Indianapolis in 2007.

• 1:01:26Guy Raz?

  And you moved to Indianapolis because your wife got a job at the art museum there?

• 1:01:29Speaker 01

  Exactly, yeah. So from my perspective, as I told Sarah when she was applying for jobs, all basements are essentially identical, and so it doesn't really matter to me where I'm writing.

• 1:01:40Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And Hank, you were still in Montana, still are there now? Yeah. And at this point, really, I think 2011 is another turning point, which is when you worked with YouTube to launch what would become Crash Course. And any middle school and high school kid knows, and even adults, no Crash Course. But really, like, did you, John, see the video work and the YouTube work as like what you did? Or did you still see yourself as a novelist?

• 1:02:12Speaker 01

  I saw myself primarily as a novelist because that was how I made a living.

• 1:02:17Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:02:17Speaker 01

  But the biggest thing is that Hank and I had always wanted to make educational videos. And we would talk about it all the time. We would have these hours-long conversations where we would discuss different paths toward achieving this dream of being able to make educational video with a team that had really good animation and was fact-checked and all that stuff that we just weren't in a place to be able to do from our basements.

• 1:02:42Guy Raz?

  So when you kind of launched Crash Course, and I guess there was some funding from YouTube. The idea that you guys had was we're gonna make videos about a variety of topics that would essentially be like free, free school, that would get kids or people excited about science or history, or what was sort of the idea behind it?

• 1:03:03Speaker 01

  We wanted to make learning fun. We wanted to make it feel the way that it feels for us in adulthood, which is thrilling. It's so exciting to be able to better understand the universe and our place in it. That's so wondrous and funny. And so our initial idea was really, we want to take the best of YouTube culture and the best of educational approaches to content and bring them together.

• 1:03:32Speaker 02

  Because one of the things that YouTubers are extremely good at is holding on to people's attention in an environment where there are many demands for your attention. And it is increasingly the challenge, I guess, that schoolteachers face.

• 1:03:46Guy Raz?

  Yeah. And you, John, John, you'd handle humanities. Hank, you handle sort of the sciences. And in that, by the way, I'm just curious, can you talk about how much YouTube gave you to start that?

• 1:03:58Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think they gave us $450,000.

• 1:04:00Speaker 02

  Yep, that is right.

• 1:04:02Guy Raz?

  But you would own the IP. They would not own it.

• 1:04:04Speaker 01

  Right, exactly. So it was sort of an advance against advertising royalty. So they recouped via advertising revenue, but we got to own the IP.

• 1:04:14Guy Raz?

  And here now with $450,000 from YouTube, what did that mean? Like, did that mean you could hire, you could hire a team of people around you to help you? Because was it just the two of you up until that point?

• 1:04:28Speaker 02

  Yeah, we had just hired our first people, executive assistants slash operations people, right before that money came in.

• 1:04:37Speaker 01

  Right. And so what it meant for the humanities side of Crash Course was that Stan Mueller could come on full time and be the producer and director and editor of that show. And also that we could hire animators and people who made the videos look really good.

• 1:05:00Guy Raz?

  All right, so 2012, obviously, this is the first time a lot of, I should say, older people, let's say, parents, hear the name John Green, because all of a sudden, this book comes out, The Fault in Our Stars, and this one is different, very different from your previous books, in that it doesn't sell 150 copies in the first week. It was the number one book on Amazon six months before it was published.

• 1:05:24Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:05:25Guy Raz?

  The first, I think the first run was 150,000 copies. I think it sold worldwide more than 20 million copies, that book?

• 1:05:31Speaker 01

  Yeah, yeah.

• 1:05:33Guy Raz?

  It's crazy. By this point, by 2012, you know, you had probably, what, 2 million subscribers on your YouTube channels?

• 1:05:40Speaker 01

  Probably about.

• 1:05:41Guy Raz?

  And people knew you, John, from the videos, but great books, it's so hard to break through, right?

• 1:05:48Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah.

• 1:05:48Guy Raz?

  How did this book become number one on Amazon six months before it was even published?

• 1:05:53Speaker 01

  Well, I think the short answer is that I don't know. And when I was writing the book, I did not think that it would be successful. I mean, I remember writing the book, I was at the Starbucks at 86th and Ditch is where I wrote most of it, Starbucks in Indianapolis. And I would come into the Starbucks and I would write for three or four hours, and I would be crying, and then I would think to myself, I am really grateful to be writing this book, but I can't imagine that anyone is ever going to want to read it.

• 1:06:25Guy Raz?

  About two teenagers in a cancer support group?

• 1:06:27Speaker 01

  Yeah, about kids living with really serious illness and having to face mortality at a really young age.

• 1:06:37Guy Raz?

  I wonder how you came up with such a complex world, right? It's two characters, and they meet in this support group, and they're both, you know, one's in remission, one's struggling with thyroid cancer. And when I think about your time as a chaplain working at a children's hospital, and presumably that, you know, experience informed some of your knowledge, but like, where did it come from?

• 1:06:58Speaker 01

  I do think that my time at the hospital was extremely important to me, you know, learning from, listening to young people living with cancer. I think the most important thing, though, was my friendship with a young woman named Esther, who was a fan of our videos.

• 1:07:14Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:07:16Speaker 01

  Esther and I and her family and her friends, we were all quite close in the last six months or so of Esther's life. She died in 2010. And I'd written a lot of stuff set at a children's hospital over the 10 years since I worked there. But after Esther died, I started to rethink all of it. You know, I wrote the book in this, you know, intense period of grief and anger. I was trying to explore and for myself as much as anyone, the question of how can a short life be a full life, be a rich and good life?

• 1:07:58Speaker 01

  Because I did and do find it so hard to understand why Esther and so many young people like her aren't here with us.

• 1:08:09Guy Raz?

  Yeah. You obviously had an audience and a lot of young people were on YouTube or are on YouTube and a lot of young adults. And so that book, of course, blew up. But what do you think it was about that book that just resonated in that way? I mean, you have to be, had to have been and probably still are stunned that 24 million copies of that book were sold.

• 1:08:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, I mean, it's just, it's honestly, it sort of feels like it happened to somebody else. But when it became an Amazon bestseller months before it came out, that was for two reasons. One was that I announced that I was going to sign the entire first printing of the book. So that was 150,000 copies. And then the second reason was that I read the first two chapters in a live stream, like on a Vlogbrothers livestream. And the reaction to those first two chapters was very different from anything I'd ever experienced before. And so I did have a little bit of a clue after that, that it was going to be different. And the other clue I got that it was going to be different was when Hank read the book

• 1:09:20Speaker 01

  and he called me after he finished and he said, I think your life is about to change.

• 1:09:27Guy Raz?

  When we come back in just a moment, how Hank and John balance time and money to keep growing the video business, and why they don't ever want to charge money for their content. Stay with us. I'm Guy Raz, and you're listening to How I Built This.

• 1:09:55Guy Raz?

  Hey, welcome back to How I Built This. I'm Guy Raz. So it's 2012, and Hank and John Green have just launched a new educational video series called Crash Course. And John's novel, The Fault in Our Stars, is already shattering expectations, which is something he can't fully explain.

• 1:10:14Speaker 01

  I still don't understand it, to be honest with you. Mostly, it was extremely surreal. Hank went on tour with me for like, five weeks, and we were driving around the country. And then I got home, and I called my agent, and I was like, when does this end? And she was like, I don't, I don't know. Might be a while.

• 1:10:31Guy Raz?

  And you were still making videos while you were touring?

• 1:10:33Speaker 01

  Oh, yeah. I never stopped making videos. Like, for us, it is a way to have ideas. Even if I was only making the videos for Hank, I wouldn't want to give it up because I really like that practice of looking at the world that way.

• 1:10:49Guy Raz?

  Yeah, I mean, it's interesting, because in almost every case on this show, the person or the people who make the business are making it because they love it, or they have an idea, and they, they want to keep doing it even after they've made lots of money because they love it, right? And so, like, you also have this YouTube world that you're part of with your brother, which is a real thing. It's becoming, at this point, when The Fault in Our Stars is released, it's becoming a business, a real business, which, which would be folded into a big production company called Complexly.

• 1:11:20Speaker 01

  Yeah, we were actually on tour for The Fault in Our Stars when the first Crash Course world history video came out. And the way I thought about it was it's great that this book is successful because now I don't have to write a book for a year or two and I can focus on Crash Course.

• 1:11:39Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:11:40Speaker 01

  It turned out to be a little bit harder to focus on Crash Course than I expected it to be.

• 1:11:45Guy Raz?

  Yeah. So there's this, this, this is where sort of the part of the interview where we really have to talk about compartmentalizing because, you know, not just your personal and emotional lives, but the professional lives, right? You've got, really The Fault in Our Stars has created a whole world of people who are connected to it and you are at the center of that. And then there is this increasingly growing world of Complexly. It becomes your business. And I don't, I don't, we don't have enough time to mention all the shows that Complexly produces. It's like Crash Course and SciShow and how many shows total is, is under the Complexly banner?

• 1:12:25Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that it's probably around 20 something.

• 1:12:28Guy Raz?

  These are just the video shows, not the podcasts?

• 1:12:31Speaker 01

  I probably counted the podcasts in there.

• 1:12:32Guy Raz?

  Yeah, okay.

• 1:12:33Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:12:34Guy Raz?

  But then you're also in four podcasts?

• 1:12:36Speaker 01

  Yeah, probably.

• 1:12:37Guy Raz?

  Let me ask you about the business model, which is all content, it's all free content. This was, basically was self-financed, right? You got the YouTube investment, but then over time, it sounds like you built it up, you know, slowly, slowly. And now you've got a pretty sustainable business. But there are other companies that sell subscriptions to content that you offer for free. I'm sure over the last many years, you had lots of maybe unsolicited advice with people saying, you gotta turn this into a subscription. You have to have a freemium model and a premium model. You've gotta charge people because you're not gonna make enough money from ads alone. But your model basically depends, I think primarily on advertising, right?

• 1:13:18Speaker 01

  Yes. That's definitely the biggest piece of the pie.

• 1:13:22Speaker 02

  And then the rest is crowdfunding and grants. So organizations that are like, hey, you're making this and you're making it for free. Like, we'd like you to make an episode, like a series on this particular topic. And we do that with their money. And then we also ask people to give us money so that we can do it. Definitely, if that money were not there, this would not be a sustainable business.

• 1:13:46Guy Raz?

  But the thing that strikes me about Complexly is that it may not generate the kind of money. I mean, if you look at like the top 20 or 30, the biggest YouTubers in terms of revenue, you guys are not on that list, which there are YouTubers who are making tons of money off videos that are pranks or challenges of basically seven to 12-year-old boys who are watching their videos and like crazy money, like 50, 60 million dollars a year. And you guys are making educational content that is not making that kind of money. But your stuff is evergreen. I mean, the value in what you're building is the content lives forever. It can be sold one day.

• 1:14:29Speaker 02

  Well, there's, I mean, there's, you know, we mostly think about that value through the lens of anybody who's in business. You've got to understand that like what your actual business is, is creation of value.

• 1:14:41Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:14:42Speaker 02

  And that there's always a majority of that value that isn't being captured by you. It's being captured elsewhere. Like, I buy my iPhone because it delivers to me more value than it costs me.

• 1:14:55Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:14:55Speaker 02

  And I think that that's how I think about the value that Complexly provides, is that we want the value we deliver to be way more than the value that we capture. That's the goal. And that's not usually the goal. But, you know, in order to do that, it's not about capturing less value. It's about creating more.

• 1:15:14Guy Raz?

  But the reality is that, I mean, I, we had Ken Burns on the show earlier this year, and he's sitting on an archive that he owns that might be worth 300, 400 million dollars, right? I mean, there are artists who are selling their music archives for hundreds of millions of dollars. I mean, is there a world where you could imagine selling this, all this stuff one day to, you know, Lynda.com sold to LinkedIn?

• 1:15:38Speaker 02

  Right.

• 1:15:38Guy Raz?

  I mean, is there a world where you would even consider that?

• 1:15:41Speaker 02

  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 you can't paywall it.

• 1:15:48Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:15:48Speaker 02

  Because that's outside of the promise that has been made. All of the content is free. So it's creating the value, but you can't capture it in the same way. It's like an easement on a property, you know? If you can't turn it into a bunch of houses, the land is worthless. And like, I'm not saying like acquisition is off the table. I just don't think that it's as valuable as it would be if we hadn't made that promise. But I just feel so, like, I think that that's the right promise to make.

• 1:16:15Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:18Guy Raz?

  Complexly has today, between the two sort of main offices in Montana and Indianapolis, got about 50 employees.

• 1:16:25Speaker 02

  Yeah, I think it's a little over 60 now.

• 1:16:27Guy Raz?

  Yeah. But, I mean, at least for you, Hank, I mean, you are also the CEO of this. And we haven't even talked about the other companies that you will have founded. But how do you organize your time? How do you, how do you have time to do this podcast? I don't know.

• 1:16:41Speaker 02

  You know, it's definitely something that I could not do without a lot of support. Because I am, like, my first job kind of remains being a vlog brother.

• 1:16:54Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:16:54Speaker 02

  You know, I, I listen to your show and I hear a lot of people who are like, seem very on top of it. But I definitely feel like I am not and am always a little bit on a tightrope. And maybe like that feeling a little too much. And I'm very glad to have the support of people who don't want that feeling. And as much as I think that I've been really effective at helping Complexly be a sustainable business, despite the fact that its business model is a little nutty, you know, I have, for the majority of my professional career, and this has changed a little bit, but I've really organized myself around sort of like, what's succeeding, just head in that direction? What's exciting, head in that direction?

• 1:17:38Speaker 02

  What's causing you the most stress, head in that direction? But I don't think that it's, I think that the company 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 more strategic.

• 1:17:51Guy Raz?

  I wonder what you think of where the creator economy has has come to now. When you see these YouTubers who are making tens of millions of dollars on challenges or playing video games, unboxing videos, opening toys, what do you think about that?

• 1:18:10Speaker 01

  The first thing I'd say is that there are some people who get paid tens of millions of dollars a year to play act like children, and we call them movie stars, and we don't think of the money that they get paid as being wild or weird because we have become accustomed to this world where if you're exceptionally good at play acting, you can make tens of millions of dollars doing it. And so if they're creating that much economic value and they're capturing some portion of it, that's not really for me to judge, I feel like.

• 1:18:41Speaker 02

  And as far as, you know, the thing to remember about the people who are making $50 million, which I think is probably a very edge case, if that's even a real number, I don't know if it is, is that the vast majority of people who are working really hard to make interesting content that entertains people or educates people or captures people's attention are making less than, you know, $15 an hour or something.

• 1:19:05Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:05Speaker 02

  We don't talk about that. It's not interesting. It's not front page news, but it's actually like a substantial part of the economy now. And I want more people to have the job that I have and love. And in order for that to happen, you have to have more money in the ecosystem. You have to have more robust advertising and crowdfunding and different tools for creators. And when that happens, it means that the big people are going to get bigger, but it also means that the people who are making $20,000 a year are making $40,000 now. And that seems like a huge win.

• 1:19:34Speaker 01

  That's a much bigger deal to us.

• 1:19:35Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:19:36Speaker 01

  One of the million companies that Hank started that we haven't talked about is Subbable, a company that was eventually acquired by Patreon and it was a-

• 1:19:42Guy Raz?

  This is a company that you started to help people subscribe to content that they liked and they could pay for it or not pay for it.

• 1:19:49Speaker 01

  Right. And the reason Hank started Subbable and the reason that we've been really interested in businesses like that is because we we know from experience and we've seen-

• 1:20:00Speaker 01

  In the lives of the people we work with and the people we're friends with, that what really transforms the lives of people is not going from making $300,000 a year to $50 million a year. It's going from making $12,000 a year to $60,000 or $80,000 a year.

• 1:20:19Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:20:19Speaker 01

  And so our interest is really in those tens of thousands of creators who will be on that journey if only we have better monetization tools.

• 1:20:31Guy Raz?

  Let me ask you, I know I'm going to sound like a complete horrible jerk to lots of people listening, but I hate the fact that most kids, a majority of kids my kids' age, say they want to be YouTubers. And they're not, they're not talking about being Hank and John Green YouTubers. They're talking about being famous. And I worry that we, that the human species cannot sustain a world where everybody is famous. I mean, right now, who knows how many millions of TikTokers and Instagrammers and YouTubers have more than 500,000 subscribers, tons, tons. And I get your point about, you know, wanting to create an ecosystem that employs people, and that's really great.

• 1:21:13Guy Raz?

  But is there any part of you that is worried or sad that most kids, at least in the US today, want to be YouTubers when they grow up?

• 1:21:22Speaker 01

  There's no part of me that's sad that most kids want to be YouTubers. In the 80s, if you'd asked my classroom, we'd all want to be rock stars or basketball players. I'm not particularly concerned about kids who want to like have jobs that bring attention and status. I think that that's pretty typical. But I am concerned about whether those jobs actually provide value to the people who end up having them.

• 1:21:48Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:21:48Speaker 01

  We've been doing this for so long. We've seen a lot of young people get a lot of attention and build big audiences really quickly and then really struggle.

• 1:22:00Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:00Speaker 01

  Yeah. And that is something that Hank and I are both deeply concerned about, that there are not a lot of systems for support. You know, it's almost like a career as a professional athlete, it lasts a couple or three years, and then you're 30 years old and you've only ever done one thing. And it's hard to figure out what to do next.

• 1:22:24Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:22:25Speaker 02

  But I also think it's important to recognize that we don't get to choose what teenagers want. And so deciding whether it's good or bad feels a little unnecessary.

• 1:22:36Guy Raz?

  Yes, it feels like a jerk thing to say. Just say it.

• 1:22:39Speaker 01

  Well, it's a little, no, I don't think it's a jerk thing to say. It's more like if you're, you're standing outside and the wind is blowing in from the west and you're like, I really think the wind should be blowing in from the east. And the wind is like, I don't really care.

• 1:22:52Guy Raz?

  Yeah. Um, there's something about the way your business works that I think is really important to point out, which is a significant, maybe the majority of the profit from all the different businesses doesn't go to Hank and John. It goes to pay the staffs and then to charities. So, but before we get there, I want to understand the revenue stream. So there's Complexly, which of course is your sprawling media empire of shows. Subbable was acquired by Patreon and I know that is part of Patreon now. VidCon eventually was acquired by Viacom, but you also have, you've got a sock club.

• 1:23:30Speaker 02

  Don't laugh at the sock club. It's by far the most successful thing we've ever done.

• 1:23:34Speaker 01

  It's true.

• 1:23:35Guy Raz?

  So give me a sense between Complexly and all of the, like, all the businesses that you guys oversee now, which is how, how many?

• 1:23:43Speaker 02

  Oh, it's really only two. It's only two day to day.

• 1:23:45Guy Raz?

  Okay. So some of them, some of them are spun off or sold or merged. And so between all the revenue that comes in every year, how much is it? What's your estimate?

• 1:23:55Speaker 02

  30? I don't know. It depends on how you count too. DFTBA is a strange business because a lot of money is royalties. So like we- So we never see it. We sell the product, but like the majority of the money from that product is going to the creator, not to us.

• 1:24:10Guy Raz?

  Right.

• 1:24:10Speaker 02

  So you can say that DFTBA is a, I don't know, $25 million company, but a lot of that money is-

• 1:24:18Guy Raz?

  Going back, right.

• 1:24:18Speaker 02

  And it's a very narrow margin business, as is Complexly.

• 1:24:21Guy Raz?

  How much roughly of whatever's left goes to you guys?

• 1:24:25Speaker 02

  I think I make $27,000 a year.

• 1:24:29Speaker 01

  Yeah. John takes a very small salary. I, I take a normal salary.

• 1:24:33Speaker 02

  Oh, I didn't know that.

• 1:24:34Guy Raz?

  You didn't know that?

• 1:24:35Speaker 02

  No.

• 1:24:37Guy Raz?

  But most of the income goes to different charities?

• 1:24:40Speaker 02

  Yes, or to employees.

• 1:24:43Guy Raz?

  You know, you guys are now in your 40s and you're still young and you have, I'm pretty sure like 40 more business. I mean, I hate to use the term hamster wheel because it doesn't sound like, I mean, I know you love what you do. But when you think about the next sort of 10, 20 years, in 20 years, are you doing all this stuff still? Are you writing books? Are you, you know, making all these shows, making all this content? Hosting these events, gathering people together and launching other businesses?

• 1:25:15Speaker 02

  I don't know. I don't think about it.

• 1:25:19Speaker 01

  He doesn't think about it. That is literally true. I think about it.

• 1:25:23Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:25:25Speaker 01

  I think about it enough for both of us.

• 1:25:28Speaker 02

  We are a good team.

• 1:25:29Speaker 01

  Sometimes I'll be like, Hank, how is VOGG Brothers gonna end? Have you thought about it? And he'll be like, no, not really.

• 1:25:35Speaker 02

  It's not gonna end this year.

• 1:25:37Speaker 01

  Right, right.

• 1:25:38Guy Raz?

  Maybe it doesn't have to end, or maybe you won't know, like, like the fault in our stars. You don't even know how it ends.

• 1:25:43Speaker 01

  Yeah, I think that is the truth, right? Like, no matter how much I plan, I don't know how it's gonna end. The thing that I've come back to over the years, because there've been a number of times where I thought, I might be close to done. I'm pretty tired. I'm pretty burnt out. I love working on the stuff that we work on and I love working with the people we work with. But I also want to be conscious of my limits. John Wesley once said, uh, "To do all the good you can, in all the ways you can, in all the places you can, to all the people you can, for as long as you can." And that was like my guiding concept about being alive was like, I'm not alive to be happy.

• 1:26:26Speaker 01

  I'm not alive to be fulfilled. I'm alive to do as much good as I can, as fast as I can, for as long as I can. And man, that is not, that's not a sustainable strategy. It's not a good way to live a life, so. I've had to rethink it in the last few years for sure, but it's hard to imagine wanting to stop.

• 1:26:46Speaker 02

  Yeah. I will say this for me, I don't see myself as the, I'm not the kind of CEO who's like, I am really the only person who could possibly do this job.

• 1:26:55Guy Raz?

  Yeah.

• 1:26:56Speaker 02

  I could definitely imagine that there are a number of people who would be better at this than me.

• 1:27:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:27:01Speaker 02

  And I would never want to not be involved. And I still love being involved in VidCon, you know, like 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 I can help. And I love to start things as well as to keep them going. And right now I really can't. I am functionally at the edge of what I can do and I can't do anything new and that's okay, but I would like to be able to someday for sure.

• 1:27:28Speaker 01

  Hank.

• 1:27:29Speaker 02

  What?

• 1:27:30Speaker 01

  Are you treating this episode of how I've built this, the way that you did that Vlogbrothers video before the first VidCon where you were like, hey, does anybody have a kid who works for Cisco who wants to, are you?

• 1:27:44Speaker 02

  Does anybody want to lead a really fantastic educational media company?

• 1:27:48Guy Raz?

  I love it. You listen, it's another platform. You might as well use it.

• 1:27:51Speaker 01

  The listeners of this podcast are perfect for you. And so you're just, you're just throwing out the line and seeing if anybody's like.

• 1:27:58Speaker 02

  My email address.

• 1:28:01Guy Raz?

  Yeah. We'll post it.

• 1:28:02Speaker 01

  I love it.

• 1:28:03Speaker 02

  Guy, you want a job?

• 1:28:05Speaker 01

  I agree. Oh yeah. Guy, do you want a job? I mean, I agree with Hank, by the way, that neither of us, deep down, is made of CEO stuff.

• 1:28:14Speaker 02

  Yeah, sometimes I listen to people on this podcast and I'm like, are you joking me? You seem really, really together.

• 1:28:20Speaker 01

  Oh God, they're so together. They wake up so early.

• 1:28:24Guy Raz?

  When you guys think about all that's happened to you, because you are, you've really had a huge impact, you know, a cultural impact. But when you think about all that you built and all these teams and this content and where you are now, how much of this do you attribute to how hard you work? And how much do you think has to do with just being lucky, being at the right place at the right time?

• 1:28:45Speaker 01

  We've been waiting for this question.

• 1:28:47Speaker 02

  I've listened to the podcast, Guy.

• 1:28:49Speaker 01

  We talked about it for like 45 minutes yesterday. And my feeling is that it's, it's so 100% luck that it's impossible to even explain how 100% luck it is. But within luck, we have to remember the way that, that luck is not like rolling dice. It's a series of structures and power systems that make paths easier for certain people.

• 1:29:20Speaker 02

  Yeah, I, I think all the time about how while I was in grad school, I was diagnosed with ulcerative colitis and initially had a very inexpensive medication. But by the time we started making Vlogbrothers, I needed to get on a new medication that was $500, $600 a month. And I was able to just do that because I had support from my family. I was able to just like pay another rent to my colon so that I could keep making Vlogbrothers videos. And that was just, that's just not an opportunity for a lot of people. So like even those little things, those little pieces of luck, it's so hard to see them sometimes.

• 1:30:01Speaker 01

  Yeah.

• 1:30:01Speaker 02

  Like I can't even attribute it to skill because I'm not even that strategic. I just sort of go towards what's working.

• 1:30:07Speaker 01

  Yeah, that was, I thought that was a really interesting answer, Hank, because like there have been a few moments in our career where we didn't like fly blindly toward the light like moths at night for reasons we didn't understand. Like there have been a few tactical decisions.

• 1:30:18Speaker 02

  Just like three or four.

• 1:30:20Speaker 01

  Yeah. But 99% of the time, we've been flying to the light. And then you like go on an interview show and people are like, hey, how'd you get so successful? And you're like, oh, I flew to the light. And all the other moths are like, hey, I was also flying toward the light.

• 1:30:32Speaker 02

  Yeah.

• 1:30:33Speaker 01

  Seems like maybe there was a lot of luck involved in you ending up on the moon.

• 1:30:41Guy Raz?

  That's Hank and John Green, vlog brothers, authors, and co-founders of Complexly. By the way, if in like 500 years from now, right, aliens come to our planet and start digging around, they come across a time capsule with one viral video that could explain the whole thing, like, explain everything about YouTube, what would you guys put in that time capsule?

• 1:31:03Speaker 01

  My answer is Mark Rober's video where he invented a really beautiful and complicated obstacle course for squirrels.

• 1:31:15Guy Raz?

  Wow.

• 1:31:17Speaker 01

  What's your pick, Hank? Is it like Charlie bit my finger, Rick roll?

• 1:31:19Speaker 02

  No, I was thinking about the Doodling in Math Class series that Viheart did like 10 years ago.

• 1:31:25Speaker 01

  I was just thinking about Viheart. Yeah, she made this series where, you know, she explores pi and spirals and hexagons in really lovely and unconventional ways that I think the aliens would dig.

• 1:31:39Guy Raz?

  You guys are all going all upmarket. I was, I'm going for Fred learns how to swim. Hey, thanks so much for listening to the show this week. If you love our show and want to show your support, please help us spread the word. Tell a friend about How I Built This or send out a message on social media. If you want to contact our team, our email address is [email protected]. If you want to follow us on Twitter, our account is at How I Built This and mine is at Guy Raz. And on Instagram, we're at How I Built This and I'm at Guy dot Raz. This episode was produced by Alex Chung with music composed by Runtin Arablui. It was edited by Neva Grant with research help from Catherine Cypher and technical assistance from Neil Tebault.

• 1:32:25Guy Raz?

  Our production staff also includes Casey Herman, J.C. Howard, Sam Paulson, Liz Metzger, Kerry Thompson, Elaine Coats, John Isabella, Chris Messini, and Carla Estvez. Our intern is Susanna Brown. I'm Guy Raz and you've been listening to How I Built This.